Strategic Defence and Security Review
Lord Arbuthnot of Edrom Excerpts(13 years, 8 months ago)
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Mr James Arbuthnot (North East Hampshire) (Con)
I am extremely grateful to the Backbench Business Committee for securing a debate on the strategic defence and security review at a time when we have not yet seen the results of either the comprehensive spending review or the SDSR—yet when has ignorance ever prevented a politician from talking about anything? This is our opportunity to present some arguments that may help to influence both those reviews, and the debate is valuable for that reason.
The coalition Government are in a very difficult position; we recognise that. If we delay the SDSR and allow more time for wider conversation and consultation to take place, we will end up making strategic defence and security decisions based on a monetary bottom line already allocated by the Treasury rather than on the actual threat. On the other hand, if we delay the CSR until the SDSR has taken place, we will hold all other Government Departments hostage and delay the reduction of the deficit. But we are where we are.
This week’s Defence Committee report has been written against the backdrop of the Committee being fully aware of the importance of a sound economy. We say that one of the main weapons that a country can have in its own defence is a strong economy. However, we are also aware—indeed the Committee warned about this in the last Parliament—of the fact that the defence budget itself is appallingly over-committed, and that is before we even begin to consider the economic circumstances of the country as a whole, so some hard decisions will have to be taken.
Tony Baldry (Banbury) (Con)
In respect of the SDSR, does the Chairman of the Select Committee agree that what is really important is that Ministers and Government have some idea of where we all want to end up? Without wishing to be disrespectful to a long-standing ally, we would not want to end up being a sort of Belgium with nukes.
Mr Arbuthnot
My hon. Friend is absolutely right, because one of the major advantages our country has is the number of alliances in which we play such an effective part. We are a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council and an extraordinarily prominent member of the Commonwealth, and we are also a member of the G20 and all the other Gs. We seem to be able to reinforce that by our strong defence posture, which is itself hugely based on the training and quality of the men and women who make up our armed forces. We must remain proud of that, and we must do whatever we can to ensure that we keep that influence and that strength. While I would not go along with the way my hon. Friend illustrates his point, I do think we need to bear in mind where we want to end up as a country and work out the best way of getting there.
In the Select Committee report, we express strong criticisms of the process the Government are now pursuing. We welcome the creation of the National Security Council and the expansion of the review to include security issues because it is increasingly impossible and unwise to try to draw the distinctions between defence and security that might have been appropriate in previous times. The world has become smaller. The threats we face are trans-national and the solutions must be comprehensive and cross-governmental. However, we now have a review that is being conducted by a body—the National Security Council—that until a few months ago did not exist, and at extraordinary speed. Our major concern, therefore, is lack of time. In practice, the timetable has been about five months.
Albert Owen (Ynys Môn) (Lab)
I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for his measured comments yesterday on his report, which he is rehearsing again today. He says the world is a smaller place. That is because there is greater mobility. In order for us to contribute fully to the international forces, we too need to have greater mobility. At the core of that are aircraft carriers and the RAF. Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that the RAF plays a vital role not only in our combat operations but in our strategic role around the world, and that the RAF as an institution should be preserved?
Mr Arbuthnot
It would be quite wrong of me to fail to pay tribute to the RAF. It achieves extraordinary things with a very small force—they are few in number. The same can, of course, be said of our Royal Navy and Army. I certainly share in the hon. Gentleman’s tribute to the RAF; it is well deserved.
As I said, the timetable for this review has been about five months. Most of the work has already been completed, about six weeks before the issue of the review. Even as I stand here, it is being finalised by the Treasury and the NSC. That means that the review has taken much less than half the time of the defence review of 1997-98, even though it is arguably even more important than that earlier review. Also, the current review should be based on an identification of the UK’s defence and security needs and what the threats are to us as a country and our interests, but it appears that it will end up being driven by the need for financial cuts and by little else.
The haste with which the review is being pursued has had some obvious consequences. Some 40 or so work streams fed into it, which is too few, and their analyses and costings cannot be as robust as they otherwise might have been, which threatens to weaken the review’s conclusions, possibly seriously.
