Sir, It is too easy to put the whole blame for the Government’s inadequate provision of resources for defence and the late arrival in service of key capabilities on ministers, civil servants and special advisers (General Lord Guthrie of Craigiebank, Opinion, Aug 27), respectively weak, self-serving and ignorant though some of them may be. Uniquely among departments of state, the Ministry of Defence has a very large number of military officers (often the most able) working alongside their Civil Service colleagues; their job is to present a well-argued case for the size and shape of our future military capability to meet the operational commitments likely to be entered into by government. This does not happen for doctors at the Department of Health, teachers in the education department or train drivers at the Department for Transport etc. Recent heads of defence procurement have also been military officers.
If these military folk collectively cannot provide defence ministers with sufficiently convincing arguments to win Treasury or Cabinet support, then the Service Chiefs of Staff who have (again uniquely) right of access to the Prime Minister should be able conclusively to press their case. Do they press hard enough? We have a right to ask. And if they do then it must be that the collective political will in Cabinet, led by the Prime Minister, is not prepared to provide what our military need. In which case commitments must be commensurately reduced.
Aside from special pleading for “the Army” and “soldiers”, when all three Services are heavily committed to operational theatres (recently there were more Navy than Army in Afghanistan), retired generals so quick to comment on today’s equipment shortages may be suffering some convenient amnesia. In my several years at the Ministry of Defence, those same generals, responsible for the size and shape of today’s Army, were not conspicuous for their support for what is now today’s critical equipment, especially when it competed for resources with the Army’s manpower costs, which always seemed to be their top priority.
None of this alters the vital importance now, today, of providing our in-theatre commanders and their brave men and women, of whatever Service, with the numbers and kit they need to win the wars that our Government has ordered them to fight for us. There is widespread public support, nay demand, for this to be provided at whatever cost necessary.
Vice-Admiral Sir Nicholas Hill-Norton
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Deputy Chief of Defence Staff, 1992-95