Armed Forces: Reserve Forces

Lord Walker of Aldringham Excerpts

Thursday 1st November 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Walker of Aldringham]

My Lords, after many years of involvement with and command of the TA, I have always held our reserves in singularly high regard, but that regard is dosed with a good dollop of realism and an understanding of the art of the possible for Army volunteer units. I stress Army because I do not know the Royal Naval and Royal Air Force Reserves as well.

Against that background, I have a number of concerns about the proposals in the report, Future Reserves 2020. Of course, there is not time to discuss them all today, so I will confine myself to just two: recruiting and roles. These are self-evidently linked because if we do not recruit sufficient volunteers there will be gaps in the Army’s order of battle and if the roles are not exacting, exciting or attractive enough then volunteers will not bother to join.

Recruiters for the Regular Army judge that about 20% of recruits are so-called “army barmy”. In other words, these are people who have passionately wanted all their young lives to join the Army and have done so. Clearly, a number of territorial reserves feel the same. These are not the people I am talking about because they will probably join whatever the Government of the day do to reform the service. The fact is that there will never be enough in this category alone to fill the ranks of either the regular or the TA elements of the Army.

To my knowledge, since the 1980s the Territorial Army has never been recruited above 80% of its full established strength. Indeed, its current unreformed strength is well below that at around 50%. There is as yet little evidence to indicate that this phenomenon will be different whatever the size of the force. Indeed, the smaller the critical mass, the less likely it will be able to keep its strength up. Nor should we underestimate the extent of the disincentive from the rationalisation—in other words, the significant reduction—of the TA estate. I would compare the impact of that on recruiting to what would happen if coffee drinkers found that Starbucks reduced its number of coffee outlets. If a Starbucks is to hand, people will go and buy their coffee there. If they have to travel some 10 miles to get to the nearest Starbucks, they will go somewhere else. That is also the case for those who might join the TA but take proximity to one of its centres into account. It is particularly the case for those who live in rural areas and may have to travel 20, 30, 40 or more miles to attend an evening or weekend session.

There is then the paradox of why people join the TA. Some who join are used in their professional specialisation. Doctors, dentists and chaplains are classic examples and there are many others. But many join to have a complete change from their professional skill. Lawyers, teachers and bankers love being riflemen, gunners and engineers, for example. They genuinely do not want to be used in their professional capacity and would probably not join if they were forced to do so.

However, my experience has been that we have gained the most effective use of the territorials by employing them in uniform to use their specialist professional skills. In Bosnia, I had a TA infantry officer who was, in civilian life, a High Court judge. He was an absolute wizard at translating the small print of the Dayton agreement into practical instructions for the warring factions. In that capacity, he made a far greater contribution to the overall operation than he would have done in his capacity as an infantryman. In Iraq, several teachers and bankers were diverted from their primary roles to help develop schools and banking systems. Indeed, our experience on recent operations is that we need people who understand the media, construction, politics, law, economics and all manner of areas for which the Army is never the first port of call. Balancing this with those who aspire to be straightforward soldiers and the needs of the total force is a delicate task: get it wrong and the volunteers will vote with their feet, even more so than the regulars because for them it is by and large a secondary job.

We also need to look at the terms of service for these folk. The EU part-time workers directive makes it clear that a part-time worker must be treated no less favourably than a comparable full-timer. That means that unless employers can objectively justify exclusion, part-time employees have to be provided with access to pension schemes on a basis no less favourable than for their full-time counterparts. I have no doubt that the clever clogs in the MoD will find some objective justification to gain derogation from this and there is no mention of it in the report. But if it is to be an integrated Army, and on moral grounds, surely we should make volunteer service to the Armed Forces of our nation pensionable. Of course the smaller the Army, the more often its component parts are likely to be used. Employers, as we have heard, are generally good people and their track record in supporting the deployment of their workforces to operations is commendable, but we must ask ourselves whether, if such deployments become routine rather than in the event of national crisis, this willingness to be supportive will continue.

Finally, my purpose in identifying these issues is not to kick dust in the face of the reforms, for I very much hope that all comes good, but it would be wrong of me to say that I agree with the outcome of the latest defence review. I regard it as a dangerous dismantlement of our Armed Forces for short-term gain in the face of years of historical evidence and at a time when global instability is rife and there is a plethora of asymmetric risks to our national security. The report Future Reserves 2020 recognises that there is risk in the proposals it contains for our part-time force. My own experience tells me, sadly, that that risk is highly likely to materialise.

Armed Forces Bill

Lord Walker of Aldringham Excerpts

Wednesday 6th July 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Walker of Aldringham]

My Lords, in the Sunday Telegraph was an inspiring article about four young soldiers who intend to row across the Atlantic. You might say that there is nothing remarkable about that, but these are four young soldiers who have been badly injured, maimed by bombs in Afghanistan, and between the four of them they can muster only three complete legs. Their plan is to enter the Woodvale Atlantic rowing race, which begins in December, and none of them has any experience of the sea. They hope to raise £1 million to share between Help for Heroes, ABF The Soldiers’ Charity and SSAFA. Their endeavour is both inspirational and highly laudable and I am sure that all of us in your Lordships’ House wish them every success.

