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Baroness Park of Monmouth: My Lords, I ought to explain that I said that our military assets are common to the NATO tasks, the ESDP tasks and the UN tasks. I do not think that I said anything about a common money pot. I should be delighted to have a common money pot, but I did not say that.
Lord Lea of Crondall: My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness for her clarification. I must not have a dialogue with her, but I should like to know about the doctrine of one set of assets being committed to NATO and it not being permissible to say that those assets can simultaneously be used for ERRF without double counting—I hope that that is not paraphrasing. Does not that doctrine apply equally to the United States? The Pentagon does that all the time. It has assets that can be NATO assets and can be other assets. I do not see why we should not use the same doctrine as the Pentagon.
My concluding point on enlargement concerns the important section of the report on Turkey, which relates to resources as well. I comment partly in the light of a parliamentary visit to Ankara that I participated in a couple of weeks ago. Turkey is of immense strategic importance, but of equally great importance as a relatively successful secular society with an Islamic tradition. From the Balkans to Afghanistan, the relevance and role of the Turks is unquestionable and I trust that there will be some progress on the matters that have been referred to. Am I not right that the issue concerning Turkey is no longer about ESDP but the fact that the Greeks tend to overplay their hand in the Council of Ministers on these matters? It would be a good idea if the EU could progress with its discussions with Turkey not only on this matter but eventually towards EU membership. I regret the statement made in London last week by Mr Stoiber, a candidate for Chancellor of Germany, who seemed to question whether Turkey was qualified on more general grounds to be a member of the EU.
9.13 p.m.
Earl Attlee: My Lords, I begin by reminding the House that I have a peripheral interest in the topic. I also thank my noble friend Lord Jopling for introducing this debate and his chairmanship of the committee. The noble Lord, Lord Lea of Crondall, talked about military relations with France. He may be interested to hear that my former TA battalion is spending its annual camp in France this summer.
Many noble Lords have raised the issue of inadequate EU defence expenditure. In the Cold War, we met almost all technical threats. We could afford to do so because we had a superior economy. Now, of course, thankfully, there is no direct threat to our territorial integrity. So we must now decide how much we can afford to spend and then live within that budget. Unfortunately, we are trying to do just a little
bit more, and that causes all the pain. Additionally, we have the 3 per cent year-on-year cost savings on top of the excellent Strategic Defence Review.The noble Lord, Lord Watson, quite properly compared French and UK defence expenditure. He was absolutely correct in that. However, in NATO and the EU, only French and United States defence expenditure are comparable with that of the UK. I am not convinced that we in the UK should increase our defence expenditure. I believe that we already spend more than our fair share. I also believe that the SDR is the answer to our defence requirements; the plan just needs to be properly funded. The report also reminds us that US defence expenditure is nearly twice that of the EU states put together. Worse than that, however, as many noble Lords have remarked, is the fact that EU nations' capability is generally pathetic compared with that of the US.
What is the reason for that? As the noble Lord, Lord Harrison, observed, we waste money and resources. We duplicate research and designs. We have, for example, the Leclerc main battle tank, the Leopard main battle tank and the Challenger main battle tank. We also duplicate capability and favour indigenous manufacturers. The noble Lord, Lord Williams of Elvel, mentioned the problem of interoperability, a problem that has been around a long time, even in NATO days. Each country tends, for example, to develop and manufacture its own range of logistics vehicles.
In the NATO context, however, the UK Government are showing the way by buying the Oshkosh tank transporter, which is built in the US. The noble Baroness, Lady Symons, will have had a great part to play in that. I think that she is very courageous, and that it is the right way of going. The US is building 1,000 of the vehicles, and we want slightly fewer than 100. What is the point of developing our own tank transporter when the Americans are themselves building 1,000 of them? We shall also gain the benefit of their logistic tail, without having to create one for a very specialised piece of equipment.
