Future Capability of the Armed Forces

My Lords, I am grateful to all noble Lords who have signed up to this debate. I am grateful that your Lordships are able to debate the United Kingdom Armed Forces’ capability shortly after the publication of the defence investment plan. I look forward to all contributions, not least that of the Minister and the valedictory speech from the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Southwark. I declare an interest as a serving officer in the Army Reserve. Let us confront a single stark reality: the United Kingdom remains the third-largest defence spender in NATO, surpassed only by the United States and Germany. Yet NATO’s own internal assessments rank us 31st out of 32 members in delivering on capability targets, with only Iceland, which has no armed forces at all, sitting below us. This is the critical gap I intend to scrutinise—not the disparity between our forces and our adversaries, real though that is, but the profound disconnect between the funds we invest and the capabilities we can deploy. This is the gulf between the promise and the product. Let me say plainly what this debate is not. It is not a party-political point. I belong to the party that was in government for 14 years and, for much of that time, we did not spend enough on defence. Many of us said so then, and I say it again now. I have no interest in a quarrel about who cut what a decade ago, or who is pledging what for 2035. The two great alibis of defence policy are the distant past and the distant future, and both are used to dodge the only question that matters: what are we spending now, and what will we feel tomorrow in the years in which we might have to fight? Those years are not theoretical. Admiral Sir Keith Blount, who stepped down only this year as NATO’s Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe, DSACEUR, warned a fortnight ago on the “The General & The Journalist” podcast from the Times that Britain now risks losing influence within the alliance if it fails to deliver what it has promised. When our most senior recent commander at NATO says that in public, the Government should listen. I give credit where the Motion invites it, on future capability. The strategic defence review was serious work, and I support its direction of travel. The best decision in last month’s defence investment plan is the one that looks furthest ahead—more than £5 billion for drones and autonomous systems, the largest such investment we have ever made. That is the right instinct. It is the lesson of Ukraine, where innovation cycles are measured in weeks. It is, in the Government’s own phrase, investing for “the next war, not the last one”. My concern is not the direction of travel; it is that £5 billion is not enough and that, when you open it up, the wider plan does not bear weight. Consider the headline of £298 billion over four years. It is a number designed to end an argument. But only around £15 billion is new money over last year’s settlement, and the Defence Secretary has acknowledged that most of that £15 billion is not for new equipment at all but for day-to-day running costs—keeping the ships and aircraft we already own available and our people trained. That is necessary, but it is not rearmament. It is paying to run the force we have and calling it the force we need. Is even that money real? Of that £15 billion, only around £10 billion is funded. The rest, some £4.7 billion, waits on a Budget that has not yet happened. That is not a funded plan; it is an IOU. The plan leaves the years from 2030 to 2035 all but blank, reaches 2.7% of GDP in 2027 and then flatlines. It funds neither the 3% promised for the next Parliament nor the 3.5% signed up to for 2035. Set against the threat that the Government’s own advisers place before 2028, this is a plan matched not to the danger but to the Treasury’s accountants. My disagreement with the review centres on its approach to personnel. The proposal to expand our reserves by a mere 20%—even then, only when financial conditions permit—is far too cautious. Currently, we field just 30,000 trained reservists compared to 137,000 regulars, rendering our Reserve Forces only a fifth of the size of our regular military. In contrast, Finland, directly confronting the Russian threat, maintains a formidable trained reserve many times the strength of its modest regular army. My goal is far bolder: we must aim for a trained reserve that is not a fraction of our regular forces but three times their size. Achieving this will require a generational pivot, but it offers the only cost-effective way to restore the strategic depth this nation has neglected for far too long. Numbers, though, are the easy part. I would not have the House think I am merely asking for a longer list of names. A reservist without equipment, training days and a drill hall to train in is not a capability, and here our record is dismal. The Public Accounts Committee found that the volunteer estate, the reserve centres on which all this depends, is in what the department calls “managed decline”. The reserve estate optimisation programme, REOP, has all but stopped. Tranche 1 was delivered, but the funding bid for tranche 2 failed and had to be rebid, and the department has still not secured funding for the phases beyond. Yet the department’s own evidence to that committee was that this estate is the critical enabler of the very reserve growth the review promises. We have written the ambition and declined to pay for the foundations beneath it. This is the habit I most want the Minister to break. When budgets tighten, the reserve is always the first to be raided because it is dispersed and part-time and, sadly, too many decisions affecting it are taken by regulars. If the reserve is genuinely part of the first echelon, as the review implies, because our regular forces are so small, then it cannot also be the balancing item. You cannot ask a formation to be ready to mobilise while treating its training, equipment and accommodation as discretionary spending. This matters most for the mission closest to home. Homeland defence and national resilience are not some additional burden for the reserve. They are its natural work. It is the reserve that is local, dispersed and embedded in every county. These are the people who would guard critical national infrastructure or reinforce the response to a flood, a cyber attack or an act of sabotage, drawing on their skills and experience from their civilian life. Every reserve centre we allow quietly to decay is a node of national resilience dismantled, and a link severed between the Armed Forces and the communities who must ultimately sustain them. If we are serious about resilience, the drill hall is not an overhead; it is infrastructure. I add one further warning on the industrial base. Small and medium firms build the drones this plan celebrates. They are the least able to survive a Government who cannot make up their mind, and techUK warns that the delay to the publication of the defence investment plan has already forced firms in the supply chain to issue redundancy notices. You cannot switch an industrial base off and on. Once the engineers are gone, they are gone, and our allies see all this. The Public Accounts Committee has warned that the delay has damaged our credibility with the very partners the review tells us to put first. “NATO first” is good and the right doctrine, shared across this House, and I am delighted to see the noble Lord, Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, in his place. However, a nation ranked 31st out of 32 on NATO’s own scorecard is practising “NATO first” in the press release and “NATO last” in the plan. I have three questions for the Minister. First, when will the £4.7 billion of unfunded commitment be confirmed and, until it is, why should the House treat this as a funded plan? Secondly, will the Government raise their ambition on the reserves well beyond 20% and will they fund the volunteer estate and the training and equipment on which such growth depends? Thirdly, given that the sharpest risk is placed before 2028, what capability will reach the front line inside that window? I tabled this Motion not to embarrass the Government but because the distance between our words and our capability is now visible to our adversaries as well as our friends, and because the years in which that distance matters most are these ones, not some comfortable decade hence. We spend enough to stand third in the alliance. We should be able to field far more than 31st. The task is not to spend more in 2035. It is to spend well, spend diligently and spend now. I beg to move.

