Defence - Minutes of EvidenceHC 197

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Oral Evidence

Taken before the Defence Committee

on Wednesday 24 April 2013

Members present:

Mr James Arbuthnot (Chair)

Mr Julian Brazier

Mr Dai Havard

Mrs Madeleine Moon

Penny Mordaunt

Sandra Osborne

Sir Bob Russell

Ms Gisela Stuart

________________

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: Professor the Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield, Professor Julian Lindley-French, and Major-General Mungo Melvin (Rtd), gave evidence.

Q1 Chair: Good morning. This is the first evidence session on our strategic inquiry, "Towards the Next Defence and Security Review." We welcome your evidence and are enormously looking forward to this evidence session. Some of the foremost strategic thinkers in the country are in front of us this morning. We intend to carry out this evidence session differently from normal. We intend to ask you a pretty broad question and then set you running as a sort of brains trust to chat among yourselves and to a certain extent with us. If we feel that there is a particular strand that some of our obsessions might move you towards, please follow that strand.

It is very much for you to set the structure of the morning. I spoke to you earlier this morning, Professor Lindley-French, and you said the problem might be stopping you. From our point of view, that is fine. General Melvin, we would like to say welcome to you in your capacity as a witness rather than as a specialist adviser to this Committee. Lord Hennessy, thank you very much indeed for coming to help us in this inquiry. You have all written extensively about the issues that we face. This is going to be very much your show. You have seen the terms of reference. We are trying to work towards a strategic defence and security review that will be soundly based, stand the test of time and give the UK the defence tools that it will need. How do we do that?

Professor Hennessy: For the first time ever in the sequence of defence reviews since the war-by my calculations it is the 12th-we know when it is coming and we know it is going to be part of a drumbeat, and it is going to be allied with national security strategy documents. All of this is terribly interesting and important in itself, but it raises the requirement, because there can be no alibi for its being as inadequate as the last one. I have some sympathy with the framers of the last one, because it was essentially five desperate spending reviews with a thin patina of strategy. This time there is no excuse. One of the reasons there is no excuse, Chairman, if you will allow me to say, is because you were on the case very early.

I have some sympathy, however, with the framers of the SDSR because there are no iron laws of history, but there are non-ferrous metal laws and one of them is that all the defence reviews have been overtaken by events remarkably rapidly, however good the intelligence input and the horizon scanning, and I think nearly all of them, although I have not done the numbers, have been underfunded. What was promised as a settlement never had sufficient financial resource behind it.

The reason I am sympathetic, and always will be, about the people who are charged to do this is because of what my great friend and mentor, Michael Quinlan, wrote not long before he died. He did not publish it, but his family have allowed me to use it and I call it Quinlan’s law. I will finish my opening remarks with what Michael wrote in December 2008: "A theorem: In matters of military contingency, the expected, precisely because it is expected, is not to be expected. Rationale: What we expect, we plan and provide for; what we plan and provide for, we thereby deter; what we deter does not happen. What does happen is what we did not deter, because we did not plan and provide for it, because we did not expect it." Michael’s very powerful shade will be behind the framers of this document.

I have also said to my chums in the Ministry of Defence, in Quinlan’s shadow as it were, that what it would be really helpful to have this time for Parliament and the public is an opening essay of about 2,000 words of the quality Michael Quinlan prepared for the 1980 defence White Paper on nuclear deterrence and his performances before this Committee in its first two years of existence. This 2,000-word essay should set out what a country like ours with a past like ours can expect sensibly to do in the world without making ourselves look ridiculous or overextending ourselves.

This has always been a problem for the Brits. I dug up the other day by accident something Palmerston said, in our apogee really, in the House of Commons in 1848. His speech in the Chamber that day was famous because he said, "We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual". What he also said was that the UK-or England, as he called it then-needs "to be the champion of justice and right: pursuing that course with moderation and prudence," but without "becoming the Quixote of the world". I still think that is absolutely crucial. I am one of those people who wants us to do good and difficult things in the world if we can with our allies, but we have always had an "instinct to intervene", in Douglas Hurd’s phrase, beyond our capacities. So these are the shades for any group that is involved in SDSR pre-thinking, including this Committee.

The final thought is that what I would really like this Committee to do, if you don’t think it is a disrespectful suggestion, is to come up with a 2,000-word essay on Britain’s place in the world that would set the tone and the pitch as part of your Report.

Chair: Can you please bear in mind that if we do, it may well be based on what you say this morning?

Q2 Sir Bob Russell: My understanding is that the Ten Commandments did not need 2,000 words.

Professor Hennessy: The sermon on the mount is 175 words, no caveats. If it had been written by Whitehall it would have said, "Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the children of God, always bearing in mind the need to maintain the effectiveness of the British strategic nuclear deterrent." If the MOD or Whitehall had written the sermon on the mount, not one of us would be Christians. But I have not come here to preach. That is just an aside.

Professor Lindley-French: Thank you all. It is lovely to be here. Thank you, Chairman. When I was asked to come here I was asked to look at this from the point of view of a Dutch taxpayer living in the middle of the eurozone and giving to some extent a perspective on why Britain having ambition to maintain strategic leadership of some variety matters, particularly on the continent right now. I can tell you, it really does matter. I believe that we are only in the crumple zone of the eurozone crisis, speaking to my Dutch counterparts. It is very clear that we are going to have at least a decade of very deep turbulence in the eurozone, which will lead to a whole range of changed circumstances for the continent but also for the UK.

When I was coming here I thought about the question that Peter framed so eloquently: why must Britain retain an ambition to be influential? I think it is critical that SDSR 2015, which for obvious reasons was a spreadsheet review-let us be clear about that: it was a spreadsheet review-now has to focus on influence and understanding: influence in terms of how we influence the environment in such a way as to prevent conflict, and if necessary to bring conflict to a rapid end. That includes with partners and through institutions and all those instruments that Britain has traditionally employed to gain leverage, but also from the point of view that, respecting Peter’s remarks about constraint, the UK is still a strategic brand.

Wherever I go in the world, our armed forces in particular still have that branding. Without overegging it, we are very clearly in reality one of the top five economies in the world, and that will probably remain. I say top five because if you look at the likes of Brazil, China and India, we routinely exaggerate their front-line economic strengths. We fail to analyse their intense internal contradictions. Given the turbulence in this world and the change that is, indeed, taking place, whether we like it or not we will be called upon to generate influence, in all its forms.

The first mental requirement for the review is to grip that reality and simply accept that 2010 was a necessary benchmark, but that in 2015 we have to look up and out in the world, understand it and understand how, through the review and the NSS, we can seek to influence-with whom and why. But, of course, to do that, we have to look down and dirty into the services all the time to drive down value for money.

To conclude my remarks, I came up with 10 headlines why the review must be ambitious, the first of which is political balance in Europe. From speaking to German colleagues, it is very clear that the role of the UK armed forces-for political balance to Germany’s emerging economic power-is critical. The more powerful Germany becomes economically in Europe, the less military she will become-for obvious reasons-and that is why the relationship with France is particularly important to maintain political balance.

