LONDON — Britain needs to rebuild conventional military capabilities lost since the end of the Cold War in order to deter further threats on Europe's eastern border, the parliamentary defense committee has warned the government.
Maritime surveillance, nuclear, biological, chemical and radiological warfare training, ballistic missile defense, a comprehensive carrier strike capability, full maneuver warfare capabilitycity , more warships and aircraft, and possible prepositioning of troops in continental Europe are were required, the report said
In a report Entitled, "Re-thinking Defence To Meet New Threats," the committee said Britain's future military force structure and the accompany national security strategy resulting from the 2010 strategic defense and security review (SDSR) conducted by the current Conservative-led coalition government are no longer fit for purpose and need rethinking.
An upcoming SDSR is planned for the other side of the general election on May 7 where many of the capability and strategy questions will be raised. Completion of the new SDSR may not come until well into 2016, particularly if Labour forms the next government.
Senior politicians speaking to Defense News last weekend also raised fears of what would happen to the SDSR if a minority government is was elected followed reasonably quickly by a second election.
The committee cited the increasing security problems around the globe and particularly the threat to Europe posed by Russia as the need for a rethink and warned that Britain couldn't afford to "retreat to isolation."
"The current national security strategy is no longer adequate for this changed world, nor is the future force structure. It will be necessary to continue to commit to 2 percent of gross domestic product to enhance the NATO alliance and retain US involvement in Europe," said the lawmakers.
"The UK will need to make tough choices within limited resources, about what to do, and perhaps more importantly, what not to do. ... But it is vital to rethink the fundamental assumptions of our defense planning, if we are to help arrest the descent into chaos, which threatens to spread from the Western Mediterranean to the Black Seat," said the report.
To bring the UK military into line with future needs, the committee said the government needed to build a closer coalition with the US and France, develop new asymmetric warfare capabilities, and develop the capacity to respond to the expanding challenges outside Europe.
Rory Stewart, the committee chairman, said the current SDSR had been overtaken by events and the military had to change to adapt to the new security situation.
"The SDSR and Future Force 2020 were based on the fundamental assumption that British forces should be structured to deploy a single bBrigade formation to a single key theater such as Afghanistan and sustain it there. But now we can see that we might be needed in a dozen different theaters, concurrently, confronting terrorism or lightly armed paramilitaries in one setting and heavily armed, formed units of an advanced military nation in another. More advanced military threats and multiple concurrent threats both require a fundamental rethinking of our strategy and our force structure,"Stewart said.
British Defence Secretary Michael Fallon dismissed the committee's recommendations, saying the government is already Europe's biggest defense spender and was committed to spending over £160 billion (US $239.1 billion) on equipment and support over the next 10 years.
"The suggestion that we need to rebuild our defense capabilities is nonsense. Under this government we have gone from the £38 billion black hole in the defense budget that we inherited to a properly funded £34 billion annual budget. That means we have been able to commit to spending over £160 billion on equipment over the next decade to keep Britain safe — including new joint strike fighters, hunter killer submarines, two aircraft carriers and the most advanced armored vehicles.
"The UK has the second largest defense budget in NATO and the largest in the EU. We are the US's largest partner in the coalition air effort against ISIL, bearing more of the load in terms of strikes in Iraq than we played in either of the gulf wars," said Fallon in a statement.
"As US Defense Secretary Ash Carter told me earlier this month, 'the UK military has the ability to act independently, to be a force of its own in the world'. Our response to events in the Middle East, Sierra Leone and Ukraine recently highlight that the flexible strategy adopted under the 2010 SDSR and Future Force 2020 is working," he said.
The Conservative Party and it's political rival's have been under increasing pressure in recent weeks to commit to the NATO spending requirement after the end of the 2015/16 budget that comes into force next month.
So far none of the leading parties have pledged to retain the spending limit, mainly because, analysts and others reckon, that even without any further cuts to defense spending it would cost Britain a further £6 billion a year by 2019 to maintain the NATO spending requirement.
Much of the talk here though is not about meeting NATO spending targets but about further cuts to the defense budget as part of a wider austerity plan to reducecut public debt.
Analysts, politicians and some in the military already reckon achieving the Future Force 2020 strategy on current funding will be touch and go. Some people here are calling it Future Force 2020s or Future Force 2025.
The Conservatives cut 7.5 percent from the defense budget in 2010, as well as fixing the so-called £38 billion black hole left in unfunded commitments by the previous Labour administration, and few people think the military will get off scot free this time round.
The last round of defense spending cuts saw capabilities and programs abandoned and military and civil service numbers at the MoD slashed.
Email: achuter@defensenews.com
Andrew Chuter is the United Kingdom correspondent for Defense News.
