Flawed British policy

While the UK Ministry of Defence is busy with Operation Ellamy, dealing with Libya, as well as Operation Herrick, in Afghanistan, and the country is rightly behind its armed forces thus engaged, it is nevertheless unwise to ignore some of the flawed decisions the UK government took last October in the defence review. While writing, let me salute Malta’s part in recent aid operations and for its offering a great “run ashore”, for well over a century, to sailors from visiting warships.

The British Public Accounts Committee, in early March, established that the real cost of each one of the 160 Typhoon aircraft ordered by the Royal Air Force (RAF), the prototype of which flew in 1994, is £126 million. Some 65 have been delivered, and 95 are still to come, but no one knows why we need 160 of these aircraft that cost £1bn for eight.

The utility of an aircraft carrier, for operations off Libya, let alone for a range of other tasks, is obvious. So obvious that even the RAF, and retired air marshals, acknowledge that a no-fly zone off North Africa is best policed by carrier-borne aircraft. The US, French and Italians have aircraft carriers in the area. Even Britain has quietly arranged for one to be in the Mediterranean since April Fool’s Day – HMS Invincible has now passed the Rock of Gibraltar as she is towed to Turkey and the scrapyard, but she is an empty vessel and characterises this government’s vacuous approach to maritime affairs and defence.

Yet the RAF advised the government, last autumn, that its land-based aircraft could carry out all future tasks were there no aircraft carrier. Why the government listened to such nonsense is hard to understand. When one learns that HMS Ark Royal and the Harriers could be run on for four years, at a total cost of £402m – less than the cost of four Typhoon jets – it is clear that the government was well and truly duped by the Brylcreem boys in Whitehall. The cost of the operations off Libya would be significantly less were HMS Ark Royal and her Harriers off the coast now. No 3,000-mile round trips by some seven aircraft, for the first strike, at a cost approaching £1m.

No comparable failure to fly, as the Harrier is newer than the Tornado and a much more reliable aircraft; of the nine Tornado aircraft intended for use in the first strike from RAF Marham, only three were serviceable. No 160 RAF personnel in hotels in southern Italy at a coast of some £10,000 a day – bunks are cost-free in a carrier. That £1m first strike contributed three missiles to some 112 others fired, the same day, from submarines and ships off the coast. These are the tactics of despair, comparable to the useless Vulcan bomber strike on Port Stanley in 1982.

The daft decisions of the SDSR are manifold. The Royal Fleet Auxiliary landing ship dock Largs Bay, commissioned four years ago, is now for sale. She provided great utility for the UK and was in the news when delivering aid to earthquake-stricken Haiti. How quickly the bean counters in Whitehall forget. A parliamentary answer shows that RFA Largs Bay cost £9.5m to run in a year. The RAF display team, the Red Arrows, costs £9.35m to run, yet it has no front-line military purpose and is quite useless when it comes to delivering humanitarian aid. But we keep the Red Arrows and RFA Largs Bay will be sold to some lucky foreign navy.

With decisions like these made last October, the government would be guilty of dissembling were it not to respond to the increasing clamour for a review of the defence review. I don’t blame ministers entirely, but they do need to be very careful as to the advice they heed from partisan advisers. Fortunately, though I am partisan insofar as maritime Britain is concerned, the figures here just speak for themselves. The Maltese government should express concern. David Cameron must review the defence review now.