Stuart Anderson

It is an honour to follow the hon. Member for North Durham (Luke Akehurst). He speaks with passion on defence, and he clearly wants to increase our defence presence. I have listened to the debate and I am sounding an alarm. I grew up in a military family; both my parents were in the military. I left school and joined the military, and my brother served in the military. I spent my entire career in security and defence, and since coming to Parliament, everything I have done, outside traditional constituency engagements, is about backing security and defence. I am delighted to be graduating next month from the Royal College of Defence Studies. It has been brilliant to spend a year immersed in the best strategic command course in the world. I reiterate the point made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith): we are in a very serious situation, but rhetoric, or party political lines, are overtaking that, and we are missing the fact that we need to rearm to face the current situation. In 2024-25, there were 54 to 55 conflicts around the world—those figures might be adjusted, depending on the source. That is the largest number of conflicts in any one year since the second world war. If we believe that we can stop a major conflict, why can we not stop minor conflicts? There is complete instability, and the whole geopolitical situation has changed. Discussions that we are having now would have seemed impossible—beyond the realms of fantasy—five or even three years ago. We need to put that in perspective and really think about it. When Government Members start to talk about “14 years of hollowed-out defence”, they make an illiterate defence argument. They are taking a moment in time and comparing peace with war. We need to look at the situation over the past 100 years and learn from history. At the end of the second world war, Clement Attlee demobilised the military, because that was the right thing to do, as we did not need 5 million soldiers. Similarly, at the fall of the Berlin wall, the majority of the world de-armed and reduced the scale of their defence spending. However, the situation has changed. In 2022, defence spending was 2.22% of GDP, according to figures from the Office for National Statistics, not 2.1% as the hon. Member for North Durham said. There is no denying that the whole world has changed since 2014, or even since 2022, and we are in the most volatile situation. The debate is about whether we should measure from the end of the cold war or the end of the second world war. I firmly believe that we should measure from the end of the second world war. I believe that we will see a global conflict in the coming years, but we are not prepared to defend our nation. I believe that, at this stage, we cannot meet our article 3 NATO commitment to defend the nation for the period of time expected. Everybody talks about article 5, but there are three things that every Defence Minister and politician must look at when we speak about defence: readiness, lethality and survivability. Everything we must do is there. We talk about numbers, but are we funding the readiness of our armed forces? Are they as lethal as they can be? Do they have the ability to survive any conflict? We are not looking at the expeditionary side of warfare that we have seen in the middle east in recent years; we are looking at how we fit on the world stage, and how we prepare for a global conflict, while hoping that it never happens. We have to look at those three areas, but there is always a debate. Are we are ready enough? Should we spend more money on lethality, or should we look at survivability? The most important of those areas is readiness, but I am not saying that the other areas are not important. We have to be ready. If we are not, we cannot go to war. In 1999, after I got married—I celebrated my 27th wedding anniversary on Friday—I said to my wife, “See you in six months,” and deployed straight to Kosovo. When we arrived in theatre, there were no Army barracks. We found derelict, flea-ridden accommodation—blokes were covered in flea bites—and we moved into houses that had been abandoned, as people were still being ethnically cleansed. We did not have the kit, but we were about the most lethal bunch of soldiers you could see. We adapted. The readiness came from what Field Marshal Slim described in the Burma conflict as spiritual morale. You can take equipment away from soldiers and break everything, but if they have the spiritual morale to fight, they can get through everything. We are burning out that morale in the military over time, bit by bit. Let me go back to when I was on the Defence Committee, from 2020 to the middle of 2022. My name is on many reports that absolutely destroyed the Government of the time. That gave me many difficult conversations with the Whips, but calling out the Government was the right thing to do, because we were not able to procure equipment. We were not ready and able to prepare for the world as it was at the time. The Chief of the Defence Staff has recently said that we will have to cut operational services and training capability. Those are big issues, but he has also touched on something that most people do not mention: the resource spending. We have resource departmental expenditure limit spending and capital departmental expenditure limit spending. CDEL buys the ships, tanks, planes and big items, but they have to be run, and we have to pay our troops, so we have to look at the resources around that. Resource is about 62% of defence spending at the moment, but it is nowhere near enough—the balance is off. We are looking at big projects. It is great to be looking at issues such as how we fund new submarines and the Type 83, but will the global combat air programme be crewed or uncrewed? That is another debate; I have some good views on that that I would love to share another time. At the moment, the debate is about what war we are preparing to fight. The hon. Member for Birmingham Selly Oak (Al Carns) has mentioned that the DIP did not fund enough preparation for wars that we may be fighting in the future. It is always hard to predict the future of warfare. It is easy to take lessons from Ukraine, and just think that that is what warfare will be, and while we should take those lessons, we need adapt and prepare, moving forward. My hon. Friend the Member for Spelthorne (Lincoln Jopp) mentioned the 18 defence primes. On the scalability of technology, I believe a disruptive model is coming, or is needed, in the defence industry. Two weeks ago, I was delighted to be at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with NATO, discussing nanotechnology—even though I left school as a lad with no GCSEs, and joined the armed forces as a rifleman. Time has moved on.