British Armed Forces: Size and Strength
Debate between Nick Thomas-Symonds and Leo Docherty(6 years, 11 months ago)
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Leo Docherty (Aldershot) (Con)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered the size and strength of the British armed forces.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Dorries. I am pleased to have secured this important debate. I will speak briefly to allow colleagues the maximum opportunity to speak and intervene. It does not take the brains of an archbishop, a Royal Military Academy Sandhurst graduate or a Mons Officer Cadet School graduate to work out that the world is an increasingly dangerous place. We are dealing with not only the threat of transnational, cross-border terrorism, but the rise of cyber-conflict, possible nuclear conflict in the Korean peninsula and a resurgent Russia probing the eastern flank of NATO. The very direct threat posed by Russia in a state-on-state approach was starkly laid out by the Chief of the General Staff in an eloquent speech at the Royal United Services Institute on Monday.
After 15 years or so of engaging in expeditionary counter-insurgency operations—wars of choice—we have to reconcile ourselves to the fact that we have to have the capacity to deal with state-on-state conflict. That is a shift in attitude and approach that we have to grapple with. We are moving from an era of wars of choice to an era of wars of necessity. In terms of capability, we need to work back from that threat.
Nick Thomas-Symonds (Torfaen) (Lab)
The hon. Gentleman has made the case well for having sufficient capacity available to us. Does he therefore agree that we cannot have a situation where Army numbers remain below 80,000? Quite simply, we need a larger Army.
Leo Docherty
I entirely agree with the hon. Gentleman. We need hard power on a large scale. We need to be able to project hard military capability globally. Part of that is about having a large body of men and women. When I was serving in the Army 10 years ago, we had north of 100,000 soldiers. We need a large pool not only to have a critical mass, but to draw special forces and other critical capabilities.