Strategic Defence and Security Review

Lord Bilimoria Excerpts

Friday 12th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bilimoria]

My Lords, in June this year, General Patraeus spoke to us in Parliament at the invitation of the Henry Jackson Society. At the time, he was the US Central Army Commander. My father, the late Lieutenant-General Faridoon Bilimoria, was Commander-in-Chief of Central Army Command, with 350,000 troops under his command. When I asked General Petraeus about winning the hearts and minds of the people of Afghanistan, his explanation was that to do that, you have to be talking from a position of strength—in other words, hard power enables soft power. The two are not opposites but actually two sides of the same coin.

We know that Britain is no longer the biggest empire the world has ever known but, whichever way you look at it, we are a powerful force in this world. We may not be a superpower, but we are one of the six largest economies in the world. As my noble friend Lord Hannay said yesterday, Britain punches above its weight. When it comes to defence spending, we have the third highest military expenditure in the world, after the United States and China. How can we be termed a medium-ranking power? By any reckoning, we are a power to be reckoned with. Humility, self-effacement and understatement may be our hallmarks, but let us get real; with all our problems we are still very much a force of influence in this world.

The Government’s strategic defence and security review is an impressive document that attempts comprehensively to address all the aspects of the defence of our realm. However, there is criticism, as we have heard from the noble Lords, Lord Rosser and Lord Lee, that it has been rushed through in five months when the previous review took a year. Would the Minister agree that this has been the case?

We understand the nation’s scale of debt and deficit and the Government’s desire to address it. I am really relieved that defence expenditure will not be cut but will actually go up in cash terms; however, as a percentage of GDP, it will go down. Over the past three decades, our defence expenditure as a percentage of GDP has halved. At the time of the Falklands war, it was 5 per cent of GDP; in 2009 it was 2.5 per cent of GDP; now we are talking about getting to the NATO threshold of 2 per cent. At the time of the Falklands War there was a cold war, and let us not forget that in those days, Russia was spending 16 per cent of its GDP on defence. We must not forget that in the past two decades we have had the first Gulf War, Bosnia, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan and Iraq. In all that time our Armed Forces have been shrinking and shrinking. There are now 250,000 personnel, including our reserve voluntary forces. Our Armed Forces are stretched to the limit.

When it comes to United Nations peacekeeping forces—a real force for good, with which my father served with his Gurkha battalion as part of the UN forces in the Congo in the 1960s—Britain is the third highest contributor financially, but what are we doing to contribute personnel on the ground? No amount of technology can replace men and women on the ground. My father commanded a mountain division on the Chinese border, where India had serious defences in place after the Chinese war in 1962, which took India completely by surprise. He said that you could defend positions in mountainous terrain with a ratio of one defender to 10 attackers. But in the engagements in which the British Armed Forces have been involved over the past two decades, we have invariably been attacking, not defending. There comes a stage when the size of your Armed Forces does not have the de minimis critical mass. The Army is shrinking to below 100,000 personnel. That will be smaller than the strength of the corps that my father commanded in the Punjab.

We know that we can never compete with the giants; China has 2.2 million, the United States has 1.5 million and India has 1.3 million. These armies will be the largest in the world for years to come, but the Government can cut the numbers of our troops with one stroke of a pen. It is harsh and it is swift, but rebuilding these numbers cannot be done overnight. It takes years to train our service personnel, who are considered the best of the best in their professionalism, capabilities and expertise. There is no short cut to achieving this excellence, and I dread to think of the awful possibility of being caught short in the future, desperately needing trained service professionals when realistically it would take years for us to rebuild that capability. Surely the Government are concerned about the numbers shrinking too low. However, I do not think that any of us would argue about cutting the size of the defence ministry when we know there have been huge inefficiencies. I found it quite shocking when I did my research that the ratio of active troops to civil servants in the Ministry of Defence is 2:1. All the other 27 western alliance countries employ proportionately fewer civil servants in their defence ministries: France has five troops per civil servant, while in Spain the ratio is 8:1.

Our brave troops are making the ultimate sacrifice. The whole nation is proud of and grateful to them, but do we show our gratitude enough? As my friend General Sir Richard Dannatt, whom I admire greatly and who had the guts to stick up for his troops, said two years ago, one of the most cited reasons given by the 20,000 personnel who left the forces in 2007 was poor salary. He pointed out that the lowest paid soldiers at that time were on a mere £12,500, less than a traffic warden on a basic salary of £17,000. On top of this, soldiers' accommodation has also been described as “appalling”. Has the SDSR addressed these concerns enough?

I am relieved that the SDSR has rightly recognised the importance of our nuclear deterrent and will not compromise on this in the long run. On the other hand, the scrapping of the Harriers, as we have heard from the noble Lord, Lord Lee, and leaving our aircraft carriers without aircraft, seems completely illogical. Surely they could have been phased out once our new aircraft were operational. This leaves a big hole in our capability.

I am delighted that the Eurofighter Typhoon is going to play a major role in the future. I have witnessed at first hand the amazing capabilities of this aircraft, and I hope that the Indian air force will choose to procure the Typhoons to add to their existing range of British aircraft, including the Hawk Advanced Jet Trainer, which is considered one of the best training aircraft in the world.

The recently signed defence collaboration with France, which has been spoken about, was not covered in the review but shows how quickly things can move, and we must seize these opportunities. However, the review does not do enough justice to the significant bridges we have built through our staff college and the Royal College of Defence Studies, international officers coming here and officers going aboard to places such as the National Defence College and the Defence Services Staff College in Wellington, India, where my father was commandant. There is no better person to speak about this than our very own Yeoman Usher, Lieutenant Colonel Ted Lloyd-Jukes, who, as a major, attended the staff college in Wellington when my father was commandant. On this note, does the review place enough emphasis on the potential for closer collaboration with other countries and armed forces, including joint exercises with countries such as India?

The SDSR has correctly addressed the multitude of threats facing us today, well beyond conventional warfare, but are we doing enough to support military intelligence? As the noble Lord, Lord Lee, said, after phasing out Nimrod, what are our Government’s plans for our AWAC capability? Could they clarify their plans here?

In conclusion, during the financial crisis, Her Majesty the Queen asked:

“Why did nobody notice it?”.

Similarly, nobody predicted 9/11 and nobody predicted the Falklands War; they both happened. Sadly, no one knows what is going to happen next. We have to be prepared for the unexpected.

Without doubt, the biggest factor for us is the economy at the moment, but the most important role of government is the defence of the realm, both internally through the police force and intelligence services, and externally through our Armed Forces and intelligence services. We are a tiny island, with just 1 per cent of the population of the world. Yet thanks to the hard power that having one of the most powerful defence forces in the world gives us, we have the soft power. This is so powerful because the world knows that this hard power and soft power emanate from a country that is respected for, and has fought for, freedom, fairness, justice and liberty for centuries.