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Strategic Defence and Security Review

Thank you. I learned to dive under Royal Navy command at Devonport, despite being a pongo, and I joined my regiment in 1969—a very long time ago—at Weeton camp in the Fylde constituency. When I joined my regiment I joined a battalion that had an establishment of 750. When I handed over command of it some two decades later, it was down to 638. We had lost 20% of the manpower of our battalion. The theme of my speech, then, is resilience at the front line. It is still called a battalion, but it has been salami-sliced and hollowed out. This is a big problem, which the strategic defence review must look at. We must ensure that our front-line troops have the capability to do the job we expect them to do. On resilience, just consider the 3rd Battalion the Rifles, which returned in April. When it came back after six months of the winter tour in Afghanistan, it had lost eight men killed in action and had 67 casualties. That meant, in terms of the fighting men for that battalion, a 14% casualty rate. My own battalion, the 1st Battalion the Cheshire Regiment as it was—now, for some strange reason, called the 1st Battalion the Mercian Regiment—is in Afghanistan at the moment. It has been there two months: it has lost five men killed in action already, and it has 35 people wounded. If we think about the basic fighting strength—I return to the theme of resilience—of a fighting unit in our infantry, it is the eight-man section. It is very sad statistically to understand what that means—that in an eight man section, it is likely that one or two of the men fighting at the moment in Afghanistan in 1st Battalion the Mercian Regiment are likely to come back to this country either in a box or on a stretcher. Thank goodness we have the Territorial Army, as it heavily reinforces the regular Army. It does that extremely well. Indeed, in Helmand at the moment, 10% of the troops out there are either Territorial Army or reserves. It was the same in Iraq. When I visited the coalition operating base in 2007, the figure was 10%. In 2004, with the invasion of Iraq, it was 20%, so the strategic defence review has to look very carefully at how we use the Territorial Army, which has now become a proper reserve force for the regular Army. When our troops are deployed on operations for six-month tours, they have a period in the middle of their tour called rest and recuperation—R and R—which is normally two weeks long. I put it to the House that approximately 1,000 of the 9,500 troops deployed to Afghanistan are either not there or are travelling to or from R and R. Effectively, in resilience terms, some infantry sections—I see the right hon. Member for Coventry North East (Mr Ainsworth) nodding his head, because he knows what I am going to say—are down to four or five men. Infantry cannot fight with sections of four or five men, so they are put together, with the result that combat power is reduced. Whatever the outcome of the strategic defence review, we must ensure that our front-line units are properly manned and that their ORBAT—organisation for battle—is good enough to sustain them properly. I have concentrated on the Army, but the principle remains the same for the Royal Air Force and Royal Navy. We have a problem with the Navy, and we must ensure that the ships deployed on operations are manned and equipped properly. The Royal Air Force currently has 74 Harrier jump jets, less than a third of which are operational. We must get this right across the services. I totally understand how difficult it is for Governments of either persuasion to get money for defence. It is extremely difficult, and I will not be found criticising the Opposition on that matter. However, we must ensure that the question of resilience is dealt with properly in the strategic defence review. We must not send our young men and women into battle without adequate manpower to sustain operations when things go wrong.