My second headline is influence over Washington. I am not suggesting that we should be looking to go into Asia-Pacific with the Americans but, being part of an influential group in Washington, I get the same message over and over again. The Americans will look to Europe to look after its own neighbourhood as they focus more and more on Asia-Pacific. We have a pretty rough neighbourhood, which means that we will necessarily be in the lead of many security aspects of that. It also means that we will then have to make NATO and the EU effective security actors but, without our full engagement in those institutions, I find it hard to believe that they will indeed release the pressure on the Americans, which we need to create so that they can be effective elsewhere.

My third point is about reinforcing the west as an idea. Much of the world still believes in the values of the west and aspires to the values of the west. If we are seen simply as having a balance-sheet view of our security influence, the west itself will start to weaken and fail because we are a cornerstone state of the west. The fourth issue is that strategy itself is important. The truly powerful do not need strategy. It is countries like the UK that need to think cleverly about concepts and applications of influence, and how we do that will probably be a benchmark for others.

I was speaking to a Dutch officer on Exercise Joint Warrior at sea last week. Most of the time I was seasick, but spent some of the time being able to have conversations! It was an interesting experience. The officer said a fascinating thing: that the Dutch Navy and the Dutch marines would not exist but for their British counterparts. Given that we can never have enough to achieve everything we have to achieve across the piece, the role of allies and partners is absolutely critical, but having sufficient power that allies and partners want to work to us is also absolutely critical, and that means enabling the strategic brand, particularly that which our armed forces still represent.

What our armed forces do in terms of their deployability offers you, our political leaders, flexibility and discretion through crises, which the friction in the world will clearly generate. That capacity is probably unmatched by almost any other state except for the Americans, and that is a hugely important premium. We have the ability to make choices. I have a problem with moving automatically from campaigning to contingency because it has a black and white quality to it, as though somehow it is all a monochrome switch question. Deterrence, for example, is not just about nuclear deterrence; it is about deterrence across the security piece, of which the military is a part, to have credibility in preventing crises. Again, that goes to the brand, the aspiration and the ambition that we set out for ourselves for the review in 2015.

Sixthly, you cannot build the resilience of society, which we have to build, unless you have the flipside of expeditionary capability. They are two sides of the same coin. If we are going to build the kind of expeditionary influence which I think is critical to the review, we must also have an holistic view of resiliency of the society that it is indeed defending. Remember, this review is genuinely about life post-Afghanistan; and I would say, looking at matters not as the historian that Peter is, but a more humble historian, that this is probably the first moment in 100 years that we have had to make true strategic judgment choices.

For a long time, much of our strategic judgment has been about how to find the middle ground between the Americans at one end and the French or the Germans at the other. The Germans are mired in a eurozone crisis and the French are facing a fiscal cliff. The loi de programmation, which is about to come out, will seem quite modest, but in fact, over the next five years, there will be very deep cuts, and the Americans are rebalancing. We have to fill that vacuum. As Hugh Strachan said, strategy must fill vacuums; it cannot take place in a vacuum, but it must fill vacuums.

Finally, I underline the opportunity that this review represents, and the opportunity for this Committee to shape what could be one of the most important defence reviews for 40 or 50 years, given the moment that we are at. I am grateful, Chairman, that we have the opportunity to kick off this whole process with the idea that the review is about looking up, looking out and driving forward the opportunity that this country has to regenerate influence in the wake of Afghanistan.

Major-General Melvin: I share with Lord Hennessy some sympathy for the writers of the National Security Strategy and the Strategic Defence and Security Review with all its failings, but we need to understand how on earth the UK-whether it is the MOD or cross-Government-has got itself into such a situation. In my last couple of years in Defence, I was writing about strategy, both within the Royal College of Defence Studies-I am glad to report that the great Michael Quinlan quote got to page 3 of the booklet "Strategic Thinking"-and, more seriously, while working for the Chief of the Defence Staff in the report, "Enhancing Strategic Capability". My team and I were absolutely shocked in the autumn of 2010, on the eve of the review, and then at the beginning of 2011 how low the strategic thinking had dipped within the MOD and across Government. To give you a simple illustration, there was no uniformed officer in the MOD above the rank of naval captain, army colonel, or group captain with strategy even in his job title. That was a rough description, but there was nobody doing strategy in the MOD. Lots of people were doing ‘Defence strategy’, trying to balance the books. There were hundreds if not thousands of people involved in the minutiae of operations, but very few were looking more than two or three months out in a strategic sense.

It is my contention that before we can get to the SDSR, we must review where we are in terms of whether we have the strategic thinking right, so that institutionally and individually those who are charged with the SDSR, or the new national security strategy, are truly going to think strategically in a way that Lord Hennessy and Professor Lindley-French have argued. I appreciate that the ability to estimate, to do that very difficult balance between ends, ways and means-what we are trying to achieve, how we can achieve it and are there the resources available-is linked fundamentally to strategic education that does not stop when an individual leaves the staff college. This is a process that needs continually to be rehearsed by senior officials, across Government and senior military. It is a combined effort increasingly with allies. What we have seen in recent years is a focus on our training and education programmes that rightly have to be done at the tactical and operational level, but a deficit in strategic exercising. We must remember that during the Cold War, the then Prime Minister herself was involved in the exercises such as Wintex, and we have got out of the habit of doing that across the board in the UK.

Q3 Chair: When was the last time that Ministers themselves were involved in a military exercise such as the one you are talking about?

Major-General Melvin: I defer to Lord Hennessy, but from memory, I do not think we have done it since the cold war.

Professor Hennessy: Nothing on that scale. Ministers were always kept away from Wintex. There were CCTV films done where people would simulate the prime ministerial role and the war cabinet, but Mrs Thatcher, to her great credit, insisted on doing a command and control exercise of her own one Saturday morning, to the chagrin of one or two of her colleagues who had to turn up, and took it to the point of nuclear release. It was an interesting scenario-I won’t bore you with what the scenario was. Well, if you ask me, I will.

Ministers were always kept separate from Wintex, but they were intimately involved because they saw the CCTV. There are only two areas in which they are intimately involved now. One is on the nuclear side; the Prime Minister obviously knows the retaliation drills and has to write the last resort letters and all that for the inner safe of each Trident boat. The two or three alternative decision takers, if he is wiped out by a bolt from the blue or unavailable for any reason, are inducted into these dreadful drills-dreadful in the sense of awesome.

The other example I can think of that is current, though I am not an insider on this, is, what do you do if there is a 9/11 contingency forming up here? A civil aircraft from the Middle East or North Africa won’t talk to air traffic control and the Typhoons are scrambled from Coningsby and the fuelling planes go up. Four or five, I think, other Ministers-usually four, I think-apart from the Prime Minister, go through the drill about when you have to take the decision, if you want it to crash before it gets inside the M25. Those are the only two I know about, but there has been nothing on that scale. I think the last Wintex was 1988. They are all declassified, well into the early ’80s, and are fascinating-absolutely chilling. They come out of the Committee of Imperial Defence tradition. The first war book was ready for 1913.

Q4 Chair: But it would be shocking to think that military officers need exercises and politicians do not.

Major-General Melvin: I tried to make the point, Mr Chairman, that this has to be done with Ministers, senior military and officials. With long experience, as all of us on this bench have in strategic education, you cannot assume that people have all the strategic skills at their fingertips. It needs education and practice. The war games and so on sound like a very old-fashioned thing, but it is still a very valid method.

