Defence - economic circumstances and saving service lives demand cost-effective procurement

A very good post by Douglas Carswell MP yesterday on defence procurement which has attracted some interesting and insightful comments. It's surprising though that none addressed the most important and troubling point that Douglas raised, namely;

"Sikorsky tells me that it wrote to the MOD, offering to supply some 20-plus lift helicopters within months. It tells me that it took Sir Kevin’s former Department longer to respond to the offer than it would have taken the firm to fulfil it".

I find that deeply disturbing. So-called - usually economically-illiterate - defence experts would like to gloss over something like this, telling us that it's all very complex and hope that we all forget about it in short order. Well it's not complicated to understand that something very wrong has happened here and it merits further discussion.

We must remind ourselves that if the UK had not been prepared to buy, borrow or beg for off the shelf equipment from the United States in WW2, we might well have lost the war. So why not do it again?

Lest we forget, we received 50 US Navy destroyers in 1940, 17,000 Sherman tanks (back then, our home-made ones were particularly bad) and nearly 39,000 military aircraft - not to mention lots of the smaller stuff.

As we find ourselves once again in a protracted war, hard up and have too much ageing, inferior equipment, why not restart the tradition of saving money by buying off the American shelf and their long production lines, even if only a little bit?

As their only consistent ally of war-fighting significance, it's not as if they wouldn't give us a discount - and we should expect better than Israeli or Egyptian prices.

That sort of procurement would free up some money to give our front-line troops a much-needed pay rise (yes, that will help existing recruitment shortfalls) and may even allow us to have a bigger less stretched army.

It's all very well saying we must have fully sovereign technology and spend more on defence. However much this may appeal to industrial and trade union interests, the state of public finances mean that the full sovereignty premium is unaffordable either to the Exchequer or to British troops. Increasing defence expenditure without anyone committing to reducing the size of the state, will be far from easy. After all, can you imagine that in the next government, any Minister is going to stand up and say, yes please, reduce my department's budget so we can increase that of defence?

Anyone wishing to get to grips with the continuing crisis of finance versus aspiration for the Armed Forces and what to do about it, should download our paper Cost-Effective Defence, published two years ago and never more relevant, by the excellent Lewis Page.