National Security Situation

Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield Excerpts

Thursday 19th April 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my interests as listed in the register. I should like to concentrate on the Government’s National Security Capability Review, which was published on 28 March. In my judgment, it is a document of considerable significance for two reasons, one of them explicit and the other implicit. I shall deal with the explicit reason first, which, among other things, has direct resonance for the Syrian operation last Saturday.

Little noticed in the rather scant media coverage of the capability review was the declaration that its proposed new way of making policy and reaching decisions on overseas and defence policy would be “Chilcot compliant”—those are the exact words. In other words, the review has absorbed the lessons of the 2003 Iraq war as laid out in the July 2016 Chilcot report. Chilcot compliance rests on the so-called “Chilcot checklist”, which regrettably is not set out in the capability review but can be found as an appendix to the Government’s response of 10 January 2018 to the House of Commons Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs report on Chilcot. It contains 10 items, and in my judgment they comprise an important element in assessing the processes by which the Prime Minister, the National Security Council and her Cabinet reached the decision that the RAF Tornados should unleash their cruise missiles in the early hours of 14 April. It is the first time that a substantial politico-military decision has been taken by a British Government against the backdrop of a checklist or anything like it.

Perhaps I may offer a swift summary of the Chilcot checklist. The first is vision: why do we care; what does this mean for British interests; what are the results of acting or doing nothing? Secondly, analysis: what is happening now; what are your sources of ground truth/evidence; have assumptions been exposed to analytical tools or external challenge? Thirdly, scenario: what might happen next? Fourthly, options: what should we do? Fifthly, legal implications: how do we ensure that action is lawful; how will you ensure that any legal basis remains sound if circumstances change? Sixthly, policy and strategy: what does success look like? Seventhly, resources: what do we need to deliver? Eighthly, planning and doing: have you planned for a range of possible contingencies? Ninthly, policy performance: how will you measure and evaluate success/failure? Tenthly, evaluation: is the policy working?

Did Her Majesty’s Government follow their own prescriptions in the aftermath of the appalling chemical attack on Douma? When we debated the Prime Minister’s Statement in the Chamber on Monday, I put this question to the noble Baroness the Leader of the House. She replied:

“I can certainly assure the noble Lord that the lessons from the Chilcot report have been learned and we have paid attention to it”.—[Official Report, 16/10/18; col. 1034.]


Perhaps the noble Earl the Minister, when he winds up, can elaborate a little on this point.

Maybe surprisingly, the Chilcot checklist is silent on the key question of whether the House of Commons should have a pre-attack debate and vote. Here, as the Leader of the House made plain on Monday, the Government’s decision not to hold such a debate was based on a passage contained in the The Cabinet Manual: A Guide to Laws, Conventions and Rules on the Operation of Government. The key paragraph in the manual is as follows:

“In 2011, the Government acknowledged that a convention had developed in Parliament that before troops were committed the House of Commons should have an opportunity to debate the matter and said that it proposed to observe that convention except when there was an emergency and such action would not be appropriate”.


The Prime Minister, as it were, invoked the emergency clause to justify putting the convention aside in this instance.

In my view, although all my instincts lean towards the desirability of pre-attack debates and votes, the Prime Minister has a case over last weekend’s strike in Syria, even though I am sure she would have secured House of Commons approval had she taken the question to MPs ahead of the attack. There will now be a wider debate—it has already started—on the constitution and military action, with the Leader of the Opposition and the Labour shadow Cabinet pressing for a war powers Act. However, I am sure that, even if Parliament passed such a measure, it too would have an emergency clause embedded in it.

A first step on which perhaps we can all agree could be the bringing together of all the papers, paragraphs and checklists that deal with this hugely important question into a single document. I would value the Minister’s thoughts on that when he replies.

I suggested a moment ago that there was a significant implicit ingredient running through the pages of the National Security Capability Review. It is, I think, the recognition—here I disagree, although I am reluctant to do so, with the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup—that we are entering the fifth year of the second cold war, which began in March 2014 with Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Naturally it is different from what the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, recently called the “classic Cold War”. Its context is different, the ideological clash has mutated, although not entirely, into something else, and the instruments are changed, as are the metrics—for example, what level does a Russian cyberattack have to reach before it triggers Article 5 of the 1949 North Atlantic Treaty?

However, there is one grim and dangerous continuity between Cold War I and cold war II: the possibility of a serious unintended escalation. I recently re-read the paper on escalation which the Joint Intelligence Committee produced in the weeks following the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. It examined what it called,

“the process by which any hostilities, once started, might expand in scope and intensity, with or without the consent of Governments”.

The misreading of each other’s intentions that might trigger unintended conflict is very much the worry of our own times.

What we need is cool and careful thinking from today’s equivalents of the great George Kennan in the early years of the first Cold War, out of which came the doctrine of “containment”. For I fear that this cold war, like its predecessor, will be a long haul, requiring care, wisdom and nerve-keeping of the highest order. Those of us who grew up in the first Cold War under the shadow of the bomb, as children of the uranium age, know just how difficult and delicate is the task of containment. It is crucial that successor generations find the level of patience and foresight required to rise to the level of events.