Personal Views
Opinions expressed in these papers are those of the authors and should not necessarily be taken as expressing UKNDA policy.
the lion has no teeth
"The RN may now lack the frigates and destroyers required to patrol the Strait of Hormuz in any strength but they do have the vessels and personnel required to deter the sort of attack that took the Stena Spiro and before her the attempted taking of the British Heritage." So says Master Mariner, and UKNDA Director, Fred Dupuy.
A Question of Design
Are we building into the Type 26 Frigates a fault that, like the propulsion problem in the Type 45 Destroyers, will have to be rectified at a later date?
Earlier this year, at HMS Sultan, UKNDA Director Fred Dupuy was shown the diesel electric power arrangement that is to be fitted into the new Type 26 Frigates. His reaction to what he was told can be found here.
THE MODERNISING DEFENCE PROGRAMME
AN OPPORTUNITY TO BREAK THE MOULD
Vice-Admiral Sir Jeremy Blackham - Former Deputy Chief of Defence Staff
Air Chief Marshal Sir Michael Graydon - Former Chief of Air Staff
Antony Hichens Esq - Former Chairman LASMO
Air Commodore Andrew Lambert - Former Director RAF Defence Studies
Major General Jonathan Shaw - Former Assistant Chief of Defence Staff
The Conservative Party, presenting itself as the champion of Defence, has ‘form’ with Defence reviews. In the ‘90s it slashed budgets and capabilities; in 2010 it carried out a Strategic Defence and Security Review which removed great swathes of capability, some of which have now had to be restored. Hardly strategic, it was a simple cost cutting exercise. In 2015, another such review made more commitments than it was prepared to fund whilst setting highly ambitious efficiency targets, in practice unattainable without further reduction in capability.
So what is different about the latest review entitled UK Modernising Defence Programme (MDP)? It has been separated from the National Security Capability Review (NSCR) and will report in the summer. The new Defence Secretary has said frequently that more money is needed for Defence and has stated that MDP is not aiming to be financially neutral.
So what is different about the latest review entitled UK Modernising Defence Programme (MDP)? It has been separated from the National Security Capability Review (NSCR) and will report in the summer. The new Defence Secretary has said frequently that more money is needed for Defence and has stated that MDP is not aiming to be financially neutral.
RESPONSE TO "TRIDENT OR NOTHING" by Fred dupuy
To Deter or not to Deter?
The question that underpins the whole Trident debate.
The question over whether the UK should or should not maintain a nuclear deterrent has raged for as long as we have had nuclear weapons. The decision has always come down in favour of maintaining one but how to do so has regularly been questioned and challenged. Most people agree that the weapon system that forms the deterrent needs to be secure and ready for use at short notice and also that it needs to be able to inflict as much unacceptable damage as is necessary to deter a potential foe. Those conditions therefore pose three questions:
Because we don’t know what will, or will not, be considered unacceptable, those that claim we should deploy just enough capability and no more seem unable to quantify what ‘just enough’ is and if they try, their explanations seem to wither in the face of critical analysis. The truth is that we will never know if we deployed more than was enough to deter but we might find out in extremis if we haven’t deployed enough!
When I see statements, such as the one that was raised recently in a personal view, posted on the UKNDA website, that “it is claimed that a mere dozen warheads delivered to the right targets will cause the collapse of the Russian economy”, my mind drifts to a passage in George MacDonald Fraser’s 1973 novel, “Flashman at the Charge.” A fictitious story based upon the Crimean war. “Well, here we are, the French and ourselves, at war with Russia, in order to protect Turkey. Ve-ry good. What shall we do, then? Better attack Russia, eh? H’m yes. (Pause) Big place, aint it?”
Those of us who have been fortunate enough to attend the Royal Navy’s Nuclear, Biological, Chemical & Damage Control course will know something of the power of nuclear weapons beyond the sometimes inflated and almost hysterical rhetoric that afflicts the public at large but also they will know something of their limitations. They will know, for instance, approximately how close a ship can be to a nuclear detonation and sustain only minor damage. Those that have viewed the aerial photographs of a burnt out Hiroshima will surely have noticed that within the circle of almost total devastation, there remained the roofless and windowless structures of substantial buildings. Standing behind one of those buildings, on 6th August 1945, when the atomic bomb Little Boy, was detonated above that city, was a gentleman that I had lunch with in 1978. He had an interesting story to tell. We still do not know, and we will never know, how many of the estimated 60-80,000 inhabitants of that city were killed in the initial blast or were consumed, trapped under their collapsed houses, as that wooden city burst into flames. Russian cities are built of concrete, the people of granite and they are backed up by a civil defence organisation that in 2016 carried out an exercise, reputedly involving 40 million people. They are a people who have had a foreign army sweep across their country within living memory and lost in excess of 20 million people during that war, have had their economy collapse along with the demise of the Soviet Union, have shrugged off the world’s worst civilian nuclear disaster (Chernobyl) and in recent years have actually sustained a rather dramatic meteor strike. They are a stoic people. Will twelve nuclear warheads impress them if conditions conspire to make them feel exposed? I very much doubt it.
