Defence

Debate between Bob Seely and Madeleine Moon

Thursday 11th January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Bob Seely (Isle of Wight) (Con)]

By way of disclosure, I should say that I had the privilege to serve, in a modest way, in the Afghan and Iraq campaigns, and I remain a reservist soldier. I thank the hon. Member for Gedling (Vernon Coaker) very much for securing this debate, and it is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for West Dunbartonshire (Martin Docherty-Hughes).

In this brief speech, I would like to talk about defence in the broader sense of the word, because the security of our nation rests on many things, not just on how many tanks or ships we have. At times, we can be fixated by so-called heavy metal warfare: ships, planes, tanks and so on. Physical defence is important, but it should not be seen in isolation, and today I would like to talk about security and defence in the round. Having said that, it is clear that we are significantly under-resourced and underfunded. What concerns me most in terms of Government Departments is that the Treasury seems to fail to understand that the point of having an armed force is not to use it. The Treasury seems to think that if an armed force is not being used, it can be cut—that is an incredibly foolish thing to think. It encourages our generals to look for wars to justify the existence of the armed forces, and starting wars and being politically or economically unwilling to finish them—there is some truth there as regards Iraq—is at best bad strategy and potentially disastrous for this nation.

I wish to talk about strategy and whether we have one, and about how we can improve coherence in policy making. I also want to make a few suggestions for parliamentary committees, building on some of the excellent things said by my colleagues on both sides of the House. First, on strategy, it is ironic that we have so many think-tanks in this country but we seem to lack one sometimes in our national strategy. I fear we are losing the capacity and confidence to act without clinging on to the coat-tails of the European Union or United States. Indeed, the US, despite its many great benefits as an ally, has in some ways exacerbated that problem. The great Oxford historian Sir Hew Strachan argues:

“a power which possesses overwhelming force has less need of strategy”

because it has so much power. That has resulted in thoughtlessness, definitely in Iraq and perhaps to a lesser extent in Afghanistan. We have been somewhat corrupted by that thought as well, because our strategy in the past 20 years seems to have been to cobble together just enough kit to take part at a meaningful level in a US-led coalition, so that we can have a political voice at the top table.

That strategy is now under pressure. First, the US has been disengaging—regardless of what one thinks of President Trump—slowly from Europe for the past three presidencies and the Russians are now a threat, with what they call “contemporary military conflict”, using both military and non-military tools.

[Mrs Moon]

One thing has been worrying me a great deal. A number of people have cited Russia as a growing threat, but it would be dangerous to ignore the threat from the south, which still exists. Is it therefore not time we stopped focusing simply on the threat from the east and recognised the threat from the south, which has not gone away?

[Mr Seely]

The hon. Lady makes a good point. I talk about the threat from the east because I would like to bring this in a bit later and I am trying to finish a thesis on contemporary Russian warfare. But she is right that in many ways the non-conventional warfare threat—migration and chaos—is represented in our southern flank. She makes a valid point and I thank her for it.

Post-Brexit, it is critical for our nation that we have a powerful security and defence policy, one that not only projects our identity—our values and our brand, if you like—but provides balanced and comprehensive security. Part of that is about remaining a powerful player on the world stage across the spectrum of effects. We are trying to be more holistic, and the Development, Concepts and Doctrine Centre in Shrivenham, with which I have done a little work over the years, has done some important work looking at national strategy in many of the joint doctrine publication documents it has written. According to the DCDC, our national strategy rests on political, military and economic power, but I wonder whether that is not quite subtle enough for today’s world. In defence, we need to be thinking about humanitarian power, governmental power, cyber capability, cultural, linguistic and informational capability and public outreach. All those tools are critical because the wars and conflicts of the past 30 years, including those we have been engaged in, show that populations have become the critical information and psychological targets. If we look at the three Russian military doctrines since 1999, their two foreign policy concepts, their national security concept and their information security concept, we see that they all put the integration of military and non-military effects aimed at civilian populations as a critical characteristic of modern warfare. Indeed, we see that in Ukraine, eastern Europe and elsewhere.

Historically, the tools of grand strategy have been held at national level. Military force is one element of that defensive strategy. Nowadays, especially with Brexit happening, we have an opportunity to rethink our national strategic culture so that we can understand how we can use our past experience of strategic culture to understand the future. Basil Liddell Hart, who was perhaps our greatest military theorist ever—I am sure that some of my right hon. and hon. Friends will know him well—said that we were champions of the indirect strategy. We had a powerful Navy and a small standing Army, and we used money to encourage others to fight. We used our alliances and set examples by our behaviour. We probably need to return more to that behaviour.

