Strategic defence review looking like a train crash

Britain's Strategic Defence and Security Review, due to reach final draft this week, is beginning to look like a Whitehall train crash rather than a piece of visionary strategy.

The main outline of the review, including the major cuts in defence ordered by the new government, was due to be approved at a meeting this Friday of the National Security Council chaired by David Cameron and Nick Clegg.

But The First Post has learnt that this has been put off because there is still no agreement on the major cuts proposed - nor on the subsequent defence strategy.

The meeting has been postponed until next week, and then it will be brief - because the PM's diary is too crowded for him to be able to give more than an hour or two to the difficulties of defence.

Firefights are breaking out across Whitehall between the three services and the MoD, the Cabinet Office and the NSC (national Security Council). Some of the details leaked to the Sunday Times about Army numbers, and to the Financial Times about the row over aircraft carriers and Trident's replacement, are clearly accurate. But things seem to be getting worse.

One of the plans, supported by most senior civil servants, was to slash service numbers - by up to 40,000 by one account - in order to preserve some of the big-ticket industrial programmes, principally the aircraft carriers and the order for four new Trident submarines to be placed in 2014.

Civil servants have argued that personnel are expensive – making up about 30 per cent of the £37 billion annual budget – and are relatively easy to fire compared with breaking major equipment contracts, which incurs huge penalty payments.

But Cameron has now been persuaded by the head of the Army, Gen Sir David Richards, to spare 20,000 of those troops. As a result, the RAF and the Navy can expect deeper cuts.

The Navy's dilemma is particularly acute, and proposed solutions have reached a sublime absurdity that Lewis Carroll might envy.

In order to keep the aircraft carrier and Trident submarine programmes going, if only in part, the admirals were prepared to bin a large chunk of their present surface fleet. One proposal was to sell off six new amphibious assault ships.

This would mean the UK would have very little amphibious capability - something we have had to draw on repeatedly in the past 30 years, including the Falklands, Sierra Leone, numerous humanitarian missions, and, twice, in wars against Iraq.

Without this capability, the Royal Marines would have little raison d’etre (despite the important role they now play in Afghanistan and in supplying top recruits to the Special Forces).

The problem with the aircraft carriers, to which the Navy seems addicted, is that their true cost has not been aired in public. The two carrier hulls will cost around £6 billion to complete, but then comes the real cost of fitting them out and equipping them with Lockheed Martin F-35 Joint Strike Fighter Lightning II aircraft.

With the price of those planes included, it is now likely to cost £50 billion to run the carriers in the first ten years of their commission – two and a half times the projected bill for Trident's replacement at £20 billion.

The original order of 150 F-35s is to be cut in half to 70 or 75. But even so, on current projections, only 10 of the jets will be fully capable of operation at one time.

Defence Secretary Liam Fox is keen on the Navy and wants both the carriers and Trident. It was his proposal that the Army should be cut substantially. But Gen Richards appears to have persuaded Cameron that you cannot cut the Army while it is still at war in Afghanistan.

With his obsession with tackling Iran, defending the High Arctic and grand maritime strategy, Dr Fox seems permanently out of step with his military, his party and increasingly his bosses across the road in Downing Street. That is a political nettle David Cameron will have to grasp - if not soon, then no later than the end of the year. ·