DEFENCE REVIEW
On the Ceiling
By JOHN ERICKSON IT was certainly a malignant wit who, in intro- ducing the discussion of 'Britain's Military ROle' in Part I of the statement of the Defence Estimate 1966, swipes at the 1957 Defence White Paper as an illustration of 'the dangers of being over-dogmatic about weapons and political de- velopment.' The present Statement has no need to flag its own peculiarities, and even if over- dogmatism be ruled out, then just plain dogma- tism looms large here, if only because of the presentation of the hypothesis itself. For this is a projection into the 1970s, a decision 'in broad terms' about 'the role' Britain should play in the world in ten years' time, a decision about 'military capabilities' in terms of 'political sense.' While the former may be subject to a number of stringent technical examinations, the latter is much more a matter of simple assertion, though its final test is the degree to which it is con- vincing, with all its criteria displayed for examination. This is an unfortunate and am- biguous conjunction when in fact the Statement goes on to discuss the nature of the relationship between 'strategy' and 'cost,' whose interdepen- dence has been scrutinised intensely by Ameri- can defence specialists in studies such as The Economics of Defense in the Nuclear Age.
By these American tests, 'strategies' are defined as 'ways of using budgets' to achieve military objectives: 'technology' provides answers about how these objectives may be achieved: the eco- nomics problem revolves round selecting an 'efficient' or 'economic' solution, so that 'effici- ency' and 'economical' (i.e., money-saving) be- come synonymous. Thus the way to a viable strategy is to define objectives very rigorously, to measure commitments and then to set the 'cost'; the proper regulation of the commitment is the fundamental element in achieving success with the subsequent economising, so that `strategy,' technology' and 'efficiency' remain in or are brought into alignment.
Leaving aside 'political sense,' which is a thoroughly subjective term, the structure and argument of the 1966 Statement suggest that exactly the reverse of this procedure has been adopted by the British government in an attempt to produce an alignment of a viable strategy with an efficient solution—somewhat surprising in view of the public emphasis on 'rationalisation' and the great flurry about 'cost efficiency.' The basic decision was evidently the choice of a financial target of f2,000 million at 1964 prices, the criteria for which are laid out in another paper on the National Plan. Within this target, therefore, the Government has seen itself free to exploit 'a role.' Thus it has gone for a simple optimisation, based on the outlook of its 'func- tional analysis of its defence expenditure,' so that `the role' east of Suez is shaped by the expendi- ture available after irreducible commitments (NATO and bilateral agreements) have been met. A 'commitment' has had to be shaped to 'a cost' in terms which appear to be somewhat arbitrary. Precisely what this Indian Ocean-Far Eastern 'role' is, apart from a summary mention of 'general limitations,' remains unclear, though it is apparently clear enough for the Government to justify—'from study and experience'—the deci-
John Erickson is Senior Lecturer in Govern- ment at the University of Manchester.
sion not to proceed with the aircraft-carrier pro- gramme, but the intention to 'retain a major military capability outside Europe.'
The ambiguities in the area of 'commitments' signifies either confusion about the priorities, or dispute about their order; the arguments over 'commitments' cannot be extricated from those about 'capabilities' and this must lead, as it has done here, to the intrusion of 'unilateral plans and priorities,' where the services are placed in a competitive situation, and in the recent past fiscal arbitrariness has collided somewhat vio- lently with an inevitable and vigorous unilateral- ism on the part of the individual services. Although the aircraft carrier is very brusquely felled in the Statement (Part I) on the grounds of 'cost-effectiveness'—an insufficient operational return in relation to expenditure—and though no specific statement is made about the real nature of this `rOle- east of Suez, the Statement is speci- fic to the point of excluding the carrier. 'There are limitations on the use of our present forces'; these 'limitations' are likely to grow more severe . . . carriers and carrier-borne aircraft are indis- pensable for only one type of operation . .. that type we shall certainly not undertake, and thus the carrier is trundled off one of the largest ocean areas in the world.
The Government therefore turns with un- bounded confidence to its other single-weapon system, in this case the F-111, and predicts full performance of all roles in contingencies which are pruned to fit the weapon in a range of com- mitments shaped to fit a single decision, yet com- mitments which, on closer inspection, have yielded only two minor diminutions, a with- drawal from British Guiana and from Aden, with tiny adjustments in Malta and Cyprus.
Obviously the argument about starting points —financial ceiling or definitions of commitment —cannot be snapped shut in an instant (though it is worth looking more closely at how Mr. McNamara discontinued the use of fiscal ceilings after 1961). Much more disquieting is the point that we do not have, in spite of all the trumpet- ings about 'rationalisation' within the central defence establishment, a viable- machine which will inhibit the expression of service preferences and which will facilitate the pursuit of options in. the real sense of the word, so that the Govern- ment proposes to run an integrated policy through a machine which promotes divisiveness. The serment about the CVA-01 and the F-111 is real enough, and has many relevancies, but the two resignations and the semi-public display of tensions point to an obvious institutional block- age, where service unilateralism is still colliding with fiscal arbitrariness. In that case (and the inter-service tensions have persisted for a long time), the need to be more rigorous and defini- tive about 'commitments' must have been awn.- ent, or else M r. Healey has shown too much confidence in his quasi-predictions, in the via- bility of his a priori stipulations and in the effi- cacy of a central machine which will not stand much strain, but which was supposed to have achieved unified control.
At least, however, this Statement, with its broader band of factual material, is less of an insult to the public intelligence than previously, and at least some of the criteria concerning the decision-making are displayed. The mania for maintaining 'official secrecy' over minutiae seems to have abated. To talk of a debate when the debaters were kept sternly at arm's length from even elementary facts was ludicrous, and a grotesque secretiveness suggested not security but furtiveness. Now perhaps the Government means 'debate' when it says it.
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