Strategic Defence and Security Review
Bob Stewart Excerpts(14 years, 1 month ago)
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Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)
Let me begin by associating myself absolutely with the Chairman of the Select Committee, my right hon. Friend the Member for North East Hampshire (Mr Arbuthnot). I thank him for his speech, which was wonderfully delivered.
We do not live in Utopia. It would be great if we did, but life is not like that. We would not need an army, a navy or an air force in Utopia. We would not even need doctors or schools. Everything would be perfect.
Bob Stewart
We certainly would not need politicians.
Everyone is a little wicked, even Opposition Members. We have a problem in this country. We have a £38 million debt in the defence budget at the moment, and we would need an SDSR regardless of which Government were in power. I am not blaming anyone; I am just giving the facts. We also have a big problem because the SDSR—
Mr Kevan Jones
The hon. Gentleman seems to be reading out the script he has been given by his party’s central office or his Front-Bench colleagues, and it is unusual for him to swallow what they give him, but I must tell him that the £38 billion to which he refers actually relates to the equipment budget over the next 10 years. [Interruption.] Yes, that was admitted: it was in the Gray report. However, it is important to recognise that over that 10-year period there will be slippage and reprogramming. The impression is being given that somehow this £38 billion must be paid for today, but that is not the case.
Bob Stewart
I am very glad to hear that, but we would certainly need an SDSR, and it is taking place very quickly—too quickly, perhaps. It is also happening when we are at war, which is extremely sad. We have a choice: we can either go straight to option one, which is to withdraw to fortress England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland and just to look after our territorial waters, or we can go abroad to protect our interests overseas, whatever they may be. I happen to believe that we must go for the latter option.
Defence is a basket-case; it is really difficult. We have got to get to grips with it now, and it is exceedingly difficult to get to grips with. Mountbatten and Heseltine tried to reorganise the MOD, and there have been incremental and experimental changes ever since. The MOD is extremely difficult to reorganise, however. People always talk about the fact that we have two service personnel for every civil servant, but may I remind the House that many civil servants are people who guard bases and substitute for soldiers, sailors and airmen who would otherwise be called upon to do that job, and we do not have enough of them?
Bob Stewart
Yes, and they may be cheaper.
Procurement is a big problem; it is never easy to procure. In the second world war, within 18 months we managed to design and build Mulberry harbours and then tow them across the channel and put them into position. Like many other Members, I cannot understand why procurement is part of this basket-case—why procurement takes so long and is so expensive—but that is a fact: procurement is a problem.
Everyone wants to have equipment off the shelf. As all ex-soldiers know, we want the best kit we can get, we want it now, and we want it regardless of where it comes from. I remember when I was an infantryman wanting the M16 rifle. It was American, it was light and it weighed 6 lb. I wanted it to replace the self-loading rifle. In the jungles it was much easier to use an M16. Instead, however, we got the SA80, which did not seem to work and was heavy. The reason we had to have it was that we had to protect British jobs. I understand that—it is a fact of life—but it is one of the reasons why procurement remains such a problem.
When we have an SDSR, all three services have a problem because of regimental tradition. I pay great tribute to the Royal Air Force—my biggest hero is Guy Gibson of 617 Squadron—and I pay great tribute to the Royal Navy. Many people do not realise that we have a problem in trying to reorganise the armed forces because each of the armed services seems to have elements of the others within it: the Royal Air Force has the RAF Regiment and some kind of maritime capability; the Royal Navy has the Royal Marines and the Fleet Air Arm; and the Army says it has more aircraft than the RAF. It all seems a bit crazy, but it works and I hope we will not change it because tradition matters so much.
I shall now move on to my favourite hobby-horse: care of the wounded. Up until discharge, care is pretty good for our servicemen and women—it is as good as it can be—but I say to hon. Members that after our servicemen and women are discharged they are cast on to the national health service. I plead with Ministers to look at how we look after our wounded servicemen and women after they leave the forces, not necessarily within the defence budget but as part of an overall package.
Mr Kevan Jones
The hon. Gentleman may find that what the previous Labour Government and I did on the Army recovery capability is exactly as he describes. I am pleased that the current Government are following through on it.
Bob Stewart
That is great, but let us make it better, because I know servicemen who were victims of the Ballykelly bomb 28 years ago who still live in poverty.
