This week has brought several stories which have reminded me of the famous words of President Eisenhower.
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. . . .Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. . . . In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
At the moment with the pressure for increased defence spending ironically often coming from the present President of the United States Donald Trump one part of that is clearly in play. One way of looking at that in UK terms is to note that over the past five years shares in British Aerospace are up 227% as opposed to 52% for the FTSE 100. So four times the average.
But the other side of the MIC appears when we see vast sums of money ploughed into projects which fail on every measure. Let me start with an example from my home country the UK.
Ajax
This is a new armoured vehicle for the British Army.
Ajax is a family of tracked armoured vehicles that will enter service with the British Army to replace the seventies era Combat Vehicle Reconnaissance (Tracked) family.
It is derived from Spanish/Austrian ASCOD Infantry Fighting Vehicle. ( Think Defence)
Seems simple doesn’t it? Buy something working elsewhere and off you go. But I am sorry to tell you reaility is very different. Here is the UK government and defence minister Luke Pollard from the 6th of this month.
- Ajax supports a UK-wide supply chain of more than 230 companies and over 4,100 jobs.
- Built in Merthyr Tydfil in Wales, it is another demonstration of defence as an engine for economic growth.
- First new armoured fighting vehicle to enter service with the British Army in nearly 30 years.
Thousands of skilled workers across the UK have helped equip British soldiers with the world’s most advanced medium weight armoured fighting vehicle.
Ajax has declared Initial Operating Capability (IOC), a key delivery milestone that means it can now deploy a squadron on operations.
A British triumph! Well played everybody. Now here is The Times from earlier this week and the emphasis is mine.
The British Army has been forced to stop the use of its Ajax armoured fighting vehicle after dozens of soldiers fell ill due to vibration and hearing problems, The Times can reveal.
Soldiers emerged from the £10 million vehicles vomiting while others were said to be shaking so violently they could not control their bodies after war games on Salisbury Plain, sources said. Others had weakness in their legs.
Thirty-one soldiers from the Household Cavalry and the Royal Lancers were affected after they spent 10 to 15 hours in the vehicle, two sources said.
As you can see they are very expensive and as the plan is to produce 589 of them the total bill is around £6 billion. The main problem is that they look set to do far more damage to the British Army than they ever will to an enemy.
The Times revealed this month that at least two had been so badly affected they had been medically downgraded and were unable to deploy overseas. A further three soldiers are due to be medically discharged from the army in the coming weeks after suffering problems last year. ( The Times)
Some might consider that to be flaw but not the generals in charge who have persisted with this gravy train since its inception in 2010. In a familiar feature to readers on here there was some mark to fantasy accountancy and economics as well along the way,
The Major Projects Report 2014 and Equipment Plan 2014 to 2020 was published by the National Audit Office in January 2015. It noted that the Scout Specialist Vehicle project had been accelerated, leading to an increase in the budget of £1.1 Billion over the next ten years but overall costs had actually reduced by £613 million over the 30 year period to 2044. On what basis this assumption had been made or what levels of certainty for a 30-year forecast was not included in the report. ( Think Defence)
The numbers were already spiralling out of control, But don’t worry as our Ivory Tower tells us it will be cheaper in the end. Was someone on secondment from the Bank of England? Meanwhile back in the real world stories were already circulating of an omnishambles making our soldiers ill. The reality is that this has been a dog’s dinner all along but people were doing too well out of it so they lied.One simple issue is that a suspension designed for around 25 tonnes now has a vehicle of 40 tonnes.
Plus it doesn’t seem to actually work.
“Preventing the main armament from stabilizing on the move, damaging the electronic systems that make Ajax a step-change in capability, and leading to a high rate of component failure, with the idler and rear road wheels shearing off with concerning regularity.” ( RUSI)
For our purposes the issue here is that in spite of a litany of failures over more than a decade no-one has been sacked and lie after lie has been told. Switching to my home territory of economics this presents a problem. If you add £6 billion to GDP how does that work when the output you have may be zero? Indeed if it keeps injuring our soldiers you could argue that the output has been negative,especially with a Prime Minister claiming we are on a “war footing.”
Constellation Frigate
It is now the turn of the United States for the MIC hall of shame. The story is even more long-running than above because it starts with the LCS or Littoral Combat Ship. I will not tire you too much with the details other than pointing out it became called the Little Crappy Ship and it is being taken out of service by the US Navy almost as quickly as they are being built. No-one with any sense wants to take on Russian and Chinese submarines with these,
So an anti-submarine frigate was needed and the US Navy decided it wanted twenty. Until this week.
US Navy has cancelled the Constellation-class frigate programme (First 2 ships will be completed). Predictable delays and spiralling costs resulted from the decision to re-work 80% of the FREMM baseline design. ( Navy Lookout)
As you can see from the second sentence there are many common issues with Ajax above. Something which does work in the Italian navy for example was modified again and again until it did not work! It is like these people are agents for our enemies!
The whole point of the programme was after the LCS debacle to buy something which worked ( for France and Italy) so that it could quickly come into service.That morphed into this.
However, once the complex design work commenced, the Navy and Marinette had to make vast changes to the design in order to meet stricter U.S. survivability standards. The delays resulted in an estimated three-year setback in the delivery of the first ship from 2026 to 2029 at a cost of about $1.5 billion. ( USNI)
If you believe the excuses there I have a bridge to sell you.
Even worse if they do this.
Sometimes, you’re just better off designing a new ship,” Navy’s former top acquisition executive Nickolas Guertin said at a conference in February. ( USNI)
The US Navy has not successfully designed a ship for over 30 years now.What it has is a long list of expensive failures. If they had simply copied the FREMMS they would have ships in service by now.
Comment
The issue here is not that mistakes are made as sadly they are inevitable. It is that nothing is learnt and the ostrich position is adopted so the gravy train can continue. It is both incompetent and corrupt. There are plenty of other examples just looking at the UK such as the E-7 Wedgetail where we order 5 radar systems but only 3 planes. The Type 23 LIFEX resulting from the failure of previous governments to order more frigates which has ended up on us spending money on frigates we then scrap. There is an irony in that for a while we were getting it right not ordering more F-35Bs as Lockheed has proven incapable of fitting our best weapons on it then in a brain dead moment we ordered some F-35As which can’t fly off out carriers and what can you do with only 12 anyway?
So in economics terms we have a lot of recorded GDP. But in practice we are singing along with Arcade Fire.
If I could have it back
All the time that we wasted
I’d only waste it again
If I could have it back
You know I would love to waste it again
Waste it again and again and again.
