Defence and Security Review (NATO)

Gerald Howarth Excerpts

Monday 2nd March 2015 Commons Chamber

[Rory Stewart]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right to raise that point about cyber-attacks. Crucially, very few of us in this House—I certainly include myself in this—understand cyber in detail. We are taking it on faith that we are developing a significant cyber-capacity. It is extremely difficult for us to be confident about what we are doing in this regard. I have two questions on cyber that I would like to put to the Minister. One is to do with NATO’s cyber-capacity. The members of the Committee visited the cyber-centre in Estonia and discovered that there were only two UK personnel posted to that site. It was very difficult to be confident about what deterrent effect that kind of cyber would involve.

My second question is to do with doctrine. Are we prepared to threaten a cyber response as a way of deterring a Russian cyber-attack? In other words, if Russia were to mount a cyber-attack against a NATO member state, would we respond with a cyber-attack in kind?

[Sir Gerald Howarth (Aldershot) (Con)]

I agree with everything my hon. Friend has said, particularly with regard to the importance of cyber. He will remember that in the SDSR 2010 one of the Secretary of State’s “up arrows”—areas in which we need to invest—was cyber-security, where we set aside £650 million over four years. Part of that was cyber-attack.

[Rory Stewart]

That is very important. The thing about cyber-defence that is difficult for us as a Committee to deal with—given that when we look at cyber we are often told that much of it is the job of the Intelligence and Security Committee—is just how good it is. Clearly, the Government have committed a lot of money to it, but at the same time, many Members come to us having spoken to the Ministry of Defence which is concerned about our cyber-capacity, and are not confident that we have really got to where we want to be or that we fully understand what the technology is.

The second issue is around information operations. It is very clear that the basic problem for Russian minorities in the Baltic states is the fact that they watch Moscow television. We need to ensure that we have the ability to project television into the Baltic states in the Russian language that is entertaining and engaging, that the minorities in those areas are prepared to watch, and that counters propaganda not with propaganda but with the truth. Such broadcasts must provide an objective, truthful and honest conversation about what is going on in the world and, above all, that is able to draw attention to the things that Putin is doing. That means that centrally we must invest in the BBC World Service. We spend a lot of time talking about this, about Russian-language television, but the reality is that we have yet to see the evidence from this Government, or from the United States, that the real investment is being made to create a genuinely watchable, attractive Russian language service that could be watched by Russian minorities around the edge of NATO.

The final and most difficult thing is dealing with special forces, insurgents, “little green men” and exactly the kinds of events that we saw in Crimea and eastern Ukraine. The reason that that is the most difficult of all is that it is a challenge of understanding not only for us and the Ministry of Defence, but also for the Foreign Office and the intelligence agencies. If Putin does something, the first question will be one of interpretation or understanding. He will operate under the thresholds. As the hon. Member for Ilford South (Mike Gapes), who was the Labour Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, pointed out, Putin will not initially do something that crosses the article 5 threshold. Let me provide a couple of examples to illustrate the threats. If, for example, the Polish electricity infrastructure were to go down, there might be an immediate claim that it had been taken down by a Russian cyber-attack. Britain would need very rapidly to be in a position to know whether that was in fact the case and to determine how to respond. In order to do that, we would need to have what we currently do not have—namely, the people on the ground in Poland with the necessary relationship with the Polish electricity Minister to get to the bottom of the matter very quickly and to pass the information through to us. We lack intelligence and information at every level from the strategic political level all the way down to the ISTAR level of watching Russian kit moving around.

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[Mr Keith Simpson (Broadland) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart) on introducing the debate with such clarity and depth of knowledge.

This autumn the Prime Minister, whoever he is—no doubt it will be my right hon. Friend—will revisit the strategic defence and security review. He is on record as saying that he thinks it just needs a light touch. With the greatest respect to my right hon. Friend, I think he is wrong for every reason that my hon. Friend and other colleagues here have pointed out. It is a horribly complex situation.

I remember, in the early 1970s, going to seminars on military history, defence and international relations at the Institute of Historical Research, where one sat at the feet of Professors A. J. P. Taylor, Donald Cameron Watt, and Sir—as he is now—Michael Howard. A lot of the talk was about rearmament and appeasement in the 1920s and ’30s, and I used to sit there and think how naive and stupid were the chiefs of staff, the politicians and most of the advisers of that time. In the past 20-odd years, I have gained more sympathy for them, because they were faced with financial collapse and a multiplicity of threats. The armed forces had been reduced in number, most Government expenditure had been reduced, and the armed forces themselves could not agree on priorities. In relation to the Ministry of Defence’s budget, the armed forces—I say this with regret—have been log-rolling for decades, often wasting billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money.