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Harlech, for securing this important debate. He speaks with great authority, particularly about the Reserve Forces. I agree with everything he said about that subject and congratulate him on his service. I speak to employers and employers’ organisations who are keen to support our reserves. I take this opportunity to once again talk up the role of the voluntary reserve. They give us a continually refreshing source of capability and long-term resilience. They are central to our Armed Forces’ present and future capability to defend and deter, and they need to be nurtured. Employers need support to shoulder their share of responsibility. I ask the Government once again to continue to encourage more employers to take on reservists. I look forward to progress reports on the SDR’s medium-term aim of seeing the active reserve expanded by 20%, although I acknowledge that the ambitions of the noble Lord, Lord Harlech, go beyond that. The subject of this debate raises huge questions about national priorities in an era of new external threats. Other speakers in this debate are far more qualified than I am to speak about matters of national security and war-fighting readiness, but I can comment on one essential component of national resilience: the role of the defence industry, which the noble Lord, Lord Harlech, already touched on. The future effectiveness of the UK’s Armed Forces depends in large measure on their access to platforms, munitions, cutting-edge skills and capabilities that match the challenge of modern warfare and deterrence. The SDR said that the defence industry must play an indispensable enabling role. It said that our Armed Forces needed to be underwritten by a thriving and resilient industry, ready to scale and innovate. As we meet today, we are falling short of this ambition. The SDR called for changes in procurement practices. It said that industry should be partners, not clients, with companies engaged early in processes and rewarded for productivity and risk-taking. The Industry and Regulators Committee is currently looking at this. The evidence the committee has heard so far chimes with what I have been told separately by defence companies, and by the people who work for them and their trade unions. Prime contractors have told me about their supply chain vulnerabilities. They have talked about problems in sustaining UK suppliers where they cannot provide predictability to smaller companies, and they are all too aware of MoD bureaucracy that stifles innovation and speed. This is fundamental to today’s debate. Down the chain of dependencies, the capability of the Armed Forces is tied to the strength of the defence industry’s sovereign supplier ecosystem. Safeguarding these small businesses is critical to national security and not a secondary consideration. The SDR asked the MoD to develop a support package for industrial partners and remove barriers to collaboration. I invite the Minister to tell the House what progress is being made towards this goal. In conclusion, I note with great joy today’s announcement of a new partnership with 35 universities to boost defence skills and research. I have met many graduates and apprentices in defence companies who tell me that their universities and schools did not encourage them to seek careers in the defence industry. I invite the Minister to take that back to colleagues.

My Lords, the most obvious and urgent thing to say about military capability is that we have nothing like enough of it, either now or as currently planned for the future. This must be addressed as a matter of urgency but, in the limited time available to us in this debate, I want to make three points about the nature of those capabilities. First, I warn against oversimplification when considering future force structures. Recent debate has focused on the need for much greater numbers of uncrewed and, in some cases, autonomous vehicles in all three environments—what are commonly but inaccurately termed drones. I agree with the general proposition, but such vehicles are not the solution to everything. Ukrainians have used them very successfully to make up for their relative shortage of front-line personnel, and we can certainly employ them to create more mass. They will be a key feature of the future force mix, but they will form part of the force structure, not the whole of it. It is crucial that we adopt transformational technologies, but we should not imagine that any one of them will solve all our problems. Secondly, whatever capabilities we have at the start of any high-intensity conflict, they will not be sufficient to sustain our effort through to victory. Some, perhaps much of them, will be destroyed in the early fighting and will have to be replaced. At the same time, technological developments and enemy initiatives will force us to adapt accordingly. It is worth remembering that many of the capabilities the Ukrainians are employing so successfully against Russia today did not exist four years ago. Therefore, we will need an agile, innovative and rapidly scalable industrial base that can support such an effort—not just traditional defence companies but the high technology sector more widely. This will require a substantial and steady stream of investment over time to underpin the necessary research and development and, importantly, to attract the necessary private sector investment. Finally, I warn against focusing solely on capital investment. Military capability requires not just the right equipment but the people who can operate it effectively in the most demanding and dangerous conditions. That means that both regulars and reserves need regular and rigorous training. Without it, we will be sending them into combat inadequately prepared for what they will face. This not only weakens our war-fighting effectiveness but exposes our people to unnecessarily high risk. This would be an act of criminal negligence. Our training requires not just equipment but the fuel, the spares and the other support necessary for its operation. This is paid for by resource funding, not capital. Such funding is under pressure and, despite some rebalancing in the investment plan, it remains insufficient. Our people are already inadequately trained for high-intensity conflict. In-year pressure on the defence budget means that this will get worse. I understand that the MoD can do little about the problem in the current financial year, but I ask the Minister to assure the House that the position will be transformed in future years. The Government simply cannot go on failing our people and the country more widely in this way. Most of what I have urged—I could have urged much more—comes down to funding. The settlement in the defence investment plan was inadequate and incoherent in the light of the commitment that the Government have rightly made to NATO. This failure endangers us all and it must be put right very quickly.

