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Armed Forces

My Lords, I remind the House that I am still a serving TA officer; indeed, I will be doing my annual range tests, and others, this weekend. I want to pay my own tribute to all those members of the Armed Forces who have recently served on operations or are currently doing so. I enjoyed listening to the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Young. It was interesting to hear his experiences of current operations. There is nothing like seeing the operations and the high morale of servicemen in the field. Many noble Lords have already touched on defence expenditure and I agree with most of what has been said. We must either significantly increase resources or reduce commitments. We cannot continue to operate far outside the defence planning assumptions; therefore, we cannot afford to have two brigades deployed on different operations in different theatres—a point made by my noble friend Lord King. We also must recognise that we will be deployed at medium scale—that is, brigade strength—continuously for the foreseeable future. There is no end in sight and always something else that we can do. I find myself in some difficulty, as my party’s past record on defence expenditure is understandable. It would have been bizarre if, at the end of the Cold War, we had maintained our Cold War posture and expenditure. The situation now is completely different to what obtained in the early 1990s, but my party does not appear to be proposing either an increase in resources or a reduction in commitments—a point made by the noble Lord, Lord Tomlinson, and others. We are good at identifying operational problems but not so good at proposing solutions. The Government’s agreement to the Armed Forces pay review body recommendations is welcome, especially for the more junior service persons who the noble Lord, Lord Young, described. However, there is a caveat to be given about it on the need to maintain pay differentials; otherwise, there will be no differential between junior and senior NCOs. I will have to look at the report to see if that was covered. I am sure that all noble Lords hope that a significant increase in defence expenditure will be announced shortly, but as one noble and gallant Lord put it, ““Don’t hold your breath””. I want to gently cross swords with the noble Lord, Lord Bach. In his excellent speech, he correctly referred to a real increase in defence expenditure by this Government. However, given his experience, he will be well aware of the effect of defence inflation—particularly in defence procurement. I also wish that I could introduce the resource account budgeting argument, but like many of your Lordships I do not understand it. The noble Lord, Lord King, and others talked about risk; a real risk of permanent damage to our defence capability. The problem to which I believe he was referring is that we are training for ““the War””—current operations, in other words—but not training for all-out, high intensity war. The reason is that individuals and formations are simply not available to train, since they are training for current operations. A senior officer told a recent meeting that force readiness, or combat power, could be shown to be something like: ““logistics times concepts times manpower times leadership raised to the powerof TEE””, where TEE is training, experience and education. We are currently cutting back severely on formation level training: even the Med Man exercises in Canada have been reduced. That is the long-term damage to which senior officers refer. We are building a gap into the training, experience and education of our officer corps. My noble friend Lord Freeman introduced the topic of reserves in the TA, and I agreed with everything that he said. There are three problems: the number of officers, the number of soldiers and the number of man training days. Cutbacks by this Government and its predecessor have made many TA units and sub-units unviable. They are simply too small and/or too geographically spread out. Furthermore, changing patterns arising from greater efficiency in industry and commerce have made it harder to pursue a TA career. The noble Lord, Lord Young, described similar problems arising for the regular Army. The strength of the TA is now about 32,000, but I can remember when it was nearly double that. Nevertheless, the TA still provides about 10 per cent of our current deployed strength. There is a pretty serious problem with junior officer direct entry, which could best be described as dire. The Minister should not take comfort from the statistics; figures do not show that a large proportion of TA officers are commissioned from senior NCO or warrant officer rank. Those are very good, committed people who attend very well; however, they are not junior direct entry officers. My noble friend Lord Freeman touched on man training days. In my experience, which extends over30 years, restrictions on man training days are extremely damaging for a TA unit. Every time MTDs have been restricted, unit training concentrates on mandatory training and the associated tests. Interesting, imaginative training falls by the wayside—as does retention and recruiting. I listened with interest to the comments of the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Inge. I visited Afghanistan over the New Year with the noble Viscount, Lord Slim; I was grateful for his kind comments. The noble and gallant Lord is infinitely better qualified than me to predict success or failure in Afghanistan. However, in answer to the noble Lord, Lord Tomlinson, who is not in his place, we cannot affect the outcome in Iraq but we can make a big difference in Afghanistan. Ministers ought to be much more frank about the timescales involved; in the case of Afghanistan, I do not think that we can expect to see significant improvements becoming apparent in fewer than about five years. So, we must be patient; the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Inge, frightened me slightly by talking about 20 years, but I suspect—or hope—that we will not be at brigade strength then. As for the poppy, I wonder whether we worry too much about this crop. An ill-timed, ill-targeted eradication programme could well cause more problems than it would solve. The challenge is to extend the influence and power of the Government of Afghanistan everywhere; we can do that with reconstruction, but that itself requires security. Military freedom of manoeuvre, however, requires evidence of progress in reconstruction and development, which is a slow process. An example is the Kajaki Dam project, where the Royal Marines are providing security so that the hydro-electric power station can be rebuilt and repaired; that will then provide electricity to improve the lot of the average Afghan. That process will eventually make the Taliban irrelevant, but only slowly.