My I add two final points to my introductory comments? We have to be fair and recognise that in the past couple of years within the Ministry of Defence, considerable progress has been made. Under the current Chief of the Defence Staff, there is much clearer strategic focus in the MOD, and we must give full credit for that, but I would raise a question. I think that it is still very fragile and I draw the Committee’s attention to how permanent those strategic improvements have been. It would be very pertinent to draw attention to that, because there is a worry among some people that all the reforms that are slowly making an impact could all be cast away again.

The final point I want to make is that all of this will be to no avail until the Government and the MOD for the very first time take seriously drawing strategic lessons together. It is shocking to say that we have no official history, apart from the Korean War and the Falklands War, since World War Two. The narratives that should have been written and the detailed analysis that should have been done have not been done. This is a strategic gap. It meant that when our forces went to Iraq in 2003 and asked for the lessons learnt report and the deep analysis of the Gulf War in 1991, they went to the Army Historical Branch-in name only-and found that the work had not been done. The lack of focus is very worrying.

Professor Lindley-French: I think there are two specific requirements that the review needs to consider. One is the role of the National Security Council, its relevant weight and its ability to drive that kind of synergy with other Government Departments. When I look at most of the military tasks, I cannot understand exercising without other Government Departments being actively involved. You need a synergising element. It strikes me that, although the NSC is obviously just a Cabinet Committee, it needs to be given more weight to drive together all the tools of national influence. That includes exercising, so that we are working up all national means.

The second is a direct reinforcement of Mungo’s point about the nature of exercising. I have looked at NATO exercising and British exercising. I have been involved in several. There is no developmental process; each exercise just about takes place in a vacuum. None of the real lessons learnt are transferred into best practice. We should really have a development programme from now forward with which we do not test the things we know work, as too many exercises do, but test the things that fail. We should draw those lessons out and have a mechanism for transferring them across the forces and beyond. Last week on Joint Warrior, I asked the command group, "What will you do with the lessons from this exercise? Will they go, for example, to 16 Air Assault Brigade?" I couldn’t understand, for example, why we were doing a massive exercise-perhaps Europe’s, if not the world’s, biggest maritime amphibious exercise this year-where we were projecting a marine force up to 50 miles inland without properly considering its military-strategic context. It all looked a bit like Arnhem to me, frankly. I was wondering what would happen if things went wrong. My question was, "Where was 16 Air Assault Brigade?" Because they would bring a mass to reinforce the theatre entry being opened up by the Commando Group. That needs to be worked up and, above all, a real development programme is needed to properly inform Force 2020 and beyond.

The problem is even worse in NATO. That is why the next British DSACEUR is a hugely important appointment. Specifically, all the High Readiness Forces (Land), which are the centre of gravity of NATO, have to have an exercise programme that we influence and is part of a genuine development process. Why now? Because my sense is that we have a certain corporate memory from operations over the past decade or so. But because we lack the institutions to capture corporate memory, we could lose that very quickly and, as a consequence, we will lose the ability to force generate coalitions and thereafter effective command and control.

The UK is a critical repository of that corporate memory because our lessons-and I have written several reports on this on the performance of headquarters-are relevant to our key allies. Allies are more important to us than they are to the United States, frankly. The lessons the Americans draw are often very different and inapplicable to smaller allies. So, unless we take the lead in really producing a scientific method of capturing knowledge-the key to this-I am afraid it will be lost. We will lose a key lever in best practice over the next decade or so.

Q5 Mr Havard: May I go back to the business of exercises and so on? I have been looking at a document that you will be familiar with, General. It is the defence strategy group document that was published in January last year, I think. It talks about trying to set out an architecture for the MOD, how best to respond and deal with this. It talks implicitly about a power that comes from the fact that there is going to be a regular review and this is an outline form of process. It says, "This, therefore, gives the opportunity for regular reviews, updating thinking at sensible intervals." It talks about incremental improvements. It also talks implicitly about-while the MOD should be doing this-how this works with the NSS.

There is talk about the NSC but my concern about this all along is that it tends to collapse-and we collapse because we are the Defence Committee-into looking at how the MOD organises itself in the process. These cross-Government issues get a little bit lost. If it is meant to be a defence and security strategy, it is that "and security" nexus bit that is the difficult bit. It is not just about how the MOD organises.

As I understand it, the exercises in the past have been for MOD people. Ministers get together and projects go on and they do all of that stuff. That is fine. But you seem to be talking about something that can, on an exercise basis, bring together collaborative arrangements across. Are you? What about other Departments? If you are going to build capacity in the NSC to do the NSS.

Major-General Melvin: Fundamentally, in grand strategic terms we must always remember that the military is but one of several instruments of national power. Therefore, in today’s security environment it makes little sense to have an exercise or education programme that solely corresponds to the planning and application of the military instrument. Therefore, I support what Professor Lindley-French has said, that we need to take this into the National Security Council arena. The questions one has to ask are: "What skills do the people in the NSC secretariat have? What education have they had? What is their exercise programme?" We need to encourage that. To be fair, a lot of people would agree with you. In the MOD and in other Departments they will say, "We are far too busy running hand to mouth with what we are doing currently." There is an issue of their resources and capability, but we are not going to make any progress, in my view, unless we address this on a cross-Government basis.

Q6 Mr Havard: But this paper talks as well about how relationships develop and how you must have all the players involved. It makes the point about policy versus strategy, mentioning ends and means, and how people understand the process. Politicians have got to be involved with practitioners.

Professor Hennessy: Mr Havard, you have put your finger on a very considerable need. I am a fan of the National Security Council, it has made things better and it is an idea whose time had come. However, now is the moment to look at the inputs into it-following your theme directly-because for the first time we have a super-Cabinet committee, which is really the old Committee of Imperial Defence with better IT, although it would have been tactless to call it that these days. It covers, for the first time ever, the entire spectrum. The Overseas and Defence Committee and the NSID under Labour did not do this to the same extent. It covers the front line, with ‘C’s people in the field and submarines doing clever things in dangerous areas, bringing back the bacon as it were, right through to the last line of defence, the Trident submarine out on patrol in the north Atlantic as we meet. In between there is politico-military, diplomacy, soft power-the BBC, British Council and so on-and all the agencies.

I think it is time to have one of those "capability reviews"-I do not know if they are still called that; they were in the Labour days-of all the agencies and departments and professions, including the horizon scanning: there has been a very interesting review on that on the side, which I might want to mention if you think it useful. It would be a capability review of all the inputs to the NSC and the official committee that shadows it, and the secretariat in the Cabinet Office that services it, to see if they have adapted themselves, as they need to, to this new, more integrated, across-the-spectrum approach to our national security. That would be timely, because we have had the NSC meeting since May 2010, plenty of time and stuff on which to go.

Professor Lindley-French: May I offer a provocative element?

Chair: Please do; this is your purpose.

