Strategic Defence and Security Review — Motion to Take Note

Part of the debate – in the House of Lords at 12:05 pm on 12 November 2010.

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Photo of Lord Boyce Lord Boyce Crossbench 12:05, 12 November 2010

My Lords, I declare an interest as a non-executive director of WS Atkins plc and other interests as in the register, including pro bono appointments in various service charities and organisations. I intend to concentrate on the defence part of the SDSR but, in passing, I welcome the attempt, under the umbrella of the national security strategy, to get some sort of order among the plethora of departments and committees dealing with various aspects of our security. It will certainly be good to see some tidying up of the shambolic and Byzantine network and, some might say, the spaghetti-like structure for security and defence that has been in place for the past few years.

So far as defence is concerned, I remain absolutely unable to reconcile the word "strategic" with what has emerged in the review, notwithstanding the country's economic difficulties. This has been a cost-cutting exercise, although I congratulate the Secretary of State for Defence on his damage limitation efforts with respect to the sort of savings that some parts of the Government, notably the Treasury, were after. The Treasury's empathy and understanding of defence are probably best captured by the Chancellor referring to aircraft carriers as "those things" in a TV interview.

With an effective cut in the defence budget of 17.5 per cent-not the headline figure of 7.5 per cent that is bandied around by those trying to cloak the true nature of the cuts-the Prime Minister's words that the security of our country is the first priority of the Government ring very hollow, as does his expectation that we should retain a prominent position in terms of global influence. In particular, I challenge the complacency of the statement that a defence budget-it now includes the cost of the Trident replacement, thereby, by the way, unravelling the promise of both main parties in the 2007 White Paper-of 2 per cent of GDP meets NATO targets. Only a few months ago, the then Opposition rightly railed against the then Government about the inadequacy of a defence budget of only 2.3 per cent to meet our strategic security needs. The world has certainly not become less dangerous since then and there is no security justification for certain of the proposed cuts in our defence capabilities.

Turning to some of the detail of the defence review's conclusions, I am sure that noble Lords would like to bear a thought for the 17,000 or so uniformed people who are to be axed-that is, service men and service women who have put their country first and their lives second. The fine-sounding words about the military covenant in the review sound cynical to me. By the way, lest anyone should think that only our outstanding soldiers have been in Iraq and Afghanistan in the past 9 years, I should say that there have been, and are, plenty of sailors, marines and airmen on the ground. The Royal Navy is the only remaining UK force in Iraq, for example. Next year, once again, the Royal Navy with its Royal Marines will constitute more than one-third of our commitment on the ground in Afghanistan.

I am sure that great resentment will have been felt by all our uniformed personnel about the comment in the review that manpower savings will be taken from non-front-line service personnel. Certainly in the Royal Navy everyone is required to serve on the front line. I ask the Minister for reassurance that, in the looming redundancy programme, our sailors, marines, soldiers and airmen are not going to be got rid of with the bare minimum pay-off that I am absolutely certain the Treasury would like to inflict. Incidentally, I suspect that, like me, our uniformed personnel must find it curious that the MoD Civil Service will have no compulsory redundancy programme.

Turning to capabilities, I would like to focus on maritime. I start by applauding the Defence Secretary for supporting so strongly the need to retain a balanced Navy on which we can build in better times. However, despite his best efforts, I believe that the Navy will be too depleted to be able to deliver all that history has shown might be expected of it and which can be expected again. It will be too depleted to be able to meet the aspirations of global influence that the national security strategy would have us deliver and too depleted to be able to contribute sensibly to every one of the seven military tasks laid out in the review. Incidentally, the Navy is the only service that is so obligated.

In particular, a destroyer frigate force level of 19, which I understand will be reached in just five months' time with the paying off of our four very capable Type 22 frigates by next April, is just too small. I suspect that we will dip below that number before 2020, as Type 23s have to start paying off. Meanwhile, fewer ships should mean fewer tasks, not least because the fleet is already overstretched to meet its current operational commitments. Will the Minister say which commitments are going to be given up or, at the very least, if such details are not yet thought through, will he assure the House that the fleet load will be reduced? I should add that that reduced role will do nothing for our international standing and influence.

Let me touch on the carrier decision; your Lordships would be surprised if I did not. The disposal of Harriers, which other speakers have mentioned, will, notwithstanding my earlier comment, cause the Royal Navy to be unbalanced in the medium term. First, the underlying rationale in the review for disposing of this aircraft, which gives the carrier its strike capability until the introduction of the Joint Strike Fighter, is this:

"The Government believes it is right for the UK to retain, in the long term, the capability that only aircraft carriers can provide-the ability to deploy airpower from anywhere in the world, without the need for friendly air bases on land. In the short term, there are few circumstances we can envisage where the ability to deploy airpower from the sea will be essential".

What a desperate expression of hope over bitter experience. The people serving on the National Security Council must have been asleep for the past dozen years or so.

We have no problem today because we have no emerging crisis. That can change in days, as it did for Sierra Leone, as it did in 2001 and as it did in 2003, to take the most recent significant examples where some so-called friends and allies, let alone neutrals, prevaricated endlessly over or even denied our overflying rights and host-nation support. We cannot even fly direct from Cyprus to Kandahar today. The review goes on to say,

"that is why we have taken the decision to retire the Harriers early", but that absolutely does not stand up to any serious analysis or judgment of history. The reason, pure and simple, is to save money. The Government should have the moral courage to say so and admit to the enormous gamble that they are taking.

Secondly, the Harrier GR9 is a relatively modern aircraft, not 40 years old as deviously implied in the review. It is significantly more modern than the Tornado-for all its virtues mentioned by my noble and gallant friend Lord Craig-against which it is compared and which will cost around £2.5 billion to modernise. So far as the close air support role in Afghanistan is concerned, if you speak to those on the ground at the very sharp end, especially the forward air controllers, as I have done recently, there is no question but that the Harrier is their aircraft of choice, not least because of its speed of response and reliability. Perhaps the noble Lord, Lord Lee, was right to say that we need both the Harrier and the Tornado in the interim before 2020.

Thirdly, will the Minister explain how, without "Ark Royal" and the Harrier force, we are to retain enough of the Navy's current carrier operators and pilots to keep alive the critical and essential expertise that will allow us safely to re-establish a UK carrier strike capability in 2020? In particular, will he provide an unequivocal reassurance that the future Joint Strike Fighter force will be manned by both Royal Navy and Royal Air Force pilots?

Shifting to the deterrent, I generally welcome the decisions in the paper, especially the commitment to continuous at-sea deterrence and ballistic launched missiles. Any other course of action simply will not provide a truly invulnerable and totally assured strategic deterrent. However, as someone scarred by the trials and tribulations of managing ageing nuclear submarines, I have serious misgivings about extending further the lives of the Trident class. Of course, Ministers will not have to go to sea in them when they are ancient-the submarines, that is, not the Ministers. I predict difficult times ahead when those submarines are past their proper sell-by date.

I conclude by saying that many aspects of this review have resonance with the ill fated Thatcher-Nott review of 1981, the Options for Change review of 1991 and the defence costs studies of the early 1990s. We can but hope that we are not once again assailed by events shortly after these reviews, as has happened before, showing how ill advised they were. We can but hope that we are spared the time for the Prime Minister to realise his "own strong view", articulated in his Statement on the SDSR in the other place, that we,

"will require year-on-year real-terms growth in the defence budget in the years beyond 2015".-[Hansard, Commons, 19/10/10; col. 799.]

That is, as I say, assuming that we are spared until then.