The headline findings are not surprising, but make for bracing reading nonetheless. They are summarised on the front page of the Telegraph: the SDSR was a rushed exercise, driven by money rather than strategy, and the cuts will leave our armed forces struggling “to do all that is asked of them”, will reduce our international influence, and could jeopardise our national security.
The report also identifies the incoherence in the Government’s position on the crucial question of whether Britain is entering a period of “strategic shrinkage”. Ministers flatly deny it, and so does the National Security Strategy; but the SDSR tacitly accepts it, and the cuts make it a reality. The Committee treats David Cameron’s recent assertion, that the armed forces will still be able to carry out the “full spectrum” of operations, with open disdain. It also draws an unfavourable contrast between the statements made by Cameron and Liam Fox in opposition, about “bringing defence commitments in line with resources”, and their decisions in government: embarking on an open-ended military operation in Libya, while maintaining the current high tempo in Afghanistan, and proceeding with steep budget cuts, all at the same time.
The one virtue of the slow arrival of the report is that the Committee is able to share its scepticism about the final act of the Government’s first year, the ‘deal’ which Fox claims to have done with the Treasury and which he used to distract attention from the announcement of a second round of Army cuts. The report echoes the concerns I set out last week: that the deal is restricted to equipment spending, so could be undermined by a less generous settlement for the rest of defence; and that it isn’t exactly generous – merely indicating a return to previous spending trends, after four years of deep cuts. (One per cent real terms per year was the average growth in the defence budget during the Labour years of 2000-2010, which I don’t remember either Fox or Cameron describing as particularly lavish at the time.) Most of all, a closer reading reveals the true nature of the Treasury’s concession, which is that the MOD can ‘plan on this basis’, rather than enjoying any kind of guarantee. Or as the Committee drily puts it, “we fully support the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State for Defence in their personal aspirations for real terms increases in defence funding from 2015… However this is meaningless without a concrete commitment that these increases will be delivered.”
Overall, however, the Committee is perhaps too hung up on spending levels. Its position is admirably clear: “The Government appears to believe that the UK can maintain its influence while reducing spending... We do not agree.” But the problem is, like the military lobby, it ends up opposing every cut, thereby undermining its own credibility. If it had recommended a realistic alternative, one that involved a smaller (but still significant) cut to the budget, implemented in a more strategic way – and if it had done so sooner – then it might, for example, have been able to change the perverse decision to scrap the Harrier, rather than pointlessly concluding that while the decision was ‘regrettable’, it is too late to do anything about it.
The obsession with resources to the exclusion of all else echoes the Committee’s report into Afghanistan – and means that, here too, the real drivers of the MOD’s problems escape proper examination. The things that really drag the MOD down are the bureaucracy, the inter-service haggling, the tendency to spend money on the wrong things, and the ever-increasing unit cost of fast jets, surface ships, and submarines. None of the series of reviews and “new strategies” on defence decision-making announced by Fox over the last year has made a visible impact on these problems, at least not yet. In fact, far from marking the end, or even the beginning of the end, the SDSR was one of the worst examples, as I wrote five months ago:
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"Consider the cuts to our amphibious capability, and the scaling back of planned purchases of Chinook helicopters: even before the reminder of recent events, any credible strategic view of our future defence needs would have identified both as a high priority; unfortunately, neither is anywhere near top of the list for any of the three service chiefs. The same dynamic explains the otherwise inexplicable decision to scrap the Harrier and have aircraft carriers with no aircraft for a decade: this makes no sense from a military or even a financial point of view, until you realise that it saves some face for both the chief of the naval staff, who gets to keep the carriers, and the chief of the air staff, who gets to keep the Tornado."
These may be the decisions that come to determine history’s verdict on the stewardship of Cameron, Osborne and Fox – not just the decisions they make on the defence budget, or on Afghanistan and Libya, but what happens to our most important military capabilities while they are in charge. Liam Fox’s immediate response to today’s report (quoted in the Telegraph) is that he is “pushing through radical reform to ensure that the mistakes of the past are not repeated”. The first thing to say here, as the Committee does, is that “while reform is long overdue, change on this scale requires exceptionally careful management.” But it also requires more urgency. To ask for both exceptional care and greater urgency might seem too demanding, or even contradictory, but it isn’t – it is just an illustration of the scale of the challenge ministers have set themselves, given the other decisions they have made. If they can make a real dent in bureaucracy, in inter-service dynamics, in the tendency to spend money on the wrong things, and on the ever-increasing cost of equipment, then some of the sacrifices they are demanding of our armed forces may come to seem justified. But time will run out faster than they think, and if they fail, their empty promises will rightly come back to haunt them.