The Ministry of Defence

The Ministry of Defence is the department of state responsible for the Royal American Armed Forces, for defence policy, for the Realm’s obligations under the Atlantic Treaty Organization, and for the five submarines that carry the entirety of the Realm’s nuclear armament. Its minister sits in the Cabinet and is among the senior members of it.

Its own motto describes a division of authority in three sentences: the Crown commissions, ministers direct, Parliament sustains. The department holds the middle one and neither of the others, and a good deal of what is distinctive about it follows from being the part of a constitutional arrangement that can be blamed by both of the other parts.

It is also the department that concealed the contamination at the Kittanning Works for twenty-seven years, did not tell the workers or the families or the province, closed the wells without explanation in 1981, and twice refused to fund a study of what had happened to the people who drank the water. The most conservative estimate before the courts is a little over four hundred deaths.

What it did when it was finally caught is the reason this article is worth reading beside the one on the Home Office. The Home Office administered the exclusion statutes for the whole of their life and has never issued a statement about them. The Ministry of Defence, confronted in 1998 with documents it had buried, accepted the findings within a fortnight, apologised without qualification, built the tracing programme it had twice refused to fund, and has paid compensation continuously since 2001.

It has also, in the thirty years since, closed the file.

Constitutional character

The Crown commissions, ministers direct, Parliament sustains

The three sentences are doing different work and only the third is a rule about power. The first protects officers from ministers, the second protects the public from officers, and the third protects everybody from both by making the whole thing conditional on an annual vote.

The Ministry holds the middle sentence. It does not commission, which is the Crown’s, and it does not sustain, which is Parliament’s. Its officials describe the position, with some feeling, as being the only party to the arrangement that can be criticised by the other two without being able to criticise either of them back.

What the Minister may not do

The Minister of Defence directs the Forces and does not command them. The distinction is the same one the Home Office draws about the Constabulary and is drawn here for a different reason: not to protect an investigation from a politician, but to keep the chain of command intact.

A direction is given to the Chief of the Defence Staff and travels down. A minister who gave an order to a formation directly would have broken the chain, and the officer receiving it would be obliged to refer it upward, which has happened and is recorded in the standing guidance as the correct response.

The Minister may not commission or dismiss an officer, may not convene a court martial or influence one, and may not order the Forces to act against a polity of the Realm except under an instrument Parliament has passed for the purpose.

The polities may not maintain armies

This is the one point on which the Realm does compel its polities, it was settled by the Charter, and it has never been seriously contested.

Polities maintain police forces and may maintain organised reserves for civil emergency, and the line between an organised reserve and an army is drawn by the Ministry, in guidance, in terms that are deliberately generous. The department’s position for two centuries has been that a rule this important should be enforced so rarely that nobody thinks about it, and that a ministry which spent its time policing the boundary would create the problem it exists to prevent.

The Ministry of the Federation, which has to argue with the polities about everything else, describes this as the single greatest kindness the founders did it.

History

Two boards and a War Office

The department is younger than most of the Realm’s great departments and was assembled rather than founded.

For the first century and a half the Realm’s forces were administered by separate bodies that answered separately to Parliament: a War Office for the Army, a Board for the Navy, and a succession of temporary arrangements for everything else. They competed for money, they duplicated establishments, they maintained separate estates and separate medical services, and the arrangement survived as long as it did because it suited the services and nobody in Cabinet wished to be the minister who took it on.

The amalgamation was carried in the twentieth century, after a war had demonstrated the cost of it, and it was resisted by all the services and by a good many members of both Houses. What emerged was a single Ministry with a single Minister in Cabinet, service ministers below him, and a Chief of the Defence Staff above the service chiefs.

The services have never entirely accepted it. The department’s internal life is still substantially the management of six institutions which regard themselves as older than it, which is true, and better at its job than it is, which is contested.

The estate

The Ministry is the largest landowner in the Realm after the Crown, and it is the only department whose property comes with two centuries of undocumented liability in it.

Ordnance works, proving grounds, ranges, depots, airfields, fuel installations and shipyards, some in continuous operation since before the Union and a great many closed, sold, built over or returned to agriculture with whatever was in the soil still in it. The department maintains a register of sites of concern which is not published, which has grown in every decade since it was started, and which did not exist at all when the Kittanning wells were closed.

The register was created in 1999.

The Forces

The Realm maintains six services: the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the Marine Corps, the Space Service and the Coast Service. The professional head of all six is the Chief of the Defence Staff.

