NATO — House of Commons, 2018-06-20
Topic: Defense
Richard Benyon (Conservative, Centre-right): It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Wakefield (Mary Creagh), who is a member of the United Kingdom delegation to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, and it is a great privilege to lead that delegation, whose membership includes former Cabinet Ministers. We have three former Defence Ministers, a former party leader, other former Ministers, and Members of Parliament with a real interest in—and knowledge and experience of—defence issues, including one holder of the Distinguished Service Order. My friend the hon. Member for Bridgend (Mrs Moon) is the deputy leader The assembly currently has a key role. Many Members have spoken today of the need to connect people in this country with defence and help them to understand what our relationship with our allies is all about. We have the job of holding NATO to account, informing our fellow parliamentarians—with whom we can discuss many of the issues that we raise in the various committees on which we sit—and also enabling people in this country to understand this great alliance, its values, and its vision for our security. In 2019 we will welcome hundreds of NATO parliamentarians to London, and I look forward to that The Royal Air Force was created 100 years ago, as a result of a new technology which had created the first new battlefield for millennia. Today we face the same scenario with the cyber threat. At a recent meeting in this building, we heard from Mark Galeotti, a senior researcher at the Institute of International Relations in Prague and a renowned Russia expert. He worked with my hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight (Mr Seely), who produced a fascinating paper entitled "A Definition of Contemporary Russian Conflict: How Does the Kremlin Wage War?" As others have pointed out and as we know ourselves, conventional wars are expensive in terms of both blood and treasure. We know that the cost of one missile that we fire at a building in Syria can run into seven figures, and we know that we are not alone: Russia, too, suffers from unrest as the coffins come home. Cyber is a cheap war to wage, and an effective means of attack: we saw the impact of the NotPetya attack on Ukraine. It is important for us to look at our defence posture in this day and age, and to consider how we respond to this new battlefield. We have defined our defence in sea, land and air, but we now need a very clear cyber posture as well. We should also follow the advice of Lord Hague, who, in a recent article, referred to a re-evaluation of article 5 of the NATO treaty. That might be something for my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State to take to the Brussels summit We need to look carefully at infrastructure as well. Those of us who were cold war warriors will remember that the infrastructure in West Germany was constructed around moving troops very fast, and we know how difficult it has been to establish the Enhanced Forward Presence because of simple factors such as bridges, road widths and border controls In the few minutes that I have I want to touch on burden sharing. My right hon. Friend the Member for Sevenoaks (Sir Michael Fallon) made a very important point. The United States is far and away the biggest supporter of the alliance, and we must help NATO-friendly members of Congress by saying precisely as the Secretary of State said earlier: that we recognise that Europe has to step up. We have the benefit of the commitment made at the Wales summit and it is a disgrace, frankly, that some countries are not stepping up to that. My figures are that six countries now do spend over 2%, which is good, and the virtue of that certainly lies with the United States, Britain, Romania, Poland, Greece and the Baltics, but there are laggards and I am going to name them, particularly Belgium and Spain. Belgium has cut its defence spending to below 1%, and I think that is wrong.