Liam Fox may quit over delays to renewing Trident nuclear submarines

By Simon Walters for The Mail on Sunday
Updated: 06:09 EST, 20 September 2010

Defence Secretary Liam Fox was heading for a showdown with David Cameron last night over the Coalition’s decision to delay renewing Britain’s Trident nuclear submarines until after the next Election.

Reports that the Prime Minister planned to put off a decision on the UK’s nuclear deterrent were denied by Downing Street last week.

But senior Government sources have told The Mail on Sunday Mr Cameron is determined not to commit himself until after the next Election, due in 2015.

Heading for a showdown: Liam Fox disagrees with David Cameron's decision to delay renewing Britain's Trident nuclear submarines until after the next Election

Right-winger Mr Fox believes it is vital to maintain Britain’s current fleet of four nuclear submarines, which provide a 24-hour, 365-days-a-year defence shield. And he is adamant the issue must be resolved by 2014 as planned, not kicked into the long grass to avoid a row with the Lib Dems who say it should be scaled down – or scrapped.

Last month Nick Clegg said: ‘It’s going to be difficult for someone who is to receive less housing benefit to understand why we should spend huge amounts on Trident.’

Tory sources say that if Mr Fox does not get his way over Trident, he could resign.

He has drawn up a detailed blueprint in response to the Treasury’s demand for a ten per cent cut in the MoD’s budget over the next four years. His costings include provision for the immediate renewal of the four Trident nuclear submarines at a cost of £20 billion.

Mr Fox proposes to reprieve a £5 billion plan to build two new aircraft carriers, but recommends halving to 70 the number of Joint Strike Fighter aircraft being purchased.

Under the Fox plan, one carrier would be in active service while the other would be kept in reserve. Army chiefs have argued for one of the carriers to be axed and the other to be put in storage, with air power restricted to RAF fast jets flying from land bases around the world.

Mr Fox proposes only a modest reduction in Army troops, down from 105,000 to 100,000, but with a further 15,000 shed after 2015 when Britain is expected to start withdrawing from Afghanistan.

ANALYSIS: We spend more on defence than everyone except China and America. So why can our top brass barely support one brigade in Helmand?

The Prime Minister lay the blame last week for the horrendous state of the Ministry of Defence’s finances squarely at the feet of the last Government.

We had been left, David Cameron said, with an appalling legacy and a commitment to overspend £28 billion. It was the biggest financial mess he’d seen since coming to office and the result of decisions taken that made very little sense.

He is right. But only half right.

Dire situation: The PM has blamed the horrendous state of the Ministry of Defence's finances on the last Government

Of course the last Government was idiotic. It demanded that the British fought two complex counter-insurgency wars in two countries while simultaneously cutting the defence budget. Yet much of the blame for the MoD’s grotesque overspend lies with senior officers and civil servants.

Britain spends around £42billion a year on defence with only America and China spending more. It is a gigantic amount of money, even allowing for the costs of actually fighting wars. How is it, then, that the Armed Forces struggle to properly equip a brigade of just 10,000 men and women in Helmand? Where has all this money gone?

I spent two months investigating the MoD and its spending habits for a Channel 4 Dispatches programme, the results of which are rather shocking. The MoD revealed itself as an organisation which fails to meet Government accounting standards, wastes staggering amounts of public money on buying equipment that is delivered decades late and is wildly over budget.

What is most shocking is the infighting between the Army, Navy and Air Force which ordinary soldiers believe has cost men their lives.

We found MoD Ministers, officers and senior officials had formed a ‘Conspiracy of Optimism’, which means that to get major projects off the ground they allow British defence manufacturers to win contracts  by underbidding. The projects are later discreetly padded out with public money.

And under political pressure to preserve British skills and jobs, the MoD often pay enormously inflated prices for British-built equipment which could have been bought ‘off the peg’ abroad. This  has resulted in officials enjoying a worryingly close relationship with the arms industry.

According to the Government’s own figures, 37 per cent of former public-sector workers who take jobs in the same private sector are part of a ‘traffic’ from the MoD to the arms industry.

And when major construction programmes do go over budget, the MoD often deliberately slows them down. The MoD is littered with examples of delays and overspends. According to the National Audit Office, the Nimrod MRA4 spy plane – supposed to be operational ten years ago – will now be four times as expensive as anticipated. And the Typhoon Eurofighter is £13billion over budget and four years late.

These delays have been partly because of the last Government’s defence cuts, which meant funds for continuing projects dried up while we had troops fighting in two wars. But in the case of the Nimrod this was not so. Costs rocketed because the MoD wanted the aircraft built in the UK from an airframe originally put together in the Sixties.

Ministers wanted to protect British jobs and so the Nimrod is being built by BAE Systems. It sucked money out of the budget which could have gone on something more useful such as crucial battlefield helicopters.

Although Britain was locked into a bloody campaign in Iraq and planning to send a brigade into Helmand a couple of years later, it was, astonishingly, the MoD, not the politicians, who elected in 2004 to cut £1.4billion from the budget for the Joint Helicopter Command.

The top brass of the Royal Navy, the Army and the RAF woke up two years later and noticed British troops were being maimed, killed, and suffering from malnutrition in Helmand because they could not be reached quickly enough by the small number of Chinooks.

So they found £2billion for new aircraft and opted to ask the Italian firm Finmeccanica to design and build a brand new aircraft at the former Westland plant at Yeovil in Somerset.

But as 3 Para commander Stuart Tootal told us: ‘If you ask any commander worth his salt on the ground what sort of helicopter he wants, he’ll tell you he wants a Chinook for heavy lift, he wants an Apache helicopter to give him fire support as a gunship and he wants a Black Hawk helicopter to do all the other things.’

The Finmeccanica helicopter, called the Future Lynx Wildcat, of which the British are going to be getting just 62, at £20-25million each, can carry four soldiers. The Black Hawk can carry 12 full sections of combat infantry. So why didn’t we get Black Hawks? Rivalry between the services. Because the Black Hawk is just heavy enough to be defined as an RAF aircraft, no one in the Army was prepared to argue for it.

The threats to, and expectations of, our military will not diminish just because Britain is short of money. But the MoD and Armed Forces do need radical reform. Top brass must be culled and brave decisions taken to abandon projects that have overrun. The cosy relationship between the MoD and the arms industry must be properly scrutinised.

Inter-service infighting must be ruthlessly stamped out.

The new chief of the defence staff, General Sir David Richards, is a battle-hardened field commander. When he takes over in a few weeks time he will need to summon every ounce of courage and cunning to reform the MoD and Armed Forces. Their very survival is at stake.

* Dispatches: How The MoD Wastes Our Billions is on Channel 4 at 8pm, Monday, September 20.