Armed Services: Claims

Lord Stirrup Excerpts

Thursday 24th November 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stirrup (CB)]

My Lords, this is an important debate, and I, too, thank my noble and learned friend Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood for securing it and for the interesting ideas that he advanced, which I support. In considering these and other aspects of the problem, it is important to be clear precisely what we seek to achieve. We are not suggesting that the Armed Forces should somehow be freed from the constraints of the rule of law. The notion that military personnel, if not kept on increasingly tight rein through legal process, would have a tendency to unlawful behaviour is totally unjustified and does great disservice to the men and women who sacrifice so much on behalf of our nation. The need to act lawfully is not a side consideration for the Armed Forces; it is an integral part of the ethos and training.

When I was an operational commander responsible for making decisions about whether or not targets should be attacked, I had a lawyer at my shoulder the entire time. We worked hand in glove to ensure that all decisions conformed with the law of armed conflict and the various other legal constraints placed on us, but I did not need a lawyer to spell out for me the various considerations of the law or the necessity of abiding by them. These had been part of my training for years and were as much a part of my thinking as the military necessity and effectiveness of the decisions I was making. The lawyer was there as a sounding board, as a provider of expert advice and as a check of last resort, should I have some sort of mental aberration, but we were not coming at the process from different angles, one military and one legal; the legal was a fundamental part of the military.

The same is true in all other parts and at all other levels of the Armed Forces. The people we are discussing today are professionals. Wider moral considerations aside, they take pride in doing their job professionally, and that means doing it under and within the law. Can I guarantee that none of them would ever act unlawfully? Of course not. Humans are not perfect and occasionally somebody, knowingly or not, will carry out an illegal act. They must be subject to the full rigour of the law.

The noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy of The Shaws, rightly highlighted the terrible Baha Mousa case, but later suggested that the MoD would generally resist investigation of such cases. I say to the noble Baroness that I was present during discussion of the Baha Mousa case in the MoD. To an individual, we were sickened. We were determined that responsible parties should be brought to justice. It was as far from resistance as can be imagined.

That said, the context of military operations is very different from that which most people experience throughout their lives. It is inherently chaotic. Operations take place in a violent arena where uncertainty abounds and an opponent is trying his utmost to wrong-foot you. In such an environment, the cleverest, most perspicacious and well-trained people will make judgments that turned out to be wrong. It is inevitable. It is inherent in the nature of the beast.

This uncertainty and imprecision extends beyond the boundaries of immediate combat. Some people have claimed that their aim is to ensure that our people go to war only with the best possible equipment. Of course we should all like that, but the effectiveness of equipment will vary according to many different factors; it cannot be perfect in all regards. Ordering an attack today with imperfect equipment may well be less costly in the long run than delaying that attack until the equipment can be improved. These are complex issues with no neat solutions.

It seems to me that that complexity has been extended beyond all reasonable grounds by the involvement of human rights legislation. The protections offered by such legislation are important in the round and are part of the very society and culture that our Armed Forces are there to defend but, ironically, we now run the risk that the way those protections are being interpreted will actually weaken that defence.

I, for one, have always been somewhat bemused by the concept of a right to life. What about the young girl who tragically dies of leukaemia? What happened to her right to life? There is, in my view, no such right—not least because it is inherently unenforceable. What there is, and must be in any civilised society, is an obligation on its members not unnecessarily to hazard the safety of others. Some may argue—rightly, I think—that this is simply another way of making the same point, but how we put things is important. It influences how we think about those things.

No military commander would ever wish unnecessarily to hazard the people under his or her command, but in the Armed Forces it is sometimes necessary to do so. The degree of necessity and level of acceptable risk are often difficult judgments, and sometimes they will turn out in hindsight to have been wrong. If the decisions were made negligently, those responsible for them should be called to account, and legal routes for doing so have long existed, but if every judgment is to be second-guessed in the courts, the result will be caution and even risk aversion. History has amply demonstrated that both tendencies are themselves damaging and dangerous over the long run. The 2013 policy paper The Fog of Law and the subsequent 2015 paper Clearing the Fog of Law provided an excellent overview of the issues involved.

Some argue that the courts can be relied upon to understand the difficult context of operations and to ensure that only egregious cases go forward, but such post-fact filtering, while better than none, will do nothing to diminish the impact on decision-making in the field. Commanders will still face the prospect of their judgments leading to legal challenge, and the assurance that they should eventually be cleared will be of no comfort to them.

In sum, we expect people in our Armed Forces to make difficult judgments in complex and ambiguous situations. With the benefit of hindsight those judgments will inevitably be called into question and, on occasion, even those making them will conclude that they turned out to be wrong. But the alternative is much worse. Hardened veterans of many nations over many centuries have averred that only one thing frightened them more than a commander who made the wrong decision and that was one who made no decision. Unless we restore some balance and provide the military with a degree of protection against the increasing tide of legal challenge it faces, that is the very situation we will be engendering.

