Defence and Security Review (NATO) — House of Commons, 2015-03-02
Topic: International Affairs
Richard Benyon (Conservative, Centre-right): This has been one of the best debates in which I have taken part during my few years in the House. It is a great pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for North Wiltshire (Mr Gray), a fellow member of the Defence Committee. As he said in his powerful speech, the tone was set by my hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart), who produced an outstanding summary of the difficulties that we face. If I could pick just one other speech, it would be that of the hon. Member for Birmingham, Edgbaston (Ms Stuart), who said things that were so similar to what my hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border said to the Conservative dinner in west Berkshire in January that it makes me wonder whether she was there. It was a fantastic speech and I agreed with it At the same time as President Putin was exerting his pressure on Crimea, my right hon. Friend the Member for Mid Sussex (Sir Nicholas Soames) gave me the speech that his grandfather had made in the Munich debate in 1938. I urge all Members to read that speech and to take out certain place names and individuals’ names and replace them with more contemporary ones. If they do so, they will see how prescient that 1938 speech was, and how it applies to the crescent of instability that faces us My hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border spoke about an arc of instability around the eastern borders of Europe, but I would suggest there is a crescent of instability that starts in Nigeria and goes through the Sahel and the Maghreb. It includes parts of the horn of Africa and east Africa, and, of course, Iran. It then goes through to the tragedy of Syria and Iraq and up to the difficulties we face on Russia’s western border and the threats we have to consider in an article 5 sense in terms of the Baltic states. That is a sobering canvas for us to consider in our debate On Ukraine and the Baltic states, in President Putin we have the leader of a powerful nation that has surrendered all pretence of adhering to the concept of rules-based governance. That is profoundly worrying I agree with my hon. Friend that the world is in perhaps the most dangerous state it has been in for decades, and it is in that context that we encourage a future Government to look at our defence posture in the years ahead. As my hon. Friend the Member for Broadland (Mr Simpson) said, this process cannot, and should not, be driven through the silo of the MOD and how it is funded. It has to be looked at across whole area of government and beyond—not just in terms of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, our intelligence services and the Department for International Development, but in the context of our alliances, certainly with our most important neighbour, the United States, but also with France, our closest neighbour. I am particularly interested in that alliance. I am not as hopeful about that as I would like to be, but I believe we should be looking at that in the context of the Lancaster House agreement. I have learned profoundly to respect France’s defence forces. I have seen them operating in places like Mali. France has its own economic problems, but I feel there is the makings of a good strategy, as it has a footprint in certain parts of Africa and elsewhere which we should be supportive of, and we have a footprint in certain places, such as the Gulf, where we can take a lead, and together we can work in ways that benefit both of us My hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border, the Chairman of the Select Committee, mentioned a point to do with languages, and it is something that I go on about. I strongly believe that we should make that a virtue in the armed forces, particularly among those who want to acquire staff rank and beyond: they should be rewarded if they master a language, whether that is French, Arabic, Russian or something that we feel we may have need of in the future. There has been a lamentable lack of language skills in the past; we seem to have forgotten about that. To the credit of the Foreign Office, it is now trying to encourage our diplomats to speak many more languages, and we should do so among our armed forces as well My hon. Friend spoke about the two types of warfare that we face. We will not only face asymmetrical conflicts versus the al-Qaeda franchises that exist around the world—to which I would add extortionist campaigns by terrorist based organisations, perhaps in failed states such as Somalia, and the piracy conflict, which will be ongoing—but face what, for want of a better term, I shall call a conventional threat. My hon. Friend described that threat much more eloquently than I ever could. However, I suggest that there could be a third element, which I would describe, almost oxymoronically, as non-kinetic wars On the asymmetric counter-insurgency conflicts, there is great thinking—perhaps in the Government, perhaps in our normal institutions, but also in academia—about how we can fight using smarter, shorter and more intelligent interventions. We are unlikely to go in again in the way we did in recent conflicts. We are unlikely to build another Camp Bastion in the desert and remain there for a decade. We shall need less mass in terms of personnel, and that mass could be proxied to the host nation. The deployments will be shorter, but they will require certain skills that we are very good at delivering, including training, equipping, mentoring and carrying out humanitarian work. They will also involve the intelligent use of special forces and of specific equipment such as drones On conventional warfare, I entirely agree with the pervading consensus in the Chamber about the need to respond dramatically in regard to thinking, to equipment and to matériel in the context of an article 5 response. If there is one thing that should keep us awake at night, it is the threat from the extraordinary recent developments on Europe’s eastern border Non-kinetic warfare involves carrying out defence activities now so that we do not have to fight wars in the future. It is about looking at countries in which instability could emerge, and about engaging with them across a whole spectrum of activities—not only through the use of military personnel but through diplomacy and intelligence and the use of the private sector, non-governmental organisations and our aid budget—to stabilise them so that they do not descend into the kind of instability that would require us to fight an expensive war in the future. It is with pride that I say that the new 77 Brigade, which is based in my constituency, is starting to develop an interesting new style of combating this kind of threat. It is built on the finest traditions of our armed forces: let us remember the work of T. E. Lawrence and Orde Wingate and how we rebuilt parts of France and Germany after the war.