Artificial Intelligence in Weapon Systems Committee Report

Lord Houghton of Richmond Excerpts

Friday 19th April 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Houghton of Richmond (CB)]

My Lords, it is a delight to follow the noble Lord, Lord Browne, whose companionship in the committee was but one of its many delights.

I start by drawing attention to my relevant interests in the register, particularly my advisory role with three companies, Thales, Tadaweb and Whitespace, all of which have some interest in the exploitation of AI for defence purposes.

It is great to see a few dedicated attendees of the Chamber still here late into Friday. My motivation to speak is probably as much to do with group loyalty as the likelihood of further value added, so I will keep my comments short and more focused on some contextual observations on the committee’s work, rather than in the pursuit of additional insights. There is not much more I want to stress and/or prioritise regarding the actual conclusions and recommendations of the report, and our chairman’s opening remarks were typically excellent and comprehensive. However, there are some issues of context that it is worth giving some prominence to. I will offer half a dozen, all of which represent not the committee’s view but a personal one.

The first comment is that the committee probably thought itself confronted by a prevailing sense of negativity about the risks of AI in general and autonomous weapons systems in particular. The negativity was not among the committee’s membership but rather among many of our expert witnesses, some of whom were technical doom-mongers, while others seemed to earn their living by turning what is ultimately a practical problem of battlefield management into an ethical challenge of Gordian complexity.

My second comment is specifically on the nature of the technical evidence that we heard, which, if not outright conflicted, was at least extremely diverse in its views on risk and timescale, particularly on the risks of killer robots achieving what you might call self-generated autonomy. The result was that, despite much evidence to the contrary, it was very difficult to wholly liberate ourselves from a sense of residual ignorance of some killer fact. I judge, therefore, that this is a topic that will as we go forward require persistent and dynamic stewardship.

My third observation relates to the Damascus road. I think that the committee experienced a conversion to an understanding of how, in stark contrast, for example, to financial services, the use of lethal force on the modern battlefield is already remarkably well regulated, at least by the armed forces of more civilised societies. In this context, I think that the committee achieved a more general understanding, confirmed by military professionals, that humans will nearly always be the deciding factor in the use of lethal force when any ethical or legal constraint is in play. Identifying the need to preserve the pre-eminence of human agency is perhaps the single most important element of the committee’s findings.

My fourth comment is that the committee’s deliberations played out in the context of the obscene brutality in Ukraine and Gaza. It was a constant concern not to deny our own people of, if you like, the benefits of ethical autonomy. There is so much beneficial advantage to be derived from AI in autonomy that we would be mad not to proceed with ways to exploit it, even if the requirements of regulations will undoubtedly constrain us in ways that patently will not trouble many of our potential enemies.

My fifth comment, it follows, is on our chosen title, Proceed with Caution. I forget whether this title was imposed by our chairman or more democratically agreed by the whole committee. I wholly accept that “proceed with reckless abandon” would not have survived the secretariat’s editorship, but, on a wholly personal level, I exhort the Minister to reassure us that the Government will not allow undue caution to inhibit progress. I fear that defence is currently impoverished, so it has to be both clever and technically ambitious.

I want to say something by way of wider context. The object of our study, AI in autonomous weapons systems, necessarily narrowed the focus of the committee’s attention on conflict above the threshold of formalised warfare. However, I think the whole committee was conscious of the ever-increasing scale of conflict in what is termed the grey zone, below the threshold of formalised warfare, where the mendacious use of AI to create alternate truth, undermine democracy and accelerate the decline of social integrity is far less regulated and far more existentially threatening to our way of life. This growing element of international conflict undoubtedly demands our urgent attention.

AUKUS

Lord Houghton of Richmond Excerpts

Thursday 29th February 2024 Grand Committee

[Lord Houghton of Richmond (CB)]

My Lords, when the Foreign Secretary answered Questions on AUKUS the week before last, he was euphoric, absolutely unbounded, in his enthusiasm for the agreement. I happily agreed with him on the undoubted attractions of AUKUS. I fully understand the potential upsides, particularly to the defence industrial base, jobs and national advantage. I did not want to appear cynical, but I asked him whether there had been any slightly more cautionary voices in the relevant NSC discussion regarding AUKUS. I have to say that I felt the Foreign Secretary was politely dismissive of the risks that I raised, such as losing, or at least leaking, specially nuclear-qualified personnel to Australia and the risks of cost escalation in a programme that might rapidly become non-discretionary in nature. In opening this debate, the noble Lord, Lord Risby, spoke of sustained expenditure until at least 2040.

From the Library pack provided to inform this short debate, I also now see that, as well as the self-evident delivery risk in increasing the drumbeat of submarine production, there appears to be a significant liability for British submarines to conduct both operational tours and extended port visits to Australia throughout the long period involved in generating the Australian capability. I worry that this must surely place at risk the operational requirements, at least for what we call two-boat availability, for standing tasks in closer-to-home waters.