Refugees and Migrants: Royal Navy and NATO Interception in Mediterranean

Lord Stirrup Excerpts

Monday 7th March 2016 Lords Chamber

[Earl Howe]

My noble friend is absolutely right. This is why NATO is in a support role, as I emphasised, to alert the authorities in the Turkish coastguard and FRONTEX, which is the EU border control agency, to intercept the ships. It is not our role to intercept those ships; it is for the Turkish and, if need be, the Greek coastguard authorities. They have assets in the area which are well placed to do that.

[Lord Stirrup (CB)]

My Lords, what degree of co-ordination will be maintained between the NATO mission and the EU’s anti-people-smuggling mission in the Mediterranean, Operation Sophia? While the two have separate areas of operation they will both require access to strategic capabilities such as surveillance, reconnaissance and helicopters, which the noble Earl has mentioned, and which are in short supply. It would seem essential that a high degree of co-operation is maintained between these two operations if those scarce resources are to be used as effectively and efficiently as possible.

[Earl Howe]

The noble and gallant Lord is absolutely right. As he knows, the UK has provided a significant contribution to the EU naval force operation countering migrant smugglers in the Mediterranean off the coast of Libya. We have been doing that since July last year. HMS “Enterprise” remains committed to that operation over the winter, identifying potential migrant-smuggling vessels off the coast of Libya. He is also right to draw our attention to the whole of the Mediterranean as an area of concern. We must not forget that Operation Sophia is just one part of the overall, comprehensive approach to tackling the migrant crisis. The migrants who come up from sub-Saharan Africa are, by and large, those who leave the Libyan coast. In the main, those arriving at the Turkish coast stem from Afghanistan and Syria.

Syria: Brimstone Missiles

Lord Stirrup Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd February 2016 Lords Chamber

[Earl Howe]

The noble Lord is absolutely right. There is no question that Russia is actively targeting civilians and is almost certainly in breach of international humanitarian law in the process. That has to stop. Russia cannot continue to sit at the table as a sponsor of the political process and, at the same time, bomb the civilian areas of the very groups of people whom we believe will form the backbone of the new Syria, once Assad has left.

[Lord Stirrup (CB)]

My Lords, is the Minister able to give the House figures for the number of civilian casualties in Syria caused by the action of ISIL on the ground?

[Earl Howe]

I do not have precise figures, but as the House will know the vast majority of civilian casualties in Syria have been caused by the regime itself and also as a result of Russian actions.

Strategic Defence and Security Review

Lord Stirrup Excerpts

Thursday 3rd December 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stirrup (CB)]

My Lords, it is perhaps worth reflecting that, during the previous strategic defence and security review in 2010, it was made clear to the Government of the day that achieving the kind of reductions that they sought in defence expenditure, at the pace at which they sought to make them, would inevitably result in a degree of strategic incoherence. If the Government nevertheless wished to proceed on that basis, the best that could be achieved was to leave defence in a position from which it could rebuild coherence between 2015 and 2020, hence Future Force 2020.

That, however, would require real-terms increases in the defence budget in each of the years after 2015. The Prime Minister acknowledged as much when presenting the outcome of the 2010 exercise in the other place. Following the most recent defence and security review and the preceding spending review, that funding increase has now, happily, been put in place. I welcome this, but we must be clear that it does no more than was assumed in 2010. It will allow defence to deliver a coherent programme, but it does not bring defence spending back to pre-2010 levels. We will still have smaller Armed Forces, and they will still be stretched to respond to the demands that the Government place on them.

We should also remember that the SDSR sets out an intent; that intent still has to be delivered. Some of the most significant defence shortcomings in recent years resulted not from the 2010 review but from the further cuts that were imposed in subsequent years, so we must seek to ensure that the plan set out in the current review is adhered to. Even that outcome was in doubt until recently. Two years ago, the prospect of the Government reversing the decline in defence spending looked fairly bleak to most of us. Among the important factors in turning that position around were undoubtedly the strong signals coming from Washington that the UK’s position as a reliable partner was in serious doubt.

We have long put our membership of NATO and, within that, the transatlantic relationship at the heart of our security strategy. We flirted dangerously with weakening, if not destroying, that crucial pillar of our defence. Thankfully, we appear to have recognised our folly in time and to have amended our way, but we must ensure that we do not repeat the error.

Any strategy must consist of ends, ways and means brought together in a coherent and achievable way. Our object is the security of our nation, its people and their interests. Two of the principal ways in which we pursue those goals are through our relationship with the United States and our leading position within NATO. This means that we have to employ our forces in a way that is consistent and appropriate, that we have to make levels of investment that are consistent and appropriate to the international situation, and that we have defence capabilities that we are clearly willing to use when the circumstances so require.

There is of course plenty of scope for debate over the exact meaning of terms such as “appropriate”, “relevant” and “circumstances”, and these complex questions and the difficult choices to which they give rise are at the heart of any defence and security review. But what should never be in doubt in the minds of friends and opponents alike is our willingness to put our security at the top of our political calculus. We have started to do that in this review and through more recent events. We must continue to do so in future.