Anything we do in the EU must complement and not duplicate NATO and US efforts. The report recognises the deficiencies in strategic heavy airlift. Currently, the UK cannot airlift a Warrior armoured infantry fighting vehicle except by means of the C-17. The noble Lord, Lord Gilbert, in his powerful and significant speech, talked about strategic heavy lift and mentioned the limit of 25,000 kilos over 3,000 miles for an A-400M. Of course, 25,000 kilos is about the weight of a Warrior. However, the NATO inventory already has a strategic heavy airlift—the C-17. They are in service with the RAF, as the noble Lord, Lord Gilbert, has told us, and the RAF loves them. The noble Lord described the C-17's utility, and the noble Baroness, Lady Symons, is now vigorously nodding in relation to the point.
The C-17 is much bigger than a C-130. Indeed, the loading ramp on a C-17 will carry the entire load of a C-130. The two aircraft also have a similar runway requirement. We can be sure that the Boeing Aircraft
Company spent an awful lot of money developing the C-17. The EU is to repeat this development programme. As noble Lords are aware, the Airbus company is to develop and build about 190 A-400M aircraft. However, as the noble Lord, Lord Gilbert, pointed out, we shall also have to develop within the EU a new turboprop engine, because none exists in the EU. We could probably get one from the US. However, is not developing a turboprop engine for just 200 aircraft a rather high-risk project? Will the Minister say whether she is confident that the engine can be manufactured within Europe?The UK has one of the widest ranges of overseas operations, and yet our staff determine that we need only 25 A-400M. The French, however, say that they need 75; the Germans say about 74, but their Parliament is very wobbly to say the least; and smaller countries are having two or three each. I understand that the cost of an A-400M is supposed to be about 80 million dollars and the cost of a C-17 about 200 million dollars. I stand to be corrected. For a variety of reasons, I am not absolutely sure about the figures. I believe that those are ball park figures. Surely, the Boeing Aircraft Company would offer the EU a very competitive price on their C-17 project in order to capture the market. Of course, the Boeing Aircraft Company will have covered all its development costs, which will be fully amortised on the US spend.
I confess that I am not an expert in aviation. I am more experienced in land-based logistics. If I had to buy a fleet of trucks and had a choice between Mercedes, offering me a vehicle that was in service, and some other manufacturer who said that he had a vehicle on paper, which he could develop for half the price, but that he did not have an engine for it, I would be a wincy bit suspicious. Does the Boeing Aircraft Company know something that we do not know? But why does the EU need about 190 of these large aircraft at a total cost of about 16 billion dollars? I hope that that is not just a numerical figure that would cover the development costs.
The noble Lord, Lord Gilbert, referred to the utility of the strategic airlift, particularly the C-17. If we in the EU went down the C-17 route, the in-service date for a capability would be mid-2004, rather than, as the noble Lord, Lord Bach, told me in a Written Answer, "around the end of the decade" for the A-400M.
I would be rather more convinced about the ESDP itself if it had, say, 50 C-17s in a European strategic airlift organisation, based in mainland EU. The cost would be only about 10 billion dollars, compared with 16 billion dollars, because we would not be buying so many aircraft to cover the development costs. The utilisation of those aircraft would be much higher, rather more like an airline utilisation rate than an air force utilisation rate, and what operation would require more than 50 C-17s to support it?
The noble and gallant Lord, Lord Inge, referred to an operation capability gap if an EU state decided not to take part. But that would not be a problem for a European strategic airlift organisation, since the
ESDP organisation would rely only on a few personnel from each country. It would not stop the ESDP having that strategic airlift capability. I believe that if we went down the C-17 route, we could quickly tick off another capability shortfall. Incidentally, in case any noble Lord is worried, I have never knowingly been briefed by Boeing on the C-17 or the A-400M.The noble Lord, Lord Williams, also mentioned possible contributions from Russia. If 50 C-17s were not enough to support an operation, the Antonov AN124 is a very large transport aircraft, bigger than a C-17, and if we had a relationship with the Russians on heavy airlift, that could be quite fruitful for them as well.
In conclusion, I believe that the A-400M is being built for all the wrong reasons. It duplicates and wastes defence expenditure and effort, and ultimately it will cost at least as much as the C-17. I am sure that the Minister, as Minister of State for Defence and Procurement, was heavily involved in this project, and, as she is double-hatted—FCO and DTI—I suspect that she still has a finger in the pie.
It is possible for our Government to stop the project at this point. However, I do not believe that they will, because it would damage their EU credibility.
