My Lords, after the election in July, I was asked by the Secretary of State for Defence and the Prime Minister to lead a team of three to do a unique strategic defence review, working with, but not to, the Ministry of Defence. I was delighted—I think that is the word—to accept this task. I am here today to give Members of this House the opportunity to offer a view on what should be in that review and how Members of the House might want it to conclude.
This debate today will add to and contribute to the 14,500 submissions made so far to the secretariat of the review. They have come from the services themselves, from other government departments, from academia, from think tanks, from industry, from our allies and from the public. It is, quite frankly, an unprecedented exercise in participation in one of the most important issues of our time. I am working on this historic endeavour, as reviewer, with General Sir Richard Barrons, who was the chief of Joint Forces and previously deputy Chief of the Defence Staff, and we have been joined by Dr Fiona Hill, formerly a senior official with the United States National Security Council and presently chancellor of the University of Durham.
We are the three reviewers, but we have been assisted in this exercise by a defence review team of six experts, including an assistant Secretary-General of NATO, and by Sir Jeremy Quin, the well-regarded and well-respected former Conservative Defence Minister and former chair of the Commons Defence Select Committee. This is, therefore, emphatically not a Labour defence review; it is the British effort to ensure that the United Kingdom is secure at home and strong abroad. Its terms of reference and the instructions to the review have been publicised and are on the GOV.UK website. I am sure that all Members of the House have carefully consulted them all before the session this afternoon.
As noble Lords will know, this is not the first strategic defence review that I have led. I did it in 1997 and 1998, which was, after all, only 26 years ago. It is worth reflecting that at that time we had 20,000 troops either in Northern Ireland or preparing to be in Northern Ireland. We had just signed the NATO-Russia Founding Act—I still have the cufflinks that were made to commemorate that—China was in the shadows and globalisation was hailed as a prosperity machine. There was no perceived danger to the British homeland at that point. That world has gone and it has gone for ever. So too have the subsequent worlds that were looked at and examined by reviews since then.
I have been reminding people that, when I concluded the review, I said that if it was a success it would be known as the SDR 1998, but that if it was a failure it would be known as the Robertson review. I am delighted to announce that it is commonly—universally—known as the SDR 1998.
This country now has to contend with a volatile and complex world of great power competition, with a war in Europe initiated unprovoked against a peaceful neighbour by a permanent member of the UN Security Council, with a horrific conflict ongoing in the Middle East and with enduring challenges to do with climate, grey zone attacks, nuclear proliferation, global inequality and greater mineral competition—and from the same failed and fragile states. It is a formidable cocktail for us to contend with.
My Lords, it is a first-class idea that we should have this opportunity for import from your Lordships, with all the enormous experience here, into the review before it happens, rather than waiting until it has happened and then moaning that they left out this or that bit that they should have put in. We may still moan at the end, because some of us moan all the time, but this is a very good way of approaching it and I congratulate the Government on doing it this way. I congratulate them on choosing the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, to chair it; he has assembled an extremely impressive team around him. This is a very good set of minds applying to a very difficult, disorganised and expanding concept of what on earth “defence” is and what we are trying to defend in a constantly changing world.
As the noble Lord said, it is the fifth strategic defence review this century if you include the 1998 review, which was modified in 2002. If you add in the integrated reviews we have had in recent years—there was one in 2021 and then the refresh review, and I have no doubt that another refresh review is being prepared now—we get the picture that there is a continuously changing platform. Technology is racing ahead at such an intense speed in the matter of defence and the conduct of war and battle, so we need to be almost constantly on the train. I have no doubt at all that, in a year or two, we will need to come back to this again—and then again—to keep up with the enormous technological advances taking place. We read about one almost every week. Last week it was explosives in pagers and exploding telephones; next week it will be something else in that region.
I take this as an opportunity for us all not so much to go over the obvious, central points—which the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, quite rightly touched on, with NATO as a bedrock—but to put in our own thoughts and hopes about particular issues that we would like to focus on and that might just be overlooked if we did not give them a little nudge. That is all I will do in my few minutes.
My Lords, one of the early and welcome announcements by Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer was that we were to have a new strategic defence review, and we are all gratified that the SDR is being led by the noble Lord, Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, to whom we are indebted for the debate today and for his wonderful introduction to it. He brings a great range of experience, as we all know.
I have previously appealed to the noble Lord in your Lordships’ House to see this review of defence in its widest sense, and I do so again today. There will, necessarily, be a focus on matériel, men and money, and this is right. We need to look at our military resources to see what we have and what we need in a world where the character of war is changing rapidly, as we see in the conduct of the war in Ukraine. I refer noble Lords to the International Relations and Defence Committee’s recently published report Ukraine: A Wake-up Call. It is a very good report. I will not repeat a lot of what it says because I know it has already been sent to the noble Lord, and indeed he played his own part in the earlier drafts of the report, so I know he is familiar with it.