Cuts and reviews are extremely difficult. The reason why we have capabilities in our armed forces is that they are required to be effective in battle. Many hon. Members, on both sides of the House, have served. Throughout our service, we all saw salami- slicing, which means cutting down units. When I joined my infantry battalion, it was 750 strong; when I left, it was 530 strong, but it was still called an infantry battalion. That is salami-slicing. No one likes it, but I have a great fear that we will have to do it again, because if we want to take expeditionary opportunities or respond to such needs, we must keep the capabilities that we have. That means that we will have to stomach what I call super salami-slicing in one way or other—I cannot see how we can avoid it.
Defence is, indeed, the first duty of government, as we all know. It is also a very difficult matter. We all understand the difficulties of choosing between a hospital and a squadron of aircraft, but defence is more like insurance, in that no one wants to pay for it until we require it, when the chips are down.
Mindful that Mr Deputy Speaker will tell me to shut up soon—which I will—I want to end with the words of Rudyard Kipling:
“For it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ “Chuck him out, the brute!”
But it’s “Saviour of ’is country” when the guns begin to shoot;
An’ it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ anything you please;
An’ Tommy ain’t a bloomin’ fool - you bet that Tommy sees!”
You bet that Tommy sees what we do.
Mr Julian Brazier (Canterbury) (Con)
Let me start by paying tribute to 5th Battalion the Royal Regiment of Scotland, better known as the Argylls, whom we are proud to host in Canterbury—they were given the freedom of the city last year, the first Scottish unit ever to do so—and to 3rd Battalion the Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment, our local Territorial Army battalion. They have both had many deployments to Afghanistan and both have taken casualties.
Before I make some rather controversial remarks, let me say that I am deeply conscious of the fact that I have never participated in active service. I was a witness to quite a serious battle once, but I have never been on active service, unlike a small number of Members of the House. Every time I meet people who have been, and especially when I meet those who have been desperately wounded—people who have lost limbs, who have been blinded and so on—I feel deeply humbled.
Bob Stewart
When people are wounded, it has an impact on morale. As I am in poetic mood, may I just say what Padre Woodbine Willie said in 1918? He put it perfectly:
“There are many kinds of sorrow
In this world of Love and Hate,
But there is no sterner sorrow
Than a soldier’s for his mate.”
The wounded not being dealt with properly has an impact on morale.
Mr Brazier
I thoroughly agree with my hon. and gallant Friend. Over the years, on a number of occasions—including at Prime Minister’s questions—I have raised that issue and been glad to do so. However, my speech today is on quite another subject.
I am emboldened by a pamphlet by two very fine fighting soldiers, General Sir Graeme Lamb and Colonel Richard Williams, both former commanding officers of the regular SAS—it will be published by Policy Exchange and was trailed in The Times today—to say that I have a very specific concern that I have never raised in the House before: I do not think that, for some years now, the quality of military advice in the upper echelons of the MOD has been anything like as good as that deserved by our gallant, brave and highly professional armed forces.
I was sorry to miss the speech made by my right hon. Friend the Member for North East Hampshire (Mr Arbuthnot) and I must apologise to the House for being late, but I had a pressing constituency engagement with the Secretary of State for Health. However, I know that my right hon. Friend set out wider concerns—he is too polite a person to concentrate on particular areas—about the SDSR. I want to cite a couple of examples from the past for which politicians and the previous Labour Government must take the blame, but in which it seems that military advice must have played quite an important role.
The first is the second Iraq war, which is the largest conflict in the past 15 years. Let us put the intelligence, the dodgy dossier and all the rest of it to one side, although there was a military element in that, and ask how that conflict, in which we started so professionally and so well, could have led to such mistakes in operations, equipment and so on that it ended with a substantial British force sheltering on Basra airbase—I am saying no more than the American media have said again and again—subject to mortar fire, with men being killed and wounded, and unable to locate the mortars that were shooting at them until the US marines arrived to rescue them and effectively to clear the area.
Let me give a second example. There is probably no Labour politician for whom I have more respect than John Reid, who is an exceptional man. When he made that—in retrospect profoundly silly—remark about it being quite possible that we could go into Afghanistan without a single shot being fired, and when we deployed a force without even such basic equipment as adequate amounts of body armour, I cannot believe that he did so without first having conversed with his senior military advisers. I say that only because a number of Members, including my hon. Friends the Members for North Warwickshire (Dan Byles) and for Beckenham (Bob Stewart), have already said that the MOD will need some shaking up. I believe passionately that the defence of the realm is the first priority of a Government. I stepped down as a Parliamentary Private Secretary—I quietly retired rather than resigning—during the “Options for Change” programme. I believe that we have to be a lot cleverer and that we cannot continue as we are now.
