The Role and Capabilities of the UK Armed Forces, in the Light of Global and Domestic Threats to Stability and Security

Lord Dannatt Excerpts

Tuesday 15th September 2015 Grand Committee

[Lord Dannatt (CB)]

My Lords, I very much welcome the debate this afternoon, which is very timely in the context of the work being done on the current SDSR. As the noble Earl, Lord Howe, outlined at the start, we are all conscious of the current security situation in which we are operating. Quite rightly, the noble Earl pointed out the wide range of operations and activities that UK Armed Forces are superbly carrying out at present.

I also welcome the commitment made before the Summer Recess to 2% of GDP being spent on defence because that is a considerable help to defence planners as they do their work within the SDSR. I made a side note to myself as the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Stamford, was speaking. I do not want to step into the word-eating competition between himself and the Minister, but I would observe that in 1997 when the then new Labour Government began their strategic defence review, I was the director of the defence programme staff, which in simple terms meant that I had some staff responsibility for the allocation of funds. It was actually an extraordinarily good SDR with a good series of policy outcomes which were widely recognised at the time. The sadness about that otherwise excellent SDR was its underfunding almost from the start. Over the next 13 years as I progressed from being a brigadier as the director of the defence programme staff until I retired as Chief of the General Staff in 2009, I watched the cumulative effect of the underfunding of the defence programme. I do not know whether the figure was £10 billion short in the defence equipment programme, or whether it was £35 billion or £38 billion short, but a shortage of funds in that programme undoubtedly accumulated as a result of the underfunding of the otherwise excellent SDR of 1997 through to the culmination of the then Government and the election in 2010 and the SDSR of that year. I shall watch with interest to see what the OBR says about the size of that underspend, but I am in no doubt from my own observation of 13 years in and out of the Ministry of Defence that underspend in equipment there undoubtedly was.

A useful and constructive point to make today is that the commitment to 2% of GDP being spent on defence undoubtedly gives the planners, in the context of this SDSR, a confirmed budget and a firm baseline from which to operate and to counter the wide-ranging challenges we know we are experiencing both at home and abroad. We must make sure that we have the right set of capabilities to deal with them.

Without rehearsing the many positives of the UK Armed Forces, I would like to raise a number of points in areas where I think we could and should do better. One of the principal lessons we learnt from our operations in Iraq and Afghanistan is that we handicapped ourselves at the outset with our poor level of understanding of the culture, history and background of those countries. The current initiative for greater emphasis being placed on defence engagement is hugely to be welcomed: to use some of our existing resources more robustly when exercising in those parts of the world we think we want to understand better and where there is a possibility that we might find ourselves operating in the future. This seems to be an extremely effective and worthwhile use of military capability. The question I would be grateful if the noble Earl would consider answering either today or at another time is whether defence engagement will formally become a military task. It seems eminently sensible to me—it is not expensive and it would authorise the use of much of our existing capability.

A subset of defence engagement is our ability to communicate with the people in the countries in which we are operating. I am talking about language skills and the need for us to use interpreters. I am mindful of the current criticism of the present Government’s policy on Afghan interpreters and whether we are looking after them adequately. I am grateful to the Minister for his recent letter explaining what the Government’s policy is. I regret that I have not yet written to the noble Earl to thank him, but this is advance notice of my thanks. However, I would point out that there is a perception that our policy is ungenerous and mean in some regards. Whether that is true, I am not entirely sure; I discussed it with the Minister for the Armed Forces last week. If it is not mean and ungenerous, there is a perception that that is the case. In my view, I think that it would be sensible of Her Majesty’s Government to mount a proactive campaign pointing out that we are looking after our interpreters properly rather than to allow the alternative narrative to gain credence. If it is thought that when the UK needs language assistants and interpreters in faraway places where we do not have native skills ourselves, then in the global world in which we live, people in other countries will be very wary of taking on employment with us if they think that when we have departed, we will have no further interest in their welfare or well-being. There is a problem. It must be addressed. If it is only a problem of perception, it still has to be addressed.

Also in this further subject of defence engagement on the softer side of defence, I would be interested to hear whether the Minister believes that sufficient effort is being made in terms of co-operation between the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, DfID and the Ministry of Defence in working together to prevent conflict through better integration of our defence, diplomatic and development capabilities. We have talked about this a lot in recent years. I am not convinced that I have sufficient evidence that we are putting substance into the words and there is a lot to be achieved in preventing conflict by better integration of our capabilities in those three areas.

This debate is essentially about capabilities to meet the current security threats that we face. One of those threats is from a resurgent Russia under its current President Vladimir Putin. I have raised before that although back in 2010 and prior to that I was one of those who very much favoured the complete withdrawal of the Army from Germany—in 2010 it seemed to be the right thing and I welcomed that within the context of the SDSR—I believe that we would send a useful and quite significant message if we were to leave an element, perhaps a brigade-sized element, of our Army in Germany. In this regard, is the Minister confident that we will have the funds to complete the withdrawal from Germany in the timeframe predicated in the 2010 SDSR? If, as I suspect, we do not have those funds, it is a consideration that we could turn a necessity into a virtue by deciding to leave an armoured brigade in Paderborn and Sennelagar. That would show solidarity with our NATO allies on the continent of Europe and contribute to sending a message that the UK does indeed take seriously its defence responsibilities in mainland Europe. That would not be an expensive thing to do, but it may be a necessity and I would strongly urge Her Majesty’s Government to consider turning that necessity into a virtue.

