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Britain's defence crisis

British defence is in its worst state since the end of the cold war. When will the government wake up?

• 
• • Richard Norton-Taylor
  • guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 11 March 2009
  • Article history

We come therefore to the conclusion that British defence is in a crisis so deep that it is no longer simply a matter of having to make difficult choices; rather, the machinery with which to analyse and understand defence, and with which to make those difficult choices, is wearing out. In short, we argue that defence policy, planning and analysis in the United Kingdom has reached a state of organisational, bureaucratic and intellectual decay.

This is the conclusion not of a partisan opposition, nor of armchair generals, nor even of retired chiefs-of-staff. They are the concluding remarks of an article in the latest issue of International Affairs, the journal of Chatham House, the respected Royal Institute of International Affairs, published on Tuesday.

The authors, Paul Cornish and Andrew Dorman, speak of "intractable structural problems", an "apparent vacuum at the political/strategic level", of a "critical shortage" of helicopters in Afghanistan. They add: "In all aspects of defence – political, financial, industrial and operational – the British government is confronted with a state of degeneration perhaps more serious than at any time since the end of the cold war".

On Monday, defence ministers announced that the RAF's fleet of Nimrod surveillance planes will be grounded from operations overseas so engineers can carry out crucial safety modifications. In 2006 14 servicemen were killed when one of the planes blew up over Afghanistan. Last year the assistant deputy coroner for Oxfordshire, Andrew Walker, said the Nimrod had "never been airworthy" from the first time it was released to the service nearly 40 years ago. The MoD has been trying to gag Walker for his repeated criticism of the ministry.

On Saturday, Major Sebastian Morley, the SAS commander in Afghanistan who resigned over the number of troops being killed in "unsafe" Snatch Land Rovers, accused the government of having "blood on its hands". He described the MoD as "cavalier at best, criminal at worst". The government did not dare to try to gag him.

Nor, it seems, does it dare to confront the seriousness of a situation which has left British soldiers ordered to fight in operations ministers describe as crucial to the UK's national security, poorly equipped and inadequately trained.

But as Col Patrick Sanders, the last commander of British troops in Basra city, said in a frank address to the Royal United Services Instituteon Monday: "They fight for pride and each other, not for a cause or a prime minister." The government does not know how fortunate it is