The Secretary of State for Defence Liam Fox has unveiled a drastic reorganisation of the armed forces’ command structure and a cut in the number of senior officers.
Dr Fox outlined the changes to Parliament on Monday to coincide with the publication of Lord Levene’s Defence Reform Review report.
In a speech at the Reform think tank in London, Fox called the MoD a “department with overly bureaucratic management structures, dominated by committees leading to indecisiveness and a lack of responsibility”.
He described the Defence Board as being “bloated” and “without ministerial membership, allowing strategic decision to drift and unable to reconcile ambition with resources”. This has left “budget holders without the levers needed to deliver and ministers kept in the dark”, he continued.
The Defence Board, the MoD’s top decision-making body, will no longer include representatives from all three services (the First Sea Lord, the Chief of the General Staff and the Chief of the Air Staff). The Chief of the Defence Staff, currently Sir David Richards, will represent the views of all three services.
The board will now be chaired by the Defence Secretary and will include an additional minister.
Fox told Parliament that he had already established a new board and chaired the first meeting last week.
The report recommended the creation of a new Joint Forces Command, which will integrate cyber warfare and military intelligence. These capabilities are currently divided between the Air Force, Army and Navy.
Service chiefs are to be given control of their own budgets. The report criticised the current system in which Whitehall delegates budgets but continues to manage the tactical detail of how they are spent.
These reforms come after Fox warned senior officers against publicly voicing concerns over the sustainability of the Libya air campaign.
“We must be very careful, those of us who have authority in defence, when discussing the sustainability of a mission. People’s lives are at stake and there can only be one message that goes out on Libya and that is we have the military capability, we have the political resolve, we have the legal authority and we have the political cohesion in the alliance to see through what we started,” he said.
“That is: we have the military capability, political resolve and legal authority to see through what we started. We will continue our mission until our mission succeeds and Colonel Gaddafi must get no other signal than that.”
Admiral Sir Mark Stanhope, the First Sea Lord, recently told a press briefing: “How long can we go on in Libya? In terms of NATO’s current time limit that has been extended to 90 days, we are comfortable with that. Beyond that, we might have to request the government makes challenging decisions about priorities.”
The RAF’s second-in-command, Air Chief Marshal Sir Simon Bryant, has also questioned the sustainability of the current Libya bombing campaign.
In response, David Cameron told a press conference, “There are moments when I wake up and read the newspapers and think: ‘I tell you what, you do the fighting and I’ll do the talking’.”
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