It starts by calling the Tornado the RAF’s workhouse jet, a simple typing error of course, but things don’t get any better after that.

The article states that Typhoon;

• Has a wing span of 37ft, no it doesn’t, it is 10.95m or 35ft 11in
• Can carry Maverick, technically yes, but this has not been cleared and is doubtful if Maverick is still in service
• Can carry HARM, HARM is a US missile, the UK has ALARM to cover this role and this is also not integrated with Typhoon
• Storm Shadow and Brimstone, again, yes but not yet
• Can be equipped with the GPS guided JDAM, no, JDAM is a US bomb, not in service with the RAF
• May eventually number more than 230 in RAF service, thought I would save the best until last

See me after school

For this reason I want to try and do justice to what was a well intentioned documentary so will briefly go through it now and perhaps follow up some of the points in later posts.

The first blow was a pretty low one, a bit of class envy and a contribution from Patrick Mercer who would have well taken advantage of the same married quarters as being portrayed. The point about being top heavy is well made, its a point we have made before but in comparing the Army with the USMC the programme makes its first blunder.

The USMC is of course part of the US Navy and falls within its larger command structure, size is almost irrelevant in this instance because the USMC does not have the breadth responsibilities that the Army has. It would have been much better to look into the real facts about rank inflation rather than making inappropriate comparisons. We are not alone in suffering rank inflation, I will try and compare the France and the US in a future post and bring the issue up to date.

Helicopters for the Chiefs is a pretty shocking but the point about the married quarters brimming with servants is way off the mark, these are often used for official functions including medal ceremonies and entertaining foreign diplomats or military personnel, all part of the defence diplomacy activity.

Listing the cost of private school tuition is another pretty low blow because while the narration says ‘all service personnel’ it is narrated over a clip of people quaffing champagne to the sound of violins. Just to make the point, all service personnel can benefit from this but also have to make a contribution.

Kevan Jones talks about Abbey Wood having a railway station, Bristol Parkway, next door, like he used it every time he visited, but I thought it was Filton Abbey Wood.

In the round though, yes we need to address rank inflation but this is small beer.

We then move on to weapon systems with an introduction from Douglas Carswell.

First up is the Nimrod, to support the narrative about BAe being useless it selectively quotes from the Haddon-Cave enquiry but fails to point out that the words were directed at the MoD, QinetiQ AND BAe. This is selective quoting at best and at worse, would seem to be misleading and unfair. The whole issue of wings not fitting is covered but also fails to mention the role of the MoD or indeed Boeing in the whole MRA4 debacle.

Then it makes a bold assertion that in a recent report major MoD procurement projects run on average 40% over budget and 80% late, listing the poster child of the overun, the Astute and Type 45. Not sure what report that would be because the last Major Equipment Review from the National Audit office paints a different picture, an 8% increase in cost for example. The film states that all the projects that hove gone over by a billion pounds are BAe ones, without delving too deeply into this claim there are plenty of other non BAe projects that go over by proportional amounts, or more.

Douglas Carswell then goes on to make the ‘protectionist racket’ claim which is again, unfair. The Defence Industrial Strategy is a complex issue and just throwing the UK industry to the dogma of free market thinking whilst conveniently forgetting the very real issues of sovereign capability, returns to the taxpayer and the issue of overseas manufacturers enjoying the same so called protectionism that UK manufacturers do.

The reality is that the UK has one of the most open defence markets in the world is not for one second entertained, go and look at a French, German, Italian, Swedish, US, Russian or Chinese soldier and see what equipment they are using, or more importantly where it is obtained from. The defence market is becoming increasingly international anyway. Buying off the shelf just means you become the victim of an overseas monopoly protectionist industry. In fairness to the programme makers, a range of views on this were shown.

The SA80 gets a mention but credibility takes a bit of a nosedive when it says that if it is good enough for the SAS it is good enough for most soldiers, there are completely different issues at stake with a general service rifle and one used in niche roles and very small quantities. As for the shiny pop studs on issue body armour being visible to infra red sensors, have a look at any night image from the MoD web site and you will IR patches to do exactly that.