Contrary to a lot of the writing from 10 or 15 years ago about new wars, the old forms of warfare have not disappeared—they are still there. It is rather the case that new ones have sprung into significance in addition to the old ones. Drone warfare, to which the noble Lord, Lord Howell of Guildford, just referred, has taken a dramatically increased significance, and our procurement must take this into account. However, as in some areas, bigger and more sophisticated is not always better. Our US allies, for example, have been using $2 million missiles to take out drones sent by the Houthis in Yemen at $2,000 a time. That is just not an economically viable strategy.
Our Ukrainian friends, too, have used ingenious tactics to make up for limited resources, not just in converting off-the-shelf drones for military use but, for example, in packing an old Cessna plane with explosives and flying it into Russia to explode in an oil terminal. They were aided by the low radar profile of this old plane, as the Russians designed their defences to deal with the more sophisticated, long-range, high-tech US missiles that they had been expecting. We need to be creative and imaginative—in a different way, of course—as well as to become more efficient and effective in our procurement.
My Lords, I, too, am grateful for the opportunity to debate the strategic defence review that the noble Lord, Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, is leading for the Government. I will start by raising a point that is formally outwith his remit but is fundamental to the issues that he is addressing—the defence budget. NATO has calculated that for its members to contribute military capabilities adequate to the challenges that the alliance now faces, they will need to spend around 3.7% of GDP on defence. Even if NATO has overdone things a bit—it is not at all clear that it has—it is certainly the case that investment in defence needs to be above 3% of GDP, not the 2.5% that the Government say that they aspire to but for which they have not so far set out a firm plan. It is worth saying that 3% of GDP for the UK, allowing for all the accounting changes that have taken place in recent years, would not be much more than we were spending in 2010, when Europe was not facing a severe threat from Russia. It is important to make this point today because, if the issue is not addressed, the current defence review would be like someone deciding whether to buy two or three fire extinguishers while the building is burning around their ears.
This dichotomy is thrown into stark relief when one looks at the substantive issues that the review will need to address. A good starting point is the recent report from your Lordships’ International Relations and Defence Committee on the implications of the Ukraine war for UK defence, to which the noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, has referred. It is a good analysis and my only real criticism is that the compelling chapter on the importance of building mass focuses almost exclusively on the British Army, whereas the shortcomings in this area are being felt across all three armed services. On current plans, for example, the UK will have only three combat air squadrons by 2040—that would not even have filled one main operating base in my day. Given the lessons from Ukraine about the importance of air power, can anyone really think that this is acceptable? Numbers of airborne early warning and control aircraft are also woefully inadequate. In the case of the Royal Navy, the operational availability of nuclear attack submarines verges on the derisory. Even before our donations to Ukraine, stocks of weapons came nowhere near what even the most optimistic observer could regard as satisfactory. I could cite many other examples.
My Lords, we are all aware that threats to global stability are greater and more unpredictable than at any time for several decades, and the SDR will, I am sure, lay them out very clearly and starkly. That is of course much easier to do than to articulate what it means for the UK, and what action we should take, to ensure the survival, safety, security and wealth of our nation and people into the future. How should we position ourselves?
The SDR has to identify how we see our position in the world and what we should be doing. We are presently a medium-sized world power: the sixth-richest nation in the world, with nuclear weapons and 14 overseas territories, and a permanent member of the UN Security Council. We still run global merchant shipping from London. We are the major European investor in south Asia, south-east Asia and the Pacific Rim, with consequent benefits for our balance of payments. All this needs protection and looking after. Successive Prime Ministers have been able to walk the world stage, being listened to and courted for alliance membership et cetera, because of our military power and not our considerable soft power. This is no longer the case; defence has been systematically underfunded for many years. Everyone recognises that our forces are hollowed out.
The 1998 SDR produced by my noble friend Lord Robertson was the best of the many produced since the end of the Cold War. It identified a force structure and the alliances required to fulfil what was seen as needed to counter the threats that our nation faced at the time, and it did that very well. It very quickly ceased being fully funded. I was successively Chief of Defence Intelligence, Commander-in-Chief Fleet and First Sea Lord from 1998 to 2006, and I had to wrestle with the problems that caused. I got a bollocking, in fact, from my political masters because I said to the media that a ship could be in only one place at one time. This was in reaction to the fact that our order of 12 45s was reduced to six and we were not going to order any more frigates. My goodness me, how we would love to have them now, with events in the Red Sea and around the world. Decisions made in defence, of course, have a long-term effect and we always need to be aware of that. Numbers have strength in themselves.
My Lords, when I spoke in the foreign policy and defence debate on the gracious Speech a few weeks ago, I welcomed the Government’s intention to hold a strategic defence review and to do so quickly. I remarked on the nature of the three defence reviews of which I had the most intimate knowledge—those of 2010, 2015 and 2020—and offered that those three reviews had three things in common.
First, they all had a superficially compelling narrative, one that gave a fairly sobering analysis of the increasing risks to the stability of the world order and the growing diversity of both the defence and security challenges to that order. The second thing was the reality of government austerity. All three reviews were ultimately the product of financial, rather than geostrategic, reality. The third thing, therefore, was that all three reviews delivered a delusion that various alchemies—modernisation, efficiency, technological superiority and fusion doctrine—somehow facilitated an ability to take acceptable risk because, in the end, everything would turn out all right and be okay.
