Grand Committee
Strategic Defence Review
(1 week ago)
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Lord Robertson of Port Ellen
That the Grand Committee takes note of the Strategic Defence Review.
Lord Robertson of Port Ellen (Lab)
My Lords, after the election in July, I was asked by the Secretary of State for Defence and the Prime Minister to lead a team of three to do a unique strategic defence review, working with, but not to, the Ministry of Defence. I was delighted—I think that is the word—to accept this task. I am here today to give Members of this House the opportunity to offer a view on what should be in that review and how Members of the House might want it to conclude.
This debate today will add to and contribute to the 14,500 submissions made so far to the secretariat of the review. They have come from the services themselves, from other government departments, from academia, from think tanks, from industry, from our allies and from the public. It is, quite frankly, an unprecedented exercise in participation in one of the most important issues of our time. I am working on this historic endeavour, as reviewer, with General Sir Richard Barrons, who was the chief of Joint Forces and previously deputy Chief of the Defence Staff, and we have been joined by Dr Fiona Hill, formerly a senior official with the United States National Security Council and presently chancellor of the University of Durham.
We are the three reviewers, but we have been assisted in this exercise by a defence review team of six experts, including an assistant Secretary-General of NATO, and by Sir Jeremy Quin, the well-regarded and well-respected former Conservative Defence Minister and former chair of the Commons Defence Select Committee. This is, therefore, emphatically not a Labour defence review; it is the British effort to ensure that the United Kingdom is secure at home and strong abroad. Its terms of reference and the instructions to the review have been publicised and are on the GOV.UK website. I am sure that all Members of the House have carefully consulted them all before the session this afternoon.
As noble Lords will know, this is not the first strategic defence review that I have led. I did it in 1997 and 1998, which was, after all, only 26 years ago. It is worth reflecting that at that time we had 20,000 troops either in Northern Ireland or preparing to be in Northern Ireland. We had just signed the NATO-Russia Founding Act—I still have the cufflinks that were made to commemorate that—China was in the shadows and globalisation was hailed as a prosperity machine. There was no perceived danger to the British homeland at that point. That world has gone and it has gone for ever. So too have the subsequent worlds that were looked at and examined by reviews since then.
I have been reminding people that, when I concluded the review, I said that if it was a success it would be known as the SDR 1998, but that if it was a failure it would be known as the Robertson review. I am delighted to announce that it is commonly—universally—known as the SDR 1998.
This country now has to contend with a volatile and complex world of great power competition, with a war in Europe initiated unprovoked against a peaceful neighbour by a permanent member of the UN Security Council, with a horrific conflict ongoing in the Middle East and with enduring challenges to do with climate, grey zone attacks, nuclear proliferation, global inequality and greater mineral competition—and from the same failed and fragile states. It is a formidable cocktail for us to contend with.
This review must therefore chart the reset of defence, dictated by these factors, if we are going to keep our country safe and secure. There will, of course, inevitably be choices in any review. Some of them will be hard choices indeed, but they will have to be made, and denial of the problems is not among the choices that we have today. The purpose of the review is clearly set out: to make sure UK defence has not only the capabilities required but the new roles and reforms in place to meet the challenges faced by the nation and the world.
NATO is the bedrock for the review. As the first and, as yet, maybe the only person to invoke Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty myself, I know the value and importance of our NATO allies and their strength. They, too, like our adversaries, acknowledge and value our independent nuclear deterrent, which will remain a central feature of UK defence.
As I told the 300 top officials in the Ministry of Defence just two weeks ago, there can be no business as usual in defence. There is no business as usual among our adversaries and our potential adversaries, and there can be no business as usual for us. We dare not do it. Therefore, we are interested in the views of Members of the House, as distinguished people with expertise and background. I look forward to listening to those views today and I give your Lordships the promise that they will be taken account of in the review and its challenge process, which is being undertaken at the moment, involving some distinguished Members of this House. That process will make a contribution to the recommendations that the review will ultimately make to both the Defence Secretary and the Prime Minister, in the interests of a strong and enduring defence policy for this country. I look forward to listening to this debate.
Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)
My Lords, it is a first-class idea that we should have this opportunity for import from your Lordships, with all the enormous experience here, into the review before it happens, rather than waiting until it has happened and then moaning that they left out this or that bit that they should have put in. We may still moan at the end, because some of us moan all the time, but this is a very good way of approaching it and I congratulate the Government on doing it this way. I congratulate them on choosing the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, to chair it; he has assembled an extremely impressive team around him. This is a very good set of minds applying to a very difficult, disorganised and expanding concept of what on earth “defence” is and what we are trying to defend in a constantly changing world.
As the noble Lord said, it is the fifth strategic defence review this century if you include the 1998 review, which was modified in 2002. If you add in the integrated reviews we have had in recent years—there was one in 2021 and then the refresh review, and I have no doubt that another refresh review is being prepared now—we get the picture that there is a continuously changing platform. Technology is racing ahead at such an intense speed in the matter of defence and the conduct of war and battle, so we need to be almost constantly on the train. I have no doubt at all that, in a year or two, we will need to come back to this again—and then again—to keep up with the enormous technological advances taking place. We read about one almost every week. Last week it was explosives in pagers and exploding telephones; next week it will be something else in that region.
I take this as an opportunity for us all not so much to go over the obvious, central points—which the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, quite rightly touched on, with NATO as a bedrock—but to put in our own thoughts and hopes about particular issues that we would like to focus on and that might just be overlooked if we did not give them a little nudge. That is all I will do in my few minutes.
First, I will talk about China’s and Russia’s vast intrusion in the developing world, which is taking place almost behind the scenes while our eyes are on Ukraine, the Middle East, Afghanistan, Syria and the Pacific dangers around Taiwan. That is the front line but, behind it, the autocratic powers are moving very fast in a variety of ways—China mostly with bribes, insidious involvements, the belt and road initiative and so on; Russia in a more crude and violent way with the Wagner Group, which is still very active throughout Africa and Asia, although its leader came to a rather abrupt end after he was unwise enough to try to invade Moscow. That is what is happening before our eyes, and I hope that the review will concentrate on all that is going on there. As one expert put it, China is hoovering up the Commonwealth and the developing world, and we need to watch that, because we may find that it is too late if we do not act.
Then there are the neo-non-aligned countries—which, after all, are most countries—that are watching very carefully. I am glad to say that many are members of the Commonwealth, and I think they are all saying, “Look, we believe in independence. We are watching. We want support and advice from and a good relationship with the United Kingdom, but we don’t want to see Britain become too much a puppet of Washington. We don’t want to be under the hegemony of the Chinese either; we are trying to avoid being sucked into their nexus and network. But nor do we want to be necessarily lined up with a Manichaean view of the world, which comes particularly from the United States, that the world is just divided between good and evil, or the West and the East, and that that is the way it must be fought out”. Therefore, I hope that, in addition to the China and Russia scene, we use this review to get our own relationship straight with a changing United States. It is not 1945—it is not the heroic days of the Second World War or the Cold War. It is an entirely different situation. That is my first point.
Secondly, I hope we recognise that the fight is now on to kill civilians—to demoralise, undermine, frighten and terrorise civilians—and every kind of AI and other technology will be used by our opponents to do that. I saw that the director of MI5 said yesterday that we are now at the greatest level of threat in decades and that Russia and Iran, to take two, are determined to generate “sustained … mayhem” in this country. I hope that will be a matter of focus.
Thirdly, the whole industry and defence relationship has changed. A Ukraine expert was here yesterday and talked about battlefield co-ordination and management in Ukraine. That has been largely organised by private enterprise or by enterprises that are semi-private—some in uniform, some not. That expert pointed out that on the Ukraine side there is the question of managing 1 million drones, either in production—maybe in remote garages that no one knows about, or in unofficial factories—or being deployed and sent in various directions. No single military authority, no single Government, can co-ordinate all the movements of that sort of thing. His firm is called Aerorozvidka and he is deeply involved, as a civilian, in battlefield deployment and in new ways of industry co-ordinating with the military not only in supply chains—we know about all that—but in the organisation and deployment of strategy on the battlefield.
Finally, we have signed the NATO industrial capacity expansion pledge, which brings industry and technology even closer to the military. We are signing up to AUKUS, which is another opportunity, and to the Tempest programme with Japan and Italy. All these will involve huge new types of involvement between industry and the military, and that will require a considerable amount of time from the review team. Beyond its cellular internet of things, the Chinese Communist Party seem to have taken a dominant role there. We have Russia’s dark fleet sailing around the world undermining all the traditional areas of marine control. These are the frightening technologies of next month, probably, or certainly of the next year or two. These are the things that I hope will be concentrated on.
That is a start from me, but I am sure there will be many other better-informed, deeper and more important views to be uttered by your Lordships. That is my contribution.
Lord Alderdice (LD)
My Lords, one of the early and welcome announcements by Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer was that we were to have a new strategic defence review, and we are all gratified that the SDR is being led by the noble Lord, Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, to whom we are indebted for the debate today and for his wonderful introduction to it. He brings a great range of experience, as we all know.
I have previously appealed to the noble Lord in your Lordships’ House to see this review of defence in its widest sense, and I do so again today. There will, necessarily, be a focus on matériel, men and money, and this is right. We need to look at our military resources to see what we have and what we need in a world where the character of war is changing rapidly, as we see in the conduct of the war in Ukraine. I refer noble Lords to the International Relations and Defence Committee’s recently published report Ukraine: A Wake-up Call. It is a very good report. I will not repeat a lot of what it says because I know it has already been sent to the noble Lord, and indeed he played his own part in the earlier drafts of the report, so I know he is familiar with it.
Contrary to a lot of the writing from 10 or 15 years ago about new wars, the old forms of warfare have not disappeared—they are still there. It is rather the case that new ones have sprung into significance in addition to the old ones. Drone warfare, to which the noble Lord, Lord Howell of Guildford, just referred, has taken a dramatically increased significance, and our procurement must take this into account. However, as in some areas, bigger and more sophisticated is not always better. Our US allies, for example, have been using $2 million missiles to take out drones sent by the Houthis in Yemen at $2,000 a time. That is just not an economically viable strategy.
Our Ukrainian friends, too, have used ingenious tactics to make up for limited resources, not just in converting off-the-shelf drones for military use but, for example, in packing an old Cessna plane with explosives and flying it into Russia to explode in an oil terminal. They were aided by the low radar profile of this old plane, as the Russians designed their defences to deal with the more sophisticated, long-range, high-tech US missiles that they had been expecting. We need to be creative and imaginative—in a different way, of course—as well as to become more efficient and effective in our procurement.
I want to elaborate a little on the question of defence in its widest sense. One of the downsides of having a fully professional Army with a high reputation is that our population has come to feel that it can be safely left to the professionals to do all our defence for us. There is little appreciation not only of the level of danger, which we speak about in our report, but also that the population at large needs to play its part in national defence. That involves encouraging young people to join up and exploring recruitment, training and retention of part-timers, but it is also crucial that our people realise that the dangers that our country and our wider world face require all of us to be engaged.
The dangers against which we must develop our defences are not only military in nature. They include epidemic diseases and climate catastrophes, and some of them can be used and abused by our enemies. We were reminded of the need for more personnel to be trained and ready and available for service during the recent pandemic and widespread flooding. We needed people who could go out and do things, not just the best brains and the most advanced research technology. We needed people on the ground to manage the situation. That is why I seek some reassurance from the noble Lord and his colleagues that they will take seriously the need for more personnel.
It is not that I do not appreciate the technological requirements. I am particularly concerned that, with hypersonic weapons making their appearance and the terrifying prospect that they could soon carry nuclear warheads, to which human operatives cannot respond sufficiently quickly, there will be pressure to give over decision-making to artificial intelligence, as has already been done in the Middle East, for example, in identifying, tracking, targeting and killing human subjects. I cannot see how we can address this issue without a serious effort to achieve international limitations and regulations, however difficult that is. That means collaboration between the five permanent members of the UN Security Council. I know that, despite the current hostilities, there have been some lower-level conversations among scientists, but I ask the noble Lord to consider recommending that our Government engage directly with Russia and China, as well as with our allies. We did it during the Cold War to try to achieve limitations on nuclear weapons. AI and nuclear weapons as a combination make this an urgent initiative, especially for nuclear weapon systems.
Perhaps the most urgent request that I would make at this moment is that the noble Lord includes de-escalation as an essential feature of our approach to defence planning. If our only response to acts of aggression is to engage in ever higher levels of aggression, which then provoke a similar reaction, as we are currently seeing in the Middle East, the consequences can only end up being catastrophic. We need to think, work and plan for how we use diplomatic and other relations with our enemies, as well as our friends, in order to be able to de-escalate dangerous situations. That requires the deployment of appropriate resources to defend our country.
Finally, on resources more generally, our people, pundits, political leaders and perhaps even some on the military side have lived for some years with the illusion that our world was becoming a safer place, or at least a less dangerous environment. This is manifestly not the case. At the same time, we cannot draw on the imperial resources that were available during the last two global conflicts. Surely we need to consider seriously whether we must review the territory that we can realistically defend. The defence of our own people, our own country and our region, western Europe, is our greatest responsibility. Although we can also play some role in the wider world and some of our historical areas of responsibility, it may now be time to trim our ambitions to what we can actually do. Illusions about our capacities will not serve us well in protecting our people in a real war. We must focus on addressing the world, especially the world that is closest to home, as it is, not as we wish it was. I wish the noble Lord and his colleagues well as they do their best to help us with that challenging task.