The revolving door issue between the MoD and industry is highlighted, making comparisons with other departments. I tend to agree that this needs seriously looking at but if you have been a soldier for 30 odd years and someone offers you a job that uses your accumulated skill and experience to carry on paying your mortgage its hard to refuse.

Quite rightly the short term saving versus long term cost increase issue and inter service rivalry comes in for serious criticism.

The final act looks at helicopters and particular re-supply. As we have seen, these have become the focus for the shortcomings of the MoD but it would be fair to say at this point that helicopters are not the only equipment that is needed for resupply, our focus on logistics in recent posts, everything from vehicles to containers to asset tracking software shows the issue is a bit more complex than just helicopters.

Future Lynx, the answer to a question that no one knows, is held up as a prime example of how the MoD gets things wrong. This gets interesting when the issue of Future Lynx, its non competitive contract, how generally poor it will be in the battlefield utility role, Sir Kevin Tebitt and revolving doors. We have covered this issue many many times and in general I agree that the Army Wildcat might be just about OK for a limited set of recce and light utility roles, medium lift it aint.

Comparing Wildcat and Blackhawk is like comparing a Transit van and Focus, the Puma would be a more appropriate comparison but then in what I think is the most incredible part of the programme, Sir Richard Dannatt continues to show why inter service rivalry is so pernicious. The Army has always seemed OK with the RAF/RN flying Puma, Merlin and Sea King so why not Blackhawk.

Frankly, if the issues highlighted in this section, that inter service politics dictated the Wildcat purchase ahead of something more appropriate like Blackhawk or NH90 then the service chiefs should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves. I think things are a bit more complex than that but seriously, my gob was hanging loose when this particular section was aired.

The report mentions a £44bn budget and £17bn on equipment, is this right, I thought it was £37bn and £9bn.

Sorry if this post seems rushed, been rewinding and fast forwarding through the programme.

In general, it was a reasonable programme and made some good points, despite being  poor in places, one sided, innacurate and spectacularly missing the point in others. Perhaps it was too wide in its remit, distilling the issue in a balanced way in less than 60 minutes was always going to be tough and this lack of focus showed.

However, if it gets people talking then its a good thing.

The report ends with the words

Chronic waste and inefficiency is no longer an option

For all the issues we might take with the aim and accuracy I think we can all agree with this.

It’s hard not to want to like this but the trails so far seem a tad one sided and this paragraph from the introduction

A three-month investigation by the Dispatches team uncovered a ministry which has wasted staggering amounts of public money in buying inappropriate equipment that arrives years lat

seems like accusing bears of shitting in wooded areas or accusing the Pope of being a Catholic.

It doesn’t take much investigative zeal to read National Audit Office or Defence Select Committee reports which basically say the same thing.

Like Mystic Meg, I am going to make a prediction, the £8million Blackhawk and £27million Lynx Wildcat will get star billing with a supporting cast of BAe and gin swilling top brass. The introduction below, from Sam Kiley, mentions the Blackhawk.

The United Kingdom has one of the biggest defence budgets in the world. But for the last decade soldiers on the front line in Iraq and Afghanistan have struggled to get the right equipment. How the MoD Wastes Our Billions asks how this can be.

With a budget of around £42 billion a year, how is it possible that the Ministry of Defence is set to go over budget by some £36 billion over the next 10 years? Is there a way that the British taxpayer can make sure that men and women at war literally get bigger and better bangs, for the taxpayer’s buck?

The MoD will face savage cuts in the October spending review. It may lose up to 20% of its budget. But the current threats to national security have not evaporated just because the United Kingdom finds itself short of cash.

A three-month investigation by the Dispatches team uncovered a ministry which has wasted staggering amounts of public money in buying inappropriate equipment that arrives years late.

The excuse for this has been that Britain needed to preserve its defence industry to ensure ‘sovereignty of supply’. But the reality has been that much of the £17 billion spent by the MoD each year on equipment and supplies goes to BAE Systems and a handful of smaller firms.

The arms industry is effectively one of the last state-subsidised industry industries left in the UK.

