Some can see the need: all across Europe and the UK, arms companies are salivating at the idea that their governments will sink huge sums into developing, from scratch, various weapons technologies that only America has. Indeed it was already our policy that we would do this before Ukraine happened, through such projects as the future “Tempest” super-jet.
But we need this equipment quickly, and we need it to actually work and be affordable. We must stop using our defence budgets as job creation schemes and instead buy working kit off the shelf. Sensible Poland, understandably more focused given its border with Russia, has not built military industries from scratch: it has simply bought huge numbers of tanks – which make a lot more sense for Poland than they do for us Brits – from South Korea, and powerful missiles from the US.
If we decide we need tanks, we should just buy them from good tank makers like South Korea or Germany or Israel, rather than trying to revive our moribund tank industry as we have been.
Since SEAD/DEAD equipment is only really made in the US, we should just purchase it from there: likewise with fifth-generation fighters rather than wasting decades and billions on Tempest – which will never be as good as the US product, because it cannot and will not have as much money spent on developing it. We need Patriot; we need the Precision Strike Missile; we need Aegis/Standard in our new warships like all sensible nations; we need a lot more Tomahawks. Even buying off the shelf, time is terribly short.
There are, of course, some things we should build and buy in Britain. America is struggling to build enough nuclear submarines for itself and Australia, so we’ll have to make our own – though we should arm them mostly with US weapons. There are other British products which are world class: sniper rifles, mini submarines, off-road gun trucks.
But we’ve got to stop trying to make everything ourselves, and we’ve got to stop getting into multinational attempts to replicate things we could just buy. These attempts are always disastrous, as the Eurofighter, A400M, Sea Viper and Merlin should have taught us. When we do buy abroad, we should stop getting British industry involved and messing up perfectly good products, as with Apache and Ajax.
In short, like the Poles, we need to get serious. The Ukrainians are buying us precious time, at a terrible price in blood. We need to arm them and arm ourselves to the teeth, without trying to create jobs for ourselves at the same time. And we must do this before it’s too late.
