Cheap is good enough

With the imminent publication of the new government’s first Strategic Defence Review this article throws out a challenge. Can we make the first cheap British Army division of the modern period?  Can we afford not to?

The ‘world-beating’ delusion

Britain has a ‘world-beating’ epidemic.  It would be funny if we were not paying such a high cost for this delusion.  Who started it may be debated.  That it has become an empty boast is indisputable.  The graph below shows the frequency of use of the phrase in Parliament.  It has only got worse.

How is Britain world-beating?  Our social statistics certainly attract attention:

• 40% of adults pay no income tax, because their annual income does not exceed the £12,570 personal allowance threshold;
• One third of 35-45 year olds in England now rents (it was one in ten at the beginning of the century), and four in every ten of the private renters is receiving housing benefit (or they would be on the street);
• By the time Universal Credit is fully rolled out, one in four working age households will be receiving it;
• Almost one fifth of Britain’s school children, apparently, have special educational needs;
• At the other end of the scale, Britain’s graduates now collectively owe around £240 billion in student loans;
• Over one million16-24 years olds are neither in education, employment nor training (the NEETs), the main reason cited is ‘mental health’, remedied by a Personal Independence Payment (PIP) (over 3.3 million Britons in England and Wales were claiming a PIP last year).

And so we could go on.

How the British Army is ‘world-beating’ also raises questions.  Marlborough’s Grand Alliance army at the beginning of the 18^th century was bigger. Cromwell had more cavalry regiments. The country that invented the tank can today deploy and sustain one tank regiment (plainly, there must be a reserve or you would be unable to rotate troops).  The British Army is effectively air defenceless. In one of the most painful sagas of many in recent times, the Army will finally be receiving a new armoured personnel carrier, 20 years late, and with no weapon beyond a machinegun. And personnel statistics, perhaps reflecting wider society, do not make happy reading.  Just five years ago, around 4,500 service personnel brought claims against the MOD.  Today the number has jumped to almost 7,000 – or roughly, one in every 17th serviceman or woman on a parade square is making a claim against the MOD.  Is serving in the (smaller) non-operational Army really so dangerous? Has the MOD become more negligent in the last five years?

We can’t go on like this.  The first thing we must do is face reality and drop the ‘world-beating’ delusion.

Good, better, best

In the early 1960s, Defence Secretary Robert McNamara – America’s most talented holder of the post in the second half of the 20^th century – coined the phrase ‘Good, better, best’, in an interview with LIFE magazine.  The Ford ‘whizz kid’ (‘human IBM machine’ was his other nickname) had been recruited by Kennedy to reform the bloated Department of Defence.  He did, against some opposition.

‘Good, better, best’ referred to defence kit.  The majority of defence kit, McNamara argued, just needs to be good.  A small proportion needs to be better.  And the smallest proportion needs to be ‘the best’.  The reason was cost.  If each of the services proposed the best kit, every time, the defence budget would be bankrupted.  Who knows what McNamara would make of Washington’s trillion dollar defence budget today.  His wisdom is certainly missed.

Or cheap is good enough

Or, perhaps, we could shorten McNamara’s dictum and simply state cheap is good enough, most of the time.  We were good at cheap.  It was the foundation for what today would be called ‘success stories’.  The Land Rover story began in 1947 with Rover responding to a War Department requirement for a cheap, jeep-like, utility vehicle.  Millions have since rolled off the production line.  In contrast, a recently procured patrol vehicle (this author will not name equipment or identify programmes for obvious reasons) cost over £1 million, per vehicle – or as much as a luxury car of the super-rich.  Few have been procured and none will ever be exported.

The Combat Vehicle Reconnaissance (Tracked) (CVR(T)) series vehicles are another example of cheap kit, and a ‘success story’.  They were designed by Alvis in 1967; production started three years later (difficult to believe today); and by the mid-1990s over 3,500 had been produced, fielded by around 20 armies.  It is highly unlikely the reconnaissance vehicle currently in procurement will win a single export order, for the unfortunate reason that it is the most expensive reconnaissance vehicle in history (if the reader can point to another, this author would be interested to know).

The FV432 series vehicles could not have been simpler, or cheaper.  Sixty years on the vehicles are still trundling along in the Army (and needed).  Countless variants were fielded. 50,000 cheap Bedford trucks were made: the ‘4 tonners’ that this author hitched rides on when young.  The L118/119 Light Gun could not have been simpler, or cheaper.  It was eventually adopted by almost 20 operators, including the US Army.  The first anti-tank weapon this author fired was a WOMBAT – a 120mm rifled barrel on wheels. What a good idea.  It was beautifully simple, deafening, and deadly.

