Lord Garden: My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord King of Bridgwater, for making this debate possible. I remember with pleasure serving in the Ministry of Defence during his time as the Defence Secretary. In preparing for this debate I looked at the foreword to his 1991 White Paper, in which he said,

• “Our determination is to produce forces which, while smaller, are well-equipped, properly trained and housed, and well motivated”.

This is something which his successors have also aimed to do. Yet, as the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Boyce, described to us, things have not gone that way.

Today, after 15 years of salami-slicing and occasional, more major reviews, we are spending just under half the proportion of GDP that we tended to spend during the Cold War, and the three armed services together have a trained strength of below 180,000—about the same size as the United States Marine Corps. Yet the operational tasks are now, as we have heard from so many noble Lords, much heavier than they ever were during the Cold War days.

Ministry of Defence planners, of which I was one, have to make assumptions about the steady state and the peak tasking in order to justify the numbersof people, the structure and also the equipment programme. These assumptions drive the calculations for equipment life and logistical support needs. Assumptions are inevitably proved wrong by events, for all the reasons that the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Guthrie, told us in his speech. Any organisation would expect to have to modify its planning assumptions regularly in the light of experience. What is so extraordinary—and it is the real criticism that underlies all the problems that have been catalogued today—is that the Ministry of Defence does not seem to have adjusted its defence planning assumptions to match the world that it is experiencing. That has been the case for the past eight years, since the intervention in Kosovo in 1999, and is why I disagree with the analysis by the noble Lord, Lord Bach, of the approach that has been taken since that time.

The noble and learned Lord, Lord Mayhew, raised the question of definitions of overstretch. When we question each statement about a change of force levels—1,400 up in Afghanistan, 1,600 down in Iraq, 800 out of Bosnia—we deal with a snapshot of tasking. The real problem is the long-term effect of continuous operations at or above the defence programme’s planned level, as the noble Baroness, Lady Dean, said. Remedies are short term, and the damage they do affects the long term more and more. The ways that one addresses short-term operational needs and the long-term structure of the forces are different; we need to keep that in mind. In this debate, there has been a lot of wishful thinking about the effect that great slugs of money could have. In the short term, there is not much that we can do quickly to rectify the situation with money. We cannot get recruits in quickly. We cannot train them up quickly. NCOs take years to grow. If we bring in more people, we need to take experienced people out of the frontline to do the training task. Deepcut showed us what happens if we cut supervisory levels too far. As the noble Baroness, Lady Park, said, specialists are an even greater problem area. I have spoken before about the black hole in naval nuclear watchkeeper manning, which dates from the 1990s. It takes many years to replace or increase the numbers of a range of essential specialists.

Things are little better when we look at short-term problems with equipment. I have no doubt about the Minister’s repeated assurances that he is giving the greatest priority to procuring all the essential needs, including the helicopter lift. Yet we do not seem to be any closer to closing the gap between what we need and what we scratch together from an assortment of tired airframes. I hope the Minister will lay out his plans today and will give firmer dates than he has been able to give so far for giving us a robust support helicopter support capability, including the plan to get the eight HC3 Chinooks flying again. The noble Viscount, Lord Slim, raised the problems of air lift, both strategic and tactical. It is another problem that the Minister regularly acknowledges, yet we still await the FSTA programme, which could provide some relief in the area of strategic lift. However, it will take time. I would also be interested to know what effect the Airbus troubles will have on the plans for A400M.

The noble Lord, Lord King, raised the question of the inerting system for C130 fuel tanks. I shall not spend much time on it, but there is a difficult operational decision to be made about the number of troops put at risk by a reduction in the C130 fleet for unscheduled servicing against the risk of a slower fitment programme. That illustrates the knock-on effect of having too small a force for the tasks we are taking on. It does not matter whether it is aircraft, ships, vehicles or military personnel; we need to have some extra capability for things that turn up unexpectedly.

