00:00You are at peace, while we are actually at war.
00:05With respect, I'm clearing up the mess that I inherited from the last government.
00:08I dare say Winston Churchill had a bit of a mess to clear up from the previous government.
00:13We couldn't even stop a 150 km per hour mile, per mile an hour drone,
00:19from getting through to hitting a sovereign base in Cyprus.
00:23That means we were unprepared.
00:25We are finalising the investment plan.
00:29That sits with the Strategic Defence Review.
00:32By all means, take your party political swipes.
00:36Here is a paper produced by me and a Labour MP, Derek Twig, on the Defence Committee,
00:41with a foreword by Lord Robertson.
00:43We've all agreed that the government is not on a war footing and needs to be very quickly.
00:50Why is it not on a war footing now?
00:54Because the Strategic Review commits us to a war footing
00:58and we now need to put the funding in place in order to get there.
01:01I have already announced the increase in defence spending to 2.5%,
01:04something that didn't happen under the last government,
01:08and where at the election a credible proposition wasn't put forward by your party.
01:12I'm going to do this and I'm going to do it properly
01:14and I want to be able to explain to Parliament where the money is coming from.
01:17It sounds as though you are at peace while we are actually at war.
01:23With respect, I'm clearing up the mess that I inherited from the last government.
01:27I dare say Winston Churchill had a bit of a mess to clear up from the previous government.
01:31Margaret Thatcher had a bit of a mess to clear up from the previous government.
01:35But now we are facing an urgency.
01:37Why were we so unready to defend Cyprus?
01:41Well, we've got a lot of defensive capability in Cyprus, as you know,
01:47including the air capability there.
01:50And I've been constantly talking to the Cypriots about this.
01:54I was on the phone yet again to the President on Saturday at some great length.
01:58His assessment, same as my assessment,
02:01is that our two military teams are working as closely as they've ever worked now
02:05and we are absolutely determined to do everything we need to do to defend Cyprus.
02:10And that's what I discussed with them at some length,
02:11not for the first time in recent weeks on Saturday morning.
02:14We couldn't even stop 150 km per hour, mile per mile an hour drone
02:20from getting through to hitting a sovereign base in Cyprus.
02:24That means we were unprepared.
02:26And the very fact that you immediately wanted to defend a destroyer
02:30meant you had failed to anticipate the need to defend Cyprus with a destroyer.
02:36But this smacks of a lack of warfighting mentality
02:40that reaches right across the government,
02:43which is what we address in this paper about warfighting readiness,
02:47where we are not at.
02:48And the Chiefs of Staff are saying we need to be ready for war.
02:52So when are we going to be prepared and prepared for what?
02:56We are finalising the investment plan.
03:01That sits with the Strategic Defence Review.
03:05This smacks of an enormous complacency.
03:07Well, this smacks of the fact that for years
03:08there was underinvestment by the last government
03:10and the stripping out and following out of our armed forces.
03:13We had 18 months to deal with that.
03:13Copyright Ben Wallace, who was the Defence Secretary.
03:16I'm not making a particle political point.
03:17Well, honestly, 14 years of underinvestment,
03:1918 months for Labour government.
03:21But take drones, for example.
03:22We're picking up the underinvestment of your government.
03:25The whole concept of warfighting has changed in the last 12 months.
03:30I understand that.
03:32I was in Ukraine very recently,
03:34and the Ukrainian armed forces are mystified
03:37and want to offer help,
03:39as they are offering help to the Gulf states,
03:41to the NATO frontline states and to the NATO JEF,
03:45about how to prepare for drone warfare.
03:47This is being held up by the lack of the Defence Industrial Plan.
03:51No, it's not.
03:52I had President Zelensky in last week.
03:54I speak to him very, very regularly.
03:55He was in last week for some time.
03:57I spoke exactly about this to him.
03:59I've been to see for myself on a number of occasions
04:01in Kyiv their capability.
04:03We are putting in backfill to that,
04:05working with them on industrial capability
04:07to produce drones with them.
04:09And I discussed this very issue with him last week.
04:11Just for the record,
04:12but he did not say that anything that they want to do
04:15is being held up by anything the UK is doing.
04:17On the contrary,
04:18he sees us as their foremost ally,
04:20and I'm very pleased that we've been able to achieve that,
04:23actually on a cross-party basis.
04:24How many defence reviews do you think took place
04:26during the Second World War?
04:28Well, I don't know off the top of my head,
04:29but I know that I've got one in front of them.
04:30Well, the answer is none.
04:31Well, because when you are at war,
04:34you get on with it.
04:35You don't wait around for a plan.
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