Armaments: The economy of waste (1966)

From the August 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

Anybody who is under any illusions about the priorities of this social system need consider only one fact. In the current financial year the British government, which claims that it cannot “afford” all sorts of things like roads, houses, hospitals and schools, is planning to spend £2,172 million on armaments.

We should be clear that this sum has been arrived at after the government have ruthlessly cut back expenditure, have abandoned many projects—such as the TSR-2—which their predecessors agreed to and have planned to withdraw from several areas overseas. In other words, £2,172 million is not an extravagance; it is an economy.

As we may expect, it took a Labour government to do it. One of the problems facing the British capitalist class in recent times has been the size of their arms bill, and the way this bill increased year by year. Taking the figures of “defence” expenditure at four yearly intervals from 1957/8, we get this picture: £1,483 million; £1,600 million; £1,837 million. At present British armaments spending is running at about seven per cent of the Gross National Product.

When Labour came to power in 1964. they resolved to do something about this situation. Perhaps some of their pacifist members actually expected them to stop spending money on weapons—Mr. Emrys Hughes, M.P. for South Ayrshire, for example, who seems to devote debates on “defence” to unrelenting sniping at speakers on both sides. Like this:

Mr. Amery (then Secretary of State for Air): I understand that there are some who would prefer slavery to death—

Mr. Emrys Hughes: Survival.

Mr. Amery: -- and if the Hon. Member cares to represent them, that is his affair.

Mr. Emrys Hughes: Survival.

And like this:

Mr. George Wigg: There are in the community only a given number of men who like service in the Armed Forces of the Crown—

Mr. Emrys Hughes: And getting less.

Mr. Wigg: That may well be. I do not believe that it is, but that depends on one’s point of view—

Mr, Emrys Hughes: It is common sense.

But of course Labour had no such intentions. All they wanted was to hack out an armaments policy which fitted the realities of Britain's standing in 1966 world capitalism, and to make sure that the ruling class got value for every penny they spent on the Armed Forces—intentions which, applied to any private firm, would bring a smile to the face of the dourest accountant.

So Harold Wilson instructed his Minister of Defence, Denis Healey, to set himself to applying the principles of what is called, in a new jargon, cost effectiveness. In his younger days, Denis Healey was considered to be a far-out Left Wing extremist, but he had no difficulty in reconciling himself to the unexceptional!y capitalist principles of his new job.

For a long time he laboured and then, in February this year, he brought forth the results—the Defence Review for 1966. This piece of work provoked a storm of hostility. The Tories professed themselves furious that Healey had decided against building a new aircraft carrier; the First Sea Lord, Sir David Luce, virtually resigned on the issue. The Defence Minister for the Navy, Christopher Mayhew, also threw up his job, protesting that “. . . the basic mistake of the Defence Review has been . . . giving the armed forces too large tasks and too few resources.”

That storm, which made the headlines for a day or two at the time, quickly blew itself out. Today, Mayhew is almost forgotten. And who now remembers Sir David Luce?

The first thing the Labour strategists had to take into account was that, for British capitalism, things are not what they used to be. Gunboat diplomacy may now be a bad joke but at one time, when Britain was the world's greatest power, it worked. Of course that was long ago; since the First World War, British influence has steadily declined and now any political party which tries to run British capitalism must always remember that they are administering a second rate power.

Today, the great disputes of world capitalism involve the United States and Russia. The world is divided mainly into two spheres of control; all others, like the British or the French, are minor affairs and have to play a supporting role. This unpalatable fact has been faced by De Gaulle, in his policy of joining with other European states in a French-dominated alliance. It has been faced since the war by all British governments, although the Conservatives have sometimes had trouble in selling the idea to the blue-nosed colonel elements in their ranks.

Britain's economic decline has also meant that the ruling class can no longer support a large peace time armed force. Compulsory military service would be an expensive affair, as ' well as a diversion of manpower from industry, which already carries a burden of labour shortage. The result is that, when the commitments of the British forces have been met, there has often been no reserve of men for movement at short notice to flares-up in Africa and similar places. To try to bridge this gap, British soldiers have sometimes been taken from Germany in an emergency.

The Labour government saw all this and they said that it was not good. They have decided, in the words of the Defence Review, that there are certain “. . . political commitments we must give up or share with others (and) limit the scale of military tasks which may be imposed by the commitments which remain.”

In practical terms, this means that British forces will be withdrawn from Aden in 1968, from British Guiana and South Africa in the near future, and reduced in the Far East as soon as possible. The bases will be replaced by “staging posts”—islands like Gan and the Cocos which will have minimum facilities such as an airstrip, fuel tanks, a wireless station and so on.

