Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander has attracted a lot of justified criticism and derision for his rather stupid remarks on defence yesterday. He said that further cuts to the MoD were justified because the army has more horses than tanks. In one sentence, Alexander the Ignorant proved why he shouldn’t be making such vital spending decisions on matters as important as national security.
The worrying thing is that Alexander isn’t alone in the political class who come out with these ridiculous statements on defence. Take the Liberal Democrats’ insistence that there is a credible, cheaper alternative to Trident. One by one, their arguments have been shot down. They once believed that there were cheaper air and land-based alternatives. They quietly changed their minds on that around the time of the last general election. They have since fallen back on the idea nuclear cruise missiles could be launched from Astute-class submarines. Yet the Lib Dems’ own Cabinet Office study is concluding that this isn’t a cheaper, viable alternative either. If only the Lib Dems just listened to the experts – people who have been telling them for years that they were barking up the wrong tree, they could’ve saved a lot of time, energy, and taxpayers’ money.
But this level of ignorance on defence isn’t confined to the Lib Dems. Most of the political and chattering classes are not very well clued up on defence matters as well. The cruise missile option for the nuclear deterrent was been taken seriously by some journalists and bloggers who knew very little about defence. Alexander was repeating a well-known Treasury line – the Treasury has always had it ‘in’ for defence. Labour has the same problem when it comes to a large number of MPs who are not well versed in defence matters. There are also plenty of fiscal conservatives on the right who also swallow untrue myths about waste and the defence budget. Philip Hammond admitted on Jeff Randall’s superb documentary on Sky this week admitted that he used to be one of them. Indeed, he was sent to the MoD to bring the defence budget into order. But now even Hammond is saying that those of us who – for years – have been saying that defence cuts are having dangerous consequences have a point.
This ignorance in the political class has serious consequences. It leads to bad policy and strategy. It leads to situations where politicians send our troops to war without the proper equipment. None of the three current leaders of the mainstream parties or chief Treasury spokesmen have ever held the defence portfolio in their political careers. Had they done so, they might have a different perspective on defence. They might also have changed their priorities about the relative importance of MoD and DFID.
But not only have they not held the defence brief, most politicians don’t seem to have much interest in it either – even though it’s the first duty of government. You don’t need anyone from the defence industry to tell you that defence is underfunded. Just read any decent defence journal from academics. Just look at the increasingly dangerous world out there, our commitments, and the decreasing levels of funding we’re putting into defence. You don’t need to be a genius to work out something’s wrong here. But the problem is that politicians don’t take the time to read these articles, books, and journals.
This is not to say that the MoD does not waste money. There have been cases in the past of enormous incompetence on the MoD’s part. And the MoD and industry do themselves no favours when stories like these appear in the press. But we have reached past the point now (especially after the strategically confused, economically-led 2010 SDSR) where the government is cutting so much on defence that it is impacting on capability. It is no exaggeration to say that the UK will now struggle to meet the ambitions set out in the National Security Strategy. When you look at this reality, people like Danny Alexander should now understand that cutting a few horses won’t even begin to sort out the mess our defence policy is in.
