Armed Forces

Lord Stirrup Excerpts

Monday 23rd June 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stirrup (CB)]

My Lords, we are within a year of a general election, following which the next Government will have to make some key choices about government expenditure over the coming years. Over the past four years, the burden of financial retrenchment has been largely borne by those departments whose expenditure has been unprotected. If that is to continue beyond 2015, we have seriously to question whether we as a country are taking a sensible approach to public policy.

There is no doubt that restoring the nation’s economic health and public finances are essential prerequisites for the provision of good public services, including our Armed Forces. This overriding priority has meant that in the short term we have faced difficult choices and painful reductions in many areas. However, our aim must be to restore long-term coherence, not to allow short-term distortions to become structurally embedded.

With that in mind, we have to take account of our national interests and aspirations. The nature of our economy and the sources of our wealth mean that we cannot responsibly withdraw from the global scene. We rely on a degree of global order and stability to pursue our goals; that means we should invest in the promotion of such order and stability. It has long been a key tenet of our foreign and security policy and I see no prospect of change in that regard. Even in the teeth of the economic challenge at the time of the last security and defence review, the Government rejected the notion of strategic shrinkage. I would have preferred a slightly different formulation. It would have been better to say that Britain was committed to sustaining its international strategic role in the long term, but that to do this we would have to suffer some strategic retrenchment in the short term. That would have been a better reflection of the reality.

Either way, we must take account of the current and likely future international situation. I will not repeat all that I said in the debate on the humble Address responding to the gracious Speech from the Throne in this regard; suffice it to say that the global threats to security, as other noble Lords have said, are many and serious. However, I will restate a key point I made in the earlier debate. I believe we are witnessing two major strategic shifts, both of which could pose serious challenges to our future security and prosperity. The first and most obvious is the rising economic might of China and its use of increasingly sharp elbows on the international scene. The major points of friction may be far removed from us geographically, but in this globalised world the consequences will certainly be felt here.

The second development is the continued unravelling of the Sykes-Picot agreement and the subsequent post-1918 arrangements that were intended to tidy up the detritus of the Ottoman Empire. The most malign consequence of this is the growth of an ungoverned space straddling the Syria-Iraq border and the emergence there of extremist Islamic groups, such as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.

There is perhaps little that we can contribute directly regarding the first development, but we have friends in the Asia-Pacific region that we should stay in close touch with and support where possible. Regarding the second issue, we cannot say how things will develop in the Middle East; nor, I suspect, can we exert much direct control over the outcomes. At the least, we should do all we can to prevent the outcome of a slide into a full-blown Sunni-Shia war, which seems to me very much in prospect at the moment.

If that were not enough, we face serious challenges on our own continent, which until recently some people thought would be at peace for ever more. It has been suggested that the EU has in some way provoked Russia’s actions in Ukraine. I am certainly not going to defend all of the EU’s policies in this regard. However, I believe that Russia’s actions are illegal and wholly unacceptable, and that the chances of subsequent miscalculation on the wider European scene have grown considerably. We now face a situation where many members of NATO feel distinctly less secure than they did 12 months ago, and they understandably seek reassurance. We have allowed ourselves and NATO to grow weaker over the past few years; risks and uncertainties are greater when we are weaker than when we are stronger. We need to be stronger if we want to be more secure, even in Europe.

We will need to employ all of the nation’s means of power if we are to rise successfully to the challenges we face on the global scene, but one thing is perfectly clear to me: we will not be able to meet them through soft power alone, important though that is. We will need the capabilities of our Armed Forces—capabilities that we have progressively weakened in the name of financial retrenchment.

Life would be easier if we were able to identify the specific capabilities we will need to employ. We can certainly say that, for example, intelligence, Special Forces and cyberwarfare will feature heavily. However, the history of security and warfare tells us that we need to retain flexibility across the full spectrum of operations. Those who have predicted the demise of particular kinds of warfare have usually been proved wrong, sometimes in spectacular fashion. Even the famous horse/tank moment is often misunderstood. It was not a fundamental change in tactic, about the mobile application of power and shock action. It was, rather, about the ability of emerging technology to provide new and better ways of doing the same basic things. That is often a challenge for military thinkers. We therefore need to retain as wide a spectrum of military capability as we can manage, and sustain within it sufficient flexibility to be able to react successfully to the unexpected, because the unexpected is certainly what we will be called on to face.

Money was the overriding issue at the time of the last strategic defence and security review. The Government’s strategy was quickly to eliminate the structural deficit; everything was subservient to that aim. Defence was set a savings target of between 10% and 20% of its annual budget. The work of the defence review showed that the consequences of this would be unacceptable to the Government, even given their strategic objective. The final level of saving was between 7.5% and 8%. Even that level of reduction was impossible to achieve without introducing a degree of military strategic incoherence. The plan adopted by the Government was to restrict, as far as possible, the short-term damage, and to leave defence in a position in 2015 from which it could restore coherence. Crucially, the Government agreed—the Prime Minister confirmed this when he announced the outcome of the review—that this could be done only through real-terms increases in the defence budget in each of the years from 2015 onwards.

I want to be clear on this point. Although the required level of growth was not specified, it was quite clearly growth in the total budget. The subsequent announcement—that the MoD would assume, for planning purposes, a 1% annual increase in the equipment budget—was necessary to allow sensible long-term planning, but it was a subsidiary issue to the increase identified as necessary in the defence review. What has actually happened is that the defence budget has been reduced even further. Although in-year underspends allowed the MoD to make those savings, one has to wonder how much capability we have forgone as a result of them. Crucially, we have reduced the baseline against which future budget entitlements will be measured.

The result is that the level of defence spending in this country is already dangerously low. NATO has set 2% of GDP as the minimum that members should achieve. Most are well below this and I fear that we fail to meet the target ourselves if one strips out the additional cost of operations, which is supposed to be funded from the contingency reserve and not from the defence budget. Even in an era of continued austerity, we cannot allow this to continue. We should bear in mind the small percentage of national wealth that we are considering here, set against what is agreed to be the first responsibility of any Government. We should be setting Europe a good example in this regard, not a bad one.

We are shortly to host the next NATO summit. I believe that, in advance of that meeting, the leaders of all the major political parties should commit themselves to spending at least 2% of our GDP on defence. That would set a much-needed tone at the summit, and put the most important issue at the top of the agenda. Beyond that, the Government should face up to their responsibilities by delivering the necessary real-terms increases in the defence budget over the second half of this decade. If they do not, then they must acknowledge that the planned Future Force 2020 will be undeliverable; that there will have to be further serious reductions in our Armed Forces; that we have accepted a future of strategic shrinkage in which our international influence will be seriously diminished; and that the nature of this country will be fundamentally changed as a result. Anybody proposing such a dramatic shift in policy ought surely to make their intentions plain in advance, and to seek the specific sanction of the electorate for them.