Orders of the Day — Defence Estimates

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons am 12:00 am ar 12 Rhagfyr 1973.

Danfonwch hysbysiad imi am ddadleuon fel hyn

Photo of Mr Maurice Edelman Mr Maurice Edelman , Coventry North 12:00, 12 Rhagfyr 1973

I was greatly impressed by the speech of the hon. and gallant Member for Eye (Sir H. Harrison) who presides over the Defence Sub-Committee with such distinction. He properly complained about the lack of information given to hon. Members, compared with the detailed information received by Senators and Congressmen generally in the United States. In taking the MRCA and Polaris as examples of systems for which information is inadequate, he was merely illustrating a more general problem, the solution of which will not have been encouraged by the skinny speech of the Minister of State. Not only did he give little information; in relation to the great and convulsive events in the world in the last few weeks I could not help feeling that his speech fell far short of the occasion.

We have recently seen the way in which a war fought by proxy by the Russians in the Sinai Desert and on the Golan Heights has proved that in terms of weaponry the Russians are far ahead of the West. It is proper that we should reappraise the situation in terms not only of weapons but of general NATO strategy in relation to the Soviet Union.

We have to ask whether we are producing the right weapons. The hon. and gallant Member for Eye was right to say that every now and again there should be a retrospection as well as a prospect about the kind of weapons that we are producing. We should ask whether our system of planning and consultation is satisfactory. During this debate there have been several references to the lack of consultation between the United States and the countries of NATO and the EEC. Opposition Members must ask themselves whether, in the new post-Middle East war context, the proposal to reduce military expenditure by £1,000 million is realistic.

My purpose today will be to urge, first, that there should be an urgent reappraisal by NATO of the weapons which we have it in mind to produce, and, second, that we must reconsider the technique of consultation among the countries of NATO and particularly between the United States and ourselves, the failure of which brought us so close not simply to disarray but to disintegration.

Whatever the political merits of the confrontation in the Middle East—with which I will not deal—it turned out to be a demonstration of Soviet power. The Middle East war was a laboratory in which the Soviet Union tested its weapons in exactly the same way as Hitler and Mussolini tested their weapons in the Spanish Civil War. What happened has not only regional importance but global significance. The Frog missiles, and the Snappers and Saggers, as hon. Members opposite who have been there will confirm, proved that they were not just showpieces at May Day demonstrations but weapons capable of being used with deadly effect—in some cases after relatively little training by those who employed them.

Some of our military assumptions were destroyed in that war. The general assumption of Western strategic planners that armour was the queen of the battlefield was destroyed by infantry with portable anti-tank missiles. The most sophisticated Skyhawks and Phantoms proved highly vulnerable to a combination of SAMs and anti-aircraft guns. The hon. and gallant Member for Eye was absolutely right to say not only that these sophisticated missiles were able to bring down the most advanced aircraft but that the largest proportion of Israeli aircraft in particular which were destroyed were destroyed by conventional guns equipped with radar. Although, as the war continued, electronic counter-measures imported from the USA were introduced, saving Israel from the disaster which threatened her, it is still a fact that even those counter-measures systems were unable to deal with the Russian SAM6, which eventually had to be destroyed by land action.

It is in this framework that we must assess the merits of a defence programme for NATO which was, after all, planned several years ago. Even the 1970 programme was based on certain assumptions which pre-date the Middle East war. There is always the historic danger that generals will be fighting, or at any rate responding to, not the dangers of what might be the next war but the techniques and systems of the last war.

Bearing this in mind and remembering the somewhat apathetic reaction of the Government, illustrated by the Minister's speech, I do not believe that the fact that the situation has changed is necessarily an argument for cutting the defence programme by £1,000 million—but it is certainly an argument for carefully assessing and examining the question whether military expenditure is being undertaken properly and wisely.

