It is a pleasure, as always, to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Colchester (Sir Bob Russell), who speaks with passion for the military people of Colchester—nobody speaks better of them than him. He added to what has been a wide-ranging, interesting and well-informed debate of various topics, some broadly associated with the report on NATO that the Select Committee produced.
My hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart), the Chairman of the Defence Committee, ably set the tone of the debate. I stood against him for the chairmanship, but let me say in public that I am extremely glad that I lost that particular election. I am glad that he won it, and I am pleased to stand behind him now and will do so in subsequent Parliaments.
We meet in what can be described only as interesting times. There is a strange coincidence—or is it a conspiracy—of events happening in the world. We have talked extensively, of course, about Russia, Ukraine, Crimea, threats to the Baltic states and the assassination of Nemtsov over the weekend—and who knows what the consequences of that will be, what it means or who did it? We have talked about ISIS, or Daesh as we prefer to call it. An important assault on Tikrit is occurring as we speak, and again, who knows what the consequences will be? We look forward to the much anticipated assault on and retaking of Mosul—potentially later this year, although I sometimes find it hard to imagine that it will actually occur.
We have heard from others, including my hon. Friend the Member for Aldershot (Sir Gerald Howarth), about events in the South China sea, and about cyber-warfare and so many other aspects of the world that are extraordinarily worrying and dangerous, but also extremely unknown. We simply do not know what is occurring in most of the world, and we do not know what we are going to do about it. I find it concerning that we in the UK, leaving aside NATO as a wider force, seem to be so unclear about what we are planning to do.
Several Select Committee reports over the last months have touched on this failing. Our report on Daesh, for example, said that our contribution to the opposition to ISIL was lamentably small. We are responsible for something like 6% of the airstrikes, which is of course useful—it is important that we are doing it—but it is none the less an extremely small contribution. We have a tiny number of soldiers in Iraq. I heard the other day that the number of our personnel helping to train in Sulaymaniyah in north-east Iraq, which we visited, is being further reduced rather than increased, despite their ambitions.
We have no real idea why we are doing things in Syria, but not in Iraq—apart from the fact that is what the motion in the House lay down. We have no real plan: we do not quite understand what we are seeking to do against ISIL in Iraq and Syria. We know they are bad people; we know we do not like the atrocities that are being carried out; but we do not really have a grand plan for what we intend to do about them.
The same applies to Putin. We know he is a bad man; we know he should not have redrawn the boundaries of Ukraine; we know that the Baltic states are under threat. When General Sir Richard Shirreff was recently in front of the Select Committee—he was either still serving or had just stepped down as Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe—it was interesting to hear him say so plainly that we should have permanent forces deployed in the Baltic states. He thought our people should be there permanently and at the very least that a large-scale exercise should take place there with equipment delivered to the Baltic states and so forth. That afternoon,
my right hon. Friend the Member for Runnymede and Weybridge (Mr Hammond), then Secretary of State for Defence, said that Sir Richard was absolutely wrong and that we should have no troops in the Baltic states. We should not worry ourselves about that, he claimed, as the main threat to the UK remained a terrorist threat. He stood by the tier 3 categorisation of state warfare as described in the strategic defence and security review in 2010.
So I was astonished when, very recently, the Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe and the Secretary of State for Defence disagreed in the course of a single day on what our policy should be on the defence of the Baltics. That raises an issue that will be the subject of a forthcoming Select Committee report, namely our distinct lack of understanding of who we are in the world, what our purpose is, what we want to do in the world, how we are to achieve it, and what kind of armed forces we need in order to do that.
The 2010 SDSR is woefully out of date. It downgraded all the threats that we now face, judging them to be potentially insignificant. The national security strategy, which was published on the same day as the SDSR, did not have a clue about what we are doing today. I was disappointed to hear the Prime Minister say recently that he thought that it was worthy of “tweaking” in respect of a few details. I think that he was absolutely wrong. I think that the Arab spring, the Russians, ISIL, events in the South China sea, and so much else that is happening in the world today require a fundamental rewriting of the national security strategy from scratch. We must identify what is wrong in the world, and say what we are going to do about it.
The notion that we could produce a new national security strategy—tweaked, as the Prime Minister had it—a few weeks or months after a general election and produce an SDSR at the same time strikes me as laughable, as does the notion that we should link the two in a strategic spending review, thereby handing all the controlling levers to the Treasury. The idea that we should say to the Treasury, “You tell us how much we can spend” , and the national security strategy will then be tweaked in an attempt to make it fit in with how much we can spend—and, incidentally, we will continue to cut our armed forces for that purpose—seems to me to represent a fundamental misunderstanding of the way in which we should consider how we intend to position ourselves in the world.
Surely it is entirely reasonable, basic and straightforward to ask, “What is our role?”, and we as a nation should be asking that question. Are we to serve as part of the American forces, as the American chief of staff was quoted as suggesting in The Daily Telegraph this morning? Most definitely not. Are we to do as President Obama suggested in his letter to the Prime Minister, and say that we are a second-rate nation that no longer pulls its weight in the world? No; for my money, we are not. But if we are to fight our corner in the world, we must know how we are to do it, and we must do it through an absolutely clear national security strategy which sets out, not vaguely but precisely, what our aims are and how we are to deal with ISIL. Will we deal with ISIL by means of containment, destruction or defeat? We do not know. We need to set out precisely how we view President Putin and what we intend to do about that,
precisely what we intend to do in the Baltic states, and precisely what we intend to do about so many other things.
Some time after the publication of the national security strategy, we must have a defence and security review specifying the assets that we need in order to realise the vision in the strategy, and some time after that, the Treasury must come along with a fundamental spending review and say, “Here is the money that you require in order to realise that vision.” I know that that will not happen. I know what will happen after the general election, whether we have a Labour or a Conservative Government: the spending review, the defence review and the national security strategy will be rushed out as they were before, entirely driven by mandarins in the Treasury. However, I think that it is worth our recognising, and worth the Select Committee’s stating, that we think that that is the wrong way of going about the defence of the realm.
We think that Britain is probably in a more dangerous state today than at any time since the second world war. We think that the nation hangs on the edge of a precipice over which it may fall, and that we, the United States and our colleagues in NATO must act urgently to do something about it. Tinkering around with 2% or not 2%, tinkering around with the current sclerotic decision-making processes in the Ministry of Defence, and tinkering around with cutting our armed forces and trying to patch them up here and there is not the right way in which to proceed. We are in an incredibly dangerous place. We as a nation, and we as a House of Commons, must act now and act decisively to put that right.
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