Armed Forces: Resilience

Earl Attlee Excerpts

Thursday 26th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Earl Attlee (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Robathan for introducing this debate. I agree with everything that noble Lords have said so far. Before saying anything substantive, I must refer to the two maiden speakers; I know I am not really supposed to. The experience of the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Peach, in NATO will be invaluable in complementing the experience of the noble Lord, Lord Robertson. I am pleased that he mentioned the importance of logistics, because I will be saying a word about that in a moment. Turning to my noble friend Lord Hintze and his excellent maiden speech, what I find admirable about him is that he initially trained as an engineer and had a short but useful time in the Australian army, in the Royal Australian Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, or—I am late—RAEME.

My noble friend Lord Robathan mentioned numbers in one UK armoured division on Op Granby. On Op Telic in Iraq, when the division crossed the start line, it had 25,000 men and women on the nominal roll—I repeat, 25,000. My noble friend mentioned the importance of armoured formations and, by implication, armoured battle groups. As the Russians are finding out, and as was reported in the Times recently, to attack dug-in infantry with anything but an armoured battle group is suicidal.

Touching directly on the war in Ukraine, I entirely agree with noble Lords, but I think it is too early to draw conclusions about what our defence posture should be in the future. We may be learning lessons—we will learn lessons—but we need to see what the outcome is. I also agree that we urgently need a full-scale and non-time-limited debate on the war in Ukraine, which really is an existential threat. We probably need to have regular debates on that.

Like many noble Lords, I think the Government are doing an extraordinarily good job in dealing with the war in Ukraine. Unfortunately, when I took a step back from Westminster during my recent illness, it seemed to be the only thing they were doing well. However, I praise my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for his sterling efforts and his frankness when discussing some of the problems in defence.

I am sure all noble Lords want to support the UK Government by speaking at various events about the war—but with authority. Speaking for myself, I cannot do this if I can rely only on a combination of the Times and the Economist, no matter how good they both are. Last year, I asked:

“Is the Minister aware of one difficulty: the paucity of briefing that we are receiving?”—[Official Report, 27/4/22; col. 354.]


In answer, my noble friend the Minister made the expected noises, including citing Parliamentary recesses, but I think I have had only one invitation to a briefing since that date.

The House will recognise that there will be a range of erroneous reasons why the Putin regime thought the time was right to invade Ukraine. Among these are—to some extent—Brexit, the accompanying instability and a weak UK Government caused by a hopelessly divided Conservative Party. The United States has its own problems. So far as the UK is concerned, there is also the false impression that we are no longer interested in defence and deterrence, despite the protestations of Ministers. When our opponents do their analysis of our Armed Forces, that must be the inescapable conclusion. We look happy to be able to deal with bush fires in the Sahel with “persistent engagement”, but not willing or able to deploy a fully bombed-up armoured division—or even exercise a small one.

We might be able to provide a mechanised division but, since we lack the necessary resilience, this will take nearly 12 months. However, what the Americans want from us is a fully supported armoured division at a useful state of readiness—a point made in the recent Select Committee report. When our opponents analyse our capabilities and resilience, they could be forgiven for thinking that we have only a heavily armoured gendarmerie with no depth, no redundancy and no reserves, especially in terms of logistics.

To provide your Lordships with just one illustration of hollowing out, I will have to go into the realm of military logistics; I apologise if this is too much detail. It is obvious that military logisticians will seek to have as few different types and models of logistics vehicles as possible. One reason is to reduce the spares inventory and the special tools and test equipment that is necessary to support these vehicles in theatre. This applies in particular to engines and main assemblies.

In the years towards the late 1990s, the British Army was supplied with numerous batches of Land Rovers. However, in terms of engines and main assemblies, they were not interchangeable, although outwardly similar. This caused huge logistics problems in supporting the Land Rovers in the field, especially in the Balkans. The last Labour Government carefully procured a range of trucks called the Support Vehicle, or SV, manufactured by the MAN company in Germany. At the time, the maximum number needed would have been carefully calculated, allowing for attrition and, most importantly, unexpected demands. In other words, that Government were prepared to pay the insurance premium referred to by my noble friend Lord Robathan. It would have been a disaster to have to buy a subsequent batch of these trucks, because they could never be built to the same build specification and the Land Rover problem that I referred to would then be repeated.

I mentioned unexpected demand. During the UNPROFOR days and Op Grapple in the Balkans, we were lucky enough to have a Malaysian battalion come and help on a UN deployment. Supporting their own trucks so far from their home base would have presented the Malaysians with insurmountable logistical difficulties, so we loaned them several of our own Leyland DAF four-tonners. We had plenty available, and we had the spare parts in theatre. We were able to provide second-line equipment support or, if necessary, give the Malays a replacement vehicle. Most importantly, we had the resilience—we had the fat.

Up until recent years, the MoD would not sell or dispose of logistics vehicles unless either the fleet concerned was obsolete or there was no longer any obvious use for the vehicle—the latter being hard to imagine for a general service truck—or, of course, the truck was damaged beyond economic repair. About two years ago, I became aware that the MoD was selling unused or nearly new MAN SV trucks with very low mileages. I asked my noble friend the Minister a suitable Written Question, and my heart sank when, on 13 January 2021, I received this answer:

“Due to a change in threat assessments, a surplus of MAN SV6T … trucks has been identified. To economise storage and support costs, a number have been identified for sale.”


We used to have what we called a war maintenance reserve; we obviously do not have one now. Would my noble friend give the same answer now? Are we still selling off perfectly serviceable MAN SV trucks? I ask, rhetorically, what signal does deliberately reducing our resilience send to a potential opponent? My overarching point is that our military capability is carefully measured by our opponents, as observed by the noble Lord, Lord West. They will pay particular attention to our resilience and whether or not we are serious about defence.