The Navy alone is still governed by a board. The defence review of 2028 proposed abolishing the Board of Admiralty and giving the Navy a single Chief of the Naval Staff like the other services. On 29 October 2028 the Minister told the Commons that the government would keep the Board and give it powers of its own instead: it will decide flag appointments, the shipbuilding programme and the Navy’s estimates by majority, with its civil members voting and their dissents recorded. The change is made by new letters patent, which need no Act. The review’s other proposals are still open.

Recruitment is all-volunteer and has been since conscription was abandoned after Indochina. The Realm regards peacetime conscription as constitutionally objectionable rather than merely unwise, which is a stronger position than most of its allies hold and which the department defends in alliance forums where several members conscript and regard the American position as a luxury.

The armament

The entirety of the Realm’s nuclear armament is carried by five ballistic-missile submarines. There are no land-based weapons and no tactical weapons of any kind.

That is a deliberate architecture and it is the department’s own. A force that exists only at sea cannot be used in a hurry, cannot be forward-deployed into somebody else’s crisis, cannot be captured, and presents no target on the Realm’s own soil. It also means that the Realm has nothing to offer an ally who wants weapons stationed on their territory, which has been raised inside the alliance and answered the same way each time.

The Realm holds the larger of the Atlantic Treaty Organization’s two nuclear arsenals. The department’s stated view of that is that the size of the arsenal is a question for the Government and the number of legs it stands on is a question for the Ministry, and that it has only ever argued about the second.

Kittanning

The works

The Kittanning Works is a federal ordnance establishment in the Province of Pennsylvania, in operation since the First Great War.

From the 1950s its solvent and propellant residues were disposed of on the site. From the 1960s they were in the groundwater, and the wells drawing on that groundwater served the works, the married quarters, and part of the town.

What the Ministry knew

The Ministry established the contamination in 1971 and commissioned three surveys between 1971 and 1979.

Paragraph 6.7 asked for three things. The Ministry did the first and neither of the other two.

The wells were closed in 1981, without explanation, and nobody was told why. The workers were not notified. The families in the married quarters were not notified. The province was not notified. No attempt was made to trace the people who had already left the site, of whom by then there were a great many, the establishment having been in operation for sixty years.

The refusals

The recommendation in 6.7 came back to the department twice, in 1983 and in 1994, and was refused both times.

Paragraph 11 is the sentence that ends the argument about what the department was doing. In the absence of a study the matter is not established, and the department’s position is therefore safe: not because it did not know, but because it had arranged not to have written it down in a form anybody could demand.

Paragraph 9 is worse on a second reading. The objection to finding out is that finding out would create a duty toward a class of people the department could not currently identify, which is to say that the department preferred not to be able to identify them.

The submission of 1994 is shorter and says the same thing.

How it broke

It was broken by the Kittanning Sentinel, a weekly with a circulation under eleven thousand and a newsroom of three.

A reporter there had read the county coroner’s findings every week for eleven years and noticed a cluster the way anybody notices anything they have looked at for a decade. Records requests were refused under the security exemption. The appeal to the commissioner failed. The appeal to the court failed.

The Sentinel then paid a clerk in the Ministry for the surveys, which is a crime in the Realm, and published them across eleven weeks in 1998.

What the Ministry did next

The statement was made thirteen days after the first article. The tracing programme was established the following year. Compensation has been paid continuously since 2001, without requiring proceedings, and the Ministry has never contested a claim on the ground of limitation.

It is, by some distance, the best thing any department in this Realm has done after being caught, and the Register says so plainly because the rest of this section does not flatter the department at all.

Nobody was charged

Nobody was prosecuted over Kittanning, in either direction.

The Sentinel’s offence was plain and admitted. The paper had printed the documents and said where it got them. Four successive ministries declined to prosecute, and the reason given privately and eventually in evidence to a committee was that no ministry wanted the trial: a prosecution would have put a jury of Pennsylvanians in a room with the 1979 survey, and the law officers reached the same conclusion each time, which was that no jury in the province would convict and that the acquittal would be worse than the offence.

The clerk was not so fortunate. They were identified in the Ministry’s own internal enquiry, dismissed, stripped of pension entitlement, and never prosecuted either, which meant they never had the trial at which any of this could have been said in public. They have never been named, at their own request.

The person who made the apology possible is the only person who was punished, and the punishment was administered by the department that apologised. The Ministry has never been asked in terms to explain that and has never volunteered an explanation.

The file is closed

The tracing programme runs. The payments are made. The Ministry regards the matter as concluded.

This is the part that a reader arriving from the article on the press may not expect, because that article treats Kittanning as a live and unresolved argument, and for the press it is. Inside the Ministry it is not. It is a completed episode with a settled procedure, handled by a small standing unit, and it does not appear in the department’s induction material, its published history or its internal training in any form.