Mr James Gray (North Wiltshire) (Con)
Am I right in thinking that somewhere in the report, the Committee comments on the unfortunate consequences that might arise if defence estates were closed down because of the review without proper thought being given to the effects on the local economy and community, such as those that would occur if RAF Lyneham in my constituency were closed?
Mr Arbuthnot
My hon. Friend is absolutely correct to say that the Committee comments in its report on the need for the MOD to work out with other Departments the consequences of changes to the defence estates. We did not mention the words “RAF Lyneham”, but had we thought of him, I am sure we would have.
Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)
The right hon. Gentleman makes quite a devastating critique of the process, but may I push him in a slightly different direction to another part of the review, namely St Athan? The process of developing the contract has gone on for a long time—I would argue that it has gone on too long—and we need to resolve the issue. Otherwise, the increased costs of delay will bear heavily on the budget. In the end, we must ensure that we provide the very best technical training in a modern world to our armed forces. We will do that either in 14 different places in England, or in one place in Wales. Does that not require a slightly different process from the one that has been adopted?
Mr Arbuthnot
The hon. Gentleman is rapidly taking on the mantle of our former colleague, John Smith, who made regular speeches on St Athan, and I pay tribute to him on that account and on many others. Training must be at the heart of maintaining the extraordinary quality of our armed forces. I hope that the process of getting to a proper result on defence training will be concluded at the end of the strategic defence and security review, because we need a degree of certainty, but so far we have had too much delay. My constituency used to contain a base at Bordon, which was seriously affected by the change to St Athan. We ought to leave the result on St Athan to the SDSR.
There has been insufficient consultation with the public at large, armed forces personnel, the defence industry and parliamentarians. With regard to the last of those, the review was initiated before the new Parliament properly began its business. There was a need for some speed in the review and it took six weeks to establish the Defence Committee, and I accept that neither was the fault of the MOD. However, only one debate has been held in the House, during which I was not fortunate enough to catch your eye, Mr Speaker. Much of the work of the review has happened during the parliamentary recess and the results will be announced shortly after the conference recess. I can best describe that as a sub-optimal process.
Our concerns include the startling speed with which the review is taking place; the influence of current operations on future capabilities; the lack of future ring-fencing for the Defence budget; the lack of public engagement with the process; the uncertainty over the future funding position of Trident; the MOD’s postponement of discussions on the potential savings that future procurement and defence reform could bring; the insufficient consultation with the defence industry; the lack of a proper review of the future of reservists; and a lack of symbiosis between structural change in the MOD and the MOD’s future direction. We ask whether operations will be funded in future by the contingency reserve. We are also concerned about the retirement within three weeks of senior people in the MOD who were deeply involved with the SDSR, and therefore that the implementation of the SDSR will be led by people who did not lead in its creation. Quite frankly, the report is a cacophony of anxiety boiled down to 23 pages.
Bob Russell (Colchester) (LD)
The right hon. Gentleman is presenting a devastating negative case. Can he bring anything positive to the House?
Mr Arbuthnot
That, of course, is the role of our hon. Friend the Minister, who will make his speech in due course. However, we need to recognise the need for speed. In discussions yesterday with the Defence Committee, some senior academics and senior retired military people suggested that delaying things would not necessarily produce better decisions.
Bob Russell
I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for allowing me to intervene a second time. I posed the question in my first intervention because I wished to be helpful to him. I agree entirely with the points he is making and I wish him and his Committee well, because the review is a rushed job.
Mr Arbuthnot
That, of course, is also what the Committee thinks.
One of the Committee’s principal objections is that the lack of general consultation may create a greater sense of disconnection between the Government’s decisions and the understanding of the people at large on defence issues. With regard to the public view of defence, there is a gap between what politicians say and what the public believe. In relation to Iraq, the British people became, towards the end of our engagement there, broadly opposed, mostly because of the very poor planning on what to do after we had won the war. There is a great degree of scepticism about the purpose of our deployment in Afghanistan. In my view, our people would support our deployment to Afghanistan if they thought we had a good strategy for winning, but at the moment they do not think that.
