Strategic Defence and Security Review

Lord Liddle Excerpts

Friday 12th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Liddle]

My Lords, I became deeply involved in defence when, in 1997, I was made the No. 10 representative on the strategic defence review steering group. It was a wonderful experience. I gained enormous respect for the ministerial team that led that review, all of whom now grace the Benches of this House. My noble friend Lord Robertson of Port Ellen led the review with tact, decisiveness and a quality of judgment that were wonderful to behold, and was very ably supported by the noble Lords, Lord Reid of Cardowan and Lord Gilbert. I also gained a lot of respect for the civil servants and military who advised him. Those military personnel were then led by the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Guthrie of Craigiebank. I ended up being an unqualified admirer of our Armed Forces, even after the Navy subjected me to the terrifying experience of making me climb up a rope ladder on to a destroyer.

I should like to reflect a little on the lessons of the past 13 years that should have been learnt by the current review. First, the Labour Government should have carried out more defence reviews. Excellent as was the 1997-98 review, we should have had another early in the 2001 Parliament after 9/11 to look at the consequences of that, and a third at the start of the 2005 Parliament to draw conclusions from what happened in Iraq and from the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan. Fighting two wars of this intensity simultaneously was not in our 1997-98 planning assumptions, and although the Labour Government always—despite allegations to the contrary—fully funded the operational requirements of the forces from the contingency reserve, the consequence was a hollowing out of our force structures as a result of the strains put on equipment and people who were being asked to do more than had been anticipated. This review has gone well beyond hollowing out; what we see is amputation, and this is not a sustainable solution for the long term.

The second lesson is that when Governments carry out defence reviews, they should fully fund them. Defence should not be seen as something that can be raided to fund social programmes—and I say this from the Labour side—as it fulfils a vital role for all Governments, including Labour Governments. In 1998, we fudged the money a little by claiming that there was a sort of pot of fool’s gold called 3 per cent a year efficiency savings. A lot of efficiency savings can be made in the MoD. Indeed, the proposals in the 1998 review regarding logistics and the attempt to reform procurement were intended to achieve efficiency savings. Certainly, it is clear from Bernard Gray’s excellent independent report that he produced for John Hutton that procurement has not been smart and there is a lot further to go. There will always be an element of politics in procurement decisions, and Bernard’s recommendation on setting up an arm’s-length body will not get rid of that entirely but it will make the process more transparent.

I do not believe that we should decide to build a new generation of submarine deterrents—nor do I think anyone else does—just because we want to preserve the Barrow shipyard, though, as a Cumbrian, I very much want to do that. Nor do I think we should build aircraft carriers just because they will be refitted at Rosyth. But, equally, we should not fool ourselves that free market principles of open competition can be applied simply as a dogma as regards defence. The ability to manufacture complex, high-tech equipment is something that we should want to maintain in Britain, or in co-operation with our European partners, out of a concern to maintain an advanced industrial policy and our own strategic capabilities. The review is largely silent on this issue, promising a further policy statement—but this is crucial.

Thirdly, our defence planning should be built on a clear concept of Britain's role in the world. It is becoming conventional wisdom that Tony Blair got all this wrong; that his belief in military intervention was conceptually flawed and committed us beyond our resources; and that Iraq and Afghanistan have demonstrated very painfully the limits of military power. The present Government do not say this explicitly, but I feel that they believe it. William Hague's talk of a stronger concept of national interest suggests the implicit rejection of a values-based foreign and defence policy. In retrospect, I have come to the conclusion—I know that other noble Lords will disagree—that Tony Blair made an honest misjudgement on Iraq. Also, the priority of Iraq over Afghanistan—which was the US’s priority in the middle of the previous decade—allowed the Taliban to rebuild its position and, as a result, now makes the war in Afghanistan very difficult if not impossible to win, at least in the nation-building terms that Tony Blair outlined in his wonderful speech to the Labour conference in 2001. I was interested in the judgment of the Institute for Strategic Studies on this in its recent report.

In these circumstances, the bravery of our service men and women, and their appalling losses of life and limb, cause me to feel intense admiration and immense distress in equal measure. However, it would be a great mistake to draw from the experience of the past decade the conclusion that humanitarian military intervention is fundamentally misconceived. The defence policy assumptions of the late 1990s were based on their own judgments of “never again”. Never again, because of lack of strategic airlift, would we find ourselves helpless to stop genocide in Rwanda. Never again would Europe, because of a lack of effective firepower when the Americans were reluctant to act, be a helpless bystander in the face of appalling atrocities in Bosnia and the former Yugoslavia.

Humanitarian intervention did work in Kuwait in the early 1990s and, with eventual US support, in Bosnia and then Kosovo. British intervention saved democracy and thousands of lives in Sierra Leone. There are just wars and interventions. Tony Blair got it right most of the time. The ultimate question is one of judgment about where military power can be effective and where it cannot. However, one cannot make those judgments unless the Government have provided effective resources and forces to be deployed. We cannot allow wrong conclusions drawn from the past decade to lead to military and moral retreat.

That brings me to my final point about Britain's relations with America and Europe. The advent of the Obama Administration represented a wonderful opportunity to rebuild the transatlantic alliance between a multilateralist United States and a values-based Europe. It is a profound regret that Europe has not sufficiently stepped up to the table. However, I challenge the assumption that, because of part of Europe's feebleness, Britain must continue to design its defence posture on the very expensive assumption that we must be capable of fighting independently alongside the United States in future wars. I wonder whether this is a sustainable political concept. For instance, if we had a Tea Party-backed Republican President appealing to an angry and frustrated American public who wanted to show that they can punch their enemies on the nose, would the British public support that kind of military action? I believe better planning assumption is that we would fight with the Americans only when our principal European allies were willing to do so as well. Not only does that make great sense, but it is absolutely vital to build common defence capabilities with our European partners. I hope that will drag our partners to accept more responsibility themselves.

I congratulate the Government on their defence treaties with the French. Surely, that must be the way forward. I welcome Liam Fox and David Cameron to the world of European co-operative partnership, as they describe it—I call it pooled sovereignty but I do not see much difference. In a review that leaves so many major gaps in our key capabilities, surely, instead of being reluctant about European co-operation, the Government should now embrace it with enthusiasm.