Examination of witnesses (Questions 40
- 59)
WEDNESDAY 10 FEBRUARY 1999
MR KEVIN
TEBBIT, MR
COLIN BALMER,
AIR MARSHAL
SIR JOHN
DAY and MR
JOHN HOWE
40. What else does the Director of Operational
Capability do other than lessons learned on existing exercises
and operations?
(Air Marshal Sir John Day) The Director of Operational
Capability, which is a tri-Service directorate—again directly
working for the Secretary of State—looks at different areas
of either a single Service or a joint capability. He does an audit
basically.
41. So, in effect, he conducts tests of
audits?
(Mr Tebbit) As I was saying when you raised that
point, we do it through exercises and simulation, operational
analysis, and the audits which the Director of Operational Capability
conducts.
(Air Marshal Sir John Day) When you said "test"——
42. It is an audit.
(Air Marshal Sir John Day) He does not test by
saying "how quickly can you deploy that?", he goes and
talks to all the people involved, not just at that unit, he will
go and talk at headquarters level. These are very comprehensive
reports that look at every aspect. It is an audit rather than
a physical test. If you put that audit next to, say, a sea training
report or you put it next to a TACEVAL report you then have a
very good measure and you will see a fair amount of correlation
between the two, not a complete correlation.
43. Would the Committee be able to share,
and it is obviously enormously valuable information coming back
from the Director of Operational Capability and all the other
evaluations, exactly where we are with our military capability,
particularly in the area of readiness and training on any basis
that the Department would care to name? This is an opportunity
for us to understand the challenges you are facing. You may think
it is going to be a security problem if it is discovered that
we cannot deploy one particular part of the Armed Services for
whatever reason as part of the evaluation but surely this is information
that would be very useful to the Committee in assessing how the
MoD is going on? There is actually none of that in here.
(Mr Tebbit) No, and I am not surprised. I do not
think that I would want to put that sort of thing in a report
of this kind. There are other measurements used in addition to
the audit itself. The Army, the Navy and the Air Force have got
different internal methods of measuring what we are discussing.
The Army has a thing called Measurement of Fighting Power. The
Navy uses a slightly different system based on the a balanced
score card, a fairly familiar management technique in industry.
The Air Force uses something more directly related to the audit
of operational capability. These are very much internal documents
for management purposes and I think there would be difficulty
in using them more generally because they are very frank and very
hard hitting and they are designed——
44. Should you not be frank and hard hitting
with the public and Parliament?
(Mr Tebbit) ——to bring units up to
fighting strength rather than to give aid and comfort to those
who they may be ranged against.
45. Part of the problem, as some of my colleagues
will talk about later on personnel issues, is this just skims
over some of the personnel issue problems that you are facing
that are very properly matters of public concern. It is impossible
for us to be able to get a handle on the challenges you are facing
and, therefore, the priorities, for example, that defence should
have. Let us take the latest pay round: defence got a 3.5 per
cent pay award and new nurses are getting an 11 per cent pay rise
because there was seen to be a crisis in nurse recruiting. Some
might actually say there is a crisis in recruitment to the Armed
Services or retention in the Armed Services and that should have
been addressed in the pay round. If the MoD is completely obfuscatory
in the challenges and problems that it is facing it becomes impossible
for the public or Parliament to understand what is going on.
(Mr Tebbit) I quite take your point. We are very
open about the shortfalls in manpower and manning levels and very
open about the measures we are adopting to try to bring ourselves
up to strength. I think that is an area that not only are we tracking
very carefully ourselves, it is an area of serious concern, but
we are perfectly willing and happy to discuss with the Committee
on exactly where we stand in terms of manning shortfalls, what
our recruiting performance is, what our targets are and what we
are doing to try to improve retention because this is a critical
issue, I quite agree. But it is rather different from a very detailed
audit of fighting strength within a particular unit.
46. It is part of it and colleagues will
want to return to that. Perhaps I can take up one issue, say,
of sustainability. Let us take one element of that, ammunition
supplies. During the Cold War I can understand why everyone was
preparing to meet a massive threat on a central front and one
would want to keep a secret exactly the precise amount of ammunition
and stores one had but now we are talking about not facing that
threat for up to ten years and we are talking about the capacity
to deploy Armed Forces to regional conflict at the highest level
and therefore it is a matter of concern to Parliament about exactly
how sustainable the force posture is. Just how much ammunition
and war supplies do we have for the Armed Forces? How many days
are we expected to sustain the Armed Forces in combat before you
need to be turning round to the factories that appear to be about
to close in order to sustain them on operations in combat?