Let me address two of the themes from the pamphlet I mentioned. First, we have to move on from the industrial age to the information age, just as we moved from the horse-drawn age to the age of the tank. The pamphlet points out that, in practical terms, although we have lots of drones and other information-gathering systems in Afghanistan, our troops do not have the technology with the bandwidth to make much use of it. We are losing more than twice as many people per thousand in each engagement as the Americans, because although we have some of the information-gathering machines, we do not have the means by which to get the information to where it is needed in a timely fashion. On a more strategic level, the pamphlet makes the strong point that, in extremis and out-and-out war, a force that has the edge over the other side in information terms will ensure that the other side is never able to deliver a single shot. We are already that far behind the Americans in some areas. The really terrifying point is that, by working with little bits of civilian technology from the mobile phone and several other areas, the Taliban have in some areas got inside our information loop.
A second point that the pamphlet makes concerns a subject on which the House has heard from me many times. It discusses the reserve forces and the regular forces and makes the point, absolutely convincingly, that we must keep a full range of capabilities, but it is absolutely impossible for us to do so and at the same time afford to modernise our armed forces given the current costs of manpower. We could achieve it by doing what the Americans and the Israelis have done—by transferring most of the heavy stuff such as armour and heavy artillery not into storage in so-called reserves but into proper, trained volunteer reserve units.
We have just had the anniversary of the battle of Britain. My great-uncle served in that battle merely by driving a desk, but as an under-age enlistment in the first world war, he was one of the founding members of the Royal Flying Corps and served gallantly in the air. I am intensely proud to represent a Kentish constituency in which much of that battle took place. As the pamphlet that was published this morning reminds us, a quarter of those units were volunteer reserve units from the Royal Auxiliary Air Force and a third of the pilots in the regular squadrons were from the RAF Volunteer Reserve and were also volunteer reservists with civilian jobs who trained to fly for the Air Force in their spare time. The pamphlet asks something that we should all be asking about why the continental air defence of the United States is carried out almost entirely by the air national guard, with F-16s manned by people who fly for a living in their civilian jobs—the same applies in Israel—while in Britain we have the absurdity of paying the huge cost of training and retaining regular pilots to fly for just 12.5 hours a month. It must be possible to move some of those pilots across to volunteer units, as the pamphlet suggests.
I want to end by spending a couple of minutes on what makes volunteer reserves tick. If the outcome of the review is that the Government say that we have run out of money and that they intend to put various things on to the reserves, and that means pools of tanks and artillery equipment, aircraft in hangars and lists of people who very occasionally turn out to train, or worse still paper lists like those for the regular reserves of all three forces, the review will have failed and the volunteer reserves will wither and disappear.
We have to think about how we make the offer and the job sufficiently attractive that a high-calibre man or woman with a busy civilian job who is tired at the end of the week will be willing to climb into a car and drive to their training centre, aerodrome or vessel and undergo challenging and interesting training. There are three ways to do that. First, units must be led by volunteer reservists with real civilian jobs, not commanded by full-time people. Secondly, there must be a range of training and opportunities for command on operations that make commanders at the junior and middle-ranking officer level and the senior and junior NCO level feel that they are valued and have a real job to do. The Americans do it. When we sent a squadron of 21 SAS —my old regiment—last year, three out of fewer than 70 were awarded MCs in six months, so it can be done. Thirdly, we talk about barracks and accommodation, but the volunteer reservists must have decent centres. As Field Marshall Montgomery said, “They must be the best clubs in town.” These things cost money, but it is about a fifth of the price of their regular counterparts.
We face a difficult and dangerous world; we face an intensely difficult financial crisis. We must be more imaginative in finding a way forward.
UK Armed Forces in Afghanistan
Bob Stewart Excerpts(14 years, 1 month ago)
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Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)
I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Wellingborough (Mr Bone) for introducing a motion that is so important to our nation. I assure the House that the armed forces will be watching our debate extremely carefully. Some of what is said will be very important, and, as was pointed out by my hon. Friend the Member for North Wiltshire (Mr Gray), some of it may have an effect on morale.