That gap between the public view and the country’s policy is both very important and deeply worrying. The SDSR was an opportunity to narrow the gap, but because of the speed with which it is being carried out, that opportunity has been missed. We in the defence community must therefore do all we can, not only in the UK but across Europe, to explain defence policy and our defence needs to the public. Without such communication, notwithstanding the country’s general support for the armed forces, defence will suffer.
That contrasts with the 1997-98 defence review, which was announced during the Queen’s Speech in May 1997 and reported, later than originally expected, just over 13 months later in July 1998. There was a good deal of consultation during the preparation of that review. The Defence Committee of the day played its part in that, holding 12 evidence sessions while the review was in preparation and eight more afterwards. It also produced a weighty three-volume report on the review—I do not know whether anybody read it, but at least somebody had the time to write it. It was a good review, but I would make two points about it. First, it ended up being underfunded, because it was overtaken by events. Secondly, I would caution the right hon. Member for Coventry North East (Mr Ainsworth), the shadow Defence Secretary, because it was held at a time when the British economy was strong, the Labour Government having received one of the best economic legacies in the history of this country. Before the shadow Secretary of State makes too much of his suggestion that this one is a cost-cutting farce—
Mr Arbuthnot
If my hon. Friend will allow me, I will just make this one comment, while I am in full flow, to the shadow Secretary of State. Before he makes too much of his suggestion that this review is a cost-cutting farce, he should reflect with an appropriate amount of humility on who got us into our current economic mess and on why the defence budget is such a shambles.
Nicholas Soames
Does my right hon. Friend agree that not only was that review not funded, but there was clearly a determination that it should not be funded, given that when these matters were discussed in the House, those on both sides agreed that the review would work only if it was properly funded and they signed up to it on that basis?
Mr Arbuthnot
My hon. Friend is entirely right; the problem was that the then Chancellor was not naturally enthusiastic about the issue of defence as a whole, and we saw the same thing when the defence industrial strategy was produced. Again, that was an extremely useful document, which was signed up to by the then Chief Secretary to the Treasury. He subsequently became the Secretary of State for Defence and discovered that he actually did not have the money to put that strategy into effect, any more than we had earlier had the money to put into proper effect an excellent 1998 defence review.
So now that I have antagonised absolutely everyone, I shall end by saying what I hope to see from the review. I hope and expect that its end result will be a changed Ministry of Defence, which is focused more on the threats of the present and the future than on the old cold war structures of the past. I hope to see an element of coherence, so that our future looks significantly better than our present. I hope and expect that the improvements that could be made to the way in which we buy our defence equipment will be far-reaching and helpful. I hope and believe that the result of the reductions in Government spending will be to strengthen the economy of the United Kingdom in such a way as to give us the chance to renew our defence industry. I hope, but fear I may not see it, that we can reverse, as we should, the reductions in our spending on research and technology. I also hope, although I am not at all confident, that enough of our defence structure will remain to take full advantage of the economic revival.
Nick Harvey
My hon. Friend is quite right. That was precisely the significance of the measures that the right hon. Gentleman had to take hastily—last December, I think—in order to make this year’s budget wash its face. That is a graphic illustration of the problem that had been allowed to grow up and which we are now having to tackle.
Of course, we could tackle this simply by cutting a bit off everything—the equal-pain option across the services—but that would not distinguish capabilities or assess real risk, and it would not reform our forces for the strategic challenges ahead. We cannot just fossilise what we currently do, and again fail the strategic test. Instead, we must look ahead to the end of this 10-year period and decide what we want our armed forces to look like at that time based on the foreign policy goals we have set, our assessment of the future character of conflict, and our anticipation of the changes in technology that we will need to incorporate.
The National Security Council has agreed that the overarching strategic posture should be to address the most immediate threats to our national security while maintaining the ability to identify and deal with emerging ones before they become bigger threats to the UK. This flexible, adaptable posture will maintain the ability to safeguard international peace and security, to deter and contain those who threaten the UK and its interests, and, where necessary, to conduct a number of different operations concurrently. It will also, crucially, keep our options open for a future in which we can expect our highest priorities to change over a period of time.
