AUKUS Security Partnership

Lord Houghton of Richmond Excerpts

Tuesday 13th February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton (Con)]

One of the things we are doing more generally is stressing the importance of freedom of navigation. That lies behind the action we are taking in the Red Sea and I hope to hold discussions with Chinese counterparts in days to come where we will ask them, given the importance of trade to China, to be as fully supportive of freedom of navigation as we are, because that matters wherever you are in the world, including the Taiwan Strait.

[Lord Houghton of Richmond (CB)]

Superficially, this sounds like very good news and I welcome it, but were there no voices at the National Security Council that spoke to caution at all in respect of risk and affordability? In terms of affordability, Team Barrow sounds quite expensive. Is this again going to be at the expense of the conventional programme of UK defence? In terms of risk, is there not a risk of leakage of our very small supply of very highly qualified people, who would rather follow their career paths in Fremantle than in Barrow?

[Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton (Con)]

I do not believe that the noble and gallant Lord’s concerns are right. The money going into Barrow is a drop in the ocean compared to the cost of one submarine: as he well knows, these things come out at about £1 billion each. We need to make sure that Barrow, which has incredible manufacturing expertise, is fit to do this extra work that is going to be required as it scales up to 17,000 jobs. Are we going to benefit as a country? I would say absolutely yes. Rolls-Royce in Derby is going to be providing the nuclear reactors for these submarines—not just for the ones we use but also the ones Australia uses. This is good for our defence, good for our international relations and good for our industrial base.

Ukraine

Lord Houghton of Richmond Excerpts

Friday 26th January 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Houghton of Richmond (CB)]

My Lords, I offer my own welcome to the noble Lord, Lord Camoys, and congratulate him on an excellent maiden speech. If I may make so bold, his relative youth, which I welcome, reminds me that the Oxford Union will debate the situation in Ukraine at its meeting on 22 February. The motion will be:

“This house believes Ukraine should negotiate with Russia to end the war now”.


I have been invited to speak in that debate and although I have much sympathy with the motion, I intend to oppose it. My grounds for doing so will undoubtedly benefit from what I have already heard and will hear today, but they are primarily based on a self-derived and clinically strategic view that it is not in our national interest to encourage or pressurise Ukraine to seek peace.

Why do I say this? If we pause to remind ourselves of the situation at the outbreak of the current phase of Russian aggression in Ukraine two years ago, there is a general consensus that Putin made a strategic miscalculation in ordering his invasion. The miscalculation was based on three underpinning assumptions. He assumed that Ukraine’s armed forces were weak, that Russia’s armed forces were strong, and that NATO lacked the political integrity and military capability to act in a coherent way. All three assumptions, in different ways, proved wrong.

The relevant issue from a UK position is not that Putin was internally misled about the quality of his own armed forces or that he misjudged the integrity and resilience of the Ukrainian people, but that he did not think that NATO would respond in a united or militarily meaningful way. Putin thought this because he had more than enough evidence to support the view that NATO was internally fractured, underfunded, globally distracted, wafer thin in respect of war-fighting resilience, and optimised for cyclical training rather than conventional deterrence. Remarkably, the UK’s refresh of the integrated review did not concede this major strategic point: that NATO, and the UK as the leading European nation in NATO, had failed in their primary task of conventional deterrence in Europe.

In fairness, NATO and the UK should be congratulated in that they have done rather better than Putin assumed. Indeed, the subsequent success of NATO has been in its ability to maintain the war in Ukraine as—in terms that military professionals would use—limited: limited in both geography and the means employed. The limitation on the means employed needs further explanation.

The calibration of NATO support for Ukraine must be, and is being, very carefully assessed as sufficient to keep Ukraine in the fight, but not so significant as to bring about a humiliation of Russia that risks an escalation of force beyond the tactical nuclear threshold. I wholly accept the moral and ethical challenge that this situation represents. To sustain an ally in a war that it cannot be permitted to decisively win is a deeply questionable policy from a moral perspective. However, the risk of nuclear escalation, even of a tactical nature, represents an overriding concern that justifies the questionable morality of the policy.

The situation on the ground in Ukraine today has many of the hallmarks of a self-hurting stalemate en route to a frozen conflict, but only in a localised sense. The frozen conflict on land might result in some element of conflict termination, but there are absolutely no grounds to pursue any hope yet of conflict resolution. I do not believe, as many others have said today, that military means alone will bring about the context for such a resolution.

