Military Readiness: Stern Words from Commons
Ben North
On February 4th 2024, the House of Commons Defence Select Committee published a report into the readiness of the UK Armed Forces. ‘Readiness’ can refer to a variety of measures. In the simplest terms, readiness is the speed with which a unit of the military is able to effectively carry out a tasking or be available for deployment. At a national, strategic level, readiness is not just the ability to respond to developing situations quickly, but also the ability to sustain military capabilities and achieve objectives over a long time period. The Armed Forces’ ability to deploy 16 Air Assault Brigade during the evacuation of Kabul might be an example of the first type of readiness. Being able to wage a conventional war over many months or years would be a demonstration of the latter type.
The report states that the Committee ‘remain to be convinced’ that the UK has the capacity to deploy globally in response to events, and is highly critical of the Government’s systems for disseminating information. ‘Corridor conversations’ are named as one of the chief sources of information available to Parliament. It is noted that many other nations have established processes for assessing their military readiness which the UK currently lacks, and the Government are charged with being obstructively slow to cooperate with the Committee. Further, the report notes that although much information regarding readiness is now classified, this was not always the case. There is a strong implication that the Ministry of Defence has become more secretive, either silently and deliberately, or because of managerial incompetence.
Beyond the criticism of the Government and senior MOD management, the report suggests some interesting, more concrete, policy proposals. One such recommendation is to investigate further the possibility of mothballing old equipment so that it can be brought out of storage, rapidly upgraded, and put to use in a large conflict if necessary. The UK seems to have a habit of disposing of old equipment, whilst major military powers such as the US, China, and Russia maintain it in storage. Such a recommendation chimes well with the MOD’s own report from July 2023, which outlines a shift in procurement strategy towards rapidly deliverable, simple, and functional equipment and vehicles. The Armed Forces must, in their words, be content to work with equipment that is ‘good enough’, if the speed of availability will give the UK a strategic edge.
The logic of these policies is similar, and can be summed up with a cliché: the perfect is the enemy of the good. The MOD and Commons are recognising that the UK may not have enough equipment to engage in a drawn out conflict, and any useable equipment is better than none at all. It is likely that the MOD’s policy shift away from ‘decades-long acquisition programmes’ shows the impact of the Ajax vehicle procurement timeline. In 2010, it was claimed that the in-service date for Ajax would be 2017. Now, full operational capability is not expected until 2029. If this does not get pushed back further, it will have taken 19 years to deliver the vehicles. Boxer, the Infantry Fighting Vehicle set to replace Warrior, is not expected to be fully operational until 2032, and initially operational until 2025 (despite being expected in 2024).
How might the above policy considerations be implemented? Ajax is supposed to be filling the operational role of Scimitar, which was taken out of service in 2023. What will happen with these Scimitar vehicles? 23 have been sent to Ukraine, out of 170 that were operational in 2022. It has been argued that Scimitar is obsolete, having come into service over half a century ago in 1971. But if this is truly the case, sending 23 of them over to Ukraine would have been nothing more than cynical PR. Presumably they are expected to be able to do their duty in that conflict. Moreover, they have been sent to fight against the very military (Russia’s) that has prompted such renewed worry about UK readiness. The Russian military itself stores and uses old equipment and vehicles.
Finding a way to store out-of-service Scimitars and Warriors should not be thought of as a trade-off for modernising the British Army’s fleet of vehicles. Any such stored vehicles would be used to hastily plug gaps where necessary, in order to maintain at least some warfighting capability. A storage policy like this, and a rapid and simple new procurement policy, would both have one overall goal: increasing the stock of available platforms in the event of a large scale conventional conflict. If the Committee’s report is to be taken seriously, the UK Armed Forces cannot get by in the current climate by simply modernising and replacing current equipment. Novel and pragmatic policies must also be pursued, accepting that they will almost certainly be costly and imperfect.