Dodgy tanks, outdated warships: how can we trust UK defence chiefs to spend our billions wisely? | Richard Norton-Taylor

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Two days after he met the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, at his Sandringham estate, King Charles was photographed on the bridge of HMS Prince of Wales. It was a clever move by the navy’s top brass to invite him. They know that the aircraft carrier, and her sister, HMS Queen Elizabeth, are being questioned as luxuries Britain can ill afford. They are completely unsuited to modern warfare. As if to acknowledge the point, while defence chiefs struggle to find weapons desperately needed by Ukraine, including basic ammunition, they are sending the Prince of Wales to “fly the flag” in south-east Asia.

The carriers, the largest warships built for the navy, cost more than £6bn, well above the original estimate of under £4bn. Maintaining and repairing the ships, hit by serious mechanical problems over their short lifespan, has already cost nearly £1bn.

Soon after he retired as chief of the defence staff, Gen (now Lord) David Richards described the carriers to me as “unaffordable, vulnerable metal cans”. They were “behemoths”, he said. The carriers were considered to be so vulnerable to attack that the navy last year advised they should not be deployed to the Red Sea to protect merchant ships from Houthi missiles.

The navy does not have enough sailors to crew the ships needed to protect and supply the carriers. The number of F-35 fighters available to fly from the carriers is also well below the ships’ capacity. We now face the extraordinary situation where the navy’s most expensive ships, designed to carry the world’s most expensive warplanes, will soon become a base for drones: drones that can cost as little as a few thousand, even a few hundred, pounds, and are proving to be the most deadly weapons in Ukraine.

For too long, Britain’s defence establishment has been allowed to get away with procuring military equipment that is more relevant to past wars, turning a blind eye to the mounting evidence of fundamental changes in the nature of military conflict. Years ago, I asked a top official what mistakes the Ministry of Defence was making, what it was ignoring. He gave me a one-word answer: “Cyber.” To the frustration of the intelligence agencies, the MoD was slow to recognise the growing threat of cyberwarfare. Russian defence chiefs were already acknowledging that their country could not beat the west by force alone, despite Vladimir Putin’s rhetoric, suggesting that “non-military” tactics – arson, subversion and sabotage, including attacks on undersea communications cables – could be more effective than traditional warfare.

UK’s largest warship enters Portsmouth – video

Year after year, the National Audit Office, backed by the Commons public accounts committee, castigates the MoD for failing to learn from past mistakes. British taxpayers are spending more than £5bn on the army’s Ajax armoured vehicle, now finally being delivered eight years late, after tests revealed serious design faults, with soldiers getting ill from vibration and noise. Serious problems have also hit plans for the army’s new communications system, the navy’s nuclear-powered Astute attack submarine fleet, and the fleet of Type 45 destroyers.

Meanwhile, Britain spends a larger portion of its military budget on nuclear weapons than any other state, research by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons shows. Annual spending on Britain’s nuclear weapons has more than doubled since 2012, the website Defence Eye has reported. The MoD has singled out uncertainties about the cost of Britain’s nuclear weapons programme as one of the reasons it failed to publish its spending plans.

In 2023, the NAO pointed to a £16.9bn black hole in Britain’s defence equipment programme. Now, for the second successive year, the MoD has failed to publish an annual report on the state of its equipment programme. The NAO has not been able to produce an independent assessment of the government’s arms procurement plans.

Earlier this year, the chairs of the Commons defence and public accounts committees wrote to the MoD’s most senior official expressing their “deep frustration” at an “unacceptable loss of transparency … severely undermining the ability of both committees to scrutinise the estimated £300bn of taxpayers’ money to be spent on defence equipment over the next decade”.

In a recent and timely book, The Retreat from Strategy, co-authored with the defence academic Julian Lindley-French, Lord Richards warns against “wallowing in nostalgia”, with British defence policy “incoherent and purposeless, with little relation between defence strategic ends, ways and means”. The final recommendations of the strategic defence review by George Robertson, the former Labour defence secretary, are being studied by the government. Promised by the end of June, it will be the most important test yet of how, or indeed whether, the government has learned from its past mistakes. Recent history tells us it is not so much the amount of money devoted to the armed forces, as how it is spent: the waste must end.