Future Army 2020

Debate between Lord Arbuthnot of Edrom and Bob Stewart

Thursday 6th March 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Arbuthnot]

The hon. Gentleman, who has been on the Defence Committee since, I think, 2003, and who knows more about it than any of us, is quite right. He will raise his points in the next Defence Committee inquiry into Future Force 2020, which will tie together all these issues in the reports that the Committee does to build up to the next defence and security review.

[Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that the next SDSR should look at the fighting power of the Army, possibly also looking at the concept of critical mass as part of the SDSR?

[Mr Arbuthnot]

My hon. Friend is right. The fighting power of the Army seems to have been less used than we would like by the MOD both as a concept and in its language in recent years. Fighting power involves the conceptual component—the thought process—the moral component, which is the ability to get people to fight, and the physical component, or the means to fight. We call on the MOD to produce a regular report on that so that we can understand how well defended the country actually is.

Maritime Surveillance

Debate between Lord Arbuthnot of Edrom and Bob Stewart

Thursday 7th February 2013 Westminster Hall

[Bob Stewart]

I thank my hon. Friend. I certainly do agree. It is good that we have those bodies, and I may speak about that a little at the end.

SDSR 2010 got rid of a number of frigates, including Type 22s and Type 23s, as well as their on-board helicopters. That has further reduced our maritime reach and capabilities. The good thing about such Royal Navy vessels is that they can travel great distances, remain at sea for considerable periods and, crucially, demonstrate intent and presence when that is needed, as part of a combined taskforce or individually.

Collectively, members of the Defence Committee are concerned about the loss of our sovereign long-range maritime surveillance capability. They are also concerned about the United Kingdom’s current dependency on its allies for operations out into the Atlantic and in terms of our wider military defence capability.

The Committee was advised that the anti-submarine warfare capability gap that resulted from the loss of the Nimrod MRA4 is covered by a mix of helicopters, ships at sea and support by our allies. I do not buy that argument. The external situation has not changed. Indeed, with a resurgent Russia and the proliferation of smaller submarines in many areas of the world, it has arguably got worse. To counter such threats, the UK has reduced its capability and capacity by removing maritime patrol aircraft completely, as well as by removing appropriate frigates and destroyers, including their organic helicopters.

As has been mentioned, the Ministry is considering a number of future options. In particular, a decision on maritime patrol aircraft may be considered as part of SDSR 2015. However, such a decision would result in delivery of the new operational capability closer to the 2020 time scale. I would prefer us not to wait until 2015 to make such a decision. I would like it to be considered as soon as possible.

[Mr Arbuthnot]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Bob Stewart]

To my Chairman? With the greatest of pleasure.

[Mr Arbuthnot]

Mr Brady, you are our Chairman, of course.

[Bob Stewart]

Forgive me, Mr Brady. Two Chairmen in one—I’ll buy it.

[Mr Arbuthnot]

My hon. Friend danced lightly over the possibility of regenerating the capacity and the skills to fly these aircraft. Such skills are difficult to maintain, let alone to regenerate. Is he coming to that important point, which needs to be covered?

[Bob Stewart]

I thank my other Chairman. The answer is that I was not, but I am glad that he has raised the matter. We also highlighted the difficulty of keeping these skills alive, and no one has mentioned it. Perhaps the Minister will tell us—you will, won’t you, Minister?

Strategic Defence and Security Review

Debate between Lord Arbuthnot of Edrom and Bob Stewart

Thursday 4th November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Arbuthnot]

I accept what my hon. Friend says and I listened with great admiration to his earlier comments. There is a lot of work to be done, as the Secretary of State has made plain, and I hope that my hon. Friend will play as valuable a part in it as he played before the election.

My greatest concern about defence is that the British, and perhaps the European, public believe that defence is a job done and that the end of the cold war meant the end of the need to spend serious amounts of money on defending our interests. They think we can rely on the Americans to protect us, but they are wrong: the Americans will protect us only for as long as it is in their interests to do so. Until our constituents demand that we spend more on defence, no Chancellor of the Exchequer will wish to do so, but that will not happen until the public are properly engaged in talking about defence or until they understand its importance and purpose. If one conducts a defence review behind closed doors, while everyone is away on holiday and at a pace that would startle Michael Schumacher, no such understanding will arise. Let us hope that the next one comes across better.

Given all my criticisms of the process, the result was far better than I expected. First, the Secretary of State for Defence did an absolutely valiant job of fighting his corner and I doubt that he alienated the Prime Minister or the Chancellor in the process—he was doing his job. Secondly, given that the Secretary of State started with a defence posture and budget that were both utterly incoherent and unsustainable there was a surprisingly strategic feel to the outcome, the thrust of which seems to be that we shall be gambling our security in the short term in exchange for its enhancement in the longer term. That is preferable to the reverse, provided that we always have at the front of our minds the need not to fail in Afghanistan.

Thirdly, despite the tightness of the settlement, there was a recognition of the changing and unpredictable nature of the threats we face. There was extra money for cyber-security and a recognition by the Secretary of State personally regarding the threat from electromagnetic pulses. I expect also that there will be extra money for space security. Those are some of the new threats.

[Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)]

I think that is superb. The real problem that having smaller armed forces will bring is an absolute requirement to get our intelligence tip-top. We have been utterly surprised so many times in history. We have to make our intelligence much better, so that we reduce the chance of being surprised again. For example, why do we have so many intelligence agencies? I would bet my bottom dollar that we will be surprised again, but we have to reduce the risks as much as we can. That is as much a part of the review as anything else; indeed, it is probably one of the most important factors.