Commonwealth War Graves Commission

Lord Stirrup Excerpts

Monday 22nd June 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stirrup (CB)]

My Lords, I, too, have an interest as a member of the Government’s First World War centenary advisory committee. I join, too, in congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth of Drumlean, on securing this short but important debate. It is important because there are very powerful reasons for recognising and supporting the outstanding work of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.

Those reasons were most powerfully brought home to me 11 years ago this month. I was in Normandy for the 60th anniversary of D-day. We were waiting in the Commonwealth Cemetery at Bayeux for the Queen and President Chirac to arrive for the start of the ceremony and I was talking to a group of cadets from the Air Training Corps. They were bright, enthusiastic young people, mostly around 17 years of age, who were helping with the administrative arrangements and looking after the veterans.

We were standing by a row of headstones and I asked the cadets whether they had really looked at the inscriptions. They had not, but they then started to read them in detail. They found words such as “Private Joe Smith, Died 9 June 1944, Aged 18 years”, “Private Arthur Brown, Died 10 June 1944, Aged 18 years”, “Aged 18 years”, “Aged 19 years” and so on. I could see from their eyes that for the first time they really understood: these were not just names from history. These were young people, much of an age with the cadets themselves, who had met their deaths in those days of June 1944. For the first time, the cadets truly understood this and thus made a personal connection with the past.

The same, of course, is true of the First World War. The three-quarters of a million who died were not just names on a wall or on a gravestone; they were not just appalling statistics. Each was an individual, and a lot of those individuals were not much older than those whose names we read in Normandy. Some would perhaps have gone on to be statesmen or diplomats, some to be businessmen, doctors or lawyers, artisans or farmers, factory workers or labourers. But it did not matter: the gravestones made no distinction of rank or status, and rightly so. For in that awful democracy of death, who dares say that any one potential life lost was worth more than another? They all loved and were loved. They all had hopes, aspirations, frustrations and disappointments. They all had value, and the full value of their lives was unrealised.

Herein lies one of the greatest achievements of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. The graves that it maintains and the headstones above those graves allow us to connect not just with the conflicts of the past, but with the people caught up in those conflicts, with the costs of those conflicts and with the individuals who paid the price. In the study of history, war can too often be represented mainly by the sweep of great events, but even in this technological age war is a very human business and the cost, even when the carnage is greatest, is measured in individual lives. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission helps us to realise and appreciate that basic truth. It enables us, young and old, to make the human connection. Its work enables us to say not just “We will remember them” but “We will remember them as the individuals they were”. Those who paid the ultimate price in the service of this nation deserve no less.

Armed Forces (Service Complaints and Financial Assistance) Bill [HL]

Lord Stirrup Excerpts

Monday 16th March 2015 Lords Chamber

The amendments agreed in the Commons are necessary to ensure that the provisions in the Bill are clear. They also ensure that the drafting is coherent and complete while giving full effect to the amendments agreed to in the other place, which had cross-party support and that of the Defence Committee. The Commons amendments give us a Bill and a process that will help the services understand when they can approach the ombudsman, on what matters and at what stage of the process. They will give the ombudsman the teeth needed to hold the services and the MoD to account. I beg to move.

[Lord Stirrup (CB)]

My Lords, Amendment 1 makes a very significant change to this Bill. In essence, it provides for a complainant who at the end of the full military process of investigation and hearing is dissatisfied with the judgment that has been reached to apply to the ombudsman for, essentially, a totally new hearing, not a review of whether the complaint was handled properly and appropriately, and not of whether the judgment reached was reasonable within the range of reasonable decisions that could have been reached, but an entirely new judgment on the merits of the case.

It is, of course, perfectly possible for two or more people to reach, in varying degrees, different views on the merits of a case on the same set of facts as presented. Perhaps the most obvious example of this is a dissenting judgment in the Supreme Court. This Bill, as amended, is now essentially saying that the judgment and view of the ombudsman is of more value and is more reliable than those of anyone in the military chain of command or of the Defence Council. Noble Lords will be able to judge for themselves whether they think that is a sensible thing to do. All I will say is that having been in the position of having to review many such hearings and judgments at Air Force Board level, I certainly, to some extent or other, found in favour of the complainant on quite a number of occasions. I could not give your Lordships an exact percentage at this remove, but my sense is that it was quite a significant percentage. The sense that someone in the chain of command is automatically going to be prejudiced and unable to give the complainant a fair hearing is entirely unfounded.

