Armed Forces: Resilience

Lord Houghton of Richmond Excerpts

Thursday 26th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Houghton of Richmond (CB)]

My Lords, I start by offering my own mixture of welcome and congratulations to our two maiden speakers. The noble Lord, Lord Hintze, of Dunster, is a new friend; I knew his speech would be a mixture of the humility, warmth and remarkable worldly wisdom that define him as a man. Such qualities make him a most welcome addition to this place. The noble and gallant Lord, Lord Peach, of Grantham, I know too well: he stalked me through the latter years of my military career. However, he went on to better things, as the chairman of the NATO Military Committee, and few in this Chamber will match his knowledge of international defence and security issues. As both their maiden speeches testify, we have gained enormously by their addition to our number.

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Robathan, and welcome this debate on the resilience of the UK’s Armed Forces. In many respects it is overdue, and it is probably the unfolding reality of conventional warfare at scale, in Ukraine, which has stirred greater concern in this House and more widely among informed commentators.

I will start with what might seem a somewhat offensive observation. It is very unlikely that we will get a wholly clear or candid statement on the resilience of our Armed Forces from a government Minister or even a chief of defence. That is not because they are habitual liars but because of three very obvious and, to be fair, largely defensible reasons. We do not want to parade the totality of our national military shortcomings to our enemies, nor internally always to our own Armed Forces, nor more widely to the British people.

When I was Chief of the Defence Staff, I know that, on occasions, I was either not allowed to speak or else had to publicly defend decisions on resources and capability using politically cleared scripts with which I was not always entirely comfortable. I was prepared to do this for a number of reasons. The first was the fact that, after all, it is not the responsibility of the Chief of the Defence Staff to determine the Government’s spending priorities. Moreover, it is not the responsibility of the Chief of the Defence Staff to determine what level of defence and security risk the Government are ultimately prepared to tolerate. Both of these things are for the Government of the day alone to determine, and they are definitely not enviable judgments to have to make.

However, it is the responsibility of the CDS, supported by the chiefs of staff, to maximise the benefit in military capability terms of a given level of resources, to deploy those resources in support of government policy, and to confirm to government, in as accurate a manner as possible, the degree to which that military capability reduces the defence and security risks to the nation. To me, the key responsibility of the CDS, in this aspect of his role, is to be loyally but brutally honest to the Government about his judgments on resources, capability choices and national risk. Therefore, the least—I hope the best—we can hope for as a result of today’s debate is the reassurance that the Government are being honest with themselves.

I make my contribution from the standpoint of an ex-CDS who believes that, in the specific context of war-fighting resilience, the situation today must—absolutely must—be even more concerning than it was in 2016 when I stood down. Drawing on my own personal experience as CDS, my first attempt, if you like, at moderated public honesty was in December 2013 at the annual Christmas CDS lecture to RUSI. In my address I first, I think, raised the spectre of the hollow force: a force I defined as increasingly built around exquisite platforms and around the capabilities that represented the iconic totems of a global power—capabilities perhaps more focused on supporting international prestige and a domestic industrial base than on rigorously based assessments of genuine national threats. In truth, it was a force that risked consuming so much of the defence budget on exquisite platforms that it was affordable only at the expense of manpower numbers, high-quality training and the stockpiles of war-fighting consumables that resilience on high-intensity operations require.

It would not be appropriate to publicly expose the detail of my private expressions of honesty to government. However, I will say that I wrote, formally, an annual letter to the Prime Minister, agreed with my fellow chiefs, offering a professional view on the state of our military capability. It was written in the clearest Yorkshire that I could muster. I can recall my final such letter to the Prime Minister, in summer 2016. I reflected one principal concern: that the strategic imbalance of investment between equipment, manpower, training, material support and infrastructure had effectively created the hollow force. The issue now was not the risk of the hollow force but whether the Government were happy to live with the reality.

Much has happened since I stood down in 2016 to suggest to me that the risk must now be intolerable. A number of external factors have occurred, many of them largely outside government control, which make the risk difficult to ameliorate quickly or cheaply. I offer three such factors, not to be exhaustive but purely as examples.

The first is that threats which were latent in 2010 and patent in 2015 are now realities, and the military outcome of the war in Ukraine will largely depend on a brutal test of national resilience. We are a part of that resilience, if only by proxy, and it seems, if the words of the current CGS are to be believed, that our contributions to date have already undermined and prejudiced our national liability to NATO.

The second example I offer is that, in pursuit of efficiency, we have created a defence industrial base in the UK which largely runs on supermarket lines: a competitive marketplace with just-in-time delivery, partly based on the guarantee of international supply. We no longer have the sovereign manufacturing base capable of sustaining war-fighting scales of consumption.

A third example would be my fear that we have done serious damage to our manpower resilience. We seem now, both institutionally and societally, unable to successfully recruit and retain. We have, by choice, reduced our military manpower strength; and, perhaps most remarkably of all, given the lessons from Ukraine and Covid, we have again neglected our Reserve Forces and have no plan in motion to address their purpose or vibrancy—although we have plenty of unacknowledged studies. I pause here to declare a personal interest, recorded in the register, as the president of the Reserve Forces’ and Cadets’ Association.

As I said at the outset, it is perhaps not fair to expect a wholly candid or clear public statement on the resilience of our Armed Forces. Many, if not most, countries involve themselves in either internal deceptions or external evasions about the true state of their military capability. President Putin is perhaps just the latest to be horribly surprised. But more widely, we need to face a disturbing reality. Simply put, what we ask of defence and our Armed Forces is based on a wholly unachievable set of mutually conflicting ambitions, given the current levels of funding. We simply cannot, at one and the same time, face the threat of land warfare in Europe, commit to a strategic tilt to south-east Asia, sustain a nuclear deterrent, undertake a maritime renaissance, be the default government response to strikes and domestic emergencies, contribute to the nation’s prosperity agenda, help it to become a tech superpower and perform remarkable acts of state ceremonial, all while supporting a defence industrial base that looks first to its shareholders, and achieve all this with fewer people, not much more money and through a misplaced reliance on the enduring alchemy of efficiency.

I, among others, wait with bated breath for the outcome of the revisitation of the integrated review. I hope that the Minister will at least confirm that honesty and realism will be the review’s defining characteristics, and that the regeneration of resilience in all its dimensions will result.