Much discussion has taken place about the alternatives to the Trident II Successor programme. Most people accept that of the possible options for fielding a nuclear deterrent it will provide the best in terms of capability but some say that it is unacceptably expensive and unnecessarily excessive. I reject both of those negatives. I do not accept that not enough attention has been credited to the alternatives. The government’s ‘Trident Alternatives Review’ lays out the results of investigations into those alternatives, which some might question but it is plain that the cost of developing those alternative systems and the time scale involved is not well understood by anybody. This is not surprising when you realise that the experienced personnel needed to form the project teams, the detailed infrastructure and for some of the alternatives, the technology, are not readily available to the UK. When a costing review quotes a 50% confidence rating for their estimates, they are effectively saying toss a coin in the air and call heads or tails before it lands. Thus when the proponents of those alternative systems claim that they will be cheaper than the proposed Successor programme, they don’t really know. At least with Trident II, much of the costing is understood because a lot of the design and development has been completed and the time scale can more readily be controlled. As a bonus it is the gold plated system.
When the critics of Trident claim that at 60 or 100 or 140 billion pounds it is far too expensive and that the nation cannot afford it, they generally paint an erroneous image of the expense because they often fail to point out that this will be the cost over 35 years. Why do they not quote, in the same light, the trillions that will be poured into those two bottomless pits, the NHS and Welfare, over that period? The nation can afford it if it wants to. It is all about priorities.
Cost aside, what of the alternatives? How effective would they actually be? The suggestion that a stretched Astute class submarine could be used to deploy the Trident I (C4) missile would provide a ballistic missile capability but it is, for several operational reasons, the poor sister of Trident II and as it would separate us from our partner in this enterprise, the US, it would cause logistic problems of its own. The idea of using stretched Astutes for cruise missile deployment, while still being able to use those vessels for normal fleet submarine operations, brings other practical problems, in addition to those of the missiles themselves. A very experienced ex submarine captain has recently claimed that “the Resolution class were far too big and too slow to be of any use other than as a weapon launch platform”. An Astute class submarine with the suggested stretch would be about the same length as a Resolution but heavier and there have already been muted criticisms of its speed. One also has to ask about the comparative stealth properties of the Astutes and the planned Dreadnought class with their new and quiet electric drive? Being able to hide is of course a major factor in deploying a strategic deterrent such as this.
The supporters of replacing long range ballistic missiles with cruise missiles, in the belief that they could be used as a strategic nuclear deterrent against a peer state such as Russia, need to look at a map of the world. Where exactly would those missiles be fired from where they did not have to overfly another country? The Black Sea maybe, or the Baltic or even the Barents Sea? All of those areas are in Russia’s back yard and difficult to get into without being noticed! They should also cast their minds back to the 15th April 1986, when piloted cruise missiles, in the form of US air force F111s, were refused overflying rights by both France and Spain when they flew from their East Anglian bases to bomb Libya. Would we have to ask permission of a third state before we could retaliate against a nuclear strike? If that state refused to let us fly nuclear tipped missiles at low level over their territory, would we ignore their reply and penetrate both their defences and those of the country we were targeting? Cruise missiles are basically a tactical system with limited strategic nuclear deterrent value and their proponents need to realise that. An analogy with football teams would be to have ours with a very strong mid field squad but no striker to put the ball into the opposing net, while the other side had many strikers that are so good that they could fill our net from behind their defensive line. We would be in the position of conceding the game before it had started.
We have already given up so much. Tactical nuclear weapons, chemical and biological weapons, cluster bombs and land mines, which many of our potential enemy’s have not. Now many people are suggesting that we should downgrade our strategic system, our striker, to a tactical mid field player – what shall we give up next – Bullets? People talk of the Cold War and that both the Polaris and Trident systems are relics of that era. The truth is that we never had a Cold War, we had a Cold Stand-Off when we tiptoed around each other, making sure that we never actually came to blows, because we knew the consequence of allowing it to brew into a Hot War. Deterrence worked. We still have a Cold Stand-Off. Possibly not as frigid as it once was but it still isn’t friendly and nobody knows where that will go.
So, when it comes to deterring, how much is enough? We will have deployed enough when potential aggressors know that one or more of our submarines are lurking somewhere in the depths of the world’s oceans, with enough range and mega tonnage to effectively turn a large part of their country to glass and that they are in no doubt that should our system be activated, the warheads will reach their targets. Aircraft don’t give that assurance, cruise missiles were being shot down by the RAF in 1944, and the suggested Trident 1 (C4) system is a poor substitute for its successor. Deterrence is about impressing the other side that you can do them irreparable harm and the only way to ensure that you can do that, as far as it is possible, is to have at your disposal the best system available and enough of it to impress.
