Tirpitz syndrome: is defence procurement broken?

Equipment always goes up in price, and we buy fewer units; the danger is that they become so valuable we daren't risk them in combat

The weather in Norway’s high Arctic north was clear on the morning of Sunday 12 November 1944. Twenty-nine Avro Lancaster bombers from No. 617 and No. 9 squadrons of the Royal Air Force, having assembled over Torneträsk lake, approached from the south-east in gaggles of between four and six aircraft, those of 617 Squadron, famous as the Dambusters, leading the way. They were at around 15,000 feet when they reached the city of Tromsø, one of the largest in the world above the Arctic Circle, west of which lay the island of Håkøya. At anchor here for the last month had the German Navy’s only remaining battleship, Tirpitz. At nearly 52,000 long tons, she was the heaviest battleship ever built by a European navy, and one of the most formidably armed, with eight 15-inch guns in four twin turrets. As the age of capital ships came to a close and naval warfare was dominated from above by the aeroplane and below by the submarine, Tirpitz could throw a 1,800-pound shell nearly 23 miles: to put that in context, from where I am in Chiswick, west London, St Albans, Windsor and Epping Forest would all be within range.

Tirpitz was the second ship in class of the Bismarck class, the lead ship having been chased and sunk in the western Atlantic by the Royal Navy in May 1941. Tirpitz, launched under the eye of Ilse von Hassell, the daughter of Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, in 1939, had been taken into active service three months before the Bismarck was sunk, and was stationed in Kiel. Initially she had been the flagship of the German Navy’s short-lived Baltic Fleet, created to prevent those elements of the Soviet Red Banner Baltic Fleet anchored in Leningrad from breaking out into open water, but at the beginning of 1942 Tirpitz sailed north to make her home in Norway, from where she could menace Allied convoys to and from Murmansk and Arkhangelsk. She would remain in Norway, dubbed “the lonely queen of the North”, where she became an only semi-rational obsession of the Allied navies.

The presence, and potential deployment, of Tirpitz in the fjords of Norway, made her a “fleet in being”, a ship able to affect the decisions of the enemy by her simple existence. There was perpetual fear that she would come out to sea and attack convoys, which could consist of 30 or more merchant ships, and in most circumstances even the most heavily armed escorts would be unlikely even to get close enough to Tirpitz to attack her. As a result the German ship tied down considerable Allied resources in the north Atlantic without doing anything. The devastating potential of this strategic shadow boxing was demonstrated in June-July 1942, with convoy PQ 17 leaving Hvalfjörður in Iceland, bound for Arkhangelsk. The convoy was sighted by a U-boat shortly after leaving port and shadowed thereafter, and was attacked from the air on 4 July, but later that day the Admiralty in London received intelligence suggesting Tirpitz had left port and would make contact with PQ 17. That could only be catastrophic, so the First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, authorised the convoy to scatter and proceed independently to its destination.

In fact Tirpitz was still at anchor in Altenfjord. She had ventured out before that, and put to sea again on 5 July, but was quickly recalled. Certainly she never came close to PQ 17. But the idea that she might had been enough for a panicky Admiralty to disperse the convoy; after that point, the merchant ships lost their mutual protection and the security of their Royal Navy escorts. This was why the convoy system had been invented in 1917. The result was brutal: of 34 ships which had left Iceland, 23 were sunk. 70,000 short tons of supplies were delivered to their Soviet recipients, but 130,000 short tons were lost, more than half the convoy’s load. All of this had been caused, or at least precipitated, by faulty intelligence about the location and intentions of one German capital ship.

For the following 18 months, Tirpitz remained a lurking threat, but the Allies were not idle. Tirpitz was attacked 17 times at her various bases in Norway, generally from the air but twice from below the surface, by manned torpedos in October 1942 and midget submarines in September 1943. Some attacks were more successful than others. By the summer of 1944, the Fleet Air Arm having failed to make much impact, the task of sinking Tirpitz was given to the RAF. The first attack, Operation Paravane in September 1944, saw a 6-ton Tallboy bomb dropped from a Lancaster strike the Tirpitz’s bow, rendering her unseaworthy, capable of only five or 10 knots. Operation Obviate, six weeks later, only scored a single near miss with a Tallboy, but that was enough to damage the rudder and cause some flooding in the stern. The Germans had decided to retain Tirpitz only as a floating anti-aircraft battery. Then came Sunday 12 September 1944, and Operation Catechism.

The end came with surprising speed. Tirpitz fired her first shots at 9.38 am in the hope of breaking up the bomber formations. The first Tallboy was dropped at 9.41 am, and hit its target amidships on the port side, exploding above the port boiler room. Tirpitz listed 15 to 20 degrees to port and caught fire. By 9.45 am the list was worse, nearly 40 degrees, and the damage continued to be inflicted. At 9.50 am, the magazine for C (“Caesar”) turret exploded, and Tirpitz listed further, by now on her side. At 9.52 am, she capsized. It had taken 14 minutes.