All this means that there is only one short-term remedy now open to the Government, given the concerns we have heard. It is no longer a matter of choice: if we wish to recover the Armed Forces, we must reduce their commitments to below the planning assumptions and we must hold that lower level of operational tasking for at least two years—my erstwhile colleague, the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Boyce, says more than two years. The noble Lord, Lord Tomlinson, asked what we should give up, and my answer is that, despite the Government’s indication of a prospective reduction in Iraq, the commitment remains significant and continues to require all the force-enabling capabilities. Yet the UK contribution is under 5 per cent of the total multinational forces. An article in the Los Angeles Times on 28 February explained the Government’s—Tony Blair’s, as it put it—plight to its readership:

• “The tragedy is that he had to rob Peter to pay Paul because Britain can't maintain 7,000 troops in Iraq and 7,000 in Afghanistan. Those are hardly huge numbers for a country of60 million with the fifth-largest national economy in the world. Yet even as Britain has continued to play a leading role in world affairs, it has allowed its defenses to molder”.

It is right—we cannot do both. We may regret it, but that is the situation. We need to complete the withdrawal from Iraq and do it quickly, handing over to the US forces so that we can concentrate on Afghanistan. I support the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, in what he said on that.

In Afghanistan, I share the concerns of many noble Lords, including the noble and gallant Lords, Lord Bramall and Lord Inge, about the confusion of strategy between allies and the prospects of success. If we are not clear on the priorities for action the tactics will also be confused. The funding suggestion made by the noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, that all should contribute to NATO operations is absolutely right; however, the Government do not accept that—I have raised it before. Nevertheless, we support the UK contribution, we believe it must become the focus for our main military and reconstruction effort.

I turn now to the second, longer term problem where money can make a difference. But do we really expect to get a large amount of money? I am a member of a panel organised by the Royal United Services Institute Acquisition Focus. We have just published a report, The Underfunded Equipment Programme: Where Now? The group assess the shortfall of necessary funding on the equipment programme over the next 10 years as being of the order of 20 per cent. I am told by some of my erstwhile colleagues that that may be quite an underestimate. Here, extra money from the defence budget could help. But we are talking about a sum of around £15 billion. Failing that, the UK will need to focus much more narrowly on essential capabilities for national security. The report identifies what those in the group saw as essential capabilities: strategic intelligence, the deterrent, a sustainable expeditionary force and its enablers, a maritime security force, defence of UK airspace, and the necessary network-enabled capability to tie all those together. The consequences for the Defence Industrial Strategy would be profound. Some of the effects could be mitigated by a more serious attempt to operate true European defence capabilities at the high end but I think it is unlikely to happen. In sum the future is bleak—in the long term as well as the short—and the problem is exacerbated further by the increasing number of private finance arrangements the Ministry of Defence takes on, thus reducing flexibility in the longer term.

I conclude by adding my tribute to the extraordinary men and women we have in our Armed Forces and our reserves. I was grateful to the noble Lords, Lord Freeman and Lord Glenarthur, for raising those—we must not forget the reserves who suffer in some way even more acutely from some of the problems we have talked about. As many noble Lords said, there are still questions about the duty of care, whether we are talking about those who are injured or—another area that was not raised today but in which I take a particular interest—those who are made homeless on leaving the service, where we need to do more. I also welcomed the contribution made by the noble Baroness, Lady Fookes; SSAFA Forces Help does good work in this area.

I trust that the Minister will tell us what the Government are doing in the two areas in terms of duty of care. I, too, was delighted by the Armed Forces’ Pay Review Body report and I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Young, for his contribution as a member of it. It recognises that the Armed Forces merited the larger reward, particularly for those at the more junior levels, and that the Government are to be congratulated on deciding to implement the award immediately. That increase costs £275 million. It is a 3.9 per cent average increase across the piece. Could the Minister say where the money is to come from in the longer term because as always, the higher rate of inflation on defence personnel costs has a knock-on effect for all the problems we have talked about.

I hope that the Minister will focus on the strategic questions that I have raised. How do we address the short-term and the long-term problems, given the realities of the money available? I do not think that any of us have before been so concerned about the fragility of the Armed Forces. We cannot ignore the long term as they try to cope with the overwhelming operational demands of the short term.