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Armed Forces

My Lords, I am most grateful to the noble Lord, Lord King of Bridgwater, for initiating the debate, and I take heart from the effective and penetrating way he got it going. He had considerable ministerial experience of defence in peace and war, and, having served in a famous light infantry regiment, has personal experience of the forces and the understanding of their ethos that counts so much. I am certain that the Minister of State will listen most carefully to all that is said with his usual care and courtesy, and I congratulate him very much on his promotion, which many of us on all sides of the House think is richly deserved. It is not difficult to identify matters of deep concern over this country’s defence policy. Over the past12 years, we have seen two initially not unreasonable and even acclaimed defence reviews, the Conservative Options for Change and the Government’s Strategic Defence Review, both systematically and progressively degraded by the Treasury to make them more draconian and less relevant and sustainable in the light of what had become our foreign policy and our Armed Forces’ commitment. Now figures from NATO, the National Audit Office and many other responsible sources give chilling testimony about falling strength in personnel, ships, aircraft and the paltry percentage of our national income—the GDP—that we spend on defence compared with other countries. That is all brought about by continued and continual underfunding, all when this Government have presided over a big increase in their commitments, and when our forces have been operating consistently above the most demanding combinations of operations envisaged by defence planners. Hang ““additional strains on the staff””, the only overstretch that the Ministry of Defence spokesman, more concerned about saving Ministers from embarrassment than anything else, will admit to. I am concerned about the undoubted stretch and strain on the fighting men on the ground, the air crew and their ground crew, ships at sea and the effect that it has on leave, time spent with families, retention and, most vital of all, essential professional training at every level, which has suffered disastrously. Essentially, two major problems emerge for the ministry, one immediate and one longer term. When General Richards, our recent, much-respected NATO commander in Afghanistan, said on leaving, ““Well, with what we had we didn’t do a bad job””, going on to say that more troops were now urgently needed, he was merely saying what many people, particularly noble and gallant Lords, knew only too well, and about which they had warned Ministers. That was that we had entered into a pacification operation in the north without the foresight of the inevitable threat to produce enough troops on the ground or enough helicopters in the air—with other shortages too—all accentuated by our preoccupation with Iraq. Now significantly more troops are being sent, but it is clear that this increased presence cannot be sustained as long as we continue to have a shooting war on two fronts. The Prime Minister has promised to see that the forces have the fighting power, equipment and logistic backing that they need. The extra ground troops will undoubtedly enable our forces to engage the Taliban on more favourable terms and allow them to win more local engagements. Whether those troops, and perhaps more later, will put us in a position to achieve a conclusive result is still very much open to question. As I said in your Lordships’ House last November, we really should be thinking hard about ways of containing and dealing with al-Qaeda other than engaging in what may well turn out to be an open-ended battle against the Taliban and others who for centuries have resented the presence of foreigners, let alone westerners, in their country. In any event, funding for our better equipped and sustained forces will be required for some time to come. The second problem is a longer term one that will get out of hand if a start is not made to tackle it now. Defence policy, like an insurance policy, which it virtually is, of which we have had experience in our own lives, has to be able to deal with immediate needs, which from time to time inevitably crop up, and at the same time guard against the bigger disasters which we hope will never happen but one day might. In military terms, the latter would cover the ability to deter, however that is done, to move quickly to the points of trouble, to have the training and equipment for the hard battle capability, as the Prime Minister put it, and to deal with lesser but still complicated and dangerous alarms and excursions. The whole thing comes back to funding. If the Government want to have—as they steadfastly claim they do—three or four nuclear submarines to launch a Trident replacement, and two fleet carriers and the aircraft to fly off them to give our forces strategic mobility, power projection and local air cover irrespective of the situation in the area, and they also need to provide the extra or improved equipment and support for our forces engaged now and in the foreseeable future, all that expenditure will start to come together at a crunch period from 2011. To put it bluntly, the anticipated funding will just not go round. It will be interesting to see what the Government have in mind to do about that. Will they, for instance, try to continue to cut their coat according to their cloth, and if so how? Perhaps they would do it by backtracking on their firm personnel and equipment commitments, on which they have more or less staked their reputation. Perhaps the Minister could comment on that. Or will they take the bold step of assembling more cloth? There will be other pressing requirements for increased expenditure in areas that, albeit peripheral to mainstream operations, are no less high profile, such as forces’ accommodation. As the noble Lord, Lord King, said, even after the £500 million extra now promised, at least 30 per cent of forces’ accommodation will still be unacceptably substandard four years from now. The shambles in certain aspects of medical care will never be put right unless more funding is put into it. I suppose that none of us, in the provision of our own insurance, ever expects to be fully insured, always taking into account what we can afford; but that is exactly what the Government manifestly have not done over the past eight years. Bearing in mind our rising GDP and the fact that, although the threats today are not potentially as massive as those of the Cold War, they are no less dangerous, I suggest that it is highly irresponsible that this Government are spending only just over 2 per cent of what the nation earns on what is, after all, their prime responsibility: the security of the state. So if the Government are serious about what the Prime Minister has openly said about the need to spend more on defence—Her Majesty’s Opposition appear to have endorsed this—it is up to the Cabinet to take the collective decision that in this dangerous world we are not paying sufficient insurance premiums. If that could then lead them to accept that, if necessary and if the case were properly made, defence expenditure could be allowed to rise up to a not unreasonable 3 per cent of GDP, it would be a major step forward. It would make it possible properly to manage the budget over the difficult next five to 15 years, and it would enable the Government to keep faith with and sustain that covenant with the Armed Forces, as has already been mentioned and as was eloquently enunciated by my noble and gallant friend Lord Walker of Aldringham in his maiden speech. The unphased pay award may have been a start but it came from a very low base line. Such a decision would also, above all, send a clear signal to the Treasury, just as back in the 1970s and mid-1980s the accepted—beginning with the Callaghan Government—NATO target of 3 per cent growth in real terms sent such a signal, and it would take decisions on cash squeezes out of the exclusive hands of senior Treasury officials, where they lie at the moment. However, if something on these lines is not seriously considered, I, for one, will fear for the future, when at any moment, and unless we handle properly, with vigour, skill and imagination, our joined-up defence and foreign policy and the influence that this can bring us, wider conflict may break out in the Near East, which will have disastrous effects for the peace of the whole world and the future of this country.