My Lords, it is a very great honour to follow the noble and gallant Lord. I find myself in no man’s land, squeezed between a former Chief of the Defence Staff and a valedictory Bishop, so I shall try to navigate as best I can through what could be dangerous territory. I particularly welcome back my noble friend Lord Harlech; it is very good to see him. He was sent to the scrapheap. The REME have got hold of him, reconditioned him and polished him up. He has come back to serve on these Benches and we will get a lot of usage from him over the coming years, of that I am certain. I draw attention—not only because I need to under the rules of the House but because it is appropriate to our deliberations this afternoon—to my involvement with BOKA, a company dedicated to security and defence, aerospace and space, sovereign resilience, AI and quantum. I chair the investment committee of that company, which is involved in many of the technologies that we have been discussing and will continue to discuss this afternoon. I listened carefully to what the noble and gallant Lord just said, and he is right. I suspect that many of the speeches this afternoon will dwell on similar topics to underscore the fact that there is a profound change in the economics of warfare. The demand from defence comes from changing defence patterns resulting from our most recent experiences in Ukraine and Iran—two very different military scenarios, but with some common themes. We are now witnessing a rapid pace of newly iterating technologies and attributable systems. These act as force multipliers to defence forces that are struggling with recruitment, and they assist in combating new threats in both conventional war-fighting and in the grey zone, such as the cyber domain. As such, defence procurement must be more focused on annualised budgeting with agile deployment and testing. It must rely more readily on partnering with private capital not only to share the burden of finance but to assist with the proper due diligence of new technologies in quick time. Further, the larger, exquisite systems will require dedicated sovereign funds for longer-term procurement cycles, but the number of items procured is likely to fall over the next decade. In conclusion, I remain unconvinced that we have properly addressed and adapted our procurement policy in a rapidly changing environment. We need to be smarter and quicker. Our Armed Forces need equipment now and simply cannot wait for long-term projects to be realised. The funding of this sea change, which is what is required, will require a change in Treasury thinking, without which none of the desired changes will be achievable. It also requires leadership from the new, as yet untested Prime Minister. Tackling the country’s economy and unsustainable welfare budget must be his priority, without which the Government will simply be unable to fund the spending on defence we need in order both to honour our international commitments and to ensure the safety of our own people.

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Harlech, for bringing this debate. Let me begin my valedictory address by making it clear that it is not my intention to advise His Majesty’s Government on the number of dreadnought battleships they should be laying down or what the future of the Blue Streak missile programme should be. I wish to address some wider issues that I believe are directly relevant to our future capability and which arise out of our current situation. Quoting from the Global Peace Index 2026, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Norwich reminded the House during a debate on the Armed Forces Bill on 6 July that “the world has continued its longstanding trajectory of deteriorating peacefulness”. It has always been my contention that, since the UK left the European Union, the costs of our security, diplomatic efforts and cultural reach will need to rise, since we no longer benefit from the partnership and pooled resources that the union provides. Instead, our defence spending has stagnated and NATO is in difficulty, with the United States now in unpredictable mode. We are planning to reduce the Diplomatic Service, and the BBC and other major cultural players continue to make cuts. I appreciate that, as we shall hear, a different trajectory is planned for UK defence. A good deal will be said about the changing nature of warfare in the light of the appalling assault on the territorial integrity of Ukraine by President Putin. However, the continued reduction in what we used to call manpower across all three services is worrying because, at the end of the day, fearful decisions need to be taken by human beings, and some situations should be addressed only by a human presence, not an AI-driven remote response. AI and drones are no substitute for physicality, presence and engagement. It may seem strange to hint at a moral dimension in a business which is never decorous or happy, but the basis of international humanitarian law in conduct of war finds its origin in the Christian doctrine of a just war with its tests of necessity, proportionality and restraint. The Geneva conventions, our more elaborate and contemporary responses, were themselves born of fearful conflict and barbarity, not wishful thinking. Yet increasingly, in conflicts such as in Sudan, in the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and, I so regret to say it, in the manner in which Israel has responded to the Hamas atrocities of 7 October 2023, international law is set aside for reasons of expediency, and with appalling results and much innocent suffering, not least in Gaza. That is why the other issues I alluded to, such as the size and effectiveness of our diplomatic service, matter, and why good quality journalism matters, including British journalism and British values in the form of the BBC, to help uphold international rules, because when these become degraded, people suffer, and we all become less safe. Finally, I wish to thank the House for the consideration given to the Lords spiritual and to me, for the great privilege of serving here, for the high calling of your Lordships and for the dedication of our staff, not least the doorkeepers, many of whom served in our Armed Forces. As someone who has led your Lordships in prayer at the beginning of business, I am reminded of the words of the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Chartres, that “the largest party in this House is the praying party”. I give thanks for that and assure all your Lordships of my continued prayers.