(Mr Tebbit) As I have said, at the general level
we are only too happy to explain the difficulties in terms of
recruitment, in terms of the need to improve rapid deployment
capabilities, which is why I was reading out some of the main
targets in the Public Service Agreement, and to sustain and support
operations overseas including medical support which is one of
the biggest concerns. I think if one were asked to go down into
the very, very small details and share them then I think there
would be some problems, not just for us but some of our allies
where precise details of fighting stocks are still regarded as
sensitive. Mr Balmer is looking hard to find some of this information
in the report.
(Mr Balmer) It is certainly the case that compared
to ten years ago we publish a lot more detail of equipment holdings
than we used to. Aircraft numbers used to be classified as secret,
we now publish them in these reports. The same was true of tanks
and ships. All of the details of major equipments are now published,
they are all in these documents. It is also the case that for
many of our missile stocks we now publish the total purchased.
That does not quite tell you how many we have got in stock because
it does not tell you how many we have necessarily used. One or
two are still regarded as sensitive because they are a particularly
important form of warfare, say for instance our heavyweight torpedo
is one of those we regard as rather sensitive, but lots of other
missile numbers we do indeed publish. We do not publish precise
numbers of rounds of ammunition but I think that is largely because
it is not regarded as all that significant. By and large we have
adequate stocks of these things.
47. We are supposed to take that to reassure
us?
(Mr Balmer) If the Committee wanted to go into
more detail of these things I do not think we would have a great
deal of difficulty in doing so. Bt it did not seem to us sufficiently
significant to put it in this document. It is not a key element
of our performance.
48. The Committee is going to take evidence
from Lord Gilbert in a fortnight about security of supply and
controversy about Royal Ordnance where obviously these issues
will be explored in more detail. You can assure us that we will
get the necessary information in order to be able to ask questions
about sustainability, particularly in the case of ammunition,
to support that inquiry? You do not have any difficulty?
(Mr Tebbit) We will do all we can to take that
on board. My main point was about details of actual readiness
states and the precise performance of individual units in meeting
them. That is classified. As far as I and the CDS are concerned
at the moment they should remain so because they would be of value
to a potential adversary.
49. One can extrapolate from the personnel
stage that if every infantry battalion is minus one company because
they are under-recruiting then——
(Mr Tebbit) I am sure as Air Marshal Day will
confirm we do not do it that way. We do not send units out which
are unprepared or under-manned, we organise ourselves accordingly,
which is why we have pressure on individual areas. There is a
distinction between having total shortfalls and sending out units
not fully combat fit.
50. In measuring capability when you buy
new equipment, such as Challenger or Eurofighter, it increases
capability. How is that going to be measured in the future? How
much will Eurofighter and the new carriers, for example, increase
our capability? How are we going to be able to express that?
(Air Marshal Sir John Day) I think the process
starts very early on in the procurement process as we put together
the operational requirement. The increase in capability that we
require to be able to continue to match and indeed over-match
the threat so if put forces into combat we will still be able
to defeat an enemy or stand a good chance of defeating an enemy,
that goes into the operational requirements phase. That then feeds
into the procurement process. When the weapons system then comes
into service, we expect to achieve that improvement in performance
and that will feed into how we use that weapons system, how we
train for it and what we expect to be able to do with it. I may
have missed the point of your question, but the fundamental reason
we——
51. I want to understand how you are going
to analyse and present future performance reports when there will
be a step change in capability when the new equipment becomes
available in a particular area. How are you going to express that
in your performance reports?
(Air Marshal Sir John Day) Well, the standards
for units operating new equipment or the requirement of what they
can achieve in terms of performance will be higher than the previous
performance. I think your background is stronger in main battle
tanks than mine, so I perhaps will leave that to you to mull over.
If I just talk about aeroplanes, when Eurofighter comes in, a
genuinely multi-role aircraft, we will be requiring the squadrons
to operate in the multi-roles and to be training in those different
roles, so whereas now an air defence unit will focus on air defence
skills and weaponry and a ground attack squadron will focus on
ground attack and such like, with some of the Eurofighter squadrons
they will be doing both and indeed we will be expecting much better
performance out of the overall weapon system than we have out
of, say, the current weapon system.
52. But to use Eurofighter as an example,
some would say that there has been a trade-off in terms of Eurofighter's
performance because it is not a stealthy aircraft and basically
there has been a trade-off between cost and capability in coming
to a decision to procure Eurofighter as it is now designed. How
do you measure or how will you measure that cost-effectiveness
of that decision?