Mr Arbuthnot
In order to set the record straight, does my hon. Friend remember that although the shadow Secretary of State takes credit for publishing the Gray report, that happened only after four months of the then Prime Minister trying to prevent it from being published, and only after I had put in a freedom of information request to demand that it should be published?
Mr Bob Ainsworth (Coventry North East) (Lab)
We have had an excellent debate. There has been the usual mixture of party political fencing, good defence analysis and knowledge, and discussion of constituency and single-service interests. These debates follow a particular pattern but are none the less enormously useful.
My hon. Friend the Member for North Durham (Mr Jones), who was the Minister for Veterans, has asked me to make a point about the comments regarding Luke Cole. We make this point constructively, but the ministerial team needs to stay on top of such issues and to be sceptical about what they are told if they are to make sure that the agreements that have been reached and the care that is, in theory, provided to people is actually provided through the chain of command. I appeal to Ministers to be as diligent as my hon. Friend and his predecessor about the welfare side of the veterans job.
We are about to go into the conference recess. I do not intend to put forward my name for the Labour shadow Cabinet, so this might—one never knows what will happen—be the last time that I speak from the Front Bench in this place. I was the Minister for the Armed Forces for two years, the Secretary of State for 11 months and I have been the shadow Secretary of State for about four months. My involvement with the MOD and the military has been life-changing and, on the whole, enormously rewarding. It has had its low points and many high points and I have worked with some amazing and fabulous people, including military personnel, civil servants, politicians and special advisers. Some great people work in this area of policy.
Let me mention one or two of the things that I have been involved with. I was totally in favour of commissioning the Gray report; I supported my predecessor in that and I never tried to suppress or delay the report in any way. I was totally in favour of my predecessor-but-one’s commissioning of the Haddon-Cave report, which was a devastating report on the systems that we had in the MOD, and I never tried to put any spin or gloss on that. It was enormously important that the MOD learned, or had the opportunity to learn, all the lessons that it needed to.
I was in charge of commissioning the service personnel Command Paper, and I had a lot of support from many good people in making sure that that was a useful document that actually delivered something for our service community—against much resistance, I have to say. I commissioned a Green Paper to try to help whoever was to be in government—us or the Conservatives —to prepare for the very difficult strategic defence review after the election. I did that in an open, broad and cross-party way, not for tactical reasons but because it was the right thing to do. I think that helped in some small way with some of the difficulties that people now have.
In my time as the Secretary of State for Defence, I never widened the gap in the defence budget; indeed, I closed it a little. The opportunities to close it outside a strategic defence review were limited, but we closed it none the less and we took some very difficult decisions in order to do so. What I am most proud of is that we moved force density in Task Force Helmand a long way in the right direction. Helmand is the most difficult job our armed forces face today. They need not only equipment, helicopters and vehicles but boots on the ground and enough of them to cover the ground. We moved force density in the right direction, and I am enormously proud of that.
Mr Arbuthnot
Will the right hon. Gentleman please accept that I confirm what he has just said in every respect? In his service to the House, the country and the defence of this country he gained and earned our admiration and respect, and we thank him for it.
Mr Ainsworth
That is very kind of the right hon. Gentleman. A number of people have said kind things.
The defence of this country faces some difficult choices. It is not my responsibility or that of my hon. Friends to help the Government in that regard; it is our responsibility to hold the Government to account. There are no easy options. Salami slicing is not going to work. It is the Government’s responsibility, and it is in their own interests, that they do not walk away from those difficulties because, if they do, all that I would say to them on a personal level is that avoiding hard choices is a bit of a matter of character, but organisationally it can be habit-forming. And if they form that habit, they will pay a heavy price.
UK Armed Forces in Afghanistan
Lord Arbuthnot of Edrom Excerpts(13 years, 8 months ago)
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Mr James Arbuthnot (North East Hampshire) (Con)
When we went to war in the autumn of 2001, unlike with Iraq, there was no serious disagreement over why UK troops were being sent to Afghanistan in the first place, but nine years later, after nearly a decade of allied military operations, there have been changes of President, changes of Prime Minister and changes of Governments. The emotional commitment of the international community to what we are doing in Afghanistan has undoubtedly diminished. Our stated purpose in being there has evolved not once or twice, but several times. We are now less interested in al-Qaeda’s presence in Afghanistan than its presence in Pakistan.
