Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for calling me to participate in this important and timely debate on defence. It comes at an exciting time for defence, following the Prime Minister’s welcome announcement that we will now increase the UK’s defence spending from a little over 2% of GDP at present—more if we include Ukraine —to 2.5% by the end of the decade. Moreover, that welcome increase is linear in nature, rather than the traditionally back-loaded version, so it provides a solid path against which both our armed forces and our defence industry can appropriately plan.
As ever with these announcements, my colleagues on the House of Commons Defence Committee will want to scrutinise in detail the Secretary of State’s claim that that represents an additional £75 billion for defence over the period. A lot seems to depend on where we draw the baseline in making the calculation. Nevertheless, the declared increase to 2.5% indisputably represents billions of pounds of extra investment over the six years in question, which helps to send a powerful signal both to our allies and to any potential aggressors that the United Kingdom is prepared to defend itself, its values and its interests, both across the globe and at home.
Allied to that, we also had the recent announcement by our very proactive Minister for Defence Procurement of a wholescale reform of how the UK plans to procure
its military equipment in future. The new system, known as the integrated procurement model, was announced in February. If I were asked to characterise it in one sentence, I would say that it represents moving from a bureaucratic peacetime model of procuring equipment to a much faster wartime model. Indeed, in Poland the Prime Minister spoke powerfully about putting the UK defence industry on to a war footing. That is very much in keeping with the Secretary of State’s speech at Lancaster House in January, in which he said that we are now moving from a post-war to a pre-war world—about which I fear he may yet be proven right.
Taken together, this suggests that after years of concentrating on wars of choice—in Iraq or Afghanistan —we are now again focusing on the possibility of having to fight a war of necessity, and perhaps even, ultimately, a war of national survival against an adversary on the scale of Russia and/or China.
For someone who has always believed that the first duty of Government is the defence of the realm, I warmly welcome what one might call this new type of clear-eyed realism, which now seems to be infusing our defence planning in a way that, at least with regard to wars of necessity, has arguably been absent for many decades. For instance, we are now recreating across Government a national defence plan, akin conceptually to what was considered everyday normal business during the cold war.
I hope that I am not betraying a confidence when I tell the House that the Minister for Defence Procurement and I, and others such as my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex (Sir Bernard Jenkin), who is in his place beside me, have discussed several times the need not just to change policy in terms of procurement, but crucially to change culture if the reforms are to have real meaning.
I note that the dynamic head of Defence Equipment and Support, Andy Start, when speaking at the Royal United Services Institute recently, explained that the reforms began in March and that the operating model will reach what he calls a “minimal viable product” by the autumn, with the whole programme in full flow by next year. As someone who has previously expressed a great deal of frustration about the bureaucracy and tardiness of our procurement system, I can only wish the Minister for Defence Procurement and the head of DE&S Godspeed in implementing these reforms as fast as possible, particularly as the international outlook continues to worsen. We urgently need a sense of urgency, as it were, and it appears that, finally, we are starting to develop one.
All that said, I would like to highlight one area in which I believe we still remain both operationally and strategically vulnerable: the realm of air defence. Given the concentration, over more than 20 years, on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we effectively disinvested in the air defence of the United Kingdom relative to other priorities. I am pleased to note that in the last few years we have reinvested in some of our radar stations in Scotland and along the east coast, which I warmly welcome.
Nevertheless, the experience from Ukraine strongly suggests that if it were ever to come to a shooting war with Russia, which has made great use of mass cruise missile strikes, most of those fixed radar sites would likely be lost to cruise missile attack in the first 24 to 48 hours of
hostilities, in addition to threats from ballistic missiles. Against that eventuality, we retain a small number of mobile radars—the number is classified, but it is small. It is true that we might also be able to rely to some degree on NATO assets or other specialist assets from elsewhere, but certainly in terms of fixed NATO radar stations they might also be subject to the same cruise missile attacks, and the precious NATO airborne early warning and control system—AWACS—aircraft could be tasked elsewhere in war.
In terms of fighter aircraft for the defence of the UK, the Royal Air Force currently possesses 137 Typhoon aircraft in three tranches, the oldest of which—in tranche 1—are, on present policy, due to be retired in the spring of next year and either cannibalised for parts or sold off to foreign buyers, likely for a pittance compared to their initial acquisition cost. Considering that the Russian air force still possesses thousands of combat aircraft, that would be an act of absolute folly, and one that I personally have likened to selling off our Spitfires prior to the battle of Britain. As I was told by BAE Systems executives on a visit to Warton a few years ago, because of the extremely complex supply chain that goes into the manufacture of Typhoons, it would take at least four years to build one from scratch, or three years if, as they put it, we hurried it all up in an emergency. If, therefore, the UK were to fight what some strategists describe as a “come as you are” war, in which people have to fight with equipment that is immediately available or can be reconstituted at short notice, there would be no prospect of building additional Typhoons in time to fight.
Moreover, both Russia and China have had a long-standing policy over many decades of putting older equipment into a war reserve that can be drawn on in times of conflict to replenish stocks. That is exactly what the Russians did in the Ukrainian conflict, when they pulled mothballed tanks out of depots from as far away as Siberia, to make up for the very large number of losses of more modern fighting vehicles at the hands of very spirited Ukrainian defenders who, one might add, were armed in many cases with British manufactured NLAWs.
Conversely, the UK Ministry of Defence has virtually no concept of a war reserve, although events suggest that we should rapidly be developing one. As a comparator, the US keeps thousands of retired combat aircraft, some very recently retired, in a giant desert boneyard, as it is known, in the Mojave desert, in hot and high conditions where aircraft do not rust. The Americans regularly rehearse taking aircraft out of the stockpile and refurbishing them to return them to the frontline. It therefore seems to me that it would be madness to sell off over 20% of our fighter force. Surely it would make much greater sense to put those aircraft into storage, either in the UK or in the Mojave desert, to begin to constitute a warfighting reserve of our own.
Not only would that come at very little expense, but it would constitute a reserve air wing of up to three squadrons in time of war, not least as the Tranche 1 Typhoon, armed with advanced medium-range air-to-air missiles and advanced short-range air-to-air missiles, is still more than a match for Russian long-range bombers, which might attempt to assault the UK via the back door over the north Atlantic, carrying multiple long-range cruise missiles.