Professor Lindley-French: Quite. My wife says that as well. I fully agree with Peter and Mungo that this is a moment when we can make a radical difference, a bit like when we made our armed forces professional. It is a moment to be radical. Sitting in the Netherlands and talking to European leaders, as I do, there is a sense that however well we organise this, there is, however, a missing ingredient, which is whether there is sufficient uniformity of belief in this place that Britain should aspire to that role. However well you organise the institutions of state towards the influence I believe Britain should aspire to, unless the political class are really engaged in this idea across the political spectrum-this is not a party political view-it will come to nought.

In a sense I throw the question back to you, having heard our initial remarks and my point about this being as much opportunity as challenge. Do you think the British political class are up to filling the strategic vacuum that Britain is being invited to fill?

Chair: The problem with that question is that we are the choir, to which you are preaching.

Q7 Penny Mordaunt: I want to follow on from that. In the last Strategic Defence and Security Reviews the political imperative was the budget-sorting out the scramble of programmes-and it was done swiftly, behind closed doors, and presented as "this is what we are up to." This time there will be more debate before the event. Certainly with any defence debate in Parliament there is always a massive consensus that we should stop doing things, we do not want to send troops anywhere, and there is a shallow-I do not mean that in a derogatory sense-view of what our influence is and could be. Do you see the process being influenced by that, or do you think it will still be taking place behind closed doors? What do you think the dangers are if there is not the ambition to do what you are articulating amongst parliamentarians?

Professor Lindley-French: It is very clear what those dangers are; we have seen them already in the last two or three years: a growth in tribalism among service chiefs as they fight for small amounts of money, and a competition between the Foreign Office and the Department for International Development and the MOD over the way we do security. Unless it is driven from the top, and there is a clear political vision and firm political guidance, the bureaucracy will do what it always has and fight for its turf. I do not gain a sense, either as a member of the strategic advisory panel of the CDS as we all are-

Professor Hennessy: I should declare an interest, in that we are all members. But are here as individual eccentrics.

Professor Lindley-French: Absolutely. We are all members of that panel. After observing abroad what is happening in my country, I get no sense that sufficient political capital has been injected into the process to ensure that there is that kind of synergy.

Professor Hennessy: May I just give a quick thought, as a parliamentarian from the other end? Winston Churchill liked to use this phrase-Roy Jenkins used it, too-about the need to rise to the level of events. Parliamentarians collectively need to rise to this one, because it is so crucial. I have great respect for your House, but it is harder for your Chamber because of the age spectrum, which is much younger. [Interruption.] I am only here to cheer everyone up.

The House of Lords is a warehouse for previous political generations. A lot of them have long experience-some of them from World War Two-which is heaven for a political historian like me, because you get to have lunch with your exhibits.

Professor Lindley-French: You are an exhibit yourself, Peter.

Professor Hennessy: That is very kind. It means that they are dripping with knowledge, and here it is hard because of the nature of political generations coming through. When I first reported Westminster in the mid-’70s, both Chambers were full of people who had done national service. It was not just a male thing, because although there was a relatively small number of women MPs then-there still are, relatively-they had been on the home front and grown up in the shadow of war.

We were also very much the first generation to grow up in the shadow of the bomb. You might call us children of the uranium age. The cold war was on and was a great concentrator of minds and we all had a sense of it. You did not need a degree in theoretical physics to know what the mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki meant or that a hydrogen bomb was 1,000 times more powerful than those atomic bombs. You almost absorbed a certain kind of strategy through your pores, and all of that has changed.

You, in the Commons, are by definition the people who are among the most interested and highly knowledgeable about it, and you know the problem of getting the wider conspectus of opinion lined up better than I. It is a first order question-Julian is right-about whether we want to continue punching heavier than our weight, or whichever metaphor you want to use. It is deep within us as a country. We are not an opting-out-of-the-world country. We have always had a great problem with institutions that we did not invent. NATO existed "to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down", as General Ismay rather tactlessly put it. No one has been able to find an equivalent of that for our membership of the EU, but that was the invention of clever, Catholic, left-wing, French bureaucrats, and the Brits have got severe problems with at least three of the five of those categories. We still have an impulse to be a big player in the world, don’t we?

Chair: We now have a determination to get involved in this conversation from Julian, Madeleine and Bob.

Q8 Mr Brazier: I have two questions. Before coming back to Professor Lindley-French, can I ask Mungo Melvin about his very strong points on the loss of history and the loss of doctrine in the process? A number of books have pointed out that America had this problem and overcame it; we have not. Would you agree that as part of that, one of the things we have to address is the short amount of time for which people are occupying senior military slots? Addressing that will not solve the problem on its own, but we are in a preposterous situation where people are unaware of what happened even two or three years before, because they are swapping over so quickly in top positions. Do you think that the Levene reform, saying that senior posts have to be held for four to five years, is, while not a sufficient condition, necessary to make progress?

Major-General Melvin: I think continuity is provided both by individuals and institutions. You are right that one of the recommendations of the Defence Reform Review was to give senior officials and senior military a longer time in post. That has been recognised, but I do not have any up-to-date statistics to see whether that has happened in practice, so that is a concern.

One of the ways that you provide continuity between individuals is by having the right institutional memory. I am sorry to report that the MOD’s rather Orwellian-sounding corporate memory is nothing of the sort. It does not provide a corporate memory. If I can speak with an academic research hat on, we know far more about the decisions made in World War Two than we will ever find out about decisions made in the MOD over Iraq or Afghanistan, because many of them were not properly documented or presented in a formal way. I hesitate to predict what we may or may not get out of various reviews, but there are problems institutionally, as well as with individuals.

The fact that we do not have a proper history programme-it sounds rather boring to mention this-is quite a shocking gap. We have sent young men and women into combat without equipping them properly with knowledge about the countries they are going to, and without knowledge of what happened last time. Shockingly, in 2006, officers went to Helmand province completely unaware that the battle of Maiwand in the Second Afghan War took place on the very same ground. That is appalling.

Q9 Mr Brazier: That is reinforced still further, as an RAF officer said to me the other day, by the movement from physical paper to electronic things. As a result, you cannot even reconstruct things from copies of documents from a few years ago, because they have all gone.

I hope colleagues will forgive me-I do not mean to hog things-but I want to develop this point a bit further. Professor Lindley-French, the answer to your question, I am certain, is no, but we have to try to change things, and this process can be one of the ways of doing that. One thing that particularly concerns me, which seems to sit side by side with the question you put to us, is that there is an unhealthy focus in the armed forces-particularly the two more capital-intensive forces, the Navy and the Air Force-on the sexier and higher-end element of what they do. From the point of view of the Great British public, who are concerned about the NHS and all the other things my constituents are concerned about-planning and a million other things-expeditionary warfare is very low, to put it mildly, down the list of the things that interest them, after two unpopular wars.

The way they seem to sell these things in America is by working on things such as resilience, being prominent on anti-terror issues and all the rest of it. There is a real danger-the recent loss of the SAR contract to civilian contractors is a bad instance of this-that the Armed Forces are, at a time when the big debate you are talking about is not happening and the issues are not being addressed, progressively seeing an erosion of the very levers that will help to keep the wider British public involved in the debate.

Professor Lindley-French: Absolutely. If I may, I have to give a quick caveat to Peter’s point about the nuclear age. I used to rather object to the fact that it was my home town, Sheffield, which always seemed to get nuked on the BBC as an example of what might happen.

