Examination of witnesses (Questions 420
- 439)
WEDNESDAY 15 NOVEMBER 2000
AIR VICE-MARSHAL
B BURRIDGE, AIR
VICE-MARSHAL
H G MACKAY, COMMODORE
M KERR, MAJOR
GENERAL A DENARO
and MAJOR GENERAL
J C B SUTHERELL
420. We are coming to visit you in a fortnight
so you can give us the answer then.
(Air Vice-Marshal Mackay) That is one of the reasons
perhaps why, compared with Sandhurst for example, we do not have
so many university graduates because the Royal Air Force has one
of the longest post-graduate training courses following initial
officer training. To be a fast jet pilot will take three years
or so until you reach your squadron. The age of the vast majority
of graduates we have at Cranwell is about 22, 23 or so. Add another
three years onto that and he will not reach his squadron until
he is 26 and by that time he or she is married, they have family
commitments and it is difficult to hang onto them for as long
as we would want. We are actually looking for 18-year-olds so
we get the return of service from them.
(Major General Sutherell) Where Shrivenham fits into
this particular process is that first of all I am responsible
for Welbeck Sixth Form College which takes people in as a Sixth
Form College and they go from there on to Shrivenham where they
will do an undergraduate programme for three years before, in
the Army's case, going on to Sandhurst with General Denaro. At
Shrivenham I also have some RAF officers who have actually been
commissioned, who have come in from the ranks, who do their degrees
with me. On the issue about the sort of people, just to give you
a feeling, at Welbeck 73% are from comprehensive schools. In terms
of how one finds these young men and women, by and large they
are very committed. They go to Welbeck with a view to joining
the services. By and large they maintain that commitment; some
change their minds but not very many. They are very committed.
I would echo the fact that we need to develop them both in terms
of their physical robustness and also in terms of their working
together as a team and developing their leadership skills. They
are good people.
(Major General Denaro) All of us want people who are
making our service the career of first choice. That is really
what we want. We do not want people who have failed to get into
here or were disappointed there. We want people who are first
choice. Secondly, I believe the diversity you talk about is one
of our strengths. I have travelled to a lot of the other academies
in the world and, as you heard from the Admiral, most of them
are university-length courses. Our organisations are essentially
post graduate and they are focusing young people for a year on
command and leadership which is a fantastic start to life, not
just to military life but to life. I know the Americans say they
are training leaders for the nation. I would not be so grandiose
as to say we are doing that but I very much hope we are putting
young people back into society who have had the huge privilege
of studying leadership and nothing else for a whole year.
Mr Gapes
421. May I ask you about the military technological
changes which are equally rapid? Are you confident that you are
able in the Sandhurst context to respond to the need to adapt
your courses to meet the demands of technology for the foreseeable
future? Do you need more resources if you are to do that adequately?
(Major General Denaro) I can give you quite a short
answer and then maybe the Commandant of the Royal Military College
of Science might support it. The answer is yes, in broad terms
we must keep abreast of all the technological developments because
we are moving our youngsters into a very technological world.
That said, at Sandhurst we are really training leadership and
we are doing it at the most basic level. From after Sandhurst,
they go into their special to-arm training. If they are going
to be a gunner they will then go to Larkhill they will go to Larkhill
and spend six months, if they are going to be a tank officer they
will go to Bovington or the signals will go to Blandford. We are
not trying to teach them the technical aspects of their future
role but technology as a whole in order to make them a better
leader. On resource terms, no, we do not have it yet. I would
reckon that anybody going to Sandhurst, from any university, would
find us way behind the times in resource terms.
(Major General Sutherell) Here I am talking primarily
in an Army context. We provide the technology insert, which is
really quite a modest insert to General Denaro's course. After
they have had their individual arm education they then come back
to us for about three and a half weeks on the Army Junior Division
where, as part of that six-month course, they have three and a
half weeks with us. Later on if they are selected for Staff College,
they will have a much more substantial period with us, nine to
12 months before they go on to the Joint College. I shall talk
about how we keep up to date in a moment, but to give you a feel,
there is a review going on at the moment looking at how much of
that is done and when it is done. However, it is still being looked
at and at the moment we do very little technology education and
training in an Army Officers' career early and then we do quite
a big chunk later on, in contrast to the other two services. How
do we keep up to date? Frankly from our point of view at Shrivenham,
it is crucial that we are up to date. We cannot really deliver
what we are meant to do unless we are up to speed with current
technology. The ways we tackle that are as follows. The first
is, as you have already heard, that we have an academic partner,
Cranfield University, and have had since 1984, who as a post-graduate
university specialises in the application of modern technology.
