Defence Policy: Deterrence
Earl Attlee Excerpts(3 weeks ago)
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Earl Attlee (Con)
I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Trefgarne for introducing this Question for Short Debate. I used to read my father’s Hansard when my noble friend was a Minister in the Foreign Office and in the Ministry of Defence.
The noble Lord, Lord Harris of Haringey, is absolutely correct: this is not just about conventional military deterrence. He is right to be worried about the home base and society’s sentiments. If those things were damaged in a conflict, in the grey area, it could have devastating effects on our conventional operations.
I am sure that the answer to my noble friend’s Question is “yes, but”. Many noble Lords have touched on nuclear deterrence, where our defence posture and signalling are absolutely clear and effective. As we have seen, we have not been cowed by President Putin’s nuclear sabre-rattling in the conflict in Ukraine. I am pleased to observe that this Government are as sound as their predecessor on nuclear deterrence but, several years ago, the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Craig of Radley, observed that an inadequate conventional deterrent will result in the nuclear trip-wire being set too low. The noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup, just asked the Minister about tactical nuclear weapons and deterrence; I look forward to his answer.
In conventional deterrence, our signalling is not positive or clear to any potential adversary. For instance, it is easy for a potential adversary to measure our land logistics capability and intent. They will note that we are still selling off perfectly serviceable, brand-new logistic vehicles to meet resource accounting and budgeting requirements. In the current situation, at the large scale of effort we ought to be able to deploy on land in 12 weeks, but I do not think we can do it at all at the moment.
I keep banging on about the essential need to undertake large-scale exercises out of area and overseas to demonstrate and test our conventional capability—or the capability that we should have. My noble friend Lord Harlech touched on the fact that the Russians regularly exercise with large numbers of troops. Yes, it is expensive to do and you can save money by not undertaking such exercises, but it is cheaper than increasing your capability and provides much more conventional deterrence. It also exposes any unrecognised weaknesses in your current capability. Currently, we have too few big exercises and the exercises we undertake are too short in duration, in order to save money.
Noble Lords must not be deluded by the wide range of military operations that we undertake all over the globe at small scale. We are now in the era of state-on-state conflict; that is what we need to deter. We will not achieve that through small operations and exercises, or the completely underresourced Armed Forces that the Minister inherited from the previous Administration.
Defence Spending
Earl Attlee Excerpts(3 weeks ago)
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Earl Attlee (Con)
My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Trenchard for introducing this debate. The noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, said that our Armed Forces were the finest in the world. I have to say that I am not absolutely convinced about that, and my noble friend Lady Buscombe outlined some of the problems. My noble friend Lord Trenchard talked about the problems that the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, may have in producing a defence review when he does not know how much money he has to spend, but he does know how much he can spend—it is about 2.5% of GDP.
If a defence analyst was to analyse both me and the Minister, he would find it very difficult to get a fag paper between us. I think we both think that we want to spend at least 3% of GDP on defence, but no more than 5%. The problem is that we live in a democracy, and political parties tend to use focus groups—and they ask the focus groups what their priorities are. We know what the priorities are for focus groups: it will always be the health service at the top, and the welfare state—all the lovely things that we want to be able to do. It is understandable why the electorate want that. If you ask them about defence, the focus group will attach a very low priority. But we do not explain to the focus groups or the general public the consequences of insufficient defence expenditure; we talked about that in the last debate on the failure of deterrence and its consequences. If you asked a focus group, “Are you happy for your daughter, son, sister or brother to be compulsorily conscripted for an overseas military operation that is not doing very well?”, just as we experienced in the 1940s, I suspect you might get a rather different answer.
Decommissioned Nuclear-Powered Submarines
Earl Attlee Excerpts(4 weeks, 1 day ago)
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Earl Attlee (Con)
My Lords, are the older submarines more difficult to recycle than the Swiftsure class?
Lord Coaker (Lab)
We will understand that more fully once we have finished the demonstrator project with HMS “Swiftsure”.
Strategic Defence Review
Earl Attlee Excerpts(1 month, 1 week ago)
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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.