Examination of Witnesses(Questions 60-79)
MR SIMON
WEBB CBE, MR
BRUCE MANN
AND MAJOR
GENERAL ROB
FULTON
WEDNESDAY 16 OCTOBER 2002
Mr Hancock
60. Is there a development to put UAVs on a
seaborne platform because, if you read the concept of where we
are going to be deployed in the future, it is heavily dependent
on being with a seaborne element. Is there a capability to be
able to allow these vehicles to take off from ships at sea, aircraft
carriers, or from a vertical take-off from a conventional warship?
Secondly, related to Gerald Howarth's point, if there are platforms
and systems available, are you looking at a system and a platform
which can be put together in time for our troops to have a proven
system and vehicle by 2004? Are we talking about a platform with
your system to be fitted into it, a new system, which will have
to go through a long process of evaluation? There must be the
two products on the shelf available today, and why are not we
going for that option?
(Major General Fulton) We are and that is what the
four contractors are offering. They are the integrator of the
system and the platform and what they are offering us is a complete
package—
61. A proven system?
(Major General Fulton) A proven system. They are responsible
for integrating that and giving us the finished article and they
have chosen the various components of the system themselves and
the competition has, as is normal, assessed the various components
of that. If I could just pick up the point, I said that clearly
we would start to see elements of the system in 2004 for trials
but it is 2005 that we are working towards as the in-service stage.
62. And the seaborne element?
(Major General Fulton) There is not currently within
the Watchkeeper requirement a requirement for it to take off and
land from a maritime platform but the Navy will be involved in
the joint UAV experimentation unit—it will be tri service—and
clearly they will be very interested in looking at the experimentation
and the possibilities for naval purposes thereafter.
Chairman
63. Is the specification including bombing missions?
(Major General Fulton) For Watchkeeper?
64. Yes.
(Major General Fulton) No, because even the Americans
had not done it at the time we wrote the Watchkeeper requirement,
and clearly it is not very smart of us to keep changing our requirement
halfway through. What we want is the best Watchkeeper system and
the purpose then of using the joint UAV experimentation unit is
to understand what the other possibilities are and to explore
bombing, maritime use and the whole range of other possibilities.
(Mr Webb) I want to add on top of that that it is
very important that we keep an eye on what we are really trying
to achieve here which is the ability to inflict military effects
in this particular case against international terrorism, to disrupt
and destroy terrorist groups, so I am afraid we are having to
have a cultural adjustment to the idea that what you see, the
bits that fly around or the bits that drop the bombs, is very
important but it is the network between them which is the difficult
bit to get right and which we must take time to achieve. Otherwise
you are just putting money into something which does not get you
to the effect. So I think Air Marshal Stirrup got a right balance
here between those two objectives of obviously getting capability
quickly but getting it so it is an effective capability to create
a military effect.
Rachel Squire
65. It has certainly been encouraging to listen
to some of the progress that is being made on UAVs and also the
way the Watchkeeper programme timetable for that has been accelerated.
What we have not really yet focused on is what Major General Fulton
mentioned about the Land Component and the commander's role in
the Land Component and the information coming from UAVs and so
on. One of the key capability lessons from operations in Afghanistan
has led to a speeding up on the UAVs, but can I ask you about
why it appears that the Future Rapid Effect System armoured vehicle
programme has not also been speeded up in order to ensure that
we do have the equipment there for more capable light forces,
and that when the commander has the information about the detection
of threat and is taking the decisions about how to respond to
that, we have the system to move our forces across the land far
more rapidly than perhaps we are able to do at the moment.
(Mr Webb) I think there is a question of the different
types of role that UAVs and Future Rapid Effect Systems might
play and also there are issues to do with the maturity of technology.
Future Rapid Effect System is really quite a step-changing concept
because what it is saying is that in between our light forces,
very effective parachute regiment-type forces, and the heavy armour
which is very slow to deploy, is there a place for a medium weight
system which would be able to be more rapidly deployed by air
and would provide a degree of protection but not necessarily the
same amount of protection obviously as heavy armour? You need
to be sure before you invest a lot of money in it that that is
a good balance because you need to be sure that you are not, as
it were, producing something which only gives you a protection
against certain small arms but is not effective against other
things, and there is a question to be worked through there which
we are getting to a positive answer on. The other point about
it is that, although there are various forays into this field
of medium weight vehicles and surveillance systems, I would judge
that the technology is not as mature yet—certainly the optimisation
of it, the complicated thing you are going to deploy in an aircraft—and
it needs to be got right, and with a vehicle it is something which
has to be bought in large numbers. UAVs are relatively small quantities
but with vehicles you have to be sure you get it right because
you are going to buy a lot of them to make up a force and you
have a sustainability issue because we are not talking about a
vehicle just running around in Europe but something which goes
to an austere environment and has to be sustained out there, so
the logistics all need to be got right. So it is a much bigger
job than UAVs. The technology has to be mature and we have to
get the right investment there. I think we should now try and
do this as soon as we can but it is not an area I would skip the
risk reduction phase on.