The result of these serial delusions has now been exposed. The International Relations and Defence Committee’s recent report on the lessons for UK defence from Ukraine, brutally but fairly, lays bare the somewhat alarming state of not just our Armed Forces but the machinery of government, the defence industry and wider society’s ability to deter or sustain a conventional war at scale.
The defence review currently under way cannot, therefore, come quickly enough, but it needs to be a review quite unlike its most recent forerunners. It cannot be a cost-capped exercise in public and self-delusion; rather, it must be an honest exercise in self-scrutiny and geopolitical reality. I realise that, ultimately, money will have to be a factor. As long as the review has integrity, it does not necessarily lead to an uncomfortable outcome. Indeed, it might be quite a liberating exercise. To me, the outcome of the review should be a justified choice from which all else flows.
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, for bringing this important debate today. I thank him particularly as a former member of the International Relations and Defence Committee—which I now have the honour of chairing—for his contributions to the committee’s work. I also declare my interest as chairman of the Council of the Reserve Forces and Cadets Association.
The strategic defence review provides a welcome opportunity for the Government to rethink their approach to defence. I will focus my remarks largely on the role that Reserve Forces could play in that.
Over the last couple of years, the global security environment has changed dramatically. As other noble Lords have said, we are witnessing a period of growing instability. Russia’s illegal and unprovoked invasion of Ukraine has been a turning point for European security and has raised serious concerns about Russian intentions elsewhere in Europe. In the Middle East, the conflict between Israel, Hamas and Hezbollah threatens to escalate into a wider regional war, potentially drawing in Iran. Tensions in the South China Sea are escalating, and a wave of coups in the Sahel is plunging millions into physical and economic insecurity. This raises the question as to whether our Armed Forces are equipped to deal with this new reality.
The International Relations and Defence Committee recently published a report, which the noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, and the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Houghton, referred to, and which we have submitted to the SDR team, on the implications of the war in Ukraine for UK defence. We found that years of strategic neglect have left our forces stretched thin and limited in size. We are underprepared to respond to the worsening global threat environment, and in particular to meet the very real and growing threat from Russia.
Our Armed Forces lack the necessary mass, resilience and coherence to sustain prolonged, high-intensity conflict at scale. This of course also weakens their deterrent effect. If we are to prevent conflict with Russia, deterrence is our best insurance. After all, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine itself represented a failure of NATO’s deterrence posture. We must therefore restore the credibility of our deterrence posture, which has to include, as other noble Lords have said, increasing troop numbers.
It is a great reassurance to the House that the noble Lord, Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, is associated with this review. I thank him for securing this debate and for the skill with which he introduced it. I hope that his review will tell it like it is.
We need to invest more and to invest better. The world is much more dangerous than when Labour last took office and the noble Lord set up his defence review. In the Middle East, the South China Sea and the Sahel and the sub-Sahara, we see higher tension and terror. In Ukraine, we see an existential threat to Europe’s liberties. There is nothing new in that—from the Moscow embassy, I watched the sack of Dubček’s Prague—but what is new is a NATO too long disarmed by a naive faith in the peace dividend and a US whose NATO commitment can no longer be taken for granted. The most chilling moment for me in the Trump-Harris Philadelphia debate was when Trump could not bring himself to say that he would support Ukraine. Putin would not stop at Kyiv—we face a 1938 moment. Ukraine’s war is our war, and keeping the alliance shield requires investment to deter and to insure against American retreat.
As the terms of reference for the defence review say, the first task of the state is to protect the citizen. That means that defence expenditure is not discretionary expenditure. When I worked in defence for Secretary of State Carington and Chancellors Healey and Howe, we had a commitment to maintain 55,000 troops on the mainland of Europe, and we always honoured it. We were spending 5% of GDP on defence, and the nation was not balking at that. When the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, ran his review, we were spending 2.5% or 2.3%—although the task has clearly grown. Russia spends 6% and is planning a 25% increase next year.
Of course it is misleading to think in terms of GDP comparisons and proportions, but it is absolutely clear that we need greater capability because the threat has got greater. We are not investing enough. I believe that if it was explained to the country why we were not investing enough and if the threat was spelled out, the country would not balk at it. I hope the defence review will tell it like it is.
My Lords, I welcome this debate and congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, on leading the SDR and its excellent team of experts and practitioners. I declare my interests as set out in the register.
I will dare to repeat a few assumptions that have been made because they are important in the context of what I will try to contribute to this debate. There are more simultaneous conflicts today than in any period since the Second World War. We see autocracies acting in a more power-hungry and aggressive way than at any time in recent history. We are witnessing widespread disregard for human rights and international law that, far from coincidentally, overlaps with a rise in mass killings, atrocities and disasters. We are seeing the accelerating development and deployment of new technology on the battlefield, including the reported use of autonomous weapons systems in the conflict in Gaza, in ways that are contributing to the perception of the unravelling of decades of norms and conventions regarding the protection of civilians. In this environment, a focus on new technology and armaments is necessary, but at the same time, we must not lose sight of certain essential principles that remain unchanged.
