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Defence Policy

I agree with the hon. Gentleman’s comments, and with the point that the Committee made. That issue is crucial to the long-term success of our operations in Afghanistan. The key point is that we must retain our commitment. We went into Afghanistan because we had no alternative: it had provided a headquarters for international terrorism. If we were to leave Afghanistan and not to see this operation through, we would be back to square one in very little time, and people there would be involved in all that again. We need a strategic defence review. The review that the Government carried out in 1998 was good, and it was to some extent updated by the White Paper that followed. However, as I said in last week’s debate, if we are to make a proper assessment of the strategic environment and the sort of requirements that we will have in years to come, now is the time for another such review. It should examine our vision of where we think we fit in the world, what we will try to achieve in terms of both hard and soft power, and how we will develop capabilities to match those future objectives and the potential operations to which they might lead. We need an agile, flexible and deployable force, as stated in the 2004 comprehensive spending review. There is some way to go before we achieve that, and in a fast-changing environment, we must look forward to what we think we will need to do in years to come, particularly as we make difficult choices in our procurement budget. I warmly welcome the Royal British Legion’s campaign on the broken covenant. It is a sign of the sense of alarm in the military community that such an organisation has felt driven to mount a campaign of that sort. The welfare and well-being of the armed forces should be at the centre of any future planning and of the sort of strategic defence review for which I am calling. It is clear that we are no longer in the cold war era, and it is right that our planning assumptions are changing to reflect that. We must look forward, on the basis of the nature of the threats that we think we will face in years to come. As some hon. Members have said, those can change at quite a speed. We could not have anticipated the rise of some of the forces that are emerging in the world, nor the recent posturing on the part of the Russian Federation. In this fast-changing world, it is high time to undertake another long hard assessment, and to make the revisions to our military strategy that would better equip us to fit that new environment.