MoD may duck decision on army numbers in review

The Ministry of Defence is struggling to complete a review aimed at modernising British forces in the face of a renewed threat from Russia and new threats such as cyber and electronic warfare.

The review was supposed to be finished in time for Theresa May to brief Nato allies including Donald Trump at what is shaping up to be a potentially fractious summit in Brussels on 11 and 12 July.

With a select committee report published on Monday calling for defence expenditure to rise to 3% of GDP, the MoD is under pressure to finalise its proposals on its spending priorities.

The MoD has failed to resolve many of the nitty-gritty issues involved in its review, stymied by black holes in its budget and threats of Tory backbench revolts if too many traditional capabilities are abandoned.

The final draft of the Modernising Defence Programme (MDP) looks likely to be a messy compromise, setting out the threat posed by Russia while ducking politically and financially difficult decisions about the size of the army, equipment orders and other issues until later this year or beyond.

The MoD, the Cabinet Office and the Treasury are still working on the review.

One of the most vocal of Conservative MPs on the issue, Johnny Mercer, a former army captain, said: “It is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to define what a modern UK defence force should look like.”

He said he and service personnel were looking for an end to speculation about cuts. Asked what his response would be if the review fails to provide detailed proposals, he said: “That would be unacceptable. I will not accept a fudge.”

Conservative backbenchers expressed concern when it was leaked that two amphibious landing ships, HMS Albion and HMS Bulwark, were to be taken out of service, and the army and Royal Marines cut.

The review is unlikely to go into such detail when published in the next few weeks, but it is understood that, given the two ships have become totemic for Tory backbenchers, at least one and perhaps both of them will be saved. HMS Albion is at present part of a flotilla enforcing sanctions on North Korea.

The defence secretary, Gavin Williamson, is scheduled to meet the chancellor, Philip Hammond, this week to press for more money for the MoD. Given the demands for increased spending from other departments such as health, it will be an uphill task.

Williamson can argue, however, that the UK will come under pressure from Trump, alongside other European members of Nato, to raise defence spending. A government source said: “The US wants to see greater commitment from the likes of Britain, France and other countries.”

Senior US military staff complained last week that the UK was not doing enough, despite being one of the few Nato countries to meet the target of spending at least 2% of GDP on defence.

The US is having to send marines to Norway, viewed by Nato as vulnerable to Russian pressure, to fill a gap after the UK stopped sending Royal Marines there for training exercises as a money saving measure.

The Commons defence select committee, which includes Mercer, published a report on Monday calling for spending on defence to be raised from 2.1% of GDP to closer to 3%.

“The strategic environment has changed for the worse, and this defence review must reflect this. The UK needs to be in a position to deter and challenge peer adversaries equipped with a full range of modern military technologies who seek to use them in way that confuse our traditional conceptions of warfare,” the report says.

“The likelihood of operating in contested environments across all five domains – maritime, land, air, cyber and space – should be reflected in this force structure.”

An MoD spokesperson said they would not speculate on the outcome of the programme.

The UK defence budget has been skewed by the nuclear programme – £31bn on four new nuclear missile-delivering submarines, which excludes work on new warheads – and two new aircraft carriers, due to be operational by 2023. A cost-cutting option would be to reduce the number of American F-35s planned to operate from the carriers.

Other cost-cutting proposals include buying ships off the shelf rather than the long delays and expense involved in building them to order.

The kind of details backbenchers and allies are looking for is whether the army will be cut from its present 77,000 to create a more mobile force that can be deployed at speed. One analyst said that although a tank invasion of eastern Europe by Russia was highly unlikely, a feasible scenario would be an incursion of Russian special forces into Norway or the unexpected arrival of a team of Russian advisers in a disputed part of the Balkans, and that would require a quick deployment.

The review began last summer as part of a look at UK security and defence as a whole, taking in the intelligence agencies as well as the MoD. In January, however, as concern grew that the defence spending problems were proving to be too big a headache, the MoD was hived off for separate review.

Prof Malcolm Chalmers, the deputy director general of the defence thinktank the Royal United Services Institute, who wrote a report in February on the review, said: “I don’t think we are going to see an end to the MDP review process before the Nato summit. We will, it appears, see some announcement of the principles around which the government is reviewing defence. But will we see the end to speculation on army numbers and marine support or other capabilities? I think that is most unlikely.”

He said that unless there was significantly more money from the Treasury, there would be more minuses than pluses from the review. “I don’t see an appetite from the government at present to conclude a review on that basis,” he said.