---

Armed Forces

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Inge, for introducing the debate today and I remind the House of my peripheral interest. My noble friend Lord Luke exclusively and comprehensively covered the issue of defence housing. I am grateful to him for so doing because it obviates the need for me to cover all his points. However, it is worth repeating that we are asking far too much of our service people. We need to alter the balance slightly between shiny new systems and platforms on one hand and decent service housing and accommodation on the other. On procurement, where are we with the future strategic tanker aircraft? The preferred bidder was announced some time ago. When will an order be placed? The STA seems an ideal candidate for PFI, so it is difficult to understand why the project is not making much progress. Many noble Lords have noted that defence funding has to be sufficient to provide deterrence to any potential aggressor. That was relatively easy during the Cold War. We put in place credible conventional forces and backed them up with a nuclear deterrent, and it worked without a shot being fired. During the Reserve Forces debate recently I paid tribute to the Ministers and senior officers who so skilfully prosecuted that campaign. However, current demand for operational deployment appears infinite. Currently we have Afghanistan, Iraq and the tail-end of the Balkans as significant operations, plus many others. If we were not involved in those, there are other candidates such as Somalia, Sudan, Zimbabwe and the DRC to mention a few. If those potential military interventions were backed up with the appropriate international sanctions, they would be a force for good. However, noble Lords should be aware of the risk being taken—we cannot really deploy one extra fighting brigade, even if we want to. The desirable Bowman installation project is not helping because it takes out a whole brigade while it is being Bowmanised. The demand for British deployment will not go away, as indicated by the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Inge. All Governments—this Government are no exception—measure commitments and liabilities and then provide the necessary resources or pretend to do so, but they never quite succeed. At the last election, my own party said that it would fully fund defence commitments, or words to that effect, which is very reassuring. The good news is that we have a fabulous defence capability. Very few countries in the world can deploy an armoured brigade at reach from home base—only ourselves, the US, the French and possibly the Russians can do so. Given the capability that we enjoy, we must be spending about the right amount on defence. The problem has a symptom starkly laid out by the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Inge—we are doing far too much with just too little. We should be honest with ourselves and admit that we are prepared to spend only about £35 billion. At Question Time today, the noble Baroness, Lady Amos, told the House that the Government had increased expenditure on international aid by 140 per cent. But this Government, some time ago, proudly announced a minuscule real increase in defence expenditure despite that not being matched by defence expenditure inflation or the growth in GDP. I will be having a chat with the Minister next week in the Chamber and I am sure he is looking forward to that. If we are honest, we should say how much money we are prepared to spend on defence and then determine what we can do with that while retaining a comprehensive capability and with the expectation of working in an alliance. Rather than having defence planning assumptions that we have failed to adhere to over the past three years, we should have a defence capability statement and then not demand any more from the Armed Forces. We should stick to what we can do. If we desire to do more, we need to increase defence funding. If we decide to continue at the current levels, we need to massively increase the size of the Regular Army and provide it with appropriate support from the other Armed Forces. The noble and gallant Lord, Lord Inge, mentioned the lack of a theatre reserve battle group. I was aware of that problem several months ago and I suspect that he was as well. When were the Minister and his colleagues first aware of this lack in the Afghanistan theatre? The Minister should understand that having a reserve battle group outside of the theatre is not good enough. My humble military duties involve being a watchkeeper for a formation headquarters—a brigade or higher. The biggest challenge that I experienced was not having a personal relationship with the officers in the subordinate units, so I had to develop those relationships extremely quickly on exercises and operations. The reserve battle group would be called up from outside the theatre only in extremis. That is not a good time to develop close relationships and trust, that vital component of command and control. Of course, key members of the battle group’s command team would undertake a recce of theatre, but it would still leave poor integration between the unit and the formation at most levels. That is not a very healthy situation.