Lord Stirrup (CB)
My Lords, I, too, am grateful for the opportunity to debate the strategic defence review that the noble Lord, Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, is leading for the Government. I will start by raising a point that is formally outwith his remit but is fundamental to the issues that he is addressing—the defence budget. NATO has calculated that for its members to contribute military capabilities adequate to the challenges that the alliance now faces, they will need to spend around 3.7% of GDP on defence. Even if NATO has overdone things a bit—it is not at all clear that it has—it is certainly the case that investment in defence needs to be above 3% of GDP, not the 2.5% that the Government say that they aspire to but for which they have not so far set out a firm plan. It is worth saying that 3% of GDP for the UK, allowing for all the accounting changes that have taken place in recent years, would not be much more than we were spending in 2010, when Europe was not facing a severe threat from Russia. It is important to make this point today because, if the issue is not addressed, the current defence review would be like someone deciding whether to buy two or three fire extinguishers while the building is burning around their ears.
This dichotomy is thrown into stark relief when one looks at the substantive issues that the review will need to address. A good starting point is the recent report from your Lordships’ International Relations and Defence Committee on the implications of the Ukraine war for UK defence, to which the noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, has referred. It is a good analysis and my only real criticism is that the compelling chapter on the importance of building mass focuses almost exclusively on the British Army, whereas the shortcomings in this area are being felt across all three armed services. On current plans, for example, the UK will have only three combat air squadrons by 2040—that would not even have filled one main operating base in my day. Given the lessons from Ukraine about the importance of air power, can anyone really think that this is acceptable? Numbers of airborne early warning and control aircraft are also woefully inadequate. In the case of the Royal Navy, the operational availability of nuclear attack submarines verges on the derisory. Even before our donations to Ukraine, stocks of weapons came nowhere near what even the most optimistic observer could regard as satisfactory. I could cite many other examples.
If we wish NATO to exercise a powerful deterrent effect on Russia, these issues must be addressed. The platforms in all three environments need the trained people, the weapons stocks, the logistics support and the defence industrial base to sustain them through the draining effects of protracted combat. Then there is the vulnerability of the home base. The necessity for significantly improved deterrent capability within NATO reaffirms the importance of the north Atlantic link, but that will be of little avail if the UK end of that link is not secure. At the moment, we could not counter the kind of missile attacks that Iran has launched against Israel. The requirement for a robust integrated air defence system can be ignored no longer. Effective defence requires an integrated system, which cannot be had on the cheap. It requires sensors, information management technology, surface-to-air weapons and air-to-air platforms and weapons.
Control of UK airspace will not of itself be sufficient, though. Again, the experience of Ukraine shows that trying to fight a land campaign without air superiority is a recipe for, at best, a long and bloody struggle and, at worst, defeat. There is nothing new in this. Neither El Alamein in 1942 nor Normandy in 1944 would have been successes without air superiority. The precise means of achieving that superiority will of course change over time, as technology offers new ways of doing old things, but the suppression and destruction of enemy air defences will continue to be a keystone of that effort. This is a complex and challenging role that involves cutting-edge and constantly evolving systems and technologies. It will also require the ability to operate effectively in the face of a hostile electronic and cyber environment, which of course will be true of the Armed Forces and their capabilities more widely.
The electronic warfare challenge that has emerged in Ukraine is well beyond anything we have ever seen before and we must expect that kind of challenge, or even greater, to be a feature of future battle spaces. This will require a response that goes beyond the purchase of certain kinds of equipment. It will need the fusion of experts and technology in an organisation with the agility, and the requisite industrial capacity, to respond to constantly evolving threats and the ability to adapt front-line platforms and tactics accordingly. Such agility and adaptability will be needed more widely across the entirety of our defence capabilities.
I could cite many other examples of the kind of improvements that will be required to defence in the years ahead, improvements across all three environments, and I have not even touched on the crucial issues of people—their recruitment, training and retention—that will be fundamental to our capabilities, let alone the question of wider national resilience. Time does not permit me this afternoon to do much more than to scratch the surface. Suffice to say that we face a double challenge: we have to make good the shrinking and hollowing out of our Armed Forces that has been the handiwork of successive, delinquent Governments. At the same time, we have to adapt those forces to meet the stark and pressing challenges of the future.
There will of course be debates about precisely how those future capabilities are to be provided, but two things seem beyond doubt. The first is that those capabilities will be essential. The second is that they are well beyond the financial guidelines under which this review is operating, so I end where I began: with the Budget. The mantra seems to be that no more money is available for defence. Of course the money is available; it is a question of choices and priorities. If the Government say that they cannot afford more than 2.5% when the need is so apparent, what they are really saying is that the safety and security of this country and its people are not their top priority. Looking back at our history, they would not be the first Government to say this, nor would they be the first to reap a frightful harvest if the current severe risks were to materialise.
Lord West of Spithead (Lab)
My Lords, we are all aware that threats to global stability are greater and more unpredictable than at any time for several decades, and the SDR will, I am sure, lay them out very clearly and starkly. That is of course much easier to do than to articulate what it means for the UK, and what action we should take, to ensure the survival, safety, security and wealth of our nation and people into the future. How should we position ourselves?
The SDR has to identify how we see our position in the world and what we should be doing. We are presently a medium-sized world power: the sixth-richest nation in the world, with nuclear weapons and 14 overseas territories, and a permanent member of the UN Security Council. We still run global merchant shipping from London. We are the major European investor in south Asia, south-east Asia and the Pacific Rim, with consequent benefits for our balance of payments. All this needs protection and looking after. Successive Prime Ministers have been able to walk the world stage, being listened to and courted for alliance membership et cetera, because of our military power and not our considerable soft power. This is no longer the case; defence has been systematically underfunded for many years. Everyone recognises that our forces are hollowed out.
The 1998 SDR produced by my noble friend Lord Robertson was the best of the many produced since the end of the Cold War. It identified a force structure and the alliances required to fulfil what was seen as needed to counter the threats that our nation faced at the time, and it did that very well. It very quickly ceased being fully funded. I was successively Chief of Defence Intelligence, Commander-in-Chief Fleet and First Sea Lord from 1998 to 2006, and I had to wrestle with the problems that caused. I got a bollocking, in fact, from my political masters because I said to the media that a ship could be in only one place at one time. This was in reaction to the fact that our order of 12 45s was reduced to six and we were not going to order any more frigates. My goodness me, how we would love to have them now, with events in the Red Sea and around the world. Decisions made in defence, of course, have a long-term effect and we always need to be aware of that. Numbers have strength in themselves.
Similarly, the design of the Type 45s—this was identified in the SDR—allowed for the fitting of land attack missiles and the ability to shoot down ballistic missiles. Again, when I went to the Secretary of State for Defence at the time to say that this had to be done and fitted, he said, “No, this money is not there now”. I do not know quite where it had gone but it was not there. Again, money was the elephant in the room.
Many have argued that cyber, AI, quantum, satellites, digitisation, drones and so on mean that platforms are unimportant. All I can say is that if you are 500 miles south of Hormuz or in the middle of the Arctic and you have not got a platform, you are swimming. I have done that in the past; it is not much fun. Yes, technology has changed and is changing war, but that has always been the case. It does not actually make things cheaper; if anything, it adds to the cost. Again, I reiterate that money is the elephant in the room.
The nuclear deterrent is extremely expensive. The maintenance of CASD, which is running on old boats as the new boats are introduced into service and new warheads are produced, needs to be seen as a national endeavour. It is very important for our nation but, as it stands, the defence budget cannot support the deterrent without growing damage to our conventional capability.
I am sure that the SDR team will go into resilience; preparedness; sovereign capability; the need for defence firms to be able to ramp up production and ensure supply in times of tension and war; the need for national repair and upgrade facilities; and the need for trained, qualified staff to operate them. I am sure that procurement will be looked at again. It needs to be, not least to address the anachronistic contracting and acquisition system, which is much better suited to the leisurely pace of peacetime than urgency in wartime. Manpower is a mess. We must ensure that we have sufficient, highly trained men and women, in particular computer-literate, digitally aware engineering specialists. A slight surplus of manpower is not that efficient, I know, but it is better than too little. Alliances are crucial as we often do not have the strength to act unilaterally. It is important to ensure that we bring to an alliance the key capabilities it does not really have enough of.
My key question for those conducting the review is: what, in military strategic terms, is most important for our nation? What do our allies value most? What is the most critical environment, bearing in mind that all the environments work together and intermesh, as we do not have sufficient money to focus on all of them? As noble Lords might imagine, to my mind, it is the maritime environment. We are an island. We depend on the sea for our survival and wealth. I can tell noble Lords from my time in the intelligence world that our enemies know that only too well. Maritime capability is what our allies expect of us. The growing strength of the European NATO allies on land and the limits of their strengths at sea reinforce that. For example, the accession of Sweden and Finland to NATO and Poland’s army expansion programme alone have added 20 army brigades to NATO’s terrestrial strength, as well as a plethora of fast jets. There is no such naval growth.
I wish the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, well with this huge task ahead of him.
Lord Houghton of Richmond (CB)
My Lords, when I spoke in the foreign policy and defence debate on the gracious Speech a few weeks ago, I welcomed the Government’s intention to hold a strategic defence review and to do so quickly. I remarked on the nature of the three defence reviews of which I had the most intimate knowledge—those of 2010, 2015 and 2020—and offered that those three reviews had three things in common.
First, they all had a superficially compelling narrative, one that gave a fairly sobering analysis of the increasing risks to the stability of the world order and the growing diversity of both the defence and security challenges to that order. The second thing was the reality of government austerity. All three reviews were ultimately the product of financial, rather than geostrategic, reality. The third thing, therefore, was that all three reviews delivered a delusion that various alchemies—modernisation, efficiency, technological superiority and fusion doctrine—somehow facilitated an ability to take acceptable risk because, in the end, everything would turn out all right and be okay.
The result of these serial delusions has now been exposed. The International Relations and Defence Committee’s recent report on the lessons for UK defence from Ukraine, brutally but fairly, lays bare the somewhat alarming state of not just our Armed Forces but the machinery of government, the defence industry and wider society’s ability to deter or sustain a conventional war at scale.
The defence review currently under way cannot, therefore, come quickly enough, but it needs to be a review quite unlike its most recent forerunners. It cannot be a cost-capped exercise in public and self-delusion; rather, it must be an honest exercise in self-scrutiny and geopolitical reality. I realise that, ultimately, money will have to be a factor. As long as the review has integrity, it does not necessarily lead to an uncomfortable outcome. Indeed, it might be quite a liberating exercise. To me, the outcome of the review should be a justified choice from which all else flows.
The choice is the strategic one of what role we, the United Kingdom, want to play in the world over the next 10 to 20 years. I do not think that this is a simplistic choice between doing everything or nothing. The nation would not understand or tolerate a wholly extreme departure from our current aspirations. Rather, it is a more nuanced choice between two more subtle options—but it is a very distinct choice.
The context is the increasingly darkening world in which we no longer have a monopoly on the ownership of truth. It is a world in which China, Russia, North Korea and Iran are increasingly mutually self-supporting and in which many of the countries of the poorly defined global South are, at best, undecided as to whom they favour.
One choice is to double down on what we have traditionally aspired to be as a nation—a global leader. It would involve us in a meaningful leadership role in NATO, necessitate a significant investment in restoring conventional deterrence in Europe, require a significant investment in resilience, necessitate the recreation of the mechanisms for generating reserves, involve continued or even greater investment in cyberspace and emerging technologies, and involve us in some more demanding global roles of which AUKUS and GCAP are perhaps the capability forerunners. This would be the more expensive option and would bring its own forms of risk and benefit on the global stage.
A second option is more modest but, some may argue, more rational. It would involve coming to terms with a reduced global ambition and accepting that there are limits to where we envisage projecting force. It would focus on the regional threat from Russia and, more specifically, it might choose to exploit the mutual synergies and interests we enjoy with the nations of the Joint Expeditionary Force. Our maritime and air forces could form the core of a meaningful contribution to the security of the north Atlantic and northern Europe. It might recognise that expeditionary land forces, at scale, looks a highly questionable ambition for a nation that cannot man an army of 72,000 and that has no current mechanisms to mobilise a reserve.
But we do have the ability to exploit space and cyber special force operations, and we retain a practised understanding of high-level command and control. This more modest option would also need to recognise our deficiencies in layered anti-missile defence and offensive missile capability. The latter may provide the necessary escalatory gearing to restore credibility to our strategic deterrent.
I do not want to give the impression that this second option necessarily generates any savings against the current or anticipated budget. It would, however, demand some markedly different capability choices. My point is that the capability choices would be the result of the decisions about our strategic ambition. I fear that, in the past, capability choices have predetermined the policy aspiration, which must be the wrong way around.
My plea is for a review of integrity, not one based on hope, boosterism or doctrinal alchemy. I would certainly be cautious of an alchemy based on the idea of an integrated force fighting an unfair war on the presumption of perpetual technological advantage. To me, such an outcome has some of the hallmarks of a delusion in waiting.
Lord De Mauley (Con)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, for bringing this important debate today. I thank him particularly as a former member of the International Relations and Defence Committee—which I now have the honour of chairing—for his contributions to the committee’s work. I also declare my interest as chairman of the Council of the Reserve Forces and Cadets Association.
The strategic defence review provides a welcome opportunity for the Government to rethink their approach to defence. I will focus my remarks largely on the role that Reserve Forces could play in that.
Over the last couple of years, the global security environment has changed dramatically. As other noble Lords have said, we are witnessing a period of growing instability. Russia’s illegal and unprovoked invasion of Ukraine has been a turning point for European security and has raised serious concerns about Russian intentions elsewhere in Europe. In the Middle East, the conflict between Israel, Hamas and Hezbollah threatens to escalate into a wider regional war, potentially drawing in Iran. Tensions in the South China Sea are escalating, and a wave of coups in the Sahel is plunging millions into physical and economic insecurity. This raises the question as to whether our Armed Forces are equipped to deal with this new reality.