My Lords, it is always a distinct privilege to rise in your Lordships’ House, particularly when the subject matter before us concerns the key priority of any nation: the defence and security of the realm in an era of unprecedented global volatility and conflict. However, before I turn to our physical defences, it is my great honour to pay tribute to a defender of a different kind, one who has spent years fortifying the moral and spiritual armour of our nation. I refer of course to the right reverend Prelate—and my dear friend—the Bishop of Southwark, and I congratulate him on a poignant and reflective valedictory speech. I feel immense warmth towards the right reverend Prelate and his neighbourly affection, for he is the person who is the spiritual guide for many of the good people of Wimbledon—indeed, he is the shepherd, as many remind me. I have always maintained that trying to guide people spiritually, especially when they are quite diverse, including the occasionally highly opinionated folk of south London, requires a level of tactical patience, strategic diplomacy and sheer resilience that would challenge any seasoned peacekeeping commander around the world. Yet, the right reverend Prelate has done so for over 15 years with quiet but effective diplomacy and, as we have seen again today, boundless grace and deep humility. In this House, the right reverend Prelate has been a reassuring and welcome presence. He has never been one, as we have heard again today, to shy away from what I would call difficult issues. Indeed, over many years in the very place where the Minister sits, I was on the receiving end of his quiet but very effective challenges to the Government of the day. He has consistently championed the homeless, the marginalised, and a cause that we share and which is incredibly close to my own heart. I live by the mantra that the greatest test of our own faith is when we stand by and for the faith and belief of others. He has lived by that. We have stood together on many platforms advocating for human rights, and I have always been struck, as I have already said, by his gentle yet effective moral clarity. While the Ministry of Defence has frequently struggled with its logistics at times, the diocese of Southwark has operated with enviable precision under the right reverend Prelate’s stewardship. It has proved, perhaps, that faith can not only move mountains but manage complex organisations. We worked together when the right reverend Prelate was the lead bishop on the issues of the Middle East, and again—I quoted that mantra earlier—he stood for justice, not just for Christians or for the Jewish community but for the Muslim community, and he addressed the challenges both in Israel and Palestine with equality and justice. Together, we worked with Archbishop Hosam of Jerusalem, a friend to us both. I was proud to lead on the issue of Christian persecution, where the support of the right reverend Prelate and others on the Spiritual Benches was vital. I am sure that I speak for all in this House when I say that we will miss deeply his wisdom, his pastoral warmth and his profound service to this House and to the nation. We wish him every blessing for his well-deserved retirement, which is with our sincere prayers. Turning back to earthly challenges, I thank my noble friend Lord Harlech—we will hold the “gallant” for a moment or two, but I am sure that it is something for the future—for tabling this debate and join the chorus welcoming him back. When I look at the international horizon, I am reminded of my own time representing our nation and our interests globally. As a Foreign Minister, one learns very quickly the value of diplomatic tact. However, as any seasoned hand will tell you, diplomacy is greatly assisted when the person whom you are negotiating with knows that you have something more formidable behind you than a beautifully drafted joint communiqué. In my case, it was my noble friend Lady Goldie. We were a double act often on the world stage. However, on a serious note, we find ourselves surveying a world that is, to put it in our customary British way, “highly complex”. To our east, state-based threats are no longer looming but are real and are redrawing borders. In maritime lanes around the world, we see state and non-state actors operating with technology that makes some of our procurement processes look positively glacial. This brings me to the capabilities of our own, magnificent Armed Forces. Our men and women in uniform are, without a shadow of doubt, world class. Their courage, their adaptability and their professionalism are second to none. I have seen their work on the ground and witnessed what they did in places such as Afghanistan. The only issue, as has already been highlighted in this debate, is that there are ever fewer of them. We have a Navy of sublime sophistication—the noble Lord, Lord West, is in his place—but, on certain Tuesdays, one wonders whether we have enough hulls to cover the water that we are legally obliged to protect and to fulfil our duties to the treaties that we are signed up to. Our defence procurement has historically operated on a philosophy that I can best describe as bespoke tailoring. We do not merely buy a helicopter; we commission a flying work of art, hand stitched by many committees, adjusted for 32 different eventualities and delivered precisely three years after the conflict that it was intended for has resolved itself. The Government’s own SDR is so ably led by the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, who I am delighted is in his place and who chairs the International Relations and Defence Committee which I am honoured to serve on. He highlighted this very issue of procurement. Yet I want to be fair. The SDR and the welcome and final publication of the delayed Defence Investment Plan is a move forward and shows that we are waking up to the reality of the challenges that we face in 2026. We are investing heavily in cyber, space and AI, areas where a well-placed line of code can do the work of an entire regiment. This is commendable, as is the £5 billion for drones. Yet you cannot deter a hostile frigate with a sternly worded PowerPoint presentation. At some point, hard capability must mean physical presence, be it in the Middle East or defending the Falkland Islands. We are a nation that prides itself on punching above our weight. It is a marvellous face, but without that punch behind it having the force of our Armed Forces, you eventually bruise your knuckles. Our friends, but more importantly our foes, are looking at us very carefully. We have rightly stood together in unity on Ukraine. I commend the Prime Minister’s comments today in Ukraine and thank him for his service in that area. Let us continue to work together, as my noble friend Lord Harlech said, in supporting government steps to modernise. However, let us do it with a healthy dose of reality and realism. Let us ensure that when we speak of deterrence, we are talking about forces that are ready to be deployed today, equipped today and sustained for tomorrow. We need the defence readiness Bill. When will we see that? Our adversaries are not waiting for the next strategic defence review to conclude. They are acting. When it comes to peace, the pen may be mightier than the sword, but it would be incredibly reassuring for all of us, in a typically British way, to have a highly sharp, fully serviced and readily available sword in the umbrella stand, just in case we need to deploy.

