Echoes of Nimrod
Tim Webb
December 2010
Tim Webb is the former Assistant General Secretary of the trade union MSF (now Unite) and is the author of "The Armour-Plated Ostrich – the Cost of Britain's Addiction to the Arms Business" and the CAAT booklet "Bribing for Britain".
Nimrod MRA4 (Ronnie MacDonald, Flickr)
The Bible describes Nimrod, the son of Ham and a descendent of Noah, as "a mighty hunter before the Lord". The Nimrod maritime patrol aircraft, which has just been scrapped as part of the Government's Strategic Defence Review, was somewhat less formidable. The total cost of £3.5 billion for the latest MRA4 version, paid by the British taxpayer, has been written off. After 18 years of development, punctuated by glitches, cost over-runs, delays and rows between BAE Systems and the Ministry of Defence, it never became operational.
The original Nimrod MR1 came into service in 1969. The plane was based on the old De Havilland Comet civil airliner and its job was to track Soviet submarines. Far more were built than required, so that when the decision was taken in the late 1970s to build the MR2, it was decided to use the surplus planes equipped with the new British advanced early warning radar (AEW). The problem was that the rest of NATO had decided to buy the American E-3 radar and the RAF was also demanding that system.
A furious tussle took place between the RAF and the UK suppliers, the MoD caught in the middle with no firm view of its own. Politicians were lobbied and trade unions were asked by their members to help protect their jobs. During the whole debate, in which I was involved as a union official for the aerospace industry, I never heard any argument presented as to why these new aircraft were essential to the defence of Britain. That was nothing new; UK defence procurement had always been based on the temporary reconciliation of conflicting military, financial and political interests. The price of the inevitable cock-ups was invariably paid from public funds.
The AEW radar, made by GEC, won the day, if not the argument, and the project went ahead. We all relaxed, jobs were saved, and the MoD breathed again. The unions published self-congratulatory articles in their journals and GEC shares rose. There was only one problem. AEW was useless. It didn't do the job it was supposed to do. The second aircraft was rolled out for trials in 1981 and it was soon clear that its radar was botched. The main problem was that the GEC computer did not have enough power. It had a storage capacity of only one megabyte – which could be expanded to 2.4 megabytes – a tiny memory, even by the standards of the 1980s.
In 1986, after a great deal of adverse publicity, stimulated by leaks from a frustrated RAF and questions in the House of Commons, the axe was poised to fall on Nimrod-AEW. The GEC public relations people went into overdrive. Nothing less than the future of British electronics was at stake, they said. The company had a number of MPs on tap, as did the unions, and ministers were lobbied furiously. Arnold Weinstock, the boss of GEC, lectured anyone who would listen that the Americans would wipe us out in defence electronics. The workforce was told there would be mass redundancies and union representatives were asked to lobby local and national politicians.
Our union, MSF, represented the aerospace designers and professional engineers. There was no problem about arguing that the government should buy British rather than American, if all things were equal, but if the British option was a proven failure, what was the best solution? It was a question that we left unanswered. If that seems less than straightforward, I can only say that the whole military equipment supply scenario was riddled with ambiguity and awkward questions. We were part of the system, and the problem.
MSF was affiliated to the Confederation of Shipbuilding and Engineering Unions (CSEU), whose executive had decided to send a delegation to see Lord Trefgarne, the Minister for Defence Procurement. We intended to press the case for continuing with AEW and opposing the American E-3. Lord Trefgarne was polite and even seemed pleased to see us, as we swapped introductory banter about cricket and the weather. Several note-taking civil servants sat alongside him, and a very senior RAF officer stared at us with undisguised hostility. We launched into the usual routine. If the contract was given to the US, British jobs would be lost, the skills could not be replaced, aerospace was a vital and successful part of the UK manufacturing industry, and the Pentagon only bought American.
One of our number, a keen reader of Jane's Defence Weekly, the military industry's trade paper, went into a long ramble about the technical superiority of the British system. The RAF man began shifting in his seat and his face twitched. When our colleague eventually finished, he leant across and asked him if he had any military experience. No, replied the union official, he was a pacifist and didn’t believe in taking up arms to prove a point. The air force officer picked up his pencil, snapped it in half and threw the pieces into his cap on the table in front of him. There was no specific outcome to the meeting, nor was there any attempt to sum up the proceedings. The whole event could have provided material for a comic sketch, but it was about par for the course in our dealings with the ministry.
Shortly after that meeting in 1986, the axe finally descended. Nimrod-AEW was cancelled and £1 billion was written off as a bad investment. The RAF ordered seven planes equipped with American radar. The 11 original Nimrod-AEWs were scrapped and used as spare parts for the new MR2. So that was that. Red faces all round, and everybody said lessons had been learned.
However, inside the thick walls of the MoD things went on as before. The lessons of the AEW were soon forgotten. In 1996 the ambitious Defence Secretary Michael Portillo decided that we needed a new Nimrod aircraft, the MRA4. Whose submarines was it supposed to hunt? The Cold War was over. The Soviet Union had fallen apart and its submarines were rust buckets that posed no threat except to those who manned them. Under Boris Yeltsin, the new Russia was making a mad dash for oligarch-ruled capitalism and trying to ingratiate itself with the western powers. There was no conventional military threat of any kind to Europe or the United States. The MoD's original intention had been to buy the American P7 aircraft, but the Pentagon - never usually averse to throwing millions of dollars in the direction of Lockheed Martin - felt that in the new world situation they could not make a convincing military case for the P7, so they cancelled it. The MoD carried on.
British Aerospace was awarded the MRA4 contract on a fixed price basis. In theory, any cost over-runs – less inflation - had to be borne by the manufacturer. In practice, the contract was about as binding as a jobbing builder's first estimate. In 1996, the price was fixed at £2.2 billion for 21 aircraft, and the date of delivery of the first plane was estimated as 2002. Within one year, the cost had risen by £37 million and the delivery was put back to 2003.
After bitter wrangling between BAE Systems and the MoD, the number on order was reduced from 21 to 18. Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon then announced in June 2004 that the programme would be reduced to 16 aircraft. In 2005, the cost rose to an estimated £3.8 billion, a total increase of £1.6 billion, with a delivery date of September 2010, a slippage of eight years. In July 2006 his successor, Des Browne, signed a contract for 12. That meant that BAE Systems would carry out much less work, but would be paid the full amount for the original order. What the MoD did, in effect, was to admit that the delays and cost over-runs were its sole responsibility and that accordingly the taxpayer would have to bear the cost of the incompetence of both the ministry and the manufacturer.
The total amount of public money flushed away by the less than mighty submarine hunters amounted to £4.5 billion. Even more will follow shortly, because of a decision taken in the same defence review that scrapped the MRA4. The go-ahead was given for the two new aircraft carriers. One of these ships will have no aircraft for nine years, and the other will be put into dry dock to await a possible buyer. The costs, problems and delays of the carriers will follow a similar pattern to that of Nimrod. When the champagne bottles eventually smash against their bows, the two huge warships that have no discernible purpose will have cost well over £5 billion; money that could have been spent on the public services that are to be slashed under the government's programme of cuts.
The defence of Britain is not just a military matter. It also involves the protection of health, education, civil industries, employment and welfare. The shambles of military procurement and the failure of successive governments to resist the power and influence of the military lobby have put these at risk. Now that the new Labour leadership has time to reflect on past mistakes, perhaps it could give some thought to developing policies on buying military equipment that is less expensive, non-nuclear and not designed to support the overseas invasions of United States forces.
© Tim Webb
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