"That is a fundamental point, so let me deal with it
briefly. We need to work from the assumption of three things. First, we
must agree that these things are threats. There is a huge debate within
the civil service, where some people are beginning to say, “Perhaps
failed states and terrorist groups are not really threats at all;
perhaps everything we have done in Afghanistan and Iraq was mistaken,
and we do not need to worry about what is happening in Libya, Iraq and
Syria.” Secondly, we need to assume that Britain wants to do something
and actually wishes to be a global power. There is another danger in
this whole debate, with people in Whitehall saying, “Perhaps this is
none of our business; perhaps these things are threats, but somebody
else such as the United States will deal with those threats for us”—a
freeloader problem. Thirdly and most importantly—this comes to the
centre of the strategy—we need to believe that we have a doctrine that
can deal with these things. We need to believe that we can deal with
them and that we have the capability to engage.
I
shall deal with resources needs separately. First, the threat posed by
Russia’s recent actions requires serious imagination. We have had
“reassurance measures”—the grisly jargon we produced in Wales,
essentially to talk about setting up a high-readiness joint taskforce,
about exercising in NATO at a divisional level and about air policing
operations. Those things need to be resourced. It will be surprisingly
difficult in practice to have that very high-readiness joint taskforce,
with all its enablers in place and functioning, particularly when some
of the framework nations are still insisting that they can take their
forces out of that very high-readiness joint taskforce and deploy them
somewhere else such as in the Central African Republic.
It
is much more than that, however. This House will have heard that we
need to invest. Here, however, the idea that flat real plus 1% is
somehow going to be enough cannot be the case if we are serious about
the threats. Let me run through some of the requirements. Maritime
surveillance is an obvious one, so there is no point debating it here
today. Chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear capacity is
another. Any Members present who were in the armed forces will remember
training, walking around in NBC suits and thinking about how to deal
with that kind of threat. All that capacity has gone out the window. We
do not do that any more, because we have been fighting for nearly 15
years against lightly-armed insurgents, and most of our planning was
based on counter-insurgency warfare operations that did not require that
kind of training.
Ballistic missile defence is a
third requirement. If we are serious about taking on a country such as
Russia, which has tactical nuclear weapons as part of its normal
operational doctrine, we need ballistic missile defence. That will
probably mean—I do not want to pre-empt procurement decisions made by
the Ministry—finding some way of buying into an existing US system and
persuading the US to locate it not just in continental Europe, but in
the United Kingdom.
If we look at our Navy, we
find that it is currently down to 19 frigates and destroyers. That is
pretty radical. What we have heard in the other place from Lord Astor is
that our attrition calculations are currently zero. That means that we
function on the assumption that we are not going to lose any of these
frigates or destroyers. Lord Astor said that we have not lost any of
those things since the Falklands war, so we do not need to worry about
that. Of course, the Falklands war was the last time that we were
fighting a navy, so it does not provide a basis for making this sort of
calculation if we are thinking about taking on Russia.
It
is the same for the Royal Air Force. As we move down to just seven
squadrons, our attrition calculations are again pretty close to zero. If
we are serious about carriers, we need to realise that they cost a lot
of money. If we are to put one carrier at sea, we need to think about
how to resupply it and how to get the fuel and weapons to it. The fuel
and weaponry supply vessels will be moving along at 9 knots, which poses
a huge challenge to us. We need to work out where to get the money to
buy the planes to put on that carrier. How can we have a comprehensive
carrier strike capacity? We have not yet paid for it.
Then
there is the Army. If we are thinking about manoeuvre warfare again, it
amounts to a huge spending commitment. It means thinking about heavy
armour and whether we want to relocate the Royal Air Force at an Army
headquarters level rather than two levels up. It means wide water
bridging capacity and all the things that any Members present who
operated during the NATO era will be able to think of much better than
me.
Then there is ambiguous warfare. If we are
thinking about dealing with Russia, we are going to have to think about
what to do on cyber, information operations, strategic communications;
and we will need to think about whether we have the special forces
capacity right the way around the edge of Russia to deal with the
phenomenon of these “green men” in these insurgency operations. We need
the knowledge of places such as Narva in Estonia.
That
is the easy stuff. That is before we get on to the concurrent threats,
mentioned by the hon. Member for Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney. If we in
this country take seriously the idea that we care about threats from
failed states, terrorists and Islamist groups, we are going to have to
think about northern Nigeria, Libya and Yemen, and we are going to have
to think much more seriously about Syria and Iraq. We are going to have
to think about continuing to support Afghanistan and, potentially,
Pakistan, and if we do not do something about these places now as a
coalition, it is just going to get worse. We will be reporting back to
the House in two years’ time, and the Nigerian problem will have spread
into Chad and Niger; the Libyan problem will have re-exploded back into
Mali; Syria and Iraq will be destabilising Lebanon and Jordan even more
profoundly than they are now.
Unfortunately, in
dealing with these problems, we cannot base what we do on the Future
Force 2020 structure. That was about the enduring stabilisation
operations and heavy investment in counter-insurgency operations, with
100,000 people retained for a decade or more. That works if we have only
one of these problems, but it simply does not work if we are dealing
with a dozen of them at one time. So we need a much lighter, smarter
approach to dealing with these countries. That will mean moving out of
the world view of “one at a time” and not losing confidence. That is
central; it cannot be about despair. It is about recognising that in
Bosnia and Sierra Leone, we did these things quite well, but that if we
are serious about them, we are going to have to upgrade our special
forces and potentially look at—again, these are just ideas—type 2
special forces of the “green beret” type that they have in the United
States. We may need to develop the idea of the Chief of the General
Staff on defence engagement, but much more ambitiously, much more
imaginatively and much more aggressively, including pre-posting officers
into a dozen countries. We may be talking about 50 or 100 officers at a
time, not about just one defence attaché covering three Baltic
countries, and we may need to rethink the whole force structure that
lies behind that.
I have run out of time, so let
me say a few things in conclusion. I have sketched out a world which,
as was made clear by the hon. Member for Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney, is
very different now. It is different in terms of the conventional threat,
but—and this is something that we have only touched on so far—it is,
above all, different in terms of the concurrent threats that are
emerging from all the fragile states. We have not begun to think those
through. We have not begun to consider the deep implications of the
skills set, the force structures and the capacity that we would need in
order to deal with those states simultaneously.
The
2% of GDP matters for several reasons. First, we can deal with these
problems only as a coalition, because they are beyond the sort of
problems that Britain can deal with on its own. The 2% matters because
it is a way of raising the commitment of more than 20 NATO countries to
matching that expenditure themselves. It essential to keep the United
States bound into the system, because it is currently spending 70% of
the NATO money. The President, the chief of the United States army, and
the United States ambassador to the United Nations have all made it
clear that they view the 2% as a sign of seriousness and of Britain’s
commitment to keep the United States involved. Above all, however, the
2% is needed because the threats are real. The world is genuinely
becoming more dangerous, and Britain cannot be a freeloader.
One
of the sad aspects of what I feel is happening is our growing obsession
with kit. People stand up and list all the different bits of kit that
we have bought, but they do not intend ever to use it. They are
freeloading on the idea that Britain will never act alone, that the
United States will somehow fill in all the gaps, and that therefore we
do not need to be serious about what we are actually doing in countries
such as Libya. The challenge to Ministers should be, “Explain how we are
to deal with a situation like the one in Libya. Explain what we are
going to do in Yemen and northern Nigeria. Explain how this kit will
really prevent us from letting the Russians into Mariupol.” Do we care
about those issues, or are we creating an isolationist world view?"
