Here is where Brown's burnishing of his humanitarian glow comes at the detriment of the armed forces. Destroying our arsenal of cluster weapons will take money out of the Ministry of Defence's budget. There is no money for our soldiers and their equipment, but New Labour's ethical credentials are unfinanced liabilities.
Secondly, we are dependent upon an untried and untested system to replace our capability for destroying armour. Given the procurement record of the armed forces, we can see a further reduction in our capabilities. No Harriers, no ability to destroy armour:
The MoD confirmed that it did not have any other cluster-type weapon systems. However, a spokesman said that development work was currently under way to produce a replacement system that would not breach the convention but would provide a capability to hit enemy armour – the principal role of the cluster bomb.
The proposed system is the ballistic sensor-fused munition (BSFM) which will be fired by the Army’s self-propelled AS90 artillery. The munitions will be dropped by parachute and use sensors to seek out enemy targets such as tanks and other armoured vehicles as they drift down. Each weapon will have two submunitions.
The Army says that this new “smart” weapon will enable gunners in the artillery regiments to target the enemy with much greater accuracy, thus reducing any “collateral damage” (civilian deaths), although it will still be an indirect-fire weapon, like the cluster bomb.
However, the BSFM will not be ready for operations until 2012, which means the Army will have a capability gap of about four years.
This short-sighted and one-sided decision confirms that the government does reduced our ability to project force and defend ourselves at a time of increased insecurity.