Dominic Cummings is right – if only about Britain’s dysfunctional defence spending

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/17/dominic-cummings-britain-defence-spending-mod

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Boris Johnson’s senior adviser has the MoD in his sights. After wasting billions, the department urgently needs an overhaul, says defence and security writer Richard Norton-Taylor

The Ministry of Defence is not fit for purpose. Every year it wastes billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money. Heated arguments between the heads of the navy, the army and the RAF are preventing urgent decisions at a time when the services face unprecedented challenges.

Now it is reported that Dominic Cummings has set his sights on the MoD. Whatever you might think of Boris Johnson’s senior aide, he has identified a massive failure in decision-making in Whitehall. “The MoD is good at identifying lessons,” the 2016 Chilcot report noted in a devastating passage, “but less good at learning them.” There is little evidence it has got any better at learning them.

Cummings, it is reported, has described as a “farce” the MoD’s handling of the aircraft carriers HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales, the two largest ships in the navy’s history, which have now both been commissioned into the fleet. Their cost has risen from an initial estimate of £3.9bn to more than £6bn.

That does not include the cost of the US F-35 Lightning II jets, the world’s most expensive warplanes, which the navy wants to fly from the carriers. The F-35 has been beset by so many technical problems, and its costs have risen so high, that an already hard-pressed navy faces the prospect of having two large aircraft carriers short of both aircraft and crew.

Originally, the MoD had intended to order aircraft carriers with catapults and arrester gear, known as “cats and traps”. But it abandoned that plan on grounds of cost, even though that would have made them compatible with French and US carriers.

In conversations with me, many senior military figures have been critical of the aircraft carriers. David Richards, the former chief of the defence staff, described them as “unaffordable, vulnerable metal cans”. They will be especially vulnerable to the extremely fast long-range missiles being developed by Russia and China.

The carriers will need to be protected by surface ships and at least one submarine. Yet only three of the navy’s six Type 45 destroyers – which cost £1bn apiece – are in service. The navy’s new fleet of seven Astute-class submarines will be further delayed, adding to already large cost overruns, according to figures collected by the independent Nuclear Information Service. That project, originally budgeted at a little over £8bn, is now officially estimated to cost nearly £11bn. Mark Francois, a member of the defence committee in the last parliament, has described the Astute project as a “disaster”.

The problems go beyond the navy. The army is facing an existential crisis. In their election manifesto, the Tories abandoned their 2015 commitment not to let the army to fall below 82,000. But numbers have been falling steadily in recent years, and now stand at fewer than 73,000. The failure of the army’s recruitment campaign has been blamed by ministers on both Capita, the outsourcing company hired by the MoD to run it, and army chiefs. It has hit morale, and hasn’t helped the army’s pleas for better equipment, including armoured vehicles.

During the 15 or so years I covered defence for the Guardian, I have calculated that, on the basis of official figures and independent analysis, as much as £280bn was wasted on disastrous equipment decisions. Those decisions were in large measure responsible for the failure and enormous expense of the interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the avoidable loss of British lives there.

Official figures put the cost of British military operations between 1990 and 2014 – the bulk of them in Iraq and Afghanistan – at £34.7bn. But independent studies have calculated that if all costs, including healthcare for veterans, are taken into account, by next year British taxpayers will have spent at least £40bn on the Afghan campaign alone. That’s enough to recruit more than 5,000 police officers or nurses, and pay their salaries throughout their careers.

While armed forces chiefs bicker among themselves about how much should be spent on outdated projects, the MoD has been ineffective at reacting to technological change. It has been extremely slow to respond to new threats, notably cyber warfare, and to recognise the potential for cheaper, modern and more flexible weapon systems, notably drones.

It is time the MoD abandoned its quest for irrelevant and expensive projects once and for all. If Cummings does carry out his promised shake-up of Whitehall, the ministry should be top of his list.

• Richard Norton-Taylor writes for the Guardian on defence and security and is the author of The State of Secrecy: Spies and the Media in Britain, published next month.