I get the idea of grey-zone warfare. I studied strategy; I realise that we cannot fight the next war as we fought the last war—I get that, too. The real problem is that we are going to have to do the next war in a different way. I get that. But we have not fought a total war as envisaged, and on
which the integrated review is predicated, for over 70 years. Instead, we have fought limited engagements. We have done counter-insurgency, peacekeeping and peacemaking. Some 99%—almost 100%, actually—of all operations have required us to put soldiers on the ground. Suddenly, we are saying that everything should be predicated on grey-zone warfare, and that leaves little else.
Having commanded men—and women, by the way—on peacekeeping missions, I can tell hon. Members that there is a real argument in favour of having enough of them. We are going to cut our Army by 12%. That is an enormous loss. I understand that tanks can be taken out from over the horizon. The Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict showed that: the poor devils in those tanks didn’t know what hit them. We have to redesign how we fight and where our tanks go—I get that. But it does seem odd that we are saying tanks are somehow obsolete when we have aircraft carriers that are 500 times bigger and marked from space by a red dot that an intercontinental missile could take out very fast.
I will end by saying how disappointed I am that my Government have cut the regiment I commanded in Bosnia, without even telling me about it in advance—not even one little word. It was dreadful, and it hits me personally. So if I am talking with emotion, so be it. The 2nd Battalion the Mercian Regiment did not deserve that, when you think that, per head of population, each Scot has three times as many battalions as each Englishwoman or Englishman—the Scots have three times more infantry battalions than we do in England.