(Major General Fulton) I think the distinction I would
draw with the question Mr Howarth asked me is that in the case
of FRES it does not exist. You cannot go anywhere in the world
and buy FRES today. FRES is in the concept phase; clearly we wish
to stay very closely in touch with the American Future Combat
System programme which is the process which they are going to
go through as part of their transformation, and clearly one of
the key issues is going to be interoperability with the United
States, so there are real disadvantages in accelerating the programme
too much anyway. There is clearly a wish to have it as soon as
possible, and we are trying to bring it forward from 2009 to 2007,
but I would simply reiterate Mr Webb's point that the technology
does not exist, the vehicle does not exist, and we are still trying
to define exactly what it is and whether it can do all the things
that are hoped for it.
Chairman: We will move on to Saif Sareea
for about forty minutes and then cost of the New Chapter. The
reason Saif Sareea in our view forms part of the New Chapter inquiry
is that the original Strategic Defence Review emphasised throughout
virtually every page the importance of expeditionary warfare.
We were grateful that we were able to observe the latter stages
of Saif Sareea, and we were sent and were very pleased to receive
this document from the Directorate of Operational Capability,
"Appraisal of Exercise Saif Sareea", and we had a summary
of another document that we were not permitted to see which I
am informed is called CJO's "Final Exercise Report".
Maybe ministers will relent, and perhaps you could pass the word
up to the ministers, Mr Webb, but it would be quite helpful if
we could have a look at some or all of that document. I was one
of the few around who went to the earlier Saif Sareea so I have
a particularly great interest. We understand the MoD are appearing
before the Public Accounts Committee and will be discussing this
document that they produced, "Exercise Saif Sareea II",
a report by the Comptroller & Auditor General, so we have
eight or nine questions and will take about 35 minutes on this,
so we have to be fairly concise. Mr Rapson?
Syd Rapson
66. Can I welcome you all, especially Rob Fulton
who tried to train me to be a Royal Marine and failed miserably,
but it was good fun at the time! I want to concentrate on the
Joint Rapid Reaction Force element of Saif Sareea and the experience
under the New Chapter. The New Chapter consultation document posed
some questions at the beginning, one of which was do we need to
be able to deploy more of our forces more rapidly to counter terrorism
worldwide, and that was a very specific question, partly answered
in the document. But in Saif Sareea the ability to test this failed
disappointingly due to financial constraints and other commitments
elsewhere, and we did not really demonstrate or prove the need
for a rapid reaction force to change it: more the concept of one.
That worries me—that we have had an extra charge and we
have had the ability and for other reasons we have not been able
to test it to the extent we should. To what extent does the New
Chapter affect the rationale of the Joint Rapid Reaction Force
concept and the sort of forces equipment that the Joint Rapid
Reaction Force needs to deploy rapidly?
(Mr Webb) The objective of the exercise, which I remember
debating very well in the crisis management organisation, was
to demonstrate key elements of the rapid reaction concept and
I think there was a great misunderstanding about this—"demonstrate
key elements of the JRRF concept, Objective 1". The point
we were trying to get out of it, certainly from when I was involved
from authorising it in the crisis management organisation, was
to prove the concept of joint rapid reaction—not every piece
of kit, not to do a traditional type exercise of collective training
that you can do in Germany if you feel like it, but we were trying
to prove the jointness, the reaction and the rapidity and, as
the audit says, that was outstandingly well achieved because we
knew about other dimensions of the issue, about individual formation
and so on, but what we did not know was whether we could get together
all the force elements, under a commander, get them out to a distant
part in an austere environment and mount military operations.
Now, the fact that some individual elements of that were on a
smaller scale than originally intended, for example, on the air
side because they had to go off and do something else of a higher
operation did not in my view detract from what we achieved overall.
Now, you learn a mass of lessons from this. The point is to learn
things that we get into our future equipment, personnel and other
programmes and there were many, many lessons learned from it but,
in terms of what we were trying to do, that was it and I resisted
people who said, "Oh, well, we must go and test out this
bit of kit or that bit of kit", because that would have taken
one's mind off the real game which was the overall joint rapid
deployment.
67. So has the New Chapter, when it concentrates
on this particular aspect, increased the need to have an increased
capacity for a rapid reaction force or decreased it? When you
have looked at it carefully you might consider some small losses
but they are rather large for me, but has the New Chapter given
a fresh view as to whether we should pursue more rapidly the rapid
reaction force, or do we not need to do that?
(Mr Webb) What the New Chapter says is we probably
need to do that kind of thing but on a smaller scale but more
frequently and potentially concurrently—in other words,
to do the two at once. The Saif Sareea was basically a medium
scale deployment as defined in Strategic Defence Review in 1998
and there was more logistics and communications as the exercise
report explained to you than for medium but there were some fewer
force elements in some areas. But it was basically a medium. What
the New Chapter says you need to be able to do is smaller scale
operations into just as austere environments, probably just as
rapidly, so to that extent the JRRF and Saif Sareea has been hugely
useful because it has shown the concept of doing it at medium
scale. If you can do it at medium scale you can do it at small
scale. The question for us though is to make sure we can do enough
of them in some sense concurrently and of course with the particular
force elements concerned. You may have to do a sequence of them
so you do not over stress particular elements of the force structure.
