Examination of witnesses (Questions 100
- 119)
WEDNESDAY 8 DECEMBER 1999
Air Vice-Marshal JOE
FRENCH, Group Captain STEPHEN
LLOYD and Brigadier PHILIP
WILDMAN OBE
Mr Blunt
100. Could I put a question to you on this.
On the basis of the information that you gave about battle damage
assessment to the Ministry of Defence, there would be no basis
on which any spokesman for the Ministry of Defence or anyone else
could have legitimately and accurately said over a brigade's-worth
of armour had been destroyed?
(Air Vice-Marshal French) I would have to see the
comments we fed in on that.
(Group Captain Lloyd) The only comment I would make,
from my perspective is that a large amount of our concentration
of effort was on the targeting campaign that was outside the province
of Kosovo. The main offensive was outside that area. In those
areas significant numbers of pieces of heavy military equipment
were destroyed.
Mr Blunt: In Serbia itself?
Mr Hancock
101. What was the main problem why the tank
busting planes could not be used, specific planes that the Americans
had? Both of you were supplying the intelligence for these planes,
were you not?
(Air Vice-Marshal French) As I said earlier, and you
have heard from Group Captain Lloyd, for JARIC, he had a particular
task laid upon him. The information or the intelligence given
had come from a variety of sources, which would have been handled
with particular care.
102. Were we not tasked with that role? Was
that not part of our role?
(Air Vice-Marshal French) I do not know without having
the specifics of your question—
103. Air Vice-Marshal, you are being far too
reluctant to answer these questions. You knew what you were tasked
to be doing.
(Air Vice-Marshal French) We can give you the information
from JARIC.
104. What was your chief task in the area?
(Group Captain Lloyd) As I said, I went through three
phases. One was to look at the national deployment of the staff
of the operation by the Yugoslav forces; the second stage was
to engage in monitoring of ethnic cleansing through the villages;
then we switched to targeting, the majority of that targeting
activity was outside Kosovo.
105. Was that predominantly for RAF planes or
for American target planes?
(Group Captain Lloyd) *** We were asked at times to
do area searches for military equipment inside Kosovo, and all
I can say is I know from my own experience we found very little
that was evident. I do believe—and there is evidence subsequently—that
a large quantity of this equipment was very heavily concealed
in buildings. *** or even tactical reconnaissance until it moved.
When it broke cover and if somebody was there then you had a chance,
I would suggest.
106. In that case, did your imagery tell you
that we were hitting this stuff when it actually did break cover?
(Group Captain Lloyd) ***
107. You would have seen the same assessment
material that was being used to judge whether or not all this
equipment was actually being hit, would you not?
(Group Captain Lloyd) ***
108. Then were you disappointed as professionals,
intelligence officers, that your success rate in finding targets
was not fulfilled by your colleagues who had the job of hitting
them?
(Air Vice-Marshal French) When you say our success
rate, again we come back to what JARIC was actually tasked to
do.
109. You claim you found them. When you say—
(Air Vice-Marshal French) Sorry, we have not claimed
anything on that front.
Mr Hancock: Somebody must have claimed
that they found them.
Chairman: Could I say that the questioning
is relevant but we are beginning our inquiry into the lessons
of Kosovo and I suspect, colleagues, that when we have our meeting
next week to work out our planning, because of the importance
of this subject we will have a full session on it and we will
draw in to respond to the questions a range of personnel over
and above the witnesses who are here today, who will give us,
hopefully, a more complete answer.
Mr Hancock
110. If I may, it goes back to what you were
saying about your ability to get all the information, about whether
or not you had sophisticated enough resources actually to interpret
fast enough what you were getting in actually to deliver a target
which was an objective that could be taken out. It goes back to
the under-resourcing of what you were being asked to do.
(Air Vice-Marshal French) I would not put it as under-resourcing.
We have to be careful we do not draw the wrong general from the
specific in terms of capabilities and also actually the feeds
of information were not just here, they were from allies overall,
so it is not evading the question but you have to set it in the
correct context to be able to give you an answer that is not misleading
and there are so many other factors. We mentioned the weather.
