On UK defence procurement

On the Today Programme the other day defence procurement minister Quentin Davies responded to accusations that a report saying that £2.5bn was being wasted annually had been suppressed.

Is it just me or does he sound exactly like you’d expect a Conservative minister to sound? Quite spooky I thought. It was as if I was listening to the government of 1994…or 1984 for that matter. Putting that aside, Mr Davies was attempting to make the case that poorly executed and horrifically wasteful procurement practices are behind us. No more would billions be wasted on the likes of Nimrod, he suggested. Military procurement is much smarter now.

There is cause for hope.

There has been much talk of the super-expensive new British aircraft carriers due to be built next decade. There are legitimate question about whether we need these leviathans at all. However, if we do decide to go ahead and build them an important nettle has finally been grasped.

Too often the Ministry of Defence has been suckered by the same setup: in an ill-conceived bid to save money upfront, they embark on a oddball alternative and ultimately pay more than if they had just been realistic about what things cost in the first place. This is what happened with Nimrod…twice. Rather than buying a new off-the-shelf product, the MoD decided it would rebuild a few old UK airframes that had already been flying for decades. With only a dozen or so planes getting converted it was never going to make financial sense. Nor would Nimrod ever secure export orders, given its quirky nature. Then the inevitable happened – as it does with immensely complex technology - the project ran into trouble as the engineers realised they had bitten off more than expected. Toilet. Billions. Flush.

With the aircraft carriers the setup is slightly different. They were originally intended to have catapult launchers. This is the standard way that heavy aircraft are thrown off ships. The only alternatives to date are helicopters and the vertical take-off (VTOL) Harrier. The shiny new aircraft carriers will be equipped with the Joint Strike Fighter, one version of which is VTOL. So in theory you can get away without the catapults on deck. It’s exactly the kind of knee-jerk option that penny-pinching politicians are likely to take. For a while it looked like the catapults would indeed be removed. Such a course of action would make no military sense.

With catapults, these huge carriers could operate just about any aircraft used on other aircraft carriers around the world, notably by the French and Americans. If you’re going to make a carrier that big, you might as well put a catapult on it. In future operation the British carriers will thus be unable to accommodate combat aircraft off other carriers, even if in an emergency.

Overseas engagements have a habit of being multinational so it doesn't make sense to be incompatible with allied equipment. It is also obvious that the military world is going the way of unmanned aircraft. Some have already been operated off ships and there plans to introduce bigger ones – that can drop bombs – on US carriers. You can of course make helicopters without pilots too, but the combination of range, speed and payload requirements mean that regular wings are required at the end of the day. And that means catapults. (Taking off vertically in a helicopter comes at the price of aerodynamic efficiency, saddling them with less range and lower speed).

For the price of a catapult or four, the British navy would lose compatibility with our allies and slam shut the door on future developments. Admittedly, the cash saving would run into the millions, but it’s still tiny percentage of the total cost of building and equipping two aircraft carriers.

One or both of these issues would inevitably come back to haunt the navy in some future conflict. Politicians would be forced to correct the problem, doubtless at a cost four times as great as if they had just included the damn catapults in the first place.

“If a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing properly,” as they say. Either do it or don’t do it. Just don’t half do it.

The good news is that Quentin Davies appears to have accepted now that the carriers should have catapults. Ironically the decisions wasn't made because it was considered a good idea to have them even with a compliment of VTOL fighters on board.

It seems that MoD may do a U-turn on the type of JSF being purchased. The S/VTOL type may be scrapped in favour of a more conventional variant of the same aircraft.

Maybe the old MoD dog really can learn a new procurement trick and get it right for once.


Coming soon...
Why UK defence strategy remains neither fish nor fowl