UK Strategy Towards the Arctic (International Relations and Defence Committee Report)

Lord Houghton of Richmond Excerpts

Thursday 9th January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Houghton of Richmond (CB)]

My Lords, I welcome this opportunity to debate this excellent report regarding the UK’s strategy towards the Arctic. I share the view that this has been a somewhat neglected area and is now of increasing strategic importance, as the report clearly lays out. Obviously, the report was completed and published under the previous Government and was not intended to inform the current ongoing strategic defence review. However, it is more in the context of that review that I want to offer some observations, and I do so because since the publication of this report the strategic context has moved on.

Regardless of the specifics of how the situation in Ukraine is resolved, my view is that the position of Russia looks weaker. It is facing the reality of its own military limitations. By contrast, the relative strengths of European NATO are becoming more apparent, particularly given the additional membership of Finland and Sweden and the upward trend in defence spending of many NATO countries. Moreover, the advent of a Trump presidency looks set—I would say, wholly justifiably—to coerce all of NATO in Europe, including the UK, into assuming an ever greater responsibility for its own security. I am not suggesting that the threat from Russia has gone away. I am suggesting that it is now increasingly likely to manifest itself as malevolent activity below the threshold of formalised warfare, the human and material costs of which are huge.

In this changing context, there may be considerable good sense in the UK reimagining its commitment within NATO, and doing so in ways that play to our natural military strengths and permit the necessary enhancements to national resilience, doing so in a manner that might just be affordable within a defence budget of 3% of GDP.

The SDR will undoubtedly confirm that some of our defence expenditure is non-discretionary: most obviously, the deterrent. We must also now recognise our vulnerability to the threat of ballistic missiles, a threat to which events in both Israel and Ukraine have now sensitised public awareness. We obviously need to invest in those areas which give us a technological edge, especially where automation and autonomy relieve the pressure on physical numbers. But, more fundamentally, a strategic choice needs to be made in respect of where, within a newly configured and energised NATO, we should develop and focus the more conventional elements of our force structure. In deciding this, we need to better evaluate the balance between conventional deterrence and the active interdiction of sub-threshold threats. We need to do this in a way that is orchestrated on a NATO-wide basis.

To me, although it pains an infantryman to say it, logic and geography suggest that we should consider focusing on a leadership role in the maritime and air domains of NATO’s northern flank—a flank which should be envisaged as including the Baltic, High North, Arctic and north Atlantic. We should adopt an operational posture that is a combination of conventional deterrence and the active interdiction of sub-threshold—particularly subsea and airborne—threats. We should build on the innate dependencies and mutual trust born of our leadership of the Joint Expeditionary Force, which now needs to be renamed, and we should build on this in respect of capability development and procurement.

Because cost pressures will dictate, we should probably worry much less about mustering a significant high-readiness land commitment to central Europe, a contingency which, in societal terms, we seem, on a national basis, either disinclined to or incapable of embracing, and for which many continental partners display far greater national urgency due to geographic realities. This does not mean that we do not need an Army: far from it. The combination of national resilience, national regeneration and constitution, and what I would call focused lethality, which I use as a term for a more technically enhanced set of specialised forces, will more than justify a significant force structure.

But I simply cannot see how, in the changing strategic environment and with the cost pressures that seem set to remain, we can continue to delude ourselves that we are much more than a regional power, albeit one that more than delivers its fair share of regional security, particularly when the nuclear deterrent is costed in. I appreciate that these remarks fall well outside a more disciplined commentary on our strategy towards the Arctic but, to me, the true excellence of the report lay less in what it specifically said and much more in what it teasingly forebode; namely, that the security dynamics of the Arctic and northern Europe are now more interconnected and that the Arctic itself is potentially far more contested. The report offers the strategic defence review much food for thought regarding our national strategic options.