The announcement yesterday of the first round of redundancies stemming from last year's Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR) was always going to be a miserable day for the Royal Navy.
With the scrapping of the flagship aircraft carrier, Ark Royal, the Harrier fleet and several frigates, job losses were inevitable. Among the 1020 announced yesterday, however, are 350 sailors forced to leave the Royal Navy against their will, some of whom have recently been deployed off the coast of Libya. They include crew members of HMS Cumberland, which helped rescue British citizens as the uprising against Muammar Gaddafi began but which has since been decommissioned.
As the Navy absorbed the news of job losses, military honours were being awarded to soldiers who have displayed exceptional bravery in Afghanistan, illustrating yet again the startling level of selflessness and courage inherent in our military personnel – and the gulf in competence between those on active service and those behind desks in Whitehall. The contrasting emotions felt at naval bases and at the ceremony in London should focus political minds on the need for a pragmatic reassessment of Britain’s defence capability and the role of our armed services in the modern world.
The naval redundancies are the latest batch in a reduction of 11,000 personnel across the Royal Navy, Army and RAF plus tens of thousands more civilian jobs announced in the plans to address a £38 billion shortfall in the defence budget. However, Liam Fox, the Defence Secretary, has added fuel to the fire by criticising the Ministry of Defence and recently retired military chiefs as well as the last Labour Government for a culture in which procurement costs were allowed to spiral disastrously out of control. By the time of the SDSR, the first for 13 years, the procurement process had become not only notoriously profligate but, scandalously, was failing to ensure a supply of suitable equipment to troops in Afghanistan.
Dr Fox oversaw the cuts in the SDSR but also warned in a leaked letter that the cuts he was being asked to make were, intellectually and financially, virtually impossible.
Among those under fire from the Defence Secretary was former First Sea Lord, Security Minister and adviser to Gordon Brown, Lord West. His riposte that successive governments have cut the military to a dangerously low capacity, backed by a report from retired senior officers suggesting the Falklands could no longer be defended, suggests confusion over exactly what Britain’s post-Cold War defence and security strategy should encompass.
The current involvement in Libya provides a timely example. The Coalition Government claims the intervention in Libya as a success. Now in its seventh month, it has lasted far longer than expected when Britain led the call for international action and one analyst has suggested eventual costs could reach £1.75bn. The policy of no boots on the ground means it has retained public support but air power comes at a very high cost. At the same time we are nearing a decade of fighting in Afghanistan at a cost £4.5bn a year. We need clarity about the Government’s defence priorities.
That is much more important than fighting a reputational battle that seeks to keep the armed forces on side while cutting the defence budget.
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