The destruction of Tirpitz notwithstanding, with its attendant loss of life (1,200 German sailors and soldiers were killed, many of them trapped in her hull when she capsized), you may consider that the Germans had, all in all, achieved good value. One capital ship, costing a little more than 100 million Reichsmarks, the equivalent of half a billion Euros today, had absorbed Allied resources and affected Allied naval planning for nearly three years. We have seen what the mere possibility of Tirpitz had cost PQ 17; how does one extrapolate this across the whole period?

But the opportunity came at a cost beyond that of Tirpitz’s construction. There was a great irony, that Tirpitz used her extraordinary main armament, those guns which could hit a target almost 23 miles away, only once in an offensive capacity, when, in concert with the battleship Scharnhorst, she bombarded Allied positions on Spitsbergen. (It amuses me that this assault, in September 1943, was known by the Germans as Operation Zitronella, or “lemon-flavour”.) She did put to sea from her anchorages in Norway from time to time, but never came close to engaging the enemy; as PQ 17 demonstrated, she did not need to in order to cause catastrophic damage. Did the German naval high command know that was all she needed to do? Had they spent all that money on this magnificent warship to shout “boo” at occasional Arctic convoys?

The truth was that Tirpitz’s strategic flexibility had been significantly compromised the moment the news of the loss of her sister ship Bismarck had reached Hitler at the Berghof, his Bavarian mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden. The Führer had been doubtful about Bismarck’s mission from the beginning but had initially accepted the reassurances of the head of the navy, Grand Admiral Erich Raeder. On learning that Bismarck had been sunk, Hitler issued a strict and very limiting order that henceforth no German capital ship was to engage an Allied vessel her equal or superior, they were to avoid contact with the enemy if expected to meet a strong force, and any of these decisions would require his own personal authorisation. As it happened, with Bismarck gone, the Kriegsmarine only had three capital ships—Tirpitz and the fast but less heavily armed Scharnhorst and Gneisenau—but this instruction effectively signalled the end of the German surface fleet as an offensive force.

Not for the first time, Hitler had perceived, or, more likely, intuited a fundamental truth, that Tirpitz’s disruptive strategic value was so high that the Kriegsmarine could not risk her loss. Everyone remembers the dramatic search for Bismarck in the Atlantic in May 1941—if you have never seen the classic 1960 British war film Sink the Bismarck!, you should: it tells the dramatic story brilliantly and Kenneth More is superb in the lead role—and the extraordinary weight of assets which the Royal Navy brought to bear chasing the German battleship: eight battleships or battlecruisers, two aircraft carriers, 11 cruisers, 21 destroyers and six submarines, of which the loss of the battlecruiser HMS Hood was a seismic blow to morale. But the result was the same. The Bismarck was lost. Hitler understood the paradox that Tirpitz was a major strategic threat to the Allies, but one which was only a threat so long as it was not used.

I relate this story partly because I find it interesting but mainly because it illustrates what I want to label “Tirpitz syndrome”, the development or acquisition of a military asset so powerful but so expensive and so difficult to replace that it becomes strategically compromised or, worse, useless. I think Western militaries suffer badly from this and it has only been the relative rarity of actual combat and the race to use the highest level of technology and sophistication available that has allowed it to go unchecked. Moreover, because Western nations have fought few peer-to-peer conflicts over the past 50 years and have mainly been restricted to counter-insurgency, air strikes and peacekeeping, there are many pieces of equipment which have spent decades in service without ever being used in anger. For example, until some were used in the Ukrainian counter-attack against Russian forces this summer, the German Leopard 2 main battle tank had barely seen combat. (Its first ever engagement was at a checkpoint at Prizrin in Kosovo in June 1999, where a detachment from Panzerbatallion 33 was fired on by two Serbian paramilitaries in a Fiat 125p.)

Let me give an example. The RAF’s current most sophisticated aircraft is the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II. The UK was involved in the aircraft’s design and construction from a very early phase, as the only Tier 1 partner in the process (Italy and the Netherlands are Tier 2 partners, while there are another five nations involved at Tier 3). Thirty F-35B Lightnings, as they are designated in UK service, were delivered in the first tranche and we will have 47 by the end of 2025, enough to equip two front-line squadrons. The Lightning is a cutting-edge, fifth-generation stealth strike aircraft; Air Chief Marshal Sir Mike Wigston, who retired recently as chief of the Air Staff, told the House of Commons Defence Committee earlier this year that his estimation was that the RAF was doing well if more than 80 per cent of the Lightning force was in operation, the others being in maintenance, on the grounds that “these are technical beasts, which don’t work 100% of the time”. They are technical and expensive: each aircraft costs something like £100 million, estimated by some to rise as high as £150 million once software upgrades and spares are factored in.

