I wasn't much impressed with a couple of pages in CAAT's recent magazine aimed at university students. Maybe it was written by a younger writer who hasn't quite worked out that most manufacturing products used by the military also have civilian uses. There are relatively few products -- e.g. munitions, attack vehicles -- that only have military applications. Letter as follows (it has been acknowledged, and I will post the reply) :
Greetings. I have been a CAAT supporter for many years. Between 1985 and 1995 I was an industrial chaplain at Rolls Royce in Coventry. I should add that neither I nor the chaplaincy received any gifts or funding from the company. It was clearly understood that my visits implied no support necessarily for anything the company or its trade unions did. I always wore my CND badge on site.
It does not help CAAT's case to present Rolls Royce crudely as a military manufacturer. Rolls Royce produces gas turbines, which are not weapons.
I simply can't make sense of your sentence which reads "non-military research demonstrates the capacity of Rolls Royce to pursue technologies with civilian applications". As far as I'm aware, all their technologies have civilian applications - or military (depending on the end user). To refer to the £5m investment in research at the University of Nottingham as 'military funds' is pretty meaningless unless you can prove that every one of the research projects funded had a narrowly specific military application. Frankly, I don't believe you can, and if I'm right then the article is simply untrue, or at best misleading.
Of course gas turbines can power warplanes. But they also power civil aircraft, ships, electricity generating plants. It's true the easy money is in defence contracts, but the product is not intrinsically military.
Don't get me wrong : most of Rolls Royce's employees have no qualms about producing turbines for military use. Many are very proud of the company's contribution to the war effort during the second world war (the Merlin engine in particular). Certainly when I was visiting there was a cosy relationship with the armed forces at senior level.
A greater problem perhaps is that their only product is a fossil fuel burner. As a very active Green Party member that is a concern to me - but even there the company's research is producing more and more fuel efficient turbines. Shortly before I moved on from Coventry Rolls Royce was developing small gas turbines for use in combined heat and power plants. I have lost contact since and don't know what happened to that project, but of course a product needs a market . . . the market for their sort of product is heavily shaped by international governments' policies.
UK governments have done a magnificent job since 1980 of exporting our manufacturing industry overseas. We are very fortunate to have retained Rolls Royce in Britain, offering first class apprenticeships and top quality research. Their viability is probably key to the survival of high end engineering in this country. I would imagine that this is well known by any engineering graduate, who is likely to treat your article with some disdain.
The articles on pages 14 and 15 actually state "Even research that has civilian applications helps arms companies succeed and thrive". This is an extremist position that I do not recall seeing in CAAT publications before. I spent several years working for diversification of the military industry with a group of campaigners and researchers in Coventry. A statement such as this is tantamount to saying "simply shut down any company that sells anything to the military". If this truly reflects CAAT's position then either I have misunderstood the campaign all these years or something has changed, and the time will have come for me to resign my membership. I'm more interested in campaigns that may actually achieve something.
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I wouldn't disagree with most of this comment.
Rolls Royce is clearly a major producer for military markets and proud of it. No-one working for the company could fail to be aware of it. It is right that it is a target of CAAT's campaigning.
The point I was trying to make is that it is not intrinsically an arms manufacturer. I take the point about the the specific customisations for military platforms, but a gas turbine is still a gas turbine.
While governments are still keen to pour taxpayers' money into propping up the 'defence' industry and promoting horrendous and probably corrupt deals like the Al-Yamamah one, companies like Rolls Royce will take that easy option.
I don't believe there is any such thing as 'business ethics'. The essential 'ethic' of business is money-making, and the only constraints on that are the market, and political governance. What we see is a massive failure of political governance, especially since the end of the Cold War, which saddles us with the appalling white elephant of Trident - the most expensive government job creation scheme anyone could imagine.
In the run-up to the 1997 election the Labour Party proposed a Defence Diversification Agency to replace DESO, in recognition of the fact that the end of the Cold War would make defence jobs increasingly vulnerable. No sooner had they been elected than all such talk evaporated. It was not exactly a surprise to me : at a meeting I attended with the responsible Shadow Minister, he turned up wearing a Navy tie.
So for me it's a question of strategy. There seems little point campaigning against Rolls Royce. Highlight what's going on, fine, but what do we expect them to do? It's Government that should be the target of campaign strategy. And my point is, Rolls Royce is in a position to adapt to changing government strategy on arms deals. They toyed with it while I was visiting -- they set up a technology spin-off facility exploring new gas turbine related products and markets. but I don't think it survived long -- there was no incentive.
My other point is that from a government perpective Rolls Royce is needed as an élite manufacturing company. They are multinational, it's true, but mainly (I think) because the development costs of new gas turbines are so high they have to collaborate with their overseas competitors on different bits of the projects. They still have a massive presence in the UK.