Nevertheless, this Bill provides for a process that is not simply judicial review but is essentially a rehearing on the facts. Given the number of complaints that go through in any given year, and that one of the defects that this Bill was intended to address was the delay in the hearing of such complaints because of their volume, it seems inevitable that the number of complaints on merit that are to be made in future to the ombudsman following the service process will be fairly large. This means that the ombudsman will not in every instance be able to hear that case personally. Some of her deputies, some of the people in her new office, will have to do that on her behalf. Although she will, of course, be called upon to sign off the outcome in every case, it will be people from the ombudsman’s office rather than the ombudsman herself who will hear some of these retrials, if I can put it that way. Therefore, it seems to me that if we are to agree to such an amendment, the very least we must insist on is that within the regulations that will give effect to this Bill in due course, the qualifications and training that will be necessary for anybody from the ombudsman’s office to sit in judgment on such de novo hearings are set out in no uncertain terms. The Minister alluded to this in his speech, and I welcome his words, but when he sums up I ask him to reassure your Lordships that he will come back to us with a form of words which, at the very least, will satisfy us that this unfortunate amendment will do as little harm as possible.

[Lord Palmer of Childs Hill (LD)]

My Lords, first, I take the opportunity to thank the Minister, my noble friend Lady Jolly and other noble Lords for their input into this Bill. I think it is very important. I take issue with the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup, because, when my colleagues in the other place asked me if I had any problems during earlier stages of the passage of this Bill in this House, with the Bill having started in your Lordships’ House before moving to the other place, I said that one thing that I spoke about, on which they spoke in the other place, was that the ombudsman would be able to look only at the process rather than the detail. I believed at that time, during the earlier stages of the Bill in this House, that the ombudsman should, in certain circumstances, have the ability to do so—but, as my noble friend said, this is after it has been through all the chains of command, and it is not meant to usurp any of those points.

Russia: Armed Forces

Lord Stirrup Excerpts

Thursday 5th February 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Astor of Hever]

My Lords, I will do my very best to ensure that that happens. Just for the benefit of the House, on 28 January two Russian bombers flew close to the south coast in congested civilian-controlled airspace, unauthorised and without communicating with UK air traffic control. The UK response was conducted in accordance with well-practised NATO procedures and the bombers were escorted from the UK’s airspace by Royal Air Force aircraft.

[Lord Stirrup (CB)]

My Lords, the Minister has agreed with the NATO minimum target for defence expenditure of 2% of GDP, but his own party has yet to commit itself to that minimum level for the United Kingdom. Will he take this opportunity to correct the position now, and if he cannot do so, will he explain the inconsistency between that and what he has just said? Will he also explain how on earth we stand any chance of persuading our partners in NATO and Europe to do better, because they are doing even worse than us in this regard?

[Lord Astor of Hever]

My Lords, we have met the 2% target for this entire Parliament. We are committed to spending 2% of GDP on defence until the end of the financial year 2015-16, following which decisions will be determined in the next comprehensive spending review.

Armed Forces

Lord Stirrup Excerpts

Monday 23rd June 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stirrup (CB)]

My Lords, we are within a year of a general election, following which the next Government will have to make some key choices about government expenditure over the coming years. Over the past four years, the burden of financial retrenchment has been largely borne by those departments whose expenditure has been unprotected. If that is to continue beyond 2015, we have seriously to question whether we as a country are taking a sensible approach to public policy.

There is no doubt that restoring the nation’s economic health and public finances are essential prerequisites for the provision of good public services, including our Armed Forces. This overriding priority has meant that in the short term we have faced difficult choices and painful reductions in many areas. However, our aim must be to restore long-term coherence, not to allow short-term distortions to become structurally embedded.

With that in mind, we have to take account of our national interests and aspirations. The nature of our economy and the sources of our wealth mean that we cannot responsibly withdraw from the global scene. We rely on a degree of global order and stability to pursue our goals; that means we should invest in the promotion of such order and stability. It has long been a key tenet of our foreign and security policy and I see no prospect of change in that regard. Even in the teeth of the economic challenge at the time of the last security and defence review, the Government rejected the notion of strategic shrinkage. I would have preferred a slightly different formulation. It would have been better to say that Britain was committed to sustaining its international strategic role in the long term, but that to do this we would have to suffer some strategic retrenchment in the short term. That would have been a better reflection of the reality.

Either way, we must take account of the current and likely future international situation. I will not repeat all that I said in the debate on the humble Address responding to the gracious Speech from the Throne in this regard; suffice it to say that the global threats to security, as other noble Lords have said, are many and serious. However, I will restate a key point I made in the earlier debate. I believe we are witnessing two major strategic shifts, both of which could pose serious challenges to our future security and prosperity. The first and most obvious is the rising economic might of China and its use of increasingly sharp elbows on the international scene. The major points of friction may be far removed from us geographically, but in this globalised world the consequences will certainly be felt here.

The second development is the continued unravelling of the Sykes-Picot agreement and the subsequent post-1918 arrangements that were intended to tidy up the detritus of the Ottoman Empire. The most malign consequence of this is the growth of an ungoverned space straddling the Syria-Iraq border and the emergence there of extremist Islamic groups, such as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.

