Integrated Review: Defence Command Paper

Debate between Ben Wallace and Adam Holloway

Monday 22nd March 2021 Commons Chamber

[Mr Wallace]

Disarmament is achieved when both sides are credible in what they offer up. To offer up something that is not credible would see us get taken to the cleaners, and the other people would just carry on, especially with the completely unbalanced numbers of warheads around the world.

[Adam Holloway (Gravesham) (Con) [V]]

I congratulate the Secretary of State and his team on these forward-thinking and rather smart proposals. Does he agree that the opposition parties need to understand the reality of modern warfare, which is a shift towards the grey zone and high tech? We could have thousands of tanks, but they would be of no use to us. The moment that we deploy on the battlefield, our enemy would destroy them. Perhaps the Secretary of State can arrange a briefing for the opposition parties on what happened to all those tanks in Syria, or what all those Armenian conscripts suffered from a modernised Azeri military, because they do not seem to understand.

[Mr Wallace]

My hon. Friend makes an important point. I made available to Members of the House a briefing by the Chief of Defence Intelligence last week where he set out the range of emerging threats, all the way from Russian ballistic missile defence to the proliferation of technology into the hands of, often, non-state militias. That is one of the big challenges of today that our conventional forces need to grapple with. It is no longer tank on tank necessarily; it could be Syrian fighters using pick-ups but firing top- generation anti-tank missiles. That is the game changer. We must be able to deal with it. If we do deploy armour, we must be able to better protect it, or we must find other ways of dealing with it. It has been blatantly clear over the past 12 months—in Libya, in Syria, and in the Caucasus—that we are incredibly exposed on the battlefield if we can be found even by some of the most low-tech weapons systems.