Defence and Security Review (NATO)

Bob Russell Excerpts

Monday 2nd March 2015 Commons Chamber

[Rory Stewart]

That provides me with a good way to drive towards a conclusion. As my hon. Friend has just pointed out, the kind of threats that Russia or Putin can bring will be very unpredictable. I will be humiliated by what Putin does over the next five to 10 years. It is very difficult to guess what he will do next. What is clear about Putin is that he has been thinking very hard, since at least 2008, about how to unsettle or unbalance NATO. He will be pulling levers and pushing buttons that we cannot yet anticipate.

I imagine that he will be tempted to do things in relation to Iran—perhaps in relation to the Iranian nuclear negotiations. We have already seen Putin’s very direct contribution to the civil war in Syria through the protection of Bashar al-Assad. We can see his control over the gas supplies in Bulgaria. It is not very difficult for us to imagine how he could cause trouble in Narva, or how he could put a few Spetsnaz troops in a forest in Latvia, just sit them there and wait to see what we do. If we are dealing with threats along that arc, we need to change the way we think in the Ministry of Defence. We cannot rest in the comfortable world we have been in for the past 20 years—imagining that we will have a neat deployment of 6,600 soldiers on an expeditionary warfare campaign, that they will stay there for five to 10 years doing stabilisation operations and then come home. We will have to respond to very nuanced, ambiguous and unpredictable attacks all the way along an arc between the Baltic and, potentially, Iran. In order to do that, we need to invest very heavily in Russian language expertise, defence engagement, and defence attachés in all those countries. The United States currently has three defence attachés in each Baltic state; we have one defence attaché covering three Baltic states. That is not enough.

The Ministry of Defence would not be able tell us whether the defences in Mariupol were adequate to deal with a Russian advance because the defence attaché currently in Kiev is not permitted to travel up to the front line. We need to invest in defence intelligence staff in the Foreign Office. To do that—this is what I will conclude on—we must make this investment of 2% of GDP in defence. We need to do that for many, many reasons.

[Sir Bob Russell (Colchester) (LD)]

I do not want the Chair of the Select Committee to ignore one part of the world. With regard to all the countries that he has mentioned we can act as part of the NATO family, but what about the Falklands? He will be aware that Argentina has not given up its ambitions, but who will support us down in the South Atlantic?

[Rory Stewart]

That is a very significant question. It is definitely worth thinking about in the next SDSR. As the hon. Gentleman points out, many of our assumptions are based on the fact that we will operate with the US coalition, but in relation to the Falklands we cannot be so confident that that will happen.

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[Sir Bob Russell (Colchester) (LD)]

In a world of rapid change, disorder and insecurity, the men and women of Her Majesty’s armed forces remain our most important asset. Yesterday I visited the Imperial War museum at Duxford, which is also the home of the Royal Anglian Regiment museum. I ask myself: are we, today’s generation, betraying their memory? There are the new threats and the old threats—as well as forgotten threats—among them, as we have heard, Iraq and Syria, and the middle east generally, Russia and Ukraine, Russia and the Baltic states, and how article 5 of NATO’s obligations may impact on the UK. I intervened earlier to say that I had visited the Falklands last month. Argentina still has its sights on those British overseas territories. Something else that we must continue to address is the defence consequences of the continuing danger of Scotland breaking away from the United Kingdom.

This evening’s debate is on the next defence and security review and NATO. Included in the motion is an item that says that

“resources authorised for use for current purposes be reduced”

by £618 million. There is a growing concern among senior British defence and security experts over the insistence on cutting defence expenditure. General Sir Peter Wall, the former head of the Army, has called for all parties to commit to the 2% target to help Britain to deal with unforeseen threats. The right hon. Member for North Somerset (Dr Fox), the former Defence Secretary, is quoted in today’s Daily Telegraph as saying:

“I think people feel that the Government’s first duty is the protection of the United Kingdom. We have to do what we need to, to make that happen, and I think that we have a commitment to Nato as part of our international treaty obligations to spend that 2 per cent.”

The Prime Minister was in my constituency today. I am told that he spoke from a normally empty warehouse belonging to a property marketing company. His big theme was housing—but not, sadly, the housing of our brave military personnel and their families. The Prime Minister is not strong when it comes to defence. On his watch, the size of the British Army will be reduced to what it was 200 years ago, at the time of the battle of Waterloo. It will be cut by a fifth by the end of this decade, to 20% smaller than it was five years ago, from 102,000 regulars in 2010 to 82,000 in 2020. However good the reserves are—and I strongly support the reserves —reducing the size of the regular Army is not in Britain’s national defence interests either at home or overseas.

Although the Prime Minister talked today about building new homes—in a town where the public are aghast at seeing so many green fields being lost to development—he was silent about the housing of families at Colchester garrison, five miles from where he spoke, on an industrial estate on the northern fringe of my constituency. The modernisation of military housing has been stopped across the UK, not just in Colchester. Last week the Deputy Prime Minister was in Colchester to announce financial support for housing for single former military personnel. What a pity the Prime Minister did not today announce the lifting of the halting of the modernisation programme of housing for the families of our brave soldiers, sailors and air force personnel. I have raised this issue in the House before and at meetings of the Select Committee on Defence, on which I serve, but halting the modernisation programme is a scandal, particularly when it is known that when the programme recommences, there will have been further deterioration, with the consequence that the cost to the public purse will be considerably greater. In the meantime, the families of our military live in housing whose condition is not always to the standard to which they are entitled.

