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Defence

I beg to move,"That this House expresses its continued support for HM armed forces personnel and their families; notes that over 440 service personnel have been killed on operations in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001; further notes that the armed forces have operated over the original planning assumptions for years; regrets that there has not been a Strategic Defence Review (SDR) since 1998; believes that the 1998 SDR was never fully funded and failed to provide proper equipment for the Iraq war; recognises that the Government failed to plan for post-conflict reconstruction in Iraq; further recognises the cut to the helicopter budget by £1.4 billion in 2004; is concerned about the cuts to the frigate and destroyer fleet from the 32 recommended in the 1998 SDR 10 to 23; is further concerned by the failure to provide the Royal Air Force with a modern troop transport and air-to-air refuelling fleet; believes that the Government has presided over a failed procurement process; further believes that the Government has failed properly to fund the armed forces for wartime operations; and calls on the Government to acknowledge its failure to honour the Military Covenant." At the beginning of this debate, our thoughts and prayers are very much with the families and friends of Sergeant Paul Fox, Rifleman Martin Kinggett and Senior Aircraftman Luke Southgate, who have all given their lives in the service of their country in the past week. The sadness that we share with their families is mixed—correctly—with pride in their courage and devotion to their country. With the 1998 strategic defence review, new Labour got off to a relatively good start with the armed forces. The 1998 SDR was a well-respected document. Moreover, it used a foreign policy baseline, not a Treasury baseline, as many of its predecessors had done. That was, and is, the right way of conducting such a review. However, the failure to have a review for more than 12 years means that our armed forces—as well as Government across Whitehall, for that matter—have failed fully to adapt to the increasingly changing global security situation. The events of 9/11 fundamentally changed the international security environment, while the aftermath of Iraq made the planning assumptions of the SDR largely obsolete. Looking back, we can also see that the review's ambitions were never fully matched with funding. That has meant that for 12 years our armed forces have been operating well beyond what they were resourced to do. The truth is that the current Prime Minister as Chancellor was never willing fully to fund Tony Blair's wars, and that same sad story has been retold time and time again during the Chilcot inquiry. As the right hon. Member for Ashfield (Mr. Hoon) stated in his evidence, within the Ministry of Defence""there was quite a strong feeling"" that the 1998 strategic defence review""was not fully funded,"" and that""in the subsequent CSR programmes we asked for significantly more money than we eventually received"." Sir Kevin Tebbit said that as permanent secretary he had to operate a permanent crisis budget. Former Chief of the Defence Staff Lord Walker said that the SDR was underfunded by well into £1 billion. In one of his many moving farewell speeches, in one of the final pieces of spin of his premiership, Tony Blair said that defence spending had remained broadly stable, at 2.5 per cent. of GDP, if we take into account Iraq and Afghanistan. In other words, much of the burden of the cost of Iraq and Afghanistan was being carried by the core defence budget. The truth is that the Ministry of Defence was effectively fighting two wars on a peacetime budget. The Treasury's unwillingness fully to fund the MOD's 1998 SDR meant that there were big losers across defence and a degradation of our capability. Let us look just at the Royal Navy. Time and time again since the 1998 SDR, the Navy has been blackmailed into accepting cuts to its fleet, to ensure the eventual addition of two new carriers. During the 1998 SDR process, the Navy agreed to cut its fleet of 12 attack submarines to 10, and its fleet of 35 destroyers and frigates to 32, in return for the promise of the two carriers. A decade later we find our Navy with only eight attack submarines, with a possible future reduction to only six or seven, and 22 —an astonishingly low number—of destroyers and frigates. Maritime commitments have not decreased since 1998 but have risen, at a time when our Navy has been slashed, mothballed and, in some cases, sold off. There is a similar pattern to be found across all three services, including the reserves.