A death on the ocean wave

The profit making drive of capitalism demands that no institution, however steeped in the traditions of history, is immutable or inviolate. Nothing—and most certainly not the vapourings of the nostalgically-inclined—will be permitted to stand in the path of exploitation and accumulation.

So it is with that steadfast and patriotic instrument of human misery and oppression, the Royal Navy. In an age in which British capitalism, no longer in a position to plunder the riches of a colonial empire, has found it more convenient to throw in its lot with Western Europe, the Navy in its present form has come to be seen as an increasingly expensive anachronism. (Philip Geddes, in an article contributed to the New Statesman of 29 May, compared the cost—£7 million—of a Leander class frigate of eight years ago with its £130 million successor, the all-missile-armed Type 22).

That the Navy is still required to “defend” British shores does not alter the fact of the increasing irrelevancy of much of its hardware: an ocean-going battle-fleet is a highly impracticable proposition when it comes to keeping open the Channel ports. And, as Geddes has observed, “The fishery-protection and offshore-resources squadron is something of a joke—sometimes, its ships can be outrun by modern trawlers.” In short, some sections of the sea-going Navy are ripe for the chop.

The Navy is also farcically top-heavy in other areas. For example, there is an admiral for every front-line ship currently in commission—nearly 100 in all. The Admiralty also employs 32,000 workers in its naval dockyards and a further 5,700 personnel in its administrative and design departments at Bath. So the dockyards are to be run down and savings made elsewhere.

These decisions must be viewed in the context of the government’s determination to arm itself with a Trident missile submarine fleet. For this baleful indulgence Britain’s capitalists must stump up £6 billion—a figure already challenged as a gross under-estimate. Then there is the (again, conservatively-estimated) £10 billion to be found over the next ten years to pay for the replacement—with the Tornado—of the ageing Jaguar and Vulcan bombers. Set these figures alongside military spending during the current financial year alone of £12.3 billion, to which must be added the £220 million spent so far on the recently-launched and almost certainly abortive aircraft carrier Ark Royal and we have some measure of British capitalism’s current arms-spending problems.

One conclusion must stand out clearly from the current debate on the condition of the Navy and of the armed forces as a whole: it has nothing to do with a reduction in the destructive capacity of the British ruling class. As has been indicated, if the Navy is to be pruned it is because it has become, at least insofar as its surface vessels are concerned, inordinately expensive, and highly vulnerable to attack from guided missiles.

The Trident missile system, on the other hand, is massively effective and relatively invulnerable. A frigate tied up in port or sinking in the Channel is no match for a submarine containing—should the Defence Ministry opt for the most advanced form of Trident—sixteen D5 missiles each fitted with fourteen independently-targeted warheads.

A revealing—and wholly characteristic—factor in ruling class thinking on armaments is what is sometimes euphemistically termed “spin-off”. This means the sale of military hardware to “friendly” powers. Such sales not only line the pockets of the arms manufacturers and traders but can also offset in part the manufacturing country’s own arms budget. Capitalists the world over vie with each other to exploit the available markets. One has only to recall the deal short-circuited by the Iranian revolution—made by the British government to sell the Shir-Iran tank to that other implacable enemy of the working class, the late unlamented Shall of Iran, to understand how much profit is up for grabs in such transactions. Not that such profiteering is confined to western capitalism: its eastern counterparts, as represented by Russia and China, paddle in the same stinking morass.

The crowning irony, even to those who view the more bizarre of capitalism’s activities with relative equanimity, must be the projected sale, by the USA, of arms to the Chinese. And this coming on top of the disclosure by US Government officials that the USA has equipped two listening posts in north-west China for the purpose of monitoring Russian missile tests. What price America’s alleged ideological differences with “communist” China now?