The International Relations and Defence Committee recently published a report, which the noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, and the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Houghton, referred to, and which we have submitted to the SDR team, on the implications of the war in Ukraine for UK defence. We found that years of strategic neglect have left our forces stretched thin and limited in size. We are underprepared to respond to the worsening global threat environment, and in particular to meet the very real and growing threat from Russia.
Our Armed Forces lack the necessary mass, resilience and coherence to sustain prolonged, high-intensity conflict at scale. This of course also weakens their deterrent effect. If we are to prevent conflict with Russia, deterrence is our best insurance. After all, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine itself represented a failure of NATO’s deterrence posture. We must therefore restore the credibility of our deterrence posture, which has to include, as other noble Lords have said, increasing troop numbers.
Yet even apart from the well-documented challenges of recruitment and retention, increasing troop numbers comes at a significant cost. This is where my own submission to the SDR comes in; the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup, and the noble Lord, Lord West, may be glad to hear that it is a tri-service proposition. Ukraine has shown that recruitment of the rank and file of a second or third echelon force need not be the problem. It recruited half a million from a population about two-thirds the size of ours in six months in 2022. What it could not do was provide the experienced people to train them. We, and other nations, had to step in and help.
My concept, in simple terms, is based loosely on the very successful Home Service Force of the early 1990s. It is that we should utilise some of the quite large number of experienced people who have recently left the regular and Reserve Forces to form cadres of about 50, as the nucleus each of a battalion-sized unit, 500 strong, the bulk—the other 450—of which would be recruited only at a time chosen by the Government when the threat level warranted it. I hope the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup, and the noble Lord, Lord West, will forgive me for using army language, but I do it for simplicity. The cadres would need, say, 10 to 15 days of training a year to maintain and update their skills. I ask only that this concept—the submission goes into considerably more detail—is given thorough consideration, and I would of course be delighted to discuss the detail with the SDR team and/or the Minister.
I turn to our Reserve Forces as they are currently constituted. As my committee’s inquiry into Ukraine revealed, their capability has been eroded over recent years. Successive Governments have failed to articulate a clear vision for how the reserves can effectively supplement and support our Armed Forces. It is time to reverse this. Our report says that the Reserve Forces, whose numbers have declined over recent years—largely because of reduced funding and a broken recruiting system—need a co-ordinated approach, including addressing clarity of purpose, demanding training, appropriate logistical and administrative support, equipment and proper funding. I know that the Reserve Forces and cadets associations have specific attributes that are able to help, and they stand ready to help.
I ask the Minister for his assurance that the Government will give due consideration to enhancing the role of the reserves. What plans are there, if any, to respond to the recommendations made by General Sir Nick Carter in his Reserve Forces review?
This is not just about troop numbers; the whole of society has a role to play in defence. We need to move beyond the idea that defence is solely the military’s responsibility, become better at conveying the significance of national security to the wider public and set out how they can contribute to a more resilient society. The volunteer reserves are part of the answer, but the Government must also draw the wider public into a conversation about defence—including the potential for higher, and especially better and cleverer, defence spending—as well as greater civic responsibility.
One useful lever available would be to involve the signatories to the Armed Forces covenant, especially the gold award holders, who ought to have a predisposition to help. There needs to be a greater sense of urgency and awareness about the risks facing the UK. An honest dialogue about the country’s vulnerabilities and what is required to keep it safe is essential. The Government must develop a compelling value proposition that resonates with citizens, emphasising the importance of national security in their daily lives and moving beyond the notion that defence is solely the military’s responsibility. There is much we can learn from our Scandinavian partners and their concept of total defence, which integrates civilians into national security. The Government should build on this framework to create a similarly compelling vision for the UK.
We are at a crossroads. The choices we make now will determine whether we can restore our nation’s credibility and remain an influential player on the global stage. Alternatively, we risk the fate of being relegated to reactive crisis management rather than playing a proactive role in preventing conflicts. The war in Ukraine has moved this debate from theoretical speculation to urgent reality. Complacency in defence is no longer an option.
Lord Kerr of Kinlochard (CB)
It is a great reassurance to the House that the noble Lord, Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, is associated with this review. I thank him for securing this debate and for the skill with which he introduced it. I hope that his review will tell it like it is.
We need to invest more and to invest better. The world is much more dangerous than when Labour last took office and the noble Lord set up his defence review. In the Middle East, the South China Sea and the Sahel and the sub-Sahara, we see higher tension and terror. In Ukraine, we see an existential threat to Europe’s liberties. There is nothing new in that—from the Moscow embassy, I watched the sack of Dubček’s Prague—but what is new is a NATO too long disarmed by a naive faith in the peace dividend and a US whose NATO commitment can no longer be taken for granted. The most chilling moment for me in the Trump-Harris Philadelphia debate was when Trump could not bring himself to say that he would support Ukraine. Putin would not stop at Kyiv—we face a 1938 moment. Ukraine’s war is our war, and keeping the alliance shield requires investment to deter and to insure against American retreat.
As the terms of reference for the defence review say, the first task of the state is to protect the citizen. That means that defence expenditure is not discretionary expenditure. When I worked in defence for Secretary of State Carington and Chancellors Healey and Howe, we had a commitment to maintain 55,000 troops on the mainland of Europe, and we always honoured it. We were spending 5% of GDP on defence, and the nation was not balking at that. When the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, ran his review, we were spending 2.5% or 2.3%—although the task has clearly grown. Russia spends 6% and is planning a 25% increase next year.
Of course it is misleading to think in terms of GDP comparisons and proportions, but it is absolutely clear that we need greater capability because the threat has got greater. We are not investing enough. I believe that if it was explained to the country why we were not investing enough and if the threat was spelled out, the country would not balk at it. I hope the defence review will tell it like it is.
We certainly need to invest much better. We must get recruitment right. Too many honourable Ministers have stood at the Dispatch Box admitting that there have been shortfalls but asserting that the corner has been turned. I am unconvinced. Outsourcing was always a mistake and it should now be corrected, but the much bigger problem is procurement, where the flaws are systemic. I recognise most of them from the 5% days when I knew a bit about defence, but they are still much more damaging now, with resources so much more constrained.
These flaws are not unique to us. In Washington, a bipartisan congressional commission reported this summer that:
“Fundamental shifts in threats and technology require fundamental change”
in how the Department of Defense functions, that the country must
“spend more effectively and more efficiently to build the future force, not perpetuate the existing one”,
and that the Defense Secretary and central staff
“should be more empowered to cancel programs, determine needs for the future, and invest accordingly”,
particularly in cyber, space and software. It said that the R&D paradigm needs to shift to adopting technological innovations from outside the department, and that 11 of the 14 technologies deemed critical for national security are “primarily non-defense specific”. That is what Congress is saying in Washington. Of course the US-UK analogy is not exact, but I believe all the elements I have mentioned are advice that we too should heed.
Investing better means a major update of the MoD’s procurement systems. The compact with the taxpayer has to be that, although we have to take more of his money, we will promise to spend it better. There must be no more sacred cows, interservice “You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” deals, or continually changing specifications to add gold plate. We need longer production runs and more emphasis on simplicity, serviceability—the secret of, for example, the Hawk aircraft programme’s success—and specialisation. We do not need, and we certainly cannot afford, industrial capabilities across the board. We need to invest where we lead in Europe, and where others lead we need to go for the reciprocal procurement deals that generate the export sales and hence longer production runs, which drive down costs. This means having the self-discipline to stop tinkering with specifications and avoid the delusions of autarky—no more Nimrods or Sting Rays. In-house solutions and UK-only programmes are very rarely best.
Two great Defence Secretaries, Denis Healey and Peter Carington, had no doubt that economies of scale and the foreign sales that would generate the jobs meant collaboration with the Germans to build tanks and with the Dutch to build frigates. Their German and Dutch colleagues agreed. Memoranda of understanding were signed, but the tanks and frigates were never built. Both programmes were sabotaged by folie de grandeur in Whitehall. The Germans went off and built their Leopard tanks and the Dutch built their frigates—also, as it happens, called Leopards—both of which cost much less than ours and so greatly outsold ours.
Can the new Healey Defence Secretary do better? I hope so, with support from the noble Lord, Lord Robertson. It is a bit presumptuous to offer the noble Lord advice because he knows the issues so much better than most of us, and it is probably unnecessary to urge him to tell it like it is because he usually does, but I hope he will press for the systemic procurement reform that the Ministry of Defence, like Washington’s Department of Defense, so badly needs. We need to invest much more, but we need to invest it much better.
Baroness Helic (Con)
My Lords, I welcome this debate and congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, on leading the SDR and its excellent team of experts and practitioners. I declare my interests as set out in the register.
I will dare to repeat a few assumptions that have been made because they are important in the context of what I will try to contribute to this debate. There are more simultaneous conflicts today than in any period since the Second World War. We see autocracies acting in a more power-hungry and aggressive way than at any time in recent history. We are witnessing widespread disregard for human rights and international law that, far from coincidentally, overlaps with a rise in mass killings, atrocities and disasters. We are seeing the accelerating development and deployment of new technology on the battlefield, including the reported use of autonomous weapons systems in the conflict in Gaza, in ways that are contributing to the perception of the unravelling of decades of norms and conventions regarding the protection of civilians. In this environment, a focus on new technology and armaments is necessary, but at the same time, we must not lose sight of certain essential principles that remain unchanged.
I welcome the Government’s stated “total commitment” to the UK’s nuclear deterrent and their reaffirming that NATO remains the cornerstone of our defence. I also welcome the Prime Minister’s “serious commitment” to spending 2.5% of GDP on defence. I hope this remains the case, since the Defence Secretary recently said in an interview that the Government will make “tough choices”, including on defence. I hope the noble Lord does not feel that the freedom to make necessary recommendations will be curtailed by this uncertainty.
The SDR has many questions to address to ensure that Britain is secure at home and strong abroad, and I know that the noble Lord will be inundated with advice. I will focus my remarks on three areas which may not necessarily make it into the briefing folder, given the 14,500 submissions. First, in our unstable and highly contested global environment, it is essential that we uphold human rights standards and push against those who challenge the international order and disregard international law. The Government’s manifesto states clearly that international law is essential
“because of the security it brings”.
Yesterday, I was encouraged to hear four government Ministers and three officials say in no uncertain terms, “We are committed to international law”. While that is welcome, there is a perception that the United Kingdom practises this selectively and condemns human rights violations committed by adversaries but not those carried out by our friends. We need to answer the question of what we stand for. Such double standards will not bring us security; they will undermine it. An SDR built on such inconsistent foundations will struggle to deliver the strengthened defences that the UK needs and I know the noble Lord wishes to see.
Secondly, it is vastly preferable to deter wars than to have to fight them or rebuild after them. With that in mind, while our military power must be backed by a strong and capable Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, or vice versa, the FCDO is our lead department in engaging with the world. It must be properly funded and supported, as war begins where diplomacy fails. A robust and capable diplomatic presence is not a luxury but a necessity. The former Foreign Secretary, the noble Lord, Lord Hague, made strengthening the Foreign Office as an institution a central priority during his tenure. I hope that the new SDR recommendations will build on this example and be prepared to go further still, since the threats to our security today are much tougher than at that time.
Closely related to this, I was dismayed to learn yesterday that, after the BBC World Service ceased to broadcast in Lebanon, the radio frequency was immediately replaced by a Russian state propaganda station. In a world where we rely on soft power to achieve and support our goals, we should be expanding the reach of the BBC World Service, not watching it wither and be replaced, as in the case of Lebanon, by Russian state propaganda.
Finally, we must back our statements of commitment to human rights with action. I urge the noble Lord not to overlook the persistence of sexual and gender-based violence as a feature of nearly all contemporary conflicts and its role as a tactic of warfare and cause of human displacement and suffering. I hope that the SDR will include recommendations on how to strengthen UK and international action to counter the use of rape as a weapon of war, including incorporating that action into all our relevant military training, particularly when we are training up allied armed forces. As is often pointed out, the United Kingdom Armed Forces are second to none and the power of this example cannot be overstated.
The SDR comes at a time when the challenges we face are immense, but not insurmountable. As well as ensuring that our Armed Forces have the tools that they need to do their work, we must uphold human rights and international law, oppose violations wherever they occur, avoid damaging double standards and invest in diplomacy and soft power. I believe that the noble Lord attaches importance to these principles, and I look forward to the 2025 review.
Lord Craig of Radley (CB)
My Lords, as the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, mentioned, his team has already received much guidance and many suggestions on force size and mix. I am sure that the first-responder contribution of the Royal Air Force front line, which gives the Government choice and strength in facing and dealing promptly with crises worldwide, will have been mentioned. It will be of key importance to sustain and enhance this capability in years ahead. As mentioned by the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup, front-line fighter strength is too low to sustain even moderate attrition in war.
Above all, the review must concentrate on the men and women who, either in uniform or civilian appointments, are essential to the strength and capabilities of each service. The comprehensive Agency and Agility Haythornthwaite report, published last year with considerable fanfare and senior leadership approval, ran to 67 recommendations. Considerable time and effort will be required to get even some of them, let alone all, into decision and implementation, and many are not cost free. I expect that some progress has been achieved, although it has not been widely publicised.
One would have hoped already to see some positive response within the services themselves, but the most recent continuous attitude survey shows no indication that morale, recruitment or retention has improved. The year-on-year failure to recruit and retain front-line personnel strength is cumulative and now extremely alarming. It will take at least five years of fully successful and increased annual intakes to correct these growing imbalances. This is a most serious issue. It must be grasped or the services will fail and fall short.
Those with long memories of attempts to improve working and living conditions at officer and other rank levels have seen them inadequately funded and suffer from short-term savings or other issues. Plans, let alone aspirations, have not lived up to expectations. This is a major reason given for premature retirements. The defence review must treat this aspect of its work with maximum attention and seriousness. Funding must be met. A further aspect causing difficulty with retention applies to pensions. Surely, special consideration should be given to the Armed Forces to reflect their distinct career patterns, and to others employed by government.
