Defence — House of Commons, 2018-01-11
Topic: Defense
Julian Murray Lewis (Conservative, Centre-right): My right hon. Friend speaks with great experience as a former Armed Forces Minister, and he made a considerable input to our recent report, "Gambling on ‘Efficiency’: Defence Acquisition and Procurement", by making that very point Quite rightly, the hon. Member for Gedling emphasised the current process involving the national security capability review, and he focused on the question of fiscal neutrality, which the National Security Adviser says he has been told to observe. When I challenged the National Security Adviser with that on 18 December, when he appeared before the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy, he said, "Well, it’s not as if the defence budget isn’t growing; it is fiscal neutrality within a growing budget." He then did something else, which is indicative of a worrying trend: he lumped together the £36 billion that we are spending avowedly on defence with all the other money that we spend on everything else related to security, and he started talking about a £56 billion budget. That lumping together of money for security and intelligence services, counter-terrorism and even the relevant aspects of policing with the defence budget, is a form of sleight of hand that causes me concern. That is what I wish to address in the second half of my remarks We have a real problem in this country because the tried and tested system for strategic decision making has broken down. In my years as a research student, my area of study was the way that Britain planned towards the end of the second world war, and the early period after it, for what form of strategy we would need to deal with future threats. I was struck by the fact that there was a huge argument between 1944 and 1946 between clever officials in the Foreign Office who wanted to make the Anglo-Soviet alliance of 1942 the cornerstone of our post-war foreign policy, and the Chiefs of Staff who wanted to prepare their assessments of what Britain might have to face militarily on alternative assumptions that that alliance might well continue—in which case all would be well—but that it might break down. There was a tremendous stand-off until 1946, when finally the iron curtain had descended and it became clear that the Chiefs of Staff, who had looked at the Anglo-Soviet alliance in theoretical terms and said, "Well it could work, but it might not", had been right to be cautious, and the Foreign Office staff, who wanted to put all their eggs in the basket of being able to continue the wartime alliance into peacetime, had been wrong. I was very struck by the systematic way in which the strategic arguments were hammered out, and at the centre of it all was the Chiefs of Staff Committee The Chiefs of Staff Committee, as we all know, is made up of the heads of each of the three services. The shocking thing that I have to say to the House today is that one can now become chief of staff of any of the three armed services—one can become head of the Royal Navy, or head of the Army, or head of the Royal Air Force—and yet have no direct input into the strategic planning process. This is all part of the lumping together of military strategic planning with national security strategies that are vague and amorphous and, above all, primarily in the hands of civil servants If the civil servants themselves were steeped, as they used to be, in the subject matter of their Departments, that would be less of a problem than it is today. But some years ago, it was decided that those in the senior levels of the civil service—which are, of course, peopled by very clever and able individuals; that is not in dispute—should be able to hop from one Department to another. One might be at a senior level in one Department and then go for the top job in another, including, for example, the Ministry of Defence. What we have is a combination where formerly specialist civil servants have become generalists and the professional military advisers—the Chiefs of Staff—have become more like business managers serving as chief executives with an allocated budget to administer to their services. All their thoughts about strategy get fed through just one single individual—the Chief of the Defence Staff—who then has to represent all their views on the National Security Council. It is this melding together, this mishmash, of the military, the security and the civilian roles that is undermining what we need, which is a clear-headed and systematic approach to the strategic challenges facing this country.