Boris Johnson’s historic defence budget boost now needs a detailed strategic vision

Boris Johnson’s defence announcement is a novelty in that it mentioned the numbers first, with the words and precise policy to be announced at a later date. The UK government is to spend an extra £16.5 billion above the current defence budget plan over the next four years. With previous pledges to raise spending by half a per cent annually in real terms, it means an uplift in cash terms of around £24.1 billion in cash terms between now and the next election due in 2024.

In today’s terms, at least, this is a big chunk of change. We heard from the Prime Minister about where some of the funds are due to go – a new Space Command under the RAF, a specialist Artificial Intelligence Agency, a new Cyber Command in which the Ministry of Defence will partner the General Communications HQ at Cheltenham and the intelligence agencies.

But most will go to equip the armed services for tackling a range of new tasks and emerging threats. An array of actual and potential enemies, state sponsored and freelance “non-state” actors are adapting fast and not sticking to the old rules. We have to adapt to the use of cheap drones used to devastating effect this past year or so in Nagorno-Karabakh, Libya, Syria and Iraq, cyber operations that can wreck whole oilfields, and the renewed menace of chemical weaponry, like the Novichok poison used to attack the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny and the Skripals in Salisbury in 2018.

In the close ground battle the Army now has to adapt to the real game changer of Direct Energy weapons, utilising laser and particle beams, which make the high explosive of artillery and rifle things of the past.

Given what the forces now face in terms of threats and challenges, at home as well as abroad, the £16.5 billion might not seem nearly enough. The services now have to acquire new tactics and skills, without abandoning altogether the fruits of past experience, capability and training. Moving to the new ways of warfare and the “grey zone” of non-kinetic confrontation and conflict, is a question of evolution, not revolution.

And there isn’t all that much cash to spare. The National Audit Office has reported that the MoD has a “black hole” of around £13 billion, the cost of unfunded projects, in its current equipment budget. Some of the new funds will have to be used to plug the gap – but not all. Some of the more unrealistic plans and programmes in the pipeline need to be scrapped altogether.

The new defence strategy was due to be announced in the much-announced comprehensive Integrated Review 2020, which was to draw together UK foreign, security, defence and aid policy. It was to be piloted by Dominic Cummings, who claimed he had written up most of the big ideas in it before his precipitous departure from Downing Street.

We are now told we are not to get the revised version of the Integrated Review until the end of January at the earliest. So it will be at least two and a half months before we get Boris’s strategic blueprint for his Global Britain.

The timing of today’s announcement is no accident and it comes from three factors. First is the onset of the second, more etiolated, stage of Covid-19. Second is the imminence of Rishi Sunak’s one-year Comprehensive Spending Review due to be unveiled next Wednesday. Third is the advent of Joe Biden as 46th president of the United States.

Covid has shown how important the forces are to national resilience – and this is the key to homeland security. This was almost ignored back in March, when the services’ role in the pandemic was given little publicity – as a matter of policy from the top, meaning Dominic Cummings. By the end of this year at least 40,000 full time and reserve service men and women will have been involved in tackling Covid. They have learnt their expertise in command and control, creating and running labs, organising parts of ministries and the NHS, setting up emergency Nightingale hospitals, manning mortuaries, running testing stations, transport logistics and tasking volunteers. They are now standing by for the mass vaccination programme, when it happens. The services have proven to be vital.

Until this week, the Treasury was proposing to give UK defence an interim budget settlement, more or less a holding operation, for one year. With admirable political adroitness the Defence Secretary Ben Wallace persuaded the Prime Minister that a one year stop-gap budget settlement was worse than useless for Defence – so many programmes need to be planned and executed over several years. Covid meant maximum support for the men and women in uniform must be sustained.

The Biden presidency means a genuine sense of partnership and not dependency. The US needs Britain to help out in many spheres, special forces operations, maritime security and intelligence surveillance and gathering especially.

In his short statement to parliament today, in his best team talk mode, Boris Johnson stressed Britain’s renewed maritime strategy. He said the Royal Navy aimed to be the lead navy among the European Nato powers. He confirmed that the building of the new frigates, the eight antisubmarine Type 26, and the five general purpose Type 31e would now be fully funded. They will be complemented by a new class, the Type 32, a larger vessel, now just a glimmer in the designers’ laptops, but announced publicly for the first time today.

According to the military analyst and senior reservist Paul Beaver, this marks a big expansion for the Navy. “Within ten years we aim to have a fleet of 24 frigate and destroyer escorts,” from the present level of 19 in theory, actually 15 or 16 in practice. “This makes sense, when you consider that 80% of British international trade in goods and commodities goes by sea,” says Francis Tusa, the Editor of Defence Analysis.

The Navy will need to recruit more men and women. Currently 32,500 strong, including 6,600 Royal Marines, it needs at least 10,000 more personnel.

Plans are now afoot to build at least one major warship a year for the next twenty years – in what Boris Johnson calls “a renaissance of British shipbuilding.”

Jobs and personnel are at the heart of the new defence plan – but the details are maddeningly scarce at present.  The government says the plan will bring 10,000 new jobs each year for the next four years. This means there must be tighter control of defence purchases. Too much is being bought from America, to great disadvantage – with the US demanding control of support and maintenance and offering too little in terms of UK – based jobs. This applies to items such as the new Wedgetail AWACS aircraft and the Poseidon P8 maritime patrol aircraft, the latest Apache attack helicopters, and some of the proposed new Army vehicles, all of which will offer only a few hundred jobs at most to British maintainers and suppliers.

Almost nothing has been said about what is on the menu for service personnel and their families in the new plan. A lot of money needs to be spent on the Defence Estate, for barracks and family quarters, much of which is still aged and rundown.

The new plan announced by the Prime Minister and Ben Wallace suggests that defence has woken from a Rip Van Winkle slumber into which it had slipped following the long drawn out, ragged wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It has a focus and a purpose – proving vital to the life and security of everyone in the country against a range of threats and requirements old and new.

The services need new kit to fight new enemies in new ways, but they also have to maintain the old skills and ethos to engage with the foe in combat in all dimensions and media: land, sea, air, space and cyber.

Covid has reminded us of the vital role of domestic security and resilience. Here the threat can be natural or manmade, the destruction of communities in flood and weird weather, the threat to the power grid from cyber attack, to physical and psychological wellbeing and health from pandemic and disease, the asymmetric predations of terrorists and organised criminals. A homeland resilience force, professional and volunteer, is there to hold things together in the last resort.

The plan, of which we got only the first chapter today, and the generous budget outline, now has to be set in its context in the full Integrated Review. Mundane matters such as how, why, where and when we should work with allies, and international organisations such as the UN, Nato, OSCE and their agencies should be spelled out.

All of this must be set against an understanding of the really big factors now shaping human destiny, climate and environmental change, demographic fluctuation and ageing populations at home and the near abroad, and the flows of migration. These are now centre stage considerations for contemporary strategic and security thinking and planning.

There must be incentives and encouragement for the young men and women who are prepared to take up the call for public duty, and if necessary put their lives on the line. Above all they must be empowered to take command of their own lives and futures, and ours.