Jim Shannon – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Ministry of Defence

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Jim Shannon on 2016-03-16.

To ask the Secretary of State for Defence, what steps his Department is taking to improve defence capacity building.

Michael Fallon

We engage in capacity building activities with a wide range of international partners, covering a broad spectrum of topics including Humanitarian and Disaster Relief; Countering Violent Extremism; Peace Support Operations and countering illicit trafficking.

We committed in the Strategic Defence and Security Review 2015 to increase our capacity building with partners, and have since then expanded our activity in a number of ways.

For example, we have launched a new three year Counter-IED capacity building programme with Pakistan. We have also joined the US-German Trans-Atlantic Capability Enhancement and Training (TACET) initiative, under which we will deploy Short Term Training Teams to Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland. In Ukraine, where we have already trained over 2,000 members of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, we are aiming to provide additional support to Ukrainian Defence reform including practical interventions in areas such as strategic communication and modernisation of procurement and logistics systems. In Nigeria we continue to expand our resident British Military Advisory and Training Team, and have committed to more than doubling the number of UK military personnel who deploy on short term training tasks to 300 in 2016. We have also significantly increased the support we provide to the Jordanian Army to help them improve border security.