Modernising Defence Programme

Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield Excerpts

Tuesday 18th December 2018 Lords Chamber

[Earl Howe]

My Lords, the defence transformation fund means that £160 million will be available next year from within the MoD’s existing budget, and we are looking to make a further £340 million available as part of the spending review. That will be part of our bid. The transformation fund has been established, in general terms, so that we can respond rapidly to new opportunities to invest in technologies that are game changing, and projects that move us forward at pace in areas that represent priorities. It will complement the innovation fund, as I have explained, although that fund will in itself more than double next year. It is too soon for me to itemise the projects and technologies that this money will be spent on. This is work in progress, but we are clear that the fund will perform a very useful function in enabling all the commands to focus their minds on priorities and potentially game-changing areas of activity. As further information becomes available, no doubt noble Lords can ask me about that and I shall be happy to provide further details in due course.

[Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield (CB)]

In the noble Earl’s judgment, what above all in this defence review distinguishes it from its 13 predecessors since 1945? As a footnote, I am greatly interested in the new tauter approach to strategic policy-making, with the new net assessment unit. To enable your Lordships to test the quality of this new approach, I wonder whether the Minister could place in the Library a copy of the new strategic assessment of the high north, undertaken as a pilot project, which is mentioned in today’s document?

[Earl Howe]

My Lords, if it is possible for the Ministry of Defence to share that document, I will certainly do as the noble Lord asks. In answer to his first question, there are two things to say about the MDP. First, this has been a major and very thorough piece of work. Secondly, the document is essentially strategic in its nature; it focuses on key defence capabilities and has affirmed the central elements of our strategy as articulated in SDSR 15, from which, as the noble Lord is aware, it emerged. It has also guided our investment decisions on capabilities, announced at the Budget, and updated our key policies. It is designed to keep us on track to deliver the right defence for the UK, and does so in what we see as a challenging decade ahead. As noble Lords read and reread the report, I am sure that it will make clear a lot of detail underlying the general proposition that I have just articulated.

National Security Situation

Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield Excerpts

Thursday 19th April 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my interests as listed in the register. I should like to concentrate on the Government’s National Security Capability Review, which was published on 28 March. In my judgment, it is a document of considerable significance for two reasons, one of them explicit and the other implicit. I shall deal with the explicit reason first, which, among other things, has direct resonance for the Syrian operation last Saturday.

Little noticed in the rather scant media coverage of the capability review was the declaration that its proposed new way of making policy and reaching decisions on overseas and defence policy would be “Chilcot compliant”—those are the exact words. In other words, the review has absorbed the lessons of the 2003 Iraq war as laid out in the July 2016 Chilcot report. Chilcot compliance rests on the so-called “Chilcot checklist”, which regrettably is not set out in the capability review but can be found as an appendix to the Government’s response of 10 January 2018 to the House of Commons Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs report on Chilcot. It contains 10 items, and in my judgment they comprise an important element in assessing the processes by which the Prime Minister, the National Security Council and her Cabinet reached the decision that the RAF Tornados should unleash their cruise missiles in the early hours of 14 April. It is the first time that a substantial politico-military decision has been taken by a British Government against the backdrop of a checklist or anything like it.

Perhaps I may offer a swift summary of the Chilcot checklist. The first is vision: why do we care; what does this mean for British interests; what are the results of acting or doing nothing? Secondly, analysis: what is happening now; what are your sources of ground truth/evidence; have assumptions been exposed to analytical tools or external challenge? Thirdly, scenario: what might happen next? Fourthly, options: what should we do? Fifthly, legal implications: how do we ensure that action is lawful; how will you ensure that any legal basis remains sound if circumstances change? Sixthly, policy and strategy: what does success look like? Seventhly, resources: what do we need to deliver? Eighthly, planning and doing: have you planned for a range of possible contingencies? Ninthly, policy performance: how will you measure and evaluate success/failure? Tenthly, evaluation: is the policy working?

