Mark Francois is a former Armed Forces minister and MP for Rayleigh and Wickford.
In his Lancaster House speech this January, Grant Shapps said that we are moving “from a post-war to a pre-war world.” His words resonated both nationally and internationally. When visiting Washington, these words were played back to us by Pentagon officials. Shortly after that, in an unclassified letter to Conservative MPs, the Defence Secretary stressed the need for industrial improvements, to “re-arm”- in terms reminiscent of the 1930s.
However, let us consider what that means. A senior Cabinet minister has said that we are now likely to go to war. Although he didn’t specifically state who with – which I fear may be true, if our deterrence does not improve – has serious implications for our entire defence and security posture.
The much-vaunted “Integrated Review” has now been overtaken by events. With increasing Iranian-inspired violence in the Middle East, sulphurous threats over Taiwan emanating from Beijing, and Russia’s state-sponsored murder of Alexy Navalny, even the most naive liberal would surely have to concede that Shapps might be right. The Integrated Review (and its 2023 “refresh”) is completely lacking in any responding “sense of urgency”.
Similarly, the “Defence Command Paper”, also lacked a sense of urgency, even to the point of retiring several key front-line systems, such as radar planes and tactical transport aircraft, in favour of new equipment, much later in this decade. Many analysts expected this to change, in the post-Ukraine, refreshed version of the Command Paper, (also published last year), but no major equipment decisions were altered, even despite Putin’s barbaric invasion.
More recently, after a detailed inquiry, the House of Commons Defence Committee published a report in February, simply entitled “Ready for War?”. Having served on the Committee since 2017, I can say this is one of the punchiest reports we have ever produced. In answer to the question in the title, the All-Party Committee (which includes six former MoD Ministers among its eleven members) concluded:
“Despite the United Kingdom spending approximately £50 billion a year on defence (plus more for Ukraine) the UK’s Armed Forces require sustained ongoing investment to be able to fight a sustained, high-intensity war, alongside our allies, against a peer adversary.”
In plainer English, despite this considerable outlay of taxpayer’s cash, we could not fight a sustained war with Putin’s Russia for more than a couple of months, before we ran out of ammunition and fighting equipment (not least as we have very few tanks, ships or combat aircraft in reserve.)
Given that it takes years to build a modern warship (eleven years in the case of the new Type 26 frigate) and four years to build a Typhoon fighter, if we had to fight what the strategists sometimes describe as a “come as you are war” – one with little further warning – we would have to rely on whatever equipment we have to hand or could rapidly remobilise- and we simply don’t have enough war winning kit to win as it is.
Even beyond the credibility gaps in our kit, our greatest weakness is now the lack of skilled personnel to operate and maintain the equipment we do have. Without them (and far too many of them are now leaving), even multi-billion-dollar aircraft systems simply remain in a hangar.
One perfect example of how dysfunctional the MoD has now become is the saga of Capita (or “Crapita”, as they are now affectionately known), the outsourcing firm who have been “managing” recruitment into the British Army since 2012. In only two of those years have they hit the recruitment target and, in recent public evidence, they admitted that three-quarters of the way through 2023-24, they have barely recruited half of their target of slightly under 10,000 soldiers. When pressed on where they would be at the year’s end, their best estimate was 7,000 – still several thousand short.
The practical effect of missing these targets has been that many Army Regiments are dangerously short of soldiers, something our potential enemies are well aware of. Everyone in Defence knows the contract has been a disaster – yet nobody in the Department’s upper echelons dares to sack them.
So, Capita limps on, as the Army bleeds out, with three soldiers now leaving for everyone Capita painfully manages to recruit. Anyone who thinks we will deter the likes of Vladimir Putin in this manner is living on a different planet.
Our members who knock on the doors and deliver the leaflets in the rain are quite entitled to ask, why, given that we now spend the thick end of £50 billion a year on defence, why does so little of our capability actually work? Why are some of the Army’s fighting vehicles now fifty or even sixty years old? Why do we have hardly any submarines which now regularly put to sea? Why do we have aircraft carriers that break down when they try to leave port?
Bluntly, it’s because the Ministry of Defence has become a gigantic, sclerotic bureaucracy; constantly hidebound by self-generated red tape; obsessed with process rather than outcomes; with senior civil servants are more interested in wokery than weaponry; in which key elements of our fighting equipment are so old – and the procurement system for replacing them so broken – that we cannot fight a major war for more than a few weeks. For months, the HCDC has been promised an MoD announcement on “fundamental reform” of procurement. This is becoming like waiting for Godot.
If you believe the role of our Armed Forces is to save lives by convincing potential aggressors that we would defeat them, then we are palpably failing. This is not a parlour game. This is about about whether our grandchildren are going to grow up in someone else’s “re-education camp” but you might not know that if you walked into the current MoD. You can try and blame the military. But, in the end, the responsibility lies with the politicians who, theoretically at least, are supposed to be in charge.
The Romans had a famous saying about military matters: “Si vis pacem, para-bellum” (“He who desires peace, should prepare for war”). Given that the Secretary of State, the man who runs the Department, has told us that we are in a “pre-war world” then surely, we had better start preparing for it – if we are going to have any chance whatsoever of preventing it – and we should now do so before it is too late.