In the few minutes that I have, I want to emphasise the fact that we should have a national security policy. That is of the things that the Government should be addressing this autumn. I hope that the discussion will not just be confined to Government Departments and to Parliament but open to wider outside expertise, as happens in the United States of America, Canada, Australia, and most European countries. That is absolutely crucial. Although this debate has—rightly given the nature of the publication—concentrated on the defence aspects and highlighted the threat from Putin, we all know that in fact we face a multiplicity of threats. If anything, the situation is more challenging for a Government now than it was even for the Governments of the late 1930s.

In looking at a national security policy, we must think not only of the threats that our country faces and is going to face, which have been outlined by my hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border and others, but what the market will bear in terms of the money that is going to be allocated. It is a sobering thought that, looking at the national security budgets in the round, one of the poorest Departments is the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, with £1.72 billion. The Department for Work and Pensions could lose that kind of money in an afternoon, and Government IT budgets have invariably done so. The MOD’s budget is £34.34 billion, and the budget of Department for International Development, which I would include in the national security budget, is £9.89 billion. I will not go into the arguments about whether DFID’s budget should be reduced.

[Sir Gerald Howarth]

The latest figures I have indicate that the figure is actually £13 billion—it has gone up from £8.5 billion.

[Mr Simpson]

I am using the latest figure provided by the House of Commons Library. There are lies, damn lies, and statistics. The fact is that if we put together the budgets of those three Government Departments, that part of the national security budget is about £45.95 billion. If we throw in, say, another £5 billion to £10 billion for the intelligence services and GCHQ, we have about £55 billion. That is not a vast sum of money, but it is quite large. We need to consider whether we are spending our national security budgets correctly. They are in separate silos, and it would be much better, in the modern world, to look at them in the round.

In outlining the threat of Putin and all the other threats, we need to think about how we get public opinion alerted to this, and whether public opinion is prepared to see more money spent on national security. The latest polling done this weekend by YouGov shows what the public think about the amount of money spent on defence: 49% think it is too little, 20% about right, and 16% too much. Yet if we drill down into the 49% and tell those people that to get the extra money we must either, in simple terms, put up taxes or cut other areas of public expenditure—some will say “Transfer the money from DFID”—they do not much like either alternative.

Another aspect of the poll—this relates directly to what my hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border has been saying—showed that 52% of those asked believed that resources on defence should be focused on dealing with the threats from Islamic terrorism rather than threats from states like Russia: in fact, only 18% thought that we should allocate resources to that. We can play with statistics, and public perception changes. In September 1938, the overwhelming majority of people welcomed the Munich agreement, but by April 1939 they had changed their views completely. Things will always change. The challenge that we all face is in being open in our debate and in getting public opinion to think about this, but also in getting the Government to move away from what can only be seen as cold war thinking in relation to cold war structures of the sort that still exist today.

To be fair to the previous Government, and our own Government, they did, between them, set up the National Security Council. Things are much better co-ordinated than ever before, according to everybody I have spoken to, including Opposition Members. The success of the National Security Council depends on the personality, interest and drive of the Prime Minister. Although one might disagree with some of the decisions that the current Prime Minister has made, he has provided that drive by regularly attending the National Security Council. There is nothing set in concrete to say that another Prime Minister would do that. As with Departments, once we remove a Minister who takes real, direct action, we can see things drift.

This has been an important debate. The national security budget and the strategic defence and security review do not need a light touch, but some serious thinking. We should have a debate not just about whether we spend 2% of GDP on defence but about how much we spend in total on national security and whether we can move any of that money around between Departments.

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[Sir Gerald Howarth (Aldershot) (Con)]

I join other Members in congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart). He has unquestionably set the tone for a seriously instructive and intelligent debate, which I hope receives wider coverage than simply in here. The hon. Member for York Central (Sir Hugh Bayley) took his cue from the massive tome on the estimates, but I will take mine from the Defence Committee’s report that was introduced by my hon. Friend.

The role of NATO has been developing and is hugely important. After the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, there was no clarity about whether NATO had any role to play. It is a great tribute to it—particularly to Anders Fogh Rasmussen in recent years and Lord Robertson of Port Ellen before him—that NATO has developed an important role in stabilising other parts of the world, as well as looking after the defence of Europe. NATO did well in the way the international security assistance force operation was conducted, whatever the criticisms of the strategy, and the Secretary-General assembling a team to bring together not just NATO members but non-NATO members in the Libyan operation was a tribute to him.

