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Defence Policy
[12 JUNE 1991]
fo Furthermore, there are ships now available. We do not have to build an expensive ship such as the "James Clark Ross" which cost £40 million. There is a very good modern ship at £25 million and other ships which are not so new immediately available. It is absurd to think that we can continue to play the role that we have played in the Antarctic and in creating the Antarctic Treaty unless the Royal Naval ensign is down there.
I hope very much that when the Government talk to the Foreign Office they will listen to the arguments that the Foreign Office put forward on this subject. I think that withdrawal would be a tragedy. That is not because of the name "Endurance” but because this is a role which the British can fulfil in the world very successfully. I believe that it will be most successfully done by the Royal Navy, but with a new ship.
4.54 p.m.
Lord Chalfont: My Lords, perhaps I may begin by congratulating my noble and gallant friend Lord Fieldhouse on a distinguished maiden speech. It was to be expected that he would bring authority and insight to any debate on this subject. Like many of your Lordships, I look forward to future contribu- tions from him.
The House must be grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Colnbrook, for raising this issue in your Lordships' House at a most critical time for our national security. As we know, the Government are engaged in a review of defence arrangements known as Options for Change. That is clearly designed to bring about radical changes in the structure, equipment and order of battle of our Armed Forces. It is therefore important and right that we should examine very closely the assumptions upon which those proposals are based.
Right at the beginning I should declare that, as chairman of Vickers Shipbuilders, the constructors of Royal Navy submarines and artillery for the British Army, I have more than an academic interest in the equipment of our Armed Forces. But I can reassure noble Lords that today I shall not engage in any special pleading for submarines, howitzers or any other form of military equipment. Nor will my remarks deal with such important issues as the threat of international terrorism, stability in the Middle East, or the situation in Northern Ireland, all of which are relevant and important. However, I should like to say in parenthesis that, like the noble Lord, Lord Shackleton, I have heard over the past two days from a senior naval source that HMS "Endurance” is to be decommissioned, that that decision has been taken and that it will take place in the very near future. If that is true-and if, as the noble Lord, Lord Shackleton, said, it is true that that has been done without the full concurrence of the Foreign Office-I hope that when the noble Earl comes to reply to this debate he will throw some light on what seems to me to be a very disturbing development.
I intend to concentrate today on the military policies and procurement of the Soviet Union. I want to focus attention on that aspect of the problem for a number of very good reasons. Anyone with even
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rudimentary experience of the craft of military intelligence will know that, in assessing the threat from a potential enemy, as the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Fieldhouse, said, two factors have to be constantly weighed: intentions and capabilities. What does a potential adversary intend to do and to what extent has he the resources to do it?
I advance the proposition today that, while Western military planners may have made a fairly shrewd assessment of current Soviet intentions, they have not paid sufficient attention to the military capabilities of the Soviet Union, in the not unlikely event that those intentions change. The military policies of the Western alliance so far as Europe is concerned are based upon a simple and apparently generally accepted proposition; namely, that the Warsaw Pact has disintegrated, that the Soviet Union has embarked upon a process of democratisation and disarmament and that the Soviet threat, as we have been accustomed to regard it over the years, has disappeared.
There is a great deal of truth in that. Certainly the Soviet Union's ability to mount a surprise-I emphasise surprise-land-air assault on NATO has been substantially reduced. Indeed, I agree that it has been reduced to a point at which it need no longer be regarded as a likely contingency for military planners. But I ask the noble Lord, Lord Mayhew to accept that that is not quite the same as saying that the threat of conventional attack as a whole has disappeared.
I believe that it is prudent and legitimate to conclude that there can now be changes in the strength, deployment, tactical doctrine and equipment of NATO's defensive forces. The assumptions on which we have been accustomed to base such cherished military concepts as forward defence, flexible response and the famous follow-on forces attack (FOFA) have all changed. They have been completely transformed. Therefore it is right that the Western alliance, and by extension Government, should examine how those changes are now to be translated into decisions about the shape, size and equipment of our Armed Forces. But that is very different from declaring the famous peace dividend, making wholesale cuts in our defence forces and sitting back content in the belief that a new world order will peacefully emerge.
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The Soviet Union remains the principal imponder- able factor in the security of the West. In the first place, as many noble Lords have said, there is no certainty that the Gorbachev experiment will result in the emergence of anything resembling liberal democracy in the Soviet Union. Some noble Lords may recall what the Chinese diplomat said to Henry Kissinger in 1975 when he was asked what impact the French Revolution had had on the political history of China: "It is too early yet to say". It is much too early yet to say what will happen to the Soviet empire. However, one thing is predictable. As anyone who has spent any time in studying these matters will attest, the powerful, intellectual and professional quality of the Soviet military establishment should
be underestimated. Nor should its remarkable capacity for survival. Soviet general staff and military
never
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