Afghanistan

Bernard Jenkin Excerpts

Monday 14th February 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

I thank my right hon. Friend for his statement, and particularly for his last few words on involving the international players around Afghanistan in a final settlement. Can he say more about who will lead the political settlement around which we hope stability will be maintained as British and American troops withdraw later in this decade? May I point out that cautious optimism represents painfully slow progress 10 years after this war started, and that a lasting settlement is possible only if there is a political settlement that involves talking to our enemies?

[Dr Fox]

It is very clear that it is unlikely that a single political initiative will bring all the players into a final settlement, so there are a number of ongoing initiatives. The Prime Minister’s role has been very important in having a dialogue with the Government of Pakistan and the Government of Afghanistan on a trilateral basis, and a similar initiative is being undertaken by the US. We must all understand that the key player is Pakistan, which is so important to a successful outcome.

If I may make a plea to the House, a lot of criticism is levied at Pakistan when things are not going right, but it would do us all good to be much more welcoming of the positive measures that are being taken there. Pakistan is in a very difficult situation, but it is still able to assist us. It does us no good constantly to criticise a key ally, or to fail to praise it, when it is making important contributions.

Strategic Defence and Security Review

Bernard Jenkin Excerpts

Thursday 4th November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Dr Fox]

The hon. Lady makes a very important point. Indeed, when we recently met a number of our armed forces coming home from Afghanistan, we both pointed out that without the support of families it would be infinitely more difficult for our service personnel to be engaged in Afghanistan. It is important that when we look at allowances, we strike a balance between what will enable our personnel and their families to get an adequate standard of living, particularly when they face the unique difficulties of postings abroad or extended periods away from family, and ensuring, in the very difficult financial climate we inherited, that we get value for money. We will carry out the review as quickly as we can, but I have to say to the hon. Lady that I would much rather get it right than get it quickly. We need properly to understand the implications for changes to the allowance, and any changes that are made must be phased in in a way that makes it possible for families to adjust to and absorb any of the financial changes that we are forced to undertake.

[Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

My right hon. Friend has rightly won admiration for the very difficult settlement that he has had to reach in this review. He is clear from his remarks that the Afghan campaign, which may be costing the British taxpayer up to £8 billion a year, has significantly skewed the shape of the core defence programme. Can this be quantified? Should not those distortions to the core defence programme also be funded from the reserve so that defence policy in the long term is not affected by what we are doing in Afghanistan?

[Dr Fox]

If my hon. Friend is saying that defence should permanently have more money than it gets in any one year, neither I, nor—I suspect, as I look at him—the shadow Defence Secretary would disagree with that. We have to live within the financial constraints that we have. When we say that there were inevitable distortions because of Afghanistan, that is merely to state the blindingly obvious. We need to have a regular period of review so that we are able to take account, on a constant basis, of changing circumstances. That is why we want to have a five-yearly defence review that is able to do that, so that we are not having to wait for disproportionately long periods before making any adjustments that we might need. The 2015 review will be a very useful point at which to try to assess what the legacy of Afghanistan may be on our armed forces and what adjustments are required in the light of that.

Let me now turn to the detail of the SDSR in relation to defence. The new national security strategy set out the policy framework that was the force driver of the SDSR. The adaptive posture demands that our armed forces become a more flexible and agile force with global reach, capable of providing nuclear and conventional deterrence, containment, coercion and intervention.

The Government are committed to the maintenance of the UK’s minimum effective nuclear deterrent. We will proceed with the renewal of Trident and the submarine replacement programme, incorporating the changes set out in the value-for-money study published in the SDSR. The decision to extend the life of the current Vanguard class submarines and changes in the profile of the replacement programme mean that initial gate will be approved in the next few weeks. The next phase of the project will commence, and the main gate decision will take place in 2016. This programme does not in any way alter the continuous nature and credibility of the nuclear deterrent.

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[Mr Jenkin]

My hon. Friend is making some extremely powerful points. Does he agree that the emphasis now seems to have become a competition not between the three services, but between military personnel and civilian personnel? The fact that civilian personnel have given themselves equivalent ranks to military personnel has put them more in direct competition, so that they double up the functions of the armed forces.

[Nicholas Soames]

My hon. Friend is right. The problem is that there are overlaps at every level of decision taking in the Ministry of Defence. Two separate audiences are competing with each other. It is extraordinary that an institution that understands the ethos of command is so bad at doing it itself. Some of the most dreadful things were brought to me when I was a Minister. There might have been a terrible military cock-up and it would be taken away to be examined. The issue would come back six months later, but everyone would have had their fingers over it and Ministers would end up being told that it had been a great military triumph. It is true that no one is ever held accountable. The decision making is very lame and very long-winded.

