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Armed Forces Personnel

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for reinforcing my point. I am also grateful to him for acknowledging that the House has had decades of experience of balancing its responsibility to hold the Government to account with that of ensuring that the troops whom we send to carry out dangerous functions are protected and not exposed to vulnerability through public debate. There are ways of doing that, and those who have had private briefings or conversations with me outside the Chamber will know that I am open to sharing the relevant information. It is not secret. The more I share it with people whom I can trust to keep it confidential, the more safe we can make our troops on the ground. I am entirely open to any devices or procedures that allow us to exercise proper accountability and to hold proper debate, and that allow me to draw on the resource of skills and experience that many people in the House have on these matters. It might not be obvious to anyone listening, but this is not a debate about operations. However, it is entirely appropriate, in a debate about supporting our armed forces, to remind ourselves of the dangers of allowing the impression to be created that our forces are not clear about what they are being sent to do, when in fact the opposite is the case. The second thing that we owe to all our servicemen and women on operations is to provide them with the equipment and protection to do their jobs safely and effectively. Of course that protection will never be absolute. Soldiering is an inherently dangerous business. As I have said, we send our forces to do the job in Iraq and Afghanistan because they are dangerous places. But we must do the best we can to give our people the protection that they need. We must relentlessly improve our equipment and technology to counter the evolving threat. In response to that evolving threat, we have developed and brought into service two new body armour systems in the past two years: Kestrel for top-cover sentries, and Osprey for general use. Osprey is a world-leading system that has been developed and delivered in a very short time. It will further reduce the risk of life-threatening injuries from terrorist attack and is being issued to all personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan. The same applies to the protection on our vehicles. I know hon. Members are very concerned about that, after recent tragic incidents, and rightly so. The threat from improvised explosive devices—IEDs—has been evolving over the past two years, and possibly much longer. Indeed, we have some experience of the evolution of such devices in Northern Ireland. Responding to that has been one of our highest priorities. In the past two years alone, we have spent £120 million on improving force protection for our ground forces in Iraq, including electronic counter measures for Snatch Land Rovers and other vehicles. We continue to invest in further research on IEDs in collaboration with the USA, and we are determined to maintain our world-leading capability in that area. Improved armour is also part of the solution, and I assure hon. Members that additional armoured options will become available to commanders over the next year. A new patrol vehicle, Vector, will enter service in Afghanistan in 2007. We have already upgraded the protection on Warrior, Saxon and the CVR(T), and we are currently upgrading it on the FV430 vehicle. I have also directed an urgent review of what could be done now to give commanders further options. However, Snatch Land Rovers will continue to be an important option. The Army’s approach to its role in Iraq and broadly in Afghanistan—although not on certain tasks—requires a low profile and a highly mobile patrol vehicle that allows troops to engage with local people. As people will have seen from their television screens, paratroopers in Afghanistan prefer to walk the streets of towns there with soft hats on. That is not our decision, but a decision made by their commanders in the light of what they are trying to do. It is clear from the pictures relayed back in recent days that that engagement works in a substantial part of the area for which they have taken responsibility. Larger and significantly heavier vehicles, such as Warrior, might be better armoured, but they are not always suitable for the lower profile and less intimidating manner in which the Army often prefers to operate. That, in turn, feeds into the security of our forces, because their relationship with the people with whom they work is an important component of security. We must remember, however, that equipment—armour and other counter measures—is only one element of protection. According to the experts who have advised me continuously over past weeks, it is only about a third of the story. The rest is down to intelligence gathering, surveillance and proactive operations to disrupt and capture insurgents, and to the tactics that our troops adopt to minimise the risks of successful attack. I am told by experienced commanders that they sometimes choose not to be in a vehicle at all but to walk the streets, which is much safer than being cooped up in a vehicle and provides a degree of flexibility. That is another reminder of why training—the next subject that I want to cover today—is so important. Our armed forces are trained to the exacting standards required for high-intensity modern warfare and to operate in the complex operational environment of modern peace support operations. Commentators sometimes talk about ““peace making””, ““peace enforcement”” and ““peacekeeping”” as though they were mutually exclusive operations that followed sequentially. In practice, they can often happen all at the same time, sometimes in the same community, and sometimes just a few miles apart. Our forces need to train for that, and I firmly believe that they are the best in the world at managing that complex environment—carrying out military tasks but also supporting wider development and foreign policy objectives. That is why we invest so much time and so many resources in training our people to ensure that they are fully able to do the jobs that we ask them to do. The House will understand the challenge inherent in military training—taking young people from everyday life, often without qualifications, and turning them in a matter of months into skilled soldiers, sailors or airmen who are able to survive on the battlefield. Much has already been done to improve service training and the welfare of our trainees. However, the Deepcut review identified a number of areas where we must further improve. As we said in our response published last month, we intend to use that review as a blueprint for further action. We are also looking to improve our training system more widely. The defence training review will ensure that training is delivered in a modern training environment, suitable to modern living. I am aware that the review will affect the constituencies of many hon. Members. I hope that the House will understand that delivering effective training to the armed forces will be paramount in the decisions that we must take over the coming months. Meeting the operational demands of today, delivering training for the future and giving our people time to recuperate and spend time with their families has always been a challenge, and it is a more significant one at present. Senior military commanders advise me, however, that under-using highly trained troops is as bad for morale as overusing them. However, we need to strike a balance between deploying people to do the job for which they joined up, training and allowing them to spend time with their families. To help to get that balance right, we have what we call ““harmony guidelines”” for the amount of time that service personnel spend away from their families and the intervals that units should enjoy between operational tours. For example, around 18 per cent. of the Army are currently deployed on operations—a figure with which the Army is comfortable. Only 4 per cent. of the RAF, 1 per cent. of the Royal Navy and 15 per cent. of the Army currently exceed harmony guidelines, but, as ever, overall statistics are not the whole story. We must pay attention to the stress on those who exceed the guidelines, who include infantry and key enablers such as communications and logistics specialists. We keep our manning under constant review and take appropriate measures to avoid overstretch, which include the fundamental restructuring in which all three services are engaged to adjust their force elements to meet the operational requirements of the 21st century.