The Government’s Trident Alternatives Review sets out five different postures for maintaining a nuclear deterrent. They are Continuous, Focussed and Sustained, which requires a submarine to be at sea all of the time, with Responsive and Preserved having vessels either at sea for only a part of the time or kept alongside until required. The Successor programme allows for the first three conditions to be covered by the Continuous at Sea Deterrent (CASD) with the final two being catered for by the standby boat, which could be sailed at short notice if we wished to show resolve and have two boats at sea, or held in port if we wished to show restraint. The third operational submarine, having recently returned from patrol, could be rapidly turned around and also sailed or held in port as the situation demanded.
The UK has now reduced available in service warheads to 120, the number of missiles carried by each submarine to eight and warheads to no more than 40. If each missile is loaded with five warheads, what will be done if a strike with only one warhead is required in order to answer a similar action from an aggressor, but without escalating the situation; are four warheads to be wasted? The previously mentioned ex submarine captain has also stated that it would be inadvisable to use a Trident missile in a tactical situation because it would immediately give that vessel’s position away. That consideration could, of course, also apply to a cruise missile boat but unfortunately it is where we have allowed ourselves to drift and a call might be made to do exactly that. A greater number of missiles including a couple with only a single warhead and decoys might be advantageous in allowing a more flexible nuclear stance and possible response. With only eight of the available twelve missile tubes being used for the Trident II D5, the suggestion is that the others may be used for cruise missile clusters, special forces equipment or unmanned underwater vehicles (UUV) and decoys. While UUVs and decoys might be instrumental in ensuring that these submarines are able to evade detection by opposing forces, the availability of other aggressive tactical weaponry smacks of a dilution of purpose and the temptation to use these vessels in that way may compromise their prime purpose of remaining hidden until needed to launch a nuclear strike. The submariner’s motto of ‘We Come Unseen’ should be amended for these submarines to be ‘We Remain Unseen’.
The benign security situation that followed the end of the Cold War has come to an end and emerging threats, some of which are not signatories to the Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT), suggest that the UK has reduced its deterrent force far enough. It is time to stop deluding ourselves that nuclear weapons will disappear any time soon and ensure that ours continue to have sufficient weight and capability to impress and deter.
Fred Dupuy
March 2018
The question that underpins the whole Trident debate.
The question over whether the UK should or should not maintain a nuclear deterrent has raged for as long as we have had nuclear weapons. The decision has always come down in favour of maintaining one but how to do so has regularly been questioned and challenged. Most people agree that the weapon system that forms the deterrent needs to be secure and ready for use at short notice and also that it needs to be able to inflict as much unacceptable damage as is necessary to deter a potential foe. Those conditions therefore pose three questions:
- How secure? – Answer: There are no systems that are 100% secure but the consensus is that the continuous at sea, ballistic missile armed submarine is the closest to that ideal.
- How short notice? – Answer: Short enough so that once the order has been sent to launch those missiles, almost instant retribution can be unleashed against an aggressor.
- How much damage would be deemed unacceptable by a potential aggressor? – Answer: We don’t know.
Because we don’t know what will, or will not, be considered unacceptable, those that claim we should deploy just enough capability and no more seem unable to quantify what ‘just enough’ is and if they try, their explanations seem to wither in the face of critical analysis. The truth is that we will never know if we deployed more than was enough to deter but we might find out in extremis if we haven’t deployed enough!
When I see statements, such as the one that was raised recently in a personal view, posted on the UKNDA website, that “it is claimed that a mere dozen warheads delivered to the right targets will cause the collapse of the Russian economy”, my mind drifts to a passage in George MacDonald Fraser’s 1973 novel, “Flashman at the Charge.” A fictitious story based upon the Crimean war. “Well, here we are, the French and ourselves, at war with Russia, in order to protect Turkey. Ve-ry good. What shall we do, then? Better attack Russia, eh? H’m yes. (Pause) Big place, aint it?”
