General Lord Houghton told us that the UK Armed Forces have maintained high levels of readiness for standing commitments (to domestic security and overseas non- discretionary tasks) and contingent commitments (commitments to allies and alliances such as the commitment to deploy forces to NATO at varying levels of readiness). Therefore readiness for these tasks (as opposed to warfighting readiness) was unlikely to be an issue because the Armed Forces had long been subject to demands to engage in significant 200 Oral evidence taken on 4 July 2023, HC (2022–23) 1689, Q44; Oral evidence taken on 12 December 2023, HC (2023–24) 54, Q95 201 Oral evidence taken on 4 July 2023, HC (2022–23) 1689, Q43 202 HC Deb, 26 October 2023, HCWS1097 [Commons Written Ministerial Statement] Ready for War? 39 operational activity, geographically widely dispersed and across a range of tasks.203 The First Sea Lord also acknowledged this, and when questioned about the range of tasks carried out by the Royal Navy noted that: You will always have more tasks for a Navy than there are ships, by dint of the fact that we are a maritime nation. … I don’t own the task allocation; I am merely forced to generate forces against that. The range of tasks would be a question for Ministers. As for whether I have sufficient forces to meet the full range of tasks all the time in the way they would wish, as I said at the beginning, there is always a desire to do more than the fleet is actually capable of doing. What we pride ourselves on is the degree of agility that will allow us to rebalance against what the ministerial priorities are at the time.204