9.24 p.m.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire: My Lords, I was a member of the committee when it produced this valuable report. I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. We have had an interesting and wide-ranging debate this evening, with a great deal of talk about the A-400 and the C-l7. If we really need some heavy-lift capability quickly, we should do what the Germans did to get their forces to Afghanistan; namely, hire an Antonov. Re-engined Antonovs could be made available much more quickly, but there are all sorts of political inhibitions about all of these procurement issues.
When the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Inge, referred to "Lord Williams of Evil", I regretted that he did not go all the way and refer to the noble Lord as "Lord Axis of Evil", which would have been better. All these phrases trip so readily off the tongue, very often in slightly misleading ways, so that we are never quite sure which axis of evil we are talking about; indeed, noble Lords may have seen the wonderful American e-mail that referred to other available axes such as the, "axis of the not terribly evil, but not very good", and so on.
The subject of our debate is extremely significant. The danger for the British Government, as well as for other European governments, that we risk missing the headline goals to which the European governments committed themselves in December 1999 to meet by January 2003, is real. There is no questioning the fact that the United States Government and the US media will provide some very dispeptic comment on a severe failure to miss that goal. There is a remarkable lack of any sense of urgency across the European Union on the issue, which I much regret.
I therefore believe this report and this committee to be significant. There is a range of significant and important subjects for this sub-committee to address. The common foreign and security policy is now one of the most active areas of European co-operation. European Union governments are co-operating on a whole range of issues, more or less effectively—for example, Russia, Turkey, Africa, Cyprus, and the Middle East.
The question of parliamentary accountability was raised by a number of noble Lords. One problem we face is that there are few available alternatives to national parliamentary scrutiny. The WEU Assembly is not really very appropriate. Some sort of joint committee between the European Parliament and national parliaments may take that one step forward, but all noble Lords who have been involved in COSAC (the Conference of European Affairs Committees) may echo what one noble Lord said to me just the other day, after having just returned from a COSAC meeting, "It was awful". Clearly, for the time being, we need to rely on our own national parliamentary scrutiny committees, working as far as we can with others, because that is the best that we have.
However, there is a limited capability for parliaments to focus public debate in this area, unless governments also stimulate such debate. I much regret that the British Government, who were the prime mover in the San Malo initiative, have since then failed to maintain the lead that they then took. My party actively welcomed the San Malo initiative. We regret that the British Government—our Prime Minister, our Secretary of State for Defence and our Foreign Secretary—have not maintained the pressure on our partners and allies across the Channel to ensure that they do fulfil the promises that they made.
Britain is the obvious country to lead in this respect. As several noble Lords have observed, there is an underlying American suspicion of French motives. Britain sees itself as maintaining the bridge between the United States and Western Europe. There is an obvious British approach that one could adopt here. Tony Blair launched the Lisbon process on economic co-ordination, which by publishing economic statistics was to be a form of ensuring that we bench-mark each other's performance; that we each follow best practice; and that we name and shame those who fail to follow best practice. It seems to me that that is the approach that the British Government should be taking here.
As the noble Lord, Lord Bowness, observed, it is very difficult to obtain proper figures on which countries contributed what to the conflicts in Kosovo, in Bosnia or in Afghanistan. The figures that I have on Afghanistan are slightly different from those obtained by the noble Lord, Lord Bowness. I have 13 member states contributing with at least a few troops, and three candidate countries. However, I am sure that that is not very different. Incidentally, when looking at the Afghanistan figures, the Danes come out remarkably well—a large contingent of special forces as well as a contingent in ISAF. It is the Belgians, who most wanted to declare that ESDP was operational, and the Italians, the Spanish and the Portuguese who are the
laggards in that respect. I should love to hear a Minister of the British Government remark to Mr Berlusconi that there is no such thing as a free dinner. If you want to be invited to a dinner at No. 10 to talk seriously about European defence, you are supposed to have a budget and a level of military effectiveness which comprise a ticket for entry.I should like to see the British Government publish the relevant figures as far as possible. Then we shall be able to see who is making most progress. In some areas there is clearly considerable progress being made. Some noble Lords may have seen the report of the discussion between Rudolph Scharping and senior German officers about overstretch within the German armed forces now that they have over 12,000 troops outside the country. That is a radical change and a radical improvement. It suggests that at least in some members of the European Union matters are moving fast. Of course, as a number of noble Lords have said, the shortfall arises in equipment, above all in the kit which gets the troops to their destination, the weapons systems needed to ensure superiority and the communications networks to hold the forces together.
