Strategic Defence and Security Review

Lord Guthrie of Craigiebank Excerpts

Friday 12th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Guthrie of Craigiebank]

My Lords, I shall make three declarations of interest. First, I am a non-executive director of an American defence company. Secondly, I am president of the Army Benevolent Fund, a soldiers’ charity, and three regimental charities that have been formed to look after their casualties from Afghanistan. Also, I am a colonel of the Life Guards.

Perhaps the most difficult and controversial decision taken by the SDSR has been to do with the two carriers. The case for them has been made, but their construction, bringing them into service, operating them and keeping them going over the years are likely to cause huge difficulties to the defence budget. Budgets are likely to be even more under pressure in future than they are today, in what we have estimated. It will be not just the Royal Navy that is affected by this but defence as a whole. I am sure that the carrier group, when it forms, will be much more expensive than it is today.

The Royal Navy’s surface fleet is now smaller than at any time since the reign of Charles II. Our small surface fleet of 19 frigates and destroyers will not be enough to meet the many worldwide tasks and to act as escorts for carriers. As an aside, when I was Chief of the Defence Staff and needed a frigate off the coast of Sierra Leone, the same ship had two commitments at the same time. Unbelievably, it was guarding the Falkland Islands and chasing drug dealers in the West Indies. At that time, we had a surface fleet of more than 30 ships; we are now going to have 19. In reality, having 19 ships means that we will probably have about 13 or 14 available at any time. We certainly need a larger Navy and we need more frigates and smaller ships. We cannot skimp on escorts for the carriers, particularly as every year improved supersonic anti-ship missiles and more sophisticated torpedoes are becoming available.

Secondly, we should welcome the recent agreement with France. It seems sensible; we probably have more in common with the French military than with anyone else in Europe. Sometimes I do not think that we have so much in common with the Quai d’Orsay and the French Government, but as far as their military is concerned we work very well with them. In the Balkans, when necessary, we were perfectly happy to put British soldiers under French command and the French were perfectly happy to put their soldiers under our command. We have also operated in different parts of the world alongside them and that has been perfectly all right. Although savings will be possible from the French agreement, they will not be anything like as much as people think, because it is important that we are able to operate independently from the French, if the need arises, and there will be occasions when we have different goals and aims in international relations.

It is certainly right to increase the effectiveness of our Special Forces, the SAS and SBS. Their successes in Iraq and Afghanistan have been remarked on. Having been to Baghdad when I was colonel commandant of the SAS and seen them working alongside the United States special forces and what benefit there was to both the United States and to our soldiers, I am completely convinced that we need to give more modern technology—particularly, intelligence technology—to our Special Forces. I am a bit nervous of increasing the size of the Special Forces. I know that people suggest that we need more, but to produce an SAS or SBS soldier needs careful selection and arduous training. If we do not maintain those standards, there is a real danger that the two units will be dumbed down in some way. I hope that the Minister can assure me—I know that he wants to assure the noble Lord, Lord Gilbert—that the introduction of the A400M will not affect SAS and SBS operations. The C130 is excellent and the right size, while the A400M is a bigger aircraft and I am not sure that it can do all the things that the SAS will want it to do.

Lastly, I am delighted that there is to be a full and fundamental review of the Ministry of Defence. Nobody could be more suited to lead that review than the noble Lord, Lord Levene, who knows the Ministry of Defence well. The noble Lord, Lord Reid, said, when he was Home Secretary, that he felt that his department was not fit for purpose. I am afraid that many of us feel the same way about the Ministry of Defence. It lacks agility and is too big. Do we really need to have a Permanent Joint Headquarters as well as the Ministry of Defence? There is a certain amount of duplication. As people second-guess, PJHQ has constantly to refer back to the Ministry of Defence when it makes decisions. Why do we need so many people? We have 86,000 civilian staff who are there for only 175,000 service men and women. We then have a Defence Equipment and Support organisation of 26,000, to which others have referred today, and we do not seem to be able to produce all the equipment that we want in time for when we need it. The review will need to take some radical and tough decisions, some of which will be very unpopular. It is always difficult to reduce numbers; it has happened before and I know that there is a plan to do it now, but I do not underestimate the difficulties of that.

We must follow through the review. Since I have been in the Ministry of Defence—and I have spent many years there—there have been any number of reviews, yet I cannot think of one that was really followed through. The noble Lord, Lord Robertson, referred in a previous debate to Mr Bernard Gray, who knows a great deal about procurement and understands the Ministry of Defence as well as anybody. I would like to know why what seemed to most of us to be an excellent report, which may have been critical of the Ministry of Defence, seems to have been shelved. Why has it not gone forward? What is happening? What is going on to put this right?