Fundamental to this review is the definition of what the Armed Forces may be required to do. In simple terms, they contribute to the defence of the nation. One glaring and widely acknowledged weakness is the air defence of the UK base itself. For far too long, this has taken second place to the demands of operations overseas. As more modern threats emerge, it is essential that our home base is more adequately protected. A Wedgetail fleet with only three airborne radar airframes is surely not enough.
But can the review meet its objectives without further top-level political guidance on our national defence strategy? How much of a global capability force is there to be, and with what reach? What sustainability is it to be equipped and manned for? How long will it be able to sustain such operations? A nuclear deterrent seems to be a given, but will the submarine force sustain the four boats and warheads required for continuous at-sea patrol? What other givens are there, or should there be? We know that 2.5% of GDP has been promised, but when? We should know that for planning assumptions at least. Would it be reasonable to presume that NATO’s operational strength, both conventional and nuclear, will effectively deter any possible Russian aggression while Russia is fighting Ukraine?
Such scene-setting assumptions will need to be examined and spelled out. Or is it, for all the depth of this review and guidance, that the outcome will once again be entirely financially governed and limited? My experience of reviews goes back to Denis Healey’s in 1966. All fell short of full funding—will this SDR prove to be the exception?
Lord Hogan-Howe (CB)
My Lords, I rise with some humility, not having the background of the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Craig, or many of the experts we have heard today—I am sure will hear from more. I rise as, I hope, a reasonably well-informed Member of this House—just a layman—who has growing concerns about the defence of this country as we see the threat grow, as has been described, and, frankly, our ability to respond to it decrease.
I will not set out the threat because other noble Lords have described the various international threats incredibly well. I want to concentrate my comments in three areas. First, have we explained to the public in simple language why we will need to spend more on defence, recruit more personnel and probably pay higher taxes? Or do we imagine that the people of this country can calculate this for themselves, or that it is self-evident?
Secondly, are we moving quickly enough to put our defence strategies into action to confront and—most importantly, as other speakers have said—deter our potential enemies? Do we rely too much at times on the support of our friends to make ourselves more credible?
Thirdly, it is said that wars are won by those with the best logistics. So have we engaged industry at the right level to deliver equipment and other resources at scale, speed and the flexibility to pivot or respond to new threats generated, as they will be, by any new conflict? Procurement has been mentioned a few times, but I argue that Covid showed why our procurement systems at state level can rarely be relied on. Although they delivered vaccines, it showed that the system as a whole was not fit for purpose. Would it be fit for purpose for any war or conflict we became involved in?
I want to make clear that I support this and the previous Government’s broad strategy. In particular, we have been at the forefront of the international community’s bid to support Ukraine and we must carry on in that relentless and ruthless endeavour to defeat Russia and the enemies of Israel, and to deter any further aggression across the world. The bullies in this world must know that we will face them down and that they will lose.
My answer to the three rhetorical questions I posed is that I am not persuaded that we have done anywhere near enough in these three hugely important areas. First, do the public understand why we will need to spend more? Well, they see the war in Ukraine on the news. They know that we have taken in Ukrainian families and given them safe haven here. We have trained many Ukrainian forces here in the UK. They see what is happening in the Middle East, but do they know what is happening in the Balkans and the obvious tensions there? Do they understand that if Russia succeeds in Ukraine, there are many smaller countries immediately in its path in the Baltic and northern Europe that will have a bear at their door—a potential standing army of 1.5 million that will be standing around waiting for something else to do? Do they need to be reminded of the immense achievements of Poland, which is raising an army of 350,000, provides logistical support to Ukraine and is the next country to the west should Ukraine be overrun?
As mentioned previously, apart from our commitments through NATO, perhaps this generation should be reminded of the catalyst for the conflagration in 1939 when Poland was invaded from another direction. Perhaps we have all become complacent that land war in Europe is a thing of the past, when Ukraine and the Balkans show that that is not the case.
There are two reasons to make this case more clearly. The first is the cost—everybody has talked about this—because someone is going to have to pay, and people need to be persuaded to put their hands in their pockets. It may also cost UK lives. If we want people to make such a sacrifice, they will need to be persuaded. Lord Kitchener found a simple way of doing this in the First World War, but I do not think that will work any more. With this generation, asking people to support a country without explaining why would be properly challenged and questioned. I do not think they are any less courageous than we have all hoped we were, but I do think they will need better explanations.
The answer to the second question, on whether our Armed Forces are large enough, must be no because we have said that we will spend more on them—up to 2.5% of GDP—although, as has been remarked already, we have not said by when. That seems a real challenge, because otherwise it is just a vague promise. If we do not set a date, how can anybody know when it has been achieved? It is not just about the previous Government; this Government will face the same challenge.
Is it not true that, with all the context we have described and threats getting bigger, our Armed Forces have in fact got smaller? Over the past two years, our Armed Forces have dropped by 18,000 when everybody has been saying that the threats have been getting bigger. Ukraine was invaded in February 2022; it was actually invaded for the first time in 2014. Yet, over the past two years, while these things have been happening, our Armed Forces have got far smaller. As has been said, the Russian army is increasing to around 1.5 million, despite the fact that it has lost 650,000 casualties—either dead or injured—over the past two and a half years. This is a massive number that every country will have to consider. In this country, not only have we lost 18,000 since 2022 but we have lost a further 4,000 over the past two years. So it is hard to say that we are pursuing the priority that we say we have set.
The noble Lord, Lord West, reminds us constantly of how few frigates we have. It has almost become a parody. People laugh when it is mentioned.
Lord Hogan-Howe (CB)
It is an incredibly serious issue, yet we all half laugh. The noble Lord has been the necessary grit in the oyster to remind everybody about the importance of what we are addressing. It is important that we all confront that reality.
I want to talk about industry. I wonder whether industry has been primed; this will be part of procurement but will depend on money because industry cannot tool up and train up unless there is a stream of money coming in the following years. Industry will have to be persuaded to invest, and the Government will have to find a way to encourage, promote and persist to make sure that this is delivered. Look at what is happening with the steel industry in south Wales: there is an inability to deliver core, ordinary steel, let alone the specialised steel that we need for military aircraft, tanks and all the other things required by the military. It makes me wonder whether we have the strategic reserve.
My final point concerns things at home. We have seen in Ukraine attacks on the capacity to provide electricity generation. Are we certain that we have the reserves? If we were attacked from the air, would we be able to stop it, or would we really struggle?
My answer to all three of the questions I have posed is that I do not feel we are doing enough, nor doing things quickly enough. I also do not think we are explaining things well enough. We want the public to support this, not just with their lives at times but through their taxes—generally, of course, we want them to support what our Armed Forces are doing in a way that only they can—but I do not think we have found that voice yet. I do not think we have roared. Poland has made a statement. I do not know what ours is, and I do not know when we will make it.
Lord Bew (CB)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, for securing this debate at this dangerous and difficult moment in our nation’s defence history. As he rightly said in his introductory remarks, there can be no business as usual. I wish him good luck for the review.
He reminded us that this is not his first rodeo. A quarter of a century ago, he was at the heart of these matters. What I will do is just remind him, although I am sure he does not need reminding, of some of the ways in which he approached his agenda at that time in the late 1990s. In particular, I draw attention to the commitment that was made to the regions of the United Kingdom and the part that they played in our defence industry. Part of that, for example, is the Thales factory in Belfast, founded around 2000, which was a major development. Every NLAW that is now fired in Ukraine has come from that Thales factory. In part, I draw attention to the disproportionate role that, for example, Belfast and Belfast factories are now playing in that major conflict, which goes back to the approach that the Labour Government had in the late 1990s and the beginning of this century, to make sure that defence and defence industries had to be looked at in a properly regional and fair way.
To take this up to the present, earlier this year, in January, the then Government produced their Safeguarding the Union document, which was part of the process, welcomed by the then Labour Opposition, by which the power-sharing institutions of the Good Friday agreement were restored in Belfast. That document was a very important part of the context for that achievement. Paragraph 34, on page 75, touches on the issues we are concerned with today:
“Recognising the untapped resources available to the defence industry in Northern Ireland, the Government”—
the then Sunak Government—
“is committed to incorporating Northern Ireland into the UK defence network, showcasing the skills, industry expertise and infrastructure that are thriving in Northern Ireland”.
The King’s Speech renewed that commitment to the regions of the United Kingdom. The Labour Party, in opposition, welcomed Safeguarding the Union as part of a process by which the institutions were restored in Northern Ireland. I am simply anxious that, during the work of this review, these commitments are not forgotten and, to repeat my point, that the first time around the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, got this right. I just hope that, the second time around, he also gets it right.
I strongly welcome the Government’s commitment to raise defence spending up to 2.5%—although I know that there are many in this Room who think that it is not enough. I also welcome—this point has come up already in the debate—the renewed intensity of the Government’s commitment to international law. I want to add a coda, particularly in the light of recent days, that this correct concern about double standards should not lead to a neglect of our vital interests.
The noble Lord, Lord Kerr of Kinlochard, said that we were in a 1938 moment—and we are in a double sense. The second sense is about the Anglo-Irish treaty of 1938. All civilised opinion in London welcomed that as a wonderful moment in which we healed our relations with the Irish people, with whom we had not been getting on well—legendarily. It was advertised by the then Chamberlain Government that we were telling Mr Hitler, “This is how you deal with problems: you make concessions, you are very civilised, you talk”. Indeed, at times, we had a leader saying that this would even help solve problems in the Middle East—which is a big ask, I have to say—immediately after this event.
In fact, the key moment was the surrendering of our ports that existed under the treaty in the south and west of Ireland. The Admiralty just made a miscalculation. It did not concede that the Germans would be operating out of French ports in 1940 so rapidly. It therefore thought that it did not really need those expensive ports in Ireland. At the end of the war, the Admiralty calculated that we had lost 5,000 to 7,000 sailors because we had given up those ports in the south and west. So while we think of international law and international civilised standards, there is always a need to remember, above all, the hard-headed and perhaps cynical assessment of what our own national interests are in a world in which not every country is equally committed to liberal values. Like other noble Lords, including the noble Lord, Lord West, I wish everyone good luck in this project.
Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer (LD)
My Lords, I welcome this early consultation of Parliament and I thank the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, for bringing this debate today. He will not be surprised that I want to talk about the first of the parameters that the Government have declared fixed: the independent nuclear deterrent. I accept that it is the settled view of this Government, the previous Government and my party, the Liberal Democrats, that the British nuclear deterrent is here for the short and medium term. In the long term, all three parties have declared that their goal is global nuclear disarmament. So as one of the nuclear weapons states, it is incumbent upon us to do all we can, while possessing nuclear weapons, to make their possession as risk-free as possible.
I attended part of the preparatory conference for the nuclear non-proliferation treaty in Geneva this summer and listened to the delegations from many of the 94 countries that signed the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. That treaty really came into being, and those 94 countries felt it was necessary, because the nuclear non-proliferation treaty itself has failed to make any progress. That makes the next round of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty all the more important. In the last decade, there has really been no constructive progress towards either disarmament —rather, nuclear weapons states are ignoring their Article 6 obligation, while modernising and updating their nuclear weapons—or making possession of nuclear weapons safer.
I have three hopes. I hope that this strategic defence review will think about how the UK’s nuclear doctrine and posture accords with the stated aims of the NPT. I hope that when the Government think about their priorities for this NPT round they can give a lead, among the nuclear weapons states, to move further with some of the positive things such as verification—the sort of work that the previous Labour Government initiated and were so good at driving forward. I also hope that this review will consider at some point at what moment substantial investment in cyber capability will be considered far more appropriate for efficient defence, and far more usable, than a nuclear deterrent.
As the UK ambassador on disarmament, Mr David Riley, said in Geneva,
“the UK takes its responsibilities seriously. We remain committed to working with others—including those who may threaten our interests and security—to build stability, transparency, and better mutual understanding, and to identify and implement effective measures which will ultimately shape the conditions for achieving a world free of nuclear weapons”.
These are all sentiments I thoroughly agree with but, as far as transparency and trust go, I have to mention the matter of nuclear weapons and Israel. Israel neither admits nor denies that it has nuclear weapons, and the USA and the UK have colluded in this ambiguity, but that moment has passed its sell-by date. As much as we may condemn Iran for trying to develop a nuclear capability, we must surely take the same stance towards Israel now. It is almost 40 years since Mordechai Vanunu bravely warned us of Israel’s capability.
I wish the Government well at next year’s nuclear non-proliferation treaty conference. As I mentioned, when they were last in power, they had the will, insight and people to give good leadership in an effort to diminish the nuclear threat. I have just one question for the Minister when he comes to close. In the light of a strategic defence review being done now, why did the Government choose on 25 July to suggest amendments to the mutual defence agreement with the States, one of which is to extend it for infinity? At the moment, it has to be reviewed regularly. As the noble Lord, Lord Howell, said, we do not know what is going to happen with the States; I think he was suggesting that we have to keep our bets hedged. Why is this the moment to extend that agreement indefinitely?
Lord Verdirame (Non-Afl)
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, for securing this debate. The starting point of the review will be the changes in the threat picture. A number of noble Lords, including the noble Lords, Lord Robertson and Lord Kerr, have already eloquently explained how that threat picture has changed, so I will not repeat that. To appreciate how fundamental this change has been in a short period of time, it is useful to recall that the 2021 integrated review, which provided a very thoughtful analysis of the main trends in the international security environment, said:
“The realistic optimum scenario is an international order in which these trends can be managed effectively”.
It is fair to say that this optimum scenario is no longer realistic and now seems implausible.
This fundamental change of circumstances gives rise to at least four challenges, which I hope will be addressed in the review. First, the most pressing question is whether we are adjusting to this new reality fast enough; it seems to me that we are not. It would be important for the review to provide an assessment of the strategic cost of delay, including further delaying a decision to increase defence spending.
