Part of the debate – in the House of Commons am 12:00 am ar 12 Rhagfyr 1973.
I admire the common sense of the hon. Member for Coventry, North (Mr. Edelman) when he attacks and criticises some of the wilder eccentricities in some of the fringe policies of his party's defence strategy, but I part company with him in his technical assessment of the lessons of the Middle East war. We cannot assume that this shows that Soviet technology and equipment is superior to Western equipment. At sea the Russian STYX missile was ineffective—or, rather, the counter-measures against it were very effective. On land, Western tanks, particularly the Centurions—even without the spares and ammunition they might have had—were more effective than any of the Soviet battle tanks. In the air the American aircraft which the Israeli Air Force was flying proved to be more effective than the Soviet aircraft.
My hon. Friend the Member for Stretford (Mr. Churchill) has given some remarkable statistics in Press articles on this matter. It is fair to say that the whole war underlined the importance of electronic warfare. I do not believe that the West lagged behind the Soviet Union in this branch of technology. I am glad that weapon development seems to suggest that the mass of armour and aircraft which the Soviet can put into action can be counter-balanced by more effective weapons which we have in the West.
In opening the debate my right hon. Friend was right to say that it would be a long time before we could draw the real lessons from the fighting. It will, indeed. I am sure that the Arab forces and their Soviet allies will not give us the technical information we need to draw the lessons from the fighting. I am reasonably sure, given the present state of diplomatic relations, that the Israelis will not be keen to give us information we need. I am also reasonably sure that the Americans will not be too enthusiastic about passing on to us the information that they have received from the Israelis. It takes a long time to draw the proper conclusions from the outbreak of fighting in the Middle East.
We know, without any technical analysis, that a surprise attack can be a very effective weapon. There is no doubt that the Egyptians and the Syrians gained an enormous advantage from the element of surprise which they were able to achieve. Given the importance of the element of surprise, much of the discussion earlier, about the state of alert of the American forces in Europe at the time of the Middle East war, sounded rather threadbare and academic.
Instead of complaining that the American forces were brought up to an adequate state of preparedness—as the right hon. and learned Member for Aberavon (Mr. John Morris) seemed to be arguing—we ought to have been pressing the Americans at an earlier date to bring their forces to a state of readiness at a time of substantial danger to the West. I fear that the criticisms of the right hon. and learned Member, if they carry any weight, may make the Americans, in some future state of emergency, more reluctant to bring their forces to a state of readiness.
There should be an overhauling of the whole system under which NATO brings its forces to a greater state of alert, not in order to slow down bringing the forces to a proper state of readiness but to make it easier for us to enter into a proper posture of preparedness. Therefore, in so far as we are reviewing the whole system of security alerts and preparedness, I hope that we remove some of the brakes in the system, rather than slow it down.