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[Mr Bob Ainsworth (Coventry North East) (Lab)]

It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Mid Sussex (Nicholas Soames). I echo his tribute to our armed forces—not just the fallen, but all of them. I spent two years as Minister for the Armed Forces and one as Secretary of State for Defence during a period when we were not only suffering the greatest losses of modern times, but fighting at the highest level of capability that we have had to achieve recently, and showing what our armed forces were capable of. That impressed on me what amazing people they are: they are worthy of our wholehearted support.

It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Mid Sussex for many other reasons. As he said, he was very helpful when I was producing a Green Paper while I was a Minister, and his commitment to the armed forces is recognised by nearly everyone. I do not think it was entirely recognised by the sergeant-major who was responsible for his training at Sandhurst, if all the stories that he has told me are true, but everyone else recognises it—and, of course, his ancestry rivals my own. [Laughter.]

My admiration for the current Secretary of State is growing by the minute. I have to say that he has displayed huge capability in the political field, both in the House today and elsewhere. In the political arena, he is emulating some of the skills displayed by the Duke of Wellington, who used to hide his horses on reverse slopes and show his strength where he felt weakest. The Secretary of State has done the same this afternoon: he has lectured us about strategy—he has used the phrases of the lecture circuit—because he knows jolly well that what has been presented to the nation in the last few weeks is far from a strategy. What we have is an SPSR, or “seriously pretend spending review”, not a strategic security review. I think the Secretary of State knows that, but he does his very best to hide it, and he will do his very best to work within it. He has fought his corner hard in Government, and he is to be respected for that.

However, we never quite received an answer from the Secretary of State to the intervention from my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Edgbaston (Ms Stuart). He talked a great deal about how we were joining our commitment to Afghanistan with the growing capability of the Afghan national security forces. The right hon. Member for North East Hampshire (Mr Arbuthnot), the Chairman of the Select Committee, tried to help him by telling us again what we all know—how long we have been in Afghanistan—but the question was very simple: did the Prime Minister consult the Secretary of State before he announced the 2015 withdrawal date for our combat mission in Afghanistan?

Answer came there none, but we know what the answer is. The Prime Minister did not consult the Secretary of State. He did not consult his Defence Secretary, he did not consult his Foreign Secretary, and he did not consult his Chief of the Defence Staff. We know whom the Prime Minister consulted before he made that decision: he consulted the Deputy Prime Minister. This was a political decision, made for political reasons. We have more than 9,000 troops in theatre in Afghanistan, facing an enemy whose main tactic is to wait until we tire and then to inherit a victory, but for political reasons, and no others, the Prime Minister of this country announced an end date for our combat mission, playing into the hands of the enemy by transferring the pressure from the Taliban to the Afghan Government.

I am not saying that there is not a huge need for pressure on the Afghan Government. The single weakest point of the campaign of the international security assistance force in Afghanistan lies in the weaknesses and corruption of its Government, and if we fail to put that right, the mission will most certainly fail. But the decision to remove the pressure on the main enemy for domestic political reasons without even consulting the Defence Secretary, the Foreign Secretary or the Chief of the Defence Staff was astonishing.

[Mr Jenkin]

I have great respect for the way in which the right hon. Gentleman conducted himself as Defence Secretary in very difficult circumstances, but I really do think that he is talking complete rubbish about this. When I last visited Afghanistan, the Americans had already indicated that they were minded to withdraw, and the effect of that was to galvanise the Afghan political process. The stalemate in the Afghan political process has been the main obstacle to progress in Afghanistan. I believe that the Prime Minister made the right announcement, and I have no doubt that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Defence was properly consulted.

[Mr Ainsworth]

I have the greatest respect for the hon. Gentleman as well. I know that he follows these issues, and takes them very seriously. As I have said, there is a need for pressure on the Afghan Government—I do not doubt that—but let us not pretend that the British Government only went as far as the American Government had gone. What the American President said in autumn 2009—albeit unfortunately taking a long time to say it—was that by 2011 there would be a draw-down of the additional troops put into Afghanistan. He did not say there would be a withdrawal and an end to the combat mission. It was the British Prime Minister who said that, and as he is the leader of the nation providing the second largest troop contribution, that announcement was by no means insignificant in respect of the ISAF contingent.

The British Prime Minister named a date for the total end of the combat mission for party political reasons. We can establish that by considering the people he consulted as against those he failed to consult. If the reasons for the announcement had been to do with the operational mission, he would have consulted the Defence and Foreign Secretaries and the Chief of the Defence Staff, but as both the hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex (Mr Jenkin) and I know, the person he consulted was the Deputy Prime Minister.

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[Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

I commend the hon. Member for Bridgend (Mrs Moon) on alighting on a vital capability. There was one thing that she did not say about it: if it were deployed, it would be the envy of the Americans, such is the sophistication of the capability. It is also a valued asset of many of our European NATO allies and I hope that even now, at this eleventh hour, there might be ways to explore how we can share the burden of the capability so that it can be retained. I fear that that underlines how the defence review was done in a rush and that, whatever the thinking in advance, it ended in the inevitable collision between the Ministry of Defence and the Treasury which, as the letter from my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State to the Prime Minister advertised, threatened to be even more destructive than it was.

