The Tempest is the world’s best aircraft – and it’s being made in Britain

The latest Situation Report on defence given by Gavin Williamson should be called the defence review that never was.

We had been told that much of the work had been done by midsummer on the Modernisation of Defence Programme (MDP), as the latest review is pretentiously named. But all dolled up with nowhere to go, the review which was first set for the opening of the Brussels Nato summit on July 12^th, and then for the rise of parliament for the summer recess, has slipped through the deadlines.

Don’t hold your breath. We, the defence hacks, are being warned off about ‘some headline announcements’, possibly, at the Tory party conference in October. Much more likely is some settlement on defence spending to be given in November – and for that, read Christmas. Philip Hammond is not prepared to settle defence funding until the Comprehensive Spending Review round is complete.

Somehow, the Chancellor has to find space in his plans for the extra £20 billion pledged for the NHS over ten years. And Hammond now faces demands for a similar extra funding for defence over the same period.

By temperament and inclination, Hammond does not want to do this. He regards the MoD as a wastrel. After all, when he was defence secretary, he claimed to have fixed the black hole in the ten year equipment budget – Why the media fell for such tosh at the time I still find hard to fathom.

Hammond’s refrain was that the defence chiefs didn’t understand business and accounting as he did, and should wise up. Forensic accounting, and attention to the bottom line are the answers to the nation’s strategic threats and risks. It should be noted that neither he, nor his successor Michael Fallon, enjoyed the complete trust of the services, and relations deteriorated throughout their tenure – leaving a toxic legacy to this day.

The trouble is that defence policy has been bedeviled by politics,  political posturing and grandstanding both under Labour and the subsequent Tory-led administrations. It has led to costly confusion and muddle – just look at the policy and procurement handbrake turns on the aircraft carrier, F-35 fighter and Maritime Patrol Aircraft, with the cancellation of Nimrod MRA4, and the expensive P8 Poseidon now bought from the States. All this has unnecessarily cost us billions.

The civil service has more than a walk-on part too, in defence of the Whitehall farce. There is no longer a culture of the dedicated defence and security civil servant in the way there was in the tradition of Frank Cooper, mastering the Falklands crisis, and Michael Quinlan, the great theologian of nuclear policy and deterrence. His star pupils, Kevin Tebbit and Richard Mottram, had to wrestle with the need to deliver a post Cold War peace dividend. For, as Lord Peter Hennessy points out, every one of the defence reviews since 1945 – the new one will be the 14th – has had an overt or covert agenda of cuts.

Part of the perennial solution is to cut personnel, and to insist on a rolling programme of ‘efficiency savings,’ some parts of which cost more to run than the sum to be saved. There was also a continuous effort to get the commanders and military out of the MoD building itself, thus trying to ignore its unique status as a front-line ministry and strategic and military headquarters combined. Over the past 80 years, the military has found from the ranks of all three services some remarkably shrewd and ingenious adminstrators.

Two recent permanent undersecretaries, in charge of the MoD at crucial times, gave every impression of not wanting to be there at all. It would be invidious to name them, but their hesitant performances before parliamentary committees said it all.

The conundrum of defence policy and spending is ovious. The MoD and services are committed to a series of roles, operations, and programmes for which the funds are inadequate. This was spelled out in this year’s National Audit Office reports – especially on equipment. The government cannot pay for all that it wants to buy.

Talk of punching above our weight, and being one of the few Nato powers in Europe spending more than two per cent of GDP on defence, are completely beside the point. We are allowed to lump into the calculation items such as pensions, intelligence services and GCHQ. Nor should President Trump’s Nato bluster being taken at face value – though it cannot be ignored. More important is the firm but steady message from US Defence Secretary, Jim Mattis, that Britain needs to sort out its defence priorities and spend a little more.

Despite the Trump tub–thumping, few European Nato allies are going to up their defence spending. Italy spends 1.1% of GDP and Spain is at 0.9% and both said explicitly they will not spend more the day after Trump left the Brussels meeting. France and Germany, vital Nato allies with or without Brexit, aren’t likely to spend much more, either. In addition, there is now the image of America the unreliable, under its growling, mercurial commander in chief.

Given this landscape, where allies seem as confusing as the potential and actual foes, the UK’s defence and strategy question looks like a wicked problem. Curiously, I disagree with this. There are ways forward, with ingenuity, imagination and a great deal of trust.

First, the Hammond view that defence is profligate and must take an accountancy lesson does not really work, or help. Mrs May, her defence secretary, Gavin Williamson, and her national security adviser cum acting cabinet secretary, Mark Sedwill, understand how important defence is to Britain’s standing and viability in the world.  The Conservative party cannot afford to go into an election with the electorate believing, with some reason, that its government has screwed up the nation’s defences.

Probably, extra funding will have to be found – not least because of the extra roles and capabilities in cyber warfare, electro-magnetic weaponry, surveillance, intelligence and communication the services are taking on.

As a trade-off some adjustment and reform are vital for the bigger programmes involving all three services. The first of these is the enormously costly replacement and update of the Trident missile system, including the four Dreadnought class submarines – currently costed at £51 billion.

The whole doctrine and strategy need to be revisited – especially the requirement to have one Trident boat at sea all year round – the concept of CASD (continuous at sea deterrent). It looks increasingly out of date, a Cold War relic that probably deters no one in today’s world. This doesn’t mean that the UK’s nuclear knowhow should be chucked away. There is still a large threat of nuclear proliferation, not least from non-state actors. Britain can keep a capability and expertise, but at a more practical level and much less expense.

