'Defence'

The UK’s Ministry of Defence has announced that there will be 2,600 redundancies among serving personnel over the next six months and a personnel reduction (mostly by redundancy) of 17,000 by April 2015.

There will, of course, be a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth; historic tradition, camaraderie, commitments to NATO, punching above our weight in the world, da da da da.

However, I am tempted to see this in a positive light. The last figures I have, for August 2010, show 194,440 regular troops, 39,420 volunteer forces and 191,300 regular reserves. That makes just over 425,000 military, which with our sophisticated kit and fourth largest military defence budget in the world, gives us the second highest power projection capability in the world, after America.

This is far, far too high. Indeed it is a wonder we have allowed the euphemism ‘Defence’ at all: it is an attack force, a power projection force, and we can’t afford it, even if it were desirable to have it, which I doubt.

There is a proviso, though. One of the reasons I don’t own a screwdriver is so that no one asks me to do any repairs or ‘do it yourself’. You cannot, however make dramatic cuts to military personnel while continually engaging in these foreign adventures, such as Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. It is like me developing a passion for putting up shelves.

Against that, 17,000 would be a cut of 4%, which doesn’t look awful.

Those aircraft carriers

The Italian financial paper Il Sole 24 Ore reports that as part of a budget reduction programme the USA is considering cancelling the Joint Strike Fighter.

This means that not only will our aircraft carriers have no aircraft for ten years, but they won't even have any then.

Perhaps we could borrow something from the Chinese.

Defence Cuts

The whole point of a strategic defence review is that it should cover what we are actualy going to want from our armed services over the medium-term. I should have thought the most obvious criterion was that the public are no longer going to permit one of these insane international frolics like Iraq and Afghanistan.

Accordingly, when the Daily Telegraph wails that Britain can not independently fight a major war again, we should rejoice.

Let's just have minor ones. Or none.

In fact, service personnel will be cut from 175,000 to 158,000. Whereas we sent 45,000 soldiers to Iraq in 2003, we could now only send 30,000. I don't find that too shocking.

We really have to rid ourselves of the sentiment in all this - it is a shame if soldiers lose their jobs, but a lot of people are losing their jobs; it is a shame if we are not an international superpower, but then we were anyway so far behind America that it wasn't really relevant; it is a shame if we can't invade someone on the other side of the world: nor can France, Germany, Italy, Japan or Canada. That's why we belong to NATO, where we have been more than pulling our weight while others haven't.

We'll live.

UK Defence

Whenever costs are being squeezed the departmental PR machine goes into overdrive. None do this better than the ministry of defence which alternates from mawkish support of our 'brave boys' to warnings of the massed hordes of foreign invaders threatening the channel ports.

Something has to give, somewhere, of course. An article in the Telegraph by retired General Sir Richard Dannatt probably shows the way things are going. Dannatt is well connected in Tory circles and would hardly have been allowed to write the article if it weren't what the Government were trying to project.

The article suggests that one of the two new aircraft carriers, which is already half built and paid for, should be kept on, but in mothballs. The saving on the other one and the reduction in the number of aircraft needed would pay for more frigates. We would pull out of Germany and those soldiers could be based at the airbases which would no longer be needed. Apart from scrapping some tanks and heavy artillery the army and the Royal Marines would be kept roughly as they are.

There is a lot of imprecise mumbling about the nuclear deterrent, some saying it would be Trident based, others going out of their way to avoid mentioning Trident at all. Whatever, the decision will be delayed as long as possible. For myself I have always wondered whether we couldn't replace it with something which made a smaller - but still substantial - bang, and cost half as much. Say big enough to bust an Iranian subterranean silo but not big enough to destroy every Iranian city at the same time. A smaller bomb could be delivered from a variety of different platforms, which would surprise Johnny Foreigner just as much as it coming from a secret submarine.

Probably wrong.