Therefore, I again ask the Minister: has there been any recognition or discussion of attendant risks to this agreement and how to mitigate them? Or does it now represent an irreversible commitment which might place further constraints on the future flexibility required to bring into balance defence policy aspiration and the MoD’s available funding?

One might be tempted to ask similar questions about the Global Combat Air Programme, GCAP, a parallel initiative with Japan and Italy. Let me be clear: I am a huge supporter of advanced technology but, equally, I am concerned that the continued addiction of our procurement processes to pursuing ever more exquisite capabilities risks a future defence capability programme that, because it is underfunded, is also completely unbalanced.

King’s Speech

Lord Houghton of Richmond Excerpts

Wednesday 15th November 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Houghton of Richmond (CB)]

I am pleased to have this opportunity to contribute to the debate on the gracious Speech. In doing so, the only interest I wish to declare is my national presidency of the Reserve Forces’ and Cadets’ Association.

The great military theorist Carl von Clausewitz wrote his classic work On War partly as a reflection on his observations on Napoleonic warfare. He formulated the concept of a trilogy: the harmonious combination of society, government and the armed forces, which, when working in unison, brought the art of warfare to its ultimate conditionality. This conditionality is best defined as national integrity, bound to a common purpose. In different ways, both Ukraine and Israel are experiencing such conditionality now.

In recent years, perhaps the closest the UK has come to such an experience was during Covid. Certainly, British society demonstrated a remarkable willingness to volunteer, at scale, to support the national response to a genuine crisis. In my last decade of service, I was very aware that the trinity in Britain was somewhat fractured. We were involved in two highly unpopular campaigns: Iraq and Afghanistan. British society undoubtedly respected its Armed Forces but was deeply concerned about the purposes to which we were being put. The Armed Forces enjoyed public sympathy rather than public support. As a result, government strategy, perhaps understandably, eventually came to focus more on damage limitation than any form of objective success in those campaigns.

In the time since our extraction from those unpopular wars, the state of the trinity in our country has taken another turn—a rather disturbing one, I believe. Simply put, and as the gracious Speech rather bears witness to, the trinity has gone missing. Why do I say this? In part, it is the absence of a compelling strategic narrative that binds the country together in a common purpose: a national conversation about the true state of a dangerous world, society’s views on and aspirations for our place in that world, and the abilities of the Armed Forces and wider society to play their roles in securing it.

As a society, we appear to live in an age increasingly defined by an obsessive fascination with completely pointless things; an age when many have defaulted to cynicism about what is truly meaningful. I credit the Government with some very good strategic thinking about the world. They know that it has become a much more actively malign and dangerous place, and they understand the need to reimagine warfare as a consistent and persistent condition between competing nations and interests, existing across a spectrum of malevolent activity, much of it below the threshold of what we have previously considered to be formalised warfare. The Government have a far better understanding of the differing vectors of warfare that embrace non-military activity—vectors that harness artificial intelligence to erode the integrity of societies, to undermine democratic process and to create alternate truth.

Government understands the need to build a more resilient society but it does not seem to want to engage with society about how to bring this about. Perhaps the most important lesson from both Ukraine and Israel is the requirement for a nation to have resilience. Fundamental to this resilience is a society that understands the realities of a dangerous world and a Government who have effective methods of mobilising national energy and human capacity to deal with it.

In the military sphere, there is a compelling need for a vibrant set of Reserve Forces, a supportive employer base, a practical volunteer offer and a practised methodology for training and mobilisation. The defence reviews of both 2010 and 2015 took cuts in the size of regular manpower. These were predicated on the growth of the Reserve Forces. In the 2015 review, a reduction in the size of the Army to 82,000 was predicated on a volunteer reserve of 30,000. In the Library material produced to support this debate, every single statistic on Armed Forces personnel levels, regular and reserve, shows a decreasing trend, bar one: the sole increase is in the number of people leaving.

The custodianship of the nation’s military capability is one of any Government’s most critical responsibilities. A healthy reserve is a vital national strategic capability. It is critical to resilience and national integrity. Therefore, can the Minister confirm to the House and the country what the future levels of Armed Forces personnel need to be? Can he confirm that they take into account the imminent revisions to NATO’s deterrent posture and the emerging concept of a UK national defence plan? Perhaps the Minister can also confirm that the Government will lose no more time in defining the specific demands they want their Reserve Forces to meet. I fear that they currently feel uncertain and in a state of neglect.

Armed Forces

Lord Houghton of Richmond Excerpts

Thursday 7th September 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Houghton of Richmond (CB)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord for securing this debate. It is very timely, as I worry that the capabilities of our Armed Forces are getting seriously out of balance with the ambitions of our defence policy.