I would further underline, as the Secretary of State admitted, that the review has been distorted by our activities and the burden of operations in Afghanistan. To that extent, the review is raiding future capability to sustain current operations, which is an unstrategic approach. I fully accept—I think we have to understand the predicament faced by those on the Treasury Bench—that the Government have inherited a very difficult situation and not just in the Ministry of Defence. Of course the national deficit has to be addressed, but there is a deeper malaise at the heart of the dysfunctional relationship between the Ministry of Defence and the rest of Government and, indeed, in dysfunctional relationships at the MOD.

As shadow Secretary of State for two years and a member for four years of the Select Committee on Defence, I watched with increasing perplexity post-9/11 our first Afghan deployment, the invasion of Iraq and the subsequent deployment to Helmand, as chaos grew due to policy that was increasingly reactive to events and less and less in control of them. There was increasingly an apparent lack of strategic thinking behind what we were doing. As we started calling for NATO to develop a new strategic concept, I began to ask myself who held the UK’s strategic concept and whether there was one. That was the starting point for the Public Administration Committee’s inquiry once I was elected its Chairman in this Parliament. Our report entitled, “Who does UK National Strategy?” is on the Table and tagged for this debate. The evidence, I am afraid, was more disturbing than I had imagined.

The word “strategy” itself has become corrupted. It has become a tool of management-speak for consultancies and people who do not really know what they are doing when they use it. We heard evidence from Sir Rob Fry and Commodore Stephen Jermy, who were both involved in decisions in the Ministry of Defence about the deployment to Helmand. They said that it was driven primarily by military concerns, without any strategic thinking going on in Whitehall about the reasons for it or its consequences.

In one rather telling piece of evidence, Peter Hennessy, shortly to be ennobled as Lord Hennessy, says that politicians too often reach for the word “vision”, and that we should be ready to excise that word with our red buzzer, because it is an excuse for a politician to disconnect his aspirations and the sunlit uplands that he dreams of from the reality of the world in which he, and the civil servants who have to deliver the policy that he is seeking to deliver, have to live.

We found that Whitehall Departments each have their own version of strategy, with their own strategy units, but none of them knows what they are meant to contribute to national strategy, if they even knew what that was. That applies to the Treasury in particular. There is no doubt that the main strategic effort of this Government has to be deficit reduction, but I think that, as far as the Treasury is concerned, it is the Government’s sole strategic effort. To have a sole strategic effort is strategic blindness, not strategy. It may be a necessity to have that imperative driving the whole Government at this time, but other strategic priorities have to be recognised.

Strategy is not just about reconciling ends, ways and means. It is not about having a document that is published as a Command Paper and stacked on a shelf afterwards—job done. Strategy is a state of mind. It is a process of thinking that has to be ongoing, has to be done continuously, and has to be continually adapted. A grand strategy, or a national strategy, is about reconciling all the instruments of statecraft to the main ends of promoting the security, peace and prosperity of the people of these islands. It is evident that both the national security strategy and the defence and security review lack strategic thinking—the consistency of analysis and assessment that is necessary to give them strategic coherence.

The problem is that the work simply has not been done, because Whitehall lacks the capacity to do it. There are no people working for the National Security Council or the strategy units of different Departments who are tasked with doing or trained to do such work. Some people say, “Strategists are not trained, they are born”, but that is like saying that a great gymnast is born a gymnast. Of course, someone has to have talent to be a great gymnast or a great concert pianist, but they also have to put in the work and the training in order to be successful before they give that first recital. There used to be a six-month civil service course on strategic thinking; at the moment, it consists of one module of one week’s training.

That lack of strategy is evident in all the contradictions in the documents. The national security strategy says that it is the first duty of Government to protect our people. Well, that is clearly not so. The first priority of Government is not defence. Health, pensions, schools, the Department for International Development, and even the European Union budget have taken priority over the defence of these islands in the comprehensive spending review.

The words “national interest” are sprinkled liberally throughout the documents. They are mentioned 26 times in the national security strategy and six times in the SDSR, and were even mentioned once by my right hon. Friend the Chancellor in his comprehensive spending review statement—but that was only in connection with justifying the increase in spending on overseas aid. In all those mentions, there is very little definition of what our national interests actually are. When I tabled a parliamentary question to the Prime Minister to ask him, he referred me to paragraph 2.12 of the national security strategy:

“Our security, prosperity and freedom are interconnected and mutually supportive. They constitute our national interest.”

That is really sub-GCSE stuff. If that is the depth of thinking that has gone into an assessment of our national interests, we can hardly expect much coherence from the Government’s documents.

