Syria: UK Military Involvement

Lord Glenarthur Excerpts

Tuesday 21st July 2015 Lords Chamber

[Earl Howe]

My Lords, it will not surprise the noble Lord to know that I do not share his analysis of the handling of this matter. I can tell him that UK pilots embedded with the Royal Canadian Air Force and USAF have permission to strike ISIL targets in Syria should their mission require them to do so. The US unit that UK pilots are currently embedded with has conducted strikes in Syria, but it is important to emphasise that neither the US nor Canada is authorised to attack Syrian regime military forces.

[Lord Glenarthur (Con)]

My Lords, is it not the case that secondment or exchange has been part of the services’ policy, rightly, for very many years and provides very valuable experience and expertise in both directions, and that, once seconded, our servicemen fill a vital role as part of the services that they are seconded to? Does the noble Earl further agree that, should our servicemen not be able to play a full operational part on deployment, secondment would be worthless and disruptive to the other nations, who are often our allies—probably all our allies—to whom the individuals are on exchange?

[Earl Howe]

I fully agree with my noble friend. In a nutshell, one could say that service personnel are either embedded or they are not. The value to our people from being embedded with the United States Navy is the key skills that they are acquiring to operate the Queen Elizabeth class carriers when those come into service later in the decade. The experience gained by flying and supporting US fixed-wing aircraft will allow the pilots to retain the suitably qualified and experienced person status needed to operate the F35B.

Defence: Budget

Lord Glenarthur Excerpts

Wednesday 17th June 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Glenarthur (Con)]

My Lords, I, too, welcome my noble friend Lord Howe to his new responsibilities at the Ministry of Defence, but I am afraid that this is the only welcome I can give to the Government’s apparent attitude to defence. Do the Government understand that defence, and the strategic and foreign policy imperatives that make it so essential, underpins the security of every other element of their domestic, let alone their wider, ambitions, or are they simply prepared to take the risk that sound defence is a luxury that will never need to be tested?

Strict economic and financial policies cannot be at any price. Taking responsibility for defence, at every level from the Chiefs of Staff down to perhaps the tank crew commander, is not simply a matter of management. It is about command, it is about leadership, and it is about exhortation to operate in ways that are not matched in any other walk of life. Is my noble friend aware of the deep pessimism that so many serving members of the Armed Forces, let alone other commentators, feel about the current reducing state of our defence capabilities, about the provision of adequate equipment for the future and about the difficulty of motivating all ranks to understand that a career in the services is more a calling and a duty than a job, the experience of which will serve well both the country and the individual throughout his or her life? Were the assumptions underlying the previous SDSR correct at the time they were made? If so, were Libya, ISIL, Ukraine and Syria foreseen? Of course they were not. What of further Russian military developments in both the nuclear and conventional fields? What of China’s expanding sphere of influence and military capability? These are stark illustrations of growing global instability.

What is there to give us confidence that the new SDSR is likely to be based on assumptions that are any more realistic than last time? Do the Government agree with the House of Commons Defence Committee report, Towards the Next Security and Defence Review: Part Three, which was published in March, and the committee’s paper, Re-thinking Defence to Meet New Threats? Beyond the need to upgrade the nuclear deterrent, what are the foreign policy objectives that underlie our status as a nation, as part of the EU, as a member of the Commonwealth, within NATO and as a member of the permanent five?

Managing and developing defence capability within an even greater allocation of resources would be difficult enough. But the prospect of further cost reductions, which appear to have started already, with £500 million—perhaps more in reality—being cut before the SDSR is remotely complete, inevitably make it exceedingly difficult to match the 2% of GDP expenditure that the Prime Minister seems to exhort others to do. Not to commit to it or even more—or worse, to fudge the figure—is folly in the extreme. The Government have so far dodged every rational argument to halt, let alone reverse, the reduction in our defence capability and this is the height of irresponsibility. The current SDSR is an opportunity to arrest this perilous decline.