This was brought sharply into focus in November 2021, when a Lightning operating from HMS Queen Elizabeth in the Mediterranean Sea crashed shortly after take-off, the pilot ejecting to safety. The aircraft was salvaged for security reasons, and will be replaced: but the decision to replace it was taken at the highest level, being mentioned explicitly in the MoD’s Annual Report and Accounts 2021-22. An investigation concluded that the aircraft suffered a sudden loss of power caused by a failure to remove a plastic rain cover from the port engine intake, which was then ingested by the engine. Just think about that: an aircraft costing perhaps £150 million was lost due to a piece of plastic costing, what, £20? And that cover was left in place due to human error. Its loss represents three per cent of our current fleet, and its replacement was so momentous a process that it featured in the department’s annual report and accounts.

Of course the loss of the Lightning was a freak accident. But it was an accident in peacetime. Imagine we were engaged in a full-blown armed conflict with even a near-peer adversary. It is true that the F-35B is extremely difficult to detect on radar due to its shape and cladding material. One assessment rated the Lightning as “unparalleled” and suggested that it could engage and destroy multiple targets at a stand-off range, while its technological ability to relieve the pilot of a number of routine tasks allows him or her to focus much more on the business and flying and fighting. Even if we accept that the Lightning is the most capable aircraft of its kind, with impressive offensive and defensive features, it is not invulnerable. If we look at the conflict in Ukraine, while accepting that the aircraft involved are not as sophisticated as the Lightning, the Russian Aerospace Forces have lost advanced Sukhoi Su-30 Flanker fighters while on the ground and from the air, probably to shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missiles.

So there is a conundrum here. We have a modest number of these extremely expensive aircraft, which are so enormously potent that they are unlikely to be challenged in the air and should be largely able to overcome most ground air defences. Most. But the possibility remains that a Lightning could be tackled in the sky by another aircraft, or subject to a lucky strike by a portable rocket launcher costing maybe $100,000 or perhaps as little as $10,000. How do senior commanders factor in that cost/benefit ratio? His aircraft may have a very high survivability rate, but a run of bad luck which cost us, say, three aircraft would represent a serious blow to our overall capability. In a sustained conflict, like the one in Ukraine, how often would a senior commander have to make that calculation, and how heavy a weight would it place on his operational freedom?

To an extent, we have done this to ourselves. Defence procurement is not like other types of procurement in that it is not dictated by conventional “competition”, for two reasons: first, the development of technology and the economy has led to waves of mergers and consolidation, with smaller manufacturers, either by choice or through force majeure, gradually banding together or being swallowed up by larger companies.

Take BAE Systems, for example, the largest defence company in Europe and the seventh-largest in the world. It was formed in 1999 when British Aerospace (BAe) bought Marconi Electronic Systems, the defence subsidiary of General Electric. But BAe had begun life in 1977 as a state-owned corporation under the provisions of the Aircraft and Shipbuilding Industries Act 1977. This law merged the British Aircraft Corporation (BAC), Hawker Siddeley Aviation, Hawker Siddeley Dynamics and Scottish Aviation (all private companies), but the nationalisation drive of industry secretary Eric Varley was not to last, and the British Aerospace Act 1980 paved the way for re-privatisation (although the government retained a £1 golden share). BAC itself was a creature of government persuasion, formed in 1960 when English Electric Aviation Ltd, Vickers-Armstrongs (Aircraft), the Bristol Aeroplane Company and Hunting Aircraft merged when the Macmillan government hinted strongly that a rationalised industry would win forthcoming contracts.

This has, inevitably, led to a large number of contracts being placed with single-sources supplier. In 2020-21, a third of the MoD’s contracts, worth £9.3 billion, were let without competition. It is simple logic that if there are fewer and fewer domestic manufacturers, then the scope for competitive tenders will be much smaller, and negotiations will not have the piquancy of a genuine ability on both sides to walk away. This fact was eventually recognised by the Blair goverment’s 2005 Defence Industrial Strategy, which to all intents and purposes set aside conventional notions of competition and looked for more of a partnership between the Ministry of Defence and domestic defence manufacturers.

The second issue which distorts natural competition in defence is that there are some manufacturing capabilities which the UK wishes to retain as domestic, in order to protect not on the supply chain but also the technological research and the production facilities. An obvious example is the design and construction of our nuclear ballistic missile submarines, currently the four Vanguard-class boats which will begin to be replaced in the early 2030s by the Dreadnought class. It would be impossible, for reasons of national security, to grant that contract to an external manufacturer, therefore BAE Systems and Rolls Royce could have been reasonably confident that they would be awarded the contract to build the Dreadnoughts because no-one else could.