Did Her Majesty’s Government follow their own prescriptions in the aftermath of the appalling chemical attack on Douma? When we debated the Prime Minister’s Statement in the Chamber on Monday, I put this question to the noble Baroness the Leader of the House. She replied:

“I can certainly assure the noble Lord that the lessons from the Chilcot report have been learned and we have paid attention to it”.—[Official Report, 16/10/18; col. 1034.]


Perhaps the noble Earl the Minister, when he winds up, can elaborate a little on this point.

Maybe surprisingly, the Chilcot checklist is silent on the key question of whether the House of Commons should have a pre-attack debate and vote. Here, as the Leader of the House made plain on Monday, the Government’s decision not to hold such a debate was based on a passage contained in the The Cabinet Manual: A Guide to Laws, Conventions and Rules on the Operation of Government. The key paragraph in the manual is as follows:

“In 2011, the Government acknowledged that a convention had developed in Parliament that before troops were committed the House of Commons should have an opportunity to debate the matter and said that it proposed to observe that convention except when there was an emergency and such action would not be appropriate”.


The Prime Minister, as it were, invoked the emergency clause to justify putting the convention aside in this instance.

In my view, although all my instincts lean towards the desirability of pre-attack debates and votes, the Prime Minister has a case over last weekend’s strike in Syria, even though I am sure she would have secured House of Commons approval had she taken the question to MPs ahead of the attack. There will now be a wider debate—it has already started—on the constitution and military action, with the Leader of the Opposition and the Labour shadow Cabinet pressing for a war powers Act. However, I am sure that, even if Parliament passed such a measure, it too would have an emergency clause embedded in it.

A first step on which perhaps we can all agree could be the bringing together of all the papers, paragraphs and checklists that deal with this hugely important question into a single document. I would value the Minister’s thoughts on that when he replies.

I suggested a moment ago that there was a significant implicit ingredient running through the pages of the National Security Capability Review. It is, I think, the recognition—here I disagree, although I am reluctant to do so, with the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup—that we are entering the fifth year of the second cold war, which began in March 2014 with Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Naturally it is different from what the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, recently called the “classic Cold War”. Its context is different, the ideological clash has mutated, although not entirely, into something else, and the instruments are changed, as are the metrics—for example, what level does a Russian cyberattack have to reach before it triggers Article 5 of the 1949 North Atlantic Treaty?

However, there is one grim and dangerous continuity between Cold War I and cold war II: the possibility of a serious unintended escalation. I recently re-read the paper on escalation which the Joint Intelligence Committee produced in the weeks following the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. It examined what it called,

“the process by which any hostilities, once started, might expand in scope and intensity, with or without the consent of Governments”.

The misreading of each other’s intentions that might trigger unintended conflict is very much the worry of our own times.

What we need is cool and careful thinking from today’s equivalents of the great George Kennan in the early years of the first Cold War, out of which came the doctrine of “containment”. For I fear that this cold war, like its predecessor, will be a long haul, requiring care, wisdom and nerve-keeping of the highest order. Those of us who grew up in the first Cold War under the shadow of the bomb, as children of the uranium age, know just how difficult and delicate is the task of containment. It is crucial that successor generations find the level of patience and foresight required to rise to the level of events.

Defence Modernisation Programme

Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield Excerpts

Monday 29th January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Earl Howe]

My Lords, I hope noble Lords will agree that I have always been open with the House about the stresses on the defence budget, not least those arising from the EU referendum. In particular, we have been quite open about the fact that the exchange rate has impacted our procurement budget, so I cannot agree with the noble Lord that we have tried to obscure the strain on our budget. I am not aware that there is the prospect of any in-year money, but I take issue with his word “crisis”. Speaking to my finance colleagues in the Ministry of Defence, it is pretty clear that we can get through this year, albeit with some temporary cuts to training which I agree are regrettable. But we can get through this year in good shape. The decisions that we need to take affect next year and beyond.

[Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield (CB)]

My Lords, I warmly welcome the winnowing out of this exercise from the Cabinet Office’s capability review, but could the noble Earl explain the difference between a defence review and a defence modernisation programme?