Another point that I remain concerned about that I have raised in your Lordships’ House before is the issue of protected mobility. Whether we remain with an element still in Germany or not, our battlefield manoeuvre capability remains compromised by the effective cancellation in 2007 of the Army’s medium-weight vehicle replacement programme. The noble Lord, Lord Davies of Stamford, recalled a conversation with me at about that time when he asked me about my priority for the FRES programme, which is the unfortunate acronym for that particular programme. My priority was and is the Scout vehicle, mostly because the vehicle that it was due to replace, the CVRT vehicle, was designed in the 1970s and very light. The concept of its design was to be small enough to go between two rubber trees in Malaya. Clearly, that concept was outdated by the time we got to Afghanistan. Not surprisingly, I said that my priority was that we should have the Scout vehicle. But it was only my priority in a whole range of vehicles that we required at medium weight. The only survivor of that medium-weight vehicle replacement programme is the Scout vehicle, now called Ajax.

Now that we have withdrawn from Afghanistan and the Army is reconfiguring to Army 2020 around several brigades but three armoured infantry brigades, there are battalions within those armoured infantry brigades that do not have the vehicles that were originally intended in the 2001-02 endorsed medium-weight vehicle replacement programme. Those battalions are now equipped with what we salvaged from Afghanistan under the UOR programme—the Mastiffs and the Ridgebacks. Those vehicles have no place on a modern-manoeuvre battlefield. I cannot see where we will fight a modern-manoeuvre battle, but a lot of us cannot see much about the future and at some point we will be required to put one or more armoured infantry brigades into the field, probably in a division, and those battalions and combat support, and combat service support units, do not have suitable battlefield mobility. That remains a major failing.

It comes back to this issue of: was there a deficit in the defence budget building up towards 2009-10? Yes, there was. The competition in the Defence Board in 2007 was between two major programmes, of which there was money only for one. One was the carrier strike programme and the other was the Army’s medium-weight replacement vehicle programme. A debate was had, a decision was taken and the carrier strike programme was funded. It would be churlish of me to be anything other than welcoming of the two new large aircraft carriers, in which we can all take pride in the future. However, I am in no doubt that the casualty of that success was the Army’s medium-weight vehicle replacement programme, which leaves our Army hobbled in the future. I have a question for the Minister.

[Lord Davies of Stamford]

I do not think there is much difference between us on this issue. I am prepared to agree with the noble Lord; I am sure it is still correct that we could have, and probably should have, spent even more money implementing the 1998 White Paper, which, as he said, was an excellent White Paper. That, however, is not what is referred to when the black hole myth is mentioned. The black hole myth implies not that we did not contract for enough military equipment—you can always usefully buy more military equipment and, of course, there are other things we could and would have liked to have done if we had had the money to do it—but that we could not pay for the equipment that we had contracted for. The programmes the noble Lord is talking about—the rest of the FRES programme, apart from Scout and so forth—was not something we ever contracted for or pretended that we had contracted for. There is a real distinction here and I do not think there is any difference between my perception of that period of our history and that of the noble Lord.

[Lord Dannatt]

I am very grateful for that information. I do not want to extend this debate unduly other than to observe that at the time when the Army endorsed the requirement for what became the FRES programme in 2001-02, the money for that programme was available because we had cancelled two other programmes, TRACER and MRAV, and the production money sat in the budget for the years 2007, 2008 and 2009. We could have paid for it if the money had not been reallocated by the Defence Board to the otherwise very welcome carrier strike programme. However, I do not want to go any further down that track other than to observe, without being unduly lengthy, that I attended the Welcome to Norfolk party for the Queen’s Dragoon Guards last week—a reconnaissance regiment which previously had been equipped with CVRT and might have been expected to be equipped with something like Scout, but discovered that they have four-wheeled unarmed Jackals and their combat boots in which to conduct their reconnaissance. They have less capability than they have had over the last 30 or 40 years and this, I am afraid, illuminates the fact that, if we had more money, we would have done more things that we needed to do. We did not have that money: therefore, we have gaps in our capability.

I am conscious that I have taken far too much time, for which I apologise. However, I have a wider concern about our national defence industrial capability. It is something that we are right to worry about. We are told that European collaborative ventures, while superficially attractive, are the way forward, but experience has shown that many of them are costly and slow. We often do not get what we want when we want it and in a manner that we want. The alternative is that our national industrial capability is protected and preserved. That, of course, is good for jobs and apprenticeships in this country, and is good for giving youngsters coming out of education hope for decent employment in the future. However, I accept that bolstering, if you like, the national industrial capability is more expensive. Perhaps less expensive is not to go down the multilateral European route but to adopt some bilateral options. Some very good examples exist of bilateral arrangements between the French and the United Kingdom at the present time and, indeed, of course, with our well-known partner, the United States.

There is a current debate about Apache attack helicopter replacement: should we buy Boeing off the shelf or Westland, as we did last time? It does not have to be an either/or debate: we could buy the aircraft from Boeing and Westland could undertake to do the maintenance and upgrade. However, I worry that if we go too much further down the European collaborative track we will not get what we want when we want it and it will cost an awful lot more.

Finally, I am suspicious—maybe overly so—that those who are keen proponents of European defence industrial integration see it as a stepping stone to European armed forces integration, ultimately providing a unified set of European armed forces, which is an essential element for those who wish to see full European political integration. I may be overworrying here, and there is a wider issue at stake, but I would not want to see defence used as a Trojan horse in a wider political argument.