My Lords, I join my noble friend Lord Ahmad in congratulating the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Southwark on his final speech. I hope he enjoys an excellent retirement and has every opportunity to go on worshipping God and doing his best to swell the congregations in our churches. I think he will find that easier when he is no longer encumbered by the necessary political compromises that have to be made in your Lordships’ House. My noble friends have made the point that we do not have enough money for the defence budget, but nobody is asking why. A tremendous amount of money is being spent by this Government on welfare that is not achieving what it is intending. It is supposed to be lifting people out of poverty, and it is not; it is condemning people to poverty. There are enormous savings to be made in the welfare budget but, unfortunately, the Labour Party in the other place will not allow those reforms to go through. That has grave implications for our democracy, and I would be very worried if I were a member of the Labour Party. If it cannot fulfil its functions as a Government with the enormous majority that it has, one has to ask whether it would ever be worthy of forming a Government again. If I were in the Labour Party, I would be very worried about that. This comes at a particularly unfortunate period in defence. There have been a lot of false forecasts of peace in Ukraine, but as the Ukrainians develop technology in the amazing way that they have and, with western help, develop longer-range missiles that can penetrate central facilities in Russia, I think we will eventually bring this conflict to an end. At that stage, NATO must ask who is going to fess up, come to the plate and say that they are prepared to help provide Ukraine with the essential security guarantees that it needs to ensure that Russia does not invade again. That is going to be a big test for NATO. I look back to the Joint Expeditionary Force, which was established by NATO in south Wales in 2014. Two years later, two countries joined—Finland and Sweden—that were not members of NATO at the time. We could expand the Joint Expeditionary Force to become a nucleus of the coalition of the willing. I was on the NATO Parliamentary Assembly but was slung off when the Conservatives did so badly in the election. However, I gather from a former colleague that Poland might join the Joint Expeditionary Force. That would be very significant indeed; it would form the nucleus for a coalition of the willing that might be able to change the price of fish in European NATO, as we look to a future in which the United States plays a reduced role in defending European interests. You might have some sympathy with the United States when it reminds us that Russia has an economy smaller than that of Italy. It is therefore a great pity that we cannot properly fund our Armed Forces at this critical moment, when we should be setting an example to all our allies and not be laggards in the business.

My Lords, I appreciate that this debate has already focused, and I am sure will continue to focus, on the challenges facing our Armed Forces—issues around funding, the defence investment plan and, of course, as the noble Lord, Lord Harlech, eloquently argued, the role of our reserves. I declare an interest, as my husband is a reservist. However, in the context of a strategic defence review that put NATO first, and a defence investment plan which headlined our NATO commitment as its first priority in stepping up UK leadership, I want to focus on our Armed Forces’ nuclear deterrent capability. Sir Adam Thomson, former UK permanent representative to NATO, gave evidence to the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy on Monday and made an important point that I wish to amplify in this Chamber. The UK is one of only two European nuclear powers, and the only one that has committed its nuclear capability to NATO. In the DIP, our Government set out their key investment commitments, including to the UK nuclear deterrent. The plan committed to over £20 billion more investment in the defence nuclear enterprise over the next four years, compared with the previous four, to modernise the UK’s nuclear capabilities and the facilities that deliver them, including new submarines. This is a commitment that contributes significantly to European deterrence against our adversaries. It also recommitted, following the original June 2025 announcement, to joining NATO’s dual-capable aircraft nuclear mission. This will see the Royal Air Force, in the form of the acquisition of F35A combat aircraft, returning to the airborne nuclear role it relinquished in 1998. In the last 12 months, I have reconvened some of our now-retired RAF “Cold War warriors” from the Tornado, Jaguar and Nimrod aircraft forces to distil lessons from that era. Although there are many differences—the weapon will not be a UK weapon, the technology has changed vastly, and the likely readiness commitment will be significantly less—there is also much to learn from the past. I, of course, say that as a history scholar. The Chief of the Air Staff and the Chief of the Defence Staff have both talked about the need for the RAF to rediscover its “nuclear IQ”. Those who joined the RAF during the Cold War were fully aware that they were joining a nuclear-armed force and that they might be stationed at a nuclear-armed base, regardless of their branch or trade. Now, the RAF is constituted almost entirely of personnel who joined after the Cold War, during the era of wars of choice. Similarly, politicians and the public have lived through the decades of expeditionary warfare. This future airborne capability—the theme of today’s debate being, of course, future capability—will add an important rung to the escalation ladder. As the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup, wrote in a recent paper, co-edited with Daniel Skeffington, “the stronger …the ‘ladder’ … – through the possession of credible capabilities on a sliding scale between small arms and strategic weapons – the stronger the deterrent effect”. To conclude, there are many challenges facing our Armed Forces, but I hope that my noble friend the Minister will agree that we should find, in Sir Adam’s words, “fresh ways” to emphasise the importance of our nuclear deterrent to the UK and to our NATO allies in Europe.

