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Armed Forces Personnel

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his support. Indeed, I am grateful for the support of Members on both sides of the House, particularly, through me, their support for those who are doing this very difficult job in Afghanistan and paying the terrible price that they have been paying recently for their engagement particularly with the Taliban. We accepted the responsibility for doing this in the context of ISAF and under the leadership of NATO. We have made it very clear to NATO that we expect our allies in NATO to step up to the plate and to provide the level of support that we know that they have and can be deployed to deliver the results that NATO has taken responsibility for delivering. I will continue to do that through the appropriate NATO channels, and through General Richards and others, to ensure that people deliver what they are capable of delivering. My principal responsibility, as I have used the first part of my speech to repeat to the House, is to ensure that the troops in the Helmand taskforce whom we have sent to take part in the reconstruction of the part of Afghanistan for which we have taken responsibility are given the equipment to do the job that they need to do, and, in particular, given the security to be able to do it as safely as they possibly can, recognising that it is a very dangerous part of the world. In short, that is why we sent Apache attack helicopters with artillery and why we sent some of our finest troops there to do the job in the first place. If hon. Members will allow me, it is time that I made some progress on the broader waterfront of our debate. Yesterday’s death, together with other recent fatalities in Afghanistan and Iraq, remind us that, although the nature of modern conflict is different in many ways from conflicts of the past, the ultimate human cost is the same. Over recent weeks, I have had the privilege of meeting many of our servicemen and women, who come from all parts of the UK, serve in all parts of the UK and across the globe and display the courage and professionalism that make our armed forces the envy of the world. However, I have also been reminded of how, as well as being ultimate professionals, they are, first and foremost, husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, and sons and daughters. We must support and respect them not only as professionals—I stress that they are professional—but as people. That is the subject of our debate today—how we support our armed forces. The first point to make is that we are asking our armed forces to do more than ever, placing greater demands on them and their families, and therefore placing a correspondingly greater duty on ourselves to support what they are doing. The Ministry of Defence currently has more than 24,000 service personnel on operations in more than 15 countries. That includes around 7,200 in Iraq, around 5,000 in Afghanistan, and around 900 in the Balkans. More than 300 are supporting various UN deployments around the world. There are approximately 8,500 in Northern Ireland, although the welcome political progress, albeit not yet completed, of recent years has allowed troop numbers to be reduced there.