The real inconsistency at the heart of all three of the Government’s reviews is the attempt to reconcile what the Foreign Secretary has said about having no strategic shrinkage and expanding our influence on the world stage with the savage defence cuts that will lead to a reduction of one third in our deployable capability. That is what the defence planning assumptions actually show. There has been an attempt to connect the Foreign Secretary’s vision of our foreign policy with the reality of the deficit reduction programme, but it has not been achieved.

Our Committee concluded that political strategic leadership is essential if we are to have a coherent national strategy. Strategic thinking is vital, and we need to examine all the threats, possibilities and opportunities, not just certain threats and contingencies. Within Whitehall we need challenge, with alternatives coming up through the system and people conducting thorough analysis. Ideally, we want a national centre of strategic assessment, protected for secrecy in a similar way to the intelligence services and able to provide a permanent resource to Ministers.

[Mr Russell Brown (Dumfries and Galloway) (Lab)]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way, given the time limit—perhaps I have bought him a little more time. Would he like to define for the House what he believes national strategy should be?

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[Mr Jenkin]

I am grateful for the question, but I will continue. [Interruption.] With respect, that was not the purpose of the Committee’s report. We were not trying to write a national strategy; we were simply trying to advertise the fact that the capacity for developing a coherent national strategy does not exist.

[Mr Ainsworth]

I think that the hon. Gentleman is on to something, and I know that a number of people are examining his report. Why does he think that we as a political class have shrunk to pragmatic reactions, rather than daring ones? Does he think politicians would be rewarded or punished if they dared to be strategic?

[Mr Jenkin]

The right hon. Gentleman asks an interesting question, which has been raised with me before. There are two reasons why politicians fear such a challenge. The first is that politicians who are busy running their Departments do not like people running into their offices with contrary ideas and imperatives. The other reason is that if they ask for alternatives to be developed, they say, “Whatever you do, don’t put it on to a piece of paper and don’t e-mail it to anybody, in case it leaks out.”

We are embarked on a deficit reduction programme that depends on a certain economic out-turn. I just hope that the Treasury has run through the alternative plans B, C and D, in case things do not turn out as we expect. The problem is that we have got into the habit of thinking in closed systems. Economists in particular work in mathematical equations and like tame, predictable problems. Economics is all about prediction and certainty, with the intention of being vindicated by what happens. We live in a world in which problems are not tame but wicked and unpredictable. As we face greater and greater global challenges, we must be more prepared for the unpredictability of the global security, economic and geopolitical environments. We therefore need the capacity for strategy.

I shall give a brief example. I gather that after the global banking crisis started, Her Majesty the Queen asked how nobody had seen that it would happen, given that it was so big. The answer is that one body did foresee a global banking collapse being a major security threat to the UK. It was the advanced research and assessment group, based at Shrivenham, and I am afraid that in March the right hon. Member for Coventry North East as Defence Secretary closed it down, to save £1 million. [Interruption.] It was such a small cut, he did not even realise it was being made. I have no doubt it did not cross his desk. It was shut down because it had made enemies by telling truth to power, and that is the capacity that needs to exist in Whitehall.

Defence Treaties (France)

Bernard Jenkin Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Dr Fox]

The Government business managers, in conjunction with the Opposition, will set out how the process will take place, but my personal choice would certainly be to ensure that both Houses have a full opportunity to debate these measures, not least because it would give them the chance to understand fully the benefits that they will bring the United Kingdom.

[Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

Is my right hon. Friend aware that earlier today, the Downing street spokesman described the agreements as being about “our strategic partnership” with France? Does he agree that a little modesty about them would be in order, and that we cannot have a strategic fusion with a country that has historically had, and still has, diametrically different strategic objectives on the world stage? We had better recognise the primacy of the relationship with the United States.

[Dr Fox]

Fortunately, it is still this country’s Secretaries of State, not Downing street spokesmen, who reply for the Government in the House of Commons. It is very important, however, that we understand the huge overlap with France in our strategic overview. My hon. Friend calls for greater modesty, but on the other hand we should not lack ambition.

Strategic Defence and Security Review

Bernard Jenkin Excerpts

Thursday 16th September 2010 Commons Chamber

[Nick Harvey]

Every time there was a defence debate in this House in the two or three years before the election, Conservative and Liberal Democrat Members repeatedly quizzed Ministers about the apparent gap between the promises they were making, the plans they were laying down and the funds that they appeared to have at their disposal in order to fulfil them. Time and again, they stood there pretending that it all added up, and the fact of the matter is that it did not.

The right hon. Gentleman refers to the Gray report. That very telling report specifically identified the true situation on the procurement side. However, that was only half the story, because the black hole existed not only in the procurement budget but across the whole defence budget, and that is the scale of the challenge that now faces us.

[Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

Although I have great respect for the shadow Secretary of State and the work that he did in the Department, I think that my hon. Friend is equally entitled to ask him when he ever admitted to the scale of the crisis that his Department was facing—although he did have the honesty to come to the House and admit that he had started the process of raiding future capability in order to sustain current operations, which showed that our commitments had got wildly ahead of the resources that the Government had made available.