However, their endeavour brings into focus the whole question of the funding of the covenant that is addressed in this latest Bill. The Armed Forces have a long and strong tradition of raising money for charities. In the last century the vast majority of such fundraising activity was targeted on charities that were not linked directly to the armed services—they tended to focus on cancer, children and raising money for those charities which were local to units’ bases or linked to their specialist trades.

The service-orientated charities do a remarkable job but in essence they are there to attend to the needs of veterans and their families who have fallen on hard times. However, those who have been killed, maimed and wounded by being sent to war by our country can hardly be portrayed as “falling” on hard times. I believe most passionately that if the covenant is to mean anything at all, when a service man or woman is damaged in any way whatever during their military service, then a clear duty lies with the Government for a lifetime of support.

As the doctrine states, this is about service men and women doing their duty, putting the needs of the nation before their own, forgoing some of the rights enjoyed by those outside the Armed Forces and accepting the grave responsibility and legal right to fight and kill according to their orders and their unlimited liability to give their lives for others. The unique nature of military service means that the Armed Forces differ from all other institutions, as many noble Lords have said.

We should not forget—sometimes I think we do—that during the lifetimes of most of us in this House British service men and women have lost their lives and been maimed and wounded in Palestine, China, Korea, Malaya, Egypt, Kenya, the Suez, Cyprus, Borneo, Aden and Dhofar. More recently, they have died and been wounded as they fought across the Falkland Islands; as they steadfastly, and without favour, absorbed the venom of Northern Ireland; as they have twice driven massed armour into the Middle Eastern deserts. They have snatched hostages from the swamps of Sierra Leone and the embassies of Kensington. They have hunted terrorists in the mountains of Afghanistan and the Pacific Islands; they have fed refugees, delivered humanitarian aid, slaughtered sheep, put out fires, guarded prisons, cleared domestic rubbish and fought floods. That is a pretty impressive CV by any standards, and there can no doubt in your Lordships’ minds about the debt that we owe these people and what we ought to do about it. Even as we debate, our service men and women are at full stretch on operations helping to manage the consequences of, or prevent the intensification of, conflict in various parts of the world.

The covenant that must exist between the Government and the Armed Forces is in my view a simple moral contract which means that, in return for the sacrifices made by those in the forces, the Government will ensure they are treated fairly and they should be confident, as many of the speakers today have said, that the nation will look after them and their families.

Of course, the covenant is wider than just the response to those who are injured. This notion of fairness is, I believe, central to any covenant and must be demonstrated both strategically and tactically. The recent strategic defence and security review committed the Government to being more selective in their use of the Armed Forces,

“deploying them only where key UK national interests are at stake; where there is a clear strategic aim; where the likely political, economic and human costs are in proportion to the likely benefits; where there is a viable exit strategy”.

Just try measuring our latest military adventure in Libya against “key national interests”, “clear strategic aim” and “viable exit strategy”. How fair does that seem, as a use of our military forces, when we are heavily engaged elsewhere and at the same time key elements of our forces are being dismantled? At the other end of the scale, service men and women who have recently served in Afghanistan are being made compulsorily redundant, which is morally indefensible. In this context, one has to ask: what price a commitment to the covenant? My heart sinks at the thought of the recent defence reform proposals which see a defence board, with only a single military member among seven to 10, giving any airtime to developing a covenant which really means anything.

As many noble Lords have already observed, the Bill introduces the requirement for the Secretary of State to lay an annual report before Parliament about the effects of membership or former membership of the armed services on servicepeople. I am not certain that a covenant lends itself in any way to legislation—of course the covenant is not going into legislation, merely the requirement for the Secretary of State to report—but I am certain that the time for reports, of which there has been a plethora in the past five years, is over. The requirement is absolutely clear, as so many have said. What is needed now is action: action to implement the covenant across all government departments and from top to bottom. It cannot be achieved without the necessary funding.

I return to our four brave young men rowing the Atlantic. We should be enormously uplifted by what they are doing and why they are doing it. However, there are too many examples of the third sector being exploited to fill the void of support that in my view is legitimately and morally the Government’s responsibility, and we should be deeply ashamed that the money they raise is going into that void.

Strategic Defence and Security Review

Lord Walker of Aldringham Excerpts

Friday 12th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Walker of Aldringham]

My Lords, I very much welcome the profile that the current security and defence debate has given to the whole business of defence over recent months. The national security strategy is a very commendable attempt to look into the future and isolate the threats and risks that we face so that we are in the best place to deal with them. However, like many other noble Lords and noble and gallant Lords, I am quite clear that it is always the unexpected that happens, and it will be the unexpected that happens next time.

The national security strategy states in its introduction that:

“The security of our Nation is the first duty of Government”,

and goes on to say:

“The Coalition Government has given national security the highest priority”.