Those of us who have been fortunate enough to attend the Royal Navy’s Nuclear, Biological, Chemical & Damage Control course will know something of the power of nuclear weapons beyond the sometimes inflated and almost hysterical rhetoric that afflicts the public at large but also they will know something of their limitations. They will know, for instance, approximately how close a ship can be to a nuclear detonation and sustain only minor damage. Those that have viewed the aerial photographs of a burnt out Hiroshima will surely have noticed that within the circle of almost total devastation, there remained the roofless and windowless structures of substantial buildings. Standing behind one of those buildings, on 6th August 1945, when the atomic bomb Little Boy, was detonated above that city, was a gentleman that I had lunch with in 1978. He had an interesting story to tell. We still do not know, and we will never know, how many of the estimated 60-80,000 inhabitants of that city were killed in the initial blast or were consumed, trapped under their collapsed houses, as that wooden city burst into flames. Russian cities are built of concrete, the people of granite and they are backed up by a civil defence organisation that in 2016 carried out an exercise, reputedly involving 40 million people. They are a people who have had a foreign army sweep across their country within living memory and lost in excess of 20 million people during that war, have had their economy collapse along with the demise of the Soviet Union, have shrugged off the world’s worst civilian nuclear disaster (Chernobyl) and in recent years have actually sustained a rather dramatic meteor strike. They are a stoic people. Will twelve nuclear warheads impress them if conditions conspire to make them feel exposed? I very much doubt it.
Much discussion has taken place about the alternatives to the Trident II Successor programme. Most people accept that of the possible options for fielding a nuclear deterrent it will provide the best in terms of capability but some say that it is unacceptably expensive and unnecessarily excessive. I reject both of those negatives. I do not accept that not enough attention has been credited to the alternatives. The government’s ‘Trident Alternatives Review’ lays out the results of investigations into those alternatives, which some might question but it is plain that the cost of developing those alternative systems and the time scale involved is not well understood by anybody. This is not surprising when you realise that the experienced personnel needed to form the project teams, the detailed infrastructure and for some of the alternatives, the technology, are not readily available to the UK. When a costing review quotes a 50% confidence rating for their estimates, they are effectively saying toss a coin in the air and call heads or tails before it lands. Thus when the proponents of those alternative systems claim that they will be cheaper than the proposed Successor programme, they don’t really know. At least with Trident II, much of the costing is understood because a lot of the design and development has been completed and the time scale can more readily be controlled. As a bonus it is the gold plated system.
When the critics of Trident claim that at 60 or 100 or 140 billion pounds it is far too expensive and that the nation cannot afford it, they generally paint an erroneous image of the expense because they often fail to point out that this will be the cost over 35 years. Why do they not quote, in the same light, the trillions that will be poured into those two bottomless pits, the NHS and Welfare, over that period? The nation can afford it if it wants to. It is all about priorities.
Cost aside, what of the alternatives? How effective would they actually be? The suggestion that a stretched Astute class submarine could be used to deploy the Trident I (C4) missile would provide a ballistic missile capability but it is, for several operational reasons, the poor sister of Trident II and as it would separate us from our partner in this enterprise, the US, it would cause logistic problems of its own. The idea of using stretched Astutes for cruise missile deployment, while still being able to use those vessels for normal fleet submarine operations, brings other practical problems, in addition to those of the missiles themselves. A very experienced ex submarine captain has recently claimed that “the Resolution class were far too big and too slow to be of any use other than as a weapon launch platform”. An Astute class submarine with the suggested stretch would be about the same length as a Resolution but heavier and there have already been muted criticisms of its speed. One also has to ask about the comparative stealth properties of the Astutes and the planned Dreadnought class with their new and quiet electric drive? Being able to hide is of course a major factor in deploying a strategic deterrent such as this.
The supporters of replacing long range ballistic missiles with cruise missiles, in the belief that they could be used as a strategic nuclear deterrent against a peer state such as Russia, need to look at a map of the world. Where exactly would those missiles be fired from where they did not have to overfly another country? The Black Sea maybe, or the Baltic or even the Barents Sea? All of those areas are in Russia’s back yard and difficult to get into without being noticed! They should also cast their minds back to the 15th April 1986, when piloted cruise missiles, in the form of US air force F111s, were refused overflying rights by both France and Spain when they flew from their East Anglian bases to bomb Libya. Would we have to ask permission of a third state before we could retaliate against a nuclear strike? If that state refused to let us fly nuclear tipped missiles at low level over their territory, would we ignore their reply and penetrate both their defences and those of the country we were targeting? Cruise missiles are basically a tactical system with limited strategic nuclear deterrent value and their proponents need to realise that. An analogy with football teams would be to have ours with a very strong mid field squad but no striker to put the ball into the opposing net, while the other side had many strikers that are so good that they could fill our net from behind their defensive line. We would be in the position of conceding the game before it had started.
We have already given up so much. Tactical nuclear weapons, chemical and biological weapons, cluster bombs and land mines, which many of our potential enemy’s have not. Now many people are suggesting that we should downgrade our strategic system, our striker, to a tactical mid field player – what shall we give up next – Bullets? People talk of the Cold War and that both the Polaris and Trident systems are relics of that era. The truth is that we never had a Cold War, we had a Cold Stand-Off when we tiptoed around each other, making sure that we never actually came to blows, because we knew the consequence of allowing it to brew into a Hot War. Deterrence worked. We still have a Cold Stand-Off. Possibly not as frigid as it once was but it still isn’t friendly and nobody knows where that will go.
