George Kerevan: Treasury must resist shooting RAF down

Published on Thursday 9 September 2010 15:03

SEVENTY years ago this month, the skies over southern England were streaked with the telltale contrails of Spitfires, Hurricanes and Messerschmitts, as the Battle of Britain reached its nerve-wracking climax.

The RAF's gallant Few foiled Hitler's plans for invading Britain, though Air Chief Marshall Dowding, head of Fighter Command, was sacked afterwards. We won because Dowding kept his head while others, including Churchill, were either panicking or putting political gestures before sensible tactical necessities. It is a lesson that still applies.

The Treasury is now more of a threat to the RAF than Herman Goering's Luftwaffe in 1940. Whitehall departmental spending is being slashed by around 20 per cent, which means our overstretched armed forces face a significant downsizing.

True, there is fat to be trimmed. Although the Army has shrunk to about 100,000 fighting soldiers, in 2009 there were 255 officers with the rank of brigadier or above - one for every 400 lower ranks. Not to mention the fact that the army of civil servants working at the Ministry of Defence (MoD) is larger than the Royal Navy and the RAF combined.

But the cuts facing the military go far beyond sensible housekeeping. The stark truth is that the MoD has been guilty of serial financial incompetence on a grand scale. It has accrued a 72 billion deficit in its budget over the next decade, as a result of ordering over-priced, hi-tech equipment it cannot afford. And that was before Chancellors Darling and then Osborne took a hatchet to spending. As a result, the military faces wholesale amputation.

The roots of this debacle go back to the discredited Blairite agenda of fighting extensive foreign wars as America's ally. That led to a bonanza of spending on new weapons; in particular, two new super-carriers and expensive American jump jets (at 100 million a pop) to operate from them.

Meanwhile, Tony Blair was also sucking up to Brussels, so the RAF had to get the Typhoon Eurofighter, despite the fact it was designed to fight the Russians not the Taleban. Plus a new fleet of Airbus-designed cargo planes.

Only the Army got short shrift despite being expected to fight two ground wars simultaneously, in Iraq and Afghanistan. It went into battle with a shortage of helicopters, duff radios and canvas-sided Land Rovers.

What was prudent chancellor Gordon Brown up to when this was going on? Brown's penchant for appearing tough led him to rubber-stamp the big equipment purchases, especially as the new carriers were to be assembled near his constituency in Fife. But as part of his on-going feud with Tony, Gordon was miserly with MoD demands for revenue funds - hence the Army's criticism he cut military spending.

Brown was suspicious of the MoD because Blair had appointed close allies to run it, in particular Geoff Hoon. Under Hoon the MoD completely lost control over defence procurement, letting programme costs spiral out of control.

Blair and Brown enjoyed playing toy soldiers, but ended up wasting money and lives. Now comes the reckoning. But where can cuts be made? As The Scotsman reported yesterday, one option being touted is to scrap the Navy's new carriers. The loss of these ships would cost 4,000 jobs on the Clyde and 1,500 at Rosyth.

However, it is probably too late for the coalition to renege on the contracts to build the carriers. More likely the first, the Queen Elizabeth, will go ahead as planned while the second, the Prince of Wales, will be completed as an amphibious commando ship, flying only helicopters. In this scenario, Scotland retains shipbuilding work and money is saved on the American planes.

That would still leave big savings to be made elsewhere. I suspect talk of the carriers being scrapped is a political feint by the Navy to force the coalition to axe the RAF.

Expect the RAF's current force of 120 Tornado fighter-bombers to be scrapped immediately. The number of Eurofighter Typhoons could be slashed and based at a single airfield in England. Together that implies shutting RAF bases at Lossiemouth and Kinloss, which sustain a fifth of all jobs in the Moray area. The question arises: why keep the RAF at all? Why not split its planes and role between the two other services? This notion is certainly percolating around the MoD.

Apart from nostalgia, the serious arguments against scrapping the RAF are: (i) it does nothing to reduce the major costs involved, which are aircraft and airfields; (ii) the current leadership of the Army and Navy are not trained to run an air force; and (iii) it would reinforce the blimpish inter-service rivalry that makes the MoD so dysfunctional.

There is alternative: scrap Trident and its replacement, saving 100 billion. Then merge all three traditional services into a single UK Defence Service along the lines of the US Marine Corps. This would reduce bureaucracy and is a more relevant structure for fighting small insurgencies and terrorism.

It would also facilitate the retention of the Scottish air bases in an era when the melting of the Arctic ice cap is bound to create new strategic threats to the north. As an SNP supporter, I can see such an arrangement allowing a sovereign Scotland to share a common defence force with the rest of Britain.

There are plenty of examples of this unified command model: the Canadian Defence Forces were established in 1968, and the Israeli Defence Forces are good at winning wars, so I've heard.

This Saturday sees the annual Battle of Britain air show at RAF Leuchars. I will enjoy watching vintage Spitfires and Hurricanes doing their stuff. There has to be reform in the armed services. But it would be criminal to scrap the RAF out of financial convenience, or as the result of inter-service rivalry. We need the sort of cool thinking that enabled Dowding and the Few to prevail against the odds in 1940.