Set against being a wealthy nation and an SDSR stating:

“The Armed Forces are at the core of our nation's security”,

it seems, sadly, that these notions are patently not carried through, and I cannot help but reflect that as a country we seem to be rather bad at defence reviews. We either get them wrong because we do not resource them properly when we have come up with a good answer, or we do not think about them thoroughly enough in the first place. I fear that this defence review suffers from both those defects, and the distraction of a special alliance with France is no substitute for ensuring that our own military house is in good order.

At first reading, it seems that all three services have lost a similar number of personnel and each has lost a bit of its equipment. In terms of our envisaged deployments, the largest now is a third smaller than it has been until this moment, the brigade-sized force for deployment is equally a third smaller and we have a few less tanks, guns, ships and aircraft. An outsider looking in might well be forgiven for judging that the review is merely a salami-slicing exercise with equal pain for everybody and that same outsider might see it as a touch incoherent. If as a student at staff college I had suggested to my instructor that we would have an aircraft carrier but no aircraft to fly off it, or that we should spend £1 billion or more on a new aircraft carrier only for it to be put immediately into mothballs, or that a minuscule garrison, such as that on the Falklands, would be sufficient to stave off a surprise attack from a determined enemy, I would certainly not be standing before noble Lords now.

However, they are the easy targets. What I would like to do is focus on something that is much less visible to the readers of the SDSR but is more insidious in the longer term. It is about our men and women, who have already been mentioned by one or two noble Lords. I will have to use the Army as the example or it will get too complicated, but please read across for the other two services. The physical effect that an army can have, even when it is constrained by resources, can be multiplied by the reputation that that army has in the minds of its enemies and allies alike. The reputation of the British Army comes from the soldiers who man it, and they exhibit a very particular cocktail of characteristics. The British soldier has always been somebody seeking a bit of roving and adventure, even with the off-chance that he might have to lay down his life for his country. In the past decade alone, we have seen him in Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Sierra Leone, East Timor, Iraq and Afghanistan. It is not surprising therefore that this busy little Army is well recruited. But the soldier now reads that,

“we will be more selective in our use of the Armed Forces, deploying them decisively at the right time but only where key UK national interests are at stake; where we have a clear strategic aim; where the likely political, economic and human costs are in proportion to the likely benefits and”—

wonderful—

“where we have a viable exit strategy”.

Oh, that we should be able to achieve all of that when we do everything. But “more selective” than what? We may be more selective than we were about Iraq, but are we going to stop being good members of NATO or deny our friends in need a bit of help? Indeed, we have just made a new French friend. You cannot shape the battlefield from Whitehall and exit strategies will always be contingent upon events in theatre. What is more, idle hands will make Tommy a very dull boy.

The British soldier's sense of professionalism is of central importance to him. Question it, or undermine it, and you upset him greatly. His equipment too is of great consequence to him and adds to his sense of self-worth. The notion of extended readiness, for those noble Lords who read into the review, is not one that brings comfort to him. It smacks of a first and a second XI, and every time there is pressure on the budget the readiness gets extended even further, training opportunities reduce and equipment is in even shorter supply, and the second XI drops even further behind. The British soldier is the first to know that a gas rattle is no substitute for a rifle and live ammunition. He will be the first to seek employment elsewhere if he sees the Army to which he belongs becoming hollow and he seems to be losing the skills and self-esteem.

Financial reward has never been, and today still is not, his mainspring, but he expects to be treated fairly, and he wants and needs to be valued by the nation that he serves. But he now has uncertainties about his terms and conditions of service as he sees the continuity of education allowance, public service pensions, housing and post-service medical care all under pressure. As we have heard already, and as we shall see shortly, Professor Hew Strachan's report will make clear that there is a long way to go before we can be satisfied that the so-called military covenant is properly in place.

Even within the initial reduction of 7,000 in the Army, we will see people returning from operational duty to find that they are being made redundant. Many noble Lords will have seen that unedifying interview on the television of the Harrier pilot at Joint Headquarters who expressed, with suppressed anger and frustration, that he was being done out of a job. What price a fair deal?

On the wider front, the Army is coming home. But we have no real idea of how much leaving Germany will cost us. We will need to leave everything in the exact order and acceptable condition that the Germans want, and we have no real idea of the costs of rebarracking and providing training facilities for 20,000 troops and rehousing their families here. Those costs will lie where they fall, to the detriment of all of us—something that is very apparent to our commanders. We should not underestimate how damaging the cumulative effect of all of this can be on both recruiting and retention, but equally on the quality of those who seek to join the services. It may not be noticeable for several years, but it will become apparent, not least among our special forces.

Like many noble Lords, I too fear that this defence review has failed us again. It has not been sufficiently strategic; it has been done at such a speed that it has not been thorough enough; its outcome is not resourced; and, while I accept that there are some industrial and procurement handcuffs that have had to be considered, it has been driven, rather than constrained by, resources. Only time will tell, but this defence review could well be the catalyst for an irreversible outflow of quality and we may have embarked on a course in which the consequence, unintended or not, will be a steady dilution of the excellence of our Armed Forces.