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UK Armed Forces (Operational Direction)

I will write to the hon. Lady on those two specific points. It is important, for the reasons expressed by the hon. Lady, to accept that there have been procurement mistakes, but we want to learn from those and to ensure that we develop and produce high-quality, battle-winning equipment at the forefront of technology. We continue to make progress, but when things go wrong, we acknowledge that and want to put them right. Referring back to the title of the debate and operational direction, it is important to remember that our nation has a proud history of responding to the challenges of an uncertain world, and we must continue to do so. We recognise that the major security challenges are those posed by international terrorism, by the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and by failed and failing states. Our armed forces are proving that they can meet those challenges. However, while our focus remains heavily on current operations in an uncertain world, we must also be ready to meet tomorrow’s threats and challenges. We cannot assume that they will be the same as those facing us today. Let us just look at the range of operations that our forces have faced in recent years. Sierra Leone, East Timor, Kosovo, Bosnia, Lebanon, disaster relief in Pakistan and the Indian ocean, and the early stages of the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan had little or no counter-insurgency element, but there is no guarantee of whether the next ones will. Other fast-accelerating trends are complicating the picture. Issues such as climate change, changing demographics and new technologies may further exacerbate existing security problems or present security challenges of their own. For example, changes in the geopolitical balance might even result in the re-emergence of state-on-state warfare in the longer term with an impact on our interests, especially in an increasingly globalised world. We cannot predict whether and how those developments will evolve and interact, or how they will affect us. It would be irresponsible not to maintain armed forces that are balanced, agile and adaptable. That provides some insurance against the inherent uncertainty of the future. We need balanced forces capable of responding to a broad range of scenarios, and we must acknowledge that, once a capability is removed, it takes many years to get it back, if it can be restored at all. Nor can we rely on our allies to provide the capabilities that we need in the circumstances that we need them. However, I accept the hon. Lady’s important points about our relationship with the United States and our other partners. Against that background, we must maintain the capability to undertake conventional hard-war fighting, counter-terrorism, intelligence gathering, peace-enforcement, peacekeeping and humanitarian operations. To prepare for the future, we must sometimes preserve capabilities that might be more likely to be used tomorrow than today. But we should not forget that major platforms, such as aircraft carriers, Typhoon and nuclear submarines, have a role to play in today’s operations. Typhoon will provide the RAF with a world-class, multi-role aircraft for use on expeditionary operations. Our Astute class nuclear submarines, such as those currently in service, will be equipped with land attack missiles that are capable of delivering effect many hundreds of miles from the sea, as they did in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq. New aircraft carriers allow us to project force across the world in a range of scenarios from diplomacy and persuasion to war fighting, just as their predecessors did in Sierra Leone, Kosovo and Iraq. We shall make an announcement on carriers when the time is right. We must continue rigorously to examine our relative priorities to allow focused investment in those that we need most, and we do so. The hon. Lady was right to draw attention to the need to ensure that we have the balance right between meeting the very demanding operations that our forces face now and the less predictable challenges of the future.