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Defence Procurement

My hon. Friend is completely right. As I said to the hon. Member for Crosby (Mrs. Curtis-Thomas), the prime point was the UN vote, on which the vote in this House was conditional. I agree with my hon. Friend, however; there is an unparliamentary word and I cannot use it, but suffice to say, it was fantastically unwise and not very brave of the Government to take a risk, knowing that they were going to send into war troops who did not have the proper equipment, not to go ahead and make the order. I remember that in the Falklands war, ships were put to sea with civilian crews still on board tooling them up, and they got off at the Ascension islands. We should have been much more energetic, but I pay tribute to the work at the Ministry of Defence not only of the soldiers but of the civilians, who marvellously support our troops. When I was a Defence Minister, I was very proud to work alongside the civilian staff, who were incredibly proud of and very good at what they did. My right hon. Friend the Member for North-East Hampshire (Mr. Arbuthnot) was so right to say that because the problems of the Ministry of Defence are enormous, they are magnified tenfold. Fundamentally, however, it is one of the best-run Departments in Whitehall. Nothing is too much trouble for it, but the fact was that we were not equipped and we did not, in my view, have the correct military doctrine for what was going to follow on in Iraq. As I said, I hope that those lessons have now been learned and that we will not suffer such problems in Afghanistan. I would like the Minister to find out—I do not expect him to know—whether the architecture for the conduct of operations in Afghanistan is different from that for Iraq. Has it changed? We know of the terrible problems of the Department for International Development, which is unable to act in areas that are remotely hostile because of the views that it takes. That position is perfectly reasonable. Nevertheless, there are still people who are worried about the conduct of operations in Afghanistan, and I would be grateful if the Minister reassured me on that. In my judgment, most of the programmes that we have been discussing today remain unaffordable. I want to make two points about the Navy. First, the carrier programme is much too expensive. The ships are much too big and the aeroplanes are much too costly. We will need to look at it all again and decide whether we need ships of that size. I totally endorse, as did the 1997 defence review and my right hon. Friend the Member for North-East Hampshire, the concept of "go away"—of being fully deployable. There is no doubt that the "fully deployable" concept is right, and that the carriers would be useful, but is the air power required proportionate to or necessary for what we need, bearing in mind that we will never go to war again on an expeditionary basis without being part of a coalition, and that one part of that coalition has massive air power? My second point is that the Type 45s, the Daring class, are magnificent ships—some of the greatest that this country will ever own. Their technology is simply unmatched and they are extraordinarily powerful. However, as we have said for 10 years, ships can be in only one place at a time. I am afraid to say that the Navy is a shrunken beast; it has shrunk substantially since my right hon. Friend and I were at the Ministry of Defence, when it was also shrinking—we got rid of too many ships. However, now the Navy is suffering from a problem of critical mass. Since the Minister’s party came to power, about a fifth of the whole operational side of the Royal Navy and the Royal Fleet Auxiliary Service’s total fleet has been cut. Furthermore, frigate and destroyer numbers have fallen from 35 to 25, which is way below what the strategic defence review said was the minimum requirement to carry out the standing tasks of the Royal Navy, and the number is due to fall to 23. The number of attack submarines has been cut from 12 to eight, and will fall to seven. That is a really catastrophic situation for a maritime power—an island—that is dependent on keeping the sea lanes open. If we faced a terrible difficulty, we would have to be able to secure our sea lanes, but the truth is that we could not secure anything. We are now a very minor sea power with some wonderful people and very good but very small ships. We also have some terrible gaps. There is a serious problem. We have done what we have done throughout so much of our procurement—we have bought equipment that still lives in the cold war era. The Daring class radars are some of the most sophisticated and powerful in the world; they can enable a golf ball to be shot down at 700 miles or something. That is terribly useful, but it will not be necessary. We need many smaller ships capable of dealing with such events as the pirate operations in the lower gulf. There is no point in sending a Daring class destroyer to deal with Somali pirates—we could blow them out of the water with a .50 Browning. We would not need a fully gunned-up warship. The Danes have a good range of ships, which are much smaller and lightly armed. They carry good weapons and small crews and can operate pretty much anywhere in the world. We need such ships for the next generation of warfare. We really need three or four HMS Oceans, and, if necessary, a bigger HMS Ocean to carry a short take-off/vertical landing version of whatever aeroplane is involved. We do not need enormous carriers. There is no point in having only two carriers; there have to be three if there is to be proper rotation. They will be a terrible drain on the existing surface vessels of the fleet, and we do not have enough submarines to protect them. The whole thing is geared towards a cold war concept, but all the planners will tell the Minister that, as he knows, the concept of warfare for the next 20 years will be very different from anything that went before. We are going back to the arguments about the tank and the horse, when the British Army had to be persuaded that, sadly, the day of the horse in battle had gone and that it had to be replaced by the tank and armoured car. We are at that sort of moment now, and we are building a lot of the wrong kit. That is why the future rapid effects system, or FRES, order is so important; it contains all the things required to enable soldiers to operate in a more forward way, using all the relevant communications. However, my right hon. Friend is completely right: one has almost given up on FRES ever appearing.