So Rolls Royce is the 17th largest arms-producing company in the world, with $4.3 billion in annual military sales to over 100 countries, including engines for fighter jets, military drones, attack helicopters, destroyers, aircraft carriers, attack submarines and nuclear weapons platforms, but you maintain that it is “not intrinsically an arms manufacturer”? What are your criteria for calling a company an arms manufacturer?
You say that “a gas turbine is still a gas turbine” as if all Rolls Royce does to produce military engines is make a few “specific customisations” to a standard product. This is a gross understatement of the enormous amount of work the company puts into developing products specifically for military applications.
Of course Rolls Royce has expertise in gas turbines, but the company still spends years and tens of millions of pounds developing each military engine. For example, the XG-40 / EJ200 took over 10 years to develop – a huge project that was from the outset specifically about producing a multi-role fighter engine.
To see arms production solely as a failure of politics is to ignore the malign influence that arms-producing companies have on government strategy. This is a key reason why “governments are still keen to pour taxpayers’ money into propping up the ‘defence’ industry”. The “revolving door” between arms companies and government allows arms companies to effectively buy off ministers and high-ranking civil servants.
For example, in 2006 Rolls Royce appointed the outgoing head of the Army to its International Advisory Board; in 2010 Rolls Royce hired the MoD’s Science & Technology Director General as its Chief Scientific Officer, and in 2012 David Cameron appointed Rolls Royce’s Chief Executive to the Convervatives’ Economic Recovery Committee, from where he successfully lobbied for £45 million of government funding, part of which was spent on a new factory in Singapore to make military jet engines for the Asian market.
You seem to contradict yourself, first agreeing that “It is right that [Rolls Royce] is a target of CAAT's campaigning” and then saying that “There seems little point campaigning against Rolls Royce.”
You may not believe that “there is any such thing as 'business ethics'” and that Rolls Royce has no choice but to make and sell military machines, but I do not think that we should absolve arms-producing companies so easily. Similarly, the fact that Rolls Royce is important to the UK as “an élite manufacturing company” doesn’t mean that they should get a free pass to carry on arming authoritarian regimes around the world. Companies like Rolls Royce should be held to account, and if government will not do it, then civil society should.
You say that the only constraints on businesses are the market and the government, but I think there are more: Individuals can refuse to work for unethical companies, activists can demonstrate and blockade, and campaigns can work to expose arms companies and to change the prevailing culture so that a career in the “defence” industry is not seen as respectable, but shameful.
By 'intrinsically an arms manufacturer' I guess I mean a company that makes weapons rather than components for weapons (i.e. guns, munitions, military airframes, tanks etc) and which therefore cannot convert to civilian production without totally abandoning their 'product line'.
I fully accept that Rolls Royce have dug their claws into the military market so deeply that were that market to suddenly disappear they would have to drastically and rapidly downsize. I didn't know they were producing power units for drones. Maybe that's what happened to the mini-turbines they were developing for civilian CHP plants when I left in 1995, in which case, what a tragedy.
The revolving door is appalling, I agree. The way I see it, though, is that business is amoral - indeed the whole capitalist project is amoral - and it is only what you would expect a business like Rolls Royce to do. By all means protest and tell the world about it, but the only thing that will make any difference to company policy is if markets start disappearing and share prices start getting affected. It is an intrinsically amoral system which depends utterly on a strong ethical framework applied from without by government and the law. And instead of governing we have the degrading spectacle of a Prime Minister touring the Middle East flogging fighter jets to unsavoury regimes. It makes me ashamed to be British. And it's so desperate — I'm not convinced there's really a market for these things. These weapons are being used as bargaining chips in international relations -- like Trident, largely useless. The whole business is skating on thin ice and the sooner this is recognised and government steers a different path the better.
So I agree with you : Rolls Royce should not be given a free pass by government to flog its products for military purposes. Government should be steering it in completely the opposite direction.
My point is, of course, that Rolls Royce has every choice not to sell its products into the military market, and has plenty of opportunity to convert to civilian production. (One advantage of military sales, I suppose, is that you can get foreign governments to test your products for you for free. And with a bit of luck a few planes will get shot down to stimulate demand for replacements).
Overall, however, I think you have convinced me : the whole arms manufacturing culture (a legacy of empire that has done us no favours) has to change in order for government to change. We have to reach a point where the seedy capitulation to the military industry is widely acknowledged for what it is and starts to become an electoral liability. That may well involve public campaigning and education, and it's right that engineering students are made to think about what they're getting into and whether they're happy to have their skills prostituted. There are also strong economic arguments for diversification into the civilian sector : military-dependent jobs are vulnerable and probably only exist because they are massively subsidised by the British taxpayer and dodgy foreign governments.
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