Costs have also soared because of a ‘conspiracy of optimism’ in which MoD officials, and their defence contractors, are so keen to get new projects off the ground that they underestimate the real cost of production in order to get the projects going. Once the project is well advanced, and after tens of millions have been spent on it, the costs are allowed to creep up to reflect reality.

Dispatches investigated the cosy relationship which exists between the British arms industry and the top echelons of the military and civil service. More than a third of all jobs taken in the private sector by former government employees with relevant contractors involve MoD officials taking positions in the defence industry. Despite industry appointments having to be approved by the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments (ACOBA), critics suggest that such appointments should be more strictly controlled to avoid allegations of a conflict of interest.

On top of this, Dispatches found that turf wars over funding pit the army, navy and air force against one another.

The consequences of such inefficiency are sometimes fatal. Fourteen RAF personnel were killed when their Nimrod spy plane crashed in Afghanistan in 2006. The ageing aircraft was only flying because its replacement, the Nimrod MRA4, had been delayed by years which meant the older version had to be kept in the air long after it should have been retired.

Since the beginning of operations in Helmand, southern Afghanistan, in 2006 front line soldiers have been desperately short of helicopters. Paul Hartley and half a dozen other soldiers spent hours trapped in a minefield in Kajaki before an American Blackhawk helicopter could be found to winch them to safety. One of the men bled to death.

The workhorse of the US Armed Forces, the Blackhawk, has been the favoured choice of helicopter for soldiers in the field for years.

But Britain has recently opted to buy the smaller Lynx Wildcat, which is built in the West Country. It can carry only four infantrymen in fighting kit, compared to at least eight in a Blackhawk.

Senior army officers were wary of Blackhawk because it would have been defined, by its weight, as an RAF aircraft. The army wanted army pilots to be flying army personnel around the battlefield and so opted for the new Lynx as ‘better than nothing’.

Whether the MoD is buying rifles or radio equipment for the infantry, fighters and bombers for the RAF or Destroyers for the Royal Navy, successive defence ministers, former senior officers and top civil servants agreed that the ministry needs a drastic overhaul.

Dispatches found that the MoD has been desperately trying to balance the books in one year by shoving costs from expensive procurement projects into the next year, or delaying them even further. This has resulted in lengthy delays and huge cost overruns – not only of the original equipment but further costs from having to maintain ageing kit which, like the Nimrod MRA4, should no longer have been in service.

Strong vested interests exist inside the arms industry, which has hired former top level MoD officials who are able to lobby their former ministry. These top level officials, together with unions, will be keen to protect the tens of thousands of jobs generated by the defence industry, and will argue against heavy cuts.

Ministers know that if the British armed forces are to remain anything to be reckoned with then they will have to finally abandon a historic ‘buy British’ policy in arms, end the protection of the local defence industry, and drastically streamline the current procurement system by instead buying ready-made equipment ‘off the peg’.

Reform of the MoD would save the tax payer money and give British troops a fighting chance in Afghanistan and future wars.

I think we can expect the conclusions to be the over simplistic ‘buy off the shelf to protect our brave boys’ but I am looking forward to this, Sam Kiley and the Dispatches team are well regarded and I hope that it stirs things up a bit

As for much of the budget going to BAe and a handful of smaller companies, have a look at the MoD DASA site for a list of those ‘handful of smaller companies’

http://www.dasa.mod.uk/modintranet/UKDS/UKDS2009/c1/table117a.html

Didn’t take me 3 months!

Words fail me and normally I would resort to swearing but I simply cannot muster the words to describe my outrage at the Guardian for giving Gerry Adams a platform to make cheap political capital and Gerry Adams.

To quote the article (which I note hasn’t got comments switching on)

On the way home someone had placed hundreds of little name plaques along the grass verge at the side of the road outside Dungiven. The names were of hundreds of citizens killed by the British army and other state forces here during the conflict, including the 11 from Ballymurphy.

Cameron should know they and their families continue to be denied truth. His apology for Bloody Sunday was right. But he said that “Bloody Sunday is not the defining story of the service the British army gave in Northern Ireland from 1969-2007.”

