My Lords, over the course of many debates on defence and the Armed Forces, I and a number of other noble, and noble and gallant, Lords have cautioned, warned and, when that was predictably to no avail, criticised the Government fairly and not unreasonably. It is now generally recognised that, among other things, we should not have charged into Helmand province of all places, in the south of Afghanistan. We had, at first, token forces and totally inadequate weapons, vehicles and munitions. We were still committed significantly in Iraq and in pursuit of an unrealistic aim and strategy. If anything, that made the terror situation worse, not better, and a price had to be paid in significant battle casualties.
Now, poised as we are on the brink of a new strategy in Afghanistan and with an all-embracing funding problem, this may well be an opportune moment to remind the Government to face up to realities and their responsibilities. I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord King of Bridgewater, on this debate and on introducing it with his customary penetrating clarity bred from considerable experience, all of which I warmly endorse.
Noble and noble and gallant Lords have also made some, I hope, helpful suggestions in these debates. It is to the Government’s credit that, over the past two years or so, the Ministry of Defence has made strenuous efforts to get our Helmand force in better balance and provide the proper equipment and supplies to support, sustain and protect our land and air forces in that area, where they still have such a difficult job to do. However, it is equally clear that, as a result of the urgency of all this, and because of continuous cheeseparing over the past 10 years or so, they now have a fundamental funding problem on their hands, accentuated by the recent Budget, of which more in a moment.
However, we are now committed to Afghanistan and, for many compelling reasons, there can be no going back in the foreseeable future. Indeed, our best hope is wholly to support the United States, to the limit of our resources, in its new, more enlightened strategy, with a strong—albeit temporary, I hope—surge of forces to give people in that vulnerable area proper rather than fleeting protection, with less talk of democracy and more of stability. There must be meaningful negotiations and financial inducements which could help separate the moderates from the fanatics, who must then be isolated and dealt with. We must have better directed and more quickly implemented financial aid.
We must also work as closely as possible with Pakistan. It was good to hear the Pakistani president welcome the initiative of President Obama, giving us hope that we can, despite all of Pakistan’s very real internal problems, work together in some common cause, to our mutual benefit and for the benefit of the peace of the world. In conjunction with our well motivated, highly professional American and Canadian friends, and with others from a still somewhat lukewarm NATO, all of that will require our best shots. At the moment, we have no alternative but to provide and sustain them, fortified by the wonderful sense of duty and esprit de corps of our Armed Forces that the noble Lord, Lord King, brought out so well.
Finally, while the Secretary of State has a significant war to oversee and manage, he has another major problem: a virtual black hole between established requirements and the resources that the Treasury is likely to make available. If the Treasury is to get its pound of flesh, as it usually does, that will require some very hard decisions, particularly if our best-shot operations in Afghanistan are to be fully supported and sustained, and those personnel matters such as medical, housing and welfare—the ones that fall off the bottom when you try to squeeze a quart into a pint pot—are not to suffer in a way that would rupture the military covenant, now so generally recognised as essential for the well-being of our Armed Forces. That means that the higher-spending items of equipment will have to be looked at rigorously.
What we really need is a proper defence review, but that will clearly not happen before the next general election. Meanwhile, a similar intellectual rigour will have to be turned on the more expensive items in the current three to five-year spending cycle. Of course, what is kept in or left out is a matter for the chiefs of staff to recommend as they, chaired by the Chief of Defence Staff, try to find that difficult balance between the most urgent operational needs and what the longer term may require if our forces are to be capable of taking part in any wider and more sophisticated conflict. That capability cannot be produced from a standing start.
We must look again in more detail at how we spend our money in the context of, perhaps, a more flexible approach to our independent nuclear deterrent and what exactly follows Trident, and when, and, certainly, with the general recognition that, since the Cold War, the world scene and the scale of urgency of future threats have changed considerably. We cannot automatically feel bound by old Cold War cries and clichés such as, "You must have four and not three nuclear submarines, because there must always be one on station". Indeed, I was surprised to hear the noble Lord, Lord Malloch-Brown, repeat that in an otherwise wide-ranging and flexible summing-up of a foreign affairs debate.
The same intellectual rigour needs to be applied to the carrier argument. The Royal Navy has tasks that fall upon it regularly in peace and war—some on every day of the week—while we should take into account the new dimension of piracy. In order for it to do those tasks, we should look at whether the Navy would prefer two less than fully equipped carriers with greatly reduced and, I would suggest, insufficient small surface ships and killer submarines or, perhaps, one fully equipped carrier with everything required to fly off it and to protect it and, perhaps, rather more ships for their everyday tasks.
There is no doubt, then, that the Secretary of State has some real problems on his hands. I hope that the Minister will give us some idea how the Government are facing up to those problems and how they are likely to be resolved in the near future, while ensuring a proper defence of the United Kingdom against a variety of eventualities, and proper support for our foreign policy and interests abroad—whether that involves peacekeeping, enforcement or something even more decisive and intense altogether.
Armed Forces
Proceeding contribution from
Lord Bramall
(Crossbench)
in the House of Lords on Thursday, 30 April 2009.
It occurred during Debate on Armed Forces.
Type
Proceeding contribution
Reference
710 c341-3 
Session
2008-09
Chamber / Committee
House of Lords chamber
Subjects
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Timestamp
2024-04-21 11:18:15 +0100
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