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Love Enterprise - Crucial Week for Defence
09/02/2010
This is a crucial week for the future of our armed forces, for the UK defence industry and for the people who work in the defence sector in Barrow, Furness and northwest England’s companies that provide the equipment and services our armed forces need.
Last week at Chatham House, London the Secretary of State for Defence set the scene for this week’s publication of a green paper on Britain’s next Strategic Defence Review (SDR) expected after the General Election. The green paper will examine the nature of future threats and conflicts and Britain’s ability to respond.
The Secretary of State for Defence said 'In my judgment, defending our citizens in the coming decades will require projecting military power beyond our borders.' He also argued that 'pre-emptive strikes' would be needed to protect national interests from regimes harbouring Al Qaeda or trying to develop nuclear, chemical and biological warheads.
The Secretary of State’s comments suggest that the green paper recognises the need to sustain the means of delivering expeditionary capability, i.e. use of naval vessels. Yesterday’s Times suggested the planned two new aircraft carriers could be central to the UK’s future SDR policy. The Keep Our Future Afloat lobby have consistently argued that this approach will mean that more nuclear powered submarines will be needed to both protect the carriers from submarine threats and to ensure that deep strike and intelligence gathering can take place.
We therefore hope that when The Prime Minister makes his announcement of plans for investing billions of pounds of extra defence spending when introducing the green paper he commits some of the funds to the submarine industrial base and mirrors the approach of President Obama who last week in his State of the Union speech said national security i.e. defence is one of four areas (the others being Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security) exempt from a 2011 freeze in government spending for three years.
In some circles it is suggested Britain’s SDR may be determined by the notion of 'affordability', the availability of resources, and must be adjusted accordingly. If we do this resource constraints could determine strategy. The SDR must be open-minded in its analysis of strategic threats and challenges. It must identify which strategic risks are the priorities for funding and which can be tolerated.
I leave the last words to Dr Paul Cornish, Professor of International Security, who said on 28 January 2010, “The United Kingdom could certainly 'afford' to do all that is needed in Afghanistan while at the same time equipping the Armed Forces well enough to meet the future. The total cost of the new and improved capabilities announced in December is the equivalent of just two tenths of one per cent of government spending for 2009-2010. That sum could conceivably be recovered from other departments on the grounds that a major conflict is underway and those departments' spending plans could be postponed relatively easily. “
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