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Harlech on introducing this debate. I join other noble Lords in wishing the right reverend Prelate the best for the future and in thanking him for his work and his valedictory speech. I begin by commending the Lord Speaker’s lecture, delivered by the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, yesterday evening. I encourage all noble Lords to read it, if they have not already. He posed a fundamental question: is Britain really safe? His answer was very clear: the threats that we face are real, they are growing, and meeting them will require urgency, resilience and sustained national resolve. Our Armed Forces, regular and reserves, remain among the finest anywhere. But the question is not the quality of those who serve but whether they are being given the equipment, support, resources and training they need. The strategic defence review, led by the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, recognised that Britain is responding to an immediate and growing threat, not preparing for a distant possibility. The Government’s acceptance of the recommendations is welcome. The challenge remains delivering on them at the pace that the security environment demands. The Prime Minister has warned that Russia could pose a direct challenge to NATO before the end of this decade, a view echoed by NATO’s secretary-general. If that is the Government’s assessment, procurement and investment must reflect it. Yet some priority capabilities are not expected until the early 2030s. Every delay narrows our margin for deterrence. The war in Ukraine has reinforced enduring lessons. Technological advantage remains essential, but so are ammunition, logistics, industrial capacity and the ability to sustain operations over time. Tomorrow’s technology cannot compensate for today’s shortages. Deterrence depends on forces that are trained, equipped and ready and on a resilient defence industrial base. Production cannot be expended overnight, skilled workers cannot be created in a crisis, and supply chains cannot be rebuilt once conflict has begun. Industry needs confidence that government decisions will be timely, consistent and backed by long-term commitment. As the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, has warned, we are running out of years. If the threats are accelerating, our response must accelerate too. National security is not solely a Ministry of Defence responsibility. It also depends on a resilient energy supply, secure communication, cyber resilience and the protection of critical national infrastructure. Defence is now a whole of government and whole of society responsibility, requiring an honest conversation with the British people about national preparedness. Our allies will judge us, and our adversaries will too, not by the quality of our reviews but by our ability to deliver them. Britain’s influence rests on credibility, demonstrating that when we identify a threat, we have the resolve and the means to respond. Preparing for conflict is not about expecting war but preventing it. The stronger our deterrence, the less likely it is to be tested. I have several questions for the Minister. First, what concrete steps are being taken to accelerate the implementation of the strategic defence review so that delivery matches the urgency of the threats we face? Secondly, how will the Government ensure that our Armed Forces have the equipment, munitions and industrial support they need before the end of this decade rather than after it? Thirdly, what are the Government doing to give the defence industry the confidence to invest in skills, production and innovation so that it can respond rapidly in a crisis? Finally, when will Parliament see a credible pathway to defence spending that matches today’s security challenges and enables the ambitions of the review to be realised? Britain retains exceptional Armed Forces, world-class intelligence services, innovative defence industries and alliances that remain the cornerstone of our security. We understand the threats we face, and we know what we must do. The question now is whether we will deliver in time.

My Lords, much has been said in recent months about the possibility of a Russian conflict with NATO. Such a war will be deterred if we and our allies react to strengthen our weak arms posture now. NATO’s potential military, economic and technical strength far exceeds that of any potential adversary. The challenge is to ensure that this strength is credible, visible and ready to deter any prospect of open conflict. Such determination must be led from the top of Governments. For the UK, a clear graph of intended progress to 3% then 3.5% is required, not ring-fenced with any “if fiscal conditions allow” type caveats of uncertainty. As it takes two to tango, the assessment by the potential aggressor of their own warlike capabilities and chances of strategic success matter. If Russia were that opponent, what is there to learn from its fight with Ukraine? Far from being what was expected, namely, a quick conquest of Ukraine and a change to a Russian-subservient Government in Kyiv, the Ukrainians, after great difficulty and challenge, are now able, with much NATO help, to hold Russian advances and operate far into Russia itself, to Moscow and St Petersburg as well as into Crimea and elsewhere. Maybe Putin sacked some senior commanders for bringing him only bad news. Maybe their successors rely on holding their posts by reporting only good news from the front. Maybe Putin even feels that all adverse results reported reflect western propaganda and so cannot possibly be true, but what he feels and believes is what will drive him on. While much of Putin’s available forces are fighting in Ukraine, there is much more uncommitted, with advanced capabilities in missile and maritime offence. Sub-conflict measures are already occurring and increasing in dangerous ways. But faced by a strong NATO alliance, would Russia believe it could wage and win a war of conquest, not just with arms but to achieve political mastery? One judgment might be that without the latter, the incentive to go further than sub-conflict measures may exist only if the NATO alliance appears to be weakening or even breaking apart. While there are differences between last century’s Soviet belief in the worldwide spread of communism and today’s Russia, we learned from our spy Oleg Gordievsky of the Kremlin’s abiding view that NATO is an aggressor from its perspective. Since 1949, NATO has moved from the original 12-country transatlantic alliance to one of 32 that has grown and reached eastwards to the very borders of Russia, from its far north all the way down to Turkey—far too close to Mother Russia for its own sense of security. Now, NATO’s strong support of Ukraine and the US assault on Iran, with the expectation of NATO help, must only further alarm the Kremlin’s paranoia about NATO, so real and abiding tensions exist. It may not be possible to ease such confrontation in the military domain, but more might be done with arts, culture and sporting events to ease the existing tensions, and Putin is not immortal.