This should lead to other economies; very often in the past, bases like Cyprus had to be held by military force against the wishes of a large part of the population. There is unlikely to be any similar problem with the staging posts; the most dangerous inhabitants in the Cocos at the moment are the fierce land-crabs with which the place abounds.

The staging posts will be in the area known as East of Suez, now under British control by permission of Washington, which has its own problems of stretching manpower and resources. Britain will operate East of Suez on a policy of interdependence — of joint military operations within political alliances. The Defence Review talked about ". . . allies and friendly countries who have military requirements similar to our own." Many other countries have had to give up their colonies in recent years. The empires of France. Belgium and Holland, for example, have since the war crumbled into a mass of independent states.

By their policies, the Labour government plan to reduce arms spending so that by 1969/70 it represents six per cent of the Gross National Product—£2,000 million a year at 1964 prices. (Although six per cent of the GNP forecast by the National Plan for 1970, at 1964 prices, comes to £2,463 million). The government claimed that their plan amounts to a 16 per cent reduction on what the Tories would have been spending by 1970, although Mr. Mayhew, in the sort of flash of clarity which is sometimes given to politicians who have left office, said in the debate on February 23 that £2,000 millions was “an artificial figure.”

Whatever the truth of this—and if what Mayhew said is true this would not be the first time a government has based its calculations on sheer guesswork—the fact is that it is impossible for anyone to forecast what defence, or any other, expenditure will be in five years’ time. These things have a habit of getting out of hand—according to The Guardian of June 15, the foreign exchange cost of the British military effort in Malaysia is 30 per cent more than Denis Healey forecast last August. And who can forecast what other conflicts lie in the future? Who can say that there will not be another Korea in the next five years? Or that the Vietnam war will not engulf this country as well?

And even after Labour's economy drive, armaments are still gobbling up an enormous amount of money. Apart from what the British government spends, a lot of industrial effort is devoted to making weapons for sale to the governments of other countries, which also have a big arms bill. (The United States spent about $46,000 million in 1965). The market for weapons is, to use a term which is perhaps inappropriate, cut-throat. Governments know this, and employ their salesmen to sell the products of their armaments industries through international alliances like NATO. In Britain the level of government spending makes what is called defence the biggest industry.

When we compare this colossal industrial effort to the puny attempts which are made to deal with human problems of the world—when we consider, for example, that according to a UNICEF official in India 80 per cent of the population have to live on less than 1s. 9d. a day, we get an insight into capitalism’s miserable inability to provide a world fit for people to live in.

To recognise this is not to join the charity-mongers who divide their time between protesting about the effects of capitalism and to supporting the capitalist political parties at election times. The basic priority of capitalism is the production of wealth for sale and from that a lot more follows—economic competition, international rivalry, war and armaments. It is simply impossible to have the one without the others.

It was never difficult to foresee that weapons would grow into destructive monsters. Nuclear weapons are only a stage in the development of the war machine; we can be sure that there is more to come. Denis Healey, when he was in opposition, said in the House of Commons that “. . . the West must have atomic weapons as long as the Russians have them.” Presumably this also means that if the Russians— or some other country develop something more powerful than nuclear weapons, we shall have to have those as well. This is what is called, in Healey's language, sensible strategy. Other people might call it something else.

The British armed forces exist, just like those of other countries, to protect the property of their master class; to protect their overseas interests, investments and areas of control. At the moment British investments abroad total about £11,000 million. It was as part of the attempt to protect the bit of this total which is in Rhodesia that the aircraft carrier Eagle, and the other British warships, were recently in operation off the east coast of Africa.

South Africa, which is Britain’s third largest market, has nearly £1,000 million of British money invested in it: India has £450 million. Incomes from investments in other parts of the world are now running at these annual levels:

                              £ million

Far East 70

Middle East ... 200

Australia and NZ 70

Europe                    35

Americas ... 115

Africa             110

The Defence Review said of all this:

. . . we have important economic interests in the Middle East, Asia and elsewhere . . .

and

When . . . instability leads to open war, it may imperil not only economic interests in the area, but even world peace.

We can put it another way. With such mighty interests at risk, capitalism sees it as perfectly reasonable to spend a mere £2,000 million a year to defend them. And of course politicians can always produce acceptable arguments to justify this spending; they rarely have much difficulty in convincing the working class that, no matter how much they may regret the situation, no matter how much they prefer to spend money on cancer research, or defeating famine, or building hospitals, if a foreign power takes over “our” oilfields, “our” markets, “our” investments, we shall suffer a fate far worse than merely dying of cancer.

The numerous mouthpieces of capitalism persistently claim that it is a social system founded on honour, humanity and efficiency. But try an experiment. Take a piece of capitalism, put it in a test tube, put in with it the catalyst of human interests and observe the reaction. The result is undeniable. Capitalism makes honour of betrayal, humanity of murder and a veritable economy of waste and destruction.

Ivan.