Strength of the UK’s Armed Forces

Tobias Ellwood Excerpts

Wednesday 14th April 2021 Commons Chamber

[The Minister for the Armed Forces (James Heappey)]

I thank the shadow Secretary of State for the tribute he paid to the Duke of Edinburgh—one with which I very much agree, and I know all of my colleagues in the Ministry of Defence do too. The military are taking great pride in their preparations for his funeral on Saturday, where they hope to give him the send-off he deserves.

I welcome this debate. We live in a new age of systemic competition where information, data and technology shape conflict every bit as much as ships, tanks and fighter jets. Military hardware can be undermined by cyber-attacks or by the severing of undersea cables, while the use of proxy forces and other covert and deniable activities makes it harder to determine when the threshold of war has been crossed. So we have to think about defence differently.

“The Integrated Operating Concept 2025”, published last year, changes the way we think about our response to conflict. No longer can we have a contingent force sat in the UK waiting for the fight. Instead we must be operating persistently around the globe in forging partnerships, building capacity, tackling insecurity and competing with our adversaries. Make no mistake, however: we recognise that we cannot be upstream of every potential conflict and that we must therefore not only be able to operate but able to fight.

We can all be nostalgic over the force structures that won the wars of yesteryear. Undoubtedly there is a comfort in looking out of the window and seeing row upon row of the capabilities that have kept us safe in the past. But as surely as hoof became wheel and sail gave way to steam, we should all be clear that technology is moving on quickly and industrial capabilities will no longer get the job done alone. We have a duty to the British men and women of our armed forces not to indulge in a game of military bingo, obsessed with the metrics of previous conflicts. Instead we must keep adapting to the threat, because the reality is that if we fail to change, we will be defeated.

[Mr Tobias Ellwood (Bournemouth East) (Con)]

My hon. Friend talks about adapting to the threat. We have the technological advantage in Afghanistan, yet Afghanistan has been seen as a failure—something he is more familiar with than many in this House. Now that the United States has declared that it is going to withdraw its troops, could he confirm what will happen to the British troops that are based there?

[James Heappey]

As the shadow Secretary of State noted, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State is not able to respond to this debate in person because he is at the meeting of the North Atlantic Council, along with my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary. The decisions on this are being taken this afternoon in Brussels. I hope that my right hon. Friend will forgive me if I do not pre-empt that, but I am certain that either the Defence Secretary or the Foreign Secretary will want to notify the House with appropriate urgency if and when such a decision has been made.

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[James Heappey]

I thank my right hon. and gallant Friend for his intervention, but I do not agree with his analysis. In this part of my speech I am setting out the conventional war-fighting capabilities because the shadow Secretary of State set out a very pessimistic view of what they would be, but the reality is that the key change being made through the integrated review and Defence Command Paper is to enhance the capabilities my right hon. Friend rightly stresses will be in most demand as we address the challenges of tomorrow, and they are the ones that exist below the threshold of conflict. If he will indulge me, in a couple of minutes he will hear some of the things that I think might answer his question in more detail.

That is why we are investing heavily in the national cyber force, bringing together the resources of the Ministry of Defence and the intelligence community to deceive, degrade, deny, disrupt and destroy targets in and through cyber-space. It is also why we have established a new space command that will enhance our military surveillance and communication capabilities from space, assist in the co-ordination of commercial space operations and lead the development of new low and high orbit capabilities.

Moreover, we know that the threats to UK interests, both in space and in cyberspace, are not just from ones and zeroes. Our adversaries are investing in capabilities that put our undersea fibre-optic cables and our satellites at physical risk as well, so we need the ability to protect and defend our interests in the depths of the oceans and in the heights of space.

Nor are we alone in seeking to modernise. Our adversaries as well as our allies are making rapid headway, and some of the most cutting-edge capabilities are now commercially available, meaning that the highest grade technology is no longer the preserve of the best resourced militaries. So we are investing to stay ahead of the curve and recover our technological edge, putting aside at least £6.6 billion for research and development to supercharge innovation in the next generation of disruptive capabilities, from directed energy weapons to swarming drones.