Their academic staff are continually refreshed in terms of new
blood coming in. They are conducting research as a matter of course
at Shrivenham, so in their areas of expertise they are cutting
edge. In a sense we get an academic element there. Secondly, our
military instructors at Shrivenham are all people who have actually
come from the front line, whether that front line is in units
and brigades or whether it is perhaps with the Procurement Agency
or the equipment capability area. Before they come as a DS, they
will have been working in those areas so they will be dealing
with the leading edge technology, whether it is actually in service
or whether it is coming into service. We have a policy whereby
they do not actually spend more than an absolute maximum of three
years with us; normally about two and a half years. So we can
continually refresh them in that way. The third thing is that
we have very close links with the Defence Evaluation and Research
Agency (DERA) and with various military industries so that we
have people from both industry and from DERA coming to give lectures;
our courses go to visit those places, so that it is a major factor
for us to be up to speed with technology in terms of what we are
teaching. The other dimension is the way we are applying the technology
for the delivery of the education but I sense that is perhaps
not what you were getting at. I can talk about that if you want.
422. Can you talk about possible changes? As
I understand it, the Royal Navy closed its engineering college
in Plymouth and now uses Southampton University for outsourcing
the training. Do you think that the Army should so something similar?
(Major General Sutherell) You are now deep into the
detail of the Defence Training Review. There is a proposal, which
is getting slightly beyond the proposal stage, that we should
do exactly that, that we should outsource our undergraduate programme
and it should be done on a defence-wide basis.
423. When you say defence-wide do you mean that
all three services should do it jointly?
(Major General Sutherell) That is one of the things
we are investigating as to exactly how we might implement this
programme. If you go back to Mr Fisher's comments, he made the
point that defence should be quite strong in the marketplace.
Clearly if we are going to go into negotiation with universities
it would make sense that we would do it on a defence basis rather
than on a single service basis. I have to say that we are talking
about stuff here now which is in the process of being looked at
in the Defence Training Review.
Chairman
424. Which institutions would be vulnerable
to any privatisation?
(Major General Sutherell) In terms of outsourcing
what we would be looking at is outsourcing the undergraduate programme
from RMCS which at the moment is about one third of our business.
425. Do you mean they would all go to those
institutions or they would come to you to teach?
(Major General Sutherell) In one respect we are outsourced
already in so far as those academic courses are delivered by Cranfield
University. The thought would be that they might go to get the
undergraduate courses they need from other universities on a similar
programme to the one the Royal Navy is using at the moment at
Southampton. We would obviously need to go to more than one university
to get those courses.
Mr Gapes
426. Is there not a danger, although it is good
that there is a wider association with society, that you are already
talking about principally taking graduates anyway and you lose
the camaraderie, the military ethos, the collectiveness amongst
your recruits?
(Major General Sutherell) First of all what we are
looking at here are the people who are going to Shrivenham, who
compose about 10% of General Denaro's cliente"le. It is that
10% in most cases who have come on from Welbeck Sixth Form College.
427. I see; we are talking about younger people.
(Major General Sutherell) Yes; exactly. Also some
from the Royal Air Force as well.
428. These are not graduates or 22-year-olds.
(Major General Sutherell) Absolutely not; no. As will
become apparent, Shrivenham has a number of outputs and the undergraduate
programme is one of them. We are principally a post-graduate college
but we do have this undergraduate programme at the moment.
429. So we are only talking about the outsourcing
for the undergraduate programme, not for anything else.
(Major General Sutherell) Correct.
(Commodore Kerr) May I reassure you on that point
about the loss of the military ethos because we have a lot of
experience of this now in the Navy with the Thunderer Squadron
at Southampton, the engineering sponsorship scheme, which is this
scheme which you know about. It has a very strong military ethos.
