Armed Forces: Reserve Forces

Lord Dannatt Excerpts

Thursday 1st November 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Dannatt]

My Lords, I am conscious that I am echoing the comments of other noble Lords who have spoken in this debate before me when I acknowledge and pay tribute to the dedication and commitment of our Reserve Forces, without whom the Armed Forces could not have done what they have done over the past 10 years—principally, but not exclusively, in Iraq and Afghanistan. As is widely known, typically, 10% of every brigade group deployed, previously to Iraq and now in Afghanistan, have been mobilised reservists. In defence medical units, this percentage has often been much higher. So there is no doubt about the critical role that our Reserve Forces play, especially as part of our land forces, in which I include the Army, the Royal Marines and parts of the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force.

However, it is the future role of our Reserve Forces that your Lordships are debating today, but the role of the Reserve Forces can be debated properly only in the context of today’s strategic and financial environment and the policy choices and decisions that Her Majesty’s Government have made in the past two years. The consequences of some of those decisions have undoubtedly produced risk: risk to the defence of the realm; risk to the safety of our citizens; and risk to the well-being of the Armed Forces. Reducing the size of the regular Army from 102,000 to 82,000 is a significant risk. There is no other way to describe that. But risk itself is not a problem provided that it is identified, acknowledged and then well managed. Mitigating the risk of a too small full-time Army by significantly increasing the number of part-time soldiers is a perfectly reasonable risk management strategy, but one with its own inherent risks. We have heard about many of them already this evening. Will the Reserve Forces be able to attract a sufficient number of volunteers to fill the ranks? Will enough resource be made available to train those volunteers to a sufficiently high standard? Will the roles and training opportunities being made available to the volunteers be sufficiently challenging and satisfying to motivate and sustain them—here, I think especially of officers and senior non-commissioned officers? Will sufficient civilian employers be willing to let the volunteers—their employees—take significant periods of absence to be able to join units on major training or operational deployments?

These, and more, are all legitimate questions that are being asked and must be asked. For this initiative to succeed, the answer must be yes to all of them. There must also be an absolute determination to substantiate a positive answer; otherwise the risk identified will translate from being just a risk to our security to being an actual danger to our security.

Notwithstanding our withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2014 and apparent lack of appetite for further foreign interventions, a glance at the insecurity of the world in the past decade and the insecurity of the world today fills me with no great optimism that the decade to come will be any less demanding for our Armed Forces than the decade just past. We may think that we are better at predicting the future than past generations, but strategic shocks happen, as the Falklands and 9/11 testify.

Yet it would seem that the judgment has been made either that the world will be a more secure place in the next decade or that we wish to play a lesser role within the world in the next decade, because, unless these plans for the greater utilisation of our Reserve Forces come fully to fruition, there is no doubt that we will have less military capability than in the past and no option other than to play a lesser role in the world, which would constitute a policy change forced by circumstance and not decided by debate.

Do my comments constitute a precursor to an attack on the Government’s defence policy and priorities? The answer to my own question is no, or at least not now. Despite the significant risks about which I am concerned, I take some comfort from the stated government intention to hold a major defence and security review once in every Parliament. Clearly, this Government cannot guarantee what any future Government might do after the next general election but, frankly, no right-thinking person would wish to see a repeat of the 13-year gap between the formal defence reviews of 1997 and 2010.

I look forward to the next defence review, set properly against the strategic circumstances of two or three years’ time and, of course, mindful of financial issues, but only mindful of, not driven by, financial issues. If an open, honest and thorough analysis of our strategic circumstances is made, set against a similar debate about our national ambition, we will reach proper judgments about the military capabilities that we require and their quantum. Should my fears about the capabilities and quantum of our land forces as currently envisaged be substantiated, then the mechanism for remedy exists, even if that would mean a modest reprioritisation of spending across government and not just within defence.

For now, I support the plans to increase our Reserve Forces, and, with others, will do whatever I can to help those plans succeed, but should those plans not come to fruition, I take comfort in the context of the next defence review and the formal chance that it will provide to think again.