So, when it comes to deterring, how much is enough? We will have deployed enough when potential aggressors know that one or more of our submarines are lurking somewhere in the depths of the world’s oceans, with enough range and mega tonnage to effectively turn a large part of their country to glass and that they are in no doubt that should our system be activated, the warheads will reach their targets. Aircraft don’t give that assurance, cruise missiles were being shot down by the RAF in 1944, and the suggested Trident 1 (C4) system is a poor substitute for its successor. Deterrence is about impressing the other side that you can do them irreparable harm and the only way to ensure that you can do that, as far as it is possible, is to have at your disposal the best system available and enough of it to impress.
The Government’s Trident Alternatives Review sets out five different postures for maintaining a nuclear deterrent. They are Continuous, Focussed and Sustained, which requires a submarine to be at sea all of the time, with Responsive and Preserved having vessels either at sea for only a part of the time or kept alongside until required. The Successor programme allows for the first three conditions to be covered by the Continuous at Sea Deterrent (CASD) with the final two being catered for by the standby boat, which could be sailed at short notice if we wished to show resolve and have two boats at sea, or held in port if we wished to show restraint. The third operational submarine, having recently returned from patrol, could be rapidly turned around and also sailed or held in port as the situation demanded.
The UK has now reduced available in service warheads to 120, the number of missiles carried by each submarine to eight and warheads to no more than 40. If each missile is loaded with five warheads, what will be done if a strike with only one warhead is required in order to answer a similar action from an aggressor, but without escalating the situation; are four warheads to be wasted? The previously mentioned ex submarine captain has also stated that it would be inadvisable to use a Trident missile in a tactical situation because it would immediately give that vessel’s position away. That consideration could, of course, also apply to a cruise missile boat but unfortunately it is where we have allowed ourselves to drift and a call might be made to do exactly that. A greater number of missiles including a couple with only a single warhead and decoys might be advantageous in allowing a more flexible nuclear stance and possible response. With only eight of the available twelve missile tubes being used for the Trident II D5, the suggestion is that the others may be used for cruise missile clusters, special forces equipment or unmanned underwater vehicles (UUV) and decoys. While UUVs and decoys might be instrumental in ensuring that these submarines are able to evade detection by opposing forces, the availability of other aggressive tactical weaponry smacks of a dilution of purpose and the temptation to use these vessels in that way may compromise their prime purpose of remaining hidden until needed to launch a nuclear strike. The submariner’s motto of ‘We Come Unseen’ should be amended for these submarines to be ‘We Remain Unseen’.
The benign security situation that followed the end of the Cold War has come to an end and emerging threats, some of which are not signatories to the Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT), suggest that the UK has reduced its deterrent force far enough. It is time to stop deluding ourselves that nuclear weapons will disappear any time soon and ensure that ours continue to have sufficient weight and capability to impress and deter.
Fred Dupuy
March 2018
RESPONSE TO "TRIDENT OR NOTHING" BY rob forsyth
Steve Coltman in Trident or Nothing? makes an eminently sound case for uprating the Astute class to be intermediate range/cruise missile submarines; a case many submariners tried to make before the government committed itself to the Dreadnought class. The Resolution class were designed for yesterday's cold war in the 1970s and 80s when we had sufficient SSNs and SSKs to protect the boats deployed on “Continuous at sea Deterrent” (CASD) and still have some left over to chase the Russians - and even go to The Falklands as well. The fact that the Resolution Class were far too big and too slow to be of any use other than as a weapon launch platform therefore did not matter - albeit it worried the crews as what happened after they had fired and revealed their positions! Today's four Vanguards, which form over a third of our submarine force, are similarly of no use other than as launch platforms costing the earth to keep on CASD as Steve rightly points out. Current talk is of cancelling the last Astute - probably as the first goes out of service - so the Dreadnoughts could then be nearly half the flotilla.
But I fear it may now be too late for Steve's once sensible suggestion because I surmise that the cost of a change of direction will not save anything. So should we not opt for or Nothing? The reality is that UK is not likely to be threatened in the foreseeable future by a nuclear strike - don’t fall into the trap of believing Putin’s but do fear Trump doing so - and no sane politician and certainly not a military commander would seriously contemplate using even a single warhead on a Trident missile as a tactical weapon. If nothing else, the firing boat would be crying ‘mark' for all to see and immediately be vulnerable. UK and NATO would be far better served by a rebuilt Royal Navy capable of not only protecting our own shores but also protecting the Carriers and our Royal Marines during a more likely intervention in the Baltic.
The submarine cry was always 'Remember the Aim'. I suggest our politicians have forgotten the aim. We are an island nation dependent on the sea for trade and the deterrent is not a military option for defending our shores but a political one; the problem is that it now costs so much that it has perforce become a military one because we don't have anything else - slight exaggeration but only slight! So CDS and others should speak out and say they no longer have the proper tools to conduct conventional warfare because the politicians have taken all the money and the only way out is to cancel Trident.
