First came a stupid public brawl when Defence Secretary Liam Fox argued the capital cost of the replacement for the nuclear "deterrent" should be paid centrally rather than out of the MOD's budget (odd -- I thought it was a defence system?); more recently when leakers stated that the scale of the cuts will leave the Royal Air Force with fewer planes than it had in 1914.
Which is a strange comparison, not least because the RAF wasn't even established until some years after 1914, but never mind. The fact is, a single modern fighter could destroy every single one of those World War 1 planes without exerting itself.
It is a meaningless comparison, like arguing that in WW1 Britain had about 150 ships in the Grand Fleet, but today it has "only" 87. Almost any of those ships could, singlehanded, destroy the entire Grand Fleet.
More interesting is the list of proposed cancellations -- about half the Eurofighters will be scrapped (good, because there's pretty much nothing for them to fight), and a number of main battle tanks (in fact, about 40% of the Army's 10,000 armoured vehicles). A couple of light armoured divisions will be reformed as helicopter divisions (about time, too).
The Royal Marines will be taken out of the Royal Navy and put together with the two Parachute Regiments to create a combined elite attack force (yep, that seems sensible to me, especially as, culturally, the Navy gets evermore sophisticated and hi-tech while the Army... well, the Army does what it always does).
The Navy will lose a couple of submarines (in reality, it will just stop building new nuclear attack subs a couple before the current programme was scheduled to finish) and three amphibious assault ships (ditto).
For the surface fleet, the MOD has already signalled it wants the Navy to focus on acquiring less sophisticated ships but a lot more of them: this seems to me a sensible reversal of the Navy's quest for ever more technologically advanced ships, leaving it in danger of being unable to field more than a couple at any one time. Which is both hopeless for deployments and presents an enormously high level of risk (in some circumstances they only have to lose one ship by a freak chance and they've then lost everything).
The arrival of the latest subs and the carriers and the new-generation destroyers has covered off the high end; now we need some numbers at the low end.
As predicted by me (you read it here first), the order for A400M military aircraft is unaffected but (and I hadn't seen this coming), not just some but the entire fleet of Lockheed Hercules aircraft will be withdrawn. Although that also makes sense, as their usefulness declines as a result of the increasing weight of armour on vehicles.
The military is touting this as the dawn of a new era when Britain will "only" be a "medium scale player". Really? What other "medium scale players" have nuclear attack submarines, two full-scale aircraft carriers equipped with the very latest stealth jets, and an attack force capable of projecting significant military power to the other side of the world?
Most analysts think the British military is still only second in its ability to project power inter-continentally. Nothing in these leaked proposals is going to diminish that.
I'm still waiting for someone to put the case that we really shouldn't be keeping hundreds of military horses and numerous military brass bands in the twenty-first century. I mean -- herds of horses?! Killing that symbolism is long overdue and might also show that cutting the deficit really is the most important thing right now...
Yeah, I can't see that, either. Maybe this deficit thing isn't quite so important after all?
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