A number of noble Lords have mentioned transatlantic relations and implications for transatlantic relations. I did not entirely recognise the picture which some noble Lords gave of the current state of transatlantic relations. First, we have to recognise the long-term trends. American priorities are now, in foreign policy and military terms, outside Europe. It is much more important to be in Central Command than in SHAPE. Many noble Lords who have read Wesley Clark's book or have heard him talk will understand that when he was stationed in Brussels at SHAPE he felt himself to be very much outside the Pentagon loop. The noble Lord, Lord Owen, referred to the junior officers whom it is important for us to cultivate. There are, however, many fewer of them in Europe than there were 10 years ago. That is part of our problem in maintaining links with the US armed forces.
NATO has become much less popular in the Pentagon partly because of the latter's perceptions of what happened in Kosovo, which are often rather different from those of British officers who were involved, but also because of the sense that NATO stands for consultation whereas coalitions of the willing are American led. We should all be a little concerned about the current mood in Washington towards unilateralism and, indeed, about the current mood of anti-Europeanism which one sees in the American media, which we also need to be actively concerned to argue against. I follow what the noble Lord, Lord Lea of Crondall, said about the importance of approaching the transatlantic relationship as an active dialogue, in which we have to make our case a great deal more effectively. But we should not assume that we have to follow the current American administration wherever it may lead us, even necessarily into Iraq.
The case for an increase in defence spending has to be made. It is not easy to make it across Europe to the European public. I note that the British Conservative
Party does not at the moment propose an increase in British defence spending. That shows how difficult it is to make a very difficult case. In 1990-91, General Naumann was particularly active in that regard because he felt—as I recall him saying on one occasion—that unless he defined a new role for the German armed forces their budget would fall entirely through the floor. I remember that a senior Belgian diplomat said some years later that the reason the Belgians wanted to be included in any collaborative operation that was going was that otherwise they could not justify spending money on defence when no one threatened Belgium except through 10 other countries on the way.The rationale for an increase in European defence spending has not yet been made. If a greater defence effort were just to contribute to US defined operations, the incentives would not be strong. There is no direct threat to the European region. The question is: what contribution should European governments make separately or collectively to the indirect threats from outside Europe? Questions of state collapse are involved. We have already been engaged in that regard in south-eastern Europe, but what about beyond, in Africa or the Caucasus? The Americans have adopted a role in Georgia and Armenia, but perhaps the European states should be more actively involved in those regions. What long-term role is there in military terms for European governments in Asia and, most sensitively of all, the Middle East? What role is possible for European governments in the Middle East, given that the United States wishes to define western policy towards the Middle East, and European governments—and, even more, European publics—are not entirely happy with that?
We must recognise that there are real tensions in transatlantic relations. They concern the preference for air power among the American forces as opposed to occupying the ground; the use of weapons for intervention and an exit strategy as opposed to the British approach, which involves staying the course and being involved in nation-building; and the preference for military power as opposed to financial assistance. In an interesting article in the Washington Post last week, Fred Bergsten discussed the need for the United States to understand that American burden-sharing also required the United States to spend more on development assistance and state reconstruction. The United States currently spends one-third of what the European Union spends, and most of its development assistance goes to strategic countries, such as Israel, Egypt and Turkey.
We need a European rationale and a transatlantic dialogue, which may have to be vigorous at times. Clearly, considerable improvements are needed. The British Government should suggest—no one else will do so—that a floor must be put under European defence spending and that pressure must be brought to bear on those who are lowest to begin to raise their spending from that floor.
