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Defence in the World

Indeed, and I listened with interest to my hon. Friend's remarks about military vehicles. I commend her campaign and the attention she has given to the issue. It is right that Ministers should be put on the spot for the decisions that they have to make, although I acknowledge the difficulty of those decisions and the trade-offs that have to be made. It is important that we have hon. Members willing to dig down into the detail and track procurement decisions. My hon. Friend has done a signal service in holding Ministers to account on the issue, and that is how Parliament should work. My cousin, Captain Ferguson, was ambushed when riding in a Stryker vehicle. It is well regarded by the US army, but that did not stop him being nearly killed when it was hit in Baghdad. One of the soldiers in the vehicle was killed and the young soldier sitting next to him was badly wounded. My cousin was lucky enough to survive and the vehicle was able to drive away from the ambush. My cousin's presentation was a remarkable story of 15 months in Iraq, in 2007-08, from a platoon commander in the US army. It was particularly instructive to hear how much of the US concept of operations in Iraq had become more like the British one—in terms of hearts and minds, and living alongside the community in which they were operating in order to draw intelligence from it and take the fight to the terrorists. One can only reflect on that change and what happened to the British forces in Basra—there was almost an inversion of roles over the last six years. Rather more sombrely, and again involving what I would regard as my family—my former regimental family—on Saturday, Lance Corporal Nigel Moffett became the first fatality of the Light Dragoons in operations in either Iraq or Afghanistan. The regimental family of a regiment the size of the Light Dragoons is quite small. There are only about 400 or so serving in the regiment at any one time, and that fatality brings home the pain and pride in the sacrifice made by Lance Corporal Nigel Moffett. I did not know Lance Corporal Nigel Moffett. I left the regiment a rather long time ago now and he joined it in 2003. In reading the tributes paid to him by his commanders, his contemporaries and his father, one is struck by and able to visualise the sort of character that this young man was. I want to take this opportunity to draw on those tributes and to try to give the House the sense of the sort of young men and women who are serving our country on operations today. His squadron sergeant-major, of C Squadron, the Light Dragoons, Sergeant-Major David Rae, said in tribute:""My first memory of Moff was of a young lad about to learn his trade in Bovington. Even at an early age he was not convinced his aspirations would be met in the regiment he was allocated; instead he wanted to serve as a reconnaissance soldier.""I would see him daily with a 50lb…pack on running the training areas to become fitter and stronger than those around him. I enquired as to why he was training so hard whilst others were enjoying the freedom gained from leaving Basic Training, his answer was simple, 'I want to be a 'recce' soldier and I need to convince them I am going to be one'. These words and his dedication had me wishing if only every young man had this zest for soldiering and this commitment to their chosen career. He was granted his wish and joined The Light Dragoons.""Again we crossed paths when I assumed my position as Squadron Sergeant Major. Moff was more experienced having been on tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, and unbelievably, fitter and stronger than when we first met. He was the Squadron Physical Training Instructor, and to a man, we all paraded under him for PT with more than a little apprehension of how we would fair under his 'training'.""Moff took no prisoners and never eased off, regardless of how hard people were blowing and regardless of what rank they were. The Legion"—" that was the nickname of C Squadron the 13th/18th Royal Hussars when I was in it, and is now the nickname of C Squadron, the Light Dragoons—""expected nothing less than a professional approach from him and we all benefited hugely from his expertise."" His commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Gus Fair, who has a special forces background, said:""He relished his role as a Physical Training Instructor and was always the first to volunteer for a course or adventurous training. His dedication, fitness and sheer enjoyment of his work marked him out as a star of the future and a role model to the junior soldiers.""He died at the top of his game and showed all the potential of realising his ambition of serving as a badged member of UK Special Forces."" However, it is his father's tribute that is the most moving:""Nigel felt he was prepared for operations in that he was well trained and had the right tools for the job. Both he and his family understood that ultimately he could die although we didn't want this to happen. Ultimately, Nigel was a soldier."" This week, we have had almost a fatality a day. The fact that Lance Corporal Nigel Moffett has as part of his regimental family someone who has ended up in the House of Commons is purely a coincidence, but the tributes paid apply to all the soldiers who have died over the past week and the perhaps more than 300 soldiers—I do not know the numbers—who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan serving our country since 2003. We should also not forget that for every fatality that we mark at Prime Minister's questions by naming these soldiers—now, seemingly, every Wednesday—rather more seriously wounded soldiers are coming back from theatre whose lives will be completely dominated by the experience that they have suffered serving our country. Of course, in addition to that, we are seeing just the tip of the iceberg, in terms of the psychological consequences for soldiers who are taking part in operations of an intensity perhaps unseen in large parts of the second world war, despite their coming from a country that is effectively at peace. We, as a country, obviously have to pay our debt and make sure that soldiers who have been wounded seriously, physically and psychologically, are supported properly. We also owe the soldiers who are serving us something else. I shall now make, as gently as I can, a rather serious political point. The Americans are seriously reconsidering their strategy in Afghanistan. That has important implications for how we conduct our operations in Helmand province. Our forces in Helmand province are being joined by a large number of US forces as we speak. Sadly, whatever the merits and capabilities of Defence Ministers, we have a Government and a Parliament that have lost their authority, and there is now a serious requirement. If we are