Defence of the Realm

Defence budgets and defence cuts are the talk of the town at the moment - which reminded me of the following extract from Alan Clark's diaries.

For the uninitiated, Alan Clark was a minister in Margaret Thatcher's government - not one of the so-called 'wets' by any means - but he was famously sceptical about the tendency of the military boffins to spend public money on madcap projects.

Ministry of Defence - Tuesday 3 April 1990.

For months I have been resisting expenditure (some hundreds of millions) on a completely unneccessary new piece of Army equipment known by its acronym as ACEATM.

It is a 'sideways firing mine - itself an unlikely, indeed contradictory concept, surely? The idea is that you position one of these incredibly 'intelligent' and expensive devices in the window of a house and when a tank goes past it shoots out at it, 'sideways'.

From the first moment I saw the papers it was clear that this was a complete waste of money., conceived at the height of the Cold war and now totally unnecessary. Trouble is, I'm not really meant to question 'Operational Requirements'. I'm meant to seek and then, by implication, follow advice on anything about which I have doubts. In the nature of things, the advice comes from the same people who drafted the 'Requirements' in the first place.

Finally, after much deferment, a full-scale 'Meeting' was called.

'You leave them behind, you see, to slow up the enemy's advance.'

'What advance?'

'Well, er, his advance, Minister.'

'What enemy?'

'The Warsaw Pact, Minister'  

'The warsaw pact no longer exists. It's disintegrated.'

'In villages, in built-up areas,' shouted somebody else, also in uniform. Why the fuck are these people in uniform? It's not allowed. Just to intimidate me, they think.

'O thought the first rule in deploying armour was to avoid built-up areas?'

'Roads, Minister. Choke points.'

'what happens if a truck goes past. That would be a waste, wouldn't it? How does it know not to shoot?'

'Well it knows, Minister. It's programmed with all the Warsaw Pact silhouettes.'

'Warsaw Pact?' 

'There's a l;ot f Russian stuff Out of Area now, you know.'

'I do know.'

'It's next generation, Minister. A very intelligent sensor.'

'Better programme it to recognise all the French stuff, then.' 

'Ha-ha, Minister. Oh, ha-ha.'

What can one do? Nothing. I can block this spastic weapon, and make them cross, and complaining. But about them I can do nothing.

I want to fire the whole lot. Instantly. Out, out. No 'District' commands, no golden bowlers, nothing. Out. There are so many good, tough keen young officers who aren't full of shit. How can we bring them on, before they get dissillusioned, or conventionalised by the sytem? If I could, I'd do what Stalin did to Tukhachevsky*.

* The purges of the Red Army in 1938-9 when three-quarters of all officers of field rank and above were put to firing squads.       

Now I'm pretty sure Alan Clark wouldn't have sent anyone to the firing squad - but you do get a sense of the deep frustration felt by politicians in trying to deal with the insatiable demands of their military advisers.

The last Labour government could have done with someone like Alan Clark - in considering whether or not to build two new, incredibly expensive, aircraft carriers - which are likely to become the military equivalent of 'white elephants' if and when they finally come into service.  

The present government could do with someone like Alan Clark on board as well - to explain that an 'independent' nuclear deterrent in the shape of Trident is a complete fiction, the wrong priority for British armed forces - and a terrible waste of money to boot.