However, given that there is no public support for much of an increase in defence spending, we must get greater effectiveness through closer integration. That
is what Air Marshal Sir Timothy Garden and Sir Michael Alexander have been powerfully arguing. We therefore need shared training, shared bases and new initiatives on support and joint forces. Again, Her Majesty's Government could be doing a great deal more in that regard and they could be advancing many more initiatives. For example, I refer to integrating the logistical chain for expeditionary forces of the sort that we now have in Afghanistan; to shared facilities for air-to-air refuelling, on which the British Government are currently going it alone; and to the Police Action Plan—I hope that the sub-committee will turn its attention to that and I point out that the British Government have a useful record in terms of the number of police whom we have been able to second to the forces, although we have some way to go.The underlying question is: what do we want those forces for? What sort of threats do we believe we are facing? The noble Lord, Lord Judd, was almost the only noble Lord who suggested that the wider framework is the one that counts. I suggest that, above all, we need the force for the higher level Petersberg tasks. We need to look at Africa and some parts of Asia, where weak states are threatened with collapse. Where we have relevant skills, we need to help to prevent state collapse and to begin to rebuild. That also means that we should campaign much more actively against the sale of arms to those regions. The initiative, "Anything but arms", was an excellent way forward. Part of what is mistaken about the current American thrust towards greater high technology is that American arms companies also want to sell those weapons abroad. The last thing that one should currently wish to do is to encourage the proliferation of advanced western weapons in unstable regions of the world, although they are the regions that want to buy them.
The European security and defence policy was above all a British initiative. Our interests and our prestige are at stake. The impact on transatlantic relations of a failure to meet the headline goals next year will be severe. If Her Majesty's Government do not take the lead in reminding our continental partners of how important this issue is, who will?
9.39 p.m.
Lord Howell of Guildford: My Lords, like many others in this debate, I congratulate the sub-committee on producing an excellent and stimulating report under the skilled chairmanship of my noble friend Lord Jopling. Indeed, I am proud that I had a passing association with the earlier work of this very well informed and expert committee.
Like the noble Lord, Lord Owen, I particularly welcome the reference to, and emphasis on, scrutiny by, and accountability to, national Parliaments and the need for that to be toughened not only in the area of defence decisions but in other decisions as well. It seems to me that the report is itself an example of the need to bring back to national Parliaments the thinking behind intergovernmental decisions—indeed, of all the decisions—taken in the name of the
European Union. I believe that that is the right way to go. National Parliaments are the sole source of legitimacy for the Union and its structures, and I hope that we hear no more nonsense about remote second Chambers. Indeed, the debate in your Lordships' House should have put paid to that. Another Select Committee demonstrated all the fallacies and weaknesses of such an idea.For me, European security and defence policy is more of a journey than a clear policy. It has been, and continues to be, a zigzag journey at that, with no very clear destination. If there were clear destinations before 11th September last, they certainly are not clear now. At a very high-powered conference at Chatham House last autumn, where all the leading players in the European defence scene spoke or were present, I was struck by the important conclusion that was reached. They said:
- "The EU seems at present to lack an overall strategic concept".
- "The number of senior European military appointments made recently give rise to possible confusions over unity of command".
Perhaps I may make it absolutely clear that, from this side, we have always supported a stronger European wing, branch or end of NATO. Indeed, the NATO initiative was called a "European strategic defence initiative"—ESDI. We have always supported that. As the noble Lord, Lord Lea of Crondall, said in a moment of candour, from way back, when the Labour Party was singing a quite different tune, we were arguing for a very strong European pillar of NATO. We give full support, as we have done all along, to NATO's defence capability initiative, which is intended to do what everyone in this debate has said it should do. It should develop European defence in the six crucial areas of deployability and mobility, logistics, effective engagement, command and control, survivability and, perhaps above all, interoperability. Those things are necessary. We back them totally. There has never been any doubt about that except in the mouths of some of our critics. I should not like any doubt about that to be perpetuated in this debate.
But the real issues today are the questions of defence spending in Europe and how that will be raised to at least the levels of those of Britain and France, or something approximating that level, rather than limping along at the present, much lower levels. I see that the Government's reply says that the slide has stopped. I wonder whether it has. It would certainly be interesting to hear a little more support for that contention from the noble Baroness when she replies. Therefore, the first issue is defence spending in Europe and questions of cash and resources.
The second issue is the reform of NATO. It must be reformed in the new conditions that we face. But the question arises as to how it can be enlarged without weakening it, which is obviously a danger that concerns the Americans. I believe that we shall hear more from President Bush about that next week.