to discharge our debt to soldiers who are fighting and dying for our country, we must regain the authority of the Government and the Parliament that those soldiers serve. In the circumstances, that can be done only by the people giving a new mandate to a new Parliament and Government. I hope that Ministers and people more widely will reflect on the fact that right now, we in Government and Parliament are not giving the quality of leadership that we should give to those men and women serving on our behalf. The speech made by the shadow Defence Secretary, my hon. Friend the Member for Woodspring (Dr. Fox), and the speech with which the Secretary of State opened the debate contained important reflections on the conduct of our operations in Afghanistan. Afghanistan and Pakistan cannot be taken separately. At the strategic level, they must be dealt with together. There are obviously particular problems about our ability and capacity to give direct help in Pakistan, as my right hon. Friend the Member for North-East Hampshire (Mr. Arbuthnot), the Chairman of the Defence Committee, made clear. However, in a sense, and in strategic terms, Pakistan is a much more important entity than Afghanistan. The threat from Pakistan's weapons of mass destruction, the size of its population, and the size of the British Pakistani population—given that I am shadow Minister with responsibility for counter-terrorism, I am only too aware of the domestic issues in that regard—mean that Pakistan is much more important than Afghanistan, but they are very much linked. On Afghanistan, I want to reinforce what my hon. Friend said about localism; he referred to the provincialisation of policy there. That is extremely important. Due to issues of geography and ethnicity in Afghanistan, a central authority has always struggled to exercise authority in a comprehensive way over the whole country, and if that is the model that we are trying to follow, we simply will not succeed. It would appear that we are learning, albeit all too slowly, about the methods that will achieve our objectives. Last year I was lucky enough to see the young officer cadets of the Afghan national army being trained by British forces in Kabul. As has been said in this debate, the training and mentoring—effectively the creation—of that army is gradually emerging as an important success. Of course, that sits alongside the catastrophic failure of the training and development of the Afghan national police. It is the Afghan national police with whom the average Afghan is in contact daily. Certainly when I was in Afghanistan a year ago, their corruption, criminality, ineffectiveness, inefficiency and the rest appeared to be making a more negative than positive contribution to our potential success in the conflict. I was struck by the parallel that my hon. Friend drew with the Charge of the Knights operation, and there does appear to be a parallel, given the Americans' entry into the southern part of Helmand province and the Prime Minister's indication, which my hon. Friend quoted, of a change in the nature of the British role in Afghanistan. We should be involved in an informed way in those negotiations, so that we can see what they mean in terms of the number of troops who are committed, and for our future commitment to, and concept of, British operations in Afghanistan. It is difficult to be a part of those negotiations, however, when the country is in political limbo and the future of the Government is uncertain. The Secretary of State's speech also contained some important reflections. He answered my intervention—up to a point—about the balance of resources between the Department for International Development, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Ministry of Defence in contributing to reconstruction, to reconciliation and to rebuilding failed states. However, he did not quite get around to saying this: conflict is probably the most important driver of poverty, and, if we cannot address conflict, we cannot address poverty. We will have to look seriously at the balance of resources and compare the money that DFID appears to have with that which the Foreign Office and the MOD have to devote effectively to defence, diplomacy, infrastructure building, state building and everything else. There is a complete imbalance between the interests of the people whom we are trying to serve, not least in their simple relief from poverty, and the very much wider set of British national interests that must be secured in the states that we seek to help. The Secretary of State introduced an interesting discussion about cyber-security. From the words that he used, he appeared to talk about the MOD's responsibility to secure its own information technology, but, given the capacity for a cyber attack, from a state-sponsored hit all the way down to terrorists trying to attack the information technology that controls key parts of our infrastructure and, even, to the lone hacker, we must have a better discussion of cyber-security. Particular thought must be given to, and an examination made of, the MOD's role and responsibility for securing civil national infrastructure, because, if information technology systems were attacked from outside by whatever source, there would be crippling consequences for the United Kingdom, as, indeed, there would be for any country. We, as a nation, must decide who will take responsibility for that. Currently, the lead appears to be sitting inside GCHQ, but that comes with a whole variety of compromises in respect of how public it will be in providing that defence. On that issue, there is an important debate to be had. I listened with wry amusement to the remarks about Bernard Gray's expected report on reorganising procurement. I could not help but have a sense of déjà vu about the issue, because the idea that we must be able to do procurement a great deal better appears to have been a constant over decades. From my examination of the issue during my 15-year association with it in one way or another, however, I have been struck by the fact that the United Kingdom appears to do defence procurement rather better than many—indeed, the majority of—other nations. I do not know whether we are still in such a position in the global league table, but I am slightly suspicious of a proposal to rip up all our defence procurement arrangements and of the idea that, if we replant them slightly differently, we will achieve the golden objective of producing the most efficient set of such arrangements in the world and save ourselves a vast amount of money. Systems can always be improved, but I wonder whether a revolution in the defence procurement process is necessary. I hope that when Mr. Gray produces his report, it will be looked at carefully—and sceptically, because there have been many efforts in the field, and not all have improved matters significantly.