In my constituency, I successfully argued that empty houses on the Army estate should be made available to house civilian families. That was done. The Government, via the Department for Communities and Local Government, funded a major modernisation programme of the former MOD houses and new build, for which there should be rejoicing. However, on the other side of the road there are Army houses, lived in by families of our soldiers, many of whom served in Iraq and Afghanistan, which have not been modernised. This is an insult and a disgrace. If the Government can find the money to modernise former military housing, why not the housing of serving military personnel? It is a moral obligation; the Government should do it.

The argument that the Government cannot afford this needs to be addressed head-on. I can identify how it could be funded—from the proceeds of the sale of radio spectrum that the Ministry of Defence no longer requires. Instead of the proceeds going to the Treasury, given that this is the sale of an MOD asset, why not allocate the money to pay for the modernisation of the houses of our military families? I repeat: the men and women of Her Majesty’s armed forces remain our most important asset. They and their families deserve to have decent housing to live in, and it is a disgrace that the Ministry of Defence and this Government have failed so many families.

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[Sir Bob Russell]

Can my hon. Friend recall whether on that occasion the Treasury intervened and tried to trump what the review sought to achieve?

[Dr Lewis]

I am doubly grateful to the hon. Gentleman for asking a question that I cannot possibly answer, having been in opposition at the time, because it gives me extra time and allows me to direct him to the shadow Minister, who I am sure will be able to answer it when he sums up.

The next question is who should do the strategic defence and security review? I must say that I disagree with my hon. and very learned Friend the Member for Broadland (Mr Simpson)—“learned” in the academic sense of that word—when he paints a picture of how wonderful the process of the National Security Council and the national security strategy is. Frankly, I am not impressed with it. I thought that the strategy document itself was apple pie and motherhood. I did not see much in it other than a ranking of tiered threats, most of which were fairly obvious, and those that were not may well turn out, in relation to state-against-state conflict being ranked in the third tier, to be absolutely wrong.

I am concerned about the decision-making process in defence. I will not go into that too much now because, as the Chairman of the Defence Committee, which I have recently had the privilege of joining, is well aware, we are about to produce a report on that very subject. Yet I would like to flag up something that I hope will appear in his draft in due course, and it is this: when we are trying to work out a sensible, comprehensive, coherent and well-informed strategy, it is useful to have substantive contributions from Ministers and civil servants, but we also need contributions from the military.

We appear to have dismantled the collective giving of military advice on strategy to politicians by the chiefs of staff, along with the healthy tension between them and the politicians that contributed so much to the outcome of successful campaigns in decades gone by. I am not impressed when we find that the whole burden of giving military advice on strategy to the Government falls on the shoulders of the Chief of the Defence Staff and the immediate chain of people below him, when in fact that used to be the collective responsibility of the heads of the armed services. I am not impressed when we find that the civil service has done away with what has been termed “domain competence” at the highest levels. We can find ourselves, as I do on the Defence Committee, facing a permanent Under-Secretary of State, the head of the Ministry of Defence, with next to no background in defence himself, and hearing him tell us with great pride that the new head of the Army is pleased to look on himself as a chief executive officer for his service. We are not going to get sufficient military input from that sort of configuration. We are getting non-specialist civil servants, we are getting the military insufficiently included in the process, and we are getting politicians flying by the seat of their pants. It is not good enough.

In his own excellent speech, my right hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Mid Sussex did not have time, I am delighted to say, to refer to an article by Max Hastings which appeared in The Guardian on 8 November 2005. It is headed “Our armed forces must have a voice in how to defend us” and it states:

“strategy in its proper sense—a doctrine for the prevention and prosecution of war—has been allowed to atrophy. Very few people in uniform or out of it, within the Ministry of Defence or beyond it, devote intellect and energy to anything much beyond saving money and getting through today. And those who do so are firmly discouraged from allowing any hint of their ruminations to escape into the public domain, to fuel an intelligent debate.”

Given that the entire strategic role is now devolved on to the shoulders of just the Chief of Defence Staff, it was disturbing to me to read—I do not know whether it is true—that the CDS was instructed by his political masters not to deliver a lecture. If that is true, it is appalling. [Interruption.] I am delighted, again, to have that sedentary endorsement from my right hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Mid Sussex.

On resources, I am thrilled that there has been such unanimity about recommending us to put forward the NATO minimum contribution of 2% of GDP for defence. Can hon. Members imagine anything worse than signalling to a powerful adversary that we are going to send 75 military personnel as advisers into a non-NATO country which we are not able and not obliged to defend, much as we sympathise with it, but for the first time since the 2% formula was set, we are in danger of not meeting it ourselves?