That is wrong.

Bloody Sunday is the defining story of the British army in Ireland.

If you want to read the rest of this drivel, click here

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jun/16/bloody-sunday-british-army

Hundreds of citizens eh Gerry, how about the 2057 citizens killed by republican terrorist groups or the 1,123 citizens of the security forces killed. Let’s not even go into the torture and beatings.

I don’t often quote Wikipedia but I thought a screen grab would speak volumes

How much does Gerry Adams get paid from the taxpayer.

More than the average soldier, thats for certain.

At any moment, one of Britain’s four Trident submarines is out there, somewhere, patrolling a continent-sized patch of the Atlantic. When the 160-strong crew slip beneath the waves off Scotland’s west coast, that’s the last anyone sees of them for three months. Powered by a nuclear reactor, the submarines are almost silent and virtually undetectable. While on patrol, direct communication with navy bosses back home ceases, so potential enemies cannot intercept any signals. The crew are almost completely cut off from the outside world.

Read the rest here

• Add 10,000 to the Army
• Forget balancing the forces
• Root out amateurism everywhere

For much of the article he makes sense but veers into the ridiculous when discussing the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force. I generally don’t indulge in ad hominen attacks preferring to look at the argument rather than the person making it but could the author be accused of seeing the future through green (ex Army Colonel that he is) rather than purple tinted spectacles, a product of his background.

It is true that there lies in front of the UK some serious and difficult decisions, at stake is the very security of the nation and the future of the armed forces.

In the red corner we have the balanced forces argument in which it is maintained that we should maintain a balanced force able to react to any eventuality in an increasingly unpredictable world. This is undoubtedly the most sensible thing to do, who could have predicted in the last 20 years we would have been engaged in operations from peacekeeping to integrated armoured manoeuvre. The single problem with this approach is that of funding, if there was political will to maintain a credible balanced force the defence budget would not have been in constant decline since the seventies. Underfunding has resulted in a shrinking but still ‘balanced’ force that can do everything, but not much particularly well, our jam is being spread thinner and thinner. There is a very real risk of failure, Iraq and Afghanistan are illustrative of what happens when your balanced but weak force is held to account.

In the blue corner is a compromise being forced not by any strategic imperative, but a lack of cash. This suggests that the UK should recognise that we can no longer punch above our weight or maintain the full spectrum of capability but instead carefully choose capability areas in which to specialise and over resource them so we become an essential component of a more integrated coalition, partners might include NATO, the US, EU, Commonwealth or others. This approach also makes assumption and a reasonable estimation of what the future holds. It is accepted that the future cannot be predicted with complete accuracy but a reasonable approximation can be made.

The article suggests that the UK should be in the blue corner.

Allan Mallinson also makes the point that amateurism is not confined to politicians and civil servants, this is a vitally important point to make and in the current climate of armed forces = omnipotent, politicians = idiot, very rarely made. After Crimea the professional military underwent somewhat of a renaissance because failures were actually recognised, sacred cows well and truly slaughtered (the sale of commissions for example) and real progress made towards a professional fighting force that took to the field in 1914 and beyond, even though many of the reforms were led by civilians. The UK Armed Forces are in danger of believing their own press, dissent and innovative thinking seem to be discouraged. Iraq has shown that the emperor truly has no clothes but there has yet to be a professional recognition and reckoning.

Where the author destroys the credibility of the article, which is a shame because much of it provides serious food for thought, is in the treatment of the Royal Air Force and Royal Navy.

Starting with the Royal Navy its obsession with capital ships is criticised, this is fair enough, I have often said that the Royal Navy needs to kill CVF in order to save itself but for the author to then lay the blame for its failings in the fight against piracy and the Iran hostage situation firmly at the door of the Royal Navy, rather than over restrictive rules of engagement, the Human Rights Act and underfunding is plain unfair and an insult to those in the Senior Service that make such a vital contribution to the security of the UK. Yes, the Royal Navy needs to change but evoking the memory of Nelson isn’t going to help.

