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Armed Forces Personnel

It is a great pleasure to follow my friend and Select Committee colleague, the hon. Member for Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney (Mr Havard), and indeed our excellent Committee Chairman, my right hon. Friend the Member for North East Hampshire (Mr Arbuthnot). As we remember those who gave their lives in earlier generations, we honour those who serve today. To visit them, whether on operations or on exercise, is to be humbled by the sheer quality of the men and women who serve in our forces, but over the generations since the cold war the structures that planned and organised them lost direction. On the day after another young Territorial has died in Afghanistan, I want to talk about reserve personnel, but first I shall give the House some context—when tension between operational pressures and funding is especially tight. The Ministry of Defence has become distorted by the shape of most conflicts during the 20 years between the Gulf war and the Libyan operation. For most of that period, the main effort has been a single, medium-scale expeditionary force, led by the Army with air support. Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan mostly followed that pattern. The intensity of the conflicts varied enormously, but each saw a brigade-sized expeditionary force supporting air elements in six-monthly rotations and in line with defence-planning assumptions, hence a strong temptation for the planners to configure our forces around that model. Resurgent problems in Northern Ireland and the 7/7 bombings figured very little in pre-strategic defence and security review planning, and two important overseas outliers were widely overlooked. First, there was the planned invasion of Kosovo in 1999, when 1 million desperate refugees fled the Serb army. Almost all our allies demurred from sending ground forces and the MOD initiated a confused blizzard of call-out notices, summoning many reservists at a few days' notice, even from units that it was in the process of disbanding. Britain was spared humiliation, of course, when the Serbs backed down under Russian pressure at the very last moment. Secondly, in 2003-04 we were stretched well beyond expectations, as the continuing operation in Iraq overlapped with the incursion in Afghanistan. The national security strategy rightly dismisses the assumption that our forces should be optimised almost entirely for medium-scale, Army-led expeditionary operations. It includes other roles, including, crucially, homeland security and upstream intervention, and there is even a faint hint of the scenario that dare not speak its name—general mobilisation for an unexpected crisis. Libya was Royal Air Force and Royal Navy-led—and led brilliantly, a point that I note in the week when we mourn the loss of Flight Lieutenant Cunningham of the Red Arrows. How can we address so many scenarios, therefore, when the money available is so tight? The key surely is to reverse the slide towards an impossibly expensive manning model in which most units are full-time, with costly payrolls, pensions, housing and so on. Of course they are worth it, but we cannot afford enough of them. Between two fifths and half the armies of our English-speaking sister countries are made up of volunteer reserves. On paper, ours make up less than one fifth, and in reality estimates suggest that the true figure is nearer 10%. The US deploys National Guard armoured infantry brigades and fast-jet fighter squadrons to Afghanistan; Canada had a reservist company with every infantry rotation; and Australia has deployed formed companies and handed over its main commitments in Timor and Bougainville to reserve-led forces.