There is perhaps little that we can contribute directly regarding the first development, but we have friends in the Asia-Pacific region that we should stay in close touch with and support where possible. Regarding the second issue, we cannot say how things will develop in the Middle East; nor, I suspect, can we exert much direct control over the outcomes. At the least, we should do all we can to prevent the outcome of a slide into a full-blown Sunni-Shia war, which seems to me very much in prospect at the moment.

If that were not enough, we face serious challenges on our own continent, which until recently some people thought would be at peace for ever more. It has been suggested that the EU has in some way provoked Russia’s actions in Ukraine. I am certainly not going to defend all of the EU’s policies in this regard. However, I believe that Russia’s actions are illegal and wholly unacceptable, and that the chances of subsequent miscalculation on the wider European scene have grown considerably. We now face a situation where many members of NATO feel distinctly less secure than they did 12 months ago, and they understandably seek reassurance. We have allowed ourselves and NATO to grow weaker over the past few years; risks and uncertainties are greater when we are weaker than when we are stronger. We need to be stronger if we want to be more secure, even in Europe.

We will need to employ all of the nation’s means of power if we are to rise successfully to the challenges we face on the global scene, but one thing is perfectly clear to me: we will not be able to meet them through soft power alone, important though that is. We will need the capabilities of our Armed Forces—capabilities that we have progressively weakened in the name of financial retrenchment.

Life would be easier if we were able to identify the specific capabilities we will need to employ. We can certainly say that, for example, intelligence, Special Forces and cyberwarfare will feature heavily. However, the history of security and warfare tells us that we need to retain flexibility across the full spectrum of operations. Those who have predicted the demise of particular kinds of warfare have usually been proved wrong, sometimes in spectacular fashion. Even the famous horse/tank moment is often misunderstood. It was not a fundamental change in tactic, about the mobile application of power and shock action. It was, rather, about the ability of emerging technology to provide new and better ways of doing the same basic things. That is often a challenge for military thinkers. We therefore need to retain as wide a spectrum of military capability as we can manage, and sustain within it sufficient flexibility to be able to react successfully to the unexpected, because the unexpected is certainly what we will be called on to face.

Money was the overriding issue at the time of the last strategic defence and security review. The Government’s strategy was quickly to eliminate the structural deficit; everything was subservient to that aim. Defence was set a savings target of between 10% and 20% of its annual budget. The work of the defence review showed that the consequences of this would be unacceptable to the Government, even given their strategic objective. The final level of saving was between 7.5% and 8%. Even that level of reduction was impossible to achieve without introducing a degree of military strategic incoherence. The plan adopted by the Government was to restrict, as far as possible, the short-term damage, and to leave defence in a position in 2015 from which it could restore coherence. Crucially, the Government agreed—the Prime Minister confirmed this when he announced the outcome of the review—that this could be done only through real-terms increases in the defence budget in each of the years from 2015 onwards.

I want to be clear on this point. Although the required level of growth was not specified, it was quite clearly growth in the total budget. The subsequent announcement—that the MoD would assume, for planning purposes, a 1% annual increase in the equipment budget—was necessary to allow sensible long-term planning, but it was a subsidiary issue to the increase identified as necessary in the defence review. What has actually happened is that the defence budget has been reduced even further. Although in-year underspends allowed the MoD to make those savings, one has to wonder how much capability we have forgone as a result of them. Crucially, we have reduced the baseline against which future budget entitlements will be measured.

The result is that the level of defence spending in this country is already dangerously low. NATO has set 2% of GDP as the minimum that members should achieve. Most are well below this and I fear that we fail to meet the target ourselves if one strips out the additional cost of operations, which is supposed to be funded from the contingency reserve and not from the defence budget. Even in an era of continued austerity, we cannot allow this to continue. We should bear in mind the small percentage of national wealth that we are considering here, set against what is agreed to be the first responsibility of any Government. We should be setting Europe a good example in this regard, not a bad one.

We are shortly to host the next NATO summit. I believe that, in advance of that meeting, the leaders of all the major political parties should commit themselves to spending at least 2% of our GDP on defence. That would set a much-needed tone at the summit, and put the most important issue at the top of the agenda. Beyond that, the Government should face up to their responsibilities by delivering the necessary real-terms increases in the defence budget over the second half of this decade. If they do not, then they must acknowledge that the planned Future Force 2020 will be undeliverable; that there will have to be further serious reductions in our Armed Forces; that we have accepted a future of strategic shrinkage in which our international influence will be seriously diminished; and that the nature of this country will be fundamentally changed as a result. Anybody proposing such a dramatic shift in policy ought surely to make their intentions plain in advance, and to seek the specific sanction of the electorate for them.

