Dannatt: Give 25% of aid cash to forces
A FORMER head of the Army called yesterday for a quarter of Britain’s foreign aid budget to be diverted into defence amid warnings that the military is on the verge of collapse.
General Lord Richard Dannatt said taking the chunk out of the ballooning £13billion a year aid budget would free up billions for defence.
It came as it emerged that one of Britain’s most advanced warships has had to abandon a mission to the Gulf after breaking down at sea.
HMS Diamond, a £1billion Type 45 destroyer, had problems with a propeller and has had to make a sluggish return to the UK for repairs. Lord Dannatt, who was Chief of the General Staff between 2006 and 2009, said the nation’s security was the first duty of a government, but ‘there are well-founded fears that our defence capability is to be cut once again’.
Although ministers say they are only looking at options and no decisions have been taken, Lord Dannatt
said ‘ options can quickly become decisions and the damage is done’.
he added that the Government’s insistence that it was meeting its Nato commitment to spend 2 per cent of gross domestic product on the military ‘ fools no one’, given the higher rate of defence inflation and the adverse impact of exchange rates.
Chancellor Philip hammond has been criticised for not mentioning the Armed Forces in his Budget speech and failing to give the Ministry of Defence any extra cash.
hMS Diamond has had to return home from the Gulf after completing only two months of a nine-month deployment. It is understood there were no ships to replace her so Britain will be unable to fulfil a long-running commitment in the region.
It is the latest debacle to hit the Navy’s six-strong fleet of destroyers built by BAe Systems and rollsroyce which only started entering service eight years ago, with Diamond being commissioned in 2011.
The other five are already undergoing repairs in Portsmouth, in a year the Government has called ‘the year of the royal Navy’. Their engines were unable to cope in the Gulf heat and kept cutting out. It is understood there is also a shortage of sailors.
According to the royal Navy website, hMS Diamond had been due to work ‘with international and Nato allies to protect some of the world’s busiest shipping lanes, keeping them free from criminal activities’.
The Navy’s rare failure to fulfil a priority task is a sign of the strain the service is under following decades of cuts. A Navy spokesman confirmed the ship had technical issues, but would not comment further.