For all those changes, we seem to have returned to the use of the word “war”—I have used it myself—but I am beginning to wonder whether it might be a mistake. It amounts, I think, to an over-simplification of why we are in Afghanistan. Although it allows us to ratchet up in people’s minds why we have sent our troops into harm’s way and quite how serious it all is, it over-simplifies by implying that there is something to be won or lost and by suggesting that there is something clear-cut going on, with a high degree of finality to it. We have thus created a series of expectations, which history suggests are completely impossible to meet.
I believe that our presence in Afghanistan should be seen as part of a wider global security mission in the middle east region as a whole, and that we should begin to explain it in those terms. The stability mission already exists in different places and in different forms—whether it be in the middle east peace plan, the sanctions against Iraq or the international aid given to Pakistan after recent disasters—and the public broadly understand these priorities. They also accept why we should give our priority to them. They accept that the stability of each of the individual nation states, of their people and of their rights and needs, is absolutely crucial to the world. People understand why, if these people and nations are stable, secure, free and prosperous, it makes it less likely that we will face another 9/11.
I believe that it is now our task as a Parliament to link together the different jigsaw pieces, to explain why they all connect to each other and to include Afghanistan. Only by linking those pieces together will the public see that we have a choice as to whether the picture being formed is either broadly encouraging or deeply worrying.
Defence and security are policy areas that people consume, just as much as they consume transport, education and health spending. However, this policy area becomes important only when things begin to go wrong, so things have to be explained to the public much more carefully than other issues that the public consume. For politicians to provide the explanation or give the narrative on the conflict will not be persuasive in a context where the public perceive—although I do not—Prime Minister Tony Blair as having lied over the war in Iraq. Politicians are not persuasive against that background. In the light of the allegations and counter-allegations over Iraq, and of the disastrous lack of post-war planning in Iraq, which we now all recognise, the people have lost their faith in the need for conflict and in our ability as politicians to demand it. I believe, however, that the conflict in Afghanistan is much more important and much more difficult than the conflict in Iraq ever was.
I do not think that there is a fatigue among the public for war as such. I could be wrong, but in my view, if the public believe that we have a strategy likely to succeed, they will support it. At the moment, I do not believe that that has been demonstrated, which is why they are losing their appetite for this war. There is also a deep mistrust of the politicians who preach it to them.
Steve Baker (Wycombe) (Con)
My right hon. Friend may know that in Wycombe, Afghanistan is an issue of exquisite sensitivity. Many of my constituents hail from Pakistan and Kashmir. I really admire his nuanced and wise speech, but does he agree that it is vital to address various sections of the public to explain that this conflict is actually in the interests of Pakistan and of the Afghan people, and not just in our own interests?
Mr Arbuthnot
I entirely agree. We must take not just our own public with us but the public of those countries where we are based and where we desperately need to help them. My hon. Friend’s constituency work will do a great deal to help in that regard.
I agreed with the shadow Secretary of State for Defence that the answer to the mistrust of politicians is not to set an end date to our commitment in Afghanistan. When the Prime Minister made his comment, I said that if our priority is to leave, it makes it harder to succeed, whereas if our priority is to succeed, it makes it easier to leave. Of course, we do not want to be in Afghanistan for a moment longer than necessary, and of course the Afghans want us to leave as soon as the job is done and success is achieved. However, they do not want us to leave before that point is reached. The problem is that we do not know now when that will be.
Commitments made now to leave merely fuel the loss of appetite and the mistrust of which I talked earlier. The media are acutely aware of that loss of appetite and that mistrust, and that feeds into the hearts and minds of our military personnel, who do their job brilliantly. However, if their mums and dads find that the man on the street cannot explain to them in simple terms why they are doing their job, they are bound to feel unease, especially when they suffer casualties. We must give them a developed justification, and we must not be afraid of complexity, of nuance—I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Wycombe (Steve Baker) for his comments—or of truths that might appear difficult. Sometimes conflict is popular, and sometimes it is not. Sometimes it is both popular and unpopular, especially when seen in hindsight. However, the man in the street must be able to reduce the argument for a conflict to perhaps a single sentence.