Obviously the pilot will have the last recourse to say, "No,
I do not actually want to take this particular target." There
is a whole range of other reasons but certainly it is not the
processing of the information, it is the dissemination of the
information that we could do much faster.
Chairman: We shall return to this in
our inquiry.
Mr Cohen
111. Could I ask a very brief one on targeting
because it will feed into what we can ask later on and you have
probably a unique perspective on it. There were a couple of dreadful
targeting errors where refugees actually ended up being bombed
by mistake and I just wondered what knowledge you had or whether
you had any involvement in targeting that?
(Air Vice-Marshal French) Without knowing the details
of which ones you are going into I think I would be into speculation
here, but let me say from an airman's perspective it is very unfortunate
but I think it would be wrong of me to say that we might not face
similar situations in the future. Inevitably when you take the
nature of that conflict and perhaps the different values of the
countries and the people we were going against—and we have
seen it in a different context, the human shields in Iraq—I
am afraid sadly it is one of those things that possibly we cannot
discount in the future, as regrettable as it is.
112. That does raise the issue then, if there
are human shields, whether any sort of sophisticated equipment
that you have, or anything in the future, would help to discern
that situation?
(Air Vice-Marshal French) Yes. Again I think it is
the context of how that is played up. The human shields in Iraq
was something that was well-known about and one could understand
that sort of process. The unfortunate thing you are perhaps alluding
to, the tractors and so forth, again without look at the specific
detail it is just the nature of the enemy who were there and we
should not be surprised perhaps that he resorted to those tactics.
I think perhaps the more telling point of that is the number of
times pilots might have called off their attacks when they saw
a specific situation that they did not like, and we know that
happened as well.
Mr Blunt
113. To go back to the agencies and off the
wall, we understand from the MoD, the MoD have told us that both
agencies have problems with staff shortages and retention difficulties.
Could I ask each of the Chief Executives what groups of staff
are involved in these staff shortages, the retention difficulties,
what are the causes of these difficulties and what are you doing
to put things right?
(Brigadier Wildman) From my perspective, I have two
key areas. The first of those has been that of general support
staff in my Feltham area of operation. We are very close to Heathrow;
it is a very strong competitor in terms of employment and we have
often found that we do not necessarily recruit up to our full
numbers all the time. That is one area. The second area which
I have had specific problems with over the recent past is that
during the process that we have been going through to arrange
a PPP arrangement for IT support, I have been finding that I have
been running light in terms of civil servant people and out of
about 23 people I have had as many as 14 gaps and filled many
of those with short-term contract staff as a result. Looking more
broadly, I would not say that I have retention problems and my
professional staff are very long-lived, rather large numbers of
people who have plus 20 years of service, I think largely because
they find it a fascinating area. So that in the professional area
I would not say that I have either recruiting or retention problems.
(Group Captain Lloyd) In my particular case I am currently
carrying 34 gapped posts, of which 22 are civilian posts. The
major difficulty I have experienced with regard to recruiting,
particularly imagery analysts, is that following the bulge, as
it were, of service down-sizing, the marketplace is short on analysts
to pick up. I have addressed it, though, in so far as I have been
running over the last 14 months a very aggressive recruiting programme
and I am pleased to say that in the case of imagery analysts I
have now found, and they are in the pipeline, sufficient to close
that particular gap. The other area of difficulty to some extent
is the technical grades, particularly high-end IT specialists
and accountants. Clearly they are areas of skill paucity to some
extent in the nation and the wages that are available in the outside
marketplace are significantly higher than the Ministry of Defence
is able to offer these individuals. So that does tend to slow
down the process of getting any in there. That, to some extent,
plays a hand in retention later on in so far as, particularly
in my own discipline of imagery analysis, the career horizons
are not actually that high with the net result that the pay aspirations
are not that high, and particularly if—and we have had experience
in the past of this—you tend to take a top-end graduate,
which is very nice to do, after about five years he runs a little
bit out of enthusiasm and spots what is going on in areas elsewhere.
This is a particular concern for me for the future when commercial
satellite imagery at a high-end resolution becomes more available
because I suspect I am likely to lose imagery analysts in a simple
way here. But at the moment I am getting over my problem and I
have every expectation that in the report after next you will
see a very positive likely over-manning.