In the meantime, what should the UK and NATO do in military terms? I offer three things. First, NATO should continue to calibrate its military support for Ukraine in an ever more coherently funded and programmed way, but also in a way that maintains the limited nature of the conflict. The desire should, of course, be for Ukraine to enjoy incremental tactical advantage on land, but it should also recognise that a decisive outcome of the land battle is highly unlikely. A greater strategic advantage can more easily be achieved, for example, in the Black Sea, or by the wider erosion of the Russian will.

Secondly, and as a part of the erosion of Russian will, NATO should re-establish the effective conventional deterrence of Russia. A lot is involved in this, but primarily it is about providing the resources to re-establish NATO’s war-fighting resilience. It is also about deploying NATO forces, not in some elegant and wholly inefficient force-generation cycle, but in accordance with a general defence plan optimised to convey an unmistakable deterrent message.

Thirdly, NATO should have the strategic patience to accept that, so long as Ukraine is prepared to fight—and, in truth, continue to erode the Russian threat to Europe by proxy—we should not dictate the terms on which Ukraine should seek to resolve the conflict. It must certainly not be pressured into seeking to resolve the conflict on terms that its people cannot accept or that Russia could present as victory, or from which Russia could seek to derive encouragement for future aggression.

The lesson in all this for the current or any future UK Government is simple. They and we must remember the simple paradox on which armed forces are built: the better they are, the less likely they will need to be used. The hollowing out of the United Kingdom’s conventional Armed Forces over the last 20 years has been a significant contributory factor to recent Russian aggression. Governments should take serious and urgent note of military advocacy that seeks to rebuild military deterrent capability. The failure to make that investment has brought about the current more dangerous and far more expensive situation.

I look forward to finding out in a couple of weeks what the young and lively minds of Oxford are thinking. I travel in the perhaps naive hope that, in the strategic context of 2024, they may be thinking that investing in defence is more important than tax giveaways.

Ukraine: Tactical Nuclear Weapons

Lord Houghton of Richmond Excerpts

Thursday 1st December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Houghton of Richmond (CB)]

My Lords, I welcome this more substantial debate on Ukraine and thank the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, for securing it. Occasional Questions or short responses to government Statements do not really allow time to come properly to terms with what is happening in this war. Moreover, I sense that the understandable fascination with the military—including nuclear—aspects of the conflict does not really do justice to all its strategic complexity.

To a military mind, the conflict in Ukraine conforms to much of the thinking of the Government’s recent integrated review. In a tactical sense, the conflict has crossed the threshold of formalised warfare and is now quite clearly both brutal and horrific. However, for the moment, at least, it is a war that is limited by both geography and the means employed. Keeping it that way must be one of the primary aims of international policy.

The situation in Ukraine also represents the tactical military dimension of a wider strategic conflict between Russia and those elements of the international community that support an established set of rules and values. That strategic conflict is not geographically limited and embraces a wide variety of what we call “attack vectors”, including, though not limited to, cyber, energy, food, economic sanctions, misinformation, political assassination and proxy terrorism.

I will offer three observations. First, in a military sense, we cannot afford to either win or lose the tactical battle. To attempt to win risks the military escalation that we must seek to avoid, while to lose risks a strategic moral defeat. We must, however, do more to keep Ukraine in the fight, since I fear that Russia still maintains an advantage in the means of production to sustain industrial-level warfare.

Secondly, the more difficult conflict is the strategic one: the one of international resilience in the face of the non-kinetic dimensions of the confrontation. That is also one that I worry Putin might still think he can win—or at least create the circumstances for an advantageous peace.

Thirdly, given that the non-kinetic dimensions of this conflict are not by-products of war but are most definitely the primary vectors of strategic attack, where is the Government’s strategic narrative that explains this to the British people and demands of them the necessary sacrifices? I worry that wider society is currently completely confused by a set of toxic debates about Covid, Brexit and government economic incompetence, when the most significant factor in play in the cost of living crisis is that we are actually at war—but not a war of a variety that most people recognise.

Queen’s Speech

Lord Houghton of Richmond Excerpts

Wednesday 18th May 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Houghton of Richmond (CB)]

The gracious Speech indicated that the Government will

“lead the way in championing security around the world … work closely with international partners to maintain a united NATO and address the most pressing global security challenges”

and continue to invest in our gallant Armed Forces. I would observe that even before the gracious Speech, this Government had already, in the context of Ukraine, rediscovered the wider utility of the military instrument of national power. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that defence and security have suddenly become the major currency of foreign policy. It seems of late, for example, that the dominant headline resulting from most international ministerial visits—to India, Norway, Japan, Australia and Sweden—is about the strengthening of defence and security relationships. Given the state of the world, this is all to be welcomed and we should take great pride in the quality and capability of our Armed Forces being a positive discriminator of our status as a nation on the global stage.

