Speeches by Pollard.

“I entirely agree. Having an element of churn in our overall post fill is quite normal. NATO allows for a 5% churn, and we are nearly at that point. Not many of our NATO colleagues are anywhere near that, so that is welcome. Our offer has to be about family life, service life and career. The SDR set this out very clearl…”

“No, I don’t think it is. It is about how you implement that objective. We have to be very cognisant that if we want to fundamentally change the incentives within the system about attractiveness of job roles and attractiveness of an individual for their next job role, we have to have that throughout their entire career …”

“All resource allocations are done via the established process of creating an Armed Forces plan that flows from the SDR and allocating those resources. There is temptation to answer your question by saying there is a set of forces held solely for JEF and a set of forces held solely for NATO. That is not the case. In man…”

“No, I certainly do not recognise the buccaneering suggestion there, because it is part of an integrated model of deterrence and deployments that we have across the European theatre. Our partners in JEF are very clear that JEF is entirely complementary to NATO. Now Finland and Sweden have joined the NATO alliance, where…”

“I think it is the same one. As Paul says, Ministers decide.”

“I will bring the team in on the details of how we manage the tensions between different commitments. What I would say is that the SDR very clearly set out that our defensive posture and moving to a warfighting readiness is underpinned, yes, by our NATO membership and our leading role within NATO, but also through the b…”

“Yes. What we need to make sure of is our ability to respond to those crises—and we plan, in some cases, for concurrent crises. If you are going beyond concurrent crises, you are moving into much more of a warfighting position, which then moves from effectively holding forces at readiness to forward deploying forces. Th…”

“The US global force posture review is ongoing at the moment, and it will be for them to decide what capabilities they seek to redistribute across their priorities globally. I think, to be fair to the Americans in this respect, they have been saying under various Administrations for quite some time that it is their inte…”

“We are already stepping up as a country and looking at that. The Americans have asked Europe as a whole to spend more on defence, to step up support for Ukraine and to demonstrate our ability to refill stockpiles—so we are better able to warfight and therefore have greater deterrence. We are already doing many of those…”

“First, it is good to see more west-country MPs involved in defence, so it is good to see you back doing that. The decision to purchase F-35As is deliberately designed to increase the strategic dilemmas we can pose, as the United Kingdom but also as a NATO ally, to Russian nuclear escalation. Our current proposition onl…”

“I do not mean to put words into Lord West’s mouth. That is a dangerous pursuit for anyone, let alone a Minister. On the fundamentals of the question about updating our nuclear doctrine, clearly if we have an air leg to our nuclear capabilities, that does in effect update our nuclear doctrine because our nuclear doctrin…”

“In the respect that an air leg to our nuclear deterrence provides an update and a change from where we were before we announced it, we will add it to our fighting spirit and to how we plan. It provides options for our management of any crisis, escalation and support. That would be a given. However, I do not think that …”

“It certainly provides more opportunities. I would say that this capability is not being developed from scratch. That is useful for us to look at. Frankly, as a defence nerd in this House, there has not been much debate since I was elected about NATO’s nuclear mission prior to the F-35A announcement that we mentioned in…”

“No, I would not use those words at all. I would apply the assessment of the situation we inherited a year ago. We know that our armed forces have been hollowed out and underfunded for quite some time, which means that we have to invest more in defence and our capabilities. That is why, at the general election, I stood …”

“As an approach, since we took office last year, we have been very deliberate and clear in stepping up our role within NATO and European leadership. Part of that was predicated on resetting many of the relationships that, in our assessment, had deteriorated under the last Government. The EU reset is an important part of…”

“The point that I was trying to make was that increased leadership provides us with increased influence in that debate, and that is a deliberate strategy that we have been trying to undertake. We have been making the strong case to many of our European friends and NATO allies that the era of 2% is a relic of a previous …”

“Broadly, but we have implemented changes against that. As the Cabinet Office leads broadly on the aggregation of our article 3 commitments across the UK, we are making changes against that. We have been very clear that article 3 has not been upheld in the way that we would like it to be, and that is why it is not just …”

“I think we have been very clear that we are not satisfied with article 3 in the UK. But, equally, I think that is a position that every European NATO member state is clear on as well; there has been a correct focus on article 5, but there have not been many people looking at article 3. That is why we are seeking to cha…”

“Overall responsibility sits with the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in the Cabinet Office, then responsibilities are held across Government for different areas of expertise. For instance, last week, with the Chair, I was in front of the National Security Strategy Joint Committee, and we were looking at underwater…”

“It only concerns me if it does not work.”