Mark Francois is a former Armed Forces minister and MP for Rayleigh and Wickford.
In his Lancaster House speech this January, Grant Shapps said that we are moving “from a post-war to a pre-war world.” His words resonated both nationally and internationally. When visiting Washington, these words were played back to us by Pentagon officials. Shortly after that, in an unclassified letter to Conservative MPs, the Defence Secretary stressed the need for industrial improvements, to “re-arm”- in terms reminiscent of the 1930s.
However, let us consider what that means. A senior Cabinet minister has said that we are now likely to go to war. Although he didn’t specifically state who with – which I fear may be true, if our deterrence does not improve – has serious implications for our entire defence and security posture.
The much-vaunted “Integrated Review” has now been overtaken by events. With increasing Iranian-inspired violence in the Middle East, sulphurous threats over Taiwan emanating from Beijing, and Russia’s state-sponsored murder of Alexy Navalny, even the most naive liberal would surely have to concede that Shapps might be right. The Integrated Review (and its 2023 “refresh”) is completely lacking in any responding “sense of urgency”.
Similarly, the “Defence Command Paper”, also lacked a sense of urgency, even to the point of retiring several key front-line systems, such as radar planes and tactical transport aircraft, in favour of new equipment, much later in this decade. Many analysts expected this to change, in the post-Ukraine, refreshed version of the Command Paper, (also published last year), but no major equipment decisions were altered, even despite Putin’s barbaric invasion.
More recently, after a detailed inquiry, the House of Commons Defence Committee published a report in February, simply entitled “Ready for War?”. Having served on the Committee since 2017, I can say this is one of the punchiest reports we have ever produced. In answer to the question in the title, the All-Party Committee (which includes six former MoD Ministers among its eleven members) concluded:
“Despite the United Kingdom spending approximately £50 billion a year on defence (plus more for Ukraine) the UK’s Armed Forces require sustained ongoing investment to be able to fight a sustained, high-intensity war, alongside our allies, against a peer adversary.”
In plainer English, despite this considerable outlay of taxpayer’s cash, we could not fight a sustained war with Putin’s Russia for more than a couple of months, before we ran out of ammunition and fighting equipment (not least as we have very few tanks, ships or combat aircraft in reserve.)
Given that it takes years to build a modern warship (eleven years in the case of the new Type 26 frigate) and four years to build a Typhoon fighter, if we had to fight what the strategists sometimes describe as a “come as you are war” – one with little further warning – we would have to rely on whatever equipment we have to hand or could rapidly remobilise- and we simply don’t have enough war winning kit to win as it is.
Even beyond the credibility gaps in our kit, our greatest weakness is now the lack of skilled personnel to operate and maintain the equipment we do have. Without them (and far too many of them are now leaving), even multi-billion-dollar aircraft systems simply remain in a hangar.
One perfect example of how dysfunctional the MoD has now become is the saga of Capita (or “Crapita”, as they are now affectionately known), the outsourcing firm who have been “managing” recruitment into the British Army since 2012. In only two of those years have they hit the recruitment target and, in recent public evidence, they admitted that three-quarters of the way through 2023-24, they have barely recruited half of their target of slightly under 10,000 soldiers. When pressed on where they would be at the year’s end, their best estimate was 7,000 – still several thousand short.
The practical effect of missing these targets has been that many Army Regiments are dangerously short of soldiers, something our potential enemies are well aware of. Everyone in Defence knows the contract has been a disaster – yet nobody in the Department’s upper echelons dares to sack them.
So, Capita limps on, as the Army bleeds out, with three soldiers now leaving for everyone Capita painfully manages to recruit. Anyone who thinks we will deter the likes of Vladimir Putin in this manner is living on a different planet.
Our members who knock on the doors and deliver the leaflets in the rain are quite entitled to ask, why, given that we now spend the thick end of £50 billion a year on defence, why does so little of our capability actually work? Why are some of the Army’s fighting vehicles now fifty or even sixty years old? Why do we have hardly any submarines which now regularly put to sea? Why do we have aircraft carriers that break down when they try to leave port?
Bluntly, it’s because the Ministry of Defence has become a gigantic, sclerotic bureaucracy; constantly hidebound by self-generated red tape; obsessed with process rather than outcomes; with senior civil servants are more interested in wokery than weaponry; in which key elements of our fighting equipment are so old – and the procurement system for replacing them so broken – that we cannot fight a major war for more than a few weeks. For months, the HCDC has been promised an MoD announcement on “fundamental reform” of procurement. This is becoming like waiting for Godot.
If you believe the role of our Armed Forces is to save lives by convincing potential aggressors that we would defeat them, then we are palpably failing. This is not a parlour game. This is about about whether our grandchildren are going to grow up in someone else’s “re-education camp” but you might not know that if you walked into the current MoD. You can try and blame the military. But, in the end, the responsibility lies with the politicians who, theoretically at least, are supposed to be in charge.
The Romans had a famous saying about military matters: “Si vis pacem, para-bellum” (“He who desires peace, should prepare for war”). Given that the Secretary of State, the man who runs the Department, has told us that we are in a “pre-war world” then surely, we had better start preparing for it – if we are going to have any chance whatsoever of preventing it – and we should now do so before it is too late.