Strategic Defence and Security Review

Well, the rate will decline—of course it will. We gained some insight into how the disconnect between programmes and the ability to pay for them arose last summer when Lord Levene delivered his verdict on the MOD. His revelations dovetailed disquietingly well with Gray's. He found a ““bloated top-level defence board”” supervising a"““department with overly bureaucratic management structures, dominated by committees leading to indecisiveness and a lack of responsibility.””" Last year, the armed forces covenant was written into law for the first time, as the Prime Minister said it would be. The covenant is not just about the compact between troops and the public. It also concerns the deal between troops and the high command. Those in charge betray the covenant if they allow the kind of shoddy, top-level management evidenced by both Gray and Levene. However, we still have nearly 500 one-star officers and above—a whole battalion of senior officers on packages well in excess of £100,000. Defence Medical Services is a good case in point. To oversee the care of a patient population less than half the size of Wiltshire we require one three-star, five two-star and 15 one-star officers who serve not as doctors, dentists or nurses but as administrators. Our top medic in Afghanistan is not among them—he is just a colonel. I commend the Government for the remedial measures announced before Christmas to reduce the number of starred appointments, both uniformed and civilian. More generally, I note that although there here have been and will continue to be compulsory redundancies, the package is so reasonable that there has been disappointment among many of those not selected, as there was during previous rounds. From experience, I bear testament to that. It is of course reasonable to flex personnel from one trade to another—a contention, I think, of paragraphs 67 to 70 of this week's Defence Committee report—but the majority of pinch-point trades are so specific by rank or extent of retraining necessary that it would actually be quite difficult to do so. Flexible though our young people are, we simply cannot ask an infantryman to become an Intelligence Corps linguist, a pharmacist at the rank of captain or a Cat. A nuclear watchkeeper. In our collective defence, NATO remains paramount. However, I share widespread concern that we are moving towards a two-tier alliance, with some players benefiting from the cover but not paying the premium. At next week's meeting of Defence Ministers in Brussels, will the Defence Secretary continue to press our allies to meet their proper financial responsibilities? Present at the meeting will be those who press for an increasing EU defence identity as part of the security and defence policy. Naturally, that has nothing to do with defence, which only the UK and France come close to funding properly. The latest turn of the screw comes from a European Parliament resolution of 19 February 2009, which proposes something called synchronised armed forces Europe. SAFE is a beguiling but deeply ironic acronym. Under SAFE, alarmingly, British servicemen would owe allegiance to the supranational European Union. One of its cheerleaders, the German Foreign Minister, Guido Westerwelle, told the Munich security conference in February 2010:"““The long-term goal is the establishment of a European army under full parliamentary control.””" Of course, that has nothing to do with improving our collective security; instead, it draws from a hubristic, maladroit pan-European political project that has brought us to the brink of economic catastrophe. The immediate concern about SAFE is that it would quite deliberately remove the capability of the two European nation states still able to act independently to project force worldwide on their own, or with partners of their choosing, in pursuit of the national interest.