[Nick Harvey]

My hon. Friend is quite right. That was precisely the significance of the measures that the right hon. Gentleman had to take hastily—last December, I think—in order to make this year’s budget wash its face. That is a graphic illustration of the problem that had been allowed to grow up and which we are now having to tackle.

Of course, we could tackle this simply by cutting a bit off everything—the equal-pain option across the services—but that would not distinguish capabilities or assess real risk, and it would not reform our forces for the strategic challenges ahead. We cannot just fossilise what we currently do, and again fail the strategic test. Instead, we must look ahead to the end of this 10-year period and decide what we want our armed forces to look like at that time based on the foreign policy goals we have set, our assessment of the future character of conflict, and our anticipation of the changes in technology that we will need to incorporate.

The National Security Council has agreed that the overarching strategic posture should be to address the most immediate threats to our national security while maintaining the ability to identify and deal with emerging ones before they become bigger threats to the UK. This flexible, adaptable posture will maintain the ability to safeguard international peace and security, to deter and contain those who threaten the UK and its interests, and, where necessary, to conduct a number of different operations concurrently. It will also, crucially, keep our options open for a future in which we can expect our highest priorities to change over a period of time.

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[Mr MacShane]

I was not, but I am nervous of service patriotism. I understand it, but I wonder whether the RAF should also have military regiments, whether the Army should also have an Army air force and whether there is not some rationalisation that could be applied.

On the question of the nuclear deterrent, I entirely agree with the hon. Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis) and others. If Britain substantially reduces its nuclear deterrent capability, others may be tempted to step into the breach. We are lucky that in one of the richest regions of the world only two mature democracies —France and Britain—have a nuclear capability. If either of us were to let go or significantly reduce our nuclear deterrent profile, what other major European power might be tempted to feel that it might need one?

[Mr Jenkin]

Poland.

[Mr MacShane]

From a sedentary position, the hon. Gentleman makes a crack about Poland. [Interruption.] I have a lot of Polish background and I would not suggest that it is very helpful vis-à-vis Russia to talk up any question of Poland’s becoming a nuclear power. It is far better that we are one and that the French remain one.

[Mr Jenkin]

Exactly.

[Mr MacShane]

I am glad that the hon. Gentleman agrees with me.

We have the new rising powers in the world that do not respect the rules of democracy, whereas at the same time the democratic world is leaderless. President Obama, whom I like and admire—he is in my political family—is not a strategic world leader. There is no European leader who is a strategic world leader. The Chinese know what they want, the Russians know what they want, and Iran and North Korea know what they want. Many of the so-called Islamic republics know what they want. However, do we know what we want?

That is why the debate is important—not just in terms of my constituency interests, or firing ranges in the Western Isles or the absolutely correct need to talk with trade unions and others in the industry, or to help our wounded soldiers when they come back, for which the hon. Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart) so eloquently appealed. It is about a bigger strategic set of choices. We have to lift our horizons and think about the new threats not just to our country but to the wider set of values of ourselves and our allies. I hope that the Government—I wish them well—can rise to that challenge. If they cannot, the House must make them.

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[Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

I commend my hon. Friend the Member for Canterbury (Mr Brazier) for the passion and sincerity that he regularly brings to our debates about defence and his excellent suggestion to reduce costs by depending more on reserves. It is obvious, as I shall say in a moment, that we cut equipment or cut manpower. That is it. If we cut equipment, we reduce future capability; if we cut manpower intelligently—I am afraid that the civil service cuts must come before armed forces cuts, and substantial cuts in the civil service must be made—it can be rebuilt much more quickly. We can maintain reserves of manpower, but we cannot retain reserves of equipment that we have not built. I commend his suggestion to the House.

The right hon. Member for Rotherham (Mr MacShane) mentioned strategy. Let me say first that the Defence Committee has alerted us to the startlingly compressed timetable for the review. We know that there is only one reason for that. It is to fit into the spending round. There is no doubt that we are in danger of having an FDSR instead of an SDSR—a financial defence and security review rather than a strategic defence and security review.

[Mr MacShane]

On whether we cut expenditure on manpower or equipment, does the hon. Gentleman feel any of my concern that a great deal of DFID money goes to countries with massive military expenditure that represents a disproportionate level of their national income? I wonder whether we should look a little more closely at whether DFID money should go to prop up the military machines in India, Pakistan and some of the African states.

[Mr Jenkin]

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for his suggestion, but I am not going to be drawn into that. I want to return to his mention of strategy. I am Chairman of the Public Administration Committee, which is conducting an inquiry entitled “Who does UK grand strategy?” We have had evidence from the Foreign Secretary and this morning the Chief of the Defence Staff gave evidence. There is a widespread feeling, expressed by the CDS himself, that we have lost the art of strategic thinking.

An article in the RUSI Journal by General Paul Newton and others states:

“The problem with the UK ‘debate’ on strategy, and defence matters more generally, is that for many observers there does not seem to be one.”