(Mr Balmer) That is rather a different question,
I think, than the operational analysis of it. You are now describing
whether the requirement was correctly written and whether we have
procured the right weapon system which is quite a different set
of questions which we analyse through our procurement process
and through our post-project evaluation process.
(Mr Tebbit) Perhaps Mr Howe could answer it because
we do indeed model the performance characteristics of equipment
throughout the development stage to make sure that we are getting
value for money and the right balance between performance and
cost.
(Mr Howe) It is just that latter point I wanted
to pick up. Equipment requirements are not expressed simply in
terms of the operational performance of the equipment and its
operational characteristics, but also in terms of through-life
supportability, sustainability and so on. The changes we are making
in our procurement organisation and the creation of the Chief
of Defence Logistics taken together will enable us, I think, to
reach better judgments on the balance between pure capability,
through-life supportability, through-life cost and so on. These
things, these dimensions, if you like, which will be reflected
in the way that the requirement for equipment is specified, will
be monitored throughout the development of the equipment and indeed
monitored through the equipment's life.
53. So how do you come to a decision? In
the old days you knew what the threat was because it was all piled
up on the other side of the East German border and you had a pretty
good idea what they had and, therefore, the capability requirement
to oppose it, whereas now we do not have that precise definition
of threat, so how do you make that cost-effectiveness judgment
about trading off capability in order to have more of them?
(Mr Tebbit) Well, we do look at this in great
detail through the SDR and we did work out what it was that we
were likely to be ranged against in credible scenarios because
we do know what the systems are around the world even though they
are proliferated. We may not know precisely, as it were, where
the threat might come from, but we know what capabilities the
threat will bring with it if it were to emerge, so we did model
scenarios very carefully and sized the post-SDR force levels and
goals on the basis of the most exacting threat we expected to
have to meet while at the same time making judgments about whether
we would be alone or operating in coalition and what others, as
it were, would be bringing to those hypothetical parties, so there
was a very careful effort throughout the SDR to be as clear as
we could about the sorts of things we would expect to meet.
54. But that all began from a judgment that
the MoD was not going to get any more money.
(Mr Tebbit) No, it began with a judgment about
the nature of our foreign policy objectives and what defence should
do to support them.
55. But the Secretary of State announced
at the beginning of the SDR that there would be no more money
for defence, so that must have been a factor.
(Mr Tebbit) Well, at the very beginning it was
based on the foreign policy environment and that was the driver
for the Defence Review. It was said early on that it was not going
to be done with more money because it became necessary to clarify
that, but the extent to which the resources drove the outcome
was, I think, secondary to the foreign policy environment that
drove the whole thing right from the start and indeed I wrote
the foreign policy framework at the Foreign Office before I came
across, so I can say that quite clearly, but chapter 1 was indeed———
56. Would you let us have a copy?
(Mr Tebbit) Chapter 1 is in the SDR, it is published.
57. That is it, is it?
(Mr Tebbit) Well, that is a summary version.
Mr Blunt: Would it
be possible to have the first go at that because I think most
people would be interested?
Chairman
58. I am sure Mr Blunt would have recommended
the provision of that information when he was an adviser! I am
sure you jumped ship before it hit the fan in the Foreign Office,
Mr Tebbit, so you may have some even better reasons why you should
have moved to defence.
(Mr Tebbit) I am not sure how to take that, Mr
Chairman!
Mr Hancock
59. I was going to ask two questions and
I would like to switch them round because I would like to keep
the theme running on in what you have been saying about procurement
and the type of equipment and talk about some of the unfortunate
shortfalls we have now got where the in-service dates have dropped
back quite considerably on certain pieces of equipment and maybe
I can start with the biggest question of all which is when do
you expect the in-service dates to now be for the first half squadron
or squadron of Eurofighter?
(Air Marshal Sir John Day) You are looking at
me, but I think it is actually a procurement question.
(Mr Tebbit) It is a procurement question. I think
we have a date of 2002 for the arrival of the first Eurofighter.
We do not have a published date for the full in-service date.
Mr Hancock: Surely
the first time is meaningless, is it not, really because you are
not going to have 20 odd pilots all looking out of the window
at the one who gets to fly it, are you? You are looking at the
first squadron of operational Eurofighters and the implications
of that is that it is already slipping because the first plane
is now a year later. You tell me, when do you now expect to have
the first half squadron—and I do not think that is an unreasonable
question—for the Eurofighters ready and willing to do the
business on behalf of the RAF in this country?
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