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Armed Forces: Future Defence Policy

My Lords, I count myself among those who have serious misgivings about the success of our last two defence reviews. I would contend that the first of these in the early 1990s failed because it made some changes which were not properly thought through—housing and medical are but two of them—and that of the later 1990s never was resourced properly. The outcome has been that, ever since, commitments and resources have been out of balance, to the serious detriment of our Armed Forces and the embarrassment of our Government. Surely, whichever party is in power, we need to get this right next time. Unlike the chairmen of any business, the chiefs of staff are required to sustain the British Armed Forces’ capabilities to be successful on operations in support of government policy. Paramount in their being able to do that must exist a strong relationship between the political and the military—between our Ministers and our generals. It has to be healthy and effective on both sides. If it is not, I believe that the next defence review will be flawed and that our men and women fighting in strange parts of the world will be left in doubt as to the level of support that they can expect from the Government. I hope fervently that the events we have seen over the past nine months or so in this respect mean that the relationship between our military and our politicians has not resulted in irretrievable breakdown. The quickest route to irrelevance for our Armed Forces will be via a failure to recognise the vital correlation between what they are for and how they are designed. They must be fit for a clearly understood purpose. In deciding what they are for, as always there will be the temptation to focus on the softer end of military capabilities because, by and large, they are less expensive. Indeed, we have heard suggestions of that today. This would be folly because we cannot see 10 years hence and you cannot hope to keep the peace if those who threaten you doubt your ability to wage war. They will simply laugh in your face. So if we end up with Armed Forces that cannot be used in many circumstances, they will simply wither on the vine. There is also the risk that decisions about what they are for will give too much weight to the counsel of those who have disapproved of our experiences and our engagement in Afghanistan and Iraq. If there is no political will for our military forces to be used, they will not go on operations. If they do not go on operations, they will gain no experience, and without experience they cannot hope to provide us with the sort of success that our governments have traditionally looked for. Again, they will wither on the vine. Of course, our Armed Forces must continue to embrace sensible change. We have heard already that the strategic environment has changed quite dramatically, and that the threats we face as a nation have changed beyond all recognition since the end of the Cold War. The way we deal with them has changed as well, not least because of the role we play in the military, and there is no reason to suppose that that rate of change will lessen in any way. The Armed Forces, on the other hand, are institutions which are rooted deeply in experience and tradition, strong values and standards, but the reality is that if you look back over the past decade or so, they have had to undergo changes so dramatic that many a commercial enterprise would have been brought to its knees by them. I have no doubt that the armed services will respond to whatever changes they are asked to undertake. There is, too, a fundamental importance in the "balance" between the marriage of ideas, technology and people. We have seen an explosion of ideas and technology over the past 10 or so years, and their application across the spectrum of warfare has been beneficial in many ways. But while there may come a time when technology will transform the world, we are certainly not there yet. The one constant in that equation is people. We must not allow our Armed Forces to become mechanistic; they must retain that spark of originality and unpredictability that is available only in the human form, and we want them to be capable of success, something that robots certainly cannot do for them at the moment. Indeed, it is the men and women of our Armed Forces who remain key to everything we decide in the defence review. We see on a daily basis their dedication, determination and courage in the face of uncertainty, separation from family and extreme danger, and we see it in Technicolor. They come through with flying colours time and time again. But the price of sustaining such remarkable people is significant and should not be underestimated. They must be properly trained and equipped. Above all, we must look after them fittingly when they sacrifice their health and, in some cases, their lives at the altar of what this country asks them to do. We also need enough of them. We have heard the word "overstretch", but it fails to illuminate properly the complex relationship between commitment, capability and resources because it distils it into a simple percentage. However unsatisfactory the measurement, it is widely known to be a corrosive dynamic. A policy of the "bare minimum" simply does not work on the battlefield, so we must get the numbers right. As we have seen so clearly over the past few years, underinvestment in defence is as physically and politically painful, and as potentially catastrophic, as underinvestment in health, education or any other public service. The Armed Forces’ domestic profile has been raised in recent years, drawing out that sleepy but bottomless affinity that the British soldier has with the British people, who I believe would be happier to spend money on soldiers, sailors and airmen—but not their bureaucracies—than is commonly thought. Whatever else may come out of the defence review, we must ensure that the value of these people to our nation is recognised and rewarded, and we must alter the collective political conscience by allowing defence to have fair claim on the national purse. If we do not, then I fear that this defence review will fail us as well.