I am afraid that that is the vulnerability of this defence review—that it is being conducted in the absence of a coherent strategy. As the CDS said, we have lost the “habit of strategic thought”—the kind that looks 20 years ahead and asks what sort of country we want to be. The decisions that are made in the SDSR will define what sort of country we are in 10, 15 or 20 years’ time. It seems as though we are following Sir Humphrey’s adage about producing Government documents: “Always get rid of the difficult bit in the title—it does less harm than in the text.” Thus strategy is referred to in the title, and not to be dealt with in the substance of the text.

Yes, deficit reduction is the main effort of Government under the present circumstances; nobody in the defence world resents or disputes that. Indeed, economic security is one of the fundamental qualities of a secure state. However, the SDSR should concentrate on maintaining what I call minimum recoverable capability, so that however far we pare down current capabilities, they are recoverable in the event of an emergency. It is a risky business in this world. In the 1930s, we planned for a three-year warning for going to war, yet three years was hardly enough. As was pointed out in evidence to our Committee, it was the fighters—the Hurricanes and the Spitfires—coming into service at just the critical moment that saved this country from annihilation.

That is the kind of risk analysis that has to be made in this defence review. If the debate is about what capability we are employing and what capability we do not need because we never use it, that misses the point. Defence is about preparing for what we do not expect or anticipate. It is about being ready to use capabilities that we hope never to use, the strategic deterrent being a case in point. The danger of the SDSR is that it is being cost-driven—that it will permanently relegate this country from the first division of global powers, and that we are losing capabilities that once lost will never be recovered. We nearly did that in 1982. Paradoxically, it was the invasion of the Falklands that saved us and completely changed the situation. In fact, it brought back into being the whole concept of expeditionary warfare, which was a very alien concept in cold war terms.

The CDS referred to the financial envelope that the Ministry of Defence has been given. That sends shivers down my spine. The Treasury cannot be allowed to define £500 million spent on defence in terms exactly equivalent to £500 million spent on quangos and bureaucracy. The saving of £500 million on defence will cost far more strategically to this country than that of £500 million on quangos and bureaucracy. That qualitative judgment must be understood.

We have talked about Trident, although perhaps, for the sake of brevity, today is not the time to have that debate. If we delay Trident, we are not only doing something extraordinary that the Treasury has decried and despaired about so often in relation to defence, but putting off a programme that will cost more. If we are trying to get the deficit down over a 20-year period, then adding to costs in five years’ time will not reduce the deficit. It is like the pension problem whereby we store up future liabilities instead of facing up to them today. It is better to spend the money today than store up a bigger liability later on. We also run the risk of reopening the debate and creating an atmosphere in which cancellation becomes an option, and eventually an inevitability because of the cost increase.

If we are going to have a deterrent, then it is not about firing those weapons but about being ready and evidently prepared and determined to do so if necessary. It is about resolve, intent and sending signals to the wider world about what sort of country we are and how determined we are to defend our interests and our allies. If we falter on the upgrade of Trident, we will falter on the intention and resolve to defend our country, our wider interests and our allies. That is why we should not go down that road.

The alternative that we face in the defence review is Trident crowding out everything else, because there would be a bulge in expenditure on the procurement budget between 2015 and 2024. We would lose the aircraft carriers, the fast jets, the joint strike fighter, the transport aircrafts or the tanks, and they all have to be included in the mix. The problem is that the relationship between the Treasury and the Ministry of Defence has become dysfunctional. The MOD is evidently the most dysfunctional Department in Whitehall and became so under the previous Government. If I were in the Treasury, I would be exasperated at the constant moving of the goalposts, the additional costs, the cost over-runs and the incompetence that we have seen and that the Gray report exposed.

The Prime Minister will have to intervene in that dispute between the Treasury and the Ministry of Defence, to safeguard vital defence capability, despite the MOD’s incompetence, and give it a chance to sort matters out. Otherwise, we will finish up abandoning vital capacity, and non-economic strategic considerations will simply be ignored.

Perhaps the real SDSR will start after the spending review, because this SDSR has such a short time scale. The real strategic thinking—the installation of capacity for strategic thinking throughout Whitehall—has to start after this SDSR, and then we have to rebuild on the foundations that are left after the spending round. But what this spending round must not do is permanently relegate this country to the second division.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—

Strategic Defence and Security Review

Bernard Jenkin Excerpts

Monday 21st June 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Bolton North East (Mr Crausby), with whom I served on the Select Committee on Defence in the last Parliament. I always knew that he had a great speech in him that would defend the strains in the Ministry of Defence. We certainly heard it today, and I congratulate him on it.

We all accept that in this Parliament debt reduction must be the coalition’s main effort, but in this dangerous world, the UK needs to be able to protect itself from the threats it may face, now and into the future. The possession of a flexible, deployable military capability remains an indispensible component of any cost-effective defence and security strategy. As the Secretary of State told the Royal United Services Institute last week, defence is as much about deterrence as the actual use of force—and we heard that again today. The strategic defence and security review must be preoccupied not just with the capabilities we deploy during this period of “hot peace”, as opposed to cold war, but with maintaining those capabilities that we hope never to use in anger.