I welcome the Government’s stated “total commitment” to the UK’s nuclear deterrent and their reaffirming that NATO remains the cornerstone of our defence. I also welcome the Prime Minister’s “serious commitment” to spending 2.5% of GDP on defence. I hope this remains the case, since the Defence Secretary recently said in an interview that the Government will make “tough choices”, including on defence. I hope the noble Lord does not feel that the freedom to make necessary recommendations will be curtailed by this uncertainty.
The SDR has many questions to address to ensure that Britain is secure at home and strong abroad, and I know that the noble Lord will be inundated with advice. I will focus my remarks on three areas which may not necessarily make it into the briefing folder, given the 14,500 submissions. First, in our unstable and highly contested global environment, it is essential that we uphold human rights standards and push against those who challenge the international order and disregard international law. The Government’s manifesto states clearly that international law is essential
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This review must therefore chart the reset of defence, dictated by these factors, if we are going to keep our country safe and secure. There will, of course, inevitably be choices in any review. Some of them will be hard choices indeed, but they will have to be made, and denial of the problems is not among the choices that we have today. The purpose of the review is clearly set out: to make sure UK defence has not only the capabilities required but the new roles and reforms in place to meet the challenges faced by the nation and the world.
NATO is the bedrock for the review. As the first and, as yet, maybe the only person to invoke Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty myself, I know the value and importance of our NATO allies and their strength. They, too, like our adversaries, acknowledge and value our independent nuclear deterrent, which will remain a central feature of UK defence.
As I told the 300 top officials in the Ministry of Defence just two weeks ago, there can be no business as usual in defence. There is no business as usual among our adversaries and our potential adversaries, and there can be no business as usual for us. We dare not do it. Therefore, we are interested in the views of Members of the House, as distinguished people with expertise and background. I look forward to listening to those views today and I give your Lordships the promise that they will be taken account of in the review and its challenge process, which is being undertaken at the moment, involving some distinguished Members of this House. That process will make a contribution to the recommendations that the review will ultimately make to both the Defence Secretary and the Prime Minister, in the interests of a strong and enduring defence policy for this country. I look forward to listening to this debate.
First, I will talk about China’s and Russia’s vast intrusion in the developing world, which is taking place almost behind the scenes while our eyes are on Ukraine, the Middle East, Afghanistan, Syria and the Pacific dangers around Taiwan. That is the front line but, behind it, the autocratic powers are moving very fast in a variety of ways—China mostly with bribes, insidious involvements, the belt and road initiative and so on; Russia in a more crude and violent way with the Wagner Group, which is still very active throughout Africa and Asia, although its leader came to a rather abrupt end after he was unwise enough to try to invade Moscow. That is what is happening before our eyes, and I hope that the review will concentrate on all that is going on there. As one expert put it, China is hoovering up the Commonwealth and the developing world, and we need to watch that, because we may find that it is too late if we do not act.
Then there are the neo-non-aligned countries—which, after all, are most countries—that are watching very carefully. I am glad to say that many are members of the Commonwealth, and I think they are all saying, “Look, we believe in independence. We are watching. We want support and advice from and a good relationship with the United Kingdom, but we don’t want to see Britain become too much a puppet of Washington. We don’t want to be under the hegemony of the Chinese either; we are trying to avoid being sucked into their nexus and network. But nor do we want to be necessarily lined up with a Manichaean view of the world, which comes particularly from the United States, that the world is just divided between good and evil, or the West and the East, and that that is the way it must be fought out”. Therefore, I hope that, in addition to the China and Russia scene, we use this review to get our own relationship straight with a changing United States. It is not 1945—it is not the heroic days of the Second World War or the Cold War. It is an entirely different situation. That is my first point.
Secondly, I hope we recognise that the fight is now on to kill civilians—to demoralise, undermine, frighten and terrorise civilians—and every kind of AI and other technology will be used by our opponents to do that. I saw that the director of MI5 said yesterday that we are now at the greatest level of threat in decades and that Russia and Iran, to take two, are determined to generate “sustained … mayhem” in this country. I hope that will be a matter of focus.
Thirdly, the whole industry and defence relationship has changed. A Ukraine expert was here yesterday and talked about battlefield co-ordination and management in Ukraine. That has been largely organised by private enterprise or by enterprises that are semi-private—some in uniform, some not. That expert pointed out that on the Ukraine side there is the question of managing 1 million drones, either in production—maybe in remote garages that no one knows about, or in unofficial factories—or being deployed and sent in various directions. No single military authority, no single Government, can co-ordinate all the movements of that sort of thing. His firm is called Aerorozvidka and he is deeply involved, as a civilian, in battlefield deployment and in new ways of industry co-ordinating with the military not only in supply chains—we know about all that—but in the organisation and deployment of strategy on the battlefield.