What about the future investment in our Armed Forces to meet and continue this policy ambition? The scale and nature of the Government’s intentions in this respect are far less clear, so I offer some thoughts on this, and I do so in the context of the debates I have listened to in this Chamber over the past few years. It seems to me that in those debates there is always far too much focus on what you might call the input metrics of military capabilities: how many soldiers have we got, how many main battle tanks, how many fighter squadrons? Indeed, a concern over how many ships we have has almost become an institutionalised reflex of this House. I would never underestimate the importance of numbers and I share many of those concerns, but I would always put allies as a far more important factor in assessing military capability choices. Given the security challenges of the age, collective security is the only way to achieve global stability, and the only way to achieve the scale of the capability truly required. I would, in the design of our Armed Forces capability, always place a premium on those capabilities which help to secure allies and alliances.

In this respect, the United Kingdom, as it seeks to continue to enjoy the benefits of global influence, has some unique advantages. We are a nuclear power; we are the leading NATO nation in Europe; we pioneer smaller groupings of like-minded nations, such as the Joint Expeditionary Force; and we enjoy the intelligence benefits of the Five Eyes, the global security connections of AUKUS and FPDA and defence relationships throughout the Middle East. As has been demonstrated in no small part by Ukraine, we also know how to train and assist partner nations, and to do so in ways that are professional, respectful and not demeaning.

The qualities that bring about these defence relationships are not naturally gifted. They are the result of investment, but the investments are not primarily in exquisite platforms. Rather, they are in the human quality of our people, our training, our organisational competence, our command and control systems and our intelligence capability.

It is no accident that the quality of Ukraine’s performance has been more to do with intelligence superiority, human motivation and professional competence than with numbers or firepower alone. But there is another lesson from the war in Ukraine, which relates to a different but equally critical alliance. It is the one that we as a nation must invest more in. It is the relationship that we have with our defence industry and our defence supply chain. In the absence of conventional warfare over the past couple of decades, we have taken risks with weapon stockpiles, with obsolescence and with spare parts. We call this the hollowing out of defence capability and most nations indulge in it. It is one way of maintaining the illusion of capability without having to afford the reality. As Ukraine is proving, however, to an extent on all sides of the fight, conventional war involves stunning rates of consumption and reveals levels of peacetime stockpiles which simply cannot keep pace with demand. We desperately need to invest in what we call war-fighting resilience.

I hope that when we in this House come to debate our own national balance of investment in future defence capability—in the context of more money, I hope—we do not simply revert to an internal competition based on the input metrics of platform numbers, but rather something that understands alliances and properly weighs the investments needed in human quality, superior intelligence, command and control and the resilience and sustainability that rest on adequate stockpiles, robust supply chains and, let us face it, kit that works. If we get this right, we will continue to enjoy the respect and loyalty of allies and stand a far better chance of collectively delivering the stability that we all desire.

Russia: Gas Supplies

Lord Houghton of Richmond Excerpts

Wednesday 10th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con)]

My Lords, on my noble friend’s first point, I will be sure to relay that to the Prime Minister and raise directly the concerns about him not being able to visit Russia. On the serious point about our military presence, as my noble friend will be aware, we have exercised our full support to Ukraine, including the deployment of vessels to the region in order to ensure security for international waters, and we strongly support the Ukrainian position on territorial sovereignty and integrity.

[Lord Houghton of Richmond (CB)]

My Lords, malicious activity by Russia in the context of destabilising Ukraine was prominent in the recent integrated review’s assessment of the global security context. Given its evident predictability, can the Minister reassure the House that the relevant government machinery—namely, the National Security Committee—has met recently to review scenarios and likely contingent responses, both national and integrated with close allies?

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con)]

My Lords, without going into the detail, the noble Lord is of course correct that the integrated review had a specific focus on the threat posed by Russia, not just through aggression from military sources but through other sources—cyber remains a key concern. The National Security Council repeatedly meets on issues of priority, of which the concerns across Europe are also well documented.

Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy

Lord Houghton of Richmond Excerpts

Thursday 22nd April 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Houghton of Richmond (CB)]

My Lords, time is short so I will not waste too much of it on congratulations. I also think a huge amount of the review is to be welcomed. It presents a largely compelling view of the global security context and the defence and security challenges we face. I wholly agree about the character of a far more competitive world—one that exists in a perpetual state of aggressive, but primarily non-kinetic, rivalry below the threshold of what we have previously viewed as formalised warfare.

