Strategic Defence and Security Review

Lord Hunt of Chesterton Excerpts

Friday 12th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hunt of Chesterton]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord King, who was a distinguished Secretary of State for Defence in an equally difficult period of readjustment in the early 1990s. The story in the MoD was that he rather expressed surprise about choosing a socialist to run the Met Office when he was there. The Government’s strategic defence review gives Parliament an opportunity to consider many fundamental questions about defence and security, which I welcome.

I want to clarify the brief remarks on page 28 on scientific and technical issues, particularly in relation to other countries and to the threats that we face. I declare an interest as an occasional consultant to the MoD and former chief executive of the Met Office, which indeed is part of the MoD. I also worked with defence colleagues in the United States. Some of the policies that were developed in the Met Office over 150 years, in what was described by the Government’s chief scientist in the 1990s as a world-class research and development organisation, could, I shall argue, be applied to other aspects of the MoD’s R&D, which, I am afraid, have become somewhat less than world-class. Indeed, some parts of the MoD regarded this as actual policy. That is questionable, though, since we are a country that still has a nuclear deterrent, and a nuclear deterrent is viable only if you are in a world-class technological position as well.

There are three approaches for gaining world-class technological capability. The first option is to develop it ourselves, which requires for a moderate-sized country such as the UK, as has been emphasised by other noble Lords, choosing niche areas of excellence and then exploiting and marketing them. In the United States, when they have marketed and developed a capability, they jolly well publish it. In this country, the publication and dissemination of our capabilities are rather weak. However, that is not the case in meteorology, which proudly broadcasts its great abilities.

The second option is to collaborate, either within the United Kingdom with other organisations, including in the private sector, with allies or even, most importantly, with competitor nations—in the Cold War, there was probably more collaboration with Russia than there is now. This requires focusing on fundamental issues, as happened then, such as underwater acoustics and fusion technology, and then ensuring that the UK applies the results more effectively than its competitors. Collaboration also enables UK scientists to calibrate those of our competitors.

Playing this rather high-stakes game in technology requires a sophisticated organisation in MoD: those pen-pushing bureaucrats criticised by some Members of the House. It requires an extremely sophisticated approach. I believe that MoD has had that capability in the past. It also requires a considerably greater effort of collaboration with the other scientific communities in our competitor nations—your Lordships can imagine whom I mean. Where the science and technology has been developed in MoD, it should also have an international framework. Whereas the Met Office had an international advisory scientific committee, the Defence Scientific Advisory Council when I was on it did not. Other countries take a different view.

Recent years have seen a tremendous development of collaboration in defence technology in Europe, as the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, was encouraging. There is now collaboration in aeronautical engineering, as one has seen with Eurofighter and Airbus projects and in other areas. This collaboration in Europe has not been problematic for our collaboration with the United States, as was suggested by one noble Lord. I believe that where we have collaborated strongly with Europe and developed a strong European capability, the United States has wanted to collaborate even more strongly.

The third option is to copy, purchase or obtain by other means—which we do not need to go into—the world-class technology of other countries that might not be developed here. I was in China last weekend. To develop its famous new 350-kilometres-per-hour train, it bought one train from Germany and one from Japan, put them together and got a better train. This is the economical approach which some noble Lords have advocated. The right mix of these approaches is essential for effective policy.

The review emphasises particular aspects of defence science and technology. Probably the greatest qualitative change in defence science and technology in the past 40 years has been information and systems technology. In World War II, this was developed exclusively for activities of defence forces. The breaking of the computer codes at Bletchley Park is a supreme early example of information science having huge strategic importance. Then there was the applying of such systems, analysis and operational research to tactics. The noble Lord, Lord James, is no longer in his seat, but I point out that it was operational research conducted in Edinburgh that led Nelson to know what to do at Trafalgar by changing the tactics.

Some noble Lords have referred tangentially to research into the causes of war, the areas of war, and the probabilities of war. It has been implied that all war is wholly unpredictable. That is not the view of many students of war and it is not the view of the Pentagon. I have a particular interest in Lewis Richardson, who invented numerical weather forecasting. He studied the way in which armaments developed for the First World War; he made a prediction about the Second World War in Nature; and in 1953 he even suggested how the Cold War would end—it was an extraordinarily accurate prediction about one side’s armaments overwhelming the other side’s. Research on these questions is an important part of developing a defence strategy. It is particularly important, as indeed Richardson again implied, if the countries break up into many smaller countries. You have more frontiers and more problems with wars. That is exactly what has been happening. As world conflict becomes more fragmented and the causes of conflict become more varied, research within the MoD, the academic community and internationally is needed to study that question. As the noble Lord, Lord Sterling, asked, will there be more Afghanistans and Somalias in the future?

Information technology can lead to nations moving out of poverty through increased productivity. But it also provides the wherewithal for cyberattacks on that high productivity. Cyberattacks are essentially a high productivity method of creating damage with devastating economic and social components. The point I want to make to the Minister, which I discussed with the noble Lord, Lord Reid, is that this review skirts the coalition problem of the dichotomy between information protection and personal anonymity. Many of us on this side of the House and in the intelligence services believe that we should err more on the side of ID cards and using the information that is available to protect ourselves rather than a slightly quixotic view of discarding some of the technology that enables us to protect ourselves from dangerous attacks, not to mention pollution and other things.

The review rightly identifies climate and environment, which has been mentioned before. The new National Security Committee will enable the issues of defence and national security to be combined. Ice in the polar regions melting in the summer presents a new oceanographic domain for defence issues, and research and technology in the UK on this will be very important. Similarly, in other parts of the world where there will be floods and droughts, there may be mass movements of population with considerable problems of instability. A mobile global force, as mentioned by the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Boyce, is important in such situations.

Finally, I commend the review and join others in calling for intelligent help for service men and women as they retire or are invalided out. As a former school governor, I heard from the head teacher that ex-service people with teaching qualifications are highly valued. They can demonstrate the practical value of education. I wonder whether that should not be part of the government programme. School parents and teacher organisations should be encouraged to visit military establishments. There is a good deal of feeling in some that they do not want to do that, but it is an important part of understanding the military and something that we should think about this weekend.