Above all, there is the question of further integration, not so much of the EU but of NATO, based on the type of trust to which the noble Lord, Lord Owen, referred and on a vastly expanded basis of so-called "soft security". That means, of course, the intelligence, communications and knowledge input which lies behind all modern warfare. That is the task: to create, as my noble friend Lady Park said, an integrated ESDP which supplements and reinforces the NATO system and in no way appears to weaken it or to go on a separate track. Those are the two tasks upon which all our energies should be focused.Against that background, what are we to make of the rapid reaction force, if that is what ESDP now means? People see it in different ways. I agree with the noble Lords, Lord Watson and Lord Harrison, who said that it is a modest affair; it is very modest indeed. At best it is modest; it will almost certainly take a long time properly to get on the road. As indicated by the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Inge, and by the report, that may take several years. That is at best. At worst, one could fairly and objectively say that it has already created and is creating a number of new problems which, possibly, we could have avoided if we had concentrated on the two major tasks I have mentioned.
It has caused many problems with Turkey being out of the EU but right at the heart of NATO, as instanced in paragraph 42 of the report in a telling series of comments. It could be argued that it has caused problems in Ireland, where the Nice Treaty was voted down in a referendum—largely, it appears, because it did not want to be involved in military arrangements which would involve the sullying of Ireland's neutrality. It has created a whole class of would-be insiders and outsiders. It leaves out Canada, which has hardly been mentioned in the debate. Imagine leaving out Canada, the country which came to save Europe at Vimy Ridge in the First World War and has played a central part in post-war security. Yet somehow we have to rearrange matters to ensure that Canada is not left out of this project. It has created a whole range of immature and bitter criticisms from the gentry, the grandees of Brussels. It has generated, as none of us can deny, a strong and continuing aroma of anti-Americanism.
General Ha gglund has been much quoted in this debate for his interesting comments. I do not agree with all he said. However, we must ask with him whether there is any sense in maintaining two parallel crisis management organisations. That is from the man who is, indeed, chairman of the EU Military Committee. The rapid reaction force—this modest affair—has certainly created new institutions, which have proliferated. We have a plethora of committees. We have the Political and Security Committee; the EU Military Committee; the EU military staff committee; and there are suggestions—not in the report—and references to the fact that others are calling for still more committees. There are many pledges and much rhetoric. However, there have been no new forces or capabilities brought forward as a result of all those efforts. Yet that is what Europe needs if we are to see a strong European pillar.
On the contrary, as noble Lords with far greater expertise than I have remarked, the technology gap with the United States grows wider all the time because of the fantastic coincidence of a whole range of new technologies, available world-wide but used in the United States, being brought together to carry forward concepts of weaponry and warfare to entirely new and unfamiliar levels. That has left critical shortfalls which the much quoted, forthright and sensible General Naumann tells the committee at paragraph 56 are not being addressed and are unlikely to be addressed. They will remain yawning wide. One cannot exclude from that the state of the United Kingdom's Armed Forces, with their underequipment and overstretch. As my noble friends Lord Vivian and Lord Attlee and the noble Lord, Lord Gilbert, have pointed out, there are serious deficiencies. So we are not immune in that regard either.
Much stronger defences are needed in order to build up that NATO pillar and to build up our homeland defence in the new conditions where—here I disagree with some noble Lords—there is a direct territorial threat to this nation and to all European land masses. Together with these thoughts is the St Malo commitment—which I still regret as the noble Lord forecast I would—by the Government which was for,
- "a capacity for autonomous action",
Everyone knows that all serious military tasks from now on—indeed from 9/11 onwards—will be increasingly complex and linked through global connections with globalised terrorism. The terrorists networks do not say, "Well, that is someone else's war; we shall not turn up there"; they are to be found in the midst of Chechnya, right down in Rwanda, and everywhere where evil, civil war or killing is at work. The infection of globalised terrorism will be there and will need to be addressed by the same kind of equipment and forces. One cannot go around with a little pair of scissors cutting out the minor tasks and saying, "We will look after those ones and someone else will deal with the big stuff". That is a totally wrong approach.
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