I respect the view of pacifists who are in favour of a major reduction of arms expenditure, although I am sorry that none of them is represented here today. But if we believe in defence—as, I think, do the majority of my hon. Friends—we must make sure that our defence expenditure is properly applied and is adequate for our needs and, above all, that its adequacy is assessed and measured not by the arms lobby or the military-industrial complex but by this House, acting on the best advice in order to obtain the best value in terms of strategy and tactics.

This is not a case for giving a blank cheque to the military establishment and those behind it. We have heard a great deal about "flexible response", which presumably means a mixture of conventional and tactical nuclear weapons, but under the nuclear umbrella we have seen in recent weeks how a conventional war can be fought involving the use of admittedly ultra-sophisticated electronic weapons but weapons which have been reduced to inexpensive, simple and basic forms. Masses of infantry and armour, reinforced by advanced weaponry and following the Soviet doctrine of attack in irresistible numbers, nearly overwhelmed Israel.

Face to face with the Warsaw Pact powers, with an air superiority of two to one—I do not think that the Minister will deny that preponderance—we have to ask whether, in the face of a conventional attack from the air, we should have to respond by nuclear means or should consider ourselves equipped to respond by conventional means—but conventional means which have been improved in the light of recent experience. What we are saying now is that piecemeal conventional wars and other forms of pressure, such as oil sanctions—which are another form of physical pressure—are being instigated by the Soviet Union to our continuing detriment.

The striking fact is that whenever the Soviet Union advances in this way it does so under a smoke screen of verbiage and verbal traps—a method of using language to convey exactly opposite ideas.

The Soviet Union talks of peace—and invades Czechoslovakia. It talks of détente—and supplies arms to the Middle East which it must have known, even if it had not supplied the technicians to support them, would mean the beginning of war. Indeed, looking back on it all, we see that the Soviet Union, by enjoying now what Winston Churchill called the "fruits of war" without actually practising war, is really the Tactius gaudens of the situation. We must take note of that fact.

In this context, we have to ask ourselves whether we can rely exclusively on the United Nations to protect our interests. Can we, indeed, rely on NATO to protect our major world-wide interests? If we do so, we must be prepared to say that our contribution to NATO—I say this to some of my hon. Friends—must be credible, our purpose in supporting NATO must be made clear.

I do not believe that European defence has any credibility outside NATO. The dream of M. Jobert of some kind of European defence personality which has an existence without the United States is a Gaullist dream, with no kind of reality. When President de Gaulle withdrew from NATO he did not withdraw from the Atlantic alliance. He wanted all the benefits of the alliance but he did not want the burden of making a contribution to NATO. Therefore, we must be very careful when we examine this tantalising mirage of the idea of a European defence personality which will be somehow independent of the United States.

Clearly, when we deal with the United States, we must make our voices heard individually and collectively. Obviously, it was improper of the United States to declare even a partial nuclear alert without proper consultation. Perhaps it merely means that the machinery of consultation is inadequate, in which case the right hon. Gentleman should seek to improve it. We must accept that even the sharing of conventional weapons with our partners in Europe would be an inadequate form of defence unless we had the backing of the United States.

The Russians showed what an Egyptian peasant plus electronics can do. That is something we must take closely to heart in assessing whether the type of equipment that we supply to NATO is really fitting for the new situation in which we find ourselves. If an Egyptian peasant, reinforced by electronics, can have such success against a highly developed force, what could a Soviet soldier do, brought up two generations removed from the land and reared in an atmosphere of technical development and industry and in close contact with factories and machines in a way which even Red Army soldiers of the last war were not?

I have one or two questions to put arising from NATO reports. For example, in the NATO provision for last year there was what is called a "procurement committee" of 8,500 anti-tank weapons. As the hon. and gallant Member for Eye said, we have no details, and cannot know what is involved. What sort of weapons are these? Are they wire-controlled—the type of anti-tank weapon used in the Middle East? Are they portable? Do they match up to the Soviet Saggers and Snappers? Even assuming that they are the latest form of anti-tank weapons, is 8,500 not a relatively small number for the potential confrontation in which we may be involved? There is also the question of the provision, under the programme AD70, of 3,000 anti-aircraft guns. What sort of guns are they? Are they equipped with radar? Even then, is 3.000 not also a very small number in relation to the Middle East experience?