Why do I say that? I suppose that one of the many benefits of being a Member of this House is that you get a free copy of the New Statesman every week. The copy I received just before the House went into Summer Recess contained an article by George Eaton on the fears of British decline. A quick summary of that article is that Britain is in relative decline, and that the decline is not historic or terminal. Importantly, however, the point the article makes is that we will not revise or reverse that decline through the alchemy of a small number of transformative breakthroughs. The idea that we can quickly become a science superpower, a global leader in green tech or the world’s entrepreneurial powerhouse are simply not feasible if you represent only 2% of global manufacture and global research and development.

The article made a simple footballing analogy: if you are sitting towards the lower end of the Premier League, you cannot suddenly reach the top by investing in one or two expensive players. Rather, you need to embark on a strategy of overall improvement. On reading the article, I reflected on the state of the UK’s Armed Forces and this forthcoming debate.

I start with the reassurance that our Armed Forces are definitely still in the premiership. However, we are also in the 2% club, we are in relative decline, we definitely suffer from a belief in the magic of various alchemies—digital, technological, doctrinal—and we have increasingly adopted a strategy of investment in a few very big players that we struggle to afford.

To add some flesh to this, our world-leading attributes probably consist of the continuous at-sea nuclear deterrent, the carrier-strike capability, our special forces, the overall quality of our people—as has been mentioned—and our ability to stage state ceremonial that is still the envy of the world. I worry that such capabilities are born more of a continuing desire to parade the totemic instruments of global authority rather than being the product of a cold-hearted analysis of defence need based on current threats and resource realities. I also fear that the excellence of such capabilities generates to an extent a misplaced public confidence in the Armed Forces as a whole.

To return to footballing parallels, the team has some wonderful players, we retain the ability to win some memorable games, but we do not have a big enough squad, we have some lousy kit and some very poor facilities, and we have no meaningful reserves, either human or material. We are not designed for resilience or deterrence.

What should we do? I fear that the Defence Command Paper was, perhaps understandably, an exercise if not in deception then at least in public and self-delusion. It seemed designed primarily to ingeniously reassure rather than honestly inform. What is needed is more blunt honesty about the need to resource defence appropriately and to apply those resources to a programme of holistic betterment, but, most of all, to set a realistic ambition for our nation.

As far as resources are concerned, I do not believe that the Government have developed a compelling strategic narrative to convince our society of the need to spend more on defence. Perhaps I worry in part because they do not themselves believe in such a narrative; hence, they are happy to publish illusions. As far as betterment is concerned, we need an holistic programme of reform that covers defence procurement, the relationship with the defence industrial base, the Reserve Forces, war-fighting resilience and the condition of defence infrastructure, including married quarters.

However, above all is the need to set a more realistic national ambition. At least part of the reason why Russia invaded Ukraine was that Putin did not think that NATO, and by inference the UK, had the capability or resolve to do anything about it. To an extent, he may have been proved wrong. However, the fact that Putin made that assumption means that our conventional deterrence posture lacked credibility.

I fear that we have forgotten the reality that defence is built largely on a paradigm. The greater the investment made in capability, the less likely it is that you will need to use it. Deterring war is a far less expensive option than fighting it, even by proxy. Therefore, the stark choice we face is either to increase resources or to reduce ambition. I fear that the alternative is incoherence and accelerating decline.

Ukraine: Ammunition and Missiles

Lord Houghton of Richmond Excerpts

Monday 24th July 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

I gave some indication of some of the contracts that have been placed; these are already in place for delivery. Of course, there are other arms of delivery through the NATO action plan and the International Fund for Ukraine. These agencies are working hard with the defence industry to aggregate production of ammunition and give Ukraine what it needs.

[Lord Houghton of Richmond (CB)]

My Lords, can the Minister answer the simple question: do the new contracts merely replenish the stocks, or do they maintain the means of production?

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

I think the answer is that they are doing both. We are now looking at this as a more holistic supply. We are not necessarily replacing like for like, as the noble and gallant Lord will be aware. That means that industry is moving on to a more resilient, innovative platform, to ensure that it can meet these new types of demand.

Defence: Support Ships and Type 32 Frigates

Lord Houghton of Richmond Excerpts

Tuesday 20th June 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

I have already indicated to the House that this ship is in the concept phase; there is no more that I can add to that. The programme and procurement strategy will be decided following the current concept phase, once that has concluded. However, I would observe that this is part of a shipbuilding programme for the Royal Navy that is substantial, significant and very important for the Navy’s future operational effectiveness.