The key thing that has happened is that a resurgent Russia has changed the outlook dramatically. The annexation of Abkhazia and South Ossetia in 2008 was perhaps seen as a one off, but the annexation of Crimea last year has been a wake-up call. Paragraph 2 of the Committee’s report states:

“However, events in Crimea and Ukraine represent a “game changer” for UK defence policy. They have provoked a fundamental re-assessment of both the prioritisation of threats in the National Security Strategy and the military capabilities required by the UK. The UK's Armed Forces will need now also to focus on the defence of Europe against Russia and against asymmetric forms of warfare. This will have significant implications for resources, force structures, equipment and training.”

As others have mentioned, the new Putin doctrine is instructive. Writing in Jane’s Defence Weekly, Dr Mark Galeotti said on 11 February that Russian policy

“reflects a developing theme in Russian military art, demonstrated in Ukraine, where a combination of direct military intervention—often covert or at least ambiguous and denied—as well as the operations of proxy forces and intelligence assets have been blended with political leverage, disinformation campaigns, and economic pressure.”

[Sir Nicholas Soames]

Does my hon. Friend agree that one of the most dangerous aspects of all this concerns what President Putin is doing to improve greatly on the way Russian forces acted in Georgia, which was not a great success from their point of view? He is trying a whole lot of new tactics, forces, weapons and structures in a wholly or partially deniable way.

[Sir Gerald Howarth]

My right hon. Friend is right, and it is significant how Russia has behaved, particularly with the annexation of Crimea. I remind hon. Members that I questioned the Foreign Secretary before Russia invaded to see whether he had heard any indication from Lavrov that it had no intention of using military force, but four days later, as my hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border said, it did.

Recently, a whole raft of people have been drawing attention to what is going on. The Defence Secretary spoke of Russia as a “real and present” threat, and the Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe, Sir Adrian Bradshaw, also warned us and said there was a danger that Vladimir Putin would try to use his armies to invade and seize NATO territory, calculating that the alliance will be too afraid of escalating violence to respond. Sir John Sawers, former head of MI6, has said that Russia poses a state-on-state threat. He also suggested that we must have dialogue with Russia. I find that idea attractive, but I do not see how we can possibly have dialogue with a man who is intent on redrawing the map of Europe.

It is not just in Europe that we face severe challenges. As my hon. Friend the Member for Broadland (Mr Simpson) said, we face a multiplicity of threats. We can all see what is happening in the middle east. Syria is on fire and the Arab spring has left turmoil in north Africa. Now ISIL is running rampant in Iraq—thank goodness we have intervened there to check its advance, because if Iraq and all its oil revenues had fallen to it, that would have been hugely damaging to the whole world, not just the middle east.

Iran is still declaring its ambition to achieve nuclear weapons. That matter is still unresolved. We know North Korea’s filthy weapons are available to anybody who wants to pay good money to buy them. China is ramping up its military activities. I do not know how many right hon. and hon. Members have seen what is going on in the South China sea. I refer again to Jane’s Defence Weekly—this is not a particular plug for it—which has been running a hugely instructive series of articles on what China is doing in the South China sea: creating runways and port facilities on a whole raft of disputed uninhabited islands. The most significant land building in the Spratly Islands is on Fiery Cross Reef. It is shaping up to be the site for China’s first airstrip in the Spratly Islands. James Hardy, the Asia Pacific editor, writes that the area

“was previously under water; the only habitable area was a concrete platform built and maintained by China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy…The new island”—

first seen in November 2014—

“is more than 3,000 metres long and between 200 and 300 metres wide: large enough to construct a runway and apron.”

We can see what China is up to. The United States recognises that. The former US Defence Secretary Hagel said that Beijing is taking

“destabilising, unilateral actions asserting its claims in the South China sea.”

He warned that the United States would

“not look the other way when fundamental principles of the international order are being challenged”,

although I do not see any evidence that the United States is doing that.

I have referred to the criticisms that have been made at home. Criticisms are now coming from the United States, on which we find ourselves heavily dependent. We heard General Odierno today repeat not so much criticisms but the warnings he gave two years ago about the capacity of the United Kingdom to deploy alongside the United States. We should take these warnings seriously. The President of the United States has written to our own Prime Minister to express concern. This is our closest ally. We stand shoulder to shoulder. We have beliefs that are completely in common. We share intelligence. We understand all these things. We share nuclear deterrents. We believe in all those things, yet our ally is saying, “Hold on, I am concerned.” When I went to Washington in November, the discussions I had there really did rock me. Americans were saying, “Britain is now just regarded as another European country.” That is fundamentally damaging to the United Kingdom. It is not a matter for defence buffs; it is a matter for the whole nation if we are seen to be diminished, which I believe we are.

