Armed Forces

Lord Walker of Aldringham Excerpts

Thursday 7th September 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Walker of Aldringham (CB)]

My Lords, I also join in thanking the noble Lord, Lord Soames, for leading this debate so powerfully.

In a generation, the British soldier has fought across the Falkland Islands, delivering the combat power carried on his shoulders. He has steadfastly, and without favour, absorbed bullets, bombs, fire and venom in Northern Ireland for some 32 years. He has driven massed armour into the depths of a fortified enemy in a Middle Eastern desert, having calmly waited for it for 40 years on the north German plain. He has hunted terrorists in the Hindu Kush. He has kept his reputation in the Balkans, while others have lost theirs. He has snatched hostages from the swamps of Sierra Leone and the embassies of Kensington. He has fed refugees, slaughtered sheep, put out fires, guarded prisons, cleared domestic rubbish, driven tankers, built hospitals and fought floods.

That CV shows that our Armed Forces are required to support a wide range of national policies, from fighting a well-equipped army—such as that of Saddam Hussein—in high-intensity conflict, through counter insurgency and terrorism, to peace support operations and humanitarian relief. There is no reason to believe that these types of demands being placed on our Armed Forces will not continue. We cannot predict what the future will present us with but, as history demonstrates, it will certainly be unexpected.

Unfortunately, there is no one size fits all for equipping, manning and training an army for such a wide span of commitments. Our Army has been one optimised for the most difficult and complex form of warfare—we call it war-fighting. By this, I mean that it has been structured and trained to fight a war, equipped with the firepower, mobility and protection that is needed on the high-intensity battlefield and continually seeking the best available technology to ensure that it can orchestrate all these measures and exploit them to best effect, and having the resilience to provide for sustained losses.

War-fighting has been our Army’s engine; other operations are about gear selection. That means tanks, artillery pieces, armoured personnel carriers and attack helicopters, last used for real 10 years ago when we fought Saddam Hussein and very nearly used against the Serbs in Kosovo. There is no clearer demonstration of this potential need than the war between Russia and Ukraine. It is worth remembering that there remain some 80,000 operational tanks in the world, of which we have fewer than 160.

I have three final points. First, our seat at the highest political and military tables and the influence that we may wish to bring to bear on world events are absolutely predicated on our credibility as a nation that has serious, balanced, expeditionary war-fighting forces. Our capabilities, as we have heard, have already been called into question by many commentators and American generals. It will be no good preparing for the war that we want to fight; we should prepare for the war that we have to fight.

Secondly, the price of failure in a peace support operation in some far-flung place, as we have seen, will be painful but probably containable. The price of failure in something such as the Gulf War would most likely be catastrophic for the nation. This price would certainly be out of all proportion to the price of proper preparation beforehand.

Thirdly, in the United Kingdom , political will continues to be manifest in a policy-driven defence review—integrated, strategic or whatever—with a deliberate, judgment-based and scientific estimate of the level and range of military capability required to meet the extant will. The weakness of our Armed Forces lies not in their design but in the level of resources applied to them, as we have heard. Political will, force design and resource levels are simply not aligned. Defence bureaucracy is psychologically inclined to short-term pragmatism and does not invest sufficient energy in competing for the necessary resources. It is culturally adept at blurring the distinction between affordability and military efficacy.

We must establish a pure and simple method of gaining real visibility of this predicament and be prepared to expose the true military consequences of a failure to invest properly in our Armed Forces in a politically effective way. The existing processes, attitudes and schedules are not optimised to do this. Instead, they are geared to managing decline. We see this day by day and, if it continues, it will take a great deal of resources, time and money to regenerate our forces to the right level.