Rob Forsyth (Cdr RN (Ret’d) Former SSBN XO and SSN CO)
(February 2018)
Response to "Trident or nothing" by nicolas bracegirdle
Many years ago, I spent 12 months in a fascinating job namely as the Road Manager for the Royal Naval Presentation Team - RNPT. During my short tenure we had two truly excellent Captains and some highly qualified staff - a Commander as Executive Officer and No 2 team Leader, Supply Officer, Royal Marine, WRNS officer, two very good Junior Ratings and me plus some very supportive back office staff. (We would not have been chosen if we were not err - PERSUASIVE!)
My job was to help make the annual film and some slides, set up all the venues for the No 1 team, get all the invitations and public relations done for 350 invitations per night and then support the Captain as his No 2. during his six months of winter tours. It was a very slick and wide ranging look at the need for Defence and in particular the Navy’s clear role. In 6 months of setting up and then 6 months hard work on the road we did we see most of the UK . On the technical side we had two of everything ready to go, so no failures were tolerated. Almost always we had resounding applause from a very broad cross section of the population. The No 2 team was smaller and covered schools and lesser audiences. They were equally well received.
My only “failure” was to book Sheffield City Hall at the same time as a heavy metal band!
One point we brought home forcefully in the film and slides was that a BALANCED expenditure was necessary for Defence and indeed for the other competing Ministries. In those days, Defence expenditure and Social Security spending were broadly on a par and we had some slides showing financial pie charts but this contrasted with the very real need for a Royal Navy in all its roles and guises. All of it was represented in the film and our back-up slides were truly excellent and well-researched. The Royal Marine operated his answers as if by magic since an appropriate slide was usually up on screen before the questioner had finished asking his question.
We made a very strong case for the Strategic Deterrent - perhaps even more so these days and both Polaris and Trident HAVE worked and given value-for-money. As a “skimmer” (surface ship engineer) I spent many years as a Naval Officer in weapon systems management and then a Civil Servant Project manager managing all things submarine to my amazement and to that of my disbelieving Dartmouth term-mates. Even Director Submarines had a word in my ear when I left.
After 12 months in Public Relations, I went back to mainstream engineering with a firm belief in the validity of our purpose. I could not have foretold what might happen to many of us in 1982 when we actually went to war. The Falklands was the ultimate test for all of us at sea that year and the holistic and necessary expenditures outlined in the RNPT film came home to roost. What actually was demonstrated was a miracle of co-operation between Navy, Army, and Air Force including Amphibious Forces and particularly Special Forces. Any one part of that omitted and the whole operation would have been a disaster. There was a lot of praying when bombs dropped on our ships were too low to completely fuze the detonators and if that had not happened, many of us including myself would have been killed. Our Harrier pilots were our saviours and very brave men operated in shallow water to keep us safe.
Four months later, we returned to the South Atlantic as guardship and on a rare day off, I accompanied an ordnance disposal officer to the top of Mount Harriet. “Tread in my footsteps and don’t touch anything” were my instructions. As we neared the summit completely littered with rifles, abandoned equipment and tonnes of ordnance, I saw to my distress, a dead Argentinian. “Should we bury him?”, I asked of my brave comrade. “ Sorry - too dangerous”. Such is war and very frightening it is.
So should one arm of our Service - particularly Royal Marines or Amphibious Forces be diminished or even scrapped then the Royal Navy might just as well take up farming.
And as for the size of the Social Security budget being almost 4 times that of the Defence Budget? How is that ratio sustainable?
Nicolas Bracegirdle MBE
My job was to help make the annual film and some slides, set up all the venues for the No 1 team, get all the invitations and public relations done for 350 invitations per night and then support the Captain as his No 2. during his six months of winter tours. It was a very slick and wide ranging look at the need for Defence and in particular the Navy’s clear role. In 6 months of setting up and then 6 months hard work on the road we did we see most of the UK . On the technical side we had two of everything ready to go, so no failures were tolerated. Almost always we had resounding applause from a very broad cross section of the population. The No 2 team was smaller and covered schools and lesser audiences. They were equally well received.
My only “failure” was to book Sheffield City Hall at the same time as a heavy metal band!
One point we brought home forcefully in the film and slides was that a BALANCED expenditure was necessary for Defence and indeed for the other competing Ministries. In those days, Defence expenditure and Social Security spending were broadly on a par and we had some slides showing financial pie charts but this contrasted with the very real need for a Royal Navy in all its roles and guises. All of it was represented in the film and our back-up slides were truly excellent and well-researched. The Royal Marine operated his answers as if by magic since an appropriate slide was usually up on screen before the questioner had finished asking his question.
