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Armed Forces Personnel

I welcome that comment. I draw attention also to what my hon. Friend the Member for Newark (Patrick Mercer) has regularly pointed out. If a commanding officer sets targets for all his officers to recruit and to achieve recruiting targets, it can be done. His former battalion, the Sherwood Foresters, was very well recruited as a result of that philosophy. Let me move on to training. When I visited the Colchester military festival, I found 16 Air Assault Brigade already starting its training for its second tour in Helmand, where I believe it will be deployed some time in the spring of 2008. That brought home to me how the commitments that our armed forces face today produce a relentless treadmill of operations for our front-line infantry battalions. The Defence Committee recently visited Helmand province, where we were immensely impressed by Brigadier Lorimer’s 12th Mechanised Brigade. It is doing a marvellous job, although it has its work cut out and is insufficiently supported by some of our NATO allies. Overall, there are not enough troops in theatre. NATO’s combined joint statement of requirement for Afghanistan has not been fulfilled by all the NATO nations that signed up to the principle, and once again British armed forces personnel are taking the strain. Incidentally, it is striking to see a man wearing naval uniform in the middle of the desert, but it underlines the tri-service nature of operations and how the three armed forces have integrated so well. As 16th Air Assault Brigade is commencing its training to return to Afghanistan, I asked someone, ““What equipment are you training with?”” The mobility and firepower of a vehicle known as WMIK, which is an open Land Rover with a .50 calibre machine gun strapped to its top, are vital to operations in Afghanistan. Almost all the vehicles are deployed in Afghanistan, so the entire brigade has one WMIK vehicle for training purposes in the UK and will not be able to do any training until it returns to Afghanistan. The fact that the Government appear to have been reduced to buying and providing equipment for the front line only, because they cannot afford enough equipment for the front line and for training, is affecting morale and the effectiveness of our armed forces personnel. As every soldier knows, however, sweat saves blood, and sweat on the right equipment will also save blood. If we are sending our troops to Afghanistan without their having had sufficient training on the equipment that they will use in theatre, we are putting lives at risk. I cannot put it any more clearly, but that is what the Government are now doing. I fear that there is complacency about the professionalism of our armed forces. We always ask our people to take up the slack or make up the shortfalls through their ingenuity and professionalism, but there are limits. I hope that the Minister will give me an undertaking that brigades preparing for deployment in Afghanistan or Iraq will be able to train on the equipment that they will use. Finally, I want to address two points on morale. First, I want to discuss the aftermath of the HMS Cornwall incident. I am privileged to be a member of the Defence Committee, which was briefed on General Fulton’s report earlier this week. I encourage the House to understand that the report is hard hitting and comprehensive, although it leaves some questions unanswered. That is why my right hon. Friend the Member for North-East Hampshire (Mr. Arbuthnot), the Defence Committee Chairman, has made it clear that the Committee will examine the report further, and I hope that we can make some concrete recommendations to the Government as a result. I wonder whether the Minister will confirm one thing that did not come out in Monday’s statement. The Secretary of State told the House that"““The central lesson is that we must improve our ability to identify and assess the risks that this complex environment generates, and to train and posture our forces accordingly.””—[Official Report, 19 June 2007; Vol. 461, c. 1256.]" That underlines the comprehensive nature of the failure that resulted in the capture of those sailors and Royal Marines. I understand the reluctance to find a single scapegoat for that failure; indeed, we should not scapegoat any particular service in this episode. Will the Minister confirm that HMS Cornwall was ultimately under the command of the commander of joint operations at PJHQ? It was part of a tri-service operation, the complexity of which—particularly multinational tri-service operations—perhaps led to the lack of flow of information, to which the Secretary of State referred in his statement, which contributed to an obvious mis-assessment of the threat at the time of the capture. If that is the case, will the Minister set out whether the report has considered the chain of command right to the top, which is absolutely vital for the credibility of the report? Finally, on morale, what contributes to poor morale are judgments made by the courts that add considerably to the complexity of military operations because of the number of lawyers who have to be deployed alongside the soldiers, sailors and airmen. Having studied the judgment in the case of Baha Musa, which the House of Lords decided last week, I am reassured that the international applicability of the Human Rights Act to British public bodies working overseas is very limited and does not extend to military operations. It extends only to detainees—who can blame the family for bringing the case?—contained in a British-controlled environment, even in another sovereign state. There was a dissenting opinion among the six Law Lords. Lord Bingham made it clear that he did not think that the Act extended to international jurisdiction. Article 1 of the convention, which extends the jurisdiction, was not carried into UK law. The other Law Lords understood that that was Parliament’s intention, even though Parliament expressly left out article 1 from the Human Rights Act. I am probably not explaining this particularly well, but the point is that the soldiers, sailors and airmen whom we deploy on operations now have to operate in what can only be described as a very fluid legal environment.