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Defence in the World

I should like to use the opportunity presented by the final defence debate of this Parliament to look back over the Parliament and see how we—the Ministry of Defence, the armed forces and the Select Committee on Defence, which I shall come to at the end—have all done. First, however, I should like to jump the gun by saying what a pleasure it is to follow the hon. Member for Plymouth, Sutton (Linda Gilroy). The knowledge and amount of research that she has brought to the Select Committee, and the commitment and dedication that she has always shown, have been second to none. I should like to thank her very much for that on the Committee's behalf. The courage that the armed forces have shown over the course of this Parliament in the face of extraordinary danger has been the sort of which Kipling and Henty would have been absolutely proud. They have also had to learn new skills of governance and logistics, new languages, and how to collect and disseminate intelligence. We ask a great deal of them and we are very lucky indeed to have them. Let me look back at the beginning of this Parliament. In the summer of 2005, we were at sort-of war in Iraq. We were in Afghanistan and were about to deploy the Allied Rapid Reaction Corps to Kabul. We were planning for the deployment, in June 2006, of 16 Air Assault Brigade to Helmand province. As the Committee said in its April 2006 report:""The Southern provinces will be a testing security environment"." We were then, as now, masters of understatement. Nobody believed at that time that not a shot would be fired, but in defence of the then Secretary of State for Defence, that was not what he actually said. However, I did believe, and say, then that Iraq was going to be a much easier proposition than Afghanistan, and I think that has proven to be true. At that time, the armed forces were overstretched and the Ministry of Defence was short of money for many reasons that people have tried to explain from different perspectives. First, NATO had been a success and the cold war was over. My right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition has said that we had won the cold war, and in a sense we had. NATO's very success had led people in Europe to believe that defence was not a priority for spending. That went for the whole of Europe, including this country; it certainly went for the Labour party and, frankly, for the Conservative party as well. Secondly, as a result of all that, Government public spending had risen significantly on things like health and education, but comparatively little on defence. The Government are right to say that defence spending has steadily risen, but wrong to say that that was all that mattered. The third reason for the money shortage was that fewer modern weapons were needed to achieve the same effect because they are so astonishingly powerful. Last night, I watched David Dimbleby's "Seven Ages of Britain", which explained that when the Maxim gun was invented, six of them could have the same effect as six entire regiments of soldiers. The natural consequence has been that we have been getting rid of soldiers and buying more of the modern equivalent of Maxim guns. However, we are now beginning to discover that although Maxim guns can kill very efficiently, they cannot, unlike soldiers, win the hearts and minds of a country. They cannot hold the night, and they cannot be in more than one place at one time. Neither can they win the battle of ideas back at home. They cannot persuade the people of this country that it is right for the Maxim guns to be out there in a foreign land. When one adds the effect of 24-hour news, the carnage produced by modern weapons becomes unsupportable. We now need a process of transition back to the notion of having more people, however powerful the weapons that they wield. So, back in 2005 the armed forces were overstretched. They were fighting two wars on a peacetime budget. They did not go under, but it sometimes looked close in both Basra and Helmand. In Basra, the initial deployment showed that our inadequate recent experience of deployment overseas meant that logistics were heavily stretched. There was a serious misreading of the fundamental problems in Basra. We thought that it was more a matter of criminal gangs operating in a city where there was a lot of money, as opposed to a genuine insurgency, and locals were not listened to enough. Perhaps, too, the eyes of the armed forces and the MOD were too focused on the need to deploy more and more troops to Afghanistan, so we nearly failed in Basra, but we did not. Indeed, the general result has, partly because of the quality of our armed forces, been that Iraq has been more successful than not, but we have suffered some reputational damage there. In Helmand, the problem has been that, in the initial years in which we deployed to the southern part of Afghanistan, we deployed in numbers that were too small. We were there in penny packets, and the concentration of our forces on the ground being thin was partly a result of having too few forces because we had relied on having so many powerful weapons. It was also partly because our European NATO allies did not regard it as their battle. Europe as a whole failed to lift its sights and see the importance of the battle in Afghanistan. Europe is at last beginning to wake up to some of the threats that that region poses. My conclusion is that the armed forces, in Afghanistan as well as in Iraq, have been very stretched indeed; they have been surviving, but only just. During this Parliament, how has the Ministry of Defence done as a whole? During the period, it has produced the defence industrial strategy, which I think is a good one, but according to the defence industry it has become moribund through lack of funding. Perhaps the defence industry would say that, but if it is true that the defence industrial strategy has become moribund, it ought not to have been produced in the first place, or it ought to have had a much greater eye on the need for funding right at the beginning. A number of right hon. and hon. Members have mentioned the fact that in 2005, and earlier, the Ministry of Defence was not doing procurement very well. We could say that actually it never has. I recognise many of the difficulties pinpointed and highlighted in the Bernard Gray report as having been prevalent while I was in charge of procurement. It is a long-term weakness of the Ministry of Defence that would take Hercules to clean up. Luckily, in the right hon. Member for Barrow and Furness (Mr. Hutton) there was such a Hercules, who appointed another—Bernard Gray—whose report on procurement is one of the most valuable documents ever to come out of Government. The response of the Ministry of Defence has been—frankly—muddled. I was in entire agreement with what the hon. Member for Plymouth, Sutton said about the need to firm up the 10-year budget for defence procurement, because the difference between a 10-year rolling budget and a 10-year indicative planning horizon is one that gives rise to some mirth. The Minister for defence equipment and support made it plain to the Defence Committee that he does not really agree with very much of the Bernard Gray report, whereas the Minister for strategic defence acquisition reform has told my Committee that he does accept the report. To coin a phrase, "We can't go on like this." Only with a united team at the top of the Ministry of Defence will there be any hope of achieving progress in what may be the most difficult problem the MOD faces. It needs to be approached with drive, unity and a vigour that does not exist at the moment, because of that division.