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Armed Forces Personnel

We should think carefully about what was said by the hon. Member for Llanelli (Nia Griffith) about the difficulty of procuring some very complex services. She was right to say that we should value civilians in the public service and the Ministry of Defence, who provide extremely good value for money. I also pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Sussex (Mr. Soames), who himself paid tribute to our armed forces on behalf of the whole House, eloquently and passionately. As the Secretary of State pointed out in his opening speech, this debate is about how we support our armed forces. I do not wish to make any personal criticism of Ministers, but I think that as we see one operation after another unfold before us, we must conclude we cannot continue to support our armed forces in the present fashion. I joined the hon. Member for Colchester (Bob Russell) at the memorial service for the two soldiers from the 2nd Battalion the Parachute Regiment who were killed in Iraq earlier this year. Talking to the men, one is aware that there is a long tradition of healthy contempt among the junior ranks for the senior ranks, particularly those wearing red tabs who seem to make decisions that are remote from the reality of the front line. That tension is inevitable, but, talking to soldiers on that occasion, I sensed that the gulf between the reality of the front line and those who make the decisions in high places in the Ministry of Defence was widening. As I will explain, I do not think that the chiefs of staff are entirely to blame. We are facing new circumstances which it is up to us politicians to address. My hon. Friend the Member for Woodspring (Dr. Fox) spoke of the mismatch between commitments and resources. I wish to widen the debate and speak of the inability of the modern Ministry of Defence to task military operations in a way that minimises the risks and increases effectiveness. That goes to the heart of the relationship between our military services and the politicians. The Secretary of State spoke with passion, eloquence and a command of his brief, but I must tell him that in the opening exchanges, he also demonstrated irritation. That is in part forgivable, but I think it demonstrates the tension that is building up between the reality of the front line and the general understanding among those who are ultimately responsible for decisions—those who sit in the House of Commons and the other place—of what our armed forces are having to confront. It is not possible for us to be effective armchair generals, and the Secretary of State was right to admonish us about the consequences of doing so, but I submit to him that that is not what we are about. No one in the Chamber is doing that today. In my opinion, there is a problem with the grand strategy of the country’s military policy, which is ultimately selling the personnel of our armed forces very short indeed. My hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Sussex said that sooner or later something would go wrong, and I suggest to him that something is already going wrong. We know about overstretch. We know about cancelled exercises, cancelled training, shortened tour intervals and urgent operational requirements eating the value out of the following year’s defence budget when equipment is purchased and the asset is kept on the MOD’s books. The Secretary of State shakes his head. If he does not know that yet, he is in for a shock. If he orders equipment as an urgent operational requirement that becomes part of the general inventory of the armed forces, the Treasury will take the money out of the following year’s budget. Therefore, following Operation Telic, when a large number of urgent operational requirements were put through, there was a serious row between the Ministry of Defence and the Treasury about the following year’s budget. The Treasury’s automatic assumption is that money will be pulled forward from the future year’s budget. There may be similar sorts of problems on that score with respect to the present operations in Afghanistan. The overstretch problem is a symptom of a much wider problem. I ask the House to reflect on the military tasks given to our armed forces in recent years. The first Gulf war was clearly a turning point. Then we had Bosnia in 1992, followed by Sierra Leone and Kosovo, where the optimism of the bombing did not really pay off until we showed ourselves prepared to pursue the possibility of a land war. Then, after 9/11 in 2001, we had Afghanistan and the fantastic success of the British-led international security assistance force, under General Sir John McColl, in Kabul. Then we had the Iraq war in 2003 and now Afghanistan again. I put it to the House that we are seeing a steady deterioration in the way that those operations are approached and resourced. For example, Bosnia, with a population of about 4.2 million people secured the resources of 60,000 NATO troops to rebuild the country. If we apply the same ratio to Iraq, with a population of approximately 19 million people, NATO would have committed some 300,000 or 350,000 troops. No wonder the occupation of Iraq has been such a failed challenge. What we have seen is a constant evolution to higher and higher-risk operations, larger and larger tasks, larger and larger demands on more and more limited military capability and ever-increasing complexity. With 36 nations currently operating in Afghanistan, with 72 sets of rules of engagement and some extremely complex, almost byzantine command structures, no one can possibly pretend that military operations are not becoming more complex. We have also seen an evolution from peacekeeping to war fighting, nation building and long-term counter-insurgency—the most difficult and complex operation of all, as my hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Sussex mentioned when he quoted from Professor Holmes’s book. Counter-insurgency is the most long term and most manpower intensive of operations, depending crucially on the number of boots that can be put on the ground at any one time. I take the House back to planning for the Iraq war. I supported the Iraq war and I would vote for it again. I continue to support our operations in Iraq. I view the war as essential to remove Saddam Hussein. Anyone reading the Iraq survey report that came out after the invasion can see what Saddam Hussein was up to. Much of the press chose not to and no one ever talks about the cost of failing to take action against him. However, we planned for the invasion and not the occupation, and the failure of planning for the occupation has certainly cost the lives of many British and allied service personnel. Why and how did that happen? I visited Umm Qasr and Basra just a few weeks after the cessation of invasion hostilities. There was calm and peace on the streets of Basra. There was no insurgency and there was an expectation that things would start to happen that never had happened. I had an exchange with the General Officer Commanding the British forces in Iraq at that time, and his response was, ““Where the hell is DFID? Why isn’t anything happening?”” It was into that vacuum that the insurgency built up and we left ourselves with a far greater problem than we ever should have had to face. Why did that occur? Was it poor intelligence? Both the British and the Americans were certainly reliant on far too few Iraqi sources in terms of what to expect after the invasion. There was a lack of understanding of what invading a country actually means. We had had it—dare I say it?—easy in Bosnia, and very easy in Kuwait. This was a very different challenge. I remember the right hon. Member for Ashfield (Mr. Hoon) joking on the Floor of the House about the liberation of regime assets as the invasion took place. Neither he nor—I confess—I truly understood what the looting presaged about the meaning of the complete breakdown of order and stability for the long-term future of the occupation of Iraq. The planning also broke down because there was a collapse of collective responsibility in Her Majesty’s Government before the invasion. The Department that might have been responsible for planning more effectively and for advising the Prime Minister more effectively on the future of Iraq failed to do so because the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Ladywood (Clare Short) was pursuing her own private agenda. I often ask myself what the Prime Minister and President Bush said to each other at that time about the post-invasion future of Iraq. I reflect that Baroness Thatcher might have taken President Bush rather more to task, insisting that there would not be an invasion of Iraq until such—