The second challenge concerns our posture towards the international order. Quite rightly, British defence reviews have historically emphasised our commitment to the rules-based international order and its importance for our security. As an international lawyer, I very much welcome that, and am sure we will maintain that commitment, but in light of the changes in the threat picture, we also need to be alive to the risk of the international order, its rules and its still-fragile institutions, being instrumentalised and in some cases perverted.
Russia or Iran do not sit outside the rules-based order; they are part of it and they use it, sometimes quite effectively, to advance their interests and undermine ours. The UN Human Rights Council is a lamentable example of an international institution that has been quite successfully perverted. Beyond restating our commitment, we need a degree of clear-headed, strategic thinking—and perhaps hard-nosed realpolitik, to echo what the noble Lord, Lord Bew, said—to find ways of defending these institutions from autocratic capture and sometimes to stand up to them.
Thirdly, there is the issue, on which I touched in the debate on the Loyal Address in July, of differential treaty obligations within NATO but also between us and our potential adversaries. In essence, since the end of the Cold War, a split has emerged between the US and European allies. There are a number of treaties that are very relevant to the conduct of hostilities, to which we have chosen to become parties and the Americans have not. In the days of the war on terror—the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, will remember these discussions—it was generally assessed that we could maintain adequate interoperability within NATO, notwithstanding these differential treaty obligations. We are now dealing with a very different situation: one where the British and Europeans may do much more of the heavy lifting and the fighting than was the case before.
In addition to that, we may soon also face a split within Europe. Lithuania is withdrawing from the Convention on Cluster Munitions, and other states in the Baltic region are considering their position under both that treaty and the Ottawa treaty. These are new challenges that we need to consider. We may also soon be faced with pressure to enter into new treaties on artificial intelligence. I very much agree that this is an area where we will need international legal regulation, but decoupling from the United States on that regulation in particular, as concerns the defence and security applications of AI, would be a very serious error and one which I hope the review will warn against.
The fourth challenge concerns the industrial base, which is part of the review’s terms of reference. Our share of the world’s arms exports has declined considerably. For most of the post-war period, we were the third-largest arms exporter, and 15 years ago we had about a 5% share of the world’s arms exports—now, I think we have just above 3%. There are many reasons for this. One may be our regulatory approach to arms exports.
In the last five years alone, there have been at least three situations where we stopped arms sales to countries with which we have important strategic partnerships. In 2019, we temporarily stopped arms sales to Saudi Arabia as a result of a Court of Appeal judgment. After that, we had an arms embargo, alongside other European countries, against Turkey; it is well known that that embargo, which has now been lifted, posed a serious obstacle to securing Turkish support for Ukraine and for Finland and Sweden joining NATO.
More recently, we had the decision to suspend the 30 arms licences to Israel. The Government presented that decision as one required by law and published an assessment of their reasons for the decision. A very concerning aspect of that assessment is that they said that not a single instance of violation of the IHL rules on the conduct of hostilities was established, with or without British weapons. I think the noble Baroness, Lady Goldie, commented that it seems no longer to be the case that there should be concrete and specific evidence of a nexus between British weapons and violations. A legal arms embargo is different from a political one. Legal risk, unlike political risk, will eventually apply equally to everyone.
A key question for the review to consider is whether we are still a reliable arms exporter in the eyes of our strategic partners. Countries considering buying British weapons may conclude that, if they are at war, they are unlikely to receive essential components of those weapons, as a result of our approach to policy, and may therefore decide to buy elsewhere. If we lose these contracts, we lose business; we weaken our industrial base; and, crucially, we lose influence. These are strategic costs that I hope the review will address.
Lord Walney (CB)
My Lords, I commend the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Verdirame, and associate myself with them. I draw the attention of the Committee to my interests in the register. I will add two brief points to the very many erudite contributions that have already been made in the debate.
The first is on the importance of the AUKUS alliance to our future strategic defence. The deal signed in 2021 between the UK, Australia and America was genuinely ground-breaking and historic. In the coming period, coinciding with this parliamentary term, we must realise the ambitions of both pillars of the agreement: to deliver a conventionally armed but nuclear-powered submarine to Australia through the joint industrial and technological endeavour of the UK and Australia, aided, as ever, by the Americans; and to have increased co-operation on a range of advanced capabilities, currently listed as undersea capabilities, quantum, artificial intelligence and autonomy, advanced cyber, hypersonic and counter-hypersonic system capabilities, electronic warfare, innovation and information sharing.
Incoming Labour Ministers commendably focused on the AUKUS agreement while in opposition and have given unequivocal backing to its continuation. The risk is that in this highly congested matrix of threats in the middle of which we, in the United Kingdom, find ourselves—amid ongoing questions about funding, the question mark over the US election hanging over the country, the continued threat in Ukraine, the risk of instability in the Middle East and the understandable question of whether the UK can feasibly make a sufficient contribution within the north Atlantic—AUKUS is seen as part of an Indo-Pacific tilt which takes the UK beyond its capabilities. Even if the Government’s stated intention remains, their focus may drift.
All those things are understandable, but have to be placed in the context of the fundamental importance of the strategic threat that a rising China poses to us. It should be a point of great pride for our nation that we can assist in this significant advance for the West by increasing our deterrent capabilities towards a strategic opponent or adversary—however you want to call it—which has been growing remorselessly, which is not fazed by much of what the UK and its western allies have done recently, but which has really noticed the change that AUKUS provides.
Much of the AUKUS agreement rests on embedding a consensus between Governments and within parliaments. That must be supported by an increased understanding of the threats that we face. That is the challenge that the Government, and all of us as parliamentarians, have to prosecute over the coming years.
The second of the points that I want to make is on the importance of a whole-government, whole-society approach. There have been a number of important contributions on this already.
Look at the example of the nuclear deterrent programme, which has been described many times as a national endeavour. Look at the focus that each incoming Prime Minister has placed on it and their understanding of the funding needed to drive it through. That stacks up, but is the whole of government really focused on delivering the deterrent programme in the way that is needed? That is an open question. The long-term funding that has been provided for Barrow and the wider economy to unlock issues with the programme’s delivery is hugely welcome and the commitment to that must remain under the new Government. This goes beyond the strategic defence review, and I am not saying that simply as a former MP for the area. It is hugely important to unlock the delivery of the programme, without which one would struggle to do it and certainly to do it to cost. It is a cost saving of £200 million, if the Treasury can believe that, which is sometimes a struggle.
The earlier contributions about the delinquency of former Governments were powerfully made, but we must look at ourselves and at the political debate in this country. Look, for example, at the level of controversy over the restriction and means testing of winter fuel payments or over the child benefit cap. There is nothing like the same level of controversy and focus on the gap that clearly exists in the country between present defence spending and what is needed to restore a level of deterrence and give us greater security to maintain our ways of life and values in future years. Until we can change that, which requires leadership from the top and across the political spectrum, and until we can talk more seriously about the defence and security issues that we face—not simply within this erudite Room but more widely and in a way that is more often heard by the public—we will never move to the funding levels and hard choices needed to give ourselves the strategic deterrence that we need.
Earl Attlee (Con)
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, for introducing this debate. I agree with almost everything that every noble Lord has said and I see no reason to repeat or amplify what they said. The noble Lord, Lord Robertson, was the architect of SDR 98, which we have talked about. I took part at a very junior level in Exercise Saif Sareea 2 in Oman, in which exercise we used the laydown from SDR 98. We went on to Operation Telic, but it was so important for us to learn the lessons from the mistakes we made on Exercise Saif Sareea and avoid them on Telic.
Like many noble Lords, I have confidence in the process, apart from the financial constraints that many noble Lords have talked about. My worry is that events may overtake the review. My fear is that a drastic change in the international situation may make full rearmament unavoidable, and if we were to do that I think the howls of pain from the population will be very great indeed. I entirely agree with some of the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Walney, on that.
Another challenge, if we have to rearm, will be to do it quickly. Perhaps the review might look, if we do need to rearm, at how we would do it. I also think it is important to consider what the United States wants from us. Whenever I talk to anyone from the United States, they always say they want a full-spectrum capability. I am not clear that we can actually do that, but we should make sure that we can support the United States because it is an absolutely key ally.
All noble Lords know that the land component is seriously neglected. Many noble Lords referred to the situation in 1938. It is interesting that, in 1935, the cavalry was still seen as an important land component. The future of land warfare is uncertain. For instance, at the moment there is no dead ground, so you cannot form up an armoured battle group to attack without the enemy knowing where you are and what you are likely to do. That situation might change with changes in technology—there may be some way of defeating mass drone surveillance or satellite surveillance—but we simply do not know what the outcome in the conflict in Ukraine will be. Therefore, it will be extremely difficult for the review to work out what to do about the land component.
What is clear, and I have banged on about this many times, is that we need large-scale overseas exercises at divisional level, so that commanders can exercise moving whole brigades round the area of operations. We need to do that to test our capabilities so that we can find out what our weaknesses are when they have been covered up, with some junior officers from SO2 jumping up and down saying, “We’ve got this weakness but no one will listen”. When you do an exercise, you find out what your weaknesses are, but you also demonstrate to an opponent that you have a capability. My comments about weaknesses apply particularly to combat service support—the logistics. I would say that because I am a logistician.
We know that our armoured fleet is inadequate—that is no secret—but, recently, the Daily Mail published an article about the Bulldog armoured vehicle, descended from the FV430 range. The previous Labour Government took the precaution of re-engineering the vehicle with a completely new power train, so I do not recognise the article at all.
We must make sure that the capabilities we do have work and are deployable. For instance, at the moment—this is down to the previous Government, not the current one—our LPDs, or landing platform docks, are not available for operations, simply because we do not have the ratings to man them. We must make sure that we have the terms and conditions of service so that we do not have important platforms unavailable to go to sea, because, if they cannot go to sea and our opponents know that, there is no deterrent. The deterrent relies on the fact that we have significant conventional forces. Some time ago, the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Craig, made the point that, if your conventional deterrent is too weak, your nuclear trip-wire is too low.
I also make the point that, in several military headquarters, there are too many gapped posts, especially at SO2 level. This puts unfair pressure on the other staff officers.
The aircraft carrier was a controversial part of the strategic defence review in 1998. I will not comment on whether it was a good decision or a bad one; the facts of the matter are that we built them and that they have strategic utility. The United States has only 10 or 11 aircraft carriers, while we have two, so that is a significant contribution to the Americans’ effort and enables the UK to mount a significant operation while the US is either doing something slightly different in the area of operations or is otherwise engaged. I think that the review will have to think very carefully about aircraft carriers but, in my view, they have significant strategic effect and leverage.
My final point concerns nuclear, recently touched on in the debate. I say, “Thank God for the deterrent”, because, although we do not ignore Putin’s sabre-rattling, we are not terrified into submission, because we know that we have the nuclear deterrent.
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)
My Lords, I begin by welcoming the wider participation in the preparation of this defence review reported by the noble Lord, Lord Robertson of Port Ellen. We clearly need far more democratic input to fix our broken politics. There is a need for participation and public empowerment—and, of course, a need for Governments to listen.
I begin by focusing on one element of the strategic defence review’s terms of reference, explicitly stated as background: the instability caused by climate change. Right now, as we speak, Florida is hunkered down. The National Hurricane Center in the US expects Hurricane Milton to make landfall as an extremely dangerous major hurricane tonight, our time, with coastal areas already feeling the effects. One official said that the storm is going to be like nothing they have seen before.
Of course, that could be a metaphor for the entire defence environment that we are debating today. This comes after devastating flooding in western central Africa, which displaced hundreds of thousands of people. Last month, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Austria, the Czech Republic, Italy and Germany were hit by deadly and torrential rain. In May, there were catastrophic floods in southern Brazil and Uruguay. At the same time, Brazil is having to resort to unprecedented dredging of the once mighty Amazon to keep its travelways open after unprecedented drought. So I ask the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, an explicit question: can he assure us that climate will be central to this review, as it obviously needs to be, in terms of the threat to the security of this planet? Is there enough expertise in the team to make that possible?
Another side of the climate issue, from a defence perspective, is the damaging and destabilising role of fossil fuel companies, and mining companies in general, with human rights abuses that spread instability, hostility and rightful anger at the global North. I give just one example, the events in the summer of 2021 at a gas plant in Mozambique owned by Total Energies. Security at this gas plant was provided by a unit of the Mozambique army deployed in the gatehouse at the entrance to this western oil company project. The local villagers were rounded up—this has all been recently reported by Politico—and the men were separated from the women and children and crammed into shipping containers. The estimates range from 180 to 250 men crammed into those shipping containers. They were subjected to beatings and starvation. Only 26 survived.
The officer in charge of this mission said that its project was to protect Total, a fossil fuel project. This is not just an issue for across the channel from us, because in summer 2020 Britain put $1.15 billion of taxpayer money into supporting this project, investing in what was already a site of active conflict. This is a current issue, because the Government are now considering whether to continue taxpayer-funded direct loans and guarantees to this project. The point I am making is that we have to consider this holistically—not just defence on its own, but the entire issue of rights and security within which our defence forces, our country, operate.
Regarding other mining companies, I will just mention Glencore, about which there is a database of many scores of credible allegations of significant human rights abuses since 2010. Recently in Peru and Colombia, it has threatened indigenous communities and caused enormous environmental damage. There was also a toxic spill in Chad. The noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, spoke about the responsibilities of civil society, beyond those serving in the armed forces, for security. We have to focus not just on individuals but on the behaviour of our companies and I would also say the behaviour of our financial sector. Under the former Government, a Minister acknowledged that 40% of the world’s dirty, corrupt money goes through the City of London and the Crown dependencies. There are all the issues around supply chains, deforestation, human rights abuses and environmental damage, which brings me to one of my main points: why is this only a defence review?
