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Armed Forces

My Lords, can we just kill the Options for Change argument? I took some responsibility for that; the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Vincent, personally oversaw it in this House and Sir Richard Mottram, who is now a senior servant of the present Government, played an outstanding part in that review. If we had the forces now that Options for Change arranged that we should have, we would be in a much happier position than we are. We did that against the background of an obvious reduction in threat: the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union.