It had to happen sometime. Liam Fox has got something right.
One of the most wasteful elements of defence spending for the past century has been the idiotic clamour that all three armed services should have equal budgets. If the Army needed an extra half a billion, the Air Force and Navy would demand equal treatment. If the forces were invented yesterday nobody would start with three services. Liam Fox yesterday took a bold step to challenge the military establishment. I urged him to take a second stride.
Paul Flynn (Newport West) (Lab): The statement is welcome because it recognises the waste and inefficiencies arising from rivalries between the three services, but should the Secretary of State not take the next logical step that the realities of modern warfare demand, which is to aim to create a single, unified service?
Dr Fox: No one can deny the intellectual logic behind the hon. Gentleman’s point, but anyone who has spoken to a Canadian Defence Minister in recent years will have got a strong message: “Whatever you try, don’t try that.” There are differences in the approach of the single services, sometimes differences in the ethos of the single services and, clearly, differences in their history too. As we are asking our servicemen and women to do so much for us, the last thing that we want to do is to destroy that important emotional attachment to their heritage.
In the interest of brevity I ommitted my main point that was slightly off-message on our military role. We fight beyond our national interests and die beyond our reasonable responsibilities.
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