The military wanted to do many things but because of his attitude they were unable to fund properly the Strategic Defence Review (1998) which the Cabinet had approved, especially at a time when other departments were being showered with money.
The Ministry of Defence received the bare minimum from the chancellor, who wanted to give the military as little as he could get away with.
The increases that we had in budget were small and did not take into account the above-inflation cost rises of defence. They also did not reflect the additional operations and tasks the Army was involved in, in the Balkans, Kosovo, Sierra Leone and East Timor, so when we had to do something in Iraq and Afghanistan we were not as well prepared and equipped as we should have been.
You cannot magic helicopters out of mid-air; you cannot magic armoured vehicles quickly, which, if we’d had them, would certainly have saved lives. Projects were severely curtailed which makes me think that he was very unsympathetic towards the Armed Forces. As chancellor he only came to the MoD once when I was Chief of the Defence Staff, to talk about Rosyth dockyard. Other interested Cabinet ministers regularly came to be briefed on our problems.
The whole defence budget was extremely difficult to run in his time.
For Gordon Brown to say he has given the military all they asked for is not true. They asked for more helicopters but they were told they could not have any more.
In the end because of his budget restraints the helicopters arrived far too long after the conflict in Afghanistan had begun. He should have protected the helicopter budget but it was raided in 2004 and he was too late rectifying the situation.
Doing business through Urgent Operational Requirements ends up costing you more.
His performance yesterday avoided the main point about preparations for the Iraq War: that when you go to war, although one recognises not everything can be in place, one must be far better prepared than we were, and all the people in the MoD at the time have said so.
He cannot get away with saying, “I gave them everything they asked for.” That is simply disingenuous.
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