We made a very strong case for the Strategic Deterrent - perhaps even more so these days and both Polaris and Trident HAVE worked and given value-for-money. As a “skimmer” (surface ship engineer) I spent many years as a Naval Officer in weapon systems management and then a Civil Servant Project manager managing all things submarine to my amazement and to that of my disbelieving Dartmouth term-mates. Even Director Submarines had a word in my ear when I left.
After 12 months in Public Relations, I went back to mainstream engineering with a firm belief in the validity of our purpose. I could not have foretold what might happen to many of us in 1982 when we actually went to war. The Falklands was the ultimate test for all of us at sea that year and the holistic and necessary expenditures outlined in the RNPT film came home to roost. What actually was demonstrated was a miracle of co-operation between Navy, Army, and Air Force including Amphibious Forces and particularly Special Forces. Any one part of that omitted and the whole operation would have been a disaster. There was a lot of praying when bombs dropped on our ships were too low to completely fuze the detonators and if that had not happened, many of us including myself would have been killed. Our Harrier pilots were our saviours and very brave men operated in shallow water to keep us safe.
Four months later, we returned to the South Atlantic as guardship and on a rare day off, I accompanied an ordnance disposal officer to the top of Mount Harriet. “Tread in my footsteps and don’t touch anything” were my instructions. As we neared the summit completely littered with rifles, abandoned equipment and tonnes of ordnance, I saw to my distress, a dead Argentinian. “Should we bury him?”, I asked of my brave comrade. “ Sorry - too dangerous”. Such is war and very frightening it is.
So should one arm of our Service - particularly Royal Marines or Amphibious Forces be diminished or even scrapped then the Royal Navy might just as well take up farming.
And as for the size of the Social Security budget being almost 4 times that of the Defence Budget? How is that ratio sustainable?
Nicolas Bracegirdle MBE
Trident or Nothing!
by Steve Coltman
That seems to be it as far as many are concerned – the only options Britain has regarding a nuclear deterrent is: Trident or Nothing. Really? Is that it? In industry if one wishes to buy a piece of equipment, say £250,000-worth, one would be expected to go through a rigorous justification of the proposed spend. Is it really necessary? What are the alternatives? In what way does this expenditure contribute to achieving departmental and company objectives? It seems to me as though less intellectual effort has gone into justifying the renewal of Trident (£100,000,000,000 or thereabouts) than one would expect for a modest commercial investment. We are witnessing a gradual death of our conventional forces by a thousand cuts. HMS Ocean gone today, Wildcat helicopters (almost brand new) to follow? The Albion class LPDs perhaps, followed by cuts to the Royal Marines (well, no ships for them anyway). The Army is losing one of its three Armoured Infantry brigades (replaced by a much inferior but undoubtedly cheaper ‘Strike’ brigade). And so it goes on and on. £14bn of ‘efficiency savings’ are needed, so it is claimed. Basically – even if we had an honest 2% of GDP spent on defence it would not pay for the renewal of Trident as well as full-spectrum conventional forces. One leading Conservative is on record as saying 3% of GDP is needed but that’s not going to happen. It is claimed the crash of 2008 has caused the UK economy to be 25% smaller than it might otherwise have been so money will be tight for the foreseeable future. Don’t get me wrong – I do believe Britain needs a deterrent. Russia has huge nuclear forces, including tactical ones and may well be tempted to use them in some circumstances. Nuclear weapons are proliferating. It will not be safe to unilaterally disarm any time soon. That does not mean we need to blindly, unthinkingly, sink such a huge amount of money into this particular nuclear option. What do we want from our deterrent? First, it needs to be safe – secure from pre-emptive destruction. Second, it needs to be able to deliver as much as is necessary to inflict unacceptable damage to any potential enemy. Russia is the most sophisticated of any potential enemies so it has to be the yardstick. Our deterrent needs to be able to overcome Russian attempts to destroy it before launching, and be also able to penetrate Russian defences. I doubt if we need to be able to deliver a huge number of warheads and I don’t think being able to flatten Moscow is a necessary requirement – just enough to deter. It is claimed that a mere dozen 1 warheads delivered to the right targets will cause the collapse of the Russian economy. I doubt if many would argue other than a submarine-based deterrent would be best. It’s not the only possible alternative but politically there would be few votes for land-mobile missiles and aircraft-launched missiles would not, on their own, be secure enough. Well, we have a submarine already, it’s called Astute, its nuclear powered, as big as the Resolution class boats that used to carry Polaris and is in steady production. The Americans have the similar Virginia class and they are proposing to stretch these boats with the addition of an extra ‘Virginia Payload Module’. It will add 70 feet to the length and $550m to the cost of each submarine and will give the Virginia’s the ability to fire, vertically, either cruise missiles or medium-range ballistic missiles. We could do the same with the Astute class. We would be contemplating submarines costing more like £2bn each