Back to the Unsinkable Aircraft Carrier

There is a clear winner in the Strategic Defence Review

Anybody who has worried about the hollowed-out state of the UK armed forces in an age of global crises should welcome the ambition and intent of this Strategic Defence Review.

After decades of decline and pretence, it marks the beginning of meaningful change. It is driven by adversity.

“For the first time since the end of the Cold War”, it notes, ‘the UK faces multiple, direct threats to its security, prosperity, and democratic values”. There is a coy reference also to the “United States’ change in security priorities”, or Trump to you and I, the factor that clinched Downing Street’s approval for spending boosts during the coming three years.

Of course, the degree to which these challenges can be met, and the scale of national efforts to do so, depend on money. That’s why I focused my post last week on this question, specifically on the journey to 3% of Gross Domestic Product, the need to give both a clear commitment to it and a plan of how the build up from 2.5% to that higher target will be structured. As I expected, the Treasury demurred, the government has failed to do this, so the issue overshadowed coverage of the big announcements.

Now we have more detail about what’s planned by the Ministry of Defence for the next decade let’s do something which people from that building bend over backwards to avoid in their public utterances: seeing this in single service terms. Indeed, today’s paper is stuffed with even more references to integration and joint operations by the different historic branches of the military than most MoD documents, but no matter, I’ll do it anyway.

The Royal Navy is the winner. Big time.

To an extent unique among the three services, there is an attempt across the board to rebuild naval power whittled down by the cuts of the past fifteen years. This applies to the old metrics – ships or boats – and the new ones of AI or uncrewed weaponry.

From the first thing this morning, when the Prime Minister went big on his ambition to build ‘up to’ twelve new nuclear-powered attack submarines (currently there are seven), to the idea of building the destroyer and frigate force from 14 currently to 25, this was apparent.

Add to this Project Cabot one of the most important new technology programmes, growing investment in autonomous mine hunting and protection of undersea infrastructure, and it becomes clear that strategic choices are being made to prioritise defence of the UK home islands rather than re-building the Army or Royal Air Force to the same extent.

Cabot involves the use of underwater sensors, both fixed and in the form on uncrewed submarines, to detect hostile craft beneath the waves. It will form a vital tool for the protection of the North Atlantic from Russian submarines.

On top of these developments the ongoing programme to replace the four boat Trident missile carrying submarine force, as well as the effort poured into aircraft carriers during recent years and we get a clearer idea of this maritime primacy.

For the RAF there’s a promise of jam tomorrow with the new fighter jet, called Tempest in the UK, that is being developed jointly with Japan and Italy. There’s also going to be a buy of F35A fighters (a few dozen?) as a stopgap as the current Typhoon force becomes obsolescent. But it doesn’t look like a significant uplift in terms of squadrons or missions.

The prospect of giving new F35As a role carrying US nuclear weapons is alluded to in the SDR as something that it being explored. It fits neatly with the ‘Nato first’ emphasis and marks a deliberate strategic choice over deeper cooperation with France in this area.

As for the Army, it comes in behind both other services. Yes, there’s expensive ongoing projects to re-equip it with new armoured vehicles, and the defence secretary’s ‘ambition’ to add a few thousand soldiers back into the force – but that’s for the future.

There is also a nebulous headline of making it ‘ten times more lethal’. We shall see what that amounts to in practice.

That it turned out this way shouldn’t be that surprising, given the SDR’s “defining principle” is Nato first and its frequent references to the “Euro-Atlantic area”. It adds a graphic (below) emphasising the importance of internet and energy connectors to those traditional concerns of keeping sea lanes to the British Isles open. It’s pointedly different in this respect to the Global Britain and Indo-Pacific language of the Johnson years.

Of course we could argue, on a day when the prime minister said he wasn’t going to play “fantasy politics” in response to questions about guaranteeing the money to make these changes, that until the cash is lined up to pay for them that all these new naval vessels are ‘fantasy fleets’, and indeed the shadow defence secretary used that term in the Commons. But the weight of ‘ambition’ to hijack the word of the day, is naval.

There will be many questions about how the forces find enough people, train, and support themselves in the coming years. The yearning for carrier groups with growing numbers of escorts, for example, will take attention right back to the Royal Fleet Auxiliary, running the vessels needed to support them at sea, which has been sadly diminished in recent years.

Questions were already being asked on Monday about whether the Royal Navy could service an increased submarine force and find sufficient people to crew it. It is in these broader issues of societal support for the forces that much work has been done by the SDR team.

All of this lies ahead, and all of it will be conditioned by the broader economic outlook. It doesn’t help that paying down government debt costs far more than the defence budget. But the SDR does set out a blueprint for the future, one in which the UK resumes the role of unsinkable aircraft carrier, and anchor for North Atlantic security.