Officials asked about it are courteous and brief. The department’s position is that everything asked of it in 1998 was done, that it was done without being compelled, that it has been done for thirty years, and that an institution which has apologised, paid and reformed has discharged what it owes.

That position is not obviously wrong. It is also the reason the department has no institutional memory of the thing it did, and a department with no memory of a decision taken twice by people who understood what they were deciding has nothing in place to stop the third time.

The other sites

The obvious question the Kittanning account raises is how many others there are, and the department’s answer is that it does not know and is finding out.

The register of sites of concern was created in 1999, in the same reorganisation that produced the tracing programme, and it is the department’s one durable institutional response to the affair. It records every site the Ministry has held since the Union, what was done there, and what is known or suspected to be in the ground. It is compiled from estate records, from the services’ own papers and from a survey programme that has been running for thirty years and is not finished.

Sixty-odd sites have been remediated. A number in the low hundreds are under investigation. The department will not give a total for the register itself, on the ground that publishing a list of sites of concern before the concern is established would blight land and alarm people about contamination that may not exist, which is a respectable argument and is also the argument the 1983 submission made in a different accent.

Where the register has produced a finding, the practice since 1999 has been to notify first and investigate afterwards. That is the reverse of 1981 and it is deliberate, and officials point to it as the answer to anybody who says the department learned nothing.

Two of the sites have produced compensation programmes of their own. Neither was found by a newspaper.

Procurement

Procurement is the department’s largest continuous activity, absorbs most of its civil staff, and is where its reputation is actually made and lost.

The Realm buys ships, aircraft, vehicles, munitions and systems on timescales longer than any ministry and against requirements that change while the thing is being built. Programmes run for decades. A Minister of Defence inherits every decision taken by every predecessor and answers for all of them, and the department’s unpublished advice to an incoming minister, which is widely quoted, is that the two things most likely to end their tenure are a programme somebody else ordered and a piece of ground somebody else contaminated.

The Treasury watches this more closely than it watches anything else, for the reason that defence programmes are the largest single source of the arithmetic being wrong. The spending team that shadows the Ministry is the largest in the Treasury and the relationship between the two departments is the worst in the Realm’s government, which both sides describe as healthy.

Operations and Parliament

The Forces are employed as the Government directs, and the Government answers for the direction.

Since the War Powers Act 1976 the law requires a vote of the Commons within seven days of the Forces being committed to operations abroad, and supply for such operations lapses after sixty days unless the House renews it. The Act followed the Indochina war, in which a resolution passed as a limit served for a decade as the authority for a war. How far it reaches operations short of combat has been argued about since, and the department’s own position is studiously that the question is one for the Government and the House and not for it.

What is settled is the money. Parliament sustains, an operation requires supply, and supply is voted. A deployment the Commons will not fund does not continue, and the department has never pretended otherwise.

The Atlantic Treaty Organization guarantee operates automatically and no formation comes under allied command until a war has begun, which means the Ministry’s alliance work is almost entirely preparation: interoperability, pre-positioned stores, staff exercises, and the standing arrangements that would have to work on the first morning. Officials describe it as planning for a thing that has never once happened in eighty years.

Beside the Home Office

The two departments are worth reading against each other and the Register recommends it.

The Home Office administered the exclusion statutes for their whole life, wrote their machinery, refused people under an unreviewable discretion it did not record, and has never issued a statement about any of it. Its official history gives the period eleven pages out of four hundred. What it did instead was quiet, unpublished and real: it staffed the restoration unit from 1966 and told it to grant.

The Ministry of Defence concealed four hundred deaths for twenty-seven years and, caught, apologised in thirteen days without qualification, named what it had done as a decision rather than a failure, and paid without making anybody sue. What it did afterwards was close the file.

One department cannot apologise and has never stopped carrying it. The other apologised completely and has put it down. Neither of these is the behaviour of an institution that has understood what it did, and the Realm has no department that has managed both.

The department from inside

The Ministry is large, is dominated by its relationship with people in uniform, and has the particular culture of a civil department whose clients can be ordered about and whose officials cannot order them.

Its officials are specialists to a degree unusual in the Realm’s service: procurement, estates, intelligence liaison, alliance business and the nuclear programme are separate worlds with separate careers, and movement between them is limited. The department is therefore less coherent than the Treasury and much larger, and it does not have the Home Office’s legal culture or the Ministry of the Federation’s continuity.

What it has instead is the uniformed side, which is continuous, confident, and quite capable of waiting out a minister. The civil and military halves of the department are correct with one another and the correctness is load-bearing.

Secrecy and audit

The department is the hardest in the Realm to examine and it has the best reasons.

