HAMBURG — Consigning aged warships, helicopters and drones to the scrapheap won’t mean any jobs are lost in Britain’s armed forces and will free up cash for future investments, Maria Eagle, the U.K.’s defense procurement minister, said Thursday.
Speaking in the ballroom of the Royal Navy’s flagship aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth while it is docked in Hamburg, Eagle said cuts announced this week were necessary to “grasp the nettles” and clear out systems that only “existed pretty much on paper.”
“None of our armed forces will lose their jobs,” said Eagle, adding they will be redeployed. Taking the final decision on ditching “virtually obsolescent” gear such as Cold War-era Chinook helicopters was necessary to plug a budget hole in the short-term, she said.
The military cuts announced Wednesday included two amphibious assault ships, the HMS Albion and HMS Bulwark, while logistics vessels RFA Wave Knight and RFA Wave Ruler will also be cut along with a frigate, HMS Northumberland, that is already in refit during which major structural damage has been discovered.
Eagle said the cut programs — which are being attacked by opposition parties in the U.K. — would save £150 million over the next two years in operating costs helping the Ministry of Defence cut costs quickly. Over five years, savings will amount to £500 million, she said.
“The money that we save in this way … will enable us to spend on dealing with the strategic threats that we’re going to face in future instead of pretending that ships which are never going to go back to sea, should be kept as if they might be,” said Eagle.
Still, Labour’s opponents in the right-wing Reform UK party are pouncing.
Deputy Leader Richard Tice said in a statement Thursday that the cutback plan “not only undermines our military’s readiness, but during a time of increased global tensions, leaves us weak and vulnerable.”
German defense pact
Eagle was in Germany’ port city to push on work building out a general defense cooperation pact agreed by Defense Secretary John Healey and his German counterpart Boris Pistorius in London last month. That teed up collaboration on everything from deep precision strike missile capabilities to joint procurement and shared monitoring of subsea infrastructure.
In practice, it’s a framework for future cooperation that will be set out in a bilateral treaty originally expected next year. However, a looming German federal election on Feb. 23 will likely now delay work.
“We know that we want to negotiate a treaty,” the deputy minister said. “We know that there’s a little thing like an election possibly going on in Germany soon … I know that elections always slow things down a bit, but that’s not a bad thing.”
A senior German officer, granted anonymity to speak freely on a sensitive matter, said that while there had traditionally been “a gap between the tactical and strategic level” when it came to British-German defense cooperation, the war in Ukraine was aligning the two countries in new areas such as maritime surveillance.
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