We must fix the UK’s broken defence infrastructure – our security depends on it

Editorial: The UK boasts its smallest standing army since Napoleonic times, and a defence budget far below where it needs to be if Britain wishes to defend itself

The Queen Elizabeth aircraft carrier broke down before it could leave Portsmouth harbour en route to leading the maritime arm of the exercise Steadfast Defender (PA)

It was Admiral Beatty, commander at the Battle of Jutland in 1916, who uttered the famous complaint: “There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today.” His understandable frustration at the Royal Navy’s failure to destroy the German High Seas fleet was exacerbated by the fact that two of his ships exploded primarily due to poor design and with minimal firepower expended by the enemy.

Perhaps similar epithets could be heard in recent days around the Ministry of Defence when the Queen Elizabeth aircraft carrier broke down before it could leave Portsmouth harbour en route to lead the maritime arm of Steadfast Defender, a transatlantic exercise that is the biggest in decades and involves some 40 Nato allies.

The idea was that the Queen Elizabeth, built at a cost of some £3bn, would make a major contribution to a show of collective security and British maritime power in the face of Russian aggression. Sadly, that grand scheme was scuppered thanks to an “issue” with a propeller shaft. It should not have come as a great surprise to Beatty’s successors at the Admiralty, however, because Queen Elizabeth’s sister ship, Prince of Wales, suffered a similar fault 18 months ago. The development also calls into question whether a British carrier will be available to relieve the USS Dwight D Eisenhower in the Red Sea.

These embarrassments come not long after naval pride was dented by a video showing one British minesweeper bumping into another one while in port in Bahrain, disabling their mission to protect shipping in the Red Sea, Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Aden.

And, if that wasn’t enough to keep the admirals of the King’s navy occupied, the new Argentine president has been busy putting plans in place to rearm, at a time when the Falklands are defended only thinly – a small contingent of troops, four Typhoon jets (three operational) and one British patrol vessel equipped with a single 30mm cannon.

All of these stories are further stark reminders that, as the House of Commons defence select committee puts it in its latest report, the UK’s armed forces are being “hollowed out”, being “consistently overstretched”, with the “unrelenting pressure” on personnel exacerbating the crisis in recruitment and retention, which is seeing more people leaving the armed forces than joining.

They may never go on strike, and have to be prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice, but the British defence effort is no different to other civilian public services that have been for too long asked to do too much with too few resources.

As with the schools, the hospitals and local authorities, the politicians – and indeed the public – desire superb public services to be available with ever lower levels of taxation and inward migration of labour, and then seem surprised when things don’t quite live up to expectations. Indeed, because of the Covid emergency, Brexit and long-term economic weakness, the UK has contrived to deliver the highest tax burden in decades and public services that are suffering partial collapse.

The case of national defence is a particularly difficult one. One of the great guilty secrets of the British public finances is that over the past few decades the NHS and social services have only been able to cope with the ageing population as well as they have been because the defence budget has been more than halved as a proportion of national income, as compared to the Cold War era.

So now the UK boasts its smallest standing army since Napoleonic times, and a defence budget far below where it needs to be if Britain wishes to defend itself, let alone play junior buddy to the United States everywhere from the Middle East to east Asia – as well as supporting legacy obligations in places such as the Falklands, Belize and Guyana.

The dilemmas are acute but if they are ever to be settled satisfactorily, then two things need to be done. First, the increasingly coherent (and welcome) consensus that Britain needs to be better prepared for war, and to deter it, needs to be converted into policy – on how much the taxpayer will be asked to contribute, and what the armed forces might be reasonably required to do. There is no point in, for example, pretending that the Falklands can be defended from Argentine aggression by a new nationalist leader – because the navy is now much denuded since the last time that happened, in 1982. Does the UK have a greater national interest in the South China Sea than in the South Atlantic?

The second task for government, irrespective of which party will be in power, is to conduct a systematic investigation into Britain’s disaster-prone defence procurement systems. Waste on a majestic scale is nothing new – countless billions have been wasted over the decades on everything from jets to early-warning systems to standard-issue service rifles to the latest farce around armoured vehicles.

Outstanding technical, scientific and manufacturing achievements, from radar to the Harrier jump jet, have to be put alongside spectacular failures that have endangered national security. Incompetence in defence procurement is something of a British national habit and has prevailed under all parties and all sorts of funding models and degrees of privatisation – but it is not an honourable military tradition. Perhaps it has something to do with the loss of the UK’s manufacturing base and engineering traditions, or poor systems of management and governance.

In any case, it is perhaps the key strategic weakness for the UK, and it was identified as such by the former No 10 adviser Dominic Cummings, who was therefore not wrong about everything. It might not be practical to recall Mr Cummings to active service but there is obviously work to be done with today’s defence procurement.