On your question about public support, it is an issue of leadership again. My sense is that there is a belief in the British military, as we have seen with Help for Heroes, across much of the mainstream of British society. We are not trying to become a pocket superpower; we have to be clear about that. We are not trying to be America on a slightly smaller scale. We are not focusing on the top 20% of right-of-arc conflict; but at the same time, there is the issue of capabilities. I think specifically of the two carriers, and of carrier-enabled power projection. The two ships will be more than assets; they are actually a magnet for influence. Unless we have those kinds of assets, with that branding and that flag, we will not be able to lead the kind of coalitions we will need to lead because the Americans will be so busy. We are the only ones, with the French, who can lead these kinds of coalitions. As ever, there is a balance to strike.

The real price that worries me is to do with the aligning of resources and commitments. We know that, while things may be resource driven, the commitments are unlikely to go away; we have seen that even since 2010, with Libya, Mali and elsewhere. All right, we are withdrawing from Afghanistan, but there is a lot of friction in this world. If you, as a class, do not properly grip the implications of this, all you are doing is passing risk down the command chain to the Armed Forces and, in particular, to the individual members of the Armed Forces. They are the ones who will end up trying to bridge the gap between failed strategy and policy and investment in the field. It is not simply a semantic question; it is a very real question, which will have an impact on all our deployed personnel elsewhere.

Q10 Mrs Moon: There are two things that join up together eventually in my questions. I sit on the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, so I hear what you talk about, in terms of British leadership, in every meeting I go to; I see it in action. Unfortunately, I think there is a huge gap between what the NATO Parliamentary Assembly members are engaged with and the understanding of it back here in the UK. We have agreed to have a debate in the Chamber so that we can start exploring that issue. I am increasingly aware that any future defence and security review must also be a review of NATO’s capability and where we sit within that, as well as the use of bilaterals and trilaterals, and an awareness of skills and capability gaps. How do we ensure that the Government are doing that thinking and taking that work forward now?

My response to my own question, and I would welcome your comments about it, is that last year the Chairman of the Committee and I went to the French defence university. I have to say that it blew my mind away and I am looking forward to going this year, hopefully. In that year, they were looking at naval power. They pulled together academics, the three forces and journalists, and they invited NATO colleagues. There were three days of debate around French naval power, its past and where it should be going. We never engage to that extent with wider people in the defence world. Is it beyond our capability to do that? Are we too inward-looking, and-let us keep it with us-is the Ministry of Defence a self-licking lollipop that can never share?

Professor Hennessy: There are gleams of light in our world. The Development Concepts and Doctrine Centre, in the Defence Academy at Shrivenham, does a good bit of what you have just described.

Q11 Mrs Moon: Closed.

Professor Hennessy: Yes. Openness is quite tricky, really; I understand all that. However, I certainly think that we as a country, with our tradition, should be able to do this. Maybe I am sounding Pollyanna-ish about it. Ours is the country that produced Sir Halford Mackinder, who invented the concept of geopolitics, and Sir Basil Liddell Hart, and in our own time Professor Sir Michael Howard. Surely it is not beyond our wit to so arrange these things, but Shrivenham and the DCDC do very good work on all this, and I think they need to be congratulated on all that. However, the wider conversation is absolutely crucial, including Parliament’s input, as we have said.

May I just come back with a thought on the one bit that surely is manageable? It is in Mungo’s excellent strategy paper; I don’t know if it has been declassified for you. It is an absolute must. Mungo looked at the history of previous attempts at defence reviews, the previous 11, didn’t you?

Major-General Melvin: Including the last one.

Professor Hennessy: And I had a little go at it in my book, Distilling the Frenzy.

Q12 Chair: We have had a look.

Professor Hennessy: I am gratified. It would be a good idea if the knowledge of what the previous reviews said, and what happened to them, was more widely known. It is an exercise in necessary humility for anybody engaged in the SDSR or in the wider conversation. The first one is quite extraordinary; it was neither announced nor published. It emerged 31 years later in a file marked "Royal Marine Bands" in the National Archives. Being interested in the Marines and all that, I got it out as a press preview, as the youth from The Times who read those files. It was from the admirals to the Harwood review. It said, "It is inconceivable that the Royal Marine Corps should be made part of the Army", and that it should be effectively disbanded in its form. You would have thought that the argument would have been about amphibious warfare. Oh no; the argument was that the Royal Marine Corps provide the bands for the entire naval service. I thought, "What is this review?" And here was the very first of our post-war defence reviews. Those were the days; you could commission one and have it done, but neither announce it nor publish it. No doubt some people hanker for those days.

However, as I say, the previous 11 reviews are worth looking at, and that would be an aid to raising the game this time; at least I think it would. Again, that is within everybody’s powers. If you can get Mungo’s document into the public domain-he is too gentlemanly to suggest this, but I can suggest it on his behalf-it would be an excellent start.

Professor Lindley-French: Can I just add a point, in answer to your very, very good questions on NATO?

Chair: Can I stop you and ask you to come back on that issue, because Sir Bob Russell has a question on the Floor of the Chamber and he needs to get in now?

Q13 Sir Bob Russell: Thank you, Chair, and my apologies to the three witnesses. I need to go and say my prayers, so that I can reserve a seat for Prime Minister’s questions. You have just given the best reason yet to support my view that we should not be cutting any further the bands of Her Majesty’s Armed Forces.

Professor Hennessy: Hear, hear.

Sir Bob Russell: Clearly, as the Defence Committee, we are looking from the defence perspective-that is stating the obvious-and I recognise that our battle will be to try to stop any further defence cuts. I also recognise that as a nation it could be said that we are punching above our weight. I think that we have got to try to sell our defence needs, requirements and capabilities on a wider agenda than purely defence. Stating the obvious, when it comes to energy resources and food resources, we are not self-sufficient as a nation, and I would suggest that in the future they will be potential areas of conflict. The United Kingdom needs, therefore, to be in a position where it can defend the home front by defending our overseas requirements.

Just as an aside, 20 years ago, at the collapse of the Soviet Union, I do not think that everyone assumed that Russia would re-emerge as quickly and powerfully as it did in such a relatively short time. In addition, we must not forget the powder keg of the Middle East. I think those are all reasons why we have got to convince the Treasury and colleagues in other Departments that when we are talking about military defence, it is not just men and women in uniform; it is the national interest in its widest sense.

Professor Lindley-French: First of all, any more defence cuts under the spending review would, to my mind, send a disastrous signal to the continent, and to the Dutch in particular. The Dutch are the last small-medium European country willing to give an all-arms approach a go. This is not criticising Berlin, but Berlin, because of history, has a much more constabulary policing view of the role of the Armed Forces, and the Dutch are being pulled towards that. If we indicate now that we are undercutting even the limited growth that we accepted for defence under the 2010 Defence Review, the political impact would be very great indeed. The second point I want to make is that I want to kill the phrase, "We’re punching above our weight."

Sir Bob Russell: Sorry.

Professor Lindley-French: It is well said, Sir, but we are not. We are a major economy in the world, and we are a regional power with global interests. We are not a world power, by any means-a global power-but we punch at our weight. The question then becomes: how do we punch at our weight more efficiently and effectively to promote value for money?

