Armed Forces: Resilience

Lord Stirrup Excerpts

Thursday 26th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stirrup (CB)]

My Lords, I am most grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Robathan, for securing this important debate at such a crucial time for the defence of our country. I, too, congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Hintze, on an excellent maiden speech, and I greatly look forward to the contribution of the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Peach, who has much wisdom and experience to contribute on this subject and to the House’s wider deliberations.

Resilience is a crucial issue for any military organisation, but for ours more than most—and for ours in particular. It is not our policy, on the whole, to start wars; we are usually on the receiving end of them, which means that we are generally at a disadvantage at the beginning of any conflict. An aggressor has the advantage of choosing the time, place and manner of military action, and will very often seek to take advantage of an opponent’s weaknesses. There will be weaknesses, since no nation’s military can be strong everywhere, at all times. That means that we need the capacity to absorb the first blow, to roll with it, recover our balance, adapt to the circumstances and demands of the particular conflict, and then to seize and exploit the initiative. Even the briefest study of military history will serve to illustrate the point.

What gives us the necessary resilience, and what are the particular capabilities and characteristics that enable us to overcome disadvantage and get on to the front foot? The most commonly heard answer to this question and one that we have certainly heard today is the size of our Armed Forces—the numbers of ships, troops and aircraft. Indeed, size does matter. Losses are often highest in the early stages of a conflict. Start with too little, and there may be insufficient capability left on which to base a recovery. The noble Lord, Lord West, may have a view on that from his own experience.

One argument sometimes put forward in defence of reduced numbers is that we do not intend to fight in high-intensity conflict on our own, and that it is our membership of alliances such as NATO that creates the necessary scale. To an extent that is true, but only to an extent. The argument itself can pose dangers. If too many members of an alliance continue to reduce force levels on the basis that contributions of others will create the necessary mass, that mass will never be achieved. That has certainly been the situation in NATO for many years now.

We need larger Armed Forces. Numbers have been progressively reduced by successive Governments on the basis of cost saving, with no underpinning strategic rationale. In the early 1990s, for example, the Government insisted on defence cuts as a post-Cold War peace dividend, despite the fact that we had just been involved in a conflict that had stretched our resources to the utmost and had nothing to do with the Soviet Union. It is worth remembering that the only way that we were able to field a division in the first Gulf War was by cannibalising just about the whole of the British Army of the Rhine—and all three services are much smaller now.

Inadequate force levels are not just a problem in high-intensity conflict, though. The Government’s appetite for the employment of the military instrument frequently exceeds their willingness to sustain appropriate capacity. At the moment, for example, Typhoon squadrons are spending long periods deployed on operational duty in response to the dangerous situation in Ukraine. Of course, it is absolutely right that they should do so, but the relatively small size of the force means that people are frequently away from their families, they are unable to train effectively when they are at home base, and morale is suffering as a consequence. Poor morale leads to poor retention, which simply exacerbates the problem.

Numbers of troops and of platforms are by no means the whole story. Soldiers in battalions, sailors in ships and air crew in aircraft are of little use if they do not have the systems that allow them to succeed in modern combat or the weapons with which to fight. The Defence Secretary has confirmed what we have all known for a long time: that the Army cannot field a fighting division. But this shortcoming is not a consequence of too few soldiers; it is because they do not have the necessary communications, logistics support, armoured mobility, weapons systems or munitions. The same is true of the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force. Both services can field some remarkable capabilities, but not in the number required or with the necessary sustainability. One of the earliest lessons of the war in Ukraine was the reminder—for those who needed it—of the appalling rate of consumption of weapons in such conflict.

I will not give comfort to potential adversaries by detailing the UK’s specific weaknesses here. The noble Baroness the Minister knows full well what they are. I will simply note that, in evidence to your Lordships’ International Relations and Defence Committee at the end of last year, the Defence Secretary confirmed that the UK had for far too long “hollowed out”—his words—our stocks of weapons and munitions. He has publicly repeated this statement in just the past few days. So, while we certainly need to expand the size of our Armed Forces, our immediate and urgent priority is to ensure that our current force structure can fight effectively and enduringly in high-intensity conflict. At the moment, it cannot.

This brings me to another dimension of the problem. Additional defence expenditure is of course required to bring weapons stocks not just to where they before we—rightly—donated a significant portion of them to Ukraine, but to where they should have been in the first place. We need suppliers, however, with whom we can contract for such purchases. The kinds of complex weapons that have been so successful in Ukraine cannot be produced overnight, and particularly not in the numbers that we and our allies need. That will require industrial capacity that does not exist at the moment.

We must expand our idea of resilience beyond the military community to encompass the industrial base that supports it. Such industrial capacity depends on private sector investment in the appropriate plant and personnel. But this will be forthcoming only if the investors see a reasonable prospect of a sustained return, which will in turn depend upon a fairly steady drumbeat of orders from our and other Governments. All too often, however, the procurement tap is turned on and off erratically in the face of short-term budgetary pressures. This is not the way to encourage long-term investment in industrial capacity. There is a need for a much more strategic approach to defence procurement if we are to sustain the industrial base necessary to national resilience.

Such an approach needs to address issues of culture as well as quantity. May I recommend the recently published report from your Lordships’ International Relations and Defence Committee into the extent—or otherwise—that defence policy has moved from aspiration to reality? One of the report’s more concerning findings is that high-technology companies consider the Ministry of Defence to be one of the world’s worst customers. They say that its institutional resistance to innovative ideas, its low appetite for risk, its unwillingness to invest in experimentation and the subsequent commercialisation of novel approaches all conspire to deter high-tech companies from working with the MoD. But we have seen in Ukraine how an imaginative fusion of civilian and military approaches and technology can produce startling battlefield successes.

War and the threat of defeat can of course force co-operation between apparently strange bedfellows, but we cannot afford to wait until we are embroiled in an actual conflict before we face up to this challenge. We need a change of culture in our day-to-day processes, but the Ministry of Defence cannot do this alone. The Treasury, too, needs to adopt a much more entrepreneurial and co-operative approach to innovation, risk and long-term investment.

I have tried this afternoon to demonstrate that defence resilience is a complex issue and not just a question of numbers, important though they are. But underpinning all this is the inescapable question of money; 2% of GDP is simply inadequate to fund the aspirations set out in last year’s independent review and defence Command Paper. Both of those documents are being reviewed, but the reviews are taking place in the face of an even more dangerous world, so the equation will only have become worse. It is well past time that the Government faced up to their responsibilities in this regard. Fine words butter no parsnips—particularly when we cannot afford the parsnips in the first place.