Command shake-up hits top brass

The chiefs of the Army, Royal Navy and RAF are to be removed from the decision-making Defence Board chaired by Dr Fox. And the post of commander-in-chief – the second-ranking officer in each of the three services – is to be phased out, along with a number of other senior positions.

Meanwhile, a new Joint Forces Command, led by a four-star commander, will develop cross-service co-operation as part of the more integrated defence approach which Ministers want to encourage for the future.

Dr Fox announced the “radical new approach” for the Ministry of Defence after accepting the recommendations of Lord Levene’s report into what he said was “a department bedevilled with weak decision-making and poor accountability”.

The announcement comes after a war of words between military top brass and Ministers which last week saw an exasperated Prime Minister David Cameron tell service chiefs: “You do the fighting, I’ll do the talking.”

A string of senior officers went public with their concerns over the strains of conducting simultaneous operations in Afghanistan and Libya, with Admiral Sir Mark Stanhope questioning how long the campaign against the Gaddafi regime could be sustained and Air Chief Marshal Sir Simon Bryant warning RAF morale was “fragile”.

But Dr Fox was blunt in warning top brass of the dangers of loose talk: “We must be very careful, those of us who have authority in defence, in discussing the sustainability of our mission.

“People’s lives are at stake. There can be only one message that goes out to Libya – that is we have the military capability, political resolve and legal authority to go through with what we started .

“We will continue our mission until our mission succeeds and Col Gaddafi must get no other signal than that.”

Individual service chiefs are to be given increased control of equipment programmes and flexibility within their budgets, but are to be held more robustly to account for their performance, Dr Fox told the House of Commons.

The military will be represented on the slimmed-down Defence Board by the Chief of Defence Staff – the head of the armed forces, currently General Sir David Richards – rather than the individual chiefs of each service.

A new “cost-conscious mentality” will drive a greater focus on affordability throughout the MoD. And a new approach to personnel will aim to ensure promotions go to the right person for the job, rather than operating on the principle of “Buggins’ turn”, said Dr Fox.

All non-frontline posts across the MoD are to be reviewed, beginning with senior and management levels and including an assessment of the most cost-effective balance of regular military, reservists, civil servants and contractors.

“I have made it clear for some time that I wanted a smaller defence board so that we take decisions in a much more coherent way, so that the alignment of the responsibility for spending and Government policy are in one place but at the same time to ensure that those who are responsible for running the armed forces have greater freedom to do so,” said the Defence Secretary.

“It is all about ensuring that we get better management, because - as the report says, and as we have known for some time the way in which the MoD is run has not really been to the benefit of defence as a whole. There has been too much waste and there has been too much lack of control over major projects and we intend to bring that back.”