Finally, we have signed the NATO industrial capacity expansion pledge, which brings industry and technology even closer to the military. We are signing up to AUKUS, which is another opportunity, and to the Tempest programme with Japan and Italy. All these will involve huge new types of involvement between industry and the military, and that will require a considerable amount of time from the review team. Beyond its cellular internet of things, the Chinese Communist Party seem to have taken a dominant role there. We have Russia’s dark fleet sailing around the world undermining all the traditional areas of marine control. These are the frightening technologies of next month, probably, or certainly of the next year or two. These are the things that I hope will be concentrated on.
That is a start from me, but I am sure there will be many other better-informed, deeper and more important views to be uttered by your Lordships. That is my contribution.
I want to elaborate a little on the question of defence in its widest sense. One of the downsides of having a fully professional Army with a high reputation is that our population has come to feel that it can be safely left to the professionals to do all our defence for us. There is little appreciation not only of the level of danger, which we speak about in our report, but also that the population at large needs to play its part in national defence. That involves encouraging young people to join up and exploring recruitment, training and retention of part-timers, but it is also crucial that our people realise that the dangers that our country and our wider world face require all of us to be engaged.
The dangers against which we must develop our defences are not only military in nature. They include epidemic diseases and climate catastrophes, and some of them can be used and abused by our enemies. We were reminded of the need for more personnel to be trained and ready and available for service during the recent pandemic and widespread flooding. We needed people who could go out and do things, not just the best brains and the most advanced research technology. We needed people on the ground to manage the situation. That is why I seek some reassurance from the noble Lord and his colleagues that they will take seriously the need for more personnel.
It is not that I do not appreciate the technological requirements. I am particularly concerned that, with hypersonic weapons making their appearance and the terrifying prospect that they could soon carry nuclear warheads, to which human operatives cannot respond sufficiently quickly, there will be pressure to give over decision-making to artificial intelligence, as has already been done in the Middle East, for example, in identifying, tracking, targeting and killing human subjects. I cannot see how we can address this issue without a serious effort to achieve international limitations and regulations, however difficult that is. That means collaboration between the five permanent members of the UN Security Council. I know that, despite the current hostilities, there have been some lower-level conversations among scientists, but I ask the noble Lord to consider recommending that our Government engage directly with Russia and China, as well as with our allies. We did it during the Cold War to try to achieve limitations on nuclear weapons. AI and nuclear weapons as a combination make this an urgent initiative, especially for nuclear weapon systems.
Perhaps the most urgent request that I would make at this moment is that the noble Lord includes de-escalation as an essential feature of our approach to defence planning. If our only response to acts of aggression is to engage in ever higher levels of aggression, which then provoke a similar reaction, as we are currently seeing in the Middle East, the consequences can only end up being catastrophic. We need to think, work and plan for how we use diplomatic and other relations with our enemies, as well as our friends, in order to be able to de-escalate dangerous situations. That requires the deployment of appropriate resources to defend our country.
Finally, on resources more generally, our people, pundits, political leaders and perhaps even some on the military side have lived for some years with the illusion that our world was becoming a safer place, or at least a less dangerous environment. This is manifestly not the case. At the same time, we cannot draw on the imperial resources that were available during the last two global conflicts. Surely we need to consider seriously whether we must review the territory that we can realistically defend. The defence of our own people, our own country and our region, western Europe, is our greatest responsibility. Although we can also play some role in the wider world and some of our historical areas of responsibility, it may now be time to trim our ambitions to what we can actually do. Illusions about our capacities will not serve us well in protecting our people in a real war. We must focus on addressing the world, especially the world that is closest to home, as it is, not as we wish it was. I wish the noble Lord and his colleagues well as they do their best to help us with that challenging task.
If we wish NATO to exercise a powerful deterrent effect on Russia, these issues must be addressed. The platforms in all three environments need the trained people, the weapons stocks, the logistics support and the defence industrial base to sustain them through the draining effects of protracted combat. Then there is the vulnerability of the home base. The necessity for significantly improved deterrent capability within NATO reaffirms the importance of the north Atlantic link, but that will be of little avail if the UK end of that link is not secure. At the moment, we could not counter the kind of missile attacks that Iran has launched against Israel. The requirement for a robust integrated air defence system can be ignored no longer. Effective defence requires an integrated system, which cannot be had on the cheap. It requires sensors, information management technology, surface-to-air weapons and air-to-air platforms and weapons.
Control of UK airspace will not of itself be sufficient, though. Again, the experience of Ukraine shows that trying to fight a land campaign without air superiority is a recipe for, at best, a long and bloody struggle and, at worst, defeat. There is nothing new in this. Neither El Alamein in 1942 nor Normandy in 1944 would have been successes without air superiority. The precise means of achieving that superiority will of course change over time, as technology offers new ways of doing old things, but the suppression and destruction of enemy air defences will continue to be a keystone of that effort. This is a complex and challenging role that involves cutting-edge and constantly evolving systems and technologies. It will also require the ability to operate effectively in the face of a hostile electronic and cyber environment, which of course will be true of the Armed Forces and their capabilities more widely.