[Lord Houghton of Richmond (CB)]

My Lords, on this particular argument I find myself more in favour of the Minister’s point, inasmuch as the lineage of these questions, although entertaining, occasionally gives the impression that the sole purpose of the defence budget is the maritime renaissance. Increasingly, the issue of military advantage will be born not of hardware but of software. Can the Minister confirm that it is this strategic shift, and not necessarily by accounting for military competence and capability in the counting of input numbers, that is the qualitative output of a sophisticated and technologically equipped Armed Forces—the point of the Minister’s expression of frustration—and a more balanced approach to the investment necessary?

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

I thank the noble and gallant Lord. He makes the point more eloquently and with greater authority than I can. I do not seek to pre-empt the defence Command Paper refresh, which is imminently in the stages of becoming public, but the hybrid nature of our capability will be obvious from that paper. The noble and gallant Lord is quite correct: we cannot put things in silos. We have to work out what we are trying to deal with, what the threat is, what the hybrid character of the threat is and how we can have a capability—whether by land, air or sea—that will effectively combine to address that threat.

Ukraine

Lord Houghton of Richmond Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd May 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

Many people will be in sympathy with the important point made by my noble friend. We do everything that we can through intelligence outlets to try to ascertain what is happening in Russia—what the mood is and what the sentiment is. It is difficult to elicit any specific information, apart from a general observation that there is now evidence that morale is being impacted by this illegal war in Ukraine. Increasingly within Russia, as a consequence of that war, the brutal effect upon families who have lost loved ones or seen loved ones seriously injured is beginning to tell its own story. My noble friend makes an important point. I wish that I had some more specific instrument available to me to ascertain in detail what he asks. We continue to monitor the situation as best we can.

[Lord Houghton of Richmond (CB)]

My Lords, I have a question on the high-level strategic purpose of the UK’s support and the international support for Ukraine. To an interested observer, it appears to be an attempt to allow Ukraine neither to lose badly nor to win decisively. The net result is a sustained, mutually hurting stalemate. Can the Minister comment on the morality of that? Would it be fair to say that pragmatism has trumped morality in UK policy?

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

The morality is that, when someone behaves in an inexcusably illegal and brutal fashion, it must be resisted, in the interests of international respect for upholding law and for a country’s sovereignty. That is what Ukraine is doing, supported by many countries around the world. How Ukraine wishes to approach that conflict is not for me to interpret or advance an opinion upon, but, as the noble and gallant Lord is aware, everyone understands the propriety of what Ukraine is doing. The United Kingdom, with our allies and partners, will support Ukraine as very best we can.

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.

Ukraine: Challenger 2 Tanks

Lord Houghton of Richmond Excerpts

Wednesday 18th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

I know that the noble Lord takes a keen interest in this and has posed similar questions before. I can reassure the House that the Secretary of State is cognisant of this and indeed commented in his Statement in the other place on Monday that we are very closely engaged with industry, as are our allied partners, because we are not in a silo in respect of industry supply and security of the supply chain. We are having to work with partners to ensure that, holistically, industry is able to understand demand and plan accordingly to supply it. Certainly, we are confident that we have retained sufficient equipment and ammunition so that we are able to undertake our primary responsibility to the security of the United Kingdom.

[Lord Houghton of Richmond (CB)]

My Lords, in pursuit of a more precise answer on this issue of funding, will the Minister answer two questions? First, does the aggregate of all our activities in support of Ukraine meet the formal title of a military operation? If that is the case, do the NACMO procedures apply; that is, that the net additional costs of military operations are met not from the defence budget but from the Treasury reserve?

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

My understanding in relation to the donation of munitions and equipment granted in kind to Ukraine out of our own stocks is that replenishment of granted assets is managed under a standing arrangement between the MoD and the Treasury, and funding is provided from HMT reserves.

Ukraine: NATO

Lord Houghton of Richmond Excerpts

Tuesday 18th October 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

As the noble Baroness will be aware, the best that we can do, along with our allies and partners, is to support Ukraine in the defence of its territory in trying to see off the barbaric and illegal attacks to which it has been subjected by Russia. The principal concern has probably been the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, for understandable reasons. We welcome the efforts of the IAEA and United Nations staff to be on site, and we hope that will enable a robust inspection to be concluded. We are cognisant of the risk, and we will do everything that we can to continue to help Ukraine to see off the threat.

[Lord Houghton of Richmond (CB)]

My Lords, the interest of the House in the progress of the military situation in Ukraine is entirely understandable, but can the Minister reassure the House that the Government recognise the two very separate objectives of conflict termination and conflict resolution, and that it is not in policy formulation that we aspire to resolve the conflict through military means alone?

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

It has been clear from the outset that our desire—or mission, if you like—was to support Ukraine in its attempts to defend itself against this illegal aggression and invasion of its sovereign territory. That is our role, as it is the role of NATO and other partners. As to the future, and whether the conflict can ever be resolved and negotiations embarked on, that is absolutely for Ukraine to determine.