That is perhaps a question particularly directed towards the noble Lord, Lord Coaker. What is the relationship between this work and the document Global Britain in a Competitive Age: The Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy, published in 2021 and refreshed in 2023? That document was criticised for not making strategic choices—for setting out lots of problems and things that needed to be done, but not making choices—but we have to make choices about where resources go. We can have a secure stable world, with its people equipped to tackle the polycrisis of environment, economy and geopolitics in which we are entrapped, only with support for education, healthcare, funding for democratic Governments and official development assistance. No one is safe until everyone is safe. Healthcare could not be more crucial. We have just had a German train station locked down because of the threat of the Marburg virus, which can have a fatality rate of up to 88%. Why are we not looking holistically at ODA, health spending and action against corruption?
I want to pick up very briefly the points raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Miller. The Green Party does not agree with the total commitment to the independent UK nuclear deterrent. We believe—we know—that the majority of the world’s countries back a global ban on nuclear weapons, and that we will have global security only when we have co-operation around the world. Why does it start from this point? You might hold this position, but why not ask the question? Surely, that has to be a responsibility in this unstable, dangerous age.
Finally, since AUKUS has been mentioned, I would not bet on long-term backing for AUKUS from Australian society. I note the opposition of two former Australian Prime Ministers and a former Australian Foreign Minister to AUKUS.
Lord Bilimoria (CB)
My Lords, the Government launched the strategic defence review on 16 July 2024. It is expected to report in the first half of 2025, which is an important date to note. The SDR has been described as a root and branch review of the whole of the UK defence enterprise, pointing the way to a new era for defence, but can a different approach taken this time around produce significantly better results than the other recent reviews? The worst one in history was SDSR 2010, under the leadership of Defence Minister Fox; it was hopeless, and it decimated our Armed Forces. This time, we are very lucky that the SDR is being led by my friend, the noble Lord, Lord Robertson —chair of Ditchley, where I was a governor—and General Sir Richard Barrons. He and I were fellow commissioners at Royal Hospital Chelsea together.
With the ongoing war in Europe, the conflicts in the Middle East and global and regional instability, this review is all about the values and interests of the United Kingdom, including the threats posed by terrorist groups, hybrid warfare, the instabilities intensified by climate change, the UK’s defence structure, recruitment, training, the modernisation of the defence systems and the trajectory to reach 2.5% of GDP. In 2019, in the debate on NATO’s 70th anniversary, I said that we should spend 3% of GDP on defence, and I have been like a stuck record ever since. The MoD faces funding challenges. Our budget today is £54.2 billion for defence, and I will come back to that. We know the inefficiencies in our MoD procurement processes, evidenced by the delays in programmes such as Ajax and the Type 26. They will undermine our capability to respond to emerging and unexpected threats.
We are meant to be investing more in innovative technologies such as AI and cyber, and maintaining a competitive edge, and we are also meant to prioritise effective recruitment. I plead with the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, to make sure that this review gets rids of outsourcing recruitment. How can we outsource the esprit de corps of the finest Armed Forces in the world to recruiters who are not part of the defence forces themselves? That is a stupid idea—we have to stop it right now.
Other factors are our commitment to the UK’s nuclear deterrence, reinforcing NATO as a foundation of the UK’s defence strategy and a comprehensive approach to modernisation. The terms of reference have clear parameters: a commitment to the UK nuclear deterrent, a NATO-first approach, reinforcing homeland security, continuing support for Ukraine, maintaining defence ties with the Indo-Pacific region, the Gulf and the Middle East, and delivering AUKUS. But RUSI has said that the scale and immediacy of the threats and risks to UK national security grow. We will need to consider both pressing threats in Europe and longer-term challenges—for example, from China. The conflict and instability in the Middle East could escalate into a major war. The contingencies with respect to Taiwan and the Korean peninsula; the growing risk of hybrid attacks; the challenges in the new domains of space and cyberspace; and the potential and recurrence of international terrorism—all need to be on the menu of the SDR.
This is an important point: the post-Cold War reviews have focused on threats and risks that are immediate, occupying our minds and devising headline policies right now. But then things change quickly. Look at the example of the refreshment of the integrated review and defence Command Paper—within two years of publication—which happened after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. We have to bear in mind that we need long-term thinking but also to be ready to adapt.
The UK and other western Governments have struggled to find the right balance of co-operation, competition and confrontation with regard to China. Then you have the balance between the Euro-Atlantic and the Indo-Pacific sides of things, as well as striking the right balance between short term and long term. Space is a strong candidate; we need additional expenditure on space in the SDR. We need collaboration with India, which is doing great initiatives in space. There is the scope of the Global Combat Air Programme, given that Typhoon should serve well, perhaps for another two decades, as long it has the latest weapons and sensors. The lessons learned from Ukraine and the Middle East should inform the judgment for our wider capabilities.
I am a proud member, as an honorary group captain, of the RAF 601 Squadron. I am co-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on India. It is very important that the SDR looks at how we are to work more closely with India, the fastest-growing major economy in the world. I predict that it will be the largest economy in the world by 2060. Are we doing enough joint exercises? Last year I was delighted that the RAF and the IAF had Exercise Cobra Warrior, a very good joint exercise.
My late father, General Bilimoria, was commandant of the staff college in India. There was exchange of officers, and exchanges through the RCDS and the NDC in India. We used to have an Indian Army liaison officer posted in the UK within the British Army. My father held that post as a lieutenant colonel; that post no longer exists. That trust needs to be rebuilt.
The UK should join the Quad, the Indo-Pacific alliance between the USA, Japan, Australia and India, to make it Quad Plus. We are at the top table of the world. We are a permanent member of the UN Security Council, the second-biggest power in NATO, and a member of AUKUS, Five Eyes, the G7 and the G8, though sadly not the EU any more. We have the finest, most respected Armed Forces in the world, something that we as a nation should be immensely proud of.
But here is the “but”: as has been pointed out earlier, our spending on defence was higher in real terms in 2010 at £57 billion than it is today at £54 billion. Then, in 2010, there was a golden era with China, no threat in Ukraine, and not the confrontation in the Middle East that we have today. We are spending too little. Our full-time Armed Forces number 192,760 in total, Army, Navy and Air Force combined. My father’s army, the central army in India, was 350,000. There are 29,000 reserves. This is not good enough.
My final point is that the trajectory of this review should not be assumed. We are going to have a Budget in October, and a new American President soon after. What is the new American President’s approach to Ukraine or NATO going to be? What is the central planning scenario? What if the war in Ukraine continues and we need to spend substantially more? We need to be flexible and think of that; it will be too late by the time we report in spring next year.
Finally, the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup, said that we have a shrinking and hollowing out of our Armed Forces. The noble Lord, Lord West, said that money is the elephant in the room. The price of freedom is not free.
Lord Balfe (Con)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, for initiating this debate. I had a conversation with him before Christmas and suggested that this might be a good idea.
I would first like to look at the threat picture. We know roughly what it is, but the biggest threat picture is of the division of the world into two very heavily armed camps, with one, the Russians, getting increasingly close to the Chinese. We are in danger of ending up with Chinese bases in the Arctic if we cannot manage to get some sort of peace talks going—read the recent report of this House. Then we will be in even more difficulty.
The defence review says that we take as granted our membership of NATO, so why do we not start off with that? The war in Ukraine is in a non-NATO country. It is undoubtedly illegal, but it was not unprovoked. Noble Lords can shake their heads, but while this war carries on and until we can manage to get it under control, we are not going to get anything that resembles a peaceful solution in Europe. Our first aim should be to secure the defence of our NATO allies. In particular, that means to look at how we can work with the new NATO partners to guarantee the security of the Baltic states. They have a right to expect us to help with their security, and that should be our number one priority.
Beyond that, we can debate and discuss, but we have to realise that we are dealing with a number of countries that are fundamentally unstable and have internal conflicts which, by definition, rule them out of being members of NATO. I would hope that we can concentrate on the Baltics and make it possible for the Baltic states to feel more comfortable than they clearly do; that we will look at how we police effectively the Suwałki Gap; and look at how we relate to the countries that are already in NATO.
Looking at another of these headings, I note the point about our support and the need for proper and efficient defence forces. I really hope that this review will look at the outsourcing of recruitment. I have what is supposedly an Army recruiting office at the top of the road in which I live. Most of the time it is closed; I have never actually seen anyone in it. I wonder whether this scheme is delivering any value for money. Overall, philosophically, I am opposed to outsourcing. It is generally done for the wrong reasons—to try to save money—and not for the reasons of promoting better efficiency and the like. I hope that we will look at that and at the way in which we can get people into the Armed Forces.
I live in the city of Cambridge: we have a very large Russian and Ukrainian population there. They get on very well together. They are basically the sons of the rich of those two countries who have all managed to get out, thanks to daddy’s money. They have got themselves to Cambridge where they have set up both a Russian society—the secretary lives a few doors up from me—and a Ukrainian society. The interesting thing is that the two societies get on very well together. We are becoming a sort of base. It is rather like when I was at university: we were flooded with Americans who were dodging the Vietnam War. Now Cambridge has plenty of Russians and Ukrainians who are, let us say, making themselves scarce, so we have a challenge in that direction.
I know that I have made my final point before and that it is not popular, but Russia is a European country and we somehow have to work out how to bring it back. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, that the Russians and the Indians are getting closer and closer together. Far from India coming our way, Russia is building up a dependence on its energy within India. The energy is starting to go south instead of west. Mr Modi is playing a very clever game in many ways, but he is not playing a game of being particularly friendly to us, because he sees the advantage to India in being friendly to Russia and getting closer to the stans and the former southern Soviet republics. We need to remember that.
Politics, after all, is about self-interest. People often tell me that the United States is our great ally and that we are its favourite child. They never say that in Washington; this is a myth that we pursue. Countries have foreign policies to better their own self-interests. I hope that this review will look at how we can better the self-interests of this country, rather than pretending that we are doing it for other people.
Lord Mountevans (CB)
My Lords, we all agree that the noble Lord, Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, is a highly suitable chairman for this review. He is also a man with knowledge of commercial shipping and strategic industry, so I begin on a wider note.
Yesterday, I attended a major commercial shipping conference organised by the UK Chamber of Shipping at the Westminster conference centre. It is significant to report that among commercial shipping people there is, of course, much heightened awareness of the threat internationally to ships, crews and cargoes. British fleets, and other what might be called rules-based order fleets, are increasingly aware of the extent to which they may have to rely on the potential protection and general support of the Royal Navy and associated NATO fleets, as well as the Royal Navy’s partners around the world. I believe that it is important that this sentiment is reported back to your Lordships’ House, particularly in this debate.
International trade is the lifeblood of the UK economy and nation. There is great appreciation for the men and women of the Royal Navy and all that they do to protect trade and what we commonly refer to as the rules-based order. There is likely to be an increasing need for this support, but my principal intention in speaking is to highlight the vulnerabilities and risks that exist for the United Kingdom’s economy in what might be termed coastal infrastructure.
The UK’s coastline exceeds 7,700 miles and embraces some 120 ports. These are vital for the supply of food, medicines, raw materials and more to the nation, as well as for facilitating exports. However, the nation’s exclusive economic zone—an area of almost 300,000 square miles—contains a hotchpotch of marine infra- structure, which is also critical to the nation. I begin with the underwater cables that connect the City of London and the nation’s financial services with New York. This is Britain’s most successful industry and vital to the economy. The volume of daily data and digital traffic is too great to be communicated via satellite, so it is carried by around 60 undersea cables. If only a few of these were damaged, the impact would be enormous: around $10 trillion of business a day is reckoned to be transacted through them.
All this represents a profound vulnerability at a time of increasing and overt actions by malign actors, some of them state actors, including Russia. There is growing awareness of this vulnerability in the City of London, where I served as Lord Mayor in 2016. After a long career in shipping in the City, I now regard myself as more of a West End boy, contributing where I can in your Lordships’ House. As may be imagined, however, I retain close connection with the City of London Corporation and certain sectors. There is growing awareness in certain quarters of the risks that are posed to the nation’s marine infrastructure. In this House, we very properly declare our interests. Perhaps I can say at this stage that a group of senior City practitioners and others with highly relevant experience and expertise are forming a group to look at these and other vulnerabilities to ensure that they are noted, understood and, wherever possible, addressed. I have been invited to chair the group, which I am honoured to do unless I can find some other unfortunate.
The underwater cables are just a part of this highly developed and extensive network of infrastructure systems that benefit and protect our nation. Energy is critical for the nation’s success and security. There is the web of pipelines that connect oil and gas fields to the mainland, and there are gas and electricity interconnectors that link the UK with other countries, notably Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, France and Denmark. Most visibly, there is the growing number of offshore wind turbines around our coasts. They are much in evidence already, but my understanding is that what can be seen now is a mere 10% of what will be in place when the current programme of installations is complete.
At a time when a major land war is being fought in Europe and there is increasing grey zone activity, including from state actors, it is vital that this critical and extensive marine infrastructure is protected in all ways possible. The nation’s resilience becomes ever more important, not least given the moves to just-in-time delivery of so many materials and products. It is valid to ask which entities have ownership and control of the assets and infrastructure and have responsibility for their maintenance and servicing. The cables are fundamental to the operation of the City of London and one of the world’s leading financial centres, while the energy-related assets are equally fundamental to the functioning of industry, the economy and society. Can the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, confirm that this vital national infrastructure, with all the vulnerabilities that it carries, including, but not limited to, physical damage and cyberattack, is prominent in his priorities?
We should not forget that the UK’s EEZ, if the Crown dependencies and overseas territories are included, amounts to some 2.62 million square miles. Can the noble Lord confirm that they will also be within the scope of the review?
