HC Deb 19 September 2002 vol 390 cc323-4W
Mr. Wray

To ask the Secretary of State for Defence if he will review the two operations commitment. [72939]

Mr. Ingram

The White Paper on the Strategic Defence Review: A New Chapter, Cm5566, addressed this issue (paragraphs 31–32 and 91). Since the Strategic Defence Review (SDR) was published in 1998 the risk of large scale conflict in Europe has further reduced, and relations with Russia have seen a step change improvement. But we have also routinely deployed our Armed Forces on more operations concurrently than we envisaged in the SDR, though the scale of these deployments has been in some respects smaller than we envisaged at the time of the SDR. That has created the risk of overburdening key enabling units, who are essential for all expeditionary deployments (for example, communicators, engineers and movements personnel).

We now need to factor these evolutions in the strategic and operational environment more fully into our planning.