Last week I had the sad duty and honour of attending the funeral of Lieutenant John Sanderson, a young officer in the battalion that I had the privilege to command. Twelve members of my old battalion have died on the tour that it is currently undertaking, and there is approximately a month to go. Seventy more have been injured.
Roughly 300 people in a battalion go out and seek to engage the enemy. Members can imagine the percentage of casualties that is expected in my old battalion—the 1st Battalion, The Mercian Regiment, once known as The Cheshire Regiment—and how awful that is for their families. There have been 334 deaths in Afghanistan, and probably six times as many people have been injured.
After John’s funeral I spoke to many officers, not only officers from my regiment but, for example, six Royal Marines. When I asked them what they really felt about the war, the first thing that they said to me was, “Make our sacrifice worth it. Do not let us suffer as we have, and then walk away and leave it”—rather, in a way, as we left Basra.
Mr David Winnick (Walsall North) (Lab)
I, like every other Member of the House, pay tribute both to the British soldiers who have died in Afghanistan and those who have been seriously injured, to whom we wish the very best. However, turning to a point the hon. Gentleman made a few moments ago, will he recognise that in debates in the House it is the duty and obligation of every Member to speak their mind, and that therefore in this debate it should not be felt that if we are critical, which some of us may well be—I certainly will be, if I am called to speak—that is in any way a betrayal of our British troops? We must speak frankly in this House.
Bob Stewart
Forgive me, I did not mean to imply the contrary. I accept what the hon. Gentleman says; it is quite right.
The officers and soldiers to whom I talked were firm that they do not want us not to support them; I shall return to that point. They also do not like the idea of a timeline; they are not very happy about that. Also, of course, they want to be given the resources to be able to do the job we have set them.
Interestingly, the troops also questioned some of the strategic and tactical decisions that their superiors had passed on to them. I wondered what they meant, and I looked back into that. When we went in in 2002, we went in “light”, as we call it: we went in with air power and special forces. We then thought we had done the job and left it to President Karzai. In 2003, we realised that things had gone wrong and we started going back in, and by 2006 John Reid was making hopeful statements in the House. He was acting on military advice in saying that he hoped that the 4,000-odd people being put into Helmand would not have to fire a shot in anger.
Mr Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)
Following on from the previous intervention, does my hon. Friend agree that although our troops do not want Members of Parliament to doubt ultimate victory or how to control the Taliban, we should question whether the tactics are always right, because there might be other ways of doing things? President Reagan bombed Libya, for instance, which shows that we do not necessarily have to have troops on the ground. Do the troops accept that point?
Bob Stewart
Most certainly they do, and I accept that it is our job to question everything. The problem is that we have made some fundamental mistakes. I am not blaming anyone, but we made mistakes in 2006 when we dissipated our forces so they were in platoon houses and were not within the envelope. That meant that they could not have protection from artillery, and we had to use air power instead. The air power protecting them knocked out houses around them and killed local people, turning the people against our forces. In 2007 and 2008 we had gone back to counter-insurgency tactics—taking, holding, building—and our gallant troops went in to take, but they could not hold. They had to withdraw. Perhaps Members remember those pictures of helicopters flying with men strapped aboard to try to bring troops back. We could not hold the ground. Also, of course, our enemy came in and put devices on the ground that caused real problems, and they continue to do so to this day.
We now have a situation in which there is an increase in the number of soldiers on the ground, principally from the United States, and the principles of counter-insurgency are, in fact, beginning to work. They are protecting the people, and the key is whether the Afghan people feel protected and safe and can live a decent life.
Bob Stewart
I am going to keep going, because I do not have much time left.
We all know that we have a real problem in Afghanistan. We have a military aim, which is probably relatively simple: to make sure that Afghanistan never threatens us again. We also have a political aim, which is, fundamentally, that we want Afghanistan to have a decent lifestyle and to take its part in the international community, and also that we do not want to allow groups such as the Taliban to return to the country, and thereby threaten us. The job our troops are doing is very difficult; I am clear about that.
I want to conclude by talking briefly about what we can do. The fact of the matter is our soldiers require our support. I accept the point that they have a problem with understanding the nuances of people saying, “We support our troops, but we don’t support the war.” When we talk to them, they say, “Come off it, we’re out here doing a mission; support us! Don’t just say, ‘We support you.’ We don’t quite get that.” One of them said to me, “Are you smoking dope?” [Interruption.] I was not, actually; I never have smoked dope, and if I had, I would have been chucked out of the Army. Another one said to me about the strategic situation and the tactical decisions made, “Isn’t it strange, Bob, that in this country we penalise our soldiers for losing a rifle more than we penalise our generals for losing a war?” We have not made some decisions very well thus far.
