This week’s announcement from the British Army that its newly rebuilt Apache AH-64E helicopter gunships are ‘battlefield ready’, illustrates how genuinely lethal and capable the UK Armed Forces can be. It also reminds us just how broken our defence procurement system truly is.
The Army says that it will have 50 AH-64Es by 2024, replacing its previous fleet of 67 AH-1s: numbers are going down by a full quarter.
That’s a big loss. As a former infantry junior commander I have personally witnessed the Apache’s awesome and ferocious capabilities in Helmand Province. It truly is a magnificent battle-enabling piece of kit: there is absolutely no doubt whatsoever on this.
The issue is simply that the British Army should have just bought American Apaches in the first place.
Our Apache AH-1 helicopter was ordered back in 1996: Britain sensibly avoided joining in with the disastrous Eurocopter Tiger, instead choosing the proven American option. Sadly, we didn’t just buy helicopters: although hundreds of Apaches had been made by Boeing in the USA, we set up an entire new assembly line at Westlands (now Leonardo) to assemble our 67 choppers. In fact the first eight were made by Boeing anyway, so the British line produced just 59 before shutting down. We also fiddled needlessly with the design, fitting different engines among other things.
The result of this was that a British Apache, depending on the figures you choose, cost anywhere from three to five times as much as a US-made export one. It also caused various UK-specific problems that had to be sorted out, meaning that the first Apache regiment did not go operational until 2005. Our Apaches often needed different, UK-specific parts: we couldn’t draw on the same massive system that supported the vast worldwide fleet of US-made Apaches. At one point in 2008, just 20 of our 67 helicopters were actually flyable. (There are actually only 66 now: one was wrecked in a crash in Afghanistan.)
In 2015, just ten years after the Apache was ready to use, we finally bit the bullet and decided to have our Apaches rebuilt to the American standard, including engines. This is the new AH-64E, and it comes with various improvements, particularly in its digital communications suite. Best of all, however, is the fact that it can draw on the common global supply chain, so we’ll be able to keep them flying much more easily and cheaply; and the rebuilds are being done at a reasonable price on Boeing’s rebuild line which is doing the same job on hundreds of Apaches from around the world. This time, thank goodness, we didn’t set up an entire new line ourselves.
But we’re still having to reduce the fleet by 25 per cent, because so much money has been wasted elsewhere.
One example of that waste is the Ajax family of armoured vehicles, which on the face of it seemed quite sensible: the plan was to buy an established design already in service with other armies, the ASCOD 2. But again, we didn’t just buy ASCODs from the makers: we set up a British production line in a former forklift factory in Wales. Again, we decided to make alterations and fit non-standard systems. The resulting vehicles are enormously heavier than normal ASCODs and are plagued by severe vibration and noise problems, so bad that soldiers can only drive them for limited periods. They are still not in service, years after they were supposed to be, and nobody knows when or if Ajax will actually go operational.
It can make sense to build our own, but only if there’s a genuine prospect of export sales to spread the development cost. That was obviously not there with either Apache or Ajax. The UK does make some excellent defence equipment, which it sells abroad: examples include various vehicles from Supacat, sniper rifles from Accuracy International and jet engines from Rolls Royce.
But in general it makes more sense to buy things from the makers off the shelf, very often from the USA. Most of our American gear is, and has been, very successful: Chinook, C-17, C-130, Phantom back in the day. As we’ve seen, trying to build other countries’ products in our own factories and meddling with the design typically turns into an expensive disaster.
The only thing which can go even worse is partnering with European or other Western-aligned nations in order to funnel some of our money to BAE or Leonardo, and developing things from scratch. That has led to a string of multibillion-pound procurement disasters like the Merlin helicopter, the Eurofighter Typhoon, the Type 45 destroyer and the dreadful A400M transport plane.
We’re all set to repeat the train crash of the Typhoon (and the Tornado F3 before it) with our ongoing “Tempest” fighter project. As anyone can see, even if the Tempest project goes as smooth as silk the fighter it produces is not going to be as good as the US F-35. This is for the simple reasons that there is no way it will have anything like as much money spent on its development and the nations working on it are starting from a much lower level of stealth technology. It is deeply unlikely to win any export business.
The MoD should seriously consider axing Tempest in favour of buying F-18s instead, and F-35s when they become affordable. If it spent a comparatively small amount on fitting our carriers with catapults, F-18s could fly from them: and we could then get tailhook F-35Cs, which are much better and cheaper than our current, inadequately small force of jump-jet F-35Bs. The US Marines would take those.
Similarly, we should equip our new warships with US Aegis combat systems, SMs and Tomahawk – as Japan, Australia and South Korea are doing – not the various European systems that are planned. We’d get better-armed ships, and we’d have a pathway towards hypersonic defence as well.
If we in Britain ever want to have armed forces which punch even at the level of our weight – let alone above it – we need to seriously consider the wisdom of using our defence budget, automatically, as a job creation scheme, and understand when it is prudent to make our default option that of buying off the shelf, typically from America. The story of the British Apache is just one more reminder of this.
Robert Clark is a former infantry junior commander who saw active duty in Iraq and Afghanistan
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