[Mr Arbuthnot]

I agree. My hon. Friend talks about the number of intelligence agencies we have, but he might like to look at the United States, which has such a plethora of intelligence agencies that it gives one a headache simply to look at a wiring diagram. Nevertheless, he is quite right: some of the threats we face are unpredictable. We are useless at predicting where threats will come from, or where we may need to be deployed, and for that reason we have to be adaptable.

My overall view of the review is that it is 80% common sense, pragmatic and broadly agreed upon, and 20% controversial, risky and able to generate headlines in the media. The success in pulling together the 80% that is agreed upon should not be overshadowed by discussion and argument over the 20% that is not, but that is what sells newspapers.

Let me give one example in relation to the French-UK treaties that were signed this week. I am in no doubt that they are a good thing, and that we are moving in the right direction. I have a reservation relating to the aircraft carriers, but I repeat that the treaties are a good thing. Actually, I believe that we should go further and give reality to the treaties, so that the warm words that they contain might be translated into tangible progress in training, doctrine, equipment-sharing, acquisition and research with our good friends and allies, the French. My reservation about the aircraft carriers, however, has been wrongly depicted as some great showdown between myself and the Secretary of State. I shall explain my reservation.

When the SDSR was announced last month, the Prime Minister said of the aircraft carriers:

“We will build both carriers, but hold one in extended readiness.”—[Official Report, 19 October 2010; Vol. 516, c. 801.]

And we all know that “extended readiness” in Ministry of Defence-speak means exactly the reverse. But, in the press conference after the signing of the treaties this week, my right hon. Friend referred to our “carrier”. As I understand it, we have not yet decided to sell one of the two carriers, and I hope that we do not. To talk of our “carrier” might be to build an expectation that we shall definitely mothball and almost certainly sell the other one. It is pre-empting a discussion that needs to take place much later, when we can see the economic circumstances of this country and, more importantly, the threats against us.

Two carriers would be a good idea, and no carriers would be a fairly good idea, but one carrier? Surely not. Every time it went into refit would we not prove to the Treasury that we were able to struggle on without it? Furthermore, are we really yet close enough to the French position that we can utterly rely on being allowed to use theirs? The answer is no, not yet. Our deployment to Iraq took place in the last decade. I do not say that we never will be close enough to the French, because I hope and expect that at some stage in the reasonably near future we shall, but it will come about only after a decent length of time operating alongside them, and after the treaties have been given detail, teeth and funding, none of which has yet happened.

How about another idea? How about deciding between the two of our countries that the French will contribute to the cost of the second carrier and, in return, have the right to use it when their carrier is in refit? That would mean that the two countries had three operational carriers between them, which should surely be acceptable. Having said all that, let me repeat that the French treaties are, in the words of “1066 and All That”, a “Good Thing”.

Of course, it is easy to mock the SDSR: “If only it had not been necessary to scrap the Ark Royal! If only we could have kept on the Harriers! Perhaps we could get by with some inflatable Harriers”—all that sort of jolly joking. However, the consequence of having to find money is that the alternative is to salami-slice all that is left and destroy the fundamental effectiveness of our armed forces in the process.

My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Defence has had the courage to take some very difficult decisions. My guess is that in the decision between the Tornadoes and the Harriers, the fact that the Tornadoes have an air-to-ground strike capability was what saved them; we might well need that capability sooner than the Typhoon can provide it, and there must be questions about why that has been delayed for so long. Why did we need to scrap one or the other, the Harrier or Tornado? The cost of the logistics of keeping another type in the air is huge—billions of pounds; a billion here and a billion there, and soon we are talking about real money.

The noble Lord West described the decision to scrap the Harrier as “bonkers”. That would be easier to accept if, when he was in a position to do something about the bonkers economics of the Ministry of Defence, he had tried to do something to put it right. Instead, he drove forward the carrier decision, which he must have known was unaffordable.

How did all this come about? First, as my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Sussex (Nicholas Soames) set out so convincingly and with such great knowledge in his speech, there is the awful system of perverse incentives inside the Ministry of Defence. I congratulate the noble Lord Hutton on commissioning the Bernard Gray report. Those perverse incentives did not begin under a Labour Government; they have been around for decades, and I must bear some part of the blame for them myself.

Secondly, there is the disgraceful command from No. 10 that before the election there was to be no more money, but also no bad news about base closures or programme cancellations. The former Secretary of State for Defence did his valiant best to try to take some real, hard decisions, but he was thwarted at every step of the way by the Prime Minister of the time and some of his Ministers. In the private words of one of his Ministers at the time, the problems were to be chucked over the fence, into the responsibility of the next Government. I have been Chief Whip, and I am not often shocked. But I was certainly shocked when that remark was reported to me.

I still have considerable concerns about the strategic and defence review. I am very concerned about the gap in vital capability if the Nimrod aircraft go. Like my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Sussex, I am very concerned about the overall size of the fleet, which will be tiny in future; the unquantifiable influence exerted by the Royal Navy when a smart ship sails into a foreign port will be rarer and rarer. For the next 10 years, the strategic defence and security review will rely heavily on our enemies giving us advance warning of an impending attack. The enemy have a vote in all this; let us hope that they are polite enough to do that.

There will be other concerns. Service families watching this debate will fear redundancies, uncertainties and upheaval, having given themselves and made such sacrifice for their country. The same will apply to civil servants, who have also given outstanding service, and to the defence industry, which has done so much to support our defence efforts. All this will have substantial effects on whole communities—for example, in Scotland. We must do our best to mitigate those effects.

Whatever the concerns, one thing is absolutely clear. We have now had the defence review and we must now make it work. In my view, there is only a limited amount to be achieved by blaming the Labour party for the ghastly mess that it left us or the coalition for the hasty and secretive review that it has brought in to put it right. We now have a plan and we must scrutinise it, but we must leave defence on a stronger footing at the end of the process than it is on now. We must make it work for the good of the country.