There is now great optimism that we will be able to reach the endgame, and get to a situation where our troops can come home and feel that John Sanderson and 333 other young men—and one woman, I think—have given their lives for something worth while. That is terribly important. I pay great tribute to what our armed forces are doing, of course, and I want them all to come home soon—as soon as possible, and before 2014 if that is achievable—but the only way they can come home quickly is if we get it right, give them what they require and understand that we are fighting a war. Let us imagine what would have happened if there had been reductions in the defence budget when we were at war in 1940. I know that our country has a big economic problem, but we have to make sure that those people who are running huge risks on our behalf are given everything they require and our support. I therefore ask the House to support the motion.
Oral Answers to Questions
Bob Stewart Excerpts(14 years, 4 months ago)
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Dr Fox
Ultimately, it is up to the Government to decide what the policy should be. There is a wide range of advice, military and otherwise. The House came to the conclusion that it did in 2007 on the basis that we believed that that was a cost-effective way for this country to go forward with a nuclear deterrent. We know that abroad there are a number of countries trying to develop nuclear weapons. We do not know what will happen between now and 2015—the time scale for the Trident replacement programme—and we cannot play fast and loose with Britain’s defences.
Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)
3. What recent progress has been made on the reform of NATO.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Defence (Mr Gerald Howarth)
In 2009, NATO agreed a series of measures to improve working practices in its headquarters in Brussels, and a new defence planning process better to help allies develop, acquire and maintain the capabilities required for the full range of NATO missions. Work to reform NATO’s resource management, rationalise its agencies and streamline its command structures is also under way, and should be agreed by the NATO summit in Lisbon in November.
Bob Stewart
Will the new structure that is in place in NATO be altered again so that we get better results from our operations out of area, particularly in Afghanistan?
Mr Howarth
My hon. and gallant Friend makes a very good point, and at the NATO Defence Ministers’ summit last month my right hon. Friend the Defence Secretary made it clear that command structure reform is a key priority for the United Kingdom and for the alliance, because NATO’s structure is too big and static, and too much is simply not geared up for the missions that we are undertaking, such as in Afghanistan. The House might like to ponder on the fact that, significantly, NATO did not employ elements of its command structure in any meaningful capacity in Afghanistan; instead, it put together a bespoke operation.
Strategic Defence and Security Review
Bob Stewart Excerpts(14 years, 4 months ago)
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Mr Ainsworth
I know the hon. Gentleman is very interested in the welfare of the armed forces. All we are trying to do is solicit an answer. Everyone needs to know whether the armed forces pension scheme is part of the review or not, but we cannot get an answer. We need an answer and we certainly cannot wait until the summer recess for one.
While I am talking about welfare issues, let me address what the Secretary of State said about the non-existence of a tri-service Government document. May I recommend to him the preamble in the Command Paper and suggest that he should consider seriously whether he can improve on it? Will he continue with the commitments in that paper and will he, as part of the strategic defence review, look seriously at something that was in the Labour party manifesto—the introduction of a service charter? Many members of our armed forces whom I have met—I am sure that he will have had the same—recognise some of the improvements that have been made to many aspects of their service and support in the past few years, but want them to be entrenched in law. Is he prepared to make such a commitment?
The Secretary of State seems to have said that a process to examine the value for money of alternatives to Trident has already started and will be all over before the summer. We are only five weeks away from that and from the future successor, but we have heard nothing about it from him or his coalition partners. If we hear nothing at all on this before a final decision is taken, it will only increase the cynicism that many of us had about the Liberal Democrats’ position in the first place—that it was about them trailing their coats in the direction of unilateralism without actually going there. They never had, as I think the right hon. and learned Member for North East Fife (Sir Menzies Campbell) effectively exposed in his paper, a sensible alternative to Trident. Is there going to be a process and will we be told anything about it, or is this just a way of getting a rather embarrassing chapter in the coalition’s creation off the agenda as quickly as possible?