rather than the monstrous £8-10bn each for the proposed Successor/Dreadnaught class. It would be cheaper and easier to obtain a missile to fit the submarines we already have than to build submarines to fit the (very large) Trident D5. No one should doubt we could develop a cruise missile to fit such a submarine. Not just a Tomahawk-sized missile but a big one such as the Russian Kh101/2 with a range of several thousand Km. A ballistic missile would be harder to develop but I defy anyone to stand in front of the Polaris missile on display at Duxford and say, “no – we could not possibly make anything like that”. It is worth noting that the diameter of the Astute hull is 11.3mt. The length of the Trident C4 (Trident 1) missile is 10.2mt. Might it be possible to fit the Trident C4 into a stretched Astute? How much would it cost to buy a bespoke batch of Trident C4 missiles? Has anyone even bothered to ask these questions? My doubts about the current proposals are not just about its cost, but also its possible vulnerability. Even if we could be confident that the submarine at sea was safe from destruction we cannot be confident about the rest. One or two at least are going to be tied up alongside the dockside at any given time and who could contemplate the possibility of £8-10bn of submarine being destroyed by a couple of cruise missiles costing what – a million each? Not a good exchange. It’s simply too much money tied up in one vessel. And it’s not as if we have an advanced integrated air defence system in place to protect our submarines when in harbour. There is safety in numbers and half a dozen stretched Astutes at £2bn each, plus some of the existing Astutes retrospectively stretched would give us anything up to a dozen nuclear-weapons capable nuclear-powered subs for less than the cost of two Dreadnaughts. 2 Anyone seriously interested in this subject has no excuse for not having read the Trident Alternatives Review published by the government in 2013. There is much in this document to be taken with a pinch of salt (to put it politely) and there are alternatives it ignored but it does set out five different ‘postures’ we could adopt and this is worth examining: ➢ Continuous Deterrence ➢ Focussed Deterrence ➢ Sustained Deterrence ➢ Responsive Deterrence ➢ Preserved Deterrence The assumption in the government’s document is that the submarines would be dedicated nuclear weapons platforms rather than dual-purpose vessels. In my opinion it would be better to have dual-purpose submarines capable of doing either or both roles. Continuous is what we have at present – we can nuke anyone, any time. I am not sure we really need to. Focussed is more like it – there are only a few potential threats and focussing on them makes more sense. We don’t need to be able to nuke Saudia Arabia and Brazil at the same time. Sustained Deterrence is probably good enough. We could simply have a deterrent at sea, not necessarily in constant range of a potential enemy and the submarines not necessarily dedicated to nuclear deterrence duties. To have them at sea and safe from pre-emptive destruction would be good enough most of the time and would permit an ‘upgrade’ to Focussed Deterrence if need be. Responsive Deterrence is (in my opinion) taking a chance as it involves having ‘gaps’ where there are no nuclear weapons at sea at all. Maybe one day this might be good enough but not now. Preserved Deterrence is not worth considering as it involves keeping all nuclear weapons on land and the submarines only sent to sea on training missions. A Preserved deterrent would only be sent to sea in a crisis (thereby escalating said crisis). Such a ‘deterrent’ is no deterrent at all as it can easily be destroyed in a first strike. It is a waste of money. 3 So, it is obvious what we should do: abandon the Successor/Dreadnaught monsters and continue series production of the Astutes, incorporating a ‘Virginia Payload Module’ type extension in all the new ones and perhaps retrospectively in the existing ones. A fleet of a dozen or more Astutes would keep the Barrow shipyard in steady business for the foreseeable future and would enable us to keep more than one nuclear-weapons-equipped vessel at sea at any given time. We need to find a missile for these boats – maybe Trident 1(the C4), maybe a ballistic missile of our own design, maybe cruise missiles. The latter at least we can certainly develop. And if we don’t? If we carry on like this then, to quote a former Defence Minister, the 2020s will be a car-crash for the armed forces. Spending on the Successor submarines will coincide with new armoured vehicles for the Army, F-35s for the RAF and frigates for the Navy. There are siren calls for ‘pooling and sharing’ of defence resources with our European neighbours and ‘Role Specialisation’. These are touted as cost-saving measures but they will rapidly lead to European countries (including us) rapidly losing the ability to act autonomously. We will find we need one country to supply this capability and another to supply another and we will be unable to act without the active help of others – effectively we would need their permission to act. This could be a stepwise and insidious process which might escape the overview of MPs until it is too late. If the process of pooling and sharing and role specialisation goes far enough only Brussels will be able to coordinate anything serious. There are plenty of politicians (and maybe civil servants) who would very much like this to happen. We cannot go on like this. It would take a psychologist to really work out the paranoia with which some people are clinging on to Trident but people really must let go and start thinking rationally about Britain’s defence future.
January 2018