Finally, the RAF comes under fire with the author hurling the ‘Fast Jet Flying Club’ insult into the mix with the wildly inaccurate claim that the Typhoon (in fact, he uses the provocative term Eurofighter) is solely an air superiority fighter that is being rebranded as a fighter bomber. The comment about putting a roof rack on a Ferrari is as comical as it is both factually wildly inaccurate and demonstrative of a complete lack of understanding of air power. Saying the Typhoon is ‘no way of to deliver fire support to ground troops’ flies in the face of reality, Typhoon is developing into the most effective CAS aircraft the RAF has ever had. By the end of 2010 it is likely that the RAF will only be able to field 8 fast jet squadrons anyway, that hardly seems a fast jet flying club. The RAF does perhaps need to focus more on ISR and transport, the point has been made over several posts on Think Defence but again, as with the Royal Navy, change will be painful enough without the vague insults.

To summarise, there is much to commend this article and for me the best point is about being able to recognise our failings but the ridiculous comments about the other services simply serve to discredit the piece as a whole.

One of the objectives of this blog is to elevate and broaden the debate on UK Defence issues. At the risk of repeating myself, we don’t have any special insight but one this we strive for accuracy, something that seems lacking in the mainstream media, especially when there is an opportunity to push the ‘pen pushers’ theme that seems so common.

Posts in this category will take stories from the mainstream media and try to correct them.

Kicking off this category is a story in the Telegraph, Daily Mail, New Statesman and Times this morning about the MoD spending £149million on useless ‘tanks’

The original story was in the Times with the others simply copy and pasting.

The story is here, here, here and here

Let’s have a look at some of the statements…

It is not a tank but a FV430 Mk3 Bulldog armoured personnel carrier, the Challenger 2 is a tank, the FV430 series are not.

Yes, they were upgraded for use in Iraq where the combination of improved armour, engines, electronic countermeasures, communications equipment, drivetrain, night vision, air conditioning and protected weapon station (gunshield) proved extremely useful and versatile. Particularly useful is its ability to turn within its own length, something that no wheeled vehicle can do and vital in the tight confines of Basra back alleys. In fact, it took a programme excellence award from Aviation Week and Space Technology magazine.

It is simply wrong to assume that just because it is not new it is not any good but different terrain and different threats need a diffierent vehicle, with a greater IED threat and less of an urban environment in Afghanistan vehicles like Mastiff and ridgeback are more suited. The FV430 series is one of the Army’s workhorse vehicles so of course they are going to be used in training. Many of them will be placed into controlled storage like most of the Army’s other armoured vehicles, this is to preserve them in good condition for when they are needed in combat, sensible fleet management, nothing more, nothing less.

£149m to upgrade the entire fleet is actually stunningly good value for money and they will be useful in possible future conflicts, the upgrade means that money on replacements can be deferred and used elsewhere. The Army took delivery of it’s 500th vehicle in May 2008. The original programme was an Urgent Operational requirement for Iraq but plans to upgrade the vehicle were already in place.

However, the total cost of the programme has changed with quoted figures up to £235 million, still excellent value for money.

The Times mentions that it weighs 15 tonnes, has a top speed of 32mph and a turret mounted machine gun.  1 out of 4 aint bad I suppose, the modified vehicle weighs 13 tonnes, has a top speed of 44mph and does have a machine gun (GPMG) but doesnt have a turret.

The Times quotes an unamed defence source.

“We certainly don’t need 900 of these things for training. It seems crazy to do this upgrade work on vehicles that are more than 40 years old and then put them into storage, which is what will happen to most of them”

They are not for training, the Army doesnt buy Land Rovers for training, its buys a fleet of vehicles, some of which self evidently must be used for training.

Yet again, Liam Fox weighs in with an illinformed soundbite.

“We are increasingly concerned that the procurement programme is out of tandem with our military needs. This needs to be done on a detailed and thoughtful basis which can only come as part of major acquisition reform.”

Incidentaly, most of the work has been carried out by MoD Civil Servants of the Defence Support Group.

so, business as usual, lazy and ignorant journalism followed up with the usual drivel from an assortment of ‘defence sources’ and a cherry of nonsense on the top from Dr Fox.