NATO Summit 2018

Lord Dannatt Excerpts

Tuesday 26th June 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Dannatt (CB)]

My Lords, as other noble Lords have already said, this debate is most timely in the context not only of the International Relations Committee’s excellent report ahead of the NATO summit next month, but of the report of the House of Commons Defence Committee, Beyond 2 per cent. While this debate properly focuses on NATO in the light of the forthcoming summit, it is the United Kingdom’s role within NATO, our relationship with our allies and the messages that we send to our potential foes that most urgently command our attention. Inevitably, the discussion quickly turns to money. Sadly, some of the core elements of that discussion have become embroiled in domestic politics and personal relationships within government—as the noble Lord, Lord Campbell, just alluded to—but those things should not obscure the core strategic and policy issues.

These tensions between strategy and money are not new. A previous inquiry into the future shape and size of Britain’s Armed Forces set out the two different approaches that it could have taken. The report concluded:

“The first consists of calculating the shape and size of the Armed Forces needed adequately to support and implement a given policy and strategy, and converting this into terms of money. The second consists of calculating, in relation to the various risks, the shape and size of the force which can be provided for a given sum of money and converting it, so far as it will go, into terms of policy and strategy”.


It continued:

“We have adopted the second approach because the fixed quantity in our terms of reference is money”.


That was in February 1949.

That binary choice between a defence policy determined by strategic ambition or by financial constraints has resonated down the decades to the present day. That choice is confronting the present Government most starkly today at a critical moment in our history. I suggest that our allies and our potential foes will be watching the summit very attentively on 11 and 12 July in Brussels to determine what message the United Kingdom is sending out about our future.

That message has several components to it. Are we going to remain—as we discussed earlier on this afternoon—a so-called tier 1 military power? Are we going to remain in, or perhaps work to regain, our position as the ally of choice of the United States? Are we going to aspire to be the leading European military member within NATO? Are we going to take our responsibilities seriously as a permanent member of the UN Security Council, and are we going to substantiate “global Britain” as something more than a catchy bumper sticker? By implication, my answer to all these questions is a fairly obvious yes; but then we hit the hard reality of money, and the developing debate about whether we should spend 2% of GDP on defence or whether that should rise to 2.25% or 2.5% or even as much as 3%. These small percentage adjustments, however, should also be kept firmly in perspective.

Historically, our national spend on defence has never been as small as 2%. At the time of the Sandys defence review in 1957, we were spending 8.8% on defence, 10 years after the NHS was started. For the majority of the Cold War, we were spending 5% and that spiked upwards to 5.5% under Margaret Thatcher. In the decade after the Cold War ended, we were still spending just under 4%. At the NATO Summit in Wales in 2014, we regarded David Cameron’s commitment to 2% of GDP as something of a triumph but, in reality, it was nothing more than a commitment to fund defence at the lowest level since records began, and a commitment to provide the smallest Army, the least number of fast jets and the smallest number of ocean-going ships, again, since modern records were kept. Then came the strategic defence and security review of 2015, brimming with confidence and aspiration but totally unaffordable.

What does this all look like from the perspective of our potential foes, Vladimir Putin in particular? He would like to see nothing better than an erosion or an evaporation of NATO. Stripped to his core, Vladimir Putin is an unreformed KGB colonel whose beloved Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact were undone in the late 1980s by the combined solidarity of NATO and the West, with the United States providing the backbone. He would love nothing better than for President Trump to become frustrated at the Europeans’ unwillingness to fund their own defence properly and translating “America First” into a more isolationist and protectionist position. He would love nothing better than a divided Britain eroding the solidarity of Europe and squabbling internally about whether £37 billion spent on defence was sufficient in comparison with £127 billion spent on our health service. It is no wonder that Mr Putin has chipped away at eastern Ukraine, exploited the West’s weakness over Syria, mounted cyberattacks on Estonia and threatened other Baltic states. He is challenging the core of NATO and Article 5. Would the US go to war over Lithuania, and would the UK go to war over Poland? We did in 1939, but we could not even contemplate that now. Two per cent spent on defence is a derisory amount; we know it, and Mr Putin knows it, but do we care?

It is not just a resurgent Russia that should focus our minds and shape our thinking on defence. We chose to stand back from direct involvement in the Syrian civil war and the fight against the so-called Islamic State, other than from the air, but the inevitable spill-over of Islamist fundamentalism is driving a range of other threats that affect our security at home and abroad. Fear, hunger and poverty are driving thousands from their homes in Africa and elsewhere, with the resultant migration challenge into southern Europe, and the knock-on consequences more widely. A recent in-depth report by the BBC illustrated the magnitude of the security challenge in the Sahel region of Africa spiralling out from Mali. Like Syria after 2011, we could say that this is not our problem, but is it reasonable to leave the situation to the Americans, the French and the United Nations? Obviously not, as we are about to send three Chinook helicopters to the region. But is the deployment of just three helicopters a proportionate and reasonable response from the country that wishes to portray itself as “global Britain”? Uncontained, how long will it be before militant Islamism touches countries like Sierra Leone and Kenya, with which the UK has strong historical ties?

All this comes back to the perennial tussle between strategic ambition and money. Through Brexit, we are signalling a strong independent instinct, albeit within our traditional relationship with the United States, our membership of NATO and our permanent membership of the UN Security Council. But at just 2% of GDP, we are not putting our money where our mouth is; we are taking an inordinate amount of risk in our lack of relevant military capabilities—a level of risk that history shows will come back, sooner rather than later, to bite us hard. The Government of the day will then have much explaining to do to the British people. In the late 1930s we woke up just in time to avoid complete disaster in 1940. Yes, the threats are different today, but the consequences of underfunding defence could be equally threatening to our national way of life.