Sir Bob Russell: I happily stand corrected, and I will use that term in future.

Professor Lindley-French: Thank you. I appreciate that, and it is important because of the mindset. If we put aside the punching above our weight thing and recognise that we are a top-10 player in the world, and the world is going to come visiting, then we have got to be ready for it. This review is at the very heart of that. In a sense, it brings me back to the institutions point of NATO. The state for whom institutions are most critical is this one, because institutions are key influence levers.

Let me give you an example of the gap between our declared policy and our behaviour. The German-Netherlands Corps, which I know well, had several British officers in. About a week after we had made the statement in SDSR 2010 that we were going to reinvest in the alliance as a key element in our national influence policy, somebody in the MOD decided that they had to pull those British officers out of the German-Netherlands Corps headquarters. The Dutch and the Germans said, "Right, we will pull the Dutch and German officers out of the ARRC". In a sense, what is happening is that we are declaring policy at one level, and somebody lower down the food chain is taking a spreadsheet action at another level, so we are sending conflicting signals. I am sure, Mrs Moon, that they are the messages that you are getting back from NATO.

I was in NATO headquarters two weeks ago, and there was frustration with the UK on the one side making these statements about ambition, and on the other side cutting the means to make that ambition real. When I talk about aligning resources and commitments, it is really aligning ambition with resources and commitments, so that we are indeed investing in those institutions, and not killing them through short-termism.

Professor Hennessy: What would perhaps help-going to the wider theme of getting wider public attention on these questions-is this. Two and a half years ago, when the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy was asking certain questions about this, my friend Alan Judd and I did a threat assessment-Alan is an ex-insider in a way that I am not-which I published in Distilling the Frenzy, of external and internal threats. Home and abroad are indistinguishable in terms of threats these days, as we all know. I will not itemise what the threat diagram looked like, although I put it in the book, but I have to say that in my judgment it is more than 2% of GDP on defence a year. With the threats that this country is facing and the capacities that we have got to keep in being, it is at least 2.5% of GDP, even if Bernard Gray can work miracles at Abbey Wood overnight and the Peter Levene reforms produce all the effects that we hope for.

I think that you are a member of the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy, Mr Arbuthnot, aren’t you? Going back to that point about these questions being across so many different Committees, it might be an idea if, on behalf of Parliament, you commissioned your own threat assessment of what we are likely to face. Again, the DCDC people are very helpful; they do that 40-year forward look, as they did before the last SDSR. Hardly anybody took any notice of it on the outside. I think they did on the inside, but the press did not take any notice of it because it was not classified. I have a cunning plan. I have said to them this time, "What you need is to put Top Secret on it, with a code word and strapline, and get somebody to leave it on a towpath in the traditional manner. Then the press will take notice of it." If the umbrella committee, if you can call it that-the national security one that you sit on, Chair-were to commission a threat assessment on all our behalves, it would be very, very interesting. People can lock their minds more easily on threat assessments, I think, than they can on the bits that impinge on them-the bigger picture.

Chair: Thank you for my homework.

Q14 Ms Stuart: Lord Hennessy, that was the perfect opening.

Chair: Yes, we haven’t yet got beyond the first question.

Ms Stuart: What I wanted is your help in allowing us to do the political narrative. The difficulty with this place is that, unlike any of you, we have this rather irritating thing every four or five years, which means that we have to get re-elected. Not just in this country-I talk to colleagues across Europe-defence spending is neither an election winner nor an election loser. That in itself ought to have an enormous liberating effect on us politicians, because it ought to allow us to think far more creatively. Unlike potholes, wheelie bins and hedges not being cut, it does not lose or gain us votes.

Professor Hennessy: Unless it is the question of the bomb. If we have a bomb election-

Q15 Ms Stuart: That is why I would like not to talk about the bomb. But again, nobody is going to switch their vote over the bomb; they have already made up their mind.

Chair: At some stage I would like to talk about the bomb.

Ms Stuart: Getting on, you were talking about the absence of historians. Mervyn King said that the one thing he would have liked in the Bank of England was an economic historian. It is a British disease: unlike the continentals, who think that there is a search for the right answer in which we need to engage, we do not think that there is a right answer. We think that there is a right action in response to something that is happening that we cannot really influence. Let us not jump over our history. You used this phrase, "the capture of the corporate memory." As an institution, Parliament-the Clerks and others-is enormously good at having a collective memory that rarely gets itself into the Chamber or across things. If we want to break through the FCO, MOD and DFID artificial line of how we protect ourselves from the rest of the world, other than the commissioning you mentioned, how can we get that corporate memory out into the public debate in a way that, for us poor people who have to get re-elected, will actually help?

Professor Hennessy: It is very interesting. I have never stood for office at all, so I am full of admiration for those of you who are brave enough to do that. However, in terms of dealing with the wider public on the question of our place in the world and our past, John Buchan, in his memoir-John Buchan of The Thirty-Nine Steps-said, "In the circle in which we live, we can only see a fraction of the curve." People are very interested in the several curves on which they live and how far they have got and where they might lead to. You find historical association meetings, which I go and talk to, or these extraordinary literary festivals, to which the Radio 4 audience turns up in vast numbers, and they are deeply interested in this question of how we got where we are.

Everybody carries their own sense of history and biography and family history with them, but they feel it very strongly more widely. There is a real appetite for it. Provided that my profession does not lapse into jargon and become like social science, which only talks to itself, and we stick to Max Bygraves’ requirement-that great historian-and say, "I wanna tell you a story", you can actually grip people’s imagination in the round; there is a great appetite for it.

Certainly, your point about the collective memory in your Chamber, and indeed in the one in which I sit, is well made. People have a very considerable knowledge of how we got to where we are, but the way that debates are structured and the nature of partisanship in political life means that it is extremely difficult to do that; if history does appear, it is quite often turned into bits of ordnance, as a bullet to fire at the heads of others. You struggle for your interpretation of the past to be the prevailing one, because it is your own version of Whig history-you do not, I know, but a lot of people do. The necessary historical context, which is crucial to political understanding, and for which there is a really great appetite in this country, can be distorted, can’t it? If that is the point that you are making, which I think it is, I agree with you.

Professor Lindley-French: Would it not be reinforced in the next four years with all the commemorations of World War One? In a sense, there will be a public awareness through mass media that perhaps there is not normally the case. That would be a huge opportunity to make the case of where Britain goes next. It is, after all, 100 years ago, so it is a centennial of grand strategy that is coming up. I would certainly make the case that as much is made as possible of the coming out of Afghanistan-the "what next?"-and the centennial of World War One, which will raise a lot of these issues.

My main concern on this is not a political one per se; it is what I call discretionary drift. Increasingly, defence expenditure is seen as discretionary spending. I see that clearly on the continent, where while NATO has its 2% minimum GDP target, spending is now in fact 1.52% excluding the US, and 1.36% across the EU. The Dutch are at 0.8% and probably about to cancel Joint Strike Fighter.

As a political class, you have got to make sure that you hold the Government’s feet to the fire. In fact, you need to "red team" Government all the way through. You are very good at writing papers in response to reviews, but, with respect, I would suggest that you are less good at acting as a red team throughout the process to hold Government to account for performance. That is crucial through these processes. Otherwise, given the pressures that you rightly identified to get re-elected, defence becomes discretionary; it is creeping discretion, to the point where there is suddenly an emergency, and then we are back in 1936 or 1937 and it is too late.