In principle, I do not take issue with the theory of achieving military advantage through technological superiority, though I worry that the seductive nature of technical novelty has led to a premature gamble on a further reduction in military capacity. I suspect that the true state of the defence budget is the reason for this gamble. I applaud the further moves to integrate action on multiple fronts and the need for a strategy of persistent engagement. I regret the review’s lack of emphasis on allies.

I have more serious reservations about the review. To explain them requires a short digression into some military doctrine: specifically, the three subordinate components of what we call fighting power. They are: the physical component, the means to fight—tanks, planes and ships; the conceptual component, by which the physical capabilities are coherently employed—strategy, operational art and tactics; and the moral component—the ability to get people to fight, which I abbreviate as the integrity of leadership combined with the moral superiority of purpose. The military doctrine of our nation believes that the full potential of fighting power is realised only when all three of these components are working in harmony.

I believe you can apply those components to an assessment of this review. The review is pretty good at the physical component. Indeed, historically the outcome of many reviews has been judged on that element alone: is the right amount of money being spent on the most appropriate equipment, human capability or departmental activity? Where the review lacks clarity is in accepting that in the context of our two principle threats, China and Russia, our most important weapons are not physical ones: rather, they lie in the cognitive domain. We need a more compelling narrative that better justifies our sense of moral authority and the superiority of the values that we promote and defend. This is why the moral component is so important, but I fear it is the moral component of our nation that is currently damaged because our national integrity is under threat. Brexit, the state of the union, tensions over race, the alienation of politics from society, the continued maldistribution of wealth and opportunity, and sleaze: all these things combine in varying degrees to undermine our integrity, and therefore our moral superiority, in a war of ideas.

The review has described some of the conceptual component, but the description is somewhat abstract and short of explanation as to how ideas are operationalised in practice. For example, what is the ethical, moral and legal framework within which we deploy autonomous weapons, harness artificial intelligence, destroy space-based targets and initiate or threaten offensive cyberattacks? In the battle of competing narratives about what is normal and legitimate, how do we successfully attribute the false claims and illegal acts of our enemies? How does our political leadership sustain legitimacy for its actions? How much of what is envisaged will be disclosed to society? Does the requisite of government even exist to fight this war? Who are the architects of the enduring strategy? Who are the authors of the competing political narratives, and how are the narratives disseminated? Can the NSC really achieve all this sitting for an hour every other Tuesday?

I suppose my fundamental question is: having identified through this review the Government’s best estimate of the character of future war, have we both the machinery and the mentality to prosecute the necessary campaign successfully? Are we both ready and organised for what we have apparently just discovered? My fear is that the war has started and that, at least for now, we are firmly on the defensive.

Myanmar

Lord Houghton of Richmond Excerpts

Thursday 10th May 2018 Grand Committee

[Lord Houghton of Richmond (CB)]

My Lords, I declare a personal interest in Myanmar. I have visited three times over the past three years, once as Chief of the Defence Staff and twice in an advisory capacity, assisting in efforts to bring about a resolution of Myanmar’s multiple internal conflicts through reconciliation.

On my visits, my status has permitted me exceptional access to Aung San Suu Kyi, to wider government, to the leadership of the Tatmadaw and to representatives of several of the armed ethnic opposition groups. My visits have left me with a varied set of impressions about the complexity, scale and diversity of the challenges that Myanmar faces. They have left me, on balance, with as much sympathy for those who face those challenges on the ground as for those who sit in often emotional judgment from afar.

I would never be an apologist for those who perpetrate atrocity, utilise sexual violence as an instrument of policy or proclaim impotence as a defence against inactivity. But nor can I unreservedly join the ranks of those—not today’s speakers—whose condemnations lack informed judgment and whose aspirations for action are simply not anchored in reality.

The place is a dreadful mess. The Government lack professional capacity; they are in power but not in control. The armed forces lack sophistication and enlightened leadership—an understatement. The army is internally fractured between an old guard who retain power and an emerging generation who cannot navigate a path to a desired position of civilian control and societal support. Society is riven with deep ethnic enmity and suspicion, united only by a populist hatred of the Rohingya, whose persecution is the one residual thing that keeps the army remotely popular.

Is the situation hopeless? Yes, if your aspiration is for instant remedy, for a civilian Government in control, for a country unified, for a secular state, for a depoliticised army that enjoys the widespread support of society and for a resettled Rohingya living in peaceful harmony. But the country is not without hope if the international community offers structured, long-term assistance. There are enough enlightened people on whom to build a better future; there is a society that wishes to be led to a better place; and there is an army that wants to rid itself of the burden of politics and unpopularity. I hope that government policy reflects this view. I fear it is not widely shared, but it is one that I hold.

