Armed Forces: Capability

Lord Reid of Cardowan Excerpts

Thursday 12th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Reid of Cardowan (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Robertson for bringing forward this debate today and to my noble friend and colleague Lord West for his machine-gun delivery of detailed points crammed into four minutes. I would prefer to lob the odd artillery shell—I will reduce the number to four—in order to speak more slowly.

The first is the situation in which we find ourselves in the world. My noble friend Lord Robertson admirably outlined it: a revanchist Russia asserting itself politically and diplomatically as well as militarily; the Middle East partially undergoing radical transformation and partially in war and turmoil; in the Far East, China flexing its muscles; a complete sea change in the battlefield through international terrorism—asymmetric warfare has already occurred; and cyberwarfare and hybrid warfare, updated versions of PSYCH-OPS on a global scale, which are being deployed by Russia in particular but also by others. That is the situation.

I am not one of those who believe that we can respond to all of that merely by military means or by arms—of course not—but they are an essential component of any comprehensive response. Yet, as has been said, we are now below critical mass in numbers, power and range of capabilities. The Army is at its smallest since the Napoleonic era, and even targets for the number of trained personnel are not being met. I was surprised that the Government’s response was not to increase the numbers but to redefine what was meant by “trained”—which rather begs the question about the capability behind it.

In the Navy, our surface fleet has halved, even in the period since my noble friend Lord Robertson and I were at the Ministry of Defence. A very unfair comparison is sometimes made in the form of the old cliché that we have more admirals than we have ships. It is unfair because the service produced by our admirals goes well beyond the number of our surface fleets, but it illustrates where we are now. We have 19 in our surface fleet, possibly 11 at any given time in operational terms, and 35 admirals. Arithmetically, that is not quite double the number of ships, but then of course admirals do not have to be regularly refitted—at least most of them do not. So we effectively have half the number in our surface fleet as we have admirals. Similarly in the RAF, as the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Craig, pointed out, we have between five and seven operational squadrons, compared to 30 to 35 only 20 to 30 years ago.

Thirdly, at the bottom of this is finance. Let us leave aside whether the efficiency savings quite properly pointed out by the noble Lord, Lord King, can ever be achieved, and let us leave aside even the £700 million cost of the fall in the value of the pound. The truth is that our spending, including our contribution to NATO, has been subject to what I can only kindly call “creative accountancy”—cooking the books. We are now including in the 2% a substantial amount of wages and pensions. I recall that when a Belgian official was explaining to Andrew Neil, the well-known commentator, how 80% of their budget went on pensions, he said, “What you have to understand is that we really don’t have an Armed Forces; we have a very well-defended pension scheme”. I abhor the prospect of that thin end of the wedge being used. I am not suggesting that our expenditure on wages and pensions is anything like that of Belgium, but it is very worrying indeed—and the leadership after Brexit must come into question.

My final point is unashamedly political. It would be easy and very tempting for the Minister in response to point to the shambles of the Labour Party leadership on defence. But I know that he is too big a man to do that—I say that hopefully. I hope that he will be wise enough not to do it for this reason: one can accept that while accepting that almost everyone who will speak here from every side of this House has a long-standing commitment to sound defence and the defence of this country. So first, I ask the Minister with a political P to bear that in mind.

Secondly, I understand that there will always be the normal robust exchanges with the Treasury, but there have been occasions in our history—I was part of one of them with my noble friend Lord Robertson—when our whole defence team was so concerned about the situation that we said to the Treasury, “Thus far and no further—because otherwise you will have to do it without any of the Defence Ministers”. I congratulate the Minister on what he has done so far and hope that he will bear those last two points in mind when it comes to future discussions with his colleagues.