Defence Reform Bill

Lord Stirrup Excerpts

Wednesday 26th March 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Davies of Stamford (Lab)]

My Lords, I was not intending to intervene in this debate but feel that I must, in order to correct some of the myths—which is a polite way of putting it—just purveyed by the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton. I was of course the Minister responsible for defence reform in the last three years of the last Government and, indeed, possibly the Minister to whom the noble Lord was referring when he talked about ministerial responsibility. I must tell him that during that time we always stayed within our annual cash limits. So far as the longer-term financing programme was concerned, we were fully and adequately funded on the basis of a 1.5% real terms increase in the defence budget, which was our policy at the time. It was a correct policy and I wish that it had been continued. It was very regrettable that this Government came in and made excessive cuts in public spending, which drove the economy down. The economy was reviving before we left office. The House will recall that in the first half of 2010 the economy grew, at first, by 0.3% and then by 0.7%. When this Government came in with their excessive spending cuts, the growth fell away again. The economy has been in the doldrums, more or less, ever since. That was a mistake made entirely by this Government.

In my view, the decisions of the previous Government on defence procurement were thoroughly responsible. It was very necessary to provide for two carriers; it is an essential arm in our ability to intervene around the world, irrespective of whether we have friendly powers that are willing to provide us with airfields a suitably close distance to where our troops might be deployed or where we need to bring influence or physical power—kinetic power, if necessary—to bear. That was a right decision.

It was a crazy decision to cancel those aircraft carriers—or, at least, to cancel the carrier strike capability of the nation for 10 years. Of course we need two aircraft carriers, because otherwise we cannot be absolutely certain that when we need an aircraft carrier it will be available and will not be in refit. The decisions of the last Government on defence procurement were thoroughly responsible. They were certainly funded. I am sorry to see that, after all the denials that have been made over the last few years by everybody who actually knows the facts, the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton, should still be purveying a completely untrue account of events.

[Lord Stirrup (CB)]

My Lords, let me add very briefly my weight to the comments of my noble friend Lord Ramsbotham and my noble and gallant friend Lord Craig, with whom I agree. It may be worth the House reflecting, first, on the fact that the current Chief of the Defence Staff has given his view that his top concern in terms of personnel pressures actually lies with the Navy. Secondly, a few moments ago we were debating the consequences of Russia’s action in Ukraine and the importance of NATO preparedness in the face of that. NATO’s greatest weakness—and, indeed, our own—and Russia’s most likely avenue of attack, should anything go awry, is likely to be in cyberspace. Noble Lords might like to reflect on whether this country is investing enough in that area.

It is clear that this country was previously not investing enough in the defence of the realm and that, in the light of the current situation, it is not investing enough now. As my noble friend Lord Ramsbotham has said, if the Government—whoever forms the Government in 2015 and beyond—do not live up to the requirement to increase defence expenditure in real terms in that year and in each year beyond, our situation will only get worse.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Defence (Lord Astor of Hever) (Con)]

My Lords, Part 3 of the Bill makes important changes that have been broadly welcomed by noble Lords. They will help revitalise our Reserve Forces and, along with the other measures in the White Paper, make them feel valued and valuable and, crucially, more usable.

The changes we are making to our Reserve Forces are part of what is known as Future Force 2020, which will provide military capability in a different way from the past to deliver the range and scale of military forces and skills required. The whole of the Armed Forces, not just the Army, is being transformed to meet the likely future demands on defence. There is often a narrow focus on numbers when concerning changes to the Armed Forces. I am therefore pleased that this amendment focuses more on capability.

The changes we are making to our Armed Forces are guided by the defence planning assumptions, the unclassified version of which is published in the SDSR. Detailed assessments of our force structure’s capabilities are undertaken against a range of scenarios, but they are not put into the public domain for very good reasons of national security. In capability terms, the unclassified defence planning assumptions outline that Future Force 2020 will still enable us to conduct an enduring stabilisation operation of up to 6,500 personnel, one non-enduring complex intervention of up to 2,000 personnel, and one non-enduring simple intervention of up to 1,000 personnel at the same time.

The Army will be structured around the reaction force and the adaptable force. The former are high readiness forces that will provide the Army’s conventional deterrence for defence and will be trained and equipped to undertake the full spectrum of intervention tasks. The latter will be geared more towards defence engagement and homeland resilience, but with the ability to conduct combat operations, particularly enduring stabilisation operations. So we have designed a flexible, adaptable and capable force structure that enables the Army to meet likely future threats.

Noble Lords will recognise that there has been considerable debate about Future Force 2020. To focus narrowly on the Army is, I believe, not helpful and misleading, as the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Craig, said. The other two services are vital to the UK’s defence capability. The Army cannot and does not operate in isolation, even in landlocked countries such as Afghanistan. If we are to consider the capability of our Armed Forces, we must do so in the round, collectively. The noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup, made the point very well about the recent comments of the Chief of the Defence Staff and the Royal Navy. We expect the changes we are making under Future Force 2020 to take effect by 2020. We have acknowledged that between coming out of Afghanistan and fully implementing the Future Force 2020 changes, there is some risk attached, but asking for an annual report on the capability of the Army now would be premature and rather misleading. It is only fair to judge the effectiveness of Future Force 2020 from that year onwards.

