Britain's Decline: Entitlements And The Armed Forces

Byron York has a fine piece in the Examiner pointing out that, while Britain has taken a leading role in the Libyan intervention, there is almost nothing left militarily behind the curtain. The entire British stockpile of cruise missiles amounted to 64 when the war began, and Britain was careless enough to fire off 12 of them at the start of the conflict. That’s 20 percent of Britain’s entire arsenal, shot off in a single volley.

British officials I’ve spoken with confess no anxiety at all about the sustainability of their role in Libya. That’s a fine and brave line to take, but it’s neither wise nor true. A recent U.K. National Audit Office report on the Eurofighter – now the Typhoon – points out, amidst much depressing detail about the inefficiencies surrounding European procurement, that Britain has only about 50 Tornado GR4 ground attack aircraft in service. The December 2010 retirement of the Harrier force now looks spectacularly ill-timed, and the fact that the second tranche of Typhoons will not be fully equipped for multi-role service until 2012 is even more unfortunate.

In the short term, the problem is that Britain’s force is very thin. The shortage of cruise missiles is symptomatic of the bigger problem: that Britain has underinvested in spare parts and ammunition. Because its accounting system charges the forces depreciation costs for equipment in storage, the forces have been incentivized to keep as little as possible on hand. A conflict like Libya, which looks likely to drag on for months, will cruelly expose those shortfalls, to the likely cost of the Libyan rebels and NATO’s credibility alike.

In the medium term, the problem is that Britain’s forces are very small. The GR4 is based on an airframe, the GR1, that first flew in 1974. Its avionics upgrade was launched in 1994. Britain is thus very heavily reliant on a very small number of aging aircraft. It has almost no margin for error. It cannot hope to maintain a continual presence in the Libyan skies, a fact that may partly account for the well-publicized complaints of the Libyan rebels that NATO airstrikes are slow to arrive.

The long term is the worst of all. As York points out, in the mid-1960s, Britain spent about 7 percent of its GDP on defense, and about 11 percent on entitlements. It now spends 3 percent on defense, and 23 percent on entitlements. Over the life of the current parliament, that 3 percent will fall to 2 percent.

The only difference between the U.S. and Britain is that Britain got there first: our spending patterns now roughly parallel Britain’s in the mid-1960s. Unless we change course, the coming years will see our entitlement spending grow just as Britain’s did. There was a good deal of discussion in DC recently about an emergency spending bill to fund the armed forces in the now-averted event of a shutdown. That was an important debate, but it misidentified the real emergency, which is the inescapable clash between the benefits we’ve promised ourselves and the solvency of our state.