There hasn't been much progress on my
long-term beef with Martin Kettle for a while. But it's worth remembering that if the
Guardian has a major leading article that isn't a business/economics story, it's probably him. And Saturday's
second lead (behind a rather competent
finance story) bears the Kettle hallmarks.
Forty years ago the Royal Navy came up with a wheeze to persuade the government to buy a new fleet of aircraft carriers - it claimed that they were actually "through deck cruisers". There was no need for pretence this week when the £3.9bn order for two superships was signed in Govan. The vessels, to be named after the Queen and her son (another naval wheeze - would any government dare axe Her Majesty?), should come into service from 2014 as the oceanic embodiment of British power.
Well, he could have mentioned that the "new fleet of aircraft carriers" weren't designed as aircraft carriers, either; the
Invincible class originally only carried 5 fighters, intended to chase off Soviet Bear reconnaissance planes rather than to provide serious air defence, and their main mission was as a base for anti-submarine helicopters. The
Invincibles' role as light fleet carriers was originally a desperate hack for the Falklands, which the Navy realised could be built upon.
(And if you want a good story about the CVA-01 decision, why not mention the fact the RAF promised they could provide air cover to British forces anywhere on earth, producing a map to support this on which Australia was about 300 miles north-west of where conventional wisdom would suggest?)
The government is proud, the navy thrilled and the army jealous. The problem is that no one seems to know exactly what the ships are intended to do or how they will be paid for.
Wrong; they will provide fleet air defence, the same for British or allied landing forces, close air support for troops ashore, and a significant air strike capability, with secondary ASW, command and control and logistic roles. They are budgeted for in the defence equipment programme. That is a cheap criticism, though. If Kettle means that we won't ever need the use of an aircraft carrier, or that they are morally appalling in all cases, why doesn't he say so?
Nor is it clear what sort of plane, if any, will fly from their decks: the Joint Strike Aircraft, which they are designed to carry, will not be ready in time (and will cost a further £12bn), even if the United States goes ahead with the necessary vertical takeoff version, which is not certain. In the meantime the navy will have to make do with its ageing Harriers.
It's perfectly clear. Harrier until the F-35 ISD in 2014, thereafter F-35. You've just said so yourself. Further, note that Kettle is complaining that the Fleet Air Arm's Harriers are "ageing" and also complaining about replacing them, within the space of two sentences. Is he even aware, I wonder, that there are Harriers in the RAF as well? And that they are no newer? The argument that the cost of replacing Harrier is all the fault of the Navy is dishonest; the Harriers will wear out, whether they are flying from
Illustrious and
Ark Royal, the future
Queen Elizabeths, or land bases.
And if you're worried about the Army (they are "jealous", remember), you should be aware that the Harrier force's central mission is to support the infantry. The aircraft itself was designed back in 1969 as a specialised close support aircraft, a sturmovik as the Russians would say, one that would be small, manoeuvrable, with a lot of space for weapons, and no requirement for airfields at all. This was why the US Marines, probably the most CAS-minded air force in the world, bought them. Letting the Harrier force go isn't an option - because we already cut half the RAF's CAS aircraft two years ago when the Jaguars were decommissioned, and the press didn't really notice.
For a government facing a tricky byelection in Glasgow, led by a prime minister from Fife, it is easy to understand the attractions of ships built partly in Govan and Rosyth. Last year's Commons statement giving the go-ahead was greeted by MPs cheering news of work going to their constituencies. What was lacking - and has been since the 1998 strategic defence review set out plans for the vessels - was a discussion of why the ships are needed, or how they can be afforded
And you're not going to get one here. Viz:
No one doubts the importance of carrier fleets in certain circumstances - Britain could not have fought the Falklands war without Hermes and Invincible. Floating off some future conflict zone or humanitarian disaster, the new ships will prove valuable. But so might many other forms of military resource, some of which will be sacrificed to pay for these aircraft carriers. The army lacks secure patrol vehicles and helicopters, but the Future Lynx helicopter programme looks likely to be scrapped in order to bail out a defence budget that is already overspent and must now fund naval gigantism.
