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Queen’s Speech

My Lords, it is gratifying to have the opportunity to speak about strategy and defence in the mainstream of the gracious Speech, rather than—as usual—it being shunted off into a short-notice Friday morning. The subject is of the utmost urgency. Our defence affairs are in a highly sensitive state and merit wide debate. On the one hand, we have a shooting war in Afghanistan which has not really been getting anywhere, despite the commitment, devotion to duty and, indeed, heroism of our Armed Forces. I had a chance to see the commitment and spirit for myself when I took the medal parade of the 2nd Battalion The Rifles on its return from Afghanistan, after suffering 14 soldiers killed and 60 wounded, 14 of them very seriously. However, they were in magnificent heart at every level and there was not a discordant note. Certainly, although improvements have been made, we are not, so far, making sufficient and significant gains in the areas in which we have set our aims. On the other hand, the Ministry of Defence has an immense funding problem, brought about largely by continuing underfunding of the defence programme over the past 10 to 15 years or more, which has taken elements of equipment, materiel and logistic support out of the programme so that, when faced with an intense operational situation, when these very things have become urgently needed, they have had to be bought off the peg—helicopters and spare parts are a case in point—with money over and above the defence budget provided by the Treasury, which now, of course, wants its money back. Yet the repercussions of now adjusting the budget to meet Treasury rules will themselves be very serious. Not least it means that while part of the Ministry of Defence is doing its best from precious resources to provide our front-line forces with what they need to fight the war successfully, another part of the same department, at Treasury insistence, is having to cut those same resources substantially in order to reduce defence spending and squeeze a quart of current established requirements into a pint pot of authorised resources. This absurd, schizophrenic approach leads to confusion, inevitable cheese paring, with significant damage to the defence programme as a whole, and is exactly the sort of thing that gives the impression, as my noble and gallant friend Lord Guthrie pointed out recently, that the Government and the ministry’s heart is not really in the operations in Afghanistan. As has already been said, what is now required, as admitted by the Government and promised by Her Majesty’s Opposition, should they be elected, is a comprehensive Strategic Defence Review, although for obvious reasons this is not possible before the general election. This would initially identify as far as possible Britain’s key international interests: home and European security; UN Security Council; NATO and natural resources; and identify potential threats, not forgetting, I hope, the inherent volatility of the international scene which has so invariably in the past produced responsibilities and challenges utterly unpredictable in advance. This review at Cabinet Committee level, with Chiefs of Staff input, should set out and approve the assumptions which would cover what might be required of our Armed Forces in the foreseeable future and the proper extent of their involvement. No major war for 10 years was not an unreasonable assumption in 1921 when it was made, but it was utterly unrealistic and irresponsible in 1936, when it was still in place, which underlines the need for continuous updating, which has not been done in the recent past. Only at this stage should it be possible for the Chiefs of Staff and the Ministry of Defence to try to match possible commitments to an appropriate size and shape for our Armed Forces and, most importantly, to the resources which the country might be prepared to allot to defence, perhaps in the form of an insurance policy, as a responsible and consistent proportion of GDP. What must be avoided at all costs is the insidious underfunding by the Treasury of whatever has been decided at the highest political level. This has invariably degraded expectations, minimised political and parliamentary intentions, stored up immense problems for the future and rebounded disastrously not only on operational performance but very much on the lives, support and welfare of all members of the Armed Forces. Indeed, an established figure of, say, 3 per cent of GDP might be the only sure way of curbing Treasury enthusiasm, rather as in the late 1970s and early 1980s we had an agreed NATO target of 3 per cent growth in real terms out of which the Treasury could not wriggle. Should this review involve, as it should, a truly joined-up foreign and defence policy, or if you like, security policy—with advantage taken of co-operation with allies and alliances; due regard given to intelligence operations after identifying threats; selective containment; and helping others with common cause to help themselves, rather than, as has been prevalent recently, charging in to prolonged interventions with formed bodies of troops to rearrange the pieces to some alien pattern—it may be possible to cut, in particular, the size of the equipment coat for our Armed Forces to be more in keeping with what Parliament might judge to be our political, social and economic cloth, while protecting the country’s proper interests and responsibilities. However, maintenance of peace over a prolonged period is bound to require numbers, flexibility and strategic mobility in those Armed Forces. Even prior to a full review, it is it is essential to have a rigorous and intellectual analysis of why, when, if and in what number we want some of the higher-spend items of equipment in the present programme—including any precise successor to Trident—to smooth out the budget later on. However, if in the immediate future there is to be substantial squeezing of the current budget, which is overspent only because of operational emergencies, so that the Ministry of Defence can be seen as of now to be living within its means, one of two things is bound to happen. Either operations could not be enhanced and may suffer, with disastrous consequences, or the services will be forced—as the Secretary of State admitted in the debate on the Territorial Army in the other place—to reach for the only uncommitted areas of the budget which, although they may have a less serious effect in the very short term, would be serious if not disastrous in the longer term. Territorial Army training was a good case in point. Cuts of the magnitude being put forward for the Ministry of Defence are also bound to have a debilitating effect on such things as the Defence Medical Services, which are already grossly under strength, suffering cuts in vital clinical training and professional development, and excessively reliant on the Reserve Forces and the National Health Service for the handling of battle casualties. Extra, not reduced, financial resources are required to rebuild them. Inevitably, because of accessibility, there will be cuts in accommodation, some of which is in a shocking state, and welfare in general. All of these directly impinge on the covenant, which is so sacrosanct in political eyes and in the eyes of the British people. If any such unpopular cuts are then cancelled for political reasons, you can be quite sure that the Treasury will recoup from somewhere else, and damage the programme. The political machinery must be found—perhaps in a much-needed war Cabinet while the crisis in Afghanistan lasts and before a review takes place—to curb the Treasury in its insistence on its pound of flesh as regards defence overspend. Only once have I heard a Prime Minister tell the Treasury to back off; on that occasion, the Secretary of State for Defence said that he would resign at once if that did not happen. Let us hope that similar robustness and commitment can be found in that department. Finally, I shall refer to operations in Afghanistan. Now that we are there, with a better balanced force than when we first rushed into Helmand province in pursuit of changing and largely unrealistic aims, we cannot, for a variety of compelling reasons, just walk away. Indeed, soldiers back from Afghanistan with whom I have talked recently would be horrified at the prospect; they feel that they have done a really good job and have improved things. Our best hope is to support the United Nations, wholly and to the limit of our resources, in a more enlightened approach, with less waffle about democracy and more practical emphasis on stability, proper protection of people in vulnerable areas, better direction and quicker delivery of aid, perhaps to regional governments, and above all dynamic diplomacy with meaningful negotiations with the aim of doing deals to separate hard-core extremists from moderates. We should also back the central Government in any deals that they will surely want to make. Although many in Pakistan may feel that Western intervention has been part of their problem, the new strategy that will be required must be, as the Americans appreciate, within an Af-Pak framework, because the mainstream of international terrorism now lies there and the maintenance of a secular state is vital to contain it. All this will require a temporary surge in troop numbers, as military advisers on both sides of the Atlantic have advocated, and will certainly require in the immediate future our very best shots in terms of effort, commitment, resources and the absence of that financial schizophrenia in the Ministry of Defence that I highlighted earlier. There must be a better stick to go along with a more intelligent carrot in our new strategy. We have no alternative if, at the end of the tunnel, we are to see any light that would enable us in the not-too-distant future to hand over the bulk of security to indigenous forces with our heads held high and with a reasonable assurance that al-Qaeda will continue to be marginalised, as it already has been in Afghanistan for a considerable time, and then properly contained and dealt with by other means.