[Earl Howe]

My Lords, as I tried to explain a little earlier, a fully fledged defence review would look very like the exercise that we conducted in 2015: going back to basics on what threats we face, what our ambitions are as a country and what we need to do to deter those threats and to provide for those ambitions. This modernisation programme takes the fundamentals of the SDSR as read, because we believe them to be credible. It is to decide what capabilities we now need, in the face of intensifying threats around the world, to counter those threats in a way that ensures that we have a sustainable programme going forward.

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.

Armed Forces Act (Continuation) Order 2017

Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield Excerpts

Tuesday 21st March 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my membership of the Chief of the Defence Staff’s strategic advisory panel and of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s diplomatic excellence external panel, and that I shall shortly become, at an advanced age, an honorary captain in the Royal Naval Reserve.

In the life of a nation, it falls to certain generations to undertake a rethink of their country’s place in the world, its means of defence, its instruments for projecting international influence, the limits as well as the possibilities of what it can sensibly seek to do and the states of mind needed to reconcile aspiration and reality. The outcome of last June’s referendum on our membership of the European Union requires us to be just such a generation —a generation that truly rises to the level of events.

The multiple resetting of our national and international dials, the plethora of overlapping uncertainties, is, I think, creating a growing and unsettling realisation that, for probably a decade to come, we will be a destabiliser nation in the world. It is a condition we can scarce forbear to recognise in ourselves, for it cuts deeply against the grain of how we have imagined ourselves in the past, as a nation that strives to bring stability to others and tries to turn down the heat and to lower the noise in international affairs. But cut against that comforting grain it does.

In view of this, I should like to make the case this afternoon for taking a long, hard look at ourselves in a way that goes beyond the scope of our five-yearly cycles of strategic defence and security reviews. The model I have in mind is the Future Policy Study, part of a series of post-Suez rethinks that Harold Macmillan commissioned. He established the Future Policy Study in 1959 and tasked it to take a searching forward look at where the United Kingdom would be by 1970 on current policies. It was conducted in secret, reporting in 1960, but saw the light of day only 30 years later, as it was a Cabinet document. But, at the time, it undoubtedly added its weight to the tilt away from Empire and towards Europe which led the Macmillan Cabinet to undertake the first application for British membership of the European Economic Community in the summer of 1961, which began the long years of “Brentry” negotiations that eventually concluded in 1972.

In the cold light of “Brexit”, may I suggest that we wait neither for the conclusion of the Article 50 process in 2019 nor for the next SDSR in 2020, but instead encourage the Government to create a royal commission, or equivalent, on Britain’s place in the world, peopled by a widely drawn and knowledgeable membership recruited to do in public what Macmillan’s study group did nearly 60 years ago? It could, if so commissioned, divide its work into two parts. The first would be an audit of our assets as a nation, motivated by an appetite, which I share, to play a careful but substantial role in the world. The second would be to draw up the options and possibilities that our new, post-Brexit geopolitical position will present.

General de Gaulle famously opened his memoirs by declaring, “I always had a certain idea of France”. Each of us carries in our heads a certain idea of Britain, of our country’s gifts, accomplishments and what it can bring to the international table. Here, briefly, is my own certain idea, and the ingredients of our debate today are naturally central to that idea—to that audit of our assets that I mentioned earlier on.

We live on top of the world’s sixth-largest economy.

Thanks to our history, we are a member of more international organisations than any other country, with, in addition, our permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, though of course we are about to leave a mega-international organisation thanks to Brexit.

As others in this debate have mentioned, we possess a range of top-flight Armed Forces, albeit in my judgment not enough of them, including some stunning specialities—special forces, submarines and many more—plus a substantial nuclear deterrent. We have a cluster of top-of-the-range security and intelligence services, as well as a position as one of only three nations with genuine global intelligence reach, thanks to our so-called “Two Eyes” relationship with the United States and our “Five Eyes” relationship when you add Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The other two powers with global reach are, of course, Russia and the United States, with China coming up fast.

We are served by a top-flight Diplomatic Service, and a meritocratic and uncorrupt Civil Service.