Let us consider the example of the Russian threat in Ukraine. We have parked some soldiers, some kit and around four planes—which is probably half the RAF these days—in the Baltic republics. Russia has used force in Ukraine and is bellicose towards the Baltic republics, so it is right that we put that kit there, but the most powerful threat to Ukraine is not necessarily the military threat, but the political and informational war, the co-option and corruption of its political leadership, and the trashing of its ability, confidence and statehood.

Our key weapon is not the planes or the troops—important though they are—but our ability to work with the Canadians, Americans, Germans and EU to provide a Marshall package and significant sums of money to Ukraine. We spend £13 billion on aid every year, and I apologise for saying this but much of it is badly spent. Here, though, is a major prize that we are not trying to attain. We spend probably £40 million in Ukraine, all in, including Department for International Development spending. We irritate the Russians by parking military kit in the Baltics, yet we do not seem to be thinking enough about the most powerful weapon we could have against Russian expansion, which is a stable Ukraine that looks like Poland, not like Russia. That is an example of haphazard strategic thinking.

We have an unbalanced foreign policy. DFID burns though money like it is going out of fashion. I had lots of pretty miserable experiences of DFID in Afghanistan and Iraq. I remember asking at the UK consulate in Basra how many DFID projects there were in southern Iraq and how much money was being spent. I was staggered that DFID could not provide an answer. For me, that summed up how DFID is sometimes profligate and lacks competence. I know that it does great work in some parts of the world, but sadly I have not seen the best of it.

At the same time, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office is chronically underfunded and, as my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis) said, the Ministry of Defence is scraping together savings in areas in which it should not be looking to make savings. Cyber-attacks are regular in Europe—in France, Germany and the United Kingdom—and the BBC, which is a critical part of our soft-power infrastructure, even at arm’s length from the Government, is funded such that it has to exist hand-to-mouth. BBC World Service TV and radio broadcasts should be funded entirely by DFID, by looking into and rejigging the definition of official development assistance.

I shall try to make progress; I do not have too much more to say. We must look closely at defence procurement. Can we please have a level playing field? Let us buy kit from other countries to save money, but some countries, such as France, have closed markets, so why are French companies allowed to bid here when we do not have the same rights to secure contracts there?

I will seek a meeting with the Minister in the near future to discuss the need for a complex radar technology demonstrator at the BAE site in Cowes in my constituency. As the Minister knows, the BAE radar factory in Cowes produces all the radars for the carriers and the Type 45 destroyers. If we want our own indigenous radar capability, we need that technology demonstrator soon.

We should use reservists more. I am delighted that the hon. Member for Bridgend (Mrs Moon) made a series of eloquent points about reservists—I am one myself. We need reservists, but let us also support them. The reserve unit on the Isle of Wight was saved not through the MOD’s wisdom but thanks to the remarkable work of Captain Richard Clarke and the continuing leadership of Acting Sergeant Matt Symmans, for whom I feel a certain affinity as I was an acting sergeant for much of my Army career. It is individuals punching above their weight who are saving units from closure.

As my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East and my hon. Friend the Member for North Wiltshire (James Gray) said, there is no redundancy in our defence system. There are so few surface ships—I think there are 17. Talk to any admiral—give them a drink or two—and they will admit that the Royal Navy at its current size cannot protect the carriers. In any conflict or at the threat of conflict with peer or near-peer nations, those carriers would go home and sit in a base because they are not protectable, unless they are to be surrounded by a US fleet. They have no protection against ship-busting ballistic missiles. If we keep reducing the armed forces in terms of personnel and kit, we will encourage violence against this nation rather than deter it.

I have some brief suggestions. Can the Foreign Affairs Committee champion the need to think about strategy and hold hearings to give platforms to leading academics so that they can discuss our national strategy and defence culture? With Brexit coming up, this is a perfect point in our history to look into our national strategy. If we leave the security review to the Government, they are going to come up with the answers that they want, not the answers that we all need and want to hear. We need to rethink DFID funding and encourage DFID to take greater responsibility in a more holistic and joined-up strategy. We need to think about defence in the round.

We need all forms of power for our security and the protection and projection of our values. We need soft power, hard power and cyber power, but most of all we need an attitude of smart and integrated power. We need to study and understand how to project that smart power at a strategic, operational and tactical level. From what I have seen on operations and here at home, we still lack that, but it is not unachievable, if the Government have the ambition.