Strategic Defence Review 2025

Viscount Stansgate Excerpts

Friday 18th July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Stansgate (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Robertson and his colleagues on the report that we are debating today. I congratulate my noble friend Lord McCabe on his maiden speech. If the House will allow me, I join the many other people who are so pleased to see my noble friend Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield back in his place. If nothing else, he always brings poetry to our proceedings.

In some ways, it is difficult to grasp the changes we are living through, but the SDR is nothing if not a wake-up call. It must be the start of a sustained debate within this country; I support the whole-of-society approach.

I belong to the generation born after the Second World War. I have lived all my life under the broad protective umbrella of the United States and the post-war international rules-based order, which is now changing before our very eyes. Everything is less certain than it was, and that includes Article 5.

I am also all too conscious of the sacrifices made by the generation above me that made that security possible. My own uncle was an RAF fighter pilot who was killed shortly after D-Day. In grief, my grandfather, who was an air commodore and a Member of this House, was driven to join RAF operations as a rear gunner until he was discovered and stopped. Of course, there have been many wars and conflicts in the decades since then. My first political memories were of Suez, and I remember, as a boy, seeing the headlines during the Cuban missile crisis, which was a time of extreme danger. It is a very old-fashioned view to think that nuclear weapons do not remain an extremely grave threat.

But the situation we face now is different. For the first time in my lifetime, we face the possibility of state-on-state war with a peer adversary. People generally—I include myself—have no real idea of what that would be like were it to occur. It certainly would not be a rerun of the wars we have seen in the past. The next war will not be won by bullets; it will be won by data. That is why things such as the digital targeting web, the cyber and electromagnetic command and even the so-called secret cloud will be so vital.

At the beginning of this year, when I was still a member of the Joint Committee on National Security Strategy, we agreed to conduct an inquiry into undersea cables. As my noble friend and others have remarked, an enormous proportion of all the world’s financial data—up to 95%—is sent by undersea cables. We know all about the attacks, which sometimes take place daily, the cables that have been cut and the cyberwarfare that is being conducted against us.

However, a real war would be absolutely catastrophic. A major attack would be aimed at destroying our energy capacity, our financial capacity to conduct transactions, and our communications, not to mention inflicting damage of a kind that would dwarf anything we have seen before. Social cohesion and social order might be at serious risk of collapse, which we did not see in World War II. The capacity for an enemy to spread disinformation, especially online, could utterly undercut the nation’s ability or willingness to carry on. If people could not communicate with each other, use their phones, get money out of machines or pay for anything by bank or credit cards, what would happen and how would people react?

I have a number of specific questions relating to the RAF, which my noble friend probably will not have time to cover in his reply. We are to acquire new F35A planes with nuclear capability; how will they be resourced? How will these new planes change the RAF’s approach to basing? Do we have enough early warning aircraft? Given the legendary Ukrainian attack on Russian airbases using drones, does the RAF have sufficient hardened shelters to protect our own aircraft, and do we have enough bases to ensure that we can distribute our forces evenly and operate effectively?

In the short time left, I want to raise the question of space, which my noble friend over there has already raised. I attended a briefing recently with the Air Chief Marshal, and he said that we cannot assume that we will have control over our airspace in any future conflict, and I think this applies even more to our control of space itself. In any future real war, the realm of space will be where the crucial battle will need to be fought and won.

Members may know that a committee of your Lordships’ House is looking into our engagement with space. Although we are not primarily looking at the military aspects, we have learned a very great deal. I am now of the view that space, together with cyberspace, would be the key domains were we to be engaged in a state-on-state war. If my noble friend can comment further on this, I would be very grateful. We have seen the effect of this in Ukraine.

Perhaps my noble friend can also give the House any official view from the Government on how integrated the new UK Space Command and cyberEM command are going to be and whether they think we need a sovereign launch capacity. I have run out of time, but if eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, this debate and the SDR will be very worthwhile.