If the middle east peace plan fails, if Iran obtains a nuclear bomb, if Pakistan’s infrastructure is not rebuilt after the recent floods, its education system not invested in and its nuclear weapons not protected, and if Afghanistan is some sort of grand linking corridor between the three countries, becoming a vacuum that is a trigger for nuclear war, the potential consequences are catastrophic. We do not face any of those fears being realised individually yet; we face them being realised simultaneously. The result could be shattering. We must act now, in simultaneous regions, to prevent that end point ever being reached. We cannot afford to pick and choose which interests should be prioritised; we must see them all as a wider narrative of global security, and we must see them through. The public are well able to take that narrative and to understand that case, and we should not be afraid of making it.
Afghanistan
Lord Arbuthnot of Edrom Excerpts(13 years, 10 months ago)
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Dr Fox
I am very grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for his support for the specific proposals that I have set out today and for his general support on the mission in Afghanistan. He was very generous with the briefings that he made available to the Opposition when he was in government, and we will continue the same courtesy. I also fully intend to continue the briefings for Members of Parliament begun under the previous Government; they are very valuable. In addition, as I said, if we are able to provide more detailed briefings in the Ministry of Defence, we are happy to do so. We should not, in any way, shape or form, be shy about providing any Member of this House with the information they require to make better sense of what is happening in this most important national security mission.
The shadow Secretary of State is entirely correct that it took until the American surge was fully under way for us to be better able to have sensible force densities. He asked me directly about comparisons between the British and Americans. Combat Team North has a population of 441,000, which is 37% of the population; Task Force Helmand has 388,000, or 32%; and Combat Team South has 370,000, or 31%. These are much better matches in terms of force density. He asks if this will effectively be it. Well, not necessarily, as there will be changes in the mission, but we will want to continue this pattern, or shape, in terms of force density. As he says, we have reached the end point, at least for now, of a process that began some time ago.
On the size of the theatre reserve, we will have some 300 personnel, and they will stay there until October. The size of the current UK force is about 1,000—I think that the exact number is 1,008. The exact number that the Americans put in will of course be for their commanders to determine in terms of the security situation that they find.
As regards 2015, I can only repeat what the Prime Minister has said—that British troops will not be there in a combat role, or in significant numbers, in five years’ time, but we can expect them to still be there in a training role. There will be a continued need for us to ensure that the quality of the Afghan national security forces is adequate. I echo the point that he made by saying that we are very fortunate in this country to have a volunteer Army—people who are willing to put their life and limb at risk on a voluntary basis for the security of this country, its people and its interests. We are deeply honoured and privileged to have such people in our armed forces.
Mr James Arbuthnot (North East Hampshire) (Con)
I welcome my right hon. Friend’s statement and particularly what he said about the ratio of troops to local population.
General McChrystal instigated a change of policy so that our troops should fire only when they were absolutely sure that Afghan civilians would not be put at risk. Inevitably, that put our troops at a greater degree of risk, but with the longer-term aim of maintaining the support of the local population. Is any change to that policy being considered?
Oral Answers to Questions
Lord Arbuthnot of Edrom Excerpts(13 years, 10 months ago)
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Peter Luff
If Scotland accepted the case for the nuclear deterrent, the hon. Gentleman’s argument would be a lot more impressive.
Mr James Arbuthnot (North East Hampshire) (Con)
It is good to hear about the Department’s planned expenditure and, particularly, from my hon. Friend. Last year, on 20 July, the Ministry of Defence published its accounts, which set out the planned expenditure, and for the third year running those accounts were qualified. Will they be published again this month, and will they be qualified again this year?
Peter Luff
They will be published at a very early date, and I am sure that my right hon. Friend’s Committee will take a very close interest in them when they are.