My Lords, a week ago in the Times, Andy Burnham wrote that “increasing our national security … will be my first priority”. It made me ask: does he really mean this? This Government have had loads of top priorities. The current Prime Minister has said: “Growth is the number one priority”. The noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, told the House that the “absolute priority for the Government” is “to have a water Bill ”.—[Official Report, 6/1/26; col. 1046.] The noble Baroness, Lady Twycross, disagreed: she told this House that “making creative careers accessible” was the Government’s “key priority”. I have a whole dossier of number one priorities tossed out by government Ministers, all utterly meaningless. I have to ask myself: does Andy Burnham mean what he says? Is he really going to give a cast-iron guarantee that service chiefs will get the equipment and resources to meet our NATO commitments? Is he really prepared to make the money available, and for domestic programmes to take the hit—and, if so, which ones? In the annual spending round, Ministers have to pit the claims of their department against the competing claims of other departments. If one department is always to get its way, you would no longer be evaluating its bid for more money. By the way, which departments win and which lose does not always depend on a rational evaluation. It also depends on who has the political weight in the Government and the Cabinet. I hope Andy Burnham means what he says and will throw his weight in support of defence, but that will mean standing up to his Back-Benchers, which the current Prime Minister has failed to do, most notably on welfare reform. He needs to do it. We have had warning after warning from the noble Lord, Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, about this. We are highly vulnerable to Russia on the warpath, not just potential military attack but attacks on our domestic infrastructure that could bring down our energy networks, our banking and financial systems and the day-to-day life of the whole country. Andy Burnham becomes Prime Minister next week. We will eventually have the opportunity to question and challenge the new Government in this House. The House has great respect for the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, so I very much hope that the Defence Minister in this House in the new Government will still be the noble Lord.

My Lords, I join with the noble Lord, Lord Swire, in welcoming the fact that the noble Lord, Lord Harlech, has been recycled; the value of that is before us this afternoon. We have talked repeatedly about percentages of GDP to be spent on defence. I do not like the concept of percentages of GDP. The amount of money you need to spend is what you need to spend, and some artificial percentage does not make much sense. We need to re-evaluate that. I was fortunate enough to be present when President Zelensky came into this building in March. I attended the meeting in Committee Room 14; many noble Lords will have been there. He had a big screen and a laptop, and he was able to show us in real time what was happening on his own battle-front: what was coming in and what was going out. There were four other laptops in Ukraine that were doing the same thing. Most of us went to that meeting on the understanding and acceptance that he presumably wanted more money or more ammunition. No—he was selling at that meeting, not begging. With his colleagues, he has developed a wartime economy. He has been agile and innovative, not simply for commercial reasons but out of sheer necessity to survive. The noble Lord, Lord Robertson, started his lecture last night by mentioning that we are not engaging in a meaningful conversation with the general public on what confronts us. This is not a political thing; the noble Lord, Lord Harlech, opened the debate with that point. This goes back 40 years, to the end of the Cold War. We were all very happy, whether we were Ministers or whatever, to spend the money on things that we felt were important—non-defence matters such as education, welfare or health. We were all happy to do that and all allowed it to happen, so we are not throwing stones here, but we need to recycle—in our own minds, and in the minds of the general public—the issues that confront us now. I do not believe that Putin’s tanks will roll up Whitehall or that his submarines will come up the Thames—although most of us would hardly notice if they did. The fact is that we do not have the right mindsets. We need to engage with the public to educate people on what we are confronted with: the damage that can be done to our infrastructure, such as the undersea cables on which so much of our wealth and commerce is dependent. Hardly a day goes by when we do not have a photograph in the paper of some ship or other that has been decommissioned or is laid up in a port somewhere. It is not good enough. We have to start a conversation, and I hope the new Prime Minister will do that, because we have to get the people onside. Unfortunately, that means difficult choices. We will have to rethink the post-Cold War spending profile and begin to get our heads around the fact that we face an enemy driven not by logic but by ideology.

My Lords, this debate is particularly timely as the Farnborough International Airshow begins on Monday. We do indeed live in a volatile and dangerous age, but there is no Member of your Lordships’ House who cannot recognise that, over time, our influence on the world stage has been reducing. At the heart of this has been an anaemic economy and an insufficiently sizeable and focused defence budget. Nowhere is the lack of direction more glaring than in the space domain—the very central nervous system of modern high-intensity warfare. Instead of accelerating our surveillance satellite programmes, a new plan cancels critical narrowband communication networks. By failing to secure our own space infrastructure, our future forces will risk being dependent on non-sovereign networks controlled by external providers. Furthermore, our approach is drifting. Space resilience is heavily cited in official documents but remains entirely unfocused, lacking specific variable requirements for system recovery and capability generation. Worryingly, we are falling critically out of step with the United States, which has made a fundamental conceptual shift towards an offensive space control mindset. The strategic defence review called space “a domain that is central to warfighting”. Indeed, rapidly increasing congestion in space means that there are now 16,000 satellites compared with 3,000 five years ago, and 100,000 are expected by 2030, offering nefarious actors more opportunity to conceal their activities. In the context of the international environment, space can no longer be viewed merely as an enabler of other domains. It is a critical war-fighting domain and the backbone of our critical national infrastructure. Underpinning developments in fifth generation warfare is the role that space-based assets play. This is important, particularly as digitalisation increases, delivering precise navigation, instant communications, global surveillance and early missile warning systems. Without space-based assets, co-ordinating fast-paced multidomain operations and combined arms manoeuvres becomes very difficult. The recent defence investment plan announced that the incoming Skynet 6 narrowband satellite system would not proceed. Cancelling Skynet 6A will have a demonstrably adverse effect. This is so disappointing when many in the industry felt that, for three years, the significance of this had been understood clearly by government. By contrast, if we want a model of a country that has really understood the challenges, we turn to Poland. It is investing 4.5% of its GDP into hard and visible capacity, helping to create greater defence capability from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Even Germany, casting off the Merkel inheritance, is projected to spend more on defence than France and the United Kingdom put together, without the huge debt situation in both countries. Recently, I had the chance to learn all about this by talking with government officials who are in Poland. What was spelled out was impressive yet depressing, because this great success has arisen from fiscal and pro-business policies which had stimulated growth in the private sector. For us, the lessons are obvious.