On top of this limited degree of competition and therefore potential cost savings is a tendency within the UK defence establishment to procure bespoke, extremely high-specification equipment. The MoD often tries to anticipate the widest range of potential threats by commissioning platforms which are endlessly flexible and future-proof, therefore more complicated, therefore more expensive.

I can give you a perfect example. When I joined the Defence Committee as its second clerk in October 2006, a colleague was already at work managing an inquiry into FRES. The Future Rapid Effect System, named as if to reveal nothing about its nature, was an overarching programme to procure more than 4,000 armoured vehicles to replace a plethora of outdated vehicles from the FV432 armoured personnel carrier to the Saxon wheeled APC. The ambition of FRES read like an MoD fever dream fuelled by too many E numbers: it was to be rapidly deployable, network-enabled, proof against current and future threats and capable of delivering across a sprawling spectrum of capabilities. It was divided into two parts, the Utility Variant (UV) and the Specialist Variant (SV), both of which were further subdivided into different roles, numbering at least 16. This requirement was first announced in 1998. When I arrived on the Defence Committee, then, FRES had already been in the air for eight years.

A programme over overlapping phases of development was announced in 2004, with am ambition that the vehicles would begin to enter service in the early to mid-2010s. But by around 2010, ambitions were beginning to be cut back. High operational tempos in Afghanistan and Iraq were exposing the shortcomings of some of the Army’s contemporary equipment, and solutions to new problems could not necessarily wait. In particular, the Alvis CVR(T) family of light tracked vehicles, designed in 1967 (and in service by 1972!), was showing its age, and was scheduled to be superseded (and, of course, outclasses) by FRES; but FRES was nowhere near ready. In September 2014, the MoD bowed slightly to the inevitable. FRES was too complicated, too ambitious, too wide-ranging, and the programme was abandoned, the MoD instead seeking two separate procurements, the SV and the UV (which became the Mechanised Infantry Vehicle, or MIV, project). For the latter, the MoD eventually awarded a contract jointly to BAE Systems and Rheinmetall for variants of the eight-wheeled Boxer AFV, from the development of which we had withdrawn in 2003. The SV part of the old FRES requirement would be met by the General Dynamics Ajax tracked armoured fighting vehicle, a refinement of the Austro-Soanish ASCOD. So that was the final answer: FRES, begun in 1998, would eventually result in the procurement of Boxer and Ajax.

How many of them, Boxer and Ajax, are now in service, 25 years after the initial requirement was identified? As of 1 August 2023, it’s very easy to isolate the exact figure: none. Each is still at the trial stage.

Absurdly extenuated procurement of cutting-edge equipment, delivered by a market in which competition is at best compromised: all of these factors push up overall costs. And with defence budgets under pressure as always, programmes are trimmed back, and the unit cost continues to rise. The eventual outcome is a modest number of hyper-expensive platforms. (Other parameters can fall by the wayside. Remember that FRES was supposed to able to be deployed easily and flexibly? Boxer is so large and heavy that for air deployment each vehicle must be partially disassembled and three Airbus A400M cargo aircraft are required to transport two Boxers. We have 22 A400Ms in total. I’m sure you can “do the math”.) The final reckoning is difficult with precision but each Boxer will likely cost between £5 million and £10 million. And each of these, in its basic IFV configuration, can carry only eight soldiers.

This high-value scarcity imposes a weird kind of micromanagement on commanders at a senior level. With our current fleet of F-35Bs, for example, it is possible to envisage a one- or two-star officer, at least, shaping plans with the vulnerability and potential expendability of individual aircraft on his mind. That is unprecedented and, I suspect, unhealthy.

I don’t want to labour the point more than I already have done. But the modern British Army—and we are not alone in this—is equipped with, or awaiting, some enormously capable vehicles, most of which should be at least class-leading. But they are enormously expensive too, and, while very well-protected against most threats, as subject to enemy fire and misfortune in combat scenarios as any.

I’m taking a slightly cowardly way out in this essay by simply identifying the problem rather than going on to suggest solutions. I do have some thoughts on how procurement could be managed differently, but I think they deserve their own piece. I don’t want to have them lost, and anyway, although inextricably linked, highlighting the problem is separate from a solution on which everyone agrees.

When we next fight a full-spectrum kinetic conflict—and we will—it is impossible that the investment inherent in our advanced equipment will not prey on the minds of our commanders and plant the seed of caution and self-preservation. Their tactical and strategic judgement will of course be affected. We will suffer, more severely than we are already, from Tirpitz syndrome.