Chancellor: MOD must pay for Trident

The UK chancellor George Osborne has insisted that the billions of pounds that it will cost to buy a replacement for the UK’s Trident missile system must be met by the Ministry of Defence.

The initial £20bn cost of replacing the nuclear weapons system, which is normally met by the Treasury, must come from the MOD’s budget, and the ministry will also be responsible for paying for the running costs, estimated at another £80bn.

This is a blow for Tory defence minister Liam Fox who told the BBC earlier this month that the capital costs should be met by the Treasury, as they have been in the past.

Dr Fox also told the Daily Telegraph last week that the armed forces were not able to meet all its obligations to defend the country.

The new coalition government has come in for much criticism for what many see as undue haste in making very deep cuts to public expenditure.

Normally governments of the right, however much they want to cut public spending, do not like to cut defence budgets.

They see defence and national security as their natural territory and an area where high spending is helpful electorally.

(It was George Bush who described Ronald Reagan’s plans to cut taxes, increase defence spending and balance the budget as ‘voodoo economics.’)

It will be interesting to see whether this decision rebounds on the Conservative/Lib Dem coalition.

Cuts in other public services might be seen as having more of an impact on Labour voters, not only the public employees but the people who depend on their services.

Cuts in MOD spending will not only affect military personal but more crucially the UK’s defence industry, often based in the Tories’ southeastern heartlands.

Or Nick Clegg or Danny Alexander can convince their Tory counterparts to rethink the plan to automatically replace Trident.

All of which might allow Labour to attack the government, not only on spending cuts, but on being soft on defence and national security.

MI5 chief: Iraq war increased terror threat to the UK

Eliza Manningham-Buller, director general of the Security Service (MI5) at the time of the Iraq war has told the Chilcot inquiry that Britain’s support for military action increased the terrorist threat at home.

She told the inquiry into the war that the threat to Britain from Saddam Hussein before 2003 was low.

And she said he was not thought to have been linked to terrorists planning to attack the west: “"It certainly wasn't of concern in either the short term or the medium term to me or my colleagues."

Instead, according to Ms Manningham-Buller, Britain’s involvement to the war increased the threat to the UK by radicalizing young British Muslims, who saw the war as part of an attack on Islam.

She said: “"Arguably, we gave Osama bin Laden his Iraqi jihad,”

She also said that the focus on Iraq meant that the UK and US lost focus on operations in Afghanistan.

See the Guardian’s live blog of Ms Manningham-Buller’s evidence today.

To my mind this last point is one of the main arguments against the whole Iraq adventure.

Even before the war began, and certainly before it emerged that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction, it was obvious that invading Iraq was going to damage attempts Islamist terrorism.

For a short while after 9/11 there was and international consensus on taking action against Al Qaeda.

The French press was saying “We are all Americans now,” the Russians and Chinese were willing to co-operate, even Iran was making conciliatory noises to the west about helping out.

And that opportunity was totally lost; first with the ‘axis of evil’ speech, then with the angry denunciations of ‘old Europe’, and accusations of being collaborators.

So now we have troops in Iraq, which is hardly a stable democracy, UK troops are being killed seemingly every week in Afghanistan, UK muslims have been radicalized and Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups are free to organize in Yemen, Pakistan or Sudan.

It is bad enough that hundreds of western troops, and uncounted thousands of Iraqis died in an ill-conceived war; but perhaps the real tragedy is that more will die in terrorist attacks when there was, perhaps, an opportunity for international action that was totally lost.

Liam Fox: Afghanistan ops help national security

Defence Secretary Liam Fox has defended the presence of British troops in Afghanistan, and said operations there have prevented Al Qaeda and other terrorists form using the country as a bases.

Interviewed on BBC Radio’s Today programme,Dr Fox said that UK forces were “not desperate” to leave Afghanistan and were there to secure the UK’s national security.

He said it was a testament to the success of the UK’s operations there that Al Qaeda was not organizing in the country.

Dr Fox was interviewed the day after three members of the Gurkha Rifles were killed by a member of the Afghan army being trained by British troops.