I understand as well as anyone the very difficult decisions with which the Secretary of State is confronted. I appreciate and totally agree that salami-slicing is not the way to go. I agree that a step change is probably needed and that some difficult decisions will therefore need to be taken. I am sure he regrets some of the rhetoric that he used in opposition and some of the promises he made, such as those about a bigger Army and a bigger fleet. Now he is in government, he will need not just to say those things but to deliver them. I hope he will do that in an open manner in which we can all engage, and I think it would be in his interests to do so.
Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)
Did the shadow Secretary of State ever consider whether the strategic defence review might have taken place a few years ago? It seems to have taken a very long time to get to, and it might have been quite useful to have had it in 2004. Both parties have said that they would go ahead with it, but did he consider doing so much earlier?
Mr Ainsworth
We carried out a strategic defence review in 1998; we updated it through the new chapter and the White Paper. I became Secretary of State in the late summer of 2009. We committed ourselves to a strategic defence review in exactly the same way as the Conservative party did. We would have been carrying out a strategic defence review in exactly the same way as the Government are. We would be confronting the same difficulties. We would try to be as open and inclusive as we possibly could. I genuinely believe that defence is more than a simple party interest and that it ought to expand beyond that.
Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)
We have heard three excellent maiden speeches today, and I am delighted to say that I have some connection with all three. I know that their constituencies are wonderful. I was born near Lancaster, a fabulous place—
Bob Stewart
Thank you.
I learned to dive under Royal Navy command at Devonport, despite being a pongo, and I joined my regiment in 1969—a very long time ago—at Weeton camp in the Fylde constituency. When I joined my regiment I joined a battalion that had an establishment of 750. When I handed over command of it some two decades later, it was down to 638. We had lost 20% of the manpower of our battalion. The theme of my speech, then, is resilience at the front line. It is still called a battalion, but it has been salami-sliced and hollowed out. This is a big problem, which the strategic defence review must look at. We must ensure that our front-line troops have the capability to do the job we expect them to do.
On resilience, just consider the 3rd Battalion the Rifles, which returned in April. When it came back after six months of the winter tour in Afghanistan, it had lost eight men killed in action and had 67 casualties. That meant, in terms of the fighting men for that battalion, a 14% casualty rate. My own battalion, the 1st Battalion the Cheshire Regiment as it was—now, for some strange reason, called the 1st Battalion the Mercian Regiment—is in Afghanistan at the moment. It has been there two months: it has lost five men killed in action already, and it has 35 people wounded.
If we think about the basic fighting strength—I return to the theme of resilience—of a fighting unit in our infantry, it is the eight-man section. It is very sad statistically to understand what that means—that in an eight man section, it is likely that one or two of the men fighting at the moment in Afghanistan in 1st Battalion the Mercian Regiment are likely to come back to this country either in a box or on a stretcher. Thank goodness we have the Territorial Army, as it heavily reinforces the regular Army. It does that extremely well. Indeed, in Helmand at the moment, 10% of the troops out there are either Territorial Army or reserves. It was the same in Iraq. When I visited the coalition operating base in 2007, the figure was 10%. In 2004, with the invasion of Iraq, it was 20%, so the strategic defence review has to look very carefully at how we use the Territorial Army, which has now become a proper reserve force for the regular Army.
When our troops are deployed on operations for six-month tours, they have a period in the middle of their tour called rest and recuperation—R and R—which is normally two weeks long. I put it to the House that approximately 1,000 of the 9,500 troops deployed to Afghanistan are either not there or are travelling to or from R and R. Effectively, in resilience terms, some infantry sections—I see the right hon. Member for Coventry North East (Mr Ainsworth) nodding his head, because he knows what I am going to say—are down to four or five men. Infantry cannot fight with sections of four or five men, so they are put together, with the result that combat power is reduced. Whatever the outcome of the strategic defence review, we must ensure that our front-line units are properly manned and that their ORBAT—organisation for battle—is good enough to sustain them properly.
I have concentrated on the Army, but the principle remains the same for the Royal Air Force and Royal Navy. We have a problem with the Navy, and we must ensure that the ships deployed on operations are manned and equipped properly. The Royal Air Force currently has 74 Harrier jump jets, less than a third of which are operational. We must get this right across the services.
I totally understand how difficult it is for Governments of either persuasion to get money for defence. It is extremely difficult, and I will not be found criticising the Opposition on that matter. However, we must ensure that the question of resilience is dealt with properly in the strategic defence review. We must not send our young men and women into battle without adequate manpower to sustain operations when things go wrong.