I have no fear of further scrutiny of the Trident deterrent programme, first because Trident is the cheapest option available. Its costs are vastly overstated by its opponents, amounting only to 0.5% of the defence budget over its lifetime. No one knows how expensive the alternatives would be, but they would demand the creation of a whole new weapons systems without the input of allies. Does anyone expect this to be a cheaper option than piggybacking on American technology?

Secondly, the development of an alternative weapons system would also put us in breach of the non-proliferation treaty. What would the international community say about that? Thirdly, Trident is the most effective system. It is safe from first strike, unlike land-based missiles. It is supersonic, unlike cruise missiles, which would be vulnerable to interception, and crucially, it is the least detectable.

I draw the attention of the House to something that Baroness Williams wrote in The Guardian this morning, which she clearly fails to understand. She argues that by having three Trident submarines instead of four, we would not only save, as she terms it,

“several billion pounds a year”,

which is questionable, but could maintain a

“smaller but still effective deterrent”

if we

“keep Trident submarines in port, with at least one on alert status able to sail in a developing crisis situation.”

The suggestion is that the UK should be forced to deploy our nuclear deterrent in the face of the world’s media in the midst of a full-blown international crisis. To plan for such a public escalation is strategically illiterate.

But Trident is simply one part of our deterrence. We need the new smaller surface warships to deter drug smuggling and piracy. We need more drones to protect ground forces on operations. Strike aircraft and cruise missiles help deter aggression by rogue states that threaten to destabilise their regions. How else would we defend the Falkland Islands today? The ability to deploy ground troops at a distance acts as a deterrence and also hugely increases our influence with our key allies, especially the United States.

Astute submarines can deter almost any other navy from putting to sea against us. Flexible, deployable capability gives us broader deterrence effect, and that indefinable and indispensable quality, influence. Such capabilities take decades to create and will take decades to re-create if we give them up now in the face of a one-off fiscal crisis.

But what can we afford? Even if spending is maintained, there will have to be substantial cuts in personnel and equipment. Bernard Gray, the author of the excellent MOD report on procurement last year, said that, if the MOD budget is frozen, the Department will be unable to order any new equipment for the next 10 years. If defence is to come out stronger, as the Secretary of State said it must, following the review, it is very difficult to see how spending can be cut—a point implicitly accepted by the protection of defence spending in the current year.

The Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary have both stated that they have no wish to oversee the decline of the UK as a world power. The task facing the Secretary of State is to ensure that his “policy-led, resource-informed” cross-Government review does not lead to the UK stumbling toward decline as a result. I have set out my own basis for the review in the form of a memorandum which the Prime Minister might well have sent to the Cabinet Secretary in his first week of office—a memorandum which the Royal United Services Institute very kindly published on its website today.

The defence review is about what sort of nation we wish to be in, say, 2020, and it must also explain how we get there. Are we to become just another medium-sized European country, like Spain or Italy, or must we recognise that our historical and geographic inheritance has presented us with a unique global role that we should be prepared to shoulder?

[Robert Flello]

I am thoroughly enjoying listening to the hon. Gentleman’s speech, which is well reasoned and considered. Has he considered—perhaps in his paper, which I have not had an opportunity to read yet—the position of our forces abroad, for example in Germany? He may come to that in his speech.

[Mr Jenkin]

Those forces should certainly be part of the review. It is difficult to imagine how we can hang on to a heavily armoured capability, give up those bases and provide for the expense of bases elsewhere. It is an open question. I do not present solutions or capabilities in the paper; I set out parameters for the discussion.

As I have said in the House before, for British prosperity and security, the UK’s global role is not a lifestyle choice; it is an imperative. It is not merely an expression of our aspirations. It defines who we are as a nation. We have unique capabilities and advantages that other nations do not possess, and it is in the interests of all free nations, and it is our national responsibility, that we use them for our mutual benefit.

In the past, there was nothing inevitable about the abolition of slavery, the defeat of fascism, or the facing down of communism, and in the future there is nothing inevitable about the continued spread of democracy and free trade, yet we depend upon democracy, free trade and the international rule of law utterly for our own prosperity and security. We must play our role in the world, simply because we can. That role reflects and reinforces our values and interests.

If we wish to step back from our global role, we must be frank about the likely consequences of such a move. We must ask which nation will take our role as America’s most influential and enduring ally. Are we to encourage the US to become unilateralist by disengagement? Who would protect our shipping from Somalian pirates? Who will invest in NATO if we choose to disinvest? Which other nation or nations would gain from our retreat? Would they promote freedom and democracy, or their own agenda, not ours?