Recognising the importance of routinely assessing the capabilities of our Armed Forces against the threats and challenges they may face, this Government instigated the five-yearly strategic defence and security review process. It allows for detailed consideration of changes in the strategic environment and the force structure required to counter the threats and issues identified. If we were to increase the frequency of those reviews to a yearly report on the Army’s fighting power, as this amendment suggests, we could reduce defence to a series of knee-jerk reactions, concentrating on only a small timescale and not allowing any kind of strategic decision-making and long-term planning.

The second reason for rejecting this amendment is that while one crucial role for the Armed Forces will be conventional deterrence, including intervention tasks should they be required, the range of tasks we ask of our Armed Forces is much broader. The armed services make a unique and valuable contribution to the security of the UK, her citizens and those around the world, through activities contributing to conflict prevention, defence engagement, involvement in international defence diplomacy and defence alliances, as well as contributing to peacekeeping, security operations such as counterpiracy off the coast of Somalia, and homeland resilience such as assisting with the recent UK flood relief work. The future force has been designed to be able to respond effectively to these international commitments and align them with national priorities. It therefore seems unhelpful to focus a report on the narrow concept of fighting power. A report focused solely on fighting power would not best reflect the development of the whole range of these capabilities.

Also, as the British Defence Doctrine points out, fighting power will always be considered relative to that of other parties. The notion of effectiveness itself will also change over time, as the strategic context and our national objectives change, making comparisons challenging. An assessment of fighting power would also represent a statement of the relative strengths of defence and could play into the hands of those who wish to reduce the security and relevance of the Armed Forces. We would therefore be unwilling to release a public assessment.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Roper (LD)]

My Lords, in view of the remarks made by my noble friend the Minister in his intervention in the speech of the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Craig, saying that he intends to accept the principle of Amendment 9, I can be a good deal briefer than I would otherwise have been. Broadly, I felt after the discussion in Committee and subsequent consideration—particularly after the discussions with Mr Dunne—that it would be very important to get in the Bill the assurances about the material that the Government would produce before a decision was made on the affirmative order. That, of course, was a government amendment that was introduced in Committee after representation from a number of us that a decision should be made by affirmative order and that one could not just use Part 1 of the Bill without any further parliamentary consideration.

I believe that the situation here is the right way for us to proceed. The super-affirmative procedure to which the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, has just referred was discussed in some detail in Committee, and I initially saw some advantage in having a mechanism whereby one could look at this more carefully. On further examination, I took to heart the Minister’s view that this was rather a heavy way of tackling the problem, and that it would be possible for Parliament to be properly informed so that the debate on the affirmative order could be effective and efficient with the sort of procedures that are in Amendment 9. I therefore believe that Amendments 10 and 11 are too elaborate and that the lighter proposal in Amendment 9 is the one that the House, in principle, ought to accept, although of course we will be doing that at Third Reading rather than today.

[Lord Stirrup]

My Lords, I, too, have my name attached to Amendment 9. I do not wish to make the mistake of failing to accept yes for an answer, so I will merely say that I am extremely grateful to the Minister for agreeing to take this away. I look forward to seeing the amendment as drafted by my noble and gallant friend Lord Craig at Third Reading.

[Lord Trefgarne]

My Lords, like other noble Lords I have had some reservations about the GOCO proposal but I am bound to say that my noble friend the Minister has gone a long way to meet those concerns. His observations this afternoon and his acceptance in principle of the amendment proposed by the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Craig, has further assisted me in this matter. That said, Amendment 11—I understand that the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, was anxious that we should discuss it at the same time—goes much too far. The GOCO proposal, which we have already discussed, is adequately protected by the steps which my noble friend has made. Therefore, the call from the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, for a super-affirmative resolution is very much over the top in this particular circumstance and I hope he will not press it. The amendment will achieve nothing, save a further significant delay to a measure which all sides of the House agree has considerable merit and the potential to save the taxpayer a considerable sum in the future. I believe this super-affirmative resolution amendment was tabled only last night and I suggest that it therefore bears all the hallmarks of rather hurried drafting.

Defence Reform Bill

Lord Stirrup Excerpts

Wednesday 5th February 2014 Grand Committee

The other point that has not yet been made is about the other uses of drones, because this is a defence Bill. However, Amazon has been considering using drones to deliver parcels. It is at an experimental phase but I imagine that it will continue. The real point is that I am greatly worried about drones used as armed weapons. The fact that there is no pilot in the plane makes it more dangerous in many ways. I am not so worried—in fact, it can be safer to the Armed Forces and civilians—if drones are used to gather information on battlefields or the like. I welcome this discussion, although I do not think that the amendment has a place in the Bill. However, there is an argument for having a debate and a Bill on this and other matters separately to this Bill, which is mainly about procurement and the reserves.

[Lord Stirrup (CB)]

My Lords, I welcome the opportunity to register a few points regarding some of the things that have been said in this Committee.

As currently used by UK Armed Forces, “drones” are not drones but unmanned aerial systems. They are not in any way autonomous. I should point out that I have no objection whatever to a further exploration of the use of these systems, their implications and the regulatory framework around them. That would be welcome, provided we do it with a clear eye, although I do not see the necessity for these amendments.