He told Today "We went to prevent al-Qaeda from having an open space in which to operate. We need to follow that up with a stable Afghan state so that it doesn't return to the state it was before.

"We're in Afghanistan as a matter of national security. Success in that national security context is a stable enough Afghanistan, able to manage its own internal and external security without reference to foreign forces."

But as I have argued here, while fighting a local insurgency by the Taliban, UK and US forces in country may be being distracted from Al Qaeda and other international terrorists who can use other failed or failing states as a base.

Attacks today in Yemen suggest that terror groups with an international outlook, unlike the Taliban, are still very much alive and operational.

Hear the interview with Dr Fox here.

Mind the Language

A report by the civil service into GCHQ in Cheltenham says its failure to attract ethnic minority staff is hampering its efforts to fight terrorism.

(The report was broken in the Sunday Times, now behind a paywall, so here’s a link to a piece on the matter in The Guardian.)

It also makes, perhaps, unwittingly, on of the main points about intelligence analysis that keeps on getting forgotten.

The modern signals intelligence (Sigint) business relies on computer power. Unimaginable computing power. GCHQ is the biggest computer centre in Europe.

The machines are used to intercept traffic, process it, recognize it, route it, decrypt it and turn it into something recognizable for an analyst to look at.

Except if it’s in a foreign language, at which point a human being is needed to look at it.

It is often the dream of managers of Sigint organizations to develop machine translation. Machines don’t go sick, want weekends off, extra pay or promotion.

Neither do they work. Machines can be good for highly formatted, printed text. They can be great. But for hand-writing? Or voice communications. Not a hope.

And terrorists don’t send formatted site reps. They chat. They talk elliptically.

And if they’re doing so in a language which no-one knows in a given agency, then for all intents and purposes, they are using highly encrypted comms, for free.

Better than crypt in fact, because one you’ve broken a cipher, you can break it every time at all times.

Train a linguist to the required standard to translate voice traffic in a given language, which takes up to two years, 18 months if you really push it, then you’ve got him or her for 40 hours a week. For 45 weeks a year.

One of the things intelligence agencies seem really bad at is future planning. Not for technologies, or new techniques. But identifying which areas of the world will need their attention; which languages they’ll need.

It’s tricky because you need to do it three to five years in advance, but its absolutely critical, otherwise all the technology is useless because of a lack of the right pairs of ears.

The Human Touch

The revelations about Russian illegal agents operating in the US and the thrillingly Cold War swap of western ‘spies’ and the Russian agents has put old-style espionage firmly back on the front pages.

(And incidentally, haven’t the papers just loved it all. One of the things about the press, and intelligence, is that it’s a secret world whose details are not well known. So as soon as anything is revealed, the press just goes wild for any snippet at all. And if one of the agents is an attractive redhead pictured in a corset….)

But why are intelligence agencies still using and recruiting human agents? Isn’t all a bit 20th Century?

After all, it’s really embarrassing, when they’re caught and sent home. Bad enough when they are diplomatic staff who are declared persona non grata, but at least everyone expects that, but when they are ‘civilians’ and there is a juicy court case, then it’s worse.

And since the end of the Cold War, such revelations have an even greater possible impact on international relations and trade.

Surely sigint, and fancy internet technologies and satellite imagery means that there’s not need for agents.

There are problems with human intelligence, (humint). If you’re paying for people to give you intelligence, they may quite well give you what you want to hear, whether true or not; see Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana, or the claim about Iraq’s WMD programme and missiles ready in 45 minutes, for a more serious real-world example.

But the beauty of it is that everyone knows it happens, and it can’t be stopped.

Sigint can be undone by building a better cipher, or just by using more secure communications.

Underground buildings will foil any imagery satellites.

As long as people are greedy, or stupid and reckless, or continue to be disaffected at work, or hate their boss or are vain and contemptuous, (and none of these seem to be stopping soon), agencies will always be able to recruit agents.

And counter-espionage agencies like M15 or the FBI know that and they can catch them. And that’s disruptive to the espionage agencies.

But there is no technique, including security vetting, which can produce people who are not stupid, greedy, reckless and vain, and staff in any target organization, be it a government or a commercial company, will continue to provide rich pickings for intelligence agencies.