My Lords, I speak in this debate to support the amendment moved by my noble friends. I do so because it is the closest to resolving, or at least ameliorating, the problem—and it is a problem, as many have rehearsed. It is essentially a practical one, relating to training, leadership, command oversight, operational reporting and improved investigative capacity and competence.
I fear that I remain convinced that the resort to legal exceptionalism which this Bill contemplates, and which appears to have initiated so much of the debate in the House, is an ill-considered course of action.
It will make our service men and women more, not less, exposed to the challenges of the law. Law, in the context of this debate, is not simply the legislative framework within which war is conducted; it has become a weapon of that war. In the jargon, it is a new vector of attack. By way of emphasising my point, while this Bill has been maturing, we have seen the product of an extended review of the country’s security, defence, development and foreign policy. The results have been the integrated review paper and the companion MoD document, Global Britain in a Competitive Age.
These are both excellent pieces of work and speak to the radically different character of future war. At the heart of both documents are the themes of systemic and enduring competition between nations, between political systems, across multiple spheres. The documents emphasise the lack of clarity over where the threshold of conflict sits, the impossibility of differentiating between peace and war, home and away, friend and foe. They speak of the far greater reliance, in future, on technical advantage, automated processes, autonomous systems. They move the comprehension of conflict beyond the recent sense that it is periodic, adversarial, away fixtures.
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In the context of these reviews, does not the Bill have a spectacularly old-fashioned feel about it? It is specifically designed just for overseas, for high-intensity conflict, confined to individual accountability. In the context of the reviews, what contribution does the legal dimension of the Bill make to our avowed national commitment to universal human rights, to the less defined character of future conflict, to the potential introduction of autonomous weapons systems cued by artificial intelligence? The defence procurement process is often accused of bringing complex modifications of yesterday’s equipment to yesterday’s war. I fear that the legal aspects of the Bill feel somewhat akin to the half-brother of that process.
By contrast, I hope that this amendment, in bringing about a more formalised duty of care, will initiate the provision of a more proactive understanding of the changing character of war, and a greater need to exercise command with responsibility before, during and after conflict. I also hope it will help ensure that our Armed Forces, in pursuit of technological advantage, do not fall foul of the promise of novelty and find themselves with capabilities for which no legal framework exists. In this respect, I join my friend the noble Lord, Lord Browne of Ladyton, in believing that this House needs the opportunity to debate these issues outwith the constraints of the Bill, which I fear does nothing to address them. Indeed, might the Government pull the Bill? Might they adopt a duty of care as the answer to this problem and then return to the more important debate—that is, to reassess the legal framework in which war is conducted in the light of the findings of the integrated review and ask some more fundamental questions about it?