On Sunday 18 July Andrew Marr interviewed the Defence secretary Liam Fox. Please note 'The Andrew Marr Show' must be credited if any part of this transcript is used.  Liam Fox says he is confident he can reduce the cost of Trident |
ANDREW MARR: Four British servicemen have been killed in Afghanistan in the last 24 hours. The death toll since the campaign began is now 322. Some say that the long-term role of the British Army there, as the debate goes on about a deadline for withdrawal, is unclear, but what about the future of the British Army itself? Tough times in the Ministry of Defence. Some analysts claim that because of the cost of replacing Trident and huge, new aircraft carriers, the Army may have to be slashed by a staggering 25%. I'm joined now from Bristol by the Secretary of State for Defence, Liam Fox. Dr Fox, thank you for joining us this morning. LIAM FOX: Good morning. ANDREW MARR: Can I ask you, first of all, whether the big capital projects - above all replacing Trident but also these aircraft carriers - are in any way ring-fenced, or do they have to come out of the same pot as everything else that you're looking at? LIAM FOX: Well there's always been an understanding that the budget for the nuclear deterrent came from outside the defence budget, the core defence budget. Running costs for the deterrent have always come from inside the defence budget, although the capital costs were outside. So that's something that we're discussing in the run-up to the spending review. The cost … ANDREW MARR: (over) Can I just stop you there just for a sec… I'm sorry. Just to press you on that. Does that mean that the capital cost is definitely outside your budget, or are you possibly going to have to take the capital cost as well? LIAM FOX: Well to take the capital cost would make it very difficult to maintain what we're currently doing in terms of capability, so there's an ongoing debate - as you know - with the treasury on almost every aspect of government at the present time. In terms of the question you asked about the specific project, we're looking at the costs of Trident to see whether amongst the various parts of design, of the infrastructure required to use it, of the number of missiles we use and so on, whether there can be reductions in costs. And I'm pretty confident that there can be and that we can take a fair bit of the overall cost out of the capital that will be required for this. But remember, when people talk about you know 17 to 20 billion pounds for the capital costs of Trident, they're talking about a system that will be there till 2050 or beyond to protect us from the threat of nuclear blackmail. ANDREW MARR: If you had to take the capital cost of Trident inside your defence budget, what would that mean for things like the Army? LIAM FOX: Well that's rather impossible to say until we finish the review in detail. What we're doing inside the defence review is to look at every capability we have at the present time - whether that's anti-submarine warfare, whether it's carrier groups … the aircraft carriers or whatever - and see what we actually have … ANDREW MARR: Sure. LIAM FOX: … what we think we require in terms of the threats that are out there, and then how those capabilities are provided. So we don't start by looking at the Army, the Navy and the Air Force because nowadays a lot of the capabilities are delivered across the three services. ANDREW MARR: I'm just … I'm interested if you had to take that capital cost - and it seems to me as if that is still up for debate, you may have to do that - then the implications for Trident, for our nuclear deterrents and for the rest of the defence budget are extremely grave. LIAM FOX: Well I think you can leave that to me and the Chancellor to have a discussion about that over the longer period. It's a very important issue in terms of the defence review and the ultimate defence settlement. The capital costs for Trident are not particularly high in the early years, but they mount up in the later years of this decade as we get closer to submarines actually being completed. The wider review into the costs of Trident, I hope will be able to be made available as soon as we can do that because I think it's important that the public can see that we've been properly scrutinising the costs of something that we promised as part of our election manifesto. ANDREW MARR: And it's absolutely … you are absolutely clear that there will be a replacement to Trident; Britain will continue to have a viable nuclear deterrent? If you're going to stay on as Defence Secretary, that is part of your bottom line? LIAM FOX: Well you know why do we continue to have it? Because we look at a world where North Korea has just developed nuclear weapons, where Iran seems to be trying to develop nuclear weapons, where we may be threatened by other countries. If Iran becomes a nuclear weapon state, it's likely that countries like Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Egypt will follow, and we really can't play fast and loose with the country's defence. We don't know what the threats will be between