(Wentworth and Dearne)
(Lab): The heart of our UK commitment to NATO is indeed a
fully capable war-fighting division, which the former Chief of
the Defence Staff has described as
“the standard whereby a credible army is judged.”
Why will this modernised war-fighting third division not be
delivered until 2030? Why did Ministers decide it would be built
around AJAX when
they knew about the deep-seated problems? Why, when it took the
German Chancellor just three days to overturn decades of defence
policy and boost defence spending by €100 billion, does the
National Audit Office say that UK Ministers could take another
nine months even to decide whether to stick with or
scrap AJAX
The Minister for the Armed Forces (): The right hon.
Gentleman knows that candour is the name of the game whenever I
am speaking. I think there are reasons why both sides of the
House could reflect on quite why our Army has the age of kit that
it has. Governments of both parties have missed a number of
opportunities to decide to renew the Army’s equipment inventory
over the last 20 or 30 years. The reality is that the Army has to
be redesigned to meet the threat as it now is, and I think that
two armoured infantry or strike brigades with a deep recce strike
brigade is exactly what a modern war-fighting division should
look like. Within NATO, there are discussions about how the NATO
force needs to transform to meet the modern threat.