The electronic warfare challenge that has emerged in Ukraine is well beyond anything we have ever seen before and we must expect that kind of challenge, or even greater, to be a feature of future battle spaces. This will require a response that goes beyond the purchase of certain kinds of equipment. It will need the fusion of experts and technology in an organisation with the agility, and the requisite industrial capacity, to respond to constantly evolving threats and the ability to adapt front-line platforms and tactics accordingly. Such agility and adaptability will be needed more widely across the entirety of our defence capabilities.
I could cite many other examples of the kind of improvements that will be required to defence in the years ahead, improvements across all three environments, and I have not even touched on the crucial issues of people—their recruitment, training and retention—that will be fundamental to our capabilities, let alone the question of wider national resilience. Time does not permit me this afternoon to do much more than to scratch the surface. Suffice to say that we face a double challenge: we have to make good the shrinking and hollowing out of our Armed Forces that has been the handiwork of successive, delinquent Governments. At the same time, we have to adapt those forces to meet the stark and pressing challenges of the future.
There will of course be debates about precisely how those future capabilities are to be provided, but two things seem beyond doubt. The first is that those capabilities will be essential. The second is that they are well beyond the financial guidelines under which this review is operating, so I end where I began: with the Budget. The mantra seems to be that no more money is available for defence. Of course the money is available; it is a question of choices and priorities. If the Government say that they cannot afford more than 2.5% when the need is so apparent, what they are really saying is that the safety and security of this country and its people are not their top priority. Looking back at our history, they would not be the first Government to say this, nor would they be the first to reap a frightful harvest if the current severe risks were to materialise.
Similarly, the design of the Type 45s—this was identified in the SDR—allowed for the fitting of land attack missiles and the ability to shoot down ballistic missiles. Again, when I went to the Secretary of State for Defence at the time to say that this had to be done and fitted, he said, “No, this money is not there now”. I do not know quite where it had gone but it was not there. Again, money was the elephant in the room.
Many have argued that cyber, AI, quantum, satellites, digitisation, drones and so on mean that platforms are unimportant. All I can say is that if you are 500 miles south of Hormuz or in the middle of the Arctic and you have not got a platform, you are swimming. I have done that in the past; it is not much fun. Yes, technology has changed and is changing war, but that has always been the case. It does not actually make things cheaper; if anything, it adds to the cost. Again, I reiterate that money is the elephant in the room.
The nuclear deterrent is extremely expensive. The maintenance of CASD, which is running on old boats as the new boats are introduced into service and new warheads are produced, needs to be seen as a national endeavour. It is very important for our nation but, as it stands, the defence budget cannot support the deterrent without growing damage to our conventional capability.
I am sure that the SDR team will go into resilience; preparedness; sovereign capability; the need for defence firms to be able to ramp up production and ensure supply in times of tension and war; the need for national repair and upgrade facilities; and the need for trained, qualified staff to operate them. I am sure that procurement will be looked at again. It needs to be, not least to address the anachronistic contracting and acquisition system, which is much better suited to the leisurely pace of peacetime than urgency in wartime. Manpower is a mess. We must ensure that we have sufficient, highly trained men and women, in particular computer-literate, digitally aware engineering specialists. A slight surplus of manpower is not that efficient, I know, but it is better than too little. Alliances are crucial as we often do not have the strength to act unilaterally. It is important to ensure that we bring to an alliance the key capabilities it does not really have enough of.
My key question for those conducting the review is: what, in military strategic terms, is most important for our nation? What do our allies value most? What is the most critical environment, bearing in mind that all the environments work together and intermesh, as we do not have sufficient money to focus on all of them? As noble Lords might imagine, to my mind, it is the maritime environment. We are an island. We depend on the sea for our survival and wealth. I can tell noble Lords from my time in the intelligence world that our enemies know that only too well. Maritime capability is what our allies expect of us. The growing strength of the European NATO allies on land and the limits of their strengths at sea reinforce that. For example, the accession of Sweden and Finland to NATO and Poland’s army expansion programme alone have added 20 army brigades to NATO’s terrestrial strength, as well as a plethora of fast jets. There is no such naval growth.
I wish the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, well with this huge task ahead of him.
The choice is the strategic one of what role we, the United Kingdom, want to play in the world over the next 10 to 20 years. I do not think that this is a simplistic choice between doing everything or nothing. The nation would not understand or tolerate a wholly extreme departure from our current aspirations. Rather, it is a more nuanced choice between two more subtle options—but it is a very distinct choice.
The context is the increasingly darkening world in which we no longer have a monopoly on the ownership of truth. It is a world in which China, Russia, North Korea and Iran are increasingly mutually self-supporting and in which many of the countries of the poorly defined global South are, at best, undecided as to whom they favour.
One choice is to double down on what we have traditionally aspired to be as a nation—a global leader. It would involve us in a meaningful leadership role in NATO, necessitate a significant investment in restoring conventional deterrence in Europe, require a significant investment in resilience, necessitate the recreation of the mechanisms for generating reserves, involve continued or even greater investment in cyberspace and emerging technologies, and involve us in some more demanding global roles of which AUKUS and GCAP are perhaps the capability forerunners. This would be the more expensive option and would bring its own forms of risk and benefit on the global stage.