now and 2050. No-one could have predicted you know forty years ago what the world would look like today, so we have to ensure that we have the precautions to protect Britain from nuclear blackmail by any other state. ANDREW MARR: Right. Now you have not just Trident, but some hugely expensive capital projects - two enormous aircraft carriers being planned; the biggest ships I think the Royal Navy has ever had; and hundreds of brand new aircraft to go on top of them. Can Britain really afford all of that at a time when the Army is having to take such a lot of the frontline pressure and where we depend on the Army so much? LIAM FOX: Well again it's not a question of the Army versus the Navy or the Air Force. We're looking across the services at what we need. Effectively what we're doing is this: to say for the predictable threats we might have in the future and for the protection of UK interest worldwide, what sort of shape of armed forces may we require? And we're saying is this an opportunity for us to diminish our reliance on some of our Cold War legacy and start to reshape ourselves? And there are other elements, if I may say Andrew, that go beyond this because if you're looking at some of the threats that we do face for example in cyberspace, this will be about investing in technology that the public won't necessarily be able to see … ANDREW MARR: Right. LIAM FOX: … in terms of the protection of our national assets, but it will need to be done nonetheless. ANDREW MARR: Can I ask you about a story in the Independent today, which says that the documents being prepared for the Kabul conference at the end of this week have the date of 2014 for withdrawal of British troops at least from the frontline. I mean there may be some left in Afghanistan, but by 2014 we will not be seeing British troops killed in Afghanistan, maimed in Afghanistan. LIAM FOX: Well the first thing is that, as you would expect, I wouldn't comment on any leaked document, but a leaked draft document for a potential communique of a conference that hasn't yet happened is I think really quite a leak. Secondly, on the issue - the Prime Minister's made it very clear that we don't want to have combat troops in substantial numbers in Afghanistan by 2015. He's made that explicitly clear. That does not say that we will not have troops there in a role assisting the training of the Afghan Army. But if you go back to General McCrystal's original strategy, he said that he expected that the Afghan National Security Forces would be able to maintain the security of Afghanistan by 2013. That was amended to 2014. David Cameron's assessment of 2015 is actually quite conservative by comparison. So we do, under the arrangements that we have, have a different footprint in Afghanistan. If I can just explain that the original idea to split Helmand into three with the Americans in the north, the British in the centre, and the Americans again in the south, would have meant originally that the British Forces were looking after something like two thirds of the population in a counterinsurgency strategy. That's now been changed. As you know, we announced some changes to the configuration so that British Forces will not be in Sangin. It means now that we're roughly equal in terms of a third, a third and a third of the population that we're looking after. That's a much more reasonable thing for British Forces to be asked to do. ANDREW MARR: Do you think you will ever be able to stand up and declare victory in Afghanistan? LIAM FOX: I said in answer to a question in the House of Commons a couple of weeks ago that it's not about victory in the sense that you would previously have had - one of one army surrendering or putting up a white flag. This is about success, and I've always defined success in the counterinsurgency and the security mission, the national security mission for Britain in Afghanistan as a stable enough Afghanistan able to maintain its own internal and external security without reference to foreign forces. That is what we're trying to achieve by building up the Afghan National Army and the Afghan National Police. Not an easy task, but substantial progress has already been made. ANDREW MARR: And are you confident that that deadline, the 2014/2015 deadline is going to stick; that it's not going to slip? LIAM FOX: Well it's always been our aim to be successful in the mission, and the mission has always said that the Afghan National Security Forces would be able to deal with their own security by 2014. We recognise that there'll be further work to do in terms of training and improving the quality of those forces beyond that, which is why we've said that training forces may be available after that date but we have made it very clear that that will not be combat forces. We've done a great deal in Afghanistan. We expect other countries in the coalition to also shoulder their burden as we move towards the final exit of the international community at least in a combat role. ANDREW MARR: Liam Fox, thank you very much indeed. INTERVIEW ENDS
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