Mr Blunt
114. There was reference in earlier evidence
about reshaping the civilian work force and giving early leaving
packages, which seems to be making civilians redundant. You said
that was not necessarily to do with the convergence programme,
which rather implied it might be to do with the current LTC round.
Is it?
(Air Vice-Marshal French) It is not to do with the
LTC. We are in a fortunate position that an awful lot of people
have stayed on for a significant number of years. Obviously as
they have gone up we probably ourselves have not been—brutal
is the wrong word—pruned our organisation to get the correct
rank and skill we want to deliver the task. There is no question
of redundancy within that process.
(Brigadier Wildman) No. Compulsory redundancy is something
that we have ruled out. I have wanted to reshape and to some extent
reduce the work force. The approach we are taking is an early
leaving package rather than a redundancy approach.
115. This is to meet the financial necessity.
Instead of having a body of experienced, expensive analysts you
have ones who are younger and paid less?
(Brigadier Wildman) In some cases.
116. A better financial pyramid, yes. If you
actually wanted the optimum output you would want the expensive,
highly paid people?
(Brigadier Wildman) To some extent we are having to
look at the balance between people, equipment and so on to get
the best of the output. From that point of view I need to reduce
the work force overall to get that best balance. A second, not
entirely related issue, is we have been having a very hard look
at the management levels. I will be reducing some of those into
that process of reshaping. I do not think it would be fair to
say that in the entirety of the operation what we want is long-lived,
very experienced people. You really have a number of operations.
The operations that are concerned with basically producing basic
products do not require a great deal of lengthy skill and you
are wasting taxpayers' money if you invest heavily there. What
we do want is some of the right people who can master web technology
and so on. We have to think about the balance of that. Certainly
the introduction of webs and networks will require us to have
a look at a different balance between what we might call people
who compile basic products, people who do that kind of work (webs
and networks) and also to look at the reshaping of the management
structure. It is really quite a complex package.
117. Can I ask, how interchangeable are the
technical staff in JARIC? Is there scope to ease staff shortages
as a result of the merger?
(Air Vice-Marshal French) As you heard, in terms of
staff shortages we do not see a difficulty. In the long-term when
you look at the core—
118. The sense of the question is, if you have
a temporary problem are you going to be able to move it from one
location to the other?
(Air Vice-Marshal French) At the moment, as we said,
in setting up the agencies the overlaps are relatively small.
We will still have business outputs specific to both agencies
but we will look to whether we can improve interchangeability
or get interchangeability. We have looked at the National Imagery
and Mapping Agency in the US. Their experience is there may be
scope for up to 25% over time. Certainly we would look also for
interchangeability, certainly in the short term.
Chairman
119. With agency status I thought you had a
degree of flexibility to shuffle your salary obligations, to pay
more for people at the top? I was thinking in imagery analysis,
there must be the Sherlock Holmes of analysts, those who are truly
exceptional. Would you have any flexibility in rewarding those
superstars of your profession better in order to keep them longer
than otherwise they would be allowed to stay in terms of retirement
or simply to avoid them going off into retirement or the private
sector?
(Group Captain Lloyd) In the first instance this is
a future challenge I am yet to meet because the marketplace has
not opened up for the imagery analyst to walk out in droves. I
fear it, though, under advanced systems in commercial satellite
imagery. The flexibility I have is very moderate in regard to
the fact that I follow the pay and grade systems that apply to
the Civil Service. Obviously there is great difficulty in incentivising
a serviceman's pay, and two-thirds of my analysts are servicemen.
Of course you have an issue now, if I start giving bonuses to
the civilians and not to the servicemen what happens to morale.
There is a small amount of flexibility to pay small bonuses but
I would be apprehensive whether that would be sufficient to break
a future flood if it occurred there. The other problem I have
to face is I do have a finite budget. If I am going to pay to
retain a key individual somebody else is going to have to be made
redundant to pay that bonus. That is a managerial balance I have
to strike in my investment appraisal: is it worth doing it or
do I let the guy go and find somebody at the bottom end again?
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