When we made things, we made them cheap.  Today we live with the fabulous and unchallenged notion that everything must be ‘the best’, ‘world-beating’ indeed.  In defence procurement this is known as ‘golden requirements’.  And no matter how many times it is pointed out golden requirements cripple programmes and are the root cause of multi-billion pound procurement failures – dating back to the 1990s when the disease began – nothing happens. There was no such thing as ‘golden requirements’ in the Fighting Vehicles Research and Development Establishment (FVRDE), or at GKN Sankey, or at Vickers-Armstrongs, or at Royal Ordnance – all entities, of course, which no longer exist.  Royal Ordnance had been part of the history of these islands since the Tudor period.

Attrition warfare and defence industry

Putin’s ‘special military operation’ has been unquestionably special in turning the Russian Army into an iron mountain of scrap.  The numbers are spell-binding.  At the time of writing, the ‘esveo’ has resulted in the loss of over 21,000 items of equipment, or several NATO armies. This includes around 3,850 tanks, 7,700 AFVs, and 630 APCs. Over 900 SP guns and 480 MLRSs have been lost.  Almost 100 expensive radar systems have been damaged or destroyed.

How on earth has the Kremlin kept going?  Not through production.  The only reason why Putin’s folly has not collapsed (but we are not far away now) is because of vast stocks of Soviet-era vehicles and weapons.  But as open source analysts like Covert Cabal have pointed out – based on meticulous ground-count from satellite imagery – the Soviet cupboard is almost bare.  The stocks are close to exhaustion.  What then?  Well, we know the answer to that question: over the last few months, Russian soldiers have been assaulting on motorcycles, golf carts and even e-scooters. Soviet vehicles from the 1950s have been spotted on frontlines.  A 1947 artillery piece has been seen. Horses and donkeys have replaced resupply vehicles.

This parable should be concerning to a British Defence Secretary (aside from the lesson, don’t start foolish wars).  ‘We are all Thatcher’s children now,’ Andrew Marr once wrote.  This is not the space to debate Thatcherism but few would argue against the general proposition that she re-made Britain and her shadow is long.  One legacy was the decline of Britain’s manufacturing base.  Thatcherism and the manufacturing sector is a debated subject. Indeed, the steepest decline in manufacturing actually took place during the Blair years (ironically viewed as ‘son of Thatcher’).  As Investment Monitor has opined in ‘Who killed British manufacturing’, ‘The list of suspects responsible for the decline of British manufacturing is vast.’

The fact is it happened and defence firms were especially badly hit. In the case of land defence industries the experience has been disastrous.

If Britain were embroiled in a major war tomorrow the country would be in the same position as Ukraine in February 2022 – dependent on others for its salvation. 

British governments did not take a peace dividend following the dissolution of the Soviet Union and end of the Cold War.  They disarmed Britain.

A government spokesperson may counter by stating the MOD spent £28.8 billion with UK industry and commerce during the 2023/24 financial year.  This is true.  But not making things.  You can’t win wars with ‘technical, financial or other business services’.  You have to make things.

Cheap is necessary

Which takes us back to the British Army’s future cheap division.  We don’t have a choice.  Or if war did break out we would soon be apprised of this virtue.  Soldiers need bangs and lots of them.  And they need kit, also in great quantities.

Recently, the MOD made a procurement of around 100 ‘cutting-edge’ drones (like ‘world-beating’, a phrase as predictable as the rising of the sun).  The initial cost of the contract was in the order of £130 million.  The Ukrainian and Russian armies are expending around 5,000 drones every day.  The British Army’s new ‘cutting-edge’ drones would last about 30 minutes.  Or expressed another way, the MOD would have to spend £2.3 trillion on the ‘cutting-edge’ drone, to match attrition and expenditure rates being experienced in one year of a real war.

This isn’t criticism of that particular drone or the manufacturer.  You could itemize most kit in procurement and beg the question: but how would you replace this kit affordably, or at all, at the rates of attrition witnessed in the war in Ukraine.  Could the foreign firms supply anyway?

War’s oxygen is money.  If we don’t find a way to create a cheap division we will suffocate.

 Cover photo source: Think Defence