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Harlech, on securing this debate, which is essential to the future of our country. I thank him for his service, as I thank all our Armed Forces volunteers for theirs. I associate myself with many of the comments he made in his opening remarks. I begin with a simple truth: the world has already changed, but our defence capabilities have not kept pace. The threats we face are no longer neatly divided into war and peace, foreign and domestic, military and civilian; they are hybrid, continuous, complex and aimed at undermining the very resilience of our society. Across Europe and beyond, nations have recognised this shift. Finland’s total defence, Sweden’s civil military integration, Israel’s Home Front Command and Singapore’s multi-pillar resilience doctrine all demonstrate one lesson: the defence of the nation is no longer the job of the Armed Forces alone; it is a job for the whole of society. Our Armed Forces remain world class, but they are being asked to do too much with too little in systems designed for a different era. We cannot meet today’s threats with yesterday’s structures. With the winds of political change in the air, I want to argue for three radical shifts. First, we must build a whole-of-nation resilience—not a patchwork of agencies or a set of disconnected emergency plans, but a statutory, integrated approach that brings together defence, civil contingencies, local government, critical national infrastructure and the private sector. Finland’s National Emergency Supply Agency shows just what is possible: strategic stockpiles, shared planning and clear duties on every sector. We need the same here: a UK resilience agency with real authority, real resources and real accountability. Secondly, we must fuse civilian expertise with military capabilities. Our Armed Forces need engineers, cyber specialists, medics, logisticians and data scientists, but we cannot recruit and retain all of them inside the military. Other nations have solved this through dual-track service approaches, where civilians can be mobilised rapidly into defence roles that match their professional skills. I believe we should create a UK national reserve: a modern, flexible force that draws on civilian expertise, is trained for crises, both domestic and international, and is integrated into defence planning. That would be not conscription but a national capability-building exercise for every community and every nation in this country. Thirdly, we must redesign command and co-ordination for the hybrid age. Israel’s Home Front Command integrates civilian protection directly into military planning, Japan’s self-defence forces train routinely with civilian disaster agencies, and Norway’s civil and military co-operation doctrine plans for peacetime, crisis and conflict. We need a UK equivalent: a joint civil-military resilience command, responsible for dealing with grey-zone threats, infrastructure protection and rapid mobilisation in times of crisis. It should sit alongside the military’s Strategic Command with equal status and a clear mandate. If we are serious about future capability, we must stop imagining defence as something that happens over there. Cyber attacks, disinformation campaigns and the undermining of trust in institutions is all happening now to our people, our economy and our country. Our Armed Forces will remain essential, but they cannot and should not be asked to defend the nation alone. Modern threats demand that we build a system where every sector, every skill and every citizen contributes to the security and resilience of this United Kingdom. That is the scale of ambition we need and the future capability that our times demand.

My Lords, I join with others in thanking my noble friend Lord Harlech for initiating this debate. This House meets to consider a question that goes to the very heart of our future national security. Just weeks ago, the Chief of the Defence Staff publicly stated that the United Kingdom is running out of time to boost its Armed Forces, and that our adversaries are definitely “raising the stakes” and risk “crossing a line”. Let us be clear: this is not a distant, hypothetical threat; it is a present reality. Russia’s war against Ukraine has entered its fifth year; our critical infrastructure is being tested daily in cyber space and beneath our sea, and there is an assumption that the sustained decades of relative peace in Europe no longer hold. Meanwhile, the conflict in Iran has shown how trade routes can be easily disrupted and the prosperity of our nation threatened by the closure of vital international waterways that we might be required to help unplug. We must resist the temptation to treat defence policy as a matter of budgets and spreadsheets alone. To do so would be to diminish what is really at stake: the ability of this country to keep its people safe, honour its alliances and deter those who would do us harm. This is a moment for not only ambition but candour, because the hard truth is that our war-fighting readiness has been degraded for years. It did not happen in a single Parliament and it will not be restored by a single spending review or investment plan. It is a structural problem and it demands a structural answer. The defence investment plan, which was published only recently, was meant to deliver the strategic defence review’s vision of a stronger Army, a hybrid Navy and a next-generation Air Force, yet even the Government’s own assessment points to a funding gap of billions of pounds in the years ahead, as decisions will need to be made about discretionary spending.