The security exemption is real, is narrower than the department’s critics believe and wider than the department’s defenders admit, and it was the instrument that defeated the Sentinel’s records requests, the appeal to the commissioner and the appeal to the court, all lawfully, in a matter which turned out to be groundwater.

The Comptroller and Auditor General audits the department, including the nuclear programme, and reports to the Public Accounts Committee in two parts, one published and one not. The committee has argued for thirty years about the unpublished part and has never proposed a workable alternative, which is the same position it reaches with the Home Office over warrants.

The Kittanning surveys were not security material and were never claimed to be. They were withheld under an exemption that covered the establishment, which is the narrowest available account of what happened and is the department’s own.

The emblem

The department’s badge is three bars of the same size, stacked one above another. The middle bar is filled in. The other two are empty.

It is the motto with two thirds of it left out. The Crown commissions, ministers direct, Parliament sustains: the first bar and the third are drawn at full size and not filled, because they are not the department’s to fill, and the Ministry has only ever been entitled to the one in the middle.

The three are identical in size on purpose. A proposal to draw the middle bar larger than the others was refused when the badge was settled, on the ground that it would have the department asserting that its own third of the arrangement was the important third, which is the precise claim the motto exists to deny.

Among the Realm’s departmental badges it is the only one that depicts something the department does not have. The Home Office shows a door it stands in. The Ministry of the Federation shows an open book it is about to write in. The Treasury shows nothing at all. The Ministry of Defence shows two authorities belonging to other people, at full size, and leaves them blank.

There is no crown, no motto in words and no date, and the last of those is the one officials will discuss. The department has a founding moment, which neither the Home Office nor the Treasury has, and it has never put the year on anything. Any date it chose would be the year six services older than the Ministry were told they had been amalgamated. All six have badges of their own, all six are older, and all six are worn.

The Ministry’s badge is on its paper. It is not on anybody.

The Minister

The Minister of Defence is a senior appointment and is not a resting place.

The office is a Minister and not a Secretary of State, for the reason the Realm’s nomenclature generally divides: offices predating the Charter kept their English names, and departments created afterwards were named in plain American. A Ministry of Defence is a twentieth-century creation and its head is a Minister accordingly, as at the Ministry of the Federation.

The job is a real one and it ends careers in a specific way. A Minister of Defence is answerable for procurement decisions taken by predecessors, for an estate with two centuries of liabilities buried in it, and for operations conducted by people who cannot answer back in public. The department’s own institutional advice to an incoming minister, which is not published and is widely quoted, is that the two things most likely to end their tenure are a programme somebody else ordered and a piece of ground somebody else contaminated.

Assessment

The Ministry of Defence did the worst thing any department of this Realm has done and then did the best thing any department of this Realm has done about it, and the second does not cancel the first.

The concealment was not a failure of process and the 1998 statement said so, which is the single most creditable sentence in the department’s history. It was a decision, taken in 1981 and confirmed in 1983 and again in 1994, by people who understood what they were deciding, and the 1983 submission is explicit that the purpose of not commissioning a study was to avoid creating a document that could be demanded. That is a department arranging not to know something so that it could go on saying it did not know it.

The apology was real, fast, unqualified, and cost the department a great deal of money it has never tried to avoid paying. It remains the standard by which the Realm’s other departments are found wanting, and the Home Office is found wanting by it.

And then the file was closed. The department’s view is that it has discharged what it owed, which is defensible. The consequence is that the Ministry of Defence today holds no working memory of Kittanning: nothing in its induction, nothing in its training, no annual retelling, no document circulated to the people who now hold the jobs the 1983 submission was written in. The apology was spent rather than carried.

The Realm therefore has two departments that between them demonstrate the whole problem. One cannot apologise and has never put the thing down. The other apologised completely and put it down at once. What neither has is an institution that says the words and then keeps the file open, and until one of them does, the Register’s view is that the next 1983 submission will be written by somebody who has never heard of the last one.

The one person punished over Kittanning was the clerk who made the apology possible, and the department that apologised is the department that took the pension. That has never been explained and has never been asked.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• The Royal American Armed Forces, the six services the department directs and does not command
• The Home Office, which never apologised for the exclusion era, and is the department this one should be read against
• The Press, where Kittanning is told from the newspaper’s side and remains a live argument
• The Province of Pennsylvania, where the Works stands and where no jury would have convicted
• The Atlantic Treaty Organization, in which the Realm holds the larger of two nuclear arsenals
• The Ministry of the Federation, which calls the bar on polity armies the greatest kindness the founders did it
• The Treasury, which settles what the department may spend and audits what it spent

Categories

Institutions · Ministries · The Crown and Government · Defence and Order