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Future of the Territorial Army

I begin by paying tribute to Rifleman Jamie Gunn, Private Kyle Adams and Private Richard Hunt, who lost their lives in Afghanistan. I spoke to some of their parents this morning. The experience of attending their funerals and meeting their families has made me realise beyond any doubt that the real cost of the war in Afghanistan is not measured in money. That is irrelevant. The cost is in human lives. That is one lesson that we should all remember. My own military experience is far more humble than that of those soldiers or of many hon. Members. I spent 18 months in the Territorial Army in 104 Air Defence Regiment in Newport back in the 1980s, at a time when the TA was seen in a very different light from the way it is seen now. We were not seen as being quite the same as Regular Army troops, and we were often jokingly referred to as the SAS—the Saturday and Sunday soldiers, or in terms rather less polite than that. However, I learned quite a few lessons from the experience. Perhaps the most important was this. We used to train in three different ways. We would turn up every Tuesday night, every other weekend and for two weeks at the annual camp. I presume that the training schedule is fairly similar today. The one thing that I knew even at the age of 18, without a lot of experience of life, was that that weekly training session, the so-called drill night, was extremely important. I do not know what was going through people's minds when they thought it would be a good idea to get rid of that training. Did they think that drill night meant just a number of people marching up and down, and that that was not important? That is not the case, and it has not been the case for any unit, as far as I am aware. Drill night consisted of a little bit of drilling, yes, but also vehicle maintenance, weapons training, fitness training, map reading—a host of activities, all of which are vital soldiering activities. More than that, there was something else going on that may not have been quite so obvious to us at the time. We were knitting together and becoming cohesive as a unit. It is very important that people who are full-time civilians and part-time soldiers think of themselves as soldiers on a regular basis. That is what that one night a week enabled us to do. The amount of money that we were being paid was very small. At that time of my life, I was doing manual jobs, but I did not think the money was particularly great. Nobody was doing it for the money. It was not about the money and never has been for TA soldiers, because any one of them could go and earn far more doing something else if they wanted a part-time job. But the money is important, because it sends out a message to people who are willing to give that commitment. It sends a message that the state respects them and wants to thank them for the time that they are giving up. I can speak from personal experience only about the late 1980s. It is quite different now. The level of commitment is much greater. I never thought for one minute that by joining the TA in Newport, I would ever be sent off to war. It is highly unlikely that I would have been, and in fact I never got beyond Salisbury plain, but people who join the Territorial Army these days know that it is very likely indeed that they will end up in a war zone. The regiment that I represent, the Royal Monmouthshire Royal Engineers, has sent dozens of soldiers out to Iraq, where they have performed brilliantly. They will be deploying to Afghanistan later this year. These are people who have comfortable civilian jobs back in Monmouthshire, yet they are willing to spend six months of their life in a war zone for very little reward.