Trident delay by the Coalition: Cunning plan, or bad idea?

Warning - </Analysis><Opinion>

(Usual caveat: This is only one man's opinion, and worth no more than you paid for it, ie nothing really.)

Proper new Trident, with submarine-launched ballistic nukes, is the right call for the UK. Its cost is tiny compared to UK government spending - just half of a single year's Department for Work and Pensions budget would buy new Trident boats, arm them, crew them and cover their running costs for decades.

Compared to the MoD's much smaller budget the costs look bigger, but they are still small - and ICBM submarines represent far and away the best value for money in the MoD. For perhaps £20bn to £30bn in acquisition costs you get an unstoppable, unfindable nuclear hammer capable of shattering a nation in an afternoon. When one reflects that we have spent the same money to get the Eurofighter - a wildly expensive and now rather oldfashioned pure air-to-air platform - new Trident looks like a steal.

One major reason that the Eurofighter is such poor value for money, of course, has been repeated delay so as to achieve short-term savings in the past. This is also true of nearly every other procurement project in the MoD: cumulatively, past politicians failing to grasp nettles are now costing us billions every year. It has to stop, and stop now - as a taxpayer, quite frankly I don't see why I should pay still more billions down the road just to keep Mr Cameron in Downing Street and Mr Clegg in the Cabinet today.

I don't think I'm alone in these beliefs, either. The Lib Dems, showing a lot of integrity, put clear blue water between themselves and the other two parties on nukes before the election - and took a beating at the polls. In most other respects you couldn't get a playing card between them and the other parties on policy, so a lot of those lost Lib Dem votes will have been lost by the failure to promise proper deterrence. The mainstream parties, of course, for whom most of us voted, promised new Trident on time: Labour long ago learned that disarmament is electoral suicide in this country, and once you realise the difference between ballistic and cruise missiles you know that the latter are more or less equivalent to disarming.

As for the argument that our noble boys and girls in uniform deserve our support and we shouldn't take away their money for nukes - especially while we're at war in Afghanistan - that misses several points.

First, the costs of war in Afghanistan are being met by several billion in extra funding every year from the Treasury, not from the main MoD budget which is to pay for new nukes. Our boys and girls on the front line will still get their new armoured vehicles, new rifles and weapons, better body armour, PAYG satellite bandwidth and the big black bag of shiny proper kit for each of them on setting off. Afghanistan has nothing to do with the MoD core budget. Even if it did, well... you can make an argument that it makes Britain more secure to be in Afghanistan, but it isn't nearly as convincing as the the argument that having Trident makes Britain more secure - and Trident costs less, too.

Second, it is not the armed forces' money we speak of but ours. Defence chiefs grumble that the nuclear deterrent is imposed on them by politics, in other words by public opinion - this being a democracy. Of course it is, and so it should be: if the electorate want nukes instead of tanks or frigates or jets, that's what they should have.

Third, our conventional armed forces are some of the best value in the government - in the world - in terms of capability for money. They can reach round the world to do all manner of very difficult things - dominate defended airspaces, fight tank battles, hunt submarines. We get all these tools for just £35bn pa or so: and if we give them several billion a year extra as we are doing, the forces can also carry on properly-equipped counterinsurgency, albeit on a distinctly modest scale. (The US Marines on their own have put three times the number of people into Helmand that the combined UK forces can manage. The US Marines also have about the same number of personnel in total.)

We might, perhaps, need to fight a tank battle or hunt down some submarines or control some airspace against opposition one day. It's probably worth spending money to keep at least some of these tools available.

But to me the idea that we should forfeit real, serious, geopolitically game-changing, unstoppable, invulnerable nuclear strike capability in order to spend slightly more on fighting submarines or tanks or MiGs is comically ridiculous. Nonetheless that's the argument the generals and air-marshals and even admirals - and with them a lot of politicians - are making.

They are wrong. ®

*A Trident boat spends a months-long deterrent patrol driving about very slowly in a given box somewhere in the Atlantic. It never looks around it, never goes hunting for enemy ships or subs, never does anything much at all. It is very hard for a keen young sub-driver to develop his skills or his career in this situation.