ISIL in Syria — House of Commons, 2015-12-02
Topic: Defense
David Michael Davis (Conservative, Centre-right): I agree entirely with the excellent speeches by my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Basildon and Billericay (Mr Baron), and by the Chairman of the Defence Committee, my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis). They both made eloquent speeches, and I shall therefore focus not on the high principle but on the practicalities. I shall start with the Prime Minister’s point that all Members on both sides of the House want to see the end of ISIS. We are therefore talking about not the aim but the practical method of achieving it I think that all hon. Members could agree with 90% of what is in the motion. The contentious part is whether we should engage in the bombing. That is being proposed for entirely understandable but symbolic reasons. Symbolic is not a small word; they are important symbolic reasons. The proposal is to add a few British fast jets to the American-led air campaign in Syria and Iraq. We should face some facts, however. That air campaign has so far, in both countries, mounted some 10,000 sorties, one third of them in Syria, against 16,000 targets. The avowed aim? To degrade ISIS, or Daesh. The outcome? In the period in which the campaign has been operating, recruitment to Daesh has doubled from 15,000 to 30,000 personnel. By a macabre coincidence, that is about one extra recruit for every target we destroyed. So, from that point of view, we are not achieving our aim, although we are doing some good things. The former Foreign Secretary, the right hon. Member for Derby South (Margaret Beckett), who is no longer in her place, talked about pinning ISIS down in Kobane, but we are not achieving what we intended to achieve. Arguably, we are achieving the opposite Last week, the greatest modern warrior, the American ex-special forces general Stanley McChrystal, was in the House and I spoke to him. He was talking principally about drones and aerial warfare, and he said, in terms, that we should never believe that we can cut off the head of the snake in this kind of war, because it always regenerates and reorganises. He said that that was the wrong metaphor for this kind of warfare, and that it would not work on any level Another point leapt out at me. I have heard arguments from many knowledgeable colleagues, but no matter how skilful and brave our pilots are—and they will be both—it is debateable whether they will make even a marginal difference. The reason is that despite the availability of a large number of aircraft and all sorts of weapons systems—including Brimstone, and others that compete with and might be better than Brimstone—the constraint will be the targets. The Americans are flying about seven sorties a day in Syria, while the Russians declare that they are flying more than 140. That is because the Russians are being given up to 800 targets a day by the Syrian army, while we are getting fewer than half a dozen, by the sound of it, from the Free Syrian Army. If you want a practical demonstration of the usefulness in war of the 70,000 fighters we are being told about, you have it there. They are not useful, even as target-spotters.