United States: Foreign Policy

Lord Houghton of Richmond Excerpts

Thursday 18th January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Houghton of Richmond (CB) (Maiden Speech)]

My Lords, I am hugely grateful for the opportunity to speak in this debate. It is only a couple of weeks since my introduction, so I hope that my desire to speak is not judged impetuous. In truth, I did not want to perpetuate the frustration of not being able to contribute, nor submit to the folly of awaiting a debate on which I had a special interest or strong views, only to be bound by the protocol of remaining uncontentious. So I thought I would speak softly in this debate, at least in part then to be eligible for bolder things to come.

I start by offering a general thank you to all those who have offered me such a warm welcome to the House. Even a number of noble and gallant Lords whose very proximity in a previous life I used to fear have been remarkably friendly. I single out for special thanks my two supporters: the noble Baroness, Lady Harris, and the noble Lord, Lord Hague—both selected carefully to emphasise both my Yorkshire and my soft power credentials. I most warmly thank all those members of staff who have been so courteous and helpful.

I think I am a rarity among recent defence chiefs in having a son who is a professional comedian. Comedians know little about American foreign policy, but comedic sons are good sounding-boards for maiden speeches and common sense. Tom, my son, likened this event to a “new material night”—defined as an occasion when a non-paying, often small audience, largely composed of friends, gathers to hear you try out some new ideas, in the knowledge that they are not yet perfectly formed, nor necessarily that funny.

So here is my contribution to this debate—a contribution to an understanding of the gravity of its context from the view of a military mind. When I stood down as Chief of the Defence Staff 18 months ago, I privately offered a personal view to the staff on the state of the world. I recalled that I had spent much of my adult life rather simplistically hoping that the natural evolution of mankind was towards greater mutual tolerance, greater civilisation and a greater equality of opportunity and social condition—ultimately, a more inclusive global polity that was representative of commonly shared ideals and morality.

I had a parallel sense that this natural evolution would be accompanied by relative stability among nations: a sense that cataclysmic war, as witnessed in the last century, was a watershed in human awakening, and that our evolution towards collective civilisation would occur within an agreed international rules-based system to which all nations subscribed. My views were bolstered by ample academic evidence and bestselling books which irresistibly demonstrated that the fundamentals of human existence in respect of disease, famine and violence had never been better. There was a sustained revolution going on in human fortune. But then I qualified this euphoria. My more recent experience had rather dented my confidence in this somewhat idealised human journey. Indeed, increasingly, most of the evidence seemed to support a very different narrative.

First, as has been mentioned, a number of countries—Russia, Iran, North Korea and China—variously tended to the view, perhaps understandably, that the current rules-based order denied them the historic entitlement they sensed was theirs. They were not content with the status quo, nor with the stewardship of those who control it. Separately, demographics and economics were becoming, in combination, increasingly dangerous sources of global instability, either through a rebalancing of global economic power, as in Asia, or through the continuing maldistribution of wealth and opportunity within and between countries, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. Then there was the widespread growth in violent religious extremism, a phenomenon that threatens international security and the integrity of various nation states, most obviously Iraq, Syria and Libya. The world suddenly seemed a significantly less stable and certain—and a more dangerous—place.

As I finished my time as CDS, therefore, my historical judgment was that inevitable change, often accompanied by violence, looked a far better descriptor of mankind’s future, and my philosophical judgment was that human nature still tends to the Hobbesian: driven by selfish concerns, primarily those relating to individual survival, achieved if necessary by brutal means.

Even if these judgments seem overstated, noble Lords might at least allow the conclusion that competition is a more natural human condition than peaceful coexistence, and that stability and a rules-based global order do not occur naturally. Indeed, stability, peaceful coexistence and a rules-based order need to be imposed, primarily consensually through alliances of interested parties, and occasionally through the willingness of those parties to threaten to use, or to use, force—but always in the context of mature leadership and wise policy.

This, to me, is the context of this debate. The grand strategic challenge of this age is how we accommodate the change that is inevitable while sustaining the stability on which the continued betterment of the human condition depends. The strategy needed to meet this challenge will be achieved only through a combination of wise policy, strong capability and thoughtful leadership. The absence of such a combination—or, worse still, its replacement by policy and leadership that is antagonistic or self-serving—runs the grave risk that change will be violent, stability will fail and the journey of human betterment will suffer badly. So while we look to the United States of America to lead, the United Kingdom should also look in the mirror at our ability to discharge a supporting role.

A better definition of this role forms the context of our national ambition, our place in the world and, for me—dare I say it?—a far clearer understanding of the sort of Armed Forces we actually need. I risk, however, straying into a separate debate—one to which I hope I will now be permitted to contribute.