Army Restructuring: Future Soldier

Steve Baker Excerpts

Thursday 25th November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Mr Wallace]

I understand. The hon. Lady will know that Imphal barracks is already designated to close at the end of the decade, but she should also be pleased that the new 19 reserve brigade will be based in her constituency.

On soft power, we are creating eight battalions-worth of regiments that are designed to help in that space of security force assistance, training and resilience. They will go right up to the harder end, if that is what countries need, with Rangers doing training and enabling but also potentially fighting, or operating alongside those countries’ forces, if they have to. That is a lot of capability, and we see examples of that from our forces all over the world: I have seen the Royal Engineers in Sudan helping to build in areas where only soldiers can build because of the resilience required. That will not stop, and it is partly what is at the heart of our defence Command Paper, recognising that post-conflict and pre-conflict activities are as important as actual war fighting capability. That is really important, because it is how we avoid wars happening in the first place.

[Mr Steve Baker (Wycombe) (Con)]

Yesterday when I looked at the faces of young soldiers outside Parliament, I believe I saw a number of people who were haunted by their experiences. Will my right hon. Friend therefore make sure that in his people plan he develops our war fighting resilience by taking concrete steps to better equip members of our armed forces for what they will see on operations and better help them recover their mental health afterwards?

[Mr Wallace]

My hon. Friend makes an important point. What people want to do is changing, and so too is their own personal resilience; this is a different youth generation from mine, and we have to move as fast as we can to keep up with that. He is right that there will be people on tours such as Op Pitting who will face consequences in their mental health for decades to come; we have to be on top of that, and the Minister for Defence People and Veterans is setting about NHS improvement on mental health.

We also need to improve our training. I went up to Thetford last year and saw the troops planning for Mali, and indeed at that stage for Afghanistan. It was amazing to see how much better the training was even then compared with my day. We now use genuine citizens, or former citizens, of those countries to help train our troops in what the civilian population is like. In my day the local regiment turned up and pretended to be Iraqi or whatever, which did not usually work. We have to be more sophisticated about training now, and I will definitely take my hon. Friend’s suggestions on board.