NATO

Debate between Bernard Jenkin and Bob Stewart

Thursday 4th July 2013 Commons Chamber

[Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)]

I am going to return to the theme that the vice-president of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly started us on: why NATO? By the end of next year, we will be out of combat in Afghanistan. Clearly, there will be a period of readjustment for western armed forces. The British Army is being reduced by 20%. The other armed forces—the Air Force and the Navy—are being reduced by a similar amount. The Americans are already declaring that sequestration will take $50 billion a year out of their $550 billion budget, which is a lot. Therefore, fundamentally, there will be big changes.

When NATO started in 1949, General Lord Ismay said that its purpose was

“to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.”

Obviously, the situation has changed a lot. The Warsaw pact was formed in 1955 as a reaction to NATO. We could not have had NATO without German rearmament.

I and other members in the House spent most of our military careers preparing for what we loosely called the third world war, hoping it would not happen. Thank goodness it did not happen on the north German plain. When the Berlin wall fell, everything changed and NATO had to change. As I have explained to the House on previous occasions, after I came back from Bosnia, in my last two years in the Army, I was a member of the planning team at Supreme Allied Commander Europe. We most definitely were not seeking a new role outside Europe; it was largely thrust upon us. Therefore, doubts remain about NATO and its solidarity. I agree that we must keep banging on about NATO’s target of spending 2% of GDP on defence. We must keep it. The problem is that some people, particularly in France, suggest that the alliance is

“an alliance of the unable and unwilling”.

A French academic said that. I put it to the House that NATO has a good future.

Twenty years ago, who would have thought that Russia would be resurgent? Russian military spending is now increasing by three quarters of a billion dollars; it will have increased by 53% by 2015. Russia still possesses more than 1 million troops and it has 20 million in the reserve. However, the Russians have big problems. Russian military prosecutors recently said that about a fifth of the budget had been embezzled, so they are trying to sort that out. However, look at the Russian navy. We have talked about the high north. That navy has been transformed in the last eight years: 45% of the ships in the Russian navy will be replaced by 2015. By 2007, Russia was building as many ships every year as the Soviets did at the height of their power.

My hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex (Mr Jenkin) made an excellent speech on the nuclear deterrent. The Russians certainly think in terms of flexible response. They envisage using tactical nuclear weapons in their exercises; a recent exercise that they undertook in the Baltic states suggested exactly that. Part of their war-fighting ability is to use nuclear weapons. That is one of the reasons that we must retain our nuclear deterrent.

[Mr Jenkin]

Not only do the Russians exercise that capability, but they talk about it, have not renounced first use and have said that they would use their nuclear weapons in a conventional conflict against their neighbours.

[Bob Stewart]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. He puts it better than I could write it.

In China, Xi Jinping has consolidated his power. He talks of fighting to win wars. There has been a 10.7% increase in the Chinese military budget. The strategic forces of China now have 3,000 miles of tunnels. They have 850 nuclear warheads ready to launch. They are almost at strategic parity with the United States. They are also building globally deployable forces, which are now edging into the Mediterranean, as we have heard, and coming through the high Arctic. They are challenging western strategic military superiority.

Something else is new, and we have touched on it in the debate: cyber-warfare. The Defence Committee has just completed a report on that. It is a new form of war. It is invidious and evolving at unimaginable speed, with serious consequences. Cyber-space is an aspect of asymmetric warfare. It is very difficult to identify sometimes where these attacks are coming from. State actors such as China, North Korea, Iran and Syria are devoting resources to it. Hacking can be more deadly than the gun. The targets are government, industry and the military. There is great concern in the west about how disruptive cyber-attacks can be. For example, on 23 April, in seconds, the United States stock market dropped 1%, losing $136.5 billion, because of a false tweet put into the system, possibly from Syria.

The United States is changing some of the focus of its direction. Its strategy now, as the Defence Committee heard when we were in the US, is to concentrate on trying to avoid war much more. The Americans do not want any war that is not short term. They are looking at Asia. Sequestration will cost an enormous amount in military terms. The Americans consider that Russia is not a great threat at the moment—although its military spending is increasing, as I have mentioned—but that China is and it is growing in power. However, as one American academic put it to the Committee, “Going to war with China would be like going to war with your bank if you are an American.” Thankfully, since 2001, there have been huge improvements in US intervention power: there has been a two thirds increase in its intervention power capability.

The lesson of European, and world, history is that surprise is normal. The unexpected should always be expected, so we should expect to be surprised. Therefore, whatever we do within NATO, we must try to work in such a way that our armed forces can deal with as many envisaged eventualities as possible while also expecting that we will still be surprised. NATO gives us more combat power, by collaboration with others.

I am about to conclude Mr Deputy Speaker—I think you might be looking at your watch. The problem is that our potential enemies remain our potential enemies. Symmetric warfare between states is not dead. We may think it is. We have not had a war for 70 years, when Europe historically had six or seven each century, and thus the public ask, “Why do we have to spend money on defence?” The problem is that that has not gone away and we may well be surprised.

Defence is an insurance policy, therefore. We want to deter the possibility of war. We do not want to use nuclear weapons. The point of possessing nuclear weapons is to avoid using them by avoiding threats. The aim is to help our country be left alone and not be attacked, and, in NATO terms, the aim is to avoid all NATO countries being attacked.

I believe very strongly that we must remain part of NATO as I believe it has a big future. I disagree with those who say its purpose, in Lord Ismay’s definition, is gone. No, NATO is required because it helps us, as a medium-sized nation, to combine with other nations—the French, the Germans, the Spanish and other nations that are not members of NATO—and form a coalition of the willing to deal with problems in the world.

We must have the resilience to adapt, to deter and to deal with the unexpected, and we should try to do that as cheaply as possible of course. The days of huge military budgets are over; they are long gone. The best way is for us to collaborate and work with like-minded states, and NATO is most certainly the best means to that end.