A second option is more modest but, some may argue, more rational. It would involve coming to terms with a reduced global ambition and accepting that there are limits to where we envisage projecting force. It would focus on the regional threat from Russia and, more specifically, it might choose to exploit the mutual synergies and interests we enjoy with the nations of the Joint Expeditionary Force. Our maritime and air forces could form the core of a meaningful contribution to the security of the north Atlantic and northern Europe. It might recognise that expeditionary land forces, at scale, looks a highly questionable ambition for a nation that cannot man an army of 72,000 and that has no current mechanisms to mobilise a reserve.
But we do have the ability to exploit space and cyber special force operations, and we retain a practised understanding of high-level command and control. This more modest option would also need to recognise our deficiencies in layered anti-missile defence and offensive missile capability. The latter may provide the necessary escalatory gearing to restore credibility to our strategic deterrent.
I do not want to give the impression that this second option necessarily generates any savings against the current or anticipated budget. It would, however, demand some markedly different capability choices. My point is that the capability choices would be the result of the decisions about our strategic ambition. I fear that, in the past, capability choices have predetermined the policy aspiration, which must be the wrong way around.
My plea is for a review of integrity, not one based on hope, boosterism or doctrinal alchemy. I would certainly be cautious of an alchemy based on the idea of an integrated force fighting an unfair war on the presumption of perpetual technological advantage. To me, such an outcome has some of the hallmarks of a delusion in waiting.
Yet even apart from the well-documented challenges of recruitment and retention, increasing troop numbers comes at a significant cost. This is where my own submission to the SDR comes in; the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup, and the noble Lord, Lord West, may be glad to hear that it is a tri-service proposition. Ukraine has shown that recruitment of the rank and file of a second or third echelon force need not be the problem. It recruited half a million from a population about two-thirds the size of ours in six months in 2022. What it could not do was provide the experienced people to train them. We, and other nations, had to step in and help.
My concept, in simple terms, is based loosely on the very successful Home Service Force of the early 1990s. It is that we should utilise some of the quite large number of experienced people who have recently left the regular and Reserve Forces to form cadres of about 50, as the nucleus each of a battalion-sized unit, 500 strong, the bulk—the other 450—of which would be recruited only at a time chosen by the Government when the threat level warranted it. I hope the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup, and the noble Lord, Lord West, will forgive me for using army language, but I do it for simplicity. The cadres would need, say, 10 to 15 days of training a year to maintain and update their skills. I ask only that this concept—the submission goes into considerably more detail—is given thorough consideration, and I would of course be delighted to discuss the detail with the SDR team and/or the Minister.
I turn to our Reserve Forces as they are currently constituted. As my committee’s inquiry into Ukraine revealed, their capability has been eroded over recent years. Successive Governments have failed to articulate a clear vision for how the reserves can effectively supplement and support our Armed Forces. It is time to reverse this. Our report says that the Reserve Forces, whose numbers have declined over recent years—largely because of reduced funding and a broken recruiting system—need a co-ordinated approach, including addressing clarity of purpose, demanding training, appropriate logistical and administrative support, equipment and proper funding. I know that the Reserve Forces and cadets associations have specific attributes that are able to help, and they stand ready to help.
I ask the Minister for his assurance that the Government will give due consideration to enhancing the role of the reserves. What plans are there, if any, to respond to the recommendations made by General Sir Nick Carter in his Reserve Forces review?
This is not just about troop numbers; the whole of society has a role to play in defence. We need to move beyond the idea that defence is solely the military’s responsibility, become better at conveying the significance of national security to the wider public and set out how they can contribute to a more resilient society. The volunteer reserves are part of the answer, but the Government must also draw the wider public into a conversation about defence—including the potential for higher, and especially better and cleverer, defence spending—as well as greater civic responsibility.
One useful lever available would be to involve the signatories to the Armed Forces covenant, especially the gold award holders, who ought to have a predisposition to help. There needs to be a greater sense of urgency and awareness about the risks facing the UK. An honest dialogue about the country’s vulnerabilities and what is required to keep it safe is essential. The Government must develop a compelling value proposition that resonates with citizens, emphasising the importance of national security in their daily lives and moving beyond the notion that defence is solely the military’s responsibility. There is much we can learn from our Scandinavian partners and their concept of total defence, which integrates civilians into national security. The Government should build on this framework to create a similarly compelling vision for the UK.
We are at a crossroads. The choices we make now will determine whether we can restore our nation’s credibility and remain an influential player on the global stage. Alternatively, we risk the fate of being relegated to reactive crisis management rather than playing a proactive role in preventing conflicts. The war in Ukraine has moved this debate from theoretical speculation to urgent reality. Complacency in defence is no longer an option.