However, if we are to have this kind of debate, we need to be clear on a few things. The first is that we should differentiate between systems and outcomes. The legal framework for the use of armed force within the UK is essentially about the outcomes that people are allowed to inflict on others, not the systems that they use for those outcomes. If you think in terms of the unmanned aerial systems that we currently use, there is little, if any, difference between someone piloting the system from within a cabin on an airbase somewhere—looking into a screen in that cabin, making the decision about whether to engage a target and then firing a weapon—and someone doing exactly the same thing from the cockpit of an aircraft at 20,000 feet or 30,000 feet. In fact, the only real difference is that the person on the ground is likely to make better decisions because he is looking at a bigger screen, with greater definition, he will be able to see more detail of the target area, and he will be in a better position to avoid collateral damage.

My second point is that today and in the future, before any clearance is given for a target to be engaged by the UK Armed Forces, two questions inevitably have to be answered. The first is: is it legal? That, as we have all heard, can be a difficult issue, particularly in the area of international law, and it is sometimes clear that we would reach different conclusions on that matter from those of some of our allies. That remains an issue. The second question is: is it wise? Does it actually further your strategic objectives or does it hinder them? As we have heard in this Room, and I agree, these systems have in some circumstances been used unwisely in terms of furthering one’s strategic objectives. However, we should be clear in distinguishing between the two. In attacks on targets by US systems that are operating from—or with the support of—the UK, the situation is clear. Such attacks require clearance from the UK as well as from the United States targeting authorities. Having been in this position, I can assure your Lordships that that happens every time, even when it means waking up the Attorney-General, night after night, at 4 am, as certainly happened in my experience.

The other point on which it is important to be clear is that unmanned systems are not—and certainly will not be in future—constrained merely to the air. They will operate on the surface of the land and sea, and under the sea. If we are to undertake any kind of debate and exploration of these issues, let it be about the widest possible use of these systems and not just focus on unmanned aerial systems—or “drones”, as they are incorrectly called.

Finally, if we are to have this debate, the most important element is that of autonomy—already exposed to some degree in the debate today. As far as I am concerned, all the while that someone in the loop makes a decision about the legality and military utility of the target being attacked, the current framework is secure and will save us. When you introduce degrees of autonomy into the system—decision-making within the system itself as opposed to leaving it with a human in the loop—of course you introduce a degree of risk into the whole process. That is not something that happens at the moment, but it could happen in future and it is where the focus of our attention should lie.

I welcome the debate. I have no concerns about the ways in which these systems are used by the UK at the moment but it is something we should certainly look at for the future. However, I do not see the necessity for these amendments in this particular Bill.

[Lord Roper]

Perhaps I might just ask the noble and gallant Lord one question. In the report by Ben Emmerson that I quoted there is a reference to the way the United Kingdom considers targeting intelligence. It says:

“The United Kingdom has informed the Special Rapporteur that during its operations in Afghanistan targeting intelligence is ‘thoroughly scrubbed’ to ensure accuracy before authorization to proceed is given”.

Could the noble and gallant Lord explain to those of us who are not so well informed how one “scrubs” intelligence?

[Lord Stirrup]

First, one has to decide upon the reliability of the intelligence, because intelligence is not knowledge—there is no certainty about it. What degree of assuredness can we attach to the intelligence? What sort of cross-referencing is there? Then, everything else about the target—its structure, the things around it, the possibilities of collateral damage and all the issues properly raised under the law of armed conflict; that is, the military utility of attacking the target versus the possible risks of doing so—is gone into at great length. Certainly as far as the United Kingdom—and, in my experience, the United States—is concerned, it is done with a lawyer looking over one’s shoulder the whole time. When I was responsible for these sorts of targeting decisions in the five months after 9/11 when I was at United States Central Command, my lawyer and I were essentially joined at the hip. It had to be so and I welcomed it.

[Lord Dannatt (CB)]

My Lords, I identify with the comments of my noble and gallant friend. He made many of the points I would otherwise have made. I share his scepticism here. I understand the purpose behind these amendments but I have some concern about seeing them included in a Bill such as this at the present time. On the other hand, I very much welcome the debate on the wider subject.

I just amplify one of the points made by my noble and gallant friend. In the popular mind, so-called “drones”, or “unmanned aerial systems” or “unmanned aerial vehicles”—the name professionally and technically which we have used for many years—are large and operate over great distances. However, within the same overall category come small battlefield UAVs. Some are small enough to be able to look over a hill into a valley beyond and report back to a ground tactical commander. There are reconnaissance and weapons-deploying issues here, and issues of large and small size. Because of that complexity, the issue definitely merits further investigation and debate, with the formation of a wide-ranging piece of legislation dealing with definitions and bringing the whole into a proper regulatory format. For that reason alone, while I recognise the intent behind the amendments, this should be taken forward in a somewhat different way.