But it is not just about what you’ve got; it is what you do with it. I have already set out the vision of the integrated operating concept, and over the next year or two the Ministry of Defence will be expanding our forward presence around the world as we shift from a contingent force waiting for the fight to one that operates and competes constantly. In the land domain, some of our most effective work is with small specialised infantry teams developing the capacity of partner forces in the parts of the world that cause us concern. We are reinforcing that success through the creation of the special operations-capable rangers and thus doubling the size of our partnering force. Our fighting brigades, meanwhile, will move to higher readiness so that they can deploy and operate more quickly. They will also gain capabilities that allow them to engage their enemy at greater range, thus reflecting the lessons on close combat learned from recent conflicts in northern Syria and Nagorno-Karabakh.

[Mr Ellwood]

I need to clarify the difference between what the rangers will do and what our Royal Marines do, because the Royal Marines are concerned that they are being put out of a job. Everything that my hon. Friend has just described could be done by the Royal Marines. Let us take an example in Mozambique. Were we to put this rangers brigade in, who would replace them after five or six months? Where is the endurance capability that our armed forces need to provide?

[James Heappey]

I am afraid that my right hon. Friend is not right in what he thinks the rangers will do. The distinction is that 16 Air Assault, the Parachute Regiment and 3 Commando Brigade, as high-readiness contingent forces who are there to fight at short notice in hostile contested environments such as the ones he describes, still do exactly that from the air or the sea, depending on whether it is 16 Air Assault or 3 Commando. The rangers will be a special operations-capable partnering force designed to train, advise, assist and accompany partner forces in conflicts around the world, not to be a fighting force in and of themselves. That distinction is one that we have observed from the success of the US Green Berets, which have been very successful, and we are looking forward to having that as part of the toolkit for the UK armed forces in the future.

Needless to say, in increasing readiness and being able to operate more quickly, there is still a requirement for war-fighting mass, and that leads to a long overdue revisiting of what we ask of our reservists. I am very much looking forward to the publication of the reserve forces 2030 review, and I am confident that in the discussion that follows we will come out with an exciting proposition of what it means to serve in the reserve and what value that can add as we generate war-fighting mass.

In the air, we have created a joint squadron with Qatar, and we are looking at how this concept can be extended further with other partner air forces, as well as offering world-leading flying training to helicopter and fast jet pilots from our allies around the world. Meanwhile, investment in the P-8 maritime patrol aircraft, in the E-7 airborne command and control, in the Protector uncrewed surveillance and strike platform and in a network of airfields from which we can operate the full range of RAF capabilities, enhances our capacity to understand our adversaries, find them quickly and strike them wherever they are, all around the globe.

At sea, we have had forward deployed ships in the Caribbean and the Falklands for a number of years, and I can announce to the House that last week HMS Trent arrived in Gibraltar, where she will now be permanently based in order to service the UK’s interests in both the Mediterranean and the Gulf of Guinea. Later in the year, a further offshore patrol vessel will sail for the Indo-Pacific, where she will also be permanently forward based. The maritime forward presence is further enhanced by the restoration of our high-readiness global carrier strike capability and the new littoral response groups providing an at-sea high readiness amphibious response force on NATO’s northern and southern flanks.

However, let there be no misunderstanding: we are clear-eyed on the realities of geography. We are a Euro-Atlantic power and deeply invested in the security of Europe. NATO is the cornerstone of our national security, so our priority is our partnership with other Euro-Atlantic nations and the security of our own backyard, but it is naive in the extreme to think that that means we can ignore insecurity and instability on Europe’s southern flank in sub-Saharan Africa and the middle east.

The UK interest is threatened by violent extremism in the Sahel, the Lake Chad basin and the horn of Africa, and so too is it threatened by Russian proxies massing in Libya and Syria, but those are not problems that would be solved by 10,000 troops on the ground in any one of those places. The lessons of the last two decades show that we must work intelligently to tackle instability upstream and through regional partners. We simply cannot muscle our way to a solution in those places with all-out hard power. Our contribution on those conflicts in the future must be smarter and must develop a capability that will endure even after our mission is inevitably over.