We undoubtedly think above our weight in the world. Just linger for a moment on the most stunning of our trade statistics: we have around 1.5% of the world’s population with 5% of the world’s scientific papers and 15% of its most cited ones.

We deploy a formidable array of soft-power instruments —what the noble Lord, Lord Bragg, has called our “cultural world service”, which goes far wider than the BBC World Service and the British Council.

This is but a sketch. The list could go on. It amounts to a remarkable national portfolio. We must strive to sustain, cherish and burnish it. In seeking so to do, we must not think about those assets as a hubristic, wider-still-and-wider nation, but as a temporarily anxious and perplexed people who, if the national conversation rises to the level of events, can find good, sensible and sustainable ways through into a new and valuable geopolitical place in the world, to the relief of our friends and the disappointment of our adversaries.

But, first, we need that royal commission, fuelled by a high sense of purpose and shaped by a stretching and wide-ranging set of terms of reference. The sooner that we cease to be a destabiliser nation, the better. The first step to that is working out what we think our global position should be and how best to conduct ourselves in a vexing, testing world.

Trident Missile Test

Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield Excerpts

Monday 23rd January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Earl Howe]

My Lords, I can only repeat that we have absolute confidence in the operation of our independent nuclear deterrent capability and that the effectiveness of the Trident nuclear system—should we ever need to employ it—is absolutely assured. I would add only that I often reflect on the importance of not believing everything one reads in the press. This is a classic example of the application of that principle.

[Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield (CB)]

My Lords, I declare an interest in that I witnessed the launch in question from the survey vessel two and half miles away from where the missile came out of the sea. I put it to the Minister, with great respect, that it would make it much easier for those of us who very powerfully support the independent deterrent, and the building of the four “Dreadnought” submarines in the successor class, to make the case generally in the country when we are interviewed in the media if the Minister could assure us that a full analysis has been successfully made of whatever went wrong—I have no knowledge at all of the nature of what went wrong—and that remedies have been put in place. I understand that every particle of a D5 missile is riddled with the highest security classifications, but in this case, such an assurance could be possible and would be very welcome.

[Earl Howe]

My Lords, the most important assurance is the one that I have already given: this is a system in which we have absolute confidence. It has never been the practice of government to give Parliament details of submarine operations or of the systems and subsystems that are tested during a demonstration and shakedown operation. But I hope I have said enough to reassure noble Lords about our deterrent and its reliability.

National Security Strategy and Strategic Defence and Security Review 2015

Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield Excerpts

Monday 23rd November 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Carlile of Berriew (LD)]

My Lords—

[Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield (CB)]

My Lords—

[Lord Ashton of Hyde]

My Lords, it is the turn of the Cross-Benchers.

[Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield]

My Lords, I commend the Government for the clarity and realism with which they have displayed the threats in the document before us this evening in the three tiers. However, I have looked very carefully at the ingredients of the three tiers and I can find in none of them a very possible and real threat to our kingdom—the very configuration of the United Kingdom—which is the possibility that, two SDSRs on, if we are having this debate in 2025, we may be in a kingdom outside the European Union and shorn of Scotland. Whatever noble Lords think about that as a prospect, it would be a first-order change in our strategic position in the world and there is not a whiff of it in this document. Does the Minister agree that sometimes the first people we have to defend ourselves against are ourselves?

Defence Budget

Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield Excerpts

Monday 14th May 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Astor of Hever]

My Lords, I cannot give my noble friend those figures today, but I will be able to do so very soon.

[Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield]

My Lords, I add my thanks to the Minister for his Statement and particularly welcome the firm place that he gave to the successor submarines in the long-term costing and programme. Reverting to the question asked by my noble and gallant friend Lord Stirrup, when will we get the report of Mr Bernard Gray, Chief of Defence Materiel, on the options for structuring future procurement operations? I think it was completed several months ago; it was ready at the end of last year. Some of us have been awaiting it with keen anticipation.

[Lord Astor of Hever]

I am also waiting with keen anticipation. I cannot give the noble Lord a date, but as soon as I hear one, I will let him know.