I turn to other key considerations. We need to develop and grow a skilled labour supply capable of staffing our industries and energy base, and indeed our shipyards and Armed Forces. There is a need to go beyond the simple contract price when awarding government contracts and look instead at whole-of-life costs and the multiplier impacts of contracts awarded in the UK. Defence is everybody’s business. As the noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, noted earlier, we require a national effort on this and need to develop a strategy for engaging with the general public.
Viscount Trenchard (Con)
My Lords, I congratulate the Government on their wise decision to place the strategic defence review in the most capable hands of the noble Lord, Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, who is universally well regarded on all Benches; I too thank him for introducing this timely debate. I declare my interests as a consultant to Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd, the lead industrial partner for Japan in the JICA project, and as the honorary Air Commodore of 600 (City of London) Squadron, Royal Auxiliary Air Force.
Under the previous Government, we saw two reviews: the integrated review of security, defence, development and foreign policy in 2021 and the integrated review refresh in 2023. Since then, the global security landscape has progressively deteriorated. It is in a more turbulent and unpredictable state than it has ever been since the end of the Second World War. The noble Lord, Lord Robertson, described China, Russia, Iran and North Korea as “the deadly quartet”, and many defence experts consider that the global community is on the path to a third world war.
The national defence strategy of the United States, as adopted in 2022, named China as a pacing challenge and identified it as the only competitor with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military and technological power to advance that objective. Against this background, it is essential that His Majesty’s Government—as well as the Governments of all friendly nations that believe in the international rules-based order—remember that the defence of the realm and the safety of the public is the first duty of a Government.
Can the Minister confirm that the fact that the review is to be reported to not only the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State for Defence, but the Chancellor of the Exchequer, is not significant? I worry that the Treasury may exert undue pressure on the review’s findings to prevent the Government setting out a clear pathway to increasing defence spending to at least 2.5% by 2030. I agree with the view of the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup, that the figure should be increased to 3% as soon as possible. As the previous Government’s paper, Defending Britain: Leading in a More Dangerous World, published in April this year, explained, any delay in setting out a pathway to reaching 2.5% is likely to lead to front-line cuts at the worst possible time for our Armed Forces. Spending more will not in itself be enough; reform of the Ministry of Defence, to build a less risk-averse department and improve its procurement process, is also essential.
My involvement with an RAF reserve squadron has taught me that the Reserve Forces have a major part to play in increasing total military output for less money. Today, 50% of the RAF reserves routine output is in support of the front line and operations. Against the background of today’s more flexible employment culture and the integration of the Reserve Forces into the regular forces, could we not aim to achieve a ratio of regulars to reserves of 1:1? The United States achieved that long ago, and other NATO allies such as France, Germany and Sweden are set on a pathway to the exponential growth of their reserve forces.
Can the Minister and the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, confirm that the Government’s declared intention to reset our relationship with the EU does not mean that we will pull back at all from the tilt to the Indo-Pacific, which recognises our ability to punch above our weight in hard and soft power, working with our allies across the world? Japan remembers with affection the Anglo-Japanese alliance of 1902-22. The UK’s bilateral relationship with Japan has grown progressively closer in recent years. In particular, defence and security initiatives have strengthened the relationship, forming part of a more integrated defence approach across the Euro-Atlantic and Indo-Pacific regions. This strengthening has been especially appreciated by Japan against the background of growing uncertainty over the reliability of the United States’ security umbrella and the deteriorating geostrategic situation in east Asia.
The Japan-UK reciprocal access agreement of January 2023 and the Hiroshima accord of May 2023 committed both nations to the global combat air programme—GCAP—together with Italy as the third partner. Japan and the UK have therefore joined forces and pooled their technologies, together with Italy’s, to develop a sixth-generation fighter jet—in the nick of time as far as Japan is concerned, because the life of its existing F-2 fighter aircraft cannot be extended beyond 2035. Mutual expectations among the three industrial partners are very high. The failure of any of the three of them to honour commitments to complete this project on time would have serious consequences for the other partners.
For the UK, the role envisaged in the GCAP could create 21,000 jobs each year and contribute £26.2 billion to the economy by 2050, but GCAP is not mentioned at all in the terms of reference for the SDR; nor is Japan. The UK, US and Australian Defence Ministers said in May 2024 that they would consider expanding AUKUS pillar 2 to include Japan and other countries. The parameters of the SDR merely note that it will
“identify ways to maintain the UK’s defence ties to the Indo Pacific region, the Gulf and the Middle East”.
That statement falls short of the expectations of our Japanese friends. I believe also that other friendly nations in the Indo-Pacific region, including Australia, South Korea, and New Zealand, now share Japan’s concerns. Many of our Japanese friends think and believe that we have entered the age of the second Anglo-Japanese alliance. I look forward to the Minister’s speech, which I hope will provide some reassurance.
Baroness Stuart of Edgbaston (CB)
My Lords, I refer to my register of interests as chair of Wilton Park and as an honorary captain in the Royal Navy.
Yesterday I attended part of the future defence, deterrence and resilience conference, at which the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, delivered a keynote speech on Monday, which I sadly missed. I note that his speech led to some very interesting conversations around strategy. I confess that the presence of the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Richards, and Julian Lindley-French may have also contributed to strategy being a topic of the conversation. The two published a book last month called The Retreat from Strategy: Britain’s Dangerous Confusion of Interests with Values. They argue that we not only continuously confuse interests with values, but fall into the habit of assessing risks against what we can afford to deal with.
No one can be blind or indifferent to financial constraints in any sphere of government, but I would urge that our current defence review is strategic and that we balance ends, ways and means. Similarly, we cannot ignore the vital link between policy and planning, which I sometimes fear we may have lost sight of. The noble and gallant Lord, Lord Richards, and Julian Lindley-French made a forceful and well-argued case, and I would recommend The Retreat from Strategy as a book—not as a policy.
If I may, I will return to an area which I feel strongly about and hope that the review will take into account: maritime security in the polar regions. The Arctic and Antarctic are very different, geographically, legally and politically, but both are areas of growing strategic competition, including resource exploitation, access, and strategic control.
The prevailing geopolitics of the Arctic have worsened. One big shift, even in the last 12 months, is the ever-closer relationship between China and Russia across the Euro-Asian-Russian Arctic north. It is worth remembering that our relationships with South Korea and Japan matter as much as those with our European and NATO partners. In the Arctic, the UK is the nearest non-Arctic state with a long-standing interest in working closely with NATO countries, such as Norway, as well as with international business and scientific partners across the region. More generally, the British Armed Forces are active participants in training exercises, secondments and mutual domain awareness.
I turn quickly to the Antarctic. China and Russia are disruptive players, while the BRICS countries and others are marshalling their interests—especially around resources. The EU is considering developing its own Antarctic strategy and will look to countries such as New Zealand as potential partners. The UK should be involved in those negotiations and look to scale up our collective scientific/infrastructural presence in the region. Having an active presence matters.
These things are important for the defence review because they have an impact on the Royal Navy. We have limited platforms that could be described as “ice class”, and we are asking a lot of HMS “Protector”. This is the Royal Navy’s only ice patrol ship; it replaced HMS “Endurance”. I am very clear that it would be a big mistake to think that a melting Arctic and Antarctic is a safer operating environment. It is more unpredictable, more dangerous and still ice-filled. We need trained personnel, including mountain leaders; that requires extensive training and support for the Royal Marines. We need to continue to support and invest in training and military exercises with our Joint Expeditionary Force partners, as well as with NATO.
At the risk of being accused of special pleading on behalf of the Royal Navy, I simply suggest that any strategic defence review ought to start with this sentence: “We are an island and the Navy is existential”. It must emphasise that shifting geopolitical tensions, combined with global warming and the ever-increasing need for natural resources, make our engagement in the Arctic and the Antarctic a vital national interest.
Baroness Smith of Newnham (LD)
My Lords, as other noble Lords have done, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, for securing this debate and the Government Whips for allowing us government time to debate such an important topic. The fact that we have been relegated to a Grand Committee means that this has a slightly different feel from a debate on the Floor of the House but, as we found before the general election, it is clear that there is virtual unanimity across the Government and the Opposition on defence. On so many occasions, I and the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, now the Minister, stood up and said how much we supported His Majesty’s Armed Forces, how vital the defence of the realm was and how we stood virtually shoulder to shoulder with the noble Baroness, Lady Goldie —and, later, the noble Earl, Lord Minto.
In many ways, the debate this afternoon has demonstrated the degree to which noble and gallant Lords and those who, like me, are merely noble and not gallant because we do not have service experience—but nevertheless have an interest in defence and the security of the realm—think as one. Speaking on behalf of the Liberal Democrat Benches, there were very few contributions about which we would say, “I do not think we quite agree”, because so much that was said was about the security of the realm and the questions we all need to be thinking about. We may disagree on negotiating a settlement between Ukraine and Russia because we want to secure the Baltic states, which will clearly say that Ukraine needs to be secured.
However, in thinking about the wider security and defence review, rather than specific policies for particular areas, there were a number of questions that the Lib Dem defence spokespeople raised in their submission to the review, which I reread earlier today, with very much fit the themes that we have been talking about. One of them picks up on the contributions about values: what are our visions and values? What are the Government standing for? What do we stand for as a country? I would like the Minister to say something about—and the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, to think about—how the SDR is very narrowly defined, and intentionally so. It is very much on defence rather than wider security questions. I can see the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, looking slightly worried, but there are very clearly points in the review that say it is specifically about defence, rather than some of the wider security questions that would bring in other departments. If I have misunderstood that, I would be very grateful to be corrected, but that is how I read it: that it is a narrower review than some reviews in recent years.
However, there is very little that says what His Majesty’s Government think about the UK’s place in the world. This has come up in various contributions this evening. What is the view of His Majesty’s Government about the role that the UK should be playing? We may be looking at the threats, but the threats to the United Kingdom are somewhat different from the threats globally. If we are thinking of ourselves as a regional player, what we want to do and the proposals we would make might look very different from a policy that still aspires to go global, as we had when Boris Johnson was Prime Minister. Is there a choice, as the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Houghton, suggested, between full spectrum and making narrower choices?
As so many noble Lords have raised, are we constrained by the budgetary package? There is a real concern here. In its campaign for government, the Labour Party talked about raising defence expenditure to 2.5% without any indication of when that expenditure might come about. The Conservatives’ proposal was by the end of the decade. At the moment, we have a commitment to 2.5% and the review seems to assume a trajectory, but what is the timeframe for that trajectory? As the noble Viscount, Lord Trenchard, just reminded the Grand Committee, this report is going not just to the Prime Minister or to the Secretary of State for Defence but to the Chancellor of the Exchequer. She may have a passionate interest in defence. She may, for all I know, have particular defence interests and expertise that mean sending this review to her is entirely appropriate from a defence of the realm perspective. But it seems to send a signal that one of the key issues will be keeping to the cap, limit or trajectory of 2.5%. Could the Minister reassure the Grand Committee that 2.5% is not a vague aspiration to come about when the economy has somehow been transformed and when the Government have created growth, but something for which we can have a clear timeline?
Why does that matter? It is because, if we believe that we need to look at the size of our Armed Forces, as so many noble Lords have pointed out, at the size of our reserves, as the noble Lord, Lord De Mauley, pointed out, or at the size of our Army—the Liberal Democrats have repeatedly said that we need to increase its size again—we must improve our recruitment, ideally by bringing it back in-house.
My neighbour—geographically, both this evening and in Cambridge—the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, pointed out that there are questions about recruitment which really need to be looked at. Whether we have outsourced it or are seeking to recruit directly through the services, people need to know what the training budget is. They need to know that we have the accommodation in the right place to bring in additional recruits. Do we have that?
There are clearly questions and propositions in the review which talk about the size of the defence estate and refer to forces accommodation but, without some certainty about expenditure, will His Majesty’s Government be able to make the commitments that we need to improve forces accommodation and the conditions for service personnel? Then, recruiters will genuinely be able to say to people, “Come and work for us. You’re not just doing it because it’s important for your country—we will actually be good employers as well”. That is hugely important to recruiting our service personnel.
In terms of industry, one of the suggestions is that the defence review should be looking to the British economy and to growth. Clearly, the defence industrial base is hugely important but, if we are going to let defence contracts for the security of the realm or need to procure for increasing interoperability with our allies, industry needs certainty. The idea that, at some future date, we will be spending more of our GDP on defence is not sufficient. Businesses need to know that the contracts are coming and that His Majesty’s Government will actually pay.
Defence expenditure needs to be particularly secure in terms not of the primes as much as the sub-primes of the small and medium-sized enterprises. Can we really be reassured that 2.5% is going to happen, whether or not we think that 3%—as some noble Lords think—is necessary? That is not my party’s policy, and is clearly a question for another day, but some degree of certainty is hugely important.
Finally on how the United Kingdom works, whether we are going to be a regional or global player has clearly got to be with our allies. In the north Atlantic area, are we also saying that we should play a role in the High North with our NATO partners? Picking up on the points raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Stuart of Edgbaston, about the polar regions, the High North is hugely important, but we are technically a neighbour. We have a role with the Antarctic. Are His Majesty’s Government concerned about the polar regions?
Finally, language, words and commitments matter. Just as your Lordships’ House is almost unanimous on supporting Ukraine, because Ukraine’s war is our war, so too are we certain about the importance of supporting our overseas territories. The Foreign Secretary made reassurances to Gibraltar and the Falkland Islands a couple of days ago, but the fact remains that there could again be speculation about the future of the Falklands. What went wrong in the 1980s was that John Nott suggested to the Argentinians that, actually, the Falklands did not matter. Not only do we need a strategic review, but we need to be sure where our commitments are. We need to ensure that everyone—Ministers included—is singing from the same hymn sheet and making clear our commitments to our overseas territories, as well as on our domestic security, and working with our allies to deliver as far as possible.
