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Armed Forces

My Lords, I join all noble Lords who have thanked the noble Baroness, Lady Park, for, and congratulated her on, obtaining this important and timely debate. I say it is timely, because if there is any time of the year when the nation focuses on its Armed Forces it is, sadly, this time of year marked by festivals and ceremonies of remembrance. It is interesting this year, more than in any other year I can remember, that in addition to remembering the sacrifice of people in the past, attention has been drawn to the sacrifice of the young men and women currently fighting in two wars whose fierceness is far greater than any war that I and my noble and gallant colleagues—other than the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Bramall—have had to face. The noble Baroness, in introducing her speech, used two phrases about which I have been thinking ever since. She said that she spoke with a heavy heart, but with indignation. I was reflecting on that because, as noble Lords have spoken, there has been a heavy heart certainly among my noble and gallant friends; in our careers in the Armed forces we faced neither the challenges that are currently being faced, nor the same challenges of deprivation of what we needed to do the job. My indignation is that this has been unnoticed and should not have been, given the frequent speeches, articles and attention drawn by serving, retired and other people to something that should be glaringly obvious and appears to have been ignored. The noble Baroness, Lady Park, mentioned two other words that noble Lords have picked up on—morale and pride. I shall leave pride to the end, but, following what my noble and gallant friend Lord Inge said, morale in the front line is special and unique. I cannot remember anything quite like the feeling at the time I was serving in an operational unit. It is indescribable and intangible, but, my word, it is powerful. We are concerned not just with morale in the front line of people who have a job to do, but about the morale in the whole structure of the Armed Forces. My warning to the Government is that while I would not say that morale is in imminent danger of breaking, it is fragile. I have used that word many times. It is fragile, and morale must not be taken for granted. Woe betide you if you do. Two weeks ago I attended the annual briefing of senior Army officers at which, by tradition, someone comes from an operational sector and briefs us on what it was like. This year we had the commanding officer of the Mercian group, mentioned by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mayhew. The officer was full of praise for the equipment with which his group had been provided—the Bulldog, the Mastiff, the multi-barrelled grenade launcher, the heavy machine gun and so on. But, he said, it was unfortunate that the equipment was available only in Afghanistan and they could not train on it. That is extremely short-sighted. I remember being sent to Borneo in 1965; the day before we left Malaya we were equipped with the Armalite rifle bought from the Americans. I refused to equip my whole company with it. I said that we would go half with what we had trained on and half with the new one and that we would change over in Borneo. You must have people properly trained and confident in their equipment before they go on operations, because when they arrive they have to hit the ground running on day one. At that briefing two stark statistics were given to us. The first was that the Royal Anglian battle group had 135 battle casualties evacuated during its time in Afghanistan—a huge number. I was interested in the exchange between my noble and gallant friend Lord Inge and the noble Lord, Lord King, on numbers or size. One of the lessons of the first Gulf War was that our individual organisations are too small. That is what needs to be put right. If they are to sustain that level of casualties and remain operational, they will have to be bigger—or they will have to borrow from other organisations which will then not be ready to do their task when the time comes. The second statistic was that every non-commissioned officer in that battalion was involved in 60 shooting incidents during the six-month tour. That is a tremendous intensity of operations. Two nights ago at a friend’s 80th birthday party I had the great pleasure of meeting his grandson who had returned the night before from a six-month tour of duty in Iraq with the Irish Guards. I cannot say how much pleasure it gave me to talk to that fit, confident, proud young man about what he and his men had achieved. But everything that I have heard in this debate makes me concerned that we are in danger of undermining those sorts of people and the contribution that they make to the nation. The CSR has already been mentioned. At the briefing I mentioned, the reckoning was that the CSR amounted to a reduction or at best to a zero per cent increase because of all the resulting commitments. However, those present were very angry that the Treasury was clawing back the £2 billion spent on the urgent operational requirements which have been placed on the battle group in Afghanistan and for which it has been so highly praised—and it is outrageous. If you send people to war without the kit they need and you then give it to them, then well done. But if you demand that they pay for it out of what they have already been given, then you are undermining everything that is good about the operation. Of course the only alternative in this case is to take the £2 billion from other areas. Other noble Lords have addressed that point. Will it come from long-term requirements? I agree entirely with the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Boyce, when he questions whether the strategic nuclear deterrent should come out of the defence budget. It is a political weapon. It should be paid for separately and the Navy should not have to suffer. Noble Lords have mentioned the aircraft carriers and the Joint Strike Fighter that will accompany them, the Astute submarine and the Eurofighter. Those are the big spenders in the budget—are they to go? Are requirements such as the family of vehicles for the Army and the other equipment to go? Or is the covenant to be further endangered by the failure to meet all the requirements mentioned so frequently in this debate? The programme as published is simply not affordable. There are two criteria in the definition of affordable: can you afford it, or can you afford to give up what you have to give up in order to afford it? The Government have never tackled the second question. All we have had is endless promises—you will have this, you will have that and you will have the other—but we know that it cannot happen because the funding is not there. Now we have the stark message that, on top of everything else, £2 billion is being clawed back to pay for what our soldiers need to protect them on operations to which they have been committed by this Government. Many noble and gallant Lords have given their views on this as professionals and many other noble Lords have orchestrated their views as well. My view is that it is high time that the Government stopped basking in the glory of the performance of their willing and able Armed Forces—who will always do whatever they are told to the best of their ability whenever they are sent to do it. The Armed Forces do it through pride: they are proud of who and what they are and they are proud of their nation. I just hope that the Government will demonstrate sufficient pride in them to enable them to do what they do so well. If they do so, they will be entitled to take some pride in the performance. Otherwise they should shrink from taking any credit for what people are achieving in circumstances that could and should be prevented.