Liam Fox on his time as Defence Secretary..

[Sunk at Narvik]

An interesting read:

http://www.instituteforgovernment.org.u ... /liam-fox/

Interesting background on the decision to scrap Nimrod:

"Knowing what you want to do and communicating it very clearly and not being ambivalent or ambiguous about it. I mean I remember a very clear example is over Nimrod and when the manufacturers came in and said to me, we need another tranche of money for Nimrod. And we think if we get it, we will be able to sort out a particular problem within 18 months. I said, ‘If I’m not mistaken, first of all this project was Nimrod 2000. This is now 2010. We’ve spent a lot of money. We don’t have any capability for it. And I said, ‘We’re going to cancel the programme’. And this was quite totemic because no one cancelled projects. And I remember them saying, ‘Well, there’ll be a campaign to save it’. To which my reaction to that was not if we cut them up, which is what we did, as you probably remember. End of story."

[cpu121]

And the Lib Dem presence in the MOD:

http://www.instituteforgovernment.org.u ... ck-harvey/

"A good example was the question of the aircraft carriers having cats and traps from which you would fly a conventional aeroplane rather than a jump jet. The time we got in there, we queried why we were creating ships of 65,000 tonnes and only intending to fly jump jets off them, which you could fly off a ship half that size. It was clearly too late to change the size of the ship, because the first one was coming together and the second one had already had metal cut. So the question arose, would it be worth putting cats and traps on, even at additional expense, in order to fly the more capable aircraft off it. So the MOD concluded it would be worth having one last look at that subject. It needed a study of about a year, but their back-of-a-fag-packet guesstimates said maybe it would cost about £500 million to put cats and traps onto one carrier, bearing in mind the policy was going to be to tie the other one up. It would delay the whole thing by about a year, but you would get the more capable aircraft and in any case the jump jet version of the aircraft was in serious trouble over in the States, it was in special measures and might never happen.

So all in all, it seemed a perfectly rational thing to have one last look at it. We were told that, you know, those were very, very quick and dirty guesstimates, to look at this thoroughly is going to take about a year. And that was the state of the thing when it left the MOD. Of course, the SDSR belonged to the Cabinet Office, it didn’t belong to the MOD and when that proposition got to the other side of the road, I don’t know whether it was Downing Street, for presentational reasons, the Treasury in exasperation that we were re-opening this thing yet again, or the National Security Council just thinking it all looked dithery or whatever, but somehow or other that promulgated itself into a firm policy decision, where you were going with cats and traps. Now we went ahead and did our one year piece of work, while in the meantime we were making an assumption we were going for the cats and traps, which led to some practical changes at the shipyard.

By the end of 2011, that study comes back saying whoops, terribly sorry, whereas we said it was going to cost half a billion, it is actually going to be £1.9 billion. Whereas we said it was going to delay the programme by a year, it looks like it could be as much as four or five years. The electromagnetic cats and traps system that the US is evolving has run into all sorts of trouble of its own, therefore even that delay of a four or five year period isn’t entirely robust. And oh, by the way, the jump jet version of the plane is back from the dead and has overtaken the conventional variant in the production line. So while it had seemed a perfectly rational exploration at the beginning, now it seemed, again, entirely rational to our board to go back to the plan for having the jump jets. And the brouhaha and the ridicule that was poured upon us for all that was quite notable, but absolutely a function of doing something in such a hurry in the beginning."

[ArmChairCivvy]

and in any case the jump jet version of the aircraft was in serious trouble over in the States, it was in special measures and might never happen.

So all in all, it seemed a perfectly rational thing to have one last look at it. We were told that, you know, those were very, very quick and dirty guesstimates, to look at this thoroughly is going to take about a year. And that was the state of the thing when it left the MOD. Of course, the SDSR belonged to the Cabinet Office, it didn’t belong to the MOD and when that proposition got to the other side of the road, I don’t know whether it was Downing Street, for presentational reasons, the Treasury in exasperation that we were re-opening this thing yet again, or the National Security Council just thinking it all looked dithery or whatever, but somehow or other that promulgated itself into a firm policy decision, where you were going with cats and traps. [...]

By the end of 2011, that study comes back saying whoops, terribly sorry, whereas we said it was going to cost half a billion, it is actually going to be £1.9 billion. Whereas we said it was going to delay the programme by a year, it looks like it could be as much as four or five years. The electromagnetic cats and traps system that the US is evolving has run into all sorts of trouble of its own, therefore even that delay of a four or five year period isn’t entirely robust. And oh, by the way, the jump jet version of the plane is back from the dead and has overtaken the conventional variant in the production line

A good find; puts together the management of real (but in the end mainly perceived) risks and the not so joined up Gvmnt decision making.

[jedibeeftrix]

The most important Secretary of Defence this country has had in 30 years.

The big decision was made on his watch, and he made the right call.

[shark bait]

The big decision was made on his watch, and he made the right call.

I would agree, if the MOD really was as unstable as the Tories make out some tough decisions where necessary and in most cases the right calls where made.

It may be unpopular around here, but scrapping Nimrod and Harrier was the correct thing to do.

[jedibeeftrix]

true in itself, but to me the bigger decision in 2010 was [where] to put limited resources in future:

100,000 man army designed for theatre wide enduring stabilisation, with scrapped carriers and amphib fleet, and a third of the escorts gone, or;
a more naval oriented force with an 80,000 strong army configured for limited endurance rapid interventions.

[ArmChairCivvy]

I would v much agree with jedi's assessment of Dr. Fox's steering of the chaotic situation. However, let's fast forward to the current day (even though if he has had an influence, it must have been worked v carefully through the backbenchers as a group):

In comparison to its 2010 predecessor, the 2015 SDSR has far greater coherence - explains the lack of criticism levelled against it so far. However, some analysts suggest that beneath this veneer, the 2015 SDSR is predicated on a series of financial assumptions that simply do not stack up. One could even ask if we are looking at the same kind of Fool's Gold as what the on the surface v good 1998 Review turned out to be? Further delays to major programmes and "great" assumptions about efficiency savings risk leaving Britain's armed forces without the core capabilities that can match the range of threats identified in the NSS. And when I say "further" what I mean is that on TD I have for years said that the Force 2020 only seems to be getting "there" by 2024/25 - so "further" would be on top of that delay already built in before the new decisions now announced. Have we actually moved the UK from a position of strategic shrinkage to one in which it is resourced for greater international engagement? Or have these first appearances of having ‘pulled a rabbit out of the hat’ have more to do with positioning the Chancellor as a "statesman" and therefore a worthy candidate for the PM position?

The well-worked tricks of reannouncing and repeatedly delaying will cumulatively build up into vulnerabilities reminiscent of its 1998 predecessor's (non-) implementation. The 2015 NSS/SDSR's vision for Britain's place in the world and the delays in capability development and acquisition necessary to meet that vision are vividly illustrated by the effective date for Strike bdes, which announcement in itself is just a way to annouce that other than the Ajax prgrm all majour armour capability renewals are "on ice" until then.
- if you put a couple of Bn's on wheels (by when?) that is not a major programme, but rather a patch on the multiple delays previously decided (Warrior/ ABSV prgrm not starting being a prime example; and the wheeled IFV coming in as the third leg just recognising - at long last - the fact that the total numbers of the old platforms available would not suffice for a meaningful implementation).