Baroness Goldie (Con)
My Lords, I too thank the noble Lord, Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, for facilitating this debate. I know he is committed to a viable, lethal and effective defence capability to protect the UK and to contribute to global security. Equally, I am in no doubt that he wishes to benefit from a full spectrum of opinion to inform his review. With the experience in your Lordships’ House on defence issues across all Benches so impressively evident this afternoon, I hope this debate will be regarded as an authoritative source of ideas and suggestions: many excellent ones have been advanced. I echo the important point from the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, about the extent, within this House, of consensus on defence matters.
My honourable colleague James Cartlidge, on behalf of the Official Opposition, has responded to the SDR in a manner which I hope the noble Lord has found constructive and helpful. I do not propose to read out that response ad longum, but rather to shape a perspective around it to explain why my party has focused on the particular issues which we have identified. For those interested, the response can be found online and I shall provide Hansard with the link.
My starting point is defence spend. Whatever the back office number crunchers may think, defence spend is not some financial fair-weather option, where you spend when you can and deliver biting financial cuts when you cannot. A defence capability of the magnitude of the United Kingdom’s requires core funding to ensure both maintenance of that capability and an ability to plan strategically. If the Government cannot guarantee that, they might as well walk away from having any meaningful capability at all. It will not have escaped the attention of the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, that resource has been a recurring feature of this afternoon’s debate, notably and powerfully from the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup, and my noble friend Lord Trenchard.
The previous Government set out a clear and fully funded pathway to reach 2.5% of GDP on defence by 2030. This Government have said repeatedly that they are committed to 2.5%, but not when. So why am I and so many others concerned? There has been an implied understanding that we could anticipate clarification of the “when” in the imminent Budget Statement. Regrettably, just this week, the Prime Minister has created a new doubt. In response to a question from my right honourable friend the leader of the Opposition in the other place, who, reminding the PM of his previous indication that a trajectory would be set out in the coming fiscal event, asked if he would commit to that timetable. He got the following answer:
“In relation to defence spending, let me recommit to increasing it to 2.5%. We will set out our plans in due course”.—[Official Report, Commons, 7/10/24; col. 26.]
This ambiguity and uncertainty at this late stage is unacceptable and dangerous. As the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, himself acknowledged, this is a British effort. We are actually controlling this show, so my plea to the noble Lord is this: if he has any apprehension or doubt at all that, with a Budget Statement imminent, either No. 10, the Treasury or both have been nobbled by the number crunchers and the “when” is to remain hanging in the air then he needs to get on his Islay walking boots, get round to the Treasury, get round to No. 10 and deliver a kicking.
Why is this so important? It is because it begins and ends with threat. Threat is multifaceted, but the primary threat right now is pure adversary European warfare, as the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, cogently described. That demands a shift to an urgent and immediate preparedness disposition. That is why we must deliver certainty now on the resource that defence requires. The strategic defence review must be threat-based. The threat is there now: it is all around us, it is dynamic and our resource response has to match that. Of course I accept that the defence budget is not the noble Lord’s responsibility, but there can be no more powerful an advocate than him. I entreat him to use his influence with the Government, as I entreat the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, to use his, to ensure that this uncertainty is dispelled.
The 2.5% by 2030 set out by the previous Government would have enabled an initial mobilisation of the war-ready approach and ensured stability for major existing programmes, such as GCAP and nuclear, while providing funding to enhance the lethality and survivability of our existing and imminent forces. However, coming good on the 2.5% is not enough to achieve a greater war readiness without also urgent reform within the MoD to create a less risk-averse department, able to procure at pace.
Some may greet this observation with a yawn and say, “Oh, we have heard all that before. Successive Governments have all talked about reform and what changes?”. I credit the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, with much greater discernment and acuity, because he knows, as he said, that the MoD of 2024 is unrecognisable from the MoD of the 1990s, and he knows why. The changing face of threat has transformed dramatically, as my noble friend Lord Howell described. We have seen the advances in technology. With the war in Ukraine, we know what a land-based conflict looks like in the 21st century, as the noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, described. Lastly, and arguably most importantly, it is because the MoD itself has begun that reform. On acquisition and procurement, the MoD had become subsumed in a stifling culture of risk aversion, and that atrophy feeds into strategic outlook and is inimical to a culture of war readiness—the noble Lord, Lord West, made that point well.
There needed to be a distinction between military risk and peacetime risks, which predominantly exist in the civil domain. That process had already begun under the last Government, and the noble Lord does not need me to tell him that there is an open door in the MoD for building on what has been achieved and rolling out that change in culture. If resource cannot deliver without reform, reform is limp without resource. Of course, I wish the noble Lord well with the review—he knows that—and I hope that what he has heard today will help him to shape it, but I urge him to put on these walking boots.
The Minister of State, Ministry of Defence (Lord Coaker) (Lab)
My Lords, it is a great pleasure for me to try to sum up all the incredible contributions that have been made. I am sure my noble friend Lord Robertson will have found the debate and discussion today helpful to his review. I will do my best to respond to the comments—and many of them were comments as much as questions. Obviously, I will review what was said and if there is a particular question or point that somebody has made that I have not answered, of course I will respond to that by letter and put a copy of that into the Library.
I start by saying to my noble friend, good luck. I speak now as an independent contributor to the review that he is undertaking, and it is important to note that it is an independent review. It is something that is particularly important to him and his fellow reviewers. I emphasise the point made by my noble friend, and indeed by the noble Baronesses, Lady Goldie and Lady Smith, and others, that it is an all-party review. It is a UK review, and that is why we have been especially keen to ensure that the support that my noble friend has had, and the different people who are advising him, represent a wide range of political opinion. It is in all our interests that this review is done correctly and comes to the right conclusions, for the benefit of our country and the benefit of the wider alliances that we support.
I also need to address the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Smith. This is slightly out of context, but it is really important for the people who read these deliberations. His Majesty’s Government have no intention whatever of relinquishing the sovereignty of the Falkland Islands, Gibraltar or the other overseas bases to which she referred. I put that firmly on the record, so there is no confusion about the position or policy of His Majesty’s Government. I want to emphasise it, because it is extremely important to have it on the record.
Let us address the issue of money. Numerous noble Lords have, quite rightly, made contributions about money, including the noble and gallant Lords, Lord Stirrup and Lord Houghton, the noble Lords, Lord Bilimoria and Lord Alderdice, my noble friend Lord West, the noble Viscount, Lord Trenchard, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Stuart, Lady Goldie and Lady Smith. The Government have an absolute commitment to 2.5%. I know that that is not what some people want to hear and that there is no timeline given to it, but there is an absolute commitment to 2.5%. It is not an aspiration. I know that the noble Baroness cited that and she will know that, at the recent NATO summit in Washington, the Prime Minister reiterated that commitment to 2.5%.
I know that, in the end, my noble friend Lord Robertson will wrestle with how to spend that, what the threats are and what capabilities are needed to address it. That is something that his review will have to address. That is the absolute commitment that the Government have made. People have made their views known on that and they will no doubt be considered.
I turn to some of the points on context, which was mentioned by a number of noble Lords, starting with the noble Lord, Lord Howell. In his introductory remarks, he talked about the increasing threats from Russia and China—as did other noble Lords, including the noble Lord, Lord Walney, and the noble Viscount, Lord Trenchard. Let us be absolutely clear about this. The NATO-first policy of the Government does not mean a retrenchment from the Indo-Pacific. Why would you sign up to AUKUS? Why would you see AUKUS as a completely important strategic part of what the UK is about if you are to retrench from the Indo-Pacific? Again, that will be in the context of an overall budget and the conclusions that the review comes to, but AUKUS is really important. Other noble Lords made the point—including the noble Lord, Lord Walney, very effectively—that not only pillar 1 but pillar 2 are important, as well as all the other things that the noble Lord mentioned. My noble friend Lord West knows this: why would we send a carrier strike group to the Indo-Pacific next year—2025—if we are going to withdraw from the Indo-Pacific and if it was not still important to us?
The noble Viscount, Lord Trenchard, made a very powerful comment about the Indo-Pacific and that context. I say to him: all our allies and friends in that region, having been consulted and discussed this, know what that carrier strike group should do and where it should go. We will do that with our allies. That is a really important statement about where we are. Of course Ukraine and NATO are a priority for us, but the Indo-Pacific and other areas of the world remain important.
I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Stuart, we had a meeting and conference with Norway at RUSI, where I spoke, about the very issues that she quite rightly referred to on the High North—although not the Antarctic—and the way in which climate change is opening it up and increasing the threats from Russia and China. I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, that if she reads the terms of reference for the strategic defence review, it has climate change in paragraph 1, so give credit where credit is due. It may not give the answers that the noble Baroness wants, but in the first paragraph it recognises that climate change may impact on security.
Again, as the noble Baroness, Lady Stuart, said, climate change opens up the world. As I was reminded when I looked at a map, the reason it opens up the world—not only to Russia but to China—is because you have to think of the world as round. So that means that they can come over the top. I know it sounds ridiculous, but I thought that China was 7,000 or 8,000 miles away, because I was thinking of the world as flat. We have to think of the earth as round. The serious point is that climate change makes China thousands of miles nearer to the Arctic in a way that it was not before. That is a really important consideration. The strategic interests that my noble friend Lord Robertson’s review will have to reflect on are not only in the Indo- Pacific but in the High North.
The noble Lord, Lord Howell, and others were right to point out that, of course, this means: what do we do about the global South? What do we do about the issues with respect to non-aligned countries, many of which are in the global South? We like to think that everyone supports us with respect to Ukraine—that is of course important when we consider the international rules-based order and all the other things about the rule of law and so on—but, actually, there is work to be done with respect to non-aligned nations; the noble Lord, Lord Howell, was quite right to mention that. Again, we will have to consider how we influence those nations alongside our long-standing ally, the United States, as the noble Baroness, Lady Miller, said. I am proud to say that there is a special relationship between us; it is a very important relationship, and one that includes the nuclear deterrent, which is absolutely fundamental to the posture of this Government.
In answer to the noble Baroness’s specific question, there will be a debate on the UK-US treaty on Wednesday 23 October. I look forward to explaining fully the reasons why we have decided to make it an indefinite arrangement rather than the particular arrangement that we have at present. I am not sure of the noble Baroness’s diary but maybe she will be able to find time to be with us there.
The noble and gallant Lord, Lord Houghton, made some really good points about the strategic objectives that we want. He said that the necessity for the review to deliver on what we decide strategically is really important; I could not agree more.
A number of noble Lords—the noble Lords, Lord Alderdice, Lord Howell, Lord De Mauley and Lord Mountevans—mentioned homeland security and civil defence. They will notice that, in terms of what the review will cover, homeland security is specifically mentioned. I mention my declared interest to the noble Lord, Lord De Mauley: my son-in-law is an active member of the reserves in 4 Mercian, so I recognise the importance of the reserves. We need to consider how to deal with them.
A number of noble Lords mentioned defence. One of the reasons why the Government will have a national armaments director is that we clearly need to look at how we can build our defence industrial capability to meet the threats of the future. That means not only what we do but how we work with allies in order to achieve this.
A number of other points were made but I just want to say something about the new threats we will face; these were mentioned by the noble Lords, Lord Alderdice, Lord Howell, Lord De Mauley and Lord Kerr, among others. They are really important and will be part of this. Where do we go with artificial intelligence? Where do we go to with automated air systems and drones? It is about all these sorts of things. How new warfare and the lessons that we are having to learn from Ukraine will impact on what our defence posture should be are really important things for all of us to consider.
A number of noble Lords—including, I think, the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Craig—mentioned recruitment and the retention of personnel. A review of those issues and how we can improve on them is going on.
In conclusion, the first duty of the Government is to keep our country safe. We all agree with that. The discussion, debate and challenge for us all concerns how we do that in the most effective way. Let us make no mistake: the UK is a proud country, and we stand with our allies—those in Europe, obviously, but across the globe as well—in standing up for the principles of freedom, democracy, the rule of law and the international rules-based order, as we always have done. At the moment, there is a challenge to those principles. I think we should be proud of the fact that our country, alongside our allies—including those new and fresh allies to be made—is standing up to that challenge. We are looking at how we can achieve that, standing, as I say, with our friends. We will require the review from the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, to help us to deliver that, but we can be proud of the fact that we can do it and proud that, as a democracy, we are openly debating how to develop the Armed Forces we need in order to achieve it.
Lord Robertson of Port Ellen (Lab)
My Lords, tempted as I am to intervene in this debate to answer some of the points that have been made—or even to endorse the concept of me putting on my Islay boots and doing something violent to the Chancellor of the Exchequer—I am going to restrain myself, because this was designed as a listening exercise. It was an opportunity for Members of the House of Lords to have a say and to have those views then incorporated into the process that we are undertaking at present. As I said, 14,500 submissions have already been made, some of them very substantial and a lot of them coming from organisations with different views. They will be considered properly and so will the outcome of this Grand Committee.
During the last review that I did, as part of the consultations that took place we had a dinner in Admiralty House for former Defence Ministers. I had the privilege of sitting around the table with Denis Healey, Peter Carington, George Younger and a number of other Ministers who had served in the Ministry of Defence in order to hear their views about defence. It was a very rich experience and a very entertaining evening, which largely involved anecdotes about gifts that people had received—always an entertaining subject for Ministers and former Ministers, it has to be said.
At the end of it, Lord Carrington got up and said: “We thank you very much for the opportunity of coming along this evening. We’ve all enjoyed the dinner and the conversations about it but frankly, in terms of the defence review, you’re much closer to the subject than we are, so we’re going to leave it to you—and once you’ve reported, we’ll attack it”. To avoid that fate, I thought it would be useful to have this debate in the Grand Committee. Much has been gained from it and members of the review will certainly be reading the debate with enormous interest. I beg to move.