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Defence in the World

I shall come to that. I think that we need to consider the full range of threats at home and abroad. On top of the issues that I have mentioned to do with biological weapons and dirty bombs, the use of an electromagnetic pulse device that could destroy all electronic communications infrastructure over a distance of hundreds of miles is also being considered and researched, and possibly being tested. All those different things need strategies to deal with them in the wider context of our security in a dangerous world. Like it or not, cyber warfare is a modern-day reality and attacks are increasing in both frequency and seriousness—from the mass attack on Estonia to the targeted attacks on British companies and institutions. These threats are occurring on top of our contingent overseas operations, such as Afghanistan, maritime security in the Gulf and reacting to natural disasters such as the recent earthquake in Haiti. We know from bitter historical experience the difficulty of predicting future conflict, its nature or its location. We cannot base our future security on the assumption that future wars will be like the current ones. That is why we must maintain generic capability able to adapt to any changing threats. The default position for the UK is and will be to operate as a partner within one alliance or another. However, the UK has unique national interests and we cannot always—nor should we always expect that we can—depend on our partners when Britain's direct national interests are threatened. That is why I said that although we agreed with much of the process and the output of the Green Paper, we cannot accept its assumption that Britain will always operate as part of an alliance. Most of the time, we will engage in operations as part of a coalition, whether through NATO, the European Union or coalitions of the willing, but we have unique national interests and must maintain the unique capability to act on our own if required. That is why that has to be an essential part of the strategic defence review. Considering the instability around the world, any defence and security review—increasingly, they are synonymous—must be carried out in a logical sequence. It must begin with our foreign policy priorities, outlining what we believe to be our national interests. We must then consider what we believe to be the threat environment in which those interests will exist so that we can try to determine the strategy we need to respond to them. Only then can we determine the military capabilities we will require in that threat environment and only then can we come to the specific equipment programmes that will make those capabilities a reality. Finally, we will have to confront the harsh facts of the economic climate in which we will have to operate given the catastrophic economic management of the current Government. Of course, we could try to carry out the process the other way around, and it has been done many times in the UK. In other words, we could begin with the budget and see what we can buy for it. However, that would end up, as it has in the past, with unintended consequences for our foreign policy and our wider capabilities. We would have missed the opportunity to return some real empiricism and stability to policy making.