Value for the Money? Britain's Post-War Military-Industrial Record

Considering Britain's defense acquisitions policy when I was writing Geography, Technology and the Flux of Opportunity, and later the working papers that grew into Britain's Defense Policy, 1945-1979, it seemed to me that, if Britain's defense spending was a far cry from that of the far bigger and richer United States, and so could not have produced anything like the range and depth of American military capability, Britain also got less value for the money that it did spend. (Thus Britain, in spite of American assistance, significant sacrifices and initial ambitions ended up far, far behind the superpowers in the size and variegation and capability of its nuclear arsenal. Thus did Britain strain to maintain a carrier force of four small, obsolete ships built in World War II even as the U.S. deployed a force of twenty large ships capable of carrying large wings of supersonic fighters, including the first nuclear-powered supercarriers. And so forth.)

That situation seemed to me to partly be a matter of a pattern I noticed then and which has remained relevant down to the present (something to remember as Keir Starmer essays the Showbusiness for Ugly People performers' dream role of wartime leader), namely how exaggerated notions of what Britain could afford, and the addition to that of a second layer of exaggeration in outsized expectations of "doing a lot with a little" (like being a world power on a two billion pound a year budget), kept running up against an unforgiving reality that forced retrenchment time and time again. This retrenchment after retrenchment entailed a great deal of waste as one program, one project, was canceled after another without result in a way that quickly told.

However, Britain's industrial and monetary weakness had a more direct significance for the country's military projects. After all, Britain's industry was broadly far behind that of the U.S. in completeness (consider Britain's limitations in key areas like machine tools even then) and modernity (where the U.S. government substantially recapitalized the country's already world-class industry, Britain ran its already aged plant into the ground amid an all-out production effort), leaving it more reliant on imports for important inputs, while what it could make it would generally make with less efficiency than others--as testified by how circa 1950 labor productivity in British manufacturing was scarcely one-third that of the United States. Where defense orders are concerned the far more limited orders Britain's armed forces could be expected to place relative to their American counterparts, along with Britain's more limited ability to compete in the defense exports market, meant that the country's defense industry could not enjoy the economies of scale that the U.S. would. And in contrast with a U.S. that at the time had the benefit of a gold-backed dollar, Britain's weakened currency made any importation more taxing monetarily.

This industrial weaknesses, the diseconomies of smaller scale, and the reliance on more and more painfully gained imports, meant that there could be no comparison where the efficiency of defense spending was concerned. Indeed, they meant that it made less and less sense to try and maintain what was already an increasingly superficial self-sufficiency in this area, the more in as Britain could ill-afford the resources that trying to do so required absorbed. The country, after all, was in dire need of industrial rejuvenation in the post-war period, and if the sorts of writers who tend to take up the topic prefer to snivel and sneer at the outlays on the welfare state in those years (never mind that they were indispensable to social peace at home in that fraught period), the larger sums spent on the warfare state, and the direct and indirect consequences of that spending in that critical period, seem the real drag on a British economy that never got the rejuvenation it needed--a state of affairs that has endured down to the present, as, in line with the traditions of British neoliberalism generally and Blairite New Laborism particularly, the last remnants of Keir Starmer's promised "Green New Deal" fall by the wayside.