Many other forms, eh. Fortunately the Matra-BAE Dynamics Ideological Handwave appears to be cheap and available off the shelf. The FLYNX project ought to be scrapped anyway, because it's a procurement zombie - it's been going on for ten years, not a single helicopter has been procured, but no less than three different sets of capability requirements have been written, at astonishing cost, and the current solution is to buy another lot of the same helicopters, which don't actually cover the LIFT element of the requirement (which is the bit about racing to the succour of the wounded in Afghanistan, Minister), and are rather large and expensive for the FIND element, which is about sneaking about spying, and could better be done by robots, more smaller and cheaper helicopters, or by ones big enough to cover the LIFT requirement with the spooky gear bolted on.
Regarding the "secure patrol vehicle" thing, here's
Armchair Generalist. Sure, everyone would like to see more of them. But they are relatively cheap, and in fact the government keeps buying more of them. Which is a pity, because they are completely useless for anything other than Iraq and some missions in Afghanistan (the ones where you don't need either heavy metal, or mobility). But politicians love them because they show We Care. As far as Army procurement goes, the generals are more concerned about the FRES project, which is costed at £14bn and has already spent hundreds of millions of pounds without building a single vehicle. Many people think it is actually physically impossible.
Further, the Invincible class lasted 30 years; HMS
Fearless was laid down in 1964 and managed to launch Chinooks full of SBS men into Afghanistan in 2001. Will we be in Iraq or Afghanistan in 4 years, let alone 14 or 40?
So we didn't get a serious discussion of why the ships are needed, did we? Oh well, space constraints. What about the solution?
This does not mean Britain should not have access to carriers; only that it cannot afford to build and support two new ships, three times the size of its current ones, without doing harm to other capabilities. The answer would have been to share the cost of construction and operation with France, which has just pulled back from expanding its own carrier fleet. Talk of this last month led to silly tabloid headlines about an EU navy. But a shared fleet and a capable military to back it up would do much more for global security than two big British ships and a cash-strapped army - even if it meant that the red ensign had to fly alongside the tricolour.
What does "access" to carriers
mean? I hate this "access to" meme - it's a long standing government way of saying "something other than what you need". Rather than poverty, unemployment, or a terrible diet, your problem is that you "struggle to access finance, employment, and fresh foods". I fully expect to hear a government minister explain how they "are taking forward an initiative to improve our counter-terrorist capability's access to ammunition".
More seriously, how can we possibly "share the cost of construction and operation" with France when France has just "pulled back from expanding its own carrier fleet"? The French government wants to make some quite impressive cuts in its defence budget, and has decided to put off building a ship, so why would they give us money to work on ours? This "answer" is actually self-refuting.
In fact, the French are likely to get assurances of some sort of the use of the British ships for training when the
Charles de Gaulle is in dock, and perhaps also of support if something comes up. Presumably they will offer something in return. This is roughly what Kettle is suggesting, but reversed; but
it's impossible for both Britain and France to do this, just as two people with no money cannot help each other out by lending to each other.
And on top of this, we finish with what sounds like a call to revive the European Defence Community of 1954, which is...different. After all, the Guardian's policy is not actually to support the creation of a single European state, the last I heard. Nobody actually wants this, and there is no evidence the French do. How it would work, who would command it, who would task it...all this is handwaved away.
Worse, this is a common fault of much discussion of British defence policy. On the Right, the assumption is usually that we don't need a policy because the Americans will provide. On the Left, it's usually that we don't because the Europeans will pay, as if there was a great pool of available funding or forces over there. It makes as much sense as assuming that "the Boche will pay" did in 1919.
Here, it's driven by Kettle's addiction to Neither-Nor Criticism. He wants to appear decently anti-militaristic and concerned - this is the Manchester Guardian, after all - but he also doesn't want to accept the policy consequences of this. After all, he's a sodding Decent! How can you be a fan of humanitarian intervention and the war in Iraq, but also be opposed to having a blue-water navy? If you don't think we need a navy, or you think that we don't need armed forces at all, go ahead and make a case. If you think we do, then please suggest a shape of the forces and a foreign policy that would reliably not need the carriers. But he refuses to go anywhere near either. So, what we get is a sort of tepid soup of unexamined assumptions, with the extra feature that he seems to be desperately underbriefed on the issue.
Alternatively, the reason why he dislikes the carrier project is that it might confer too much independence of the United States. Now, this would indeed be consistently Decent. Some sort of half-baked "access to carriers" would be far more likely to prevent independent British - or European - action, and far more likely to compel a future prime minister to march because some ally wanted it. George Orwell attacked the "shabby kind of pacifism common to countries with strong navies", in a passage much quoted by the Decents. But how much worse is a shabby kind of militarism that doesn't want to pay for the Navy?