We should also be clear that meeting our global trading ambitions requires both the capacity and the will to protect our sea lines of communication and the wider UK interests in the Indo-Pacific. The Opposition have wrongly characterised that as a switch in emphasis from the Euro-Atlantic to the Indo-Pacific. Instead, it is a recognition that we have the capability, the capacity and the political will to flex hard power into a part of the world where the UK’s strategic interest is growing quickly, so that we can strengthen our alliances, protect our interests and promote adherence to a rules-based international system.

The integrated review and the Defence Command Paper represent the boldest change in foreign, defence and security policy for 30 years, and it is entirely right that we are here debating them today. I know that there is disagreement on both sides of the House about some of the judgments that we have made, but the requirement is to produce a force that is credible: one that can actually fight in the complex and highly digitised battlespace of tomorrow. Some capabilities have run their course, and there can be no room for sentiment in keeping them when they simply are not relevant any more.

Ultimately, this all comes down to two key questions: first, are we offering the men and women of our armed forces exciting opportunities and the equipment they deserve; and secondly, and most important, does all this make the UK safer? I have already looked servicemen and women in the eye and explained to them our vision for our armed forces and the way they will operate, and so too have my ministerial colleagues and the senior military leaderships of all three services. Our people get this: they understand the need for change, and they want it. The reality is that they can see, and I can see, that because of this transformation, our armed forces will be stronger, more capable and therefore better able to protect our country in the decades ahead.

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[Mr Tobias Ellwood (Bournemouth East) (Con)]

I will not tire of saying this, but I feel there is a 1930s feel to the world today. The threat picture continues to grow, diversify and become more complex. We live in extremely dangerous times, and the integrated review confirms that—as did the Prime Minister when he answered questions at the Liaison Committee recently. Russia and China will continue to become more assertive; democracy will continue to decline across the world; the new domains of cyber and space pose ever greater challenges to our security, as does the threat from terrorism, not just in the middle east but now in Afghanistan and Africa; and the wider consequences of climate change will only grow.

During the cold war, defence spending was at 4% of GDP. Few would disagree that the threats today are different, but they are arguably more dangerous and more unpredictable, yet we remain on a peacetime budget of just 2.2%. It is simply impossible for the MOD to meet all the obligations spelled out in the integrated review, hence the sweeping cuts that are now taking place across our defence capabilities, something that has not gone unnoticed by either our allies or our adversaries.

The new US Defence Secretary will shortly be in town. I am sure that No. 10 will gloss over General Austin’s decision to visit Berlin and Brussels before London. We should read the signals: our special relationship requires work. General Austin’s public message in London is likely to be: “Well done on the integrated review. We like the global Britain thing and we welcome your investment in special forces, cyber and space resilience.” But in private, he will be more candid and is likely to say something very different: “Your Navy is now too small. Don’t cut your tanks, armoured fighting vehicles and 10,000 troops; you might be needing them sooner than you think. And please don’t reduce the F-35 order from 138 originally down to 48.” Why? Because the next decade is going to become very busy indeed.

Indeed, look at what the integrated review tries to achieve—help shape the international world order and deploy UK soft power; be a force for good for human rights; tilt to the Indo-Pacific; step up in Africa and the Gulf; lead NATO in Europe; stand up to China’s competition and Russia’s aggression, and create a space force and invest in cyber resilience. That is a formidable charge that we simply cannot achieve under a peacetime defence budget of just 2%, so I have huge sympathy with my hon. Friend the Minister for the Armed Forces, who is in the invidious position of having to make such tough decisions. We have heard about the impact: cuts to our frigates, with capability gaps because the replacement equipment is not ready in time, and similar effects on our land warfare capability and the RAF.

However we look at it, this is a dramatic cut in our conventional defence posture that will limit the UK’s options in stepping forward to assist in conflict prevention, stabilisation, peacekeeping and nation-building skills—things that we have been so good at in the past. I make it very clear that the real threat will come from China—not directly through going to war, but through our being nudged out from favoured nation status across the world. We need to re-engage with our allies, and that requires force presence and upstream engagement. We can do it only with the kind of hard power and the size of force that we had during the cold war.