We certainly need to invest much better. We must get recruitment right. Too many honourable Ministers have stood at the Dispatch Box admitting that there have been shortfalls but asserting that the corner has been turned. I am unconvinced. Outsourcing was always a mistake and it should now be corrected, but the much bigger problem is procurement, where the flaws are systemic. I recognise most of them from the 5% days when I knew a bit about defence, but they are still much more damaging now, with resources so much more constrained.
These flaws are not unique to us. In Washington, a bipartisan congressional commission reported this summer that:
“Fundamental shifts in threats and technology require fundamental change”
in how the Department of Defense functions, that the country must
“spend more effectively and more efficiently to build the future force, not perpetuate the existing one”,
and that the Defense Secretary and central staff
“should be more empowered to cancel programs, determine needs for the future, and invest accordingly”,
particularly in cyber, space and software. It said that the R&D paradigm needs to shift to adopting technological innovations from outside the department, and that 11 of the 14 technologies deemed critical for national security are “primarily non-defense specific”. That is what Congress is saying in Washington. Of course the US-UK analogy is not exact, but I believe all the elements I have mentioned are advice that we too should heed.
Investing better means a major update of the MoD’s procurement systems. The compact with the taxpayer has to be that, although we have to take more of his money, we will promise to spend it better. There must be no more sacred cows, interservice “You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” deals, or continually changing specifications to add gold plate. We need longer production runs and more emphasis on simplicity, serviceability—the secret of, for example, the Hawk aircraft programme’s success—and specialisation. We do not need, and we certainly cannot afford, industrial capabilities across the board. We need to invest where we lead in Europe, and where others lead we need to go for the reciprocal procurement deals that generate the export sales and hence longer production runs, which drive down costs. This means having the self-discipline to stop tinkering with specifications and avoid the delusions of autarky—no more Nimrods or Sting Rays. In-house solutions and UK-only programmes are very rarely best.
Two great Defence Secretaries, Denis Healey and Peter Carington, had no doubt that economies of scale and the foreign sales that would generate the jobs meant collaboration with the Germans to build tanks and with the Dutch to build frigates. Their German and Dutch colleagues agreed. Memoranda of understanding were signed, but the tanks and frigates were never built. Both programmes were sabotaged by folie de grandeur in Whitehall. The Germans went off and built their Leopard tanks and the Dutch built their frigates—also, as it happens, called Leopards—both of which cost much less than ours and so greatly outsold ours.
Can the new Healey Defence Secretary do better? I hope so, with support from the noble Lord, Lord Robertson. It is a bit presumptuous to offer the noble Lord advice because he knows the issues so much better than most of us, and it is probably unnecessary to urge him to tell it like it is because he usually does, but I hope he will press for the systemic procurement reform that the Ministry of Defence, like Washington’s Department of Defense, so badly needs. We need to invest much more, but we need to invest it much better.
“because of the security it brings”.
Yesterday, I was encouraged to hear four government Ministers and three officials say in no uncertain terms, “We are committed to international law”. While that is welcome, there is a perception that the United Kingdom practises this selectively and condemns human rights violations committed by adversaries but not those carried out by our friends. We need to answer the question of what we stand for. Such double standards will not bring us security; they will undermine it. An SDR built on such inconsistent foundations will struggle to deliver the strengthened defences that the UK needs and I know the noble Lord wishes to see.
Secondly, it is vastly preferable to deter wars than to have to fight them or rebuild after them. With that in mind, while our military power must be backed by a strong and capable Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, or vice versa, the FCDO is our lead department in engaging with the world. It must be properly funded and supported, as war begins where diplomacy fails. A robust and capable diplomatic presence is not a luxury but a necessity. The former Foreign Secretary, the noble Lord, Lord Hague, made strengthening the Foreign Office as an institution a central priority during his tenure. I hope that the new SDR recommendations will build on this example and be prepared to go further still, since the threats to our security today are much tougher than at that time.
Closely related to this, I was dismayed to learn yesterday that, after the BBC World Service ceased to broadcast in Lebanon, the radio frequency was immediately replaced by a Russian state propaganda station. In a world where we rely on soft power to achieve and support our goals, we should be expanding the reach of the BBC World Service, not watching it wither and be replaced, as in the case of Lebanon, by Russian state propaganda.
Finally, we must back our statements of commitment to human rights with action. I urge the noble Lord not to overlook the persistence of sexual and gender-based violence as a feature of nearly all contemporary conflicts and its role as a tactic of warfare and cause of human displacement and suffering. I hope that the SDR will include recommendations on how to strengthen UK and international action to counter the use of rape as a weapon of war, including incorporating that action into all our relevant military training, particularly when we are training up allied armed forces. As is often pointed out, the United Kingdom Armed Forces are second to none and the power of this example cannot be overstated.
The SDR comes at a time when the challenges we face are immense, but not insurmountable. As well as ensuring that our Armed Forces have the tools that they need to do their work, we must uphold human rights and international law, oppose violations wherever they occur, avoid damaging double standards and invest in diplomacy and soft power. I believe that the noble Lord attaches importance to these principles, and I look forward to the 2025 review.