Cummings is right – broken defence procurement is an open secret

“Please nip back to the department and ask them to sort their bloody selves out, because if not Cummings is going to come down there and sort you out his own way, and you won’t like it,” was the candid remark of Mark Francois, MP for Rayleigh and Wickford, this week to General Sir Nick Carter, Chief of the UK Defence Staff.

To read the Twitter chirpings of the commentariat from the Evening Standard to Kevin Maguire of the Mirror, it was as if Ricky Gervase in David Brent had cheeked Field Marshal Montgomery of Alamein, or told the Duke of Plaza Toro to grow a pair.

High on woke snobbery, their remarks were very low on forensic journalism. Speaking in a hearing of the Defence Committee, Mark Francois, a former junior defence minister, Territorial Army officer, and chair of the European Research Group of Eurosceptic MPs, was telling the general about what is now in play in the Integrated Review, due to be delivered by the end of the year.

It will be a milestone, and probably one of the most radical reorientations of Britain’s position in the world. The Integrated Review was originally launched under the leadership of Sir Mark Sedwill, recently retired as National Security Adviser and Cabinet Secretary. The report and the policy, as Francois suggested, is now being guided by the not-so-hidden hand of Dominic Cummings, thinker and consigliere to Boris Johnson and Michael Gove.

The last review was the Strategic Defence and Security Review, delivered to the Cameron government in November 2015. It was based on the similar SDSR rushed through by the coalition in October 2010. By law there should be a review every five years.

Currently the services are under their statutory or “fully trained” strength, which should total around 200,000 for all three, including special forces, reserves, and support services like the Royal Fleet Auxiliary. General Carter declared the trained strength of the Army is around 72,000 plus 30,000 reservists at this week’s Defence Committee hearing. The Navy and Air Force have 32,500 regular service men and women, plus about 4,500 reserves; the Navy figure includes the Royal Marines.

The defence budget is currently just over £40 billion a year. It’s difficult to give precise figures about how much goes to each service because some funds are concealed in “special votes” such as the funding for the Trident Nuclear deterrent. In 2015, the equipment budget was set at £180 billion over ten years.

But this includes the escalating costs of replacing the Trident ballistic missile system and the flotilla of four new Dreadnought class launch submarines, the biggest ever built in Britain. The four boats are due in service by the end of the decade. Currently some £39 billion has been allocated to the force, and this is sure to rise.

David Cameron pledged to Nato that the UK would spend 2% of GDP or above on defence, one of about only five members of the alliance to do so. Following the recent procurement glitches, the Conservatives promised a half per cent real terms increase in the defence budget.

Even before Covid-19, it was widely known in Whitehall that the Treasury would like the defence budget cut, especially as they regard the MoD and the services as poor housekeepers and extravagant.

Dominic Cummings has painted himself as something of a strategy buff. In line with his radical approach to Whitehall and the civil service, he believes the services are overmanned and is said to believe the Army could be cut to 50,000, and that it is over-officered.

It is a truth universally acknowledged by all but a few among the military and the serried ranks of Whitehall suits that defence management and the £180 billion equipment programme suffers from chronic confusion and chaos. “A car crash,” Francois told the committee. While the Integrated Review will be about much, much more than defence management and budgeting, they lie very close to the heart of the matter.

“It’s an open secret that the MOD’s procurement system is failing”, Francois told me in a phone call. “The Defence Committee has been trying to shake the department out of its complacency, warning it to reform, or it will have reform imposed on it.”

The report will target equipment procurement. It will do this as part of setting out the whole landscape of the raison d’être of the armed services and intelligence and security agencies. It will response to existing and emerging threats on land, sea, and air, and also space and cyberspace. Covid-19 has been an untimely and rude reminder of what needs to be done by the forces and agencies in homeland resilience and security. This means retooling the approach to MACA – military assistance to the civil authority – to which 14,000 service men and women have been devoted in the current crisis.

As the committee, and General Carter, acknowledged, there has to be an established “surge” of forces and resources to help the nation’s medical, sanitation, and social services in future. These might be “BioEvents”, or Public Health Emergencies like Covid, or major social and environmental disasters, caused by anything from extreme weather to infrastructure network collapse.