The state of our armed forces has been mentioned. This is a very serious matter. The Army is going to be cut from 110,000 to 82,000 regulars. I know we are going to have 30,000 reservists, but that is not the same thing. The Navy has been cut by 5,000, and the Royal Air Force cut similarly. We are down to 19 frigates and destroyers, when in 2001 we had 33. In 1990, we had 33 fast jet squadrons. We are now down to seven.

We face a very serious state of affairs. It is true we are committed to deterrent, and that, as far as we can understand, the Opposition are too. We are investing in cyber. My hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border is absolutely right about that. As I mentioned to him, cyber attack is an important dimension. We have to advertise, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Runnymede and Weybridge (Mr Hammond) the former Secretary of State for Defence made clear. We need to carry a big stick, as a number of hon. Members have said. Part of that big stick is our 2% minimum commitment to maintain our credibility with NATO. For if we do not, we will appear to be weak.

[Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)]

That could, of course, be linked to our 0.7% commitment to international development, as per the amendment in the House of Lords.

[Sir Gerald Howarth]

I am very grateful to my hon. Friend for provoking me. I think most people in this place know that I find it extraordinary, as a Conservative, that our party should be committed to enshrining in law that we spend 0.7% of our national income on overseas aid yet refuse to give a commitment to spend at least 2% on defence, which is part of our NATO obligation. As everybody has said, the Prime Minister made that clear to others last September at the NATO summit.

We are in danger of being diminished. We are in danger of sending out the wrong signals that we are not serious about the defence of the realm and our wider interests. The SDSR must be strategic. It cannot be a light touch. We have got to seize this opportunity, which we could not take in 2010 because we had to have a Defence review driven by the Treasury to put the nation’s finances back in order again after they were destroyed by the former Prime Minister.

I will leave the House with this thought. My right hon. Friend the Leader of the House said in 2009 that a Conservative Government would wish to help to shape the world in which we find ourselves, not simply be shaped by it. If we are to do that, we have got to commit to the defence of the realm.

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[Mr Jones]

I will level with the hon. Gentleman. What I will not do is what the Prime Minister and the then Members of the Opposition did at the last election by promising larger armies, more ships and more expenditure on the armed forces. The first thing they did when they got into power was cut the size of the army. Our position is very clear: we will meet the figure for 2015-16, but, as my hon. Friend the Member for York Central has said, that is still a reduction of £600 million according to the figures under discussion. Moreover, if we look at what the Defence Secretary has been good at, we will see that some £400 million has been given back to the Treasury over the past five years. That money was not even spent, which begs a question about the commitment.

Our strategic defence review will look at what most people want, as we did in 1997. It will be a proper defence review that looks at the bigger questions that many Members have raised today about our role in the world.

[Sir Gerald Howarth]

I am grateful to my good friend the shadow Minister for giving way. The reason we are in this pickle is that we inherited a budget deficit of £156 billion. I wonder whether he would accept that putting the public finances back in order was the immediate priority and that we have been successful in doing so. [Interruption.] We now have the fastest growing economy in the western world and that is why we want a 2%-plus increase in defence.

[Mr Jones]

But the hon. Gentleman needs to be honest about the time scale. I thought he was going to refer, as one Member did from a sedentary position, to the mythical £38 billion black hole, which was designed to disguise the Government’s 8% cut. The Defence Committee’s report of November 2011 says:

“We note that the MoD now state the genuine size of the gap is substantially in excess of £38 billion. However, we also note the”

former

“Secretary of State’s assertion that the ‘for the first time in a generation, the MoD will have brought its plans and budget broadly into balance, allowing it to plan with confidence for the delivery of the future equipment programme’. Without proper detailed figures neither statement can be verified.”

I have challenged numerous Ministers on that. It is one of those things that was thought up in central office during the election and then kept getting repeated.

Serious points have been made in today’s debate about Britain’s place in the world, including by my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Edgbaston and the Chair of the Committee. We need to ask the question that we asked in 1998: what is our role in the world and is there a wider debate to be had with the British public? I think there is, but this Government are not conducting the latest defence review in a constructive way. In 1998, as the hon. Member for New Forest East has said, we had a broad, inclusive debate. Even in 2010 we produced a Government Green Paper setting out the issues, but as soon as the coalition got in the Treasury-led review was completed in record time. This time the process needs to be thought out.

Things do not bode well, however, because the Ministry of Defence will not even tell my hon. Friend the Member for Gedling (Vernon Coaker) what questions it will ask in the review, while the Prime Minister’s view is that all we need is a light tweak. We live in a very changeable world—we have had a very good debate today about Russia and the threats we now face from Islamic terrorism—and the idea that all we need is a light tweak is a huge mistake.