It is run by a commander with a lieutenant in support. They have
their own headquarters, they have a very strong sense of self-perception,
very strong cohesion. They do things together and an enormous
amount of naval general education is fed into the training programme.
For example, they are constantly doing adventure training together,
they are constantly out in yachts together, sail training ships
together. They come out of that really quite well-rounded young
officers.
(Major General Sutherell) We recognise that there
is a risk. How we implement it is going to be crucial. We are
working extremely closely with the Navy and with Thunderer in
terms of how it might be done.
(Air Vice-Marshal Mackay) From the Royal Air Force
point of view, one of the things we are doing at Cranwell in the
professional training of our engineers, for example, is that we
have got some laboratories at Cranwell for electro-optics and
lasers and we get people across from the French Air Force at Salon
doing the equivalent thing. They do experiments in our laboratories,
we hope to send some of the young officers there to do experiments
in laboratories where they are better than us. So we can trade
off that sort of thing.
Chairman
430. The next question is for the Commandant
of the Joint Services Command and Staff College. I can promise
you that it is not a prelude to a punchup. You will have heard
or read in the Sunday Times about our report. Let me rephrase
that. You will have read our report Lessons of Kosovo, which I
hope is adopted as a standard text at all your institutions. What
will course work will involve learning lessons of the war? Obviously
it was a very significant development in military and political
history. Do you say to your staff that we fought a war, there
are many lessons to be learned, it is necessary for our young
men and women to see what happened and what should be done? Or
are you just inserting stuff on the Gulf War or anything subsequently?
(Air Vice-Marshal Burridge) No, we are continually
having to reflect what is going on in the external environment.
Inasmuch as the Gulf War is a good example of that sort of a war,
that sort of operational activity, so Northern Ireland, Bosnia
and Kosovo are equally applicable. We amass all the lessons learned
and apply them to our various exercises so that they can be exposed,
reinforced, whatever. Your own report is a good example of the
political process which we teach as well, the whole business of
scrutiny, etcetera.
431. What about things like lessons from the
media or countering asymmetric responses? Very often people complain
in universities that it takes so long to change a syllabus. Are
you subject to such pressures? Then they have to go off and get
the changes validated by different institutions, inspected by
external institutions. I hope you are not subject to the same
kinds of pressures.
(Air Vice-Marshal Burridge) No; indeed not. If the
world changed tomorrow, we could react tomorrow. That said, outside
it all of course is the shell of your accreditation and we would
not want accreditation necessarily to lead the operational product,
but that is a consideration. No, we can react quickly to change
and we do.
(Major General Sutherell) In terms of our post-graduate
courses exactly the same thing would apply when it comes to looking
at the implications for the application of technology and management
and how you do that. One is constantly looking to be up to date.
432. As the Navy were involved in Kosovo I am
sure the same applies to you.
(Commodore Kerr) I am sure it does further up the
line. My job at Dartmouth, however, is to try to get people to
survive in a shipboard environment and that takes about a year.
You are talking about something which is too advanced for the
initial officer training.
(Air Vice-Marshal Mackay) Certainly at the Royal Air
Force College Cranwell we have the operational studies syllabus
which does continually change to take account of things which
are happening in the outside world. We are at an early stage of
training and it is perhaps superficial.
433. With this great emphasis now on jointness
in military operations, how has this been reflected in the change
in military training?
(Air Vice-Marshal Burridge) The biggest manifestation
is the creation of the Joint Services Command and Staff College;
one of the three initiatives which came out of the defence cost
study, along with the permanent Joint Headquarters and the Joint
Rapid Reaction Force. We have completely restructured the post-graduate
command and staff training which we give to officers in both the
way we deliver it and what we deliver. It is joint in the sense
that it is delivered jointly, so people live in a syndicate of
ten from all three services and probably with three overseas students
amongst that syndicate of ten. The subjects are taught at a level
which is required so that you can understand "jointery",
so that you can understand how you knit together the contributions
that each of the services brings to the operational sphere and
how you synchronise that. That post-graduate level in the mid-thirties
is the engine room and that spins out to what we do at the junior
level as well.