Major-General Melvin: If I may very briefly pick that up. One or two of you have mentioned the SDSR and National Security Strategy being done under very fast, rushed conditions behind closed doors. As Lord Hennessy mentioned, we know the SDSR and National Security Strategy are going to be done in 2015 so there appears a huge opportunity to get some serious thinking done on the grand strategic level beforehand.

We can go back to the Strategic Defence Review in 1998, for example, where there was at least an independent expert panel being used. This Committee could do an enormous job by either running that itself, or flagging it up to the National Security Council apparatus that you cannot expect senior people, and officials particularly, to do a very good job if they are not stimulated and held to account by expert panellists who have got no institutional axe to grind, whether they are from the MOD, FCO or any other Department.

There is an opportunity not for any sort of intellectual or academic grandstanding, but for some really deep analysis-along the lines that the other members of this panel have mentioned-to talk openly for the first time in many years about grand strategy, how we see the instruments of national power being used, and to what effect, and then to do some form of strategic balance about what we are trying to achieve; what relevant methods are available, nuclear and non-nuclear, from deterrence and containment to intervention if we want to do that anymore; how we resource properly what is now colloquially called soft power, or influence; and how we address some of the new threats, such as cyber and so on, in more serious terms. That can be done well before 2015 and it would really sharpen attention in the MOD and the NSC if they had a very authoritative reference document which they had to respond to, so I think that we can front-load this process.

May I add one final point where we must give credit? In the FCO they have rediscovered history. The chief historian at the FCO, [Professor] Patrick Salmon, has been brought out of obscurity in the cellar and is almost sitting next to Mr Hague. It is the only Department, to my knowledge, that has a vibrant research and history programme. That is an example that should be taken across Government. The MOD needs to be, in my view, severely held to account on that issue and needs to address-without embarrassing anybody here-why it got rid of institutions within the MOD such as the Conflict Studies Research Centre and the Advanced Research [and Assessment] Group, which were asking all these big questions and, again, were cut; these were very short-term financial cuts. We cannot do an SDSR without the brain.

Q16 Chair: Well, for the first time there is a Foreign Secretary who is a historian. That may be valuable. Now before I call on-

Professor Hennessy: Douglas Hurd was a historian; let’s be fair.

Chair: Yes.

Professor Hennessy: Douglas Hurd is a very accomplished historian, if you don’t mind my saying so.

Chair: That is fair and true. Now, before I call on Dai Havard and Julian Brazier, let me point out that we will finish this session at 11.50 am. That means we have 15 minutes left. It was extremely generous and helpful of you to suggest the things that we need to do-a 2,000-word essay suggesting a red team for the National Security Council in advance of 2015-but before we finish, I will want you each to have one major suggestion as to what we as a Committee can do to make the SDSR better. We will come on to that at about 11.45 am, so we have a few minutes left and I want to ask a question as well as Dai and Julian.

Q17 Mr Havard: We have some questions here that were written down. Should an SDSR start with policy, needs or resources? Where should it start? What are the intellectual tools and capacities within Government that help to do it? Who should be involved in that process? Should it be a broader one? James and I were in Paris the other day. I am referring to the Livre Blanc. Our ambassador is sitting on that Committee. The French have a very different view about who they involve in the process, as Madeleine was saying. My fear is that you have the Cabinet Office, or the thought police, the Foreign Office, the Home Office and the MOD, all of which need to collaborate, and others-Government Departments, business, I would suggest, and other people-in an NSC and all the rest of it and in this review. They will all be doing their own individual assessments of where they are going to be placed in that particular fight, it seems to me. What should we be saying about how that is sequenced across Government, as well as who is involved in the process, and which end do you start with? At the moment, it seems to me they will collapse back into a spreadsheet analysis again.

Professor Hennessy: The last one was the first time that the Cabinet Office was in the lead, and it was firmly in the lead. One of my sadnesses in life is that the Ministry of Defence, for which I have always had a very high regard, is not held in great esteem in other Departments. That is getting better. I gather there was a Cabinet Office/Francis Maude review of management reforms in the light of the Peter Levene report that was very encouraging. I have not seen it, but you might want to ask for it; I hear it is interesting. The MOD is not highly regarded currently. I have been writing about it on and off since the mid-1970s and I regret to say that it isn’t.

The Cabinet Office is going to be in the lead this time, but I think-I am not sure-the MOD is further ahead than anybody else at the moment in preparing papers. One of the things that it would be very interesting to know fairly quickly-I don’t know it-is how many Departments are involved. It is a bit of a spectrum that is involved in the NSC, but it will matter more for some than others. I am talking about the degree to which they have units that are at work now on their ingredients for the SDSR, because it has not been pulled together yet. It would be quite nice if the cartography could be mapped by this Committee as it goes along-who is doing what and how far on they are. It would fit very well with the test, which we are going to come to in a minute, that you will apply to that process. It would be nice to have that knowledge, which we do not have at the moment. Previously, all the other defence reviews were done with other departmental input, with the MOD being the lead Department, but it wasn’t last time and it won’t be this time.

Professor Lindley-French: I would suggest that there needs to be a shadow SDSR process of external experts preparing a report, and then you hold the official report against that report to see how others on the outside would produce a British SDSR. I have to say I would also do the same thing for the National Security Council. We marked the card of the MOD very severely, and rightly so. I do not get the sense that we mark the card of the FCO and DFID quite so hard. Their homework needs to be marked within the broader context. That brings me to my final point in this section: I think we need a Security Minister to head up the National Security Council who is a Cabinet-level Minister, with that kind of weight, to help drive synergy across Government.

Chair: We have suggested something similar.

Q18 Mr Brazier: I strongly agree. I will come back to the point that Madeleine and Gisela touched on. The Nobel prize winner, Daniel Kahneman, in his latest bestseller, argues from all the tests he has done across psychology with highly intelligent audiences that, even faced with absolutely overwhelming evidence, they will not accept uncomfortable truths. He has experiment after experiment to show this. His latest book is Thinking, fast and slow. Without paraphrasing him, the bottom-level question I would like to ask is, how do we get a wider degree of involvement in wider society so we can get some of the symbolic or representative ideas out there, with people’s involvement, and can build a base where people will accept the conclusions? At the moment, we are in danger of losing all of this. My experience on the doorstep is that there is no appetite out there for things that we all strongly believe in.

Professor Lindley-French: My sense that the whole force concept and the role of the reserve forces is perhaps the door into that. Having created a very professional force which is somewhat detached from society, the reserve force will help reattach the force to society. That may involve some reinjection of cadets in school units, and that kind of thing, to re-embed the military back in society. In a sense, we are almost stepping back into that process already.

Chair: I think we would like to see that for the 10%.

Professor Lindley-French: Yes, quite right.

Q19 Mrs Moon: I want to see greater political relationships between reserve forces and cadet forces. I have to tell you that it is an absolute nightmare trying to get into a local cadet force; despite my quite clear interest in defence, I still have not managed to get into any of my cadet forces. It is absolutely amazing-never, ever-and I am fed up of talking about it.

