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Strategic Defence and Security Review

The C17 is not yet going out of production and, with any luck, the order from the Indians will help to keep it going. I hope that there will be more orders of C17 around the world. The noble Lord is quite right about the Hercules not carrying the latest army kit, but the C17 has an enormously good capability on short-field runways and can be used for that task, as the noble Lord well knows. I am glad to say that the noble Lord has reminded me of something else which we will lose when we get rid of the C17, which is support for the Special Forces. I hope that the Minister will tell us exactly what discussions he has been having with Hereford on this subject, because it is a very serious matter and the Americans place great weight on our co-operation in the field of Special Forces. We are particularly interoperable with their C130 Talon aircraft, as the Government know. I hope that the Minister will carefully consider the recommendation that he has received that we should have five-yearly defence reviews. That would be too frequent; once a decade is often enough. We can pull things up and look at the roots far too often, and I think that the Americans suffer from having quadrennial defence reviews.