Air Marshal Sir Timothy Garden KCB
Visiting Professor at King’s College London
A quarter of a century ago as an RAF student at Camberley, I learned how to plan the use of my artillery. For years afterwards, I could explain to successive generations of airmen why gunners were important, and that the sustained effect of an artillery barrage was different in nature and effect from air interdiction. Today it is more difficult. Indirect fire seems unfashionable in the day of the cruise missile and GPS directed bomb. Precision attack and minimum collateral damage are essential political requirements. The big war, defending the nation, has receded into an unseen future. When times get hard, the question will be asked: “Do we need the artillery any more?”
European governments face a defence crisis that threatens to end their ability to use military force in any except the most local contingencies. References to the Petersberg tasks, to peacekeeping, peacemaking, the protection of human rights and the rest pepper our leaders’ speeches. UK ambitions are focused on the need for a credible expeditionary capability. Almost totally lacking, however, is a sustained effort to persuade electorates of the rationale for these new ambitions and of the need to organise and fund relevant capabilities. No European Government dares advocate radical change in the region’s defence arrangements or aspires to do much more than keep defence spending level in real terms. The result is the vast gap between rhetoric and capability so painfully exposed during the Kosovo campaign.
News about the continuing decline in defence capabilities throughout NATO comes thick and fast. Norway needs to double its defence budget just to maintain its traditional austere national defences. The UK a looks for savings in the army budget to fund aircraft carrier plans. Germany cannot afford its current programme of re-equipment and restructuring of the armed forces. Jospin rejects the need perceived by Chirac to raise the French military equipment budget by over 10%. Even in the USA, the Congressional Budget Office reports that the US defence budget is short of $50 billion a year to sustain the military capability.
None of this should be surprising. But the dramas of the last twenty years have served to mask the systemic crisis of defence affordability that is being driven by defence inflation. Defence spending can be broken down into personnel costs, equipment costs and running costs. Running costs, the smallest segment, grow broadly in line with domestic inflation. But personnel costs, constituting just over a third of the UK budget, closely follow civilian wage costs and usually rise faster than domestic inflation. The military, particularly the army, are in a labour intensive sector. As current shortfalls show, they are recruiting from an age group on which demographic trends are placing ever greater demands. The personnel slice of the budget seems certain to grow in real terms year on year. Spending on military equipment is an even larger element in any defence budget (currently 44.2% in the UK). Price increases for defence equipment have always been, and will continue to be, significantly higher than domestic inflation. Defence programmers have balanced their budgets by reducing the fleet size with each new generation of equipment. The reducing numbers of units procured only forces the unit price higher still as research and development costs are recovered over smaller buys.
All defence programmes, therefore, have a serious inflationary problem. Maintaining level defence spending in real terms inevitably leads to decreases in force levels year on year. British defence spending today is some 8% lower, in real terms, than it was 25 years ago. But many of the main components of our defence capability are down by about 40 %. Extrapolation of this trend would see our frontline drop by as much as a further 50% over the next 15 years, almost certainly passing a critical minimum somewhere along the way. Decreases in NATO wide force levels since 1985 have been even more severe than in the UK.
One country, not European, has acknowledged the long-term problem. Recognising that the conventional approach to defence funding makes no longer makes sense, the Australian Government have decided to pay the price to sustain their defence budget at its current 1.9% of GDP. They estimate this will require an extra Aus$ 23.5bn over the next 10 years on a budget which is currently Aus $12.2bn per year.
There is little prospect of any European nation following Australia’s example. Other priorities rate more highly. A political choice for disarmament by neglect seems to have been made. That may be what electorates want. It may be that some would prefer to leave the exercise of military power to the United States. However, it is not what European leaders are saying or implying. Nor is it the way to meet their requirement for a healthy Alliance. So confused has the message become that some are being criticised for planning to make the EU militarily stronger. But, notwithstanding the Helsinki headline goals and NATO’s DCI initiative, the reality is that without a radical new approach all European military capability, including the British Army, is set for terminal decline. With it will go, along with much else, whatever ability we retain to influence defence policy in Washington.
All of this means that the prospects for retaining the heavy end of warfighting capability are becoming much less assured. When defence is unaffordable, how do you justify the requirement for a UK artillery capability? For most expected operations today, there is no obvious need for artillery. Where there might be, some will say that it can be left to the US to provide support as it does with so many other expensive requirements.
For those who would worry about such a trend away from warfighting capability, there is an alternative path. The inefficiencies of the national approach to defence within European states are self-evident. Integration between states of certain military activities could free up considerable extra money. It would not solve the problem permanently, but it could postpone the crisis for a generation or more. The constantly rising ratio of overhead costs to capability affects all nations; the more so as frontlines are reduced. Moving to pooled capabilities could reverse this trend. The number of people needed would fall, support manpower costs would decrease and, with larger contracts to let, further savings could be made by outsourcing. When pooled forces came to choose successor generation equipment, they would more easily agree on a common requirement. Production runs would be larger, and unit prices reduced. Governments would be both challenged and assisted by peer pressure and by the difficulty of escaping from binding international obligations.
Assuming they wish to retain an ability to use military force in defence of their interests, Europe’s governments will have to start down this route. The pursuit on a national basis of sophisticated and balanced capabilities, suitable for both high intensity and peacekeeping operations, is a chimera. In the case of the UK we will hit the wall well before the first new aircraft carrier is due to arrive in 2012. In the case of most of our European partners, the crunch will come much sooner. Artillery, armour and carrier air power are likely to be early casualties unless moves are made towards the rationalisation of European capabilities. The rationalisation will initially be between air forces, where such pooling is easier and produces rapid cost benefits. Instead of providing a UK air to air refuelling capability through a public private partnership arrangement, it would be easy to extend the arrangement to all of Europe’s military aircraft. Air transport would be much more effective if pooled using common assets such as the C130. The Eurofighter could be operated at much lower cost on a common ownership basis. None of this is new: the NATO AWACs is a supranational force with shared funding. The savings from such air power related integration would buy time to develop the much more difficult arrangements for truly shared land capabilities. Without early progress in this direction, capabilities like artillery will become casualties of the remorseless need for cash savings.
Integration is something different in kind from multinational co-operation. When forces are pooled, there must be consequent closures of surplus headquarters, training and maintenance infrastructure. It presupposes a sufficient commonality of purpose and policy to allow the participants to derive the economic benefits of common procurement, shared capabilities and a measure of role specialisation. This will not be popular with the vested interests of national defence ministries. However difficult to develop, the attempt must be made. Co-operation on the traditional basis will not suffice. The uncomfortable choice between hollow, increasingly unaffordable defence capabilities on a national basis and a real, sustainable capability on a European basis cannot be evaded much longer. For those in the military there is the choice to continue the decline through the regular defence review process, or to take the leadership role in generating a real European military capability.