Professor Lindley-French: Extraordinary.

Professor Hennessy: Can I come in on that? Do you not think it is a disgrace that MOD officials and military people can’t talk to parliamentarians without specific authorisation?

Mrs Moon: It is an absolute disgrace.

Professor Hennessy: We are all Crown servants in different forms. We are all meant to be on the same side. We all have our own, pretty strong, version of patriotism. For that restriction to be in place is outrageous.

Chair: The answer to your question is yes, absolutely. You are understating the issue.

Q20 Mrs Moon: I want to pick up some of what Julian has talked about, in terms of people not being willing to look at unpalatable truths. One of the things that is said is that we are always fighting the last war. Julian and I had a conversation about an episode where someone who had been involved in Iraq was in denial about what actually happened there, and we talked about how you get an honest appraisal of our own strengths and weaknesses, so that we can project that forward to look at where we need to be. I caveat that with needing to be aware of where we are in NATO, and so on, but I do think we are missing an important element if we do not look honestly at where we failed, where the skills gaps were, where the capability gaps were, and where we need to toughen up and build our capacity too. There is almost a feeling that it is disloyal to suggest that we don’t do everything wonderfully. I was in the Netherlands the week before last, talking to the Dutch military. It was an absolutely wonderful experience. I found them so open about their failings that it was jaw-dropping. One thing I must say is that they got rid of their maritime patrol capability in 2005.

Professor Lindley-French: I was coming to that.

Q21 Mrs Moon: I said to them, "Do you regret doing that? How stupid a decision was it?". They replied, "An outrageously stupid decision". I have yet to hear anybody in the MOD be that honest.

Professor Lindley-French: I would add that on Joint Warrior last week I was sitting on HMS Bulwark. In front of me was the exercise, and it had "MPA: paper". I asked, "In reality you don’t have an MPA, so what does that mean?". "The threat is much higher".

Professor Hennessy: That is maritime patrol aircraft?

Professor Lindley-French: Yes. We have to plug that gap very quickly.

Chair: That was at the top of our demand list.

Major-General Melvin: This comes back to this point about strategic education and thinking. Institutionally-I have been on the inside as well and now I am looking from the outside-taking Madeleine Moon’s point, people do not understand that the ultimate loyalty is to challenge constructively, for your nation’s sake. It is a sad fact that quite a lot of internal lesson reports from the MOD on Iraq and Afghanistan will never see the light of day, because, internally, people have tried to challenge what has gone on. I believe that it is very important to challenge, and to try to open up some of that learning in the next SDSR. Otherwise, it is not that history will necessarily repeat itself, but rather we will be destined to keep on making similar mistakes again and again. I think that is an important point: we have to rebuild the institution and we need individuals who are prepared to challenge constructively within that institution.

Professor Hennessy: It is very difficult to get officials, in uniform and out, in the Crown service to speak truth unto power. The only reason we have our tradition of Crown service is to enable that to happen. I am getting very preachy today, but I think it is the first-order duty of people to speak truth unto power. Even if in some cases you have to do it in private because of the nature of it, you have to encourage that. You do not hear a lot of those sounds any more across Whitehall, I regret to say.

Q22 Chair: It is now 11.46, and in order to get on to your final lessons I am going to ask my question. However, since you have given us homework, I would like to give you homework. Would you each please write to me about this: "Nuclear deterrence: does it work any more?" It seems to me that if what you are defending against is a ballistic missile from another state, it is easy to know against whom you are retaliating. If instead what you are defending against is a nuclear bomb, clandestinely put in a container, sailed around the world and ending up in Southampton, which explodes, against whom do you retaliate? And if you do not know against whom you are retaliating, does deterrence as such work any more? That is your homework, and it will be marked. Now, please would you give us your final suggestions as to what we as a Committee can do to best help this SDSR?

Professor Hennessy: Just a few quick thoughts. Perhaps fairly soon you could produce half a dozen tests that you will apply to the process that is under way to test its quality as it goes along. What are the six Defence Committee tests that you will apply to test not only the final product, but also across the piece, all the Departments and agencies that are feeding into it? Above all, you might want to quote Carl Sagan, the great cosmologist, to them. He talked about human beings having a terrible tendency to mistake hopes for facts.

I will not go through them now, but I applied my own tests to the previous 11 defence reviews retrospectively in distilling the frenzy. One of the ways I did it was to look at the absolute musts, the indispensables, and ask what is the defence of the realm or the core of it, come hell or high water and whatever the rest of the world is doing. I went right through to the other end, where it is a case of "Wouldn’t it be nice to do it, if we had the people, the kit and the money?". That was the way I approached it. If fairly soon the Defence Committee had half a dozen tests that everyone was aware of, and you stuck to that, I think it might help raise the level of the game that we were talking about earlier. I certainly hope so.

Q23 Chair: All right. My next piece of homework for you is to write out those half a dozen tests. Thank you. Professor Lindley-French?

Professor Lindley-French: Chairman, I would invite the Committee first of all to stop the many stupid contradictions at the heart of defence in this country. Last week, I was on Joint Warrior with Dutch politicians, and you had not been invited apparently-I find that very bizarre indeed. You need to be much higher profile at big defence events.

Secondly, you are not hard enough on the forces themselves. The Joint Forces Command is a start, but we need to go much deeper into jointness, and you need to ensure that the forces do so-tradition is important to a point, but we are going to have to change the way in which the military does business radically in the next decade or so. At the same time, we recognise that we have to rely more on our people, and yet we make it harder for them to stay by changing tax and pension laws, so that they cannot stay beyond the age of 40 because they will be priced out of the civilian job market or too old. In a sense, Defence cannot have it both ways: you cannot demand that harmony rules are set at, say, RN standards of 220 days or so a year, and then make it hard for experienced people to stay because the tax and pension changes in their contracts mean that they leave in large numbers. To me, that is a stupid contradiction. Finally, invest in new strategic relationships: France is a strategic partner; the US is changing, but we need to reinvest in that relationship too; and to look for new partners, the likes of Australia and others worldwide with whom we have now worked over the past 10 years in Afghanistan.

My final statement is that of Professor Paul Cornish, who said that all strategy must be purposive. I believe that this strategy review must be strategic and must have purpose; it simply cannot be another spreadsheet.

Major-General Melvin: I think we would do the whole of this Government a huge service if the Committee were able to set out some of the language, grammar and syntax of the new review. To pick up the points made by other members of the panel, the Committee should set out a framework of analysis, neatly under the acronym of TADS: Threats; our Allies; across Departments; within the Services, and the people enmeshed in our Society. Unless we address those five interlocking circles of analysis, we will not produce an appropriate framework for any analysis of security, let alone defence. I would also come back to my earlier points, that we cannot expect to do strategic estimation without strategic education and strategic learning. The points made today about the need to learn and challenge are absolutely fundamental, otherwise we will be destined to repeat the mistakes of the previous National Security Strategy and the SDSR.

Chair: Thank you, all of you, enormously, for one of the most fascinating evidence sessions that I have ever been involved in. We were looking forward to it, and we were right to.

Before the Committee rises, we will go into private session to discuss this for a few moments.