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Strategic Defence Review

First, I repeat what was said in another place and thank my noble friend for his contribution to the Defence Advisory Forum. My noble friend’s credentials in this matter are well known and important. He is right when he reminds us of the priority of Afghanistan. That comes out of the Green Paper and from the Statement made in another place earlier today. The work that we have done there has been quite remarkable in terms of getting everybody to work together, including other government departments. This country probably invented the term "the comprehensive approach", and bearing in mind my noble friend’s last point, it is important that we keep that in mind in all discussions. I agree that it has been beneficial for the Defence Advisory Forum to take a long view and act in a non-partisan way. One of the Green Paper’s strengths is that it is analytical and not partisan. That is one of the reasons why I am hopeful that we can have that kind of long-term approach. This is extremely timely because other countries are thinking about what they should be doing and NATO is undertaking its strategic review. I am sure that there will be a lot of interest in what we have been saying. We all acknowledge that decisions about resources will not be easy. Nobody is talking about committing to increasing spending, but it is important to recognise, as my noble friend did, the significant contributions from the Treasury on top of the core defence budget. He talked about not deploying across the full spectrum of capabilities in future and always working with others. That is acknowledged in the Green Paper and is something to which a former Secretary-General of NATO would quite rightly draw attention. Again, we welcome the expertise that he brings. My noble friend mentioned a disagreement about the actual wording and asked whether we should not have a Strategic Defence and Security Review rather than a Strategic Defence Review. That was something that we picked up on rather late in the day. As I said earlier, the distinction these days between defence and security is extremely blurred. Throughout this document we make reference to the national security strategy because we have made the psychological leap that the two are so well connected. However, we have not put it on the front of the document. I assure him that the point has been registered and is well understood by many people in the department.