I believe that the basic lesson of the Middle East war is that electronic counter-measure equipment must be studied as a matter of vital urgency, and that we must have a new array of mobile anti-aircraft guns and other weaponry. I believe that to be essential because, hitherto, most of our thinking has been based on the assumption that ultrasonic and supersonic aircraft would command the sky and would be irresistible, and that a combination of tanks and aircraft are the weapon of tomorrow as they were the weapon of yesterday. Those assumptions have been undermined.

Air Vice Marshall S. W. B. Menaul, Director General of the Institute for Defence Studies, has summed up our tactical needs in the light of the Middle East war. He says: While the advantage appears to have shifted imperceptibly in favour of defence, much more needs to be done in the anti-tank, ECM and SAM fields to correct the serious imbalance that exists between the NATO and Warsaw Pact forces. NATO forces defend a front of 400 miles from the Baltic to the Austrian border and their strength is thinly distributed along it.Advanced technology, which is available now, is the key, since sufficient manpower will never be available to increase the effectiveness of NATO armies and air forces.NATO aircraft are on the whole superior to those of the Warsaw Pact and it could well be that in the ground-attack role Europe could have an impressive advantage if it exploited Harrier can operate from semi-prepared strips, thereby increasing its own security and the sortie rate. In the light of that, I was astonished to hear the right hon. Gentleman, instead of announcing that the Harrier was to be purchased, as many of us confidently hoped he would do, saying yet again that orders for the Harrier are to be postponed. I said in an earlier discussion that this kind of delay in procurement is one of the reasons for the escalating costs of military equipment, especially of aircraft equipment. The right hon. Gentleman flatly denied that statement, but I assure him from my own observations in the factories of Coventry and elsewhere that the dillying and dallying by the Government and previous Governments has been one of the major reasons for the escalation in costs.

What measures of urgency are the Government going to take to face the challenge of our times? We are living in a revolutionary ago in which, within a few weeks, the whole strategic situation of the West has been transformed. Our Western industrial democracy is under threat in an unimaginable way because we seem to be proceeding with our lives and our industry in the ways in which we went on with them in the past. But that does not undo the underlying fact that Western democracies, including our own, which is uppermost in our minds, relying as they do on energy, are now faced by a stranglehold which in a byegone age could not have been tolerated. How we resolve these questions is for the future—for the development, I hope, of other means of exerting pressures that ensure that the life blood and the breath of our industrial democracy are preserved.

There is no doubt that at the time of the Middle East war the Western Alliance was in disarray. It is, and was, useless to talk of the Brussels Declaration at the time of the war as anything but part of a general obeisance to the oil States. It was not a declaration of solidarity. There was no solidarity, political or military. The fundamentals of NATO were ignored when there was need of urgent and collective action to restrain the Russian presence in the Middle East, from which we are suffering second-hand.

The postscript of those days lies in the present humiliated and dangerous posture of the West, grovelling on its knees to the oil potentates who, like the Russians, know that when the tocsin sounded the Western countries were not there. We should be grateful that the United States did not echo the French king who said to the Duc de Crillon: Hang yourself, brave Crillon. We fought at Arques, and you weren't there. We live in days of grave economic danger. But the danger is deepened by our conspicuous military weakness, which deprives us of a great measure of our authority. The Middle East war proved the weaknesses of NATO as well as of the European Community. It is up to the Government to restore Britain's military and political credibility within the alliances by a radical and far-reaching strategic and tactical reappraisal. Only then can we restore our shaken authority with our enemies as well as with our American allies.