Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy

Bernard Jenkin Excerpts

Tuesday 9th February 2021 Commons Chamber

[Sir Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con) [V]]

With the end of the cold war, the UK failed to develop a new national or grand strategy and allowed its mechanisms for maintaining such a strategy to atrophy. This review must start by accepting that and deal with the changes in equipment, concepts, pressure of economics, accelerating technological change, and the new forms of conflict and competition. It must demand new and different operational concepts and a new strategic frame- work to meet the challenge of modern hybrid warfare.

The Chief of the Defence Staff’s announcement of a new integrated operating concept is therefore of extreme importance. The integrated review must set out a conceptual framework that incorporates all forms of new technology and must support the new relevant operational concepts. The Nagorno-Karabakh war demonstrates just how decisive technological advantage can be if one side has deployed it and the other side does not have it. The technology can be more important than force numbers, tactics or training, and that may be a paradigm shift in the nature of modern conflict.

To prevail, today’s military must have electronic warfare dominance, integrated, multi-force battle management systems enabling very short sensor-to-shooter links, 24/7 surveillance and remote targeting, ground, air and sea-launched precision warheads and survivable platforms such as armoured fighting vehicles with active defence suites. At 2% of GDP, what will we be able to buy? Not enough on its own. Not only must the MOD adapt but many other Government Departments need to acknowledge and provide for their own evolving contribution to national security. This also extends to the private sector.

Civilian technological development has become key to maintaining military pre-eminence. A crisis may still require large equipment numbers at short notice, so we must also reduce unit costs and design in commonality, ease of training, and low cost of storage and maintenance. We must also find civilian value for military technology in order to reduce costs.

Here is an example. The west relies on space for everything that we do in our daily lives, including military operations. This contrasts with Russia or China. By 2045, China may well have equivalent reliance, but its design will be resilient and defendable. The UK has no launch capability, but we do have a thriving satellite industry. Now is the time that we must fund a coherent space policy, including launch capability. If Russia’s heavy lift rockets can destroy the global network of telecommunication satellites with nuclear electromagnetic pulse space weapons and instantly it can replace its own satellites, we must show how we would replace ours just as quickly both as a response and as a deterrent. The RAF’s experimental Microset could be a classic dual use capability in such a role.

Finally, Sir Stephen Lovegrove’s welcome move to national security adviser takes defence into what has been too much of a diplomat’s fiefdom, but it is imperative that his successor as deputy permanent secretary at Defence arrives with an appreciation of all this new complexity and the role that technology must play. In this, we need experts not amateurs, however gifted they are.