The second big cost elephant in the room is the aircraft carrier and F-35 strike aircraft package. The carrier programme is a huge strain on the Navy’s financial and human resources. I understand that even with a crew of 768, there has been a serious underbudgeting for cleaning staff on the big ships. Engineering marvels the carriers may be, but in today’s fiscal and political climate they seem too big, and maybe the wrong priority at the wrong time. It is clear that only one carrier can be fully operational at a time, perhaps and should largely be allocated to operations other than war.

The Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning is currently the world’s most expensive combat aircraft programme. Costed at around $90 million a copy, European allies, Norway, Italy and Netherlands, are reducing, and even talking of cancelling their orders for what was supposed to be Nato’s next standard combat aircraft.

Much of the difficulty with F-35 is the restrictive nature of the deal and technology cooperation the US forced on allies and even production partners like the UK. This has ranged from reluctance on transfer technology, and requirements for that deep maintenance and upgrade should be managed by the US contractor.

The ingenious response to this – and the clear and visible reason why the UK will not buy all the 138 F-35s initially ordered was at the Bae Systems stand at the Farnborough Air Show. The demonstrator model of the ‘RAF Tempest Concept’ unveiled by Gavin Williamson was a show stopper. Tempest is a Generation 6 combat aircraft concept, with Bae systems, Rolls Royce, Leonardo and MBDA as prime partners, backed by the RAF and government’s own procurement and scientific research agencies.

The partnership has been working on the concept and the demonstrator for more than three years – well before the French and German governments announced they would work on a future fighter, but not with Britain. The Tempest may be most advanced fighter project, well ahead of the US rival. Already Rolls Royce have made huge progress, they say, on the plane’s new light weight engines – half the weight of those for the F-35. The new plane can be piloted or driven as an unmanned aerial vehicle, a drone in effect. It is to incorporate laser defence systems and direct energy weaponry.

The principle of the project is ‘open architecture’ in spec, technical capability, design and production partnership. Sweden’s Saab is engaging actively, so too are government and agencies in Turkey, the UAE and Saudi Arabia, and Japan. The open architecture is the diametric opposite of the quasi-monopolistic approach of the Pentagon, Congress and Lockheed Martin to the F 35.

There is a firm eye on cost and affordability from the off, underlined by  a strict timeline. In 2020 there will be a raincheck on the prototype’s progress and funding. This means a definitive decision to go into production will be taken seven years from now in 2025, with the first plane flying operationally with the RAF in 2035. It would fly alongside Typhoon, due out of service in 2040, and the Navy and RAF F-35s, which it is very likely to supplant, fairly quickly. If all goes to plan, and such complex projects are notoriously tricky, the UK may find it needs to buy less than half the F 35s originally – possibly as few as 50 or 60.

The Tempest announcement caused surprise all round. Once the covers were off at Farnborough senior American air force generals could be seen frantically punching their mobile phones – and European representatives did much the same, according to my eyewitness. Airbus had the wit to issue a statement of congratulation, dropping a hint that they would like to have a piece of the Tempest action in due course.

But perhaps the biggest threat to Tempest will be from a putative friend, America, and the putative foe, China, which is bound to be working on a similar project and would be desperate to beg, borrow or filch from the British project.

Tempest shows real ingenuity and a world class approach. UK defence is a huge plus for the country and the economy on the world stage as the recent report by Philp Dunne on defence industry potential underlines. Currently it earns about £7billion a year in direct exports. Recently the prime minister appears to have been converted to recognize its added value to the British economy as well as Britain’s role in the world.

The trick now is to produce a defence plan and budget, flexible to be built on and adapted to need over the next  ten years. The Modernisation of Defence Programme, when we get it finally, mustn’t fall back on the usual mish-mash of Whitehall clichés and platitude, hoping nobody will notice. Sure, more money will be needed, but not that much more.

The services are exceptionally well led at present, and the government should recognize and work from this. Huge new challenges are upon us from new waves of nuclear proliferation, new weaponry, cyber warfare, the militarization of space and communication, and the weaponization of news. A coordinated cross government multi agency approach is a necessity, hence the notion of a ‘fusion policy’ announced in the Cabinet Office’s National Security Capability Review earlier this summer.

There can be no exceptions,  such as the claim that the aid budget at DFID of around £12 to £14 billion now, is off limits, a bit of the Cameron legacy that should be ditched. Too much of the DFID remit and expenditure escape rigorous audit and scrutiny. Hard power, soft power, and sharp power as defined by Joe Nye, are now all parts of the same policy complex.

There could be no better illustration of why the UK will have to make its hard power contribution in today’s world than the extraordinary and bizarre news conference in Helsinki last Monday. There you had the Titans of the world’s two leading nuclear forces talking obsessively of their power rather than governance of their people and the world order. Mr Trump and Mr Putin battled ego to ego like Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee in “Through the Looking Glass.” Neither cared over much about the facts, truth or trust – let alone allies. Nato wasn’t mentioned once. In the Trump-Putin la-la land, it seems, there are no partners and friendly nations, just patsies and victims.

Western and global defence and security thus have moved into a new dimension, where nothing is true but everything is possible, to quote Peter Pomersntsev.