IBS

David Simonds

WITH the approach of summer, pilots at the Royal Air Force's base in Coningsby are preparing their vintage aircraft from Battle of Britain times for the season's popular air shows. These days, though, the buzzing of Spitfires and Hurricanes in the skies over Lincolnshire is drowned out by the imperious roar of a newer arrival.

Typhoon, to hear the pilots talk, is as impressive a plane as the Spitfire was in its day. With its power, agility, ease of control, ability to fly high and fast, modern weapons and data links, Typhoon can beat any jet in the world, they claim, except possibly America's top-of-the-line (and far more expensive) F-22 Raptor.

Perhaps so. But the army and the navy are less than enamoured. The 232 planes the RAF is expecting to buy will cost some £20 billion ($40 billion) in all, making Typhoon Britain's most expensive defence programme yet. It is eating up funds that could go to equip other services—and this at a time when overstretched ground forces are fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Built by a consortium from Britain, Germany, Italy and Spain, Eurofighter (as Typhoon was known) was designed to give superiority in the air during the cold war. Critics argue that it is ill-suited to today's business of seeking out insurgents on the ground.

Not true, says the RAF. Typhoon will excel both at shooting down other planes and at precision bombing and aerial reconnaissance. The air force hopes to prove its point in the coming months. The first operational Typhoon squadron will be on high alert in June, ready to protect Britain's skies from foreign intruders and intercept hijacked aircraft. By the middle of 2008 the RAF expects to have the multi-role version on the front line supporting ground troops in Iraq or Afghanistan.

The RAF says air power should not be taken for granted; it is only through mastery of the air that the army and navy enjoy freedom to manoeuvre below. The Falklands war 25 years ago was a reminder that unexpected conflicts do happen.

The trouble is that it takes decades to develop a complex new defence system but threats change quickly. Each of the services argues that it holds the key to future security. Their usual tussle with each other and with Whitehall for resources has become more bitter as the Comprehensive Spending Review, which sets the parameters of government spending from 2008 to 2011, nears its conclusion this summer.

Admiral Sir Jonathon Band, the navy's chief, gave warning in February that cuts to the fleet risked reducing the once-mighty Royal Navy to the status of the “Belgian navy”. The navy frets that it could lose the two new aircraft carriers it has been counting on. With a planned displacement of 65,000 tonnes (and costing around £3.6 billion together), these carriers would be three times larger than the mini-carriers the navy has now. They would carry short-take-off and vertical-landing versions of the Joint Strike Fighter, stealthy planes that are being developed jointly with America to replace the Harrier jump-jets. The Ministry of Defence has proposed buying some 150 for the British navy and the air force. They would cost at least £8 billion in total.

Senior army commanders complain that Britain will have a surfeit of expensive fast jets, even though the main threat in the foreseeable future will come from old-fashioned weapons such as AK-47 assault rifles, grenade launchers and improvised bombs. The army chief, General Sir Richard Dannatt, gave warning in October that prolonged deployments overseas could “break the army”. It claims it needs more money to improve pay and conditions in order to attract soldiers and keep them. Army sources say the service wants to expand its shrunken ranks, raising its current 99,500 soldiers to the full budgeted number of 101,800 and then adding 3,000-4,000 more.

The army also wants to buy medium-weight armoured vehicles to replace existing equipment, some of it built in the 1960s. But the so-called Future Rapid Effect System (FRES), which costs around £14 billion, is hopelessly delayed. If the price of the FRES is the postponement or cancellation of the carriers, say some generals, so be it.

At its heart, the argument over what equipment the armed forces need, and what they can afford, is a debate about Britain's place in the world. Should it aspire to remain a global power or give up the pretence of imperial policing? Should it give priority to countering insurgency or invest in the capacity to wage high-intensity wars against more sophisticated, but still unforeseen, enemies in the future?

In a speech in January the prime minister, Tony Blair, said that British servicemen should be both “war-fighters and peacekeepers”. In an age of global terrorism, Britain had to be able to project military power around the world because “the new frontiers for our security are global”. This was not to prefer “hard” military power to “soft” political and economic power, but to make sure that they could reinforce each other.

That's all very well, say the top brass, but such ambitions do not come cheap. They also know the real decisions will be made not by Mr Blair but by the man next door—the current chancellor of the exchequer and future prime minister, Gordon Brown. It is unclear whether he shares Mr Blair's global ambitions.

Although the defence budget has been increasing in real terms, it has declined as a share of GDP and now stands at around 2.3% (see chart). Defence spending is running at £32 billion a year—excluding the cost of current operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, estimated at more than £1.5 billion in the year to March 2008. Defence sources say there is a £500m gap in the budget for next year. But the authors of a recent paper in the journal of the Royal United Services Institute argue that the equipment budget (currently about £9 billion) has been under-funded by £1.5 billion a year since the 1998 Strategic Defence Review shifted Britain's focus from defending Europe to expeditionary warfare.

Much of the equipment considered necessary in that review has been cut back, and so has the number of squadrons envisaged. At the same time, the number, size and duration of operations has been much greater than planned. For ordinary soldiers, the strains are visible from the moment they leave Britain in clapped-out Tristar jets to the moment they reach the valleys of Afghanistan with little or no American-style computer networking.

All this does not begin to consider the cost of renewing Britain's Trident nuclear deterrent. The one thing all three services agree on is that the nation's nuclear “insurance policy” should be paid for separately, not out of the defence budget.

Since the terrorist attacks on America in 2001, Britain has in many ways been a country at war operating on a peacetime budget. Without a substantial increase in funds, say commanders, something will have to give. Some argue for a full-blown defence review. “We have lost the art of strategy,” says one general. “All we have is bits of policy.”