Ukraine: Defence Relationships

Lord Stirrup Excerpts

Thursday 9th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stirrup (CB)]

My Lords, in this most welcome debate on the impact of Russia’s aggression in Ukraine we have heard some very thoughtful contributions. It has been made clear that the Ukraine war is not a little local European difficulty; it is a global crisis. The effect of food shortages and the associated price increases threaten widespread famine in Africa. The destruction of energy supplies is contributing to increased global inflation and the overall economic shock will affect living standards around the world.

However, its significance goes beyond the economic. It goes to the heart of how the world is to be ordered in future, how nations are to deal with one another in the years ahead, and how much stability we can expect to see in the international community. This should condition our thinking about the UK’s role in the crisis. Our strategic objective should be to ensure that Putin’s invasion is widely seen to have failed and that such an illegal use of force is fraught with uncertainty and danger for the aggressor. This will not, of course, entirely eliminate the threat of future conflict, but it will at least give pause to those who contemplate starting one. The question then becomes, how is that strategic objective to be achieved? The answer is in two parts—military and economic—but in the time available today I shall restrict myself to military issues.

We must of course continue to support the Ukrainians in their valiant efforts to deny Putin his objectives in their country. They have already defeated his attempts to seize their capital and split their nation in two, and they must now frustrate his latest goal of achieving total control of the entire Donbass region. President Zelensky naturally wishes to regain control over all his nation’s territory. That may not be a realistic short-term objective, but neither is it necessary in order to deny Putin his aims. Given continued Ukrainian resistance, Russia will be unlikely to advance much further and will be tied down in an attempt—almost certainly doomed —to pacify the area it occupies. However, this relies on the Ukrainians continuing to receive the military wherewithal to counter the kind of artillery-heavy attritional attacks that the Russian forces are now mounting.

More widely, we need to relearn some old lessons. The first, as I have remarked before, is the unbounded capacity of the future to surprise us, usually in very unpleasant ways. International crises and the armed conflicts that sometimes flow from them have seldom been anticipated, nor have we been well-prepared to meet them; and every time such a crisis comes to an end we seem to assume—or we certainly act as if we assume—that it will be the last. It never is. Not long ago, some observers were questioning the continued relevance of NATO. They usually did so without considering what sort of organisation might replace it, bearing in mind that we had long ago forsaken the idea of national defence in favour of collective security. Occasionally the EU has been put forward as an alternative focus for European defence, despite the fact that many European nations have declined to make the level of investment necessary to sustain NATO itself, let alone to develop independently the very expensive strategic capabilities currently provided by the United States.

The UK’s recent integrated review, while acknowledging the challenge still posed by Russia, indicated a tilt more towards the Asia-Pacific region, but it was less than clear what that actually meant. How great a tilt? How much of that tilt was to be diplomatic, how much economic and how much military? We have now been rudely reminded that the peace and security of our own continent should always be our top priority. It is also clear that those European nations most directly threatened by Russia put their faith in NATO for their defence, not in the EU. Therefore, at least for the foreseeable future, NATO must remain the bedrock of European security. However, to be credible, NATO must ensure that it has the plans and capabilities to defend its peoples effectively. It needs to be able to operate in the so-called grey zone of warfare but it also needs hard combat power, and power that can be sustained.

The war in Ukraine has reminded those who may have forgotten of the appalling rate at which munitions are expended in high-intensity conflict. For too many years, we and other NATO nations have taken too much risk with our weapon stocks. They were already inadequate and they have, rightly, been depleted further because of the need to supply Ukraine. We now need a concerted effort to bring our munition stocks, across all three services, not just back to where they were but to where they should have been in the first place, and we must press our NATO partners to do the same. That will mean careful planning and much greater investment, not just in defence budgets but in the wider industrial capacity to provide and sustain those weapons, which is currently inadequate. That will not be easy in a period of economic stress but, while the conflict in Ukraine has created great human suffering and threatens to cause much more, it has also changed the world that we have known for the past two decades. We cannot now return to business as usual. We must recognise as much and adapt accordingly.