The world is getting more dangerous and more fluid. We are in an age much more akin to the 19th century than the relative stability of the cold war stand-off. In today’s world overpopulation, competition for food and resources, the risk of environmental catastrophe, mass migration, accelerating technological change, nuclear proliferation, nationalism and extremism are all on the rise, and that is quite a list, aggravated further by the global recession. Is this the moment for us to substitute soft power for hard power? Too often, advocates of soft power are those who have decided that they can take a free ride on the hard power of others.

The Conservatives in 1979 inherited an economic and fiscal mess almost as bad as the one that we now face, yet between 1979 and 1985 defence spending increased by 30% in real terms or by almost 0.9% of GDP. The national interest was put first, and it should be put first now. Defence spending in 2009-10 was £35.3 billion, historically very low as a percentage of GDP. Other programmes, such as social security, are several times larger. While spending will have to be restrained in the long term, with a modest phased spending increase, savings of perhaps £3 billion in procurement and overheads, and a moratorium on discretionary operations, we could maintain a broad spectrum of capabilities and retain the UK’s global role. That would be outstanding value for money for this country and for the world, and would help to create a safer, more secure, and therefore more prosperous world for the next generation.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dr Lewis]

I am delighted that I gave way to the hon. Gentleman, who is absolutely right. I could add to the examples that he gave the Yom Kippur war, which was not predicted by hypersensitive Israel, the Falklands war, which was not predicted by us, the invasion of Kuwait, which was not predicted by anybody, and the attacks of September 2001, which were not predicted by the world’s then only superpower. I therefore very much welcome the Secretary of State’s acknowledgment that there is an unpredictability factor. We simply do not know what enemies will arise, when, and what sort of threat we will face.

This argument has been had over and again throughout the history of defence, most notoriously between 1919 and 1932, when something called the 10-year rule was in operation. It was felt that we could cut forces, because we could always look ahead a decade and say, “Well, there doesn’t seem to be any threat facing us now.” It is impossible to know significantly in advance, if at all, when we will next find ourselves at war. That means it is a limiting factor when we say that a defence review must be foreign policy-led, or even defence policy-led. At the end of the day, what we are doing in the strategic defence and security review is calculating the premium that we are prepared to pay on the insurance policy against harm befalling this country. With a normal insurance policy, if we knew when an accident would happen or when an injury would be inflicted, we could probably take steps to avoid it and would not need to spend money on the premium in the first place. However, we do not know, and that is why we have to spend the money.

As I indicated in an earlier intervention, I am particularly concerned about a frame of mind that is prevalent in some quarters of the Army, and which asserts that, because we are engaged in a counter-insurgency campaign now, anybody who says that in 20 or 30 years, or even longer, we might need modern aircraft to defend our airspace, modern naval vessels to defend our waters and lines of communication or even modern military vehicles to enable our Army to fight—hopefully alongside others—a foreign aggressor that not just had irregular or guerrilla forces but was possibly a hostile state, is living in the past or still thinking in cold war terms. I think like that, but I am not still thinking in cold war terms. I am thinking of the wars that we might have to face two or three decades hence, not just the conflicts in which we are engaged today.

A few years ago, I heard a senior military officer say that a tipping point might come when we had to choose between fighting the conflicts in which we were currently engaged and fighting a war at some time in the future. In other words, he was trying to contrast the small expectation of a big war in the future with the big expectation of a small war that we might have to fight sooner. I said at the time that I felt that to be a false choice, but if I had to make the choice, I would rather insure against the danger of a big war in the future than that of a small war closer to hand.

[Mr Jenkin]

My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech. To reinforce his point, I add that the small wars that we have fought recently have had more characteristics of state-on-state warfare than many people would care to admit. Serbia fought like a state, as did the Taliban, and Saddam Hussein certainly fought like a state twice. The idea that we should give up state-on-state warfare capability is absolute madness.

[Dr Lewis]

I entirely agree with my hon. Friend that that is absolute madness. I shall not name the senior Army officer who first proposed that thesis—all I will say is that he has become a very senior Army officer, and some say that he might even become an extremely senior Army officer—but leave it to people’s reading of the runes.

The reality is that in those conflicts that we fought, our high-end, precision materiel, our modern techniques, and our use of aircraft, naval vessels and mechanised warfare equipment, have been essential in getting us into theatre. The country has been disturbed and worried not by the casualties we have taken going into a theatre and displacing a hostile Government, but the casualties we take in day-by-day attrition that result from our persisting with methods that make it inevitable that our opponents can inflict them. I say this to shadow Ministers: it is not unpatriotic to question the strategy that is being followed in Afghanistan. Strategies can be improved. In previous wars, we have used strategies that failed over and again. Eventually, when they were changed, the outcomes improved. That can happen in Afghanistan.

I understand that resources are scarce and that each of the armed forces will want to make a case that suits its book best, and to claim most of those scarce resources, but we must have balanced forces, and I am delighted that the Secretary of State indicates that we will.