Queen’s Speech

Lord Houghton of Richmond Excerpts

Wednesday 18th May 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Houghton of Richmond (CB)]

The gracious Speech indicated that the Government will

“lead the way in championing security around the world … work closely with international partners to maintain a united NATO and address the most pressing global security challenges”

and continue to invest in our gallant Armed Forces. I would observe that even before the gracious Speech, this Government had already, in the context of Ukraine, rediscovered the wider utility of the military instrument of national power. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that defence and security have suddenly become the major currency of foreign policy. It seems of late, for example, that the dominant headline resulting from most international ministerial visits—to India, Norway, Japan, Australia and Sweden—is about the strengthening of defence and security relationships. Given the state of the world, this is all to be welcomed and we should take great pride in the quality and capability of our Armed Forces being a positive discriminator of our status as a nation on the global stage.

What about the future investment in our Armed Forces to meet and continue this policy ambition? The scale and nature of the Government’s intentions in this respect are far less clear, so I offer some thoughts on this, and I do so in the context of the debates I have listened to in this Chamber over the past few years. It seems to me that in those debates there is always far too much focus on what you might call the input metrics of military capabilities: how many soldiers have we got, how many main battle tanks, how many fighter squadrons? Indeed, a concern over how many ships we have has almost become an institutionalised reflex of this House. I would never underestimate the importance of numbers and I share many of those concerns, but I would always put allies as a far more important factor in assessing military capability choices. Given the security challenges of the age, collective security is the only way to achieve global stability, and the only way to achieve the scale of the capability truly required. I would, in the design of our Armed Forces capability, always place a premium on those capabilities which help to secure allies and alliances.

In this respect, the United Kingdom, as it seeks to continue to enjoy the benefits of global influence, has some unique advantages. We are a nuclear power; we are the leading NATO nation in Europe; we pioneer smaller groupings of like-minded nations, such as the Joint Expeditionary Force; and we enjoy the intelligence benefits of the Five Eyes, the global security connections of AUKUS and FPDA and defence relationships throughout the Middle East. As has been demonstrated in no small part by Ukraine, we also know how to train and assist partner nations, and to do so in ways that are professional, respectful and not demeaning.

The qualities that bring about these defence relationships are not naturally gifted. They are the result of investment, but the investments are not primarily in exquisite platforms. Rather, they are in the human quality of our people, our training, our organisational competence, our command and control systems and our intelligence capability.

It is no accident that the quality of Ukraine’s performance has been more to do with intelligence superiority, human motivation and professional competence than with numbers or firepower alone. But there is another lesson from the war in Ukraine, which relates to a different but equally critical alliance. It is the one that we as a nation must invest more in. It is the relationship that we have with our defence industry and our defence supply chain. In the absence of conventional warfare over the past couple of decades, we have taken risks with weapon stockpiles, with obsolescence and with spare parts. We call this the hollowing out of defence capability and most nations indulge in it. It is one way of maintaining the illusion of capability without having to afford the reality. As Ukraine is proving, however, to an extent on all sides of the fight, conventional war involves stunning rates of consumption and reveals levels of peacetime stockpiles which simply cannot keep pace with demand. We desperately need to invest in what we call war-fighting resilience.

I hope that when we in this House come to debate our own national balance of investment in future defence capability—in the context of more money, I hope—we do not simply revert to an internal competition based on the input metrics of platform numbers, but rather something that understands alliances and properly weighs the investments needed in human quality, superior intelligence, command and control and the resilience and sustainability that rest on adequate stockpiles, robust supply chains and, let us face it, kit that works. If we get this right, we will continue to enjoy the respect and loyalty of allies and stand a far better chance of collectively delivering the stability that we all desire.