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Strategic Defence and Security Review

The defence review inevitably involves, as we have heard this afternoon, the consideration of abstracts and concepts, but the 300th death in Afghanistan is eloquent reality. As the shadow Defence Secretary indicated a moment ago, for every one of those people, 300 families are in mourning. We have a brief acknowledgement of the sacrifice, but for those families, the sacrifice goes on for as long as they live. Particularly when we see the montages of the 300 people who have lost their lives, we must think about the promise, discipline and service that have been cut down by the fact of their deaths. That is why on these occasions we should think more than in a perfunctory way about what it costs to defend our country and the sacrifice that, sometimes painfully, must be made. Iraq and Afghanistan have skewed our priorities, but more than anything else, they have breached the assumptions of the 1998 defence review. They have put an intolerable financial burden on the Ministry of Defence, and indeed on the Government's Contingencies Fund. I spend a little time referring to Iraq and Afghanistan because neither the duration nor the intensity of either was anticipated by the 1998 defence review, which was none the less regarded as a successful operation. Indeed, if I may pick up a point that the shadow Defence Secretary made, part of that success was due to the degree to which there was consultation, and the degree to which people were invited in—not asked to make written submissions, but actually allowed to sit face to face with John Reid and George Robertson, and to argue the case with them. If that is not to be possible on this occasion, the Government will, in a sense, be restricting themselves, and perhaps shutting off a degree of help, assistance and contribution that would enable the conclusions of the defence review to be well founded. The principles of a defence review are easy to articulate. One must establish the foreign policy objectives or baseline; assess what military capability is necessary to enable one to achieve those objectives; and finally allocate the resources. In 1998, the Government never published their foreign policy baseline, but if they had, it would not have included the doctrine of humanitarian intervention, because that came after 1998, in a speech made by Prime Minister Blair in Chicago. However well founded and well regarded it is, it is an element of British policy, with military consequences, that was not embraced by the 1998 review. The review envisaged one short-term, high-intensity conflict going on at the same time as a medium-term operation such as peacekeeping, but in fact we had two hot wars being fought simultaneously, plus Sierra Leone—a notable success of Prime Minister Blair's, in my view, and, of course, there was Kosovo, where, it has to be acknowledged, he was responsible for holding the feet of the rather reluctant American President to the fire, thereby producing an outcome that all of us regarded as the best possible. In spite of the success attributed to the 1998 review, there was a continuing argument about resources and, in particular, helicopters. The reason that I point to that is that we imagine that there is some kind of immaculate conception of a defence review, but the truth is that it is based on assumptions and judgments, and the unexpected will almost certainly be part of the terrain that defence has to cover in the next 20 or 25 years. There is an element of rush about the review. When one considers the complexity of the issues at stake, setting a time limit of a few months is unwise. I would like the foreign policy baseline to be not only published, but the subject of debate in this House, because it is on that baseline that subsequent decisions will rest. If there is not unanimity, or at least general consensus, on the foreign policy baseline, what comes thereafter will undoubtedly be regarded by some as flawed.