This kind of sneering at those engaged with defence matters is a disgrace and has no place in an open democracy. Wallace also said of DCP23 “In this document you won’t find a shiny new announcement, comms-led policy driving, unsustainable force designs or any major new platforms for military enthusiasts to put up on their charts on their bedroom wall”. Instead, it tries to make a virtue of this, promising in the preamble that “there are deliberately no new commitments on platforms at all – because on that we stand by what we published in 2021.” This would be tolerable if the 2021 DCP had itself been more specific, not to mention that in the intervening period, there has been a war in Europe and inflation has jumped to a 40-year high. Unfortunately despite this ‘new’ funding, it falls well short of the £8Bn the Defence Secretary has stated is needed just to mitigate the effects of inflation.ĭCP23 avoids explaining how this shortage of funding will affect the frontline by totally failing to commit to specifics about the force. The remaining funds will be spent on replenishing ammunition – primarily NLAWS, artillery rounds and other Army munitions depleted by the war in Ukraine but this will not be of much benefit to the RN’s similarly thin naval munition stocks. £3bn of this will be spent to support the defence nuclear enterprise and enable the AUKUS Submarine delivery programme. More immediately, an extra £5bn will be available to the MoD over the next two years. The Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt confirmed on 15th March that the Defence Budget will rise by £11bn over 5 years. Here we take an overview of what the DCP23 says, or does not say, about the future of the Royal Navy. Last week Government finally published the Defence Command Paper (delayed since mid-June) which was supposed to provide more precise detail about the structure and future of the armed forces following the aspirations of the Integrated Review (Refresh) launched in March.
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