Dwelling on the record of defence procurement, Francois pointed out that there had been 13 enquiries into this one subject, with no sign of reform. The Army had been upgrading its key fighting vehicles such as the Warrior armoured infantry vehicle and the Challenger 2 tank for ten years – part of a £3.6 billion package of new battlefield vehicles, with no result. The new Warrior delivery date has yet to be decided and the upgraded tank won’t get out of the garage before 2025, when the existing Challengers become technically obsolete.

More telling is the recent report by the National Audit Office into the 32 major defence equipment programmes. Only five of the 32 are set to be delivered on time, and they will be over budget. General Carter agreed that the inability to budget over a long period had been a problem – too much had to be settled year by year. He called this the curse of “annuality.”

The extent of Dominic Cummings’s personal background researches for the review can be glimpsed in an intriguing report in the Sydney Morning Herald this week. The paper’s Latika Bourke uncovered internal Downing Street correspondence in which Cummings requested clearance to visit a number of top security sites. They include GCHQ, the home of Signals Intelligence and the National Cyber Agency, at Cheltenham, the HQ of the Special Boat Service at Poole in Dorset, and the SAS in Hereford.

A fourth site on the Cummings itinerary is the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory – DSTL – at Porton Down, which played a crucial role in Covid tracking and the investigation of the use of Novichok against the Skripals in Salisbury in 2018. Two more, according to the Herald, are the Rapid Capabilities Office at Farnborough and the defence “geospatial” intelligence centre at Wyton.

Upgrading intelligence capability, and offensive and defensive cyber operations, are a priority for the forces, General Carter explained to the Commons Defence Committee. They appear to be a priority for Cummings, too. Intelligence, cyber and surveillance are currently parcelled out across all three services, the intelligence agencies, the GCHQ hub, and the police. A new UK Cyber Force, meanwhile, is struggling to be born. Increasingly it is looking like a Cummings baby.

He will not be aiming to build a force of “cyber cadets” complete with uniforms like the US Space Command, its cyber equivalent. He and Boris Johnson are more interested in Israel’s Unit 8200, an elite cyber commando founded in 1952 – on which they have had close briefings, according to industry sources. It’s something like a Hotel California of Israeli intelligence services; recruits are handpicked from school leavers and first year undergraduates. They are offered education and training for life, then leave and re-engage with the unit at different stages.

Unit 8200 is acknowledged as the progenitor of the Stuxnet malware, revealed in 2010, which crippled infrastructure in Iran’s covert nuclear weapons programme. This week the bazaars are buzzing with informed suggestions that Unit 8200 is somehow involved in the fires and explosions reported from five different weapons and nuclear sites in Iran, including Natanz and the Parchin missile base.

Reorganising the Civil Service and the forces are tasks of which Cummings’s hero, German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, would approve. He was the creator of modern Germany, whom Cummings studied with distinction at Oxford under the late Norman Stone. The old Prussian Juncker was wary of soldiers as politicians, and of parliaments – read into that what you may.

Interestingly, Cummings to be leaving the setting of national strategy and Britain’s vision of itself in the world – very much part of the Integrated Review process – to John Bew, a resident historian in Downing Street and author of a fine biography of Clement Attlee, and to the deputy National Security Adviser, the diplomat Alex Ellis. These are surprisingly establishment choices given Cummings’s interest in strategy, modelling, artificial intelligence, and forecasting.

With his focus on the role of the armed forces, and how they must be shaped for the threats of the new era, perhaps it might be worth recalling a remark by Sir Michael Howard, greatest of military historians and strategists, just before he died last year, aged 97. I believe it was a truth about the changing yet enduring aspects of conflict and war to which Mark Francois was referring in his blunt remarks to the Chief of the Defence Staff.

Having a light lunch in his garden late last summer, Howard and I talked of the nature of the challenges ahead: migration, demography, ecological, social and political collapse. Then, alluding to his distinguished military past, and to my story, he said suddenly: “You know, an Army like the British will always need the Parachute Regiment. Like it or not, it is unique in that it is the only regiment that trains its soldiers with the prime aim to kill the enemy.”