Royal Marines

Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield Excerpts

Tuesday 28th November 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield (CB)]

My Lords, I add my thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Burnett, for securing this timely debate on this critical Question. I declare my honorary captaincy in the Royal Naval Reserve and my membership of the Chief of the Defence Staff’s strategic advisory panel, though I speak as an individual this evening. I also declare a long-standing respect and affection for the Royal Marines since accompanying them to the Norwegian Arctic in January 1978 as a young journalist on the Times to report on their annual reinforcement exercise to protect NATO’s northern flank during the Cold War. A man learns something about himself if he spends a night in a snow hole up a mountain somewhere north of Narvik that is full of Royal Marines. I shall not elaborate.

Speaking at the Royal United Services Institute on 22 November, General David Petraeus declared that,

“strategic effect comes from capabilities that are truly employable and really matter”.

It is my contention that our country’s amphibious capability, to which the Royal Marines and the sustenance of HMS “Bulwark” and HMS “Albion” are crucial, passes the Petraeus test. Given our deep maritime past, many of us in the UK think amphibiously quite naturally, but in continuing to do so and reacting to the scattering of newspaper reports about the possible decommissioning of “Bulwark” and “Albion” and cuts to the Royal Marines, I do not think we are succumbing to an emotional spasm or nostalgia or an impulse for our country to retain what Stryker McGuire, Newsweek’s man in London for many years, used to call our appetite for being “a pocket superpower”, by which he meant possessing a wide spectrum of top-of-the-range military capabilities in too small quantities.

In terms of the Petraeus test, what does our current amphibious strength bring us and our allies in a perilous and, some would say, darkening world? Greater authorities than I will ever be have already outlined how they see this. I agree with every word they said. Above all, it gives us an ability to react rapidly, flexibly and with agility in a crisis, and a high degree of what a naval friend of mine calls “poise”—the capacity to maintain a position either on the flank of a crisis for deterrence purposes or to apply close-in coercive power in critical places if deterrence fails.

The quality of amphibiosity that the Royal Navy and Royal Marines currently provide is potentially a great disrupter of an adversary’s calculations because it offers the kind of intense hard power that no alternative does, however ingenious—if “Albion” and “Bulwark” go—the alternative of placing marines and helicopters on an adapted Royal Fleet Auxiliary or on carriers way out might be. This UK capacity is highly valued, as many noble Lords have said already, by our allies in the United States and Europe. Indeed, it is the best of its kind among the European powers. To shed it would be noticed and treated as a talisman of decline, a shrivelling of nerve and a shrinking of aspiration—a self-inflicted loss of highly skilled people and specialist equipment that almost certainly could not be made good if the international climate worsened.

I have concentrated on the hard power aspects of amphibiosity, but as we all know and appreciate, and as other noble Lords have highlighted, capacity for humanitarian rescue and protection is needed by a country that not just thinks globally, but has its people living and working in myriad locations in a world 90% of whose population live within a few hundred miles’ reach of the sea. So-called littoral power is a perpetual factor in any serious security calculation.

Possible cuts in Royal Marines manpower reflect the still-wider danger lurking within those early drafts of the 13th defence review since the Second World War, which the Cabinet Office is co-ordinating as we debate this week, with a view to completing I think early in the new year. For example, is it the right moment to cut a corps that provides, as other noble Lords have emphasised, more than 40% of the country’s Special Forces? This is another possibility that our allies are contemplating with real anxiety.

I accept that the country’s economic outlook is far from buoyant and spattered with anxiety-inducing uncertainty, but through all of it we must remain a hard-nosed, hard-power people whose calculations are grounded in the world as it is rather than the world as we might wish it to be. With all its sapping, Brexit-related preoccupations I profoundly hope the Government will not deprive us of our very special bespoke amphibious capability, almost in a fit of absence of mind, despite all the talk about being a more globally minded country post Brexit. If they do, this will be the decision above all others for which the 2017-18 defence review will be remembered. One day, I fear, it will be deeply, deeply regretted.