I am trying to confine myself to the exact terms of my Amendment, and I will endeavour even more strictly to comply with your wishes in this respect, Mr. Deputy-Speaker. I would rather concentrate, not on the third explanation, but upon the other two, which were touched on yesterday by the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Woodford (Mr. Churchill). Maybe, the right hon. Gentleman had his tongue in his cheek when making his criticisms, but I believe that he is right, whatever his motive. There has been gross inefficiency at the War Office in allowing us to have on our hands a force of 900,000 men, out of which only 250,000 men are required for our additional commitments, and in not being able to reduce that Force below 600,000 by 31st March, 1948, and 660,000 by the end of the year.

I now come to the first of the major reforms which I wish to suggest. Before the war, there was an Army Reserve and the Supplementary Reserve, and both together numbered 180,000 men. It was obtainable by the simple expedient of paying these men sums varying from 9d. to 1s. 6d. a day—to men who still had the second period of their 12-year engagement to fulfil—in return for which payment the soldier made himself liable to recall in an emergency on a Royal Proclamation. There were also minor inducements offered to the Supplementary Reserve, and, by these means, the Government had at their disposal a Reserve force of 180,000 men, all of whom were assigned to a particular unit or depot and who could be rapidly absorbed into the fighting machine, as, indeed, they were in 1939. In addition, there was the Territorial Army, which could be relied upon to supply up to 200,000 men. That is why there were only 110,000 men at home before the war—because the reserves were there, 180,000 trained or partly-trained men, plus another 200,000 men in the Territorial Army. The absence of these reserves makes a difference of 270,000 men in this country permanently under arms. It is no good to say that the millions of the demobilised now constitute a Reserve, because once a man has gone through a release centre, he is lost for all military purposes, and can only be got hold of again through the cumbrous machinery of the Ministry of Labour.

It is my contention that the War Office, by the end of 1945 or the beginning of 1946, could have instituted a scheme whereby as much as 2S. per day could have been offered to the men who were about to be demobilised, if they were willing to sign on for a liability to recall in an emergency, and that, if that had happened, we should now have had as large a Reserve as any militarist wanted. The Class A Reserve need not have been restricted to 6,000 before the war, and that Reserve was always liable to call up, whenever the Government felt it necessary and not by Royal Proclamation. It is the grossest neglect that nothing of this kind has yet been done. We are told that the maximum numbers of reserves provided during this year will be 71,000, but I shall be surprised if there are more than 10,000 today, if as much. It is not too late now to advertise for suitable men to sign on, and also to arrange for the men about to be demobilised to take up an undertaking of that kind. It would be accepted by many men knowing that they would have a specific unit to go to in time of emergency and that they would only be called up in an emergency. By that means, we could quickly provide ourselves with a Reserve of about 300,000 men. It is worth while noticing that that Reserve, before the war, only cost us £7 million a year, which is an absolute fleabite to the huge expenditure which we have to support now. We should only be paying the serving soldiers £10 million, at the same time as we paid £7 million for the reserves. By that means, we could now release 270,00o men, who are wasting their time "blanco-ing" their belts at home, and put them into industry. That is the first of the major reforms which I suggest to the Government.

The second—the charge of inefficiency—concerns the wholesale waste of manpower in the Army at present. At the moment, there are ordnance depots, record offices, pay offices, pay centres, schools, training establishments, and they are all cluttered up with thousands of men doing civilian types of jobs, and they are doing these jobs in antiquated ways which existed before the Boer War. If one goes to these establishments, one never finds any comptometers or accounting machines. I do not wish to go into great detail in this matter, because my hon. Friend the Member for South Cardiff (Mr. Callaghan) will deal with it when he seconds this Amendment. The second reform, therefore, is that the Army should overhaul all these Services rigorously, and should see that the tail of the Army is increased in efficiency, but reduced in numbers, and that men are substituted, wherever possible, by women and older men. There are many jobs being done by men in the prime of life which might be done by older men or by women. If the War Office cannot do it, and it seems to me that it can without difficulty, I suggest that a working party or committee should be set up, composed partly of civilians and partly of Army officers, who could show the War Office how to do it.

Another neglectful method in economising with soldiers is the failure to ask the Royal Air Force to assist our land garrisons. Are we really to believe that we need 100,000, or 120,000, men in Palestine today, when 5,000 were sufficient before, or that we need 60,000 in Egypt, where 10,000 sufficed before the war, and that we need all the other tremendous increases that go with it? By the use of, say, 7,000 airmen, it is quite possible to cover the same amount of ground for which land garrisons haw, to employ some 30,000 men. That is the third reform which I suggest that the Government should institute. They should call in the Air Force to help them in their land garrison duties.