434. I recall a long time ago now teaching on
the Open University that they were quite pioneering in having
courses in social science which genuinely brought the social sciences
together and did not just teach political studies, sociology,
anthropology, economics. How do you find instructors who have
actually been through the process and can do more than simply
bolt on what they have read about the Army or the Navy if they
are Air Force? Do you have people who are "jointery"
oriented to do that instruction?
(Air Vice-Marshal Burridge) What we are seeking to
do is educate people to be able to deal with the complexity of
the modern world. So we need to draw out of them the ability to
be analytical, to conceptualise, in perhaps a way that we did
not need to do in the Cold War where everything was pretty much
black and white. From our instructors we require a particular
approach to things. It is a question of educating and the students
themselves have to contribute. Seventy-five% of them have operational
experience and it is very important that they share that. It is
a question of drawing out of the students so that they develop
a sort of mind. You do not actually need people as instructors
who can reel off the order of battle of the Royal Navy, the Royal
Air Force and the Army. You actually need people who themselves
can understand how to knit ideas together. It is very much as
you would expect in post-graduate education.
435. When I had my first job I arrived at the
institution at nine o'clock and I was rushed to my first class
at 9.05, never having gone through one second of instruction on
how to teach. Perhaps it showed. What kind of training would your
instructors have in how to be a lecturer in a classroom? It must
be a very different experience. Are you satisfied that they can
make the transition?
(Air Vice-Marshal Burridge) By and large our instructors
are very experienced lieutenant-colonels. We give them a week
in which we cover certain things. First of all we cover those
subjects which they are going to teach didactically, particularly
campaign planning and mission analysis, something they will know
about but will not necessarily understand how best to teach it.
Another one is resource accounting and budgeting because it is
relatively new. We guide them on how to facilitate, how to make
sure you maintain a balanced input across your ten people. We
give them guidance on the matter of dealing with diversity; three
overseas students in each syndicate, therefore they need to understand
the nuances of that. We teach them our reporting system, how our
assessment system works so we can gain a degree of standardisation
and then we teach them procedurally the things we do in the college.
It is a lifeline. As you well know, it is a question of gaining
the experience and developing your own style in these things.
They are in my view the vital building blocks from which they
have to start. These people are familiar with doing this sort
of thing anyway because that is the way the military functions.
436. They have not marked essays before.
(Air Vice-Marshal Burridge) No. Some have but when
they are new we double mark and we compare and contrast between
large groups. We use precisely the same methods as any university
would.
437. Has there been any evaluation on their
levels of competence and ability to act as professors and lecturers?
(Air Vice-Marshal Burridge) We award a King's MA in
defence studies, so we are subject to the normal processes that
brings with it, not least of which is external examiners. Our
external examiners look at what we do and make their judgements
accordingly.
438. Some academics are appalling lecturers
themselves.
(Air Vice-Marshal Burridge) I could not possibly comment.
Mr Viggers
439. Whilst there are technical features involved
in the Army and the Navy, their jobs are really about man management
at the lower levels, whereas in the Royal Air Force those who
rise to the highest levels tend to be pilots and pilots are not
in the business of man management, they are in the business of
flying aeroplanes and they come back and tell the crew chief what
is wrong with it and then they go back to the mess. Do you notice
any differences between the man management skills of the Army,
Navy and Air Force at the time they reach medium levels?
(Air Vice-Marshal Burridge) I am the person who deals
with them at medium level. I would disagree with your premise
that your archetypal pilot flies his aeroplane and does nothing
else because to get to the medium rank level that comes to my
college he will have had to have commanded. He will have had to
have been a flight commander and he will probably have been a
squadron commander. He will have commanded men and in precisely
the same way as do the other two services. We find very little
difference across the three services at the level I am talking
about, at the mid-thirties, on the ability and the understanding
and the empathy that officers have in terms of their ability to
command. Where I think you do see it is in our junior divisions
where in the late twenties your average air crew officer will
have done precisely what you said in that they are very much oriented
round flying but the air crew are only a percentage of the entire
Royal Air Force cohort. I would say the Army officer stands out
at that stage, in the late twenties, as having more understanding
and more experience of commanding men.
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