Nick Harvey MP

Future Defence Review - Red Teaming a Green Paper

George, thank you very much. I'm sorry I haven't been able to be here throughout the day, so it is not possible to respond to things that have been said throughout. But I was here this morning to hear Tom McKane setting out the context for the green paper, and I have obviously taken notes of (RUSI's) Malcolm Chalmers' paper warning where this all might lead to.

I think, by my estimation, Malcolm's paper doesn't necessarily even reach the worst case scenario. I think if we don't watch it, we run a risk of things actually being even worse than he has predicted. And I say that because the Ministry of Defence was in a perilous state financially, long before the overall economic crisis even struck. By the estimate of some analysis I have read, there is a mismatch between the Ministry of Defence commitments and its resources - on an annual basis - of as much as £10 billion. Certainly Bernard Gray's report identified that on procurement alone there is a mismatch of commitments going forward of £35 billion. So that was the situation at the Ministry of Defence, in a sense, before the economic meltdown. Just to get the Ministry of Defence's own situation into balance could therefore require some very radical surgery, even before whoever serves at the treasury starts calling at the door and wanting a contribution towards deficit elimination in terms of the national finances. So, for that reason, I believe it is absolutely vital that this Strategic Defence Review is indeed strategic, and does actually attempt to make some significant decisions and doesn't allow itself to become a cheese pairing or salami slicing exercise. Because if it does, then the sort of things that Malcolm has warned about, are only too likely to come to pass.

Now James [Arbuthnot] has said that in the event of a hung parliament, the Ministry of Defence might have a terrible job withstanding the treasury during the course of a Strategic Defence Review. I don't doubt for a moment that that is true, but I don't know why he imagines it would be different in the result that anybody wins an overall majority. And James, if it does come about that there is a hung parliament for this period, then you and I and anybody else involved from the defence angle will have to join forces and do everything that we can to repel Vince Cable, George Osborne or whoever it might be when they come knocking at the door. So, as I say, it must be a strategic review. There was debate this morning: 'are we talking about a defence review', which the current Government has talked about, 'or is it a security review', which is more what the Conservatives have talked about - and I have admired the civil servants response in that it will be whatever the Government of the day want it to be! Let me put my cards on the table and say I agree with the Conservatives' analysis, and I think it needs to start off with an assessment of the security situation, and Britain's security outlook in an increasingly shrinking global world. That must be the basis, then start looking at the specifics in Defence.

I have identified three big questions I think the Strategic Defence Review needs to answer. There are probably many more, but these are the three, I've particularly identified.

The first of these - and I think someone characterised it this morning: "what sort of country do we want to be, what do we see ourselves trying to do in Defence?" The 1998 Strategic Defence Review concluded that we wanted to act as a force for good around the world: We would join coalitions of the willing; we were committed to expeditionary warfare; we were willing to go out and try and tackle problems at their root cause rather than waiting for them in a sense to come to our shores here. Now there are those who believe after a very difficult decade, and expensive in terms of lives and money, that 'this has all been too much' and that we should 'row back from that'; that 'we should have a far more insular, far more conservative (with a small 'c') view of what we are trying to achieve'; that the 'Defence of the Realm in an increasingly uncertain security climate really is as much as we can or should hope to achieve'. Now I'm presenting these in a sense of two stark opposites, the reality of course, is that this is a spectrum and I think that the first strategic decision that needs to be made is to decide where on that spectrum we want to be. Now to put a few cards on the table - and the Chairman urged us not to say there are difficult decisions - I, and my party, remain committed to liberal interventionism, we remain committed to the idea that Britain should be willing to join coalitions of the willing, that we should be willing to go out and tackle problems before they hit our shores. The fact that our experiences over the past decade haven't always run smooth should not discourage us from continuing to adhere to that logic. But if you did, by contrast, decide that your emphasis was very much more narrowly on the Defence of the Realm, you wouldn't, for example, be considering going and procuring aircraft carriers, because they probably wouldn't have a particularly useful role to play in the conventional Defence of the Realm. So a lot of procurement decisions will flow from where on that spectrum we decide we want to be.

The second question, which in a sense flows from that, I think needs answering, is how much of our defence we think we've got to provide for and organise on our own as the UK. I mean, the last time we did anything of any great significance on our own was the Falklands. More or less everything we have done since then has been in coalition with others. I think there is a sense in which we are continuing to try and maintain too comprehensive defence capability in our own right. In a sense we have still got a perception of ourselves as a mini world power, and still try to do everything the Americans do, but on a proportionately scaled down level. I think the second question that the Review needs to ask is whether there are some things we currently try to do that we should cease to try to do. Whether that we should do fewer things and do them better, and make arrangements with allies to provide for some of the other things that we currently try and do on our own. And if we do decide to draw that line somewhere differently, it will require the most meticulous care to identify those things which we absolutely have to maintain our own sovereignty and autonomy over, and those things which it might make sense to negotiate to provide in concert with others. I'll give an example, we have had a lot of debate recently about Nimrod: there is no doubt whatsoever that we absolutely benefit from the capability that Nimrod provides, but is it absolutely essential that we have that entirely in our own right, or is that something that it would make sense to procure jointly with others?

And the third question is whether the configuration of our forces and our capabilities is appropriate for the sort of engagements we anticipate and expect in the years and decades to come. I think someone asked in the opening session this morning "should we see everything through the lens of Afghanistan"; should we assume that anything we are going to be involved in for the foreseeable future will be like Afghanistan? Or should we regard that as something we are currently involved with and we'll get past, and plan for the future more on the basis of a capability to deal with, I suppose, conventional state on state warfare. And again I'm presenting those as if they are two alternatives, the reality is that we have to decide somewhere on that spectrum. We have heard from some of the military chiefs that there isn't enough emphasis on the wars of today, and that there is too much readiness on the theoretical and the 'never-never'. I think, that although there was a lot of reconfiguration after the cold war and the so called peace dividend, it's probably still true that we haven't reconfigured enough on to the lines of the actual engagements that we are involved in. It was put to me by one commentator - and he was being deliberately facetious - that if it requires 10 -12,000 people to sustain our efforts in - I think at the time he was speaking, Iraq and Afghanistan, but now Afghanistan - the men are supposed to go out for one six month period in every thirty, then you need five times that number to keep that going. So let us say 60,000. So the commentator commented to me we have 180,000 troops and we are only sending 60,000 of them out, what the hell are the other 120,000 doing? Now, as I say, he was being deliberately facetious, but there is a sense in which during the difficulties we have had in Afghanistan, too much of our capability hasn't really been suited to that sort of thing. So we have to decide for the future whether or not we have got that sort of configuration right. The sort of wars that we fight in the twenty-first century will be about climate change and an increasingly deadly competition for oil, for water, for fertile lands; so it will be about sudden mass migrations of peoples and pandemics. We will need, I think, troops that are agile, that are fleet of foot, 'quickly in, quickly out'. We have got to ensure that the right priority is given to that, rather than preparing for the arrival Russian tanks over the East German plains.

Final point; I totally agree with James Arbuthnot, it is absolutely ludicrous to have a strategic security and defence review and not count into the equation the nuclear deterrent. That is not to say that I am a unilateral nuclear disarmer - far from it - but this is the most strategic decision, both strategically, and certainly financially, that is going to be made in the period that the Strategic Defence Review provides for and aims to cover. It is totally ludicrous for that not to be included in the mix. There are many ways that we could provide a nuclear deterrent in the future; the Governments current plans are simply not the only option.