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Armed Forces

My Lords, I have a remarkably insecure feeling being sandwiched between two noble and gallant Lords. I was told that when you feel insecure you should ask questions; don’t say anything, just ask yourself questions and see if you can get the answers. I begin with the classic questions ““How?””, ““What?””, ““Who?””, ““When?”” and ““Where?””. I am trying to apply them to the debate today. When did we move from the Ministry of War to the Ministry of Defence? Do you ever go to war these days? If so, are you going to defend interests, and, if so, whose interests? You ask yourself, ““Who and what are we seeking to defend from who and what?””. If you add in ““Where?”” life becomes much easier because of course we are going to be worldwide. The English language is the most important language. Three billion speak it as their first, second or third language or are learning it. We still have the Commonwealth, which occupies about 20 to 25 per cent of the surface of the Earth, and Her Majesty the Queen is often head of state. I was told that the Navy has the capability to fight a war further afield than anyone else—maybe 8,000 miles away from our shores. In preparing for this debate, I tried to think of what we are seeking to defend. Historically, we seek to defend our trade and free passage on the high seas or wherever in the world. Now I wonder when we went into Kosovo what we were seeking to defend. When we went to war with Iraq—we did go to war; and I will always defend the right of a Prime Minister of a country such as ours to go to war—what were we seeking to defend? When we go into Afghanistan, or wherever else in the world, what are we seeking to defend? Then, how long are we going to stay there? If I ask where the Calcutta Cup came from, your Lordships will automatically assume that it came from Calcutta. It did; it came from Calcutta when the British Army used to play rugby at the Ballygunge Cricket Club against the Scots. When the Scots were not enough, the Army played against the Irish and the Welsh as well. That meant that in order to develop a cricket and rugby team you had to have an Army force there for a long period of time. About the same time the Army moved to play rugby in Afghanistan, which meant the troops were there for a long time. Your Lordships will remember too that the Kandahar club, which moved to Wengen when they first started downhill racing, came from when the British Army skied in Kandahar. It was said that we have been in Kosovo for 17 years. I worry that we might well find that we are in Afghanistan for 17 years. I know that country quite well from my days when I chaired the Government’s Middle East trade committee. I know Iraq for the same reason. I also know that these countries to some extent would like us to stay. For the Afghanis, it is a wonderful situation. The warlords used to fight each other and burn each other’s crops. That was the punishment and the competition. Now their crops are defended by other armies and the drug pattern begins and grows on. For part of my life I had to deal with alternative crops for what we would call ““the weed of wisdom””, or ganga. That was extraordinarily difficult to advance. With greenhouses you might possibly be able to get flowers, fruit or vegetables, but this pattern of trade still followed. On flowers—I must not mention the countries—we found a major market for carnations which went into Miami extraordinarily cheaply. The whole crop was bought. They found a new way to preserve these flowers with a white substance which would absorb the moisture so that they could be distributed throughout the United States, and the white substance was cocaine. So if the Armed Forces are trying to defend drug production that is the wrong thing to do. It is another matter if they are there to keep peace, but it requires a considerable effort. In order to have the best Armed Forces in the world, which I believe we have, they must have the best equipment in the world. Of that there is no doubt. I had a word with some of my friends in the Health and Safety Executive. I asked what they would do if asked to write a report on the health and safety of the Armed Forces in the countries of the world. It is pretty frightening because you are not safe unless you have good equipment, and if the equipment does not match up to the quality of your people then something must be done about it. The relative cost is not that high. To me that should be a great priority. The facilities should be available to our Armed Forces. On capital equipment, it seems to me that at the moment the more expensive a bit of kit is, the more vulnerable it is to terrorist activity. Even an aircraft carrier now has to be defended by a vast fleet of ships if it is to go about its business. I recall during the Trafalgar Day celebrations it was once suggested that maybe an American carrier would come to the Solent. The noble and gallant Lord, Lord Boyce, will remember this. I was told that, no, they had to have a very large cordon sanitaire around them, so they could not be in English waters because they would not necessarily be safe. As regards what might be able to bring down an Apache helicopter, I have even seen proposals and suggestions that a gaucho in America could bring one down with a bolero. So we have to say that our kit, unless it is expensive and part of a large team, is not safe. On fighting in the hills of Afghanistan or wherever, it is as well possibly to think of the First World War and how many people survived bombardments by being underground. I think that it is an extraordinarily difficult job. As regards the technologies and things that we can now find to determine where the enemy is, I turn to a small role I have as secretary of the Parliamentary Space Committee. I was not looking forward to spending three full days in the Senate in Brussels listening to people presenting the latest space technology, but I found that the development projections for satellites were extraordinarily interesting. They are the future for determining where an enemy is. The surveillance that comes from some of the newer kit is quite outstanding. So I asked: ““How many satellites are there in space at the moment?””. No one could tell me. They could tell me that there were 92,000 bits of metal floating around that might cause danger to someone at some time in the future. So I said that I had heard the pretty reasonable proposal that there were 573 and everyone said, ““Yes, that is probably about right””. I had actually made up that proposal myself. Then I wanted to know how many military satellites there were, what were their purpose and how long they would be up there for. They said that they could do almost anything in the world, but then I realised that it was not so long ago that two bright entrepreneurs decided that they would try to find the source of the Nile. Unfortunately, there was a death due to tribalism in Uganda, but none of the satellites could find the source of the Nile. Having spent some time considering developments, I realised that we should probably be spending more on satellite communication. Just out of interest, because, as your Lordships may know, we have Skynet 5 and Paradigm, which enable the Armed Forces to communicate with their families, I spoke to them yesterday. I said, ““Can I say something about this?””. They said, ““We must check with the MoD first, because it is our client and might be upset””. So perhaps the Minister might say something about Skynet 5 and our forces’ ability to communicate. As that communication improves—it will be only a few years before, with a hand-held piece of metal with a screen on it, we will be able to communicate worldwide without wires—we should devote a little more attention to space. Our space budget is half that of Italy, which is half that of Germany, which is half that of France. I do not know as much as I would like about this, but I asked: ““Is it possible to disable a satellite?”” They said, ““Probably; what would you suggest?””. I said, ““We used to have anti-radar stuff during the war. We dropped silver paper out of aeroplanes to destroy signals. Would it be possible to drop silver paper or metallic sand around satellites?””. The answer was yes. Have we given some thought to what happens if satellites are disabled and what is their role in future? I am not sure where we go from here. We have 20,000 troops in Germany, 8,000 in Iraq and 1,500 in Afghanistan. If we need to be able to deploy more, we know that we have that capability. We know that we will have new aircraft carriers but, to me, above all else, we must equip our forces here and abroad to the highest standards—at least as high as their capabilities.