So I think the answer to your question is yes, we absolutely need
joint rapid reaction for some of these find and strike operations
but probably on a smaller scale than Saif Sareea.
68. So how has the experience of Saif Sareea
been fed into the Strategic Defence Review? How has it changed
the extra Chapter?
(Mr Webb) The people who wrote this report, the Directorate
of Operational Audit within the Directorate of Operational Capability,
are a very independent-minded bunch of people, and they come along
and tell you without fear or favour what they think are the lessons
of it and we pick them up and absorb them, but we have a very
systematic process for this and I think we are proud of that fact—that
we do learn lessons and if things are not quite right you pick
up for the future. You will see quite a lot of references to areas
where we can improve for the future, but it came back into the
New Chapter at a conceptual level in the way I have just described—this
is the sort of thing you need to be able to do but smaller and
perhaps more frequently. At a more detailed level it finds its
way into all the work Rob and others have been doing about individual
bits of capability. Sometimes you need to be careful. Sometimes
the lessons were applicable only to one environment and are not
worth spending money on to deal with in general, but it is a good
quarry of material.
Mr Howarth
69. Can I say at the outset, Mr Webb, that I
was extremely grateful, and I am sure I speak for my colleagues
too, that the MoD did provide us with facilities to see the exercise.
We recognise it took people away from what they were otherwise
planning to do but it was very useful to us. I was hugely impressed,
particularly that the logistics people were doing it for real—others
perhaps not so but the logistics boys were doing it absolutely
for real—and it is an exercise which, thank God, was not
cancelled. I heard what you said about future exercises and I
certainly hope that the MoD will not regard it as being a waste
of money to continue to mount such exercises in the future. You
said that it was trying to prove rapidity—well, setting
aside the fact that it took two years to plan this exercise and
it was an exercise which was trying to simulate a 30 days' notice
deployment, nevertheless there were deficiencies, some of which
will be addressed by my colleagues in a moment, but it was concluded
that even if we had had the six ro-ros which are currently on
order they would have been insufficient to carry kit and we would
have needed to charter in additional capacity, and that the defence
medical services really were only there to cater for the exercise
rather than to simulate what would have happened in real life,
and I think your comments on what lessons you have learned from
the fact that we had to deploy 35 Dutch nurses to supplement our
depleted defence medical services would be helpful. You say it
was designed to test rapidity but the report itself concluded
that ". . . the . . . ability to sustain a medium-scale war-fighting
force and operation at extended range" is questionable, and
the exercise did not test this seriously, so what are you doing
to get some assurance that you will be able to learn from those
lessons and make practical such rapid deployment?
(Mr Webb) I think you were referring to sustainment
there which is a slightly different point.
70. Sustained medium-scale warfare?
(Mr Webb) Yes. "Sustained" means to keep
it going after the initial deployment in that context. But we
do indeed need to go back in and look at what quantities of lift
you need. Can I make two points? You do have to ask yourself hard
questions about how much you own and how much you plan to lease.
There is a lot of large lift capacity around so I do not think
you need to automatically assume you have to own everything, particularly
shipping. You need some to get you started which you can absolutely
lay your hands on with complete confidence but beyond that you
know that, if you have a certain degree of notice, you can get
it in the market place and you will find what you need. So I do
not think you necessarily deduce that you need to own everything;
you may need to have a look at your arrangements for contracting.
71. But the whole ro-ro concept is based on
a PFI where the assets will be available to be leased out to earn
what I am told is 3PR, third party revenue, and presumably you
could increase the number of ro-ros and make more available for
third party revenue earning?
(Mr Webb) Well, you still have to pay, if you like.
Hidden in there is a cost of the degree of call that you have
on it, but all I am saying on sustainment is that you do need
the ro-ros to get deployed initially but for their follow-on sustainment
and logistic support, to sustain afterwards you may well be able
to use commercial shipping. On the medical question—well,
again, you do not want to draw too many instant deductions because,
of course, you always prioritise your medical forces for operations,
so it would not be a surprise when the armed forces were busy
that the medical element was reduced. Can I just say that I am
nervous about thinking that it is a disadvantage to have other
countries with you. We have a very long and deep relationship
with the Netherlands armed forces and the world we operate in
is almost certainly to be the world of coalition operations. There
are some national scenarios and we provide for them, but the force
drivers are almost invariably the coalition operations—either
as a partner to the United States in certain types of operation
or maybe leading United Nations or leading European Union or playing
leading roles in those sorts of organisations. So I think we need,
while being confident that we can back up our own armed forces
properly, to think about coalition warfare as being the way of
life rather than as something you fall back on because you cannot
do everything yourself.
72. That sounds to me dangerously like saying
to our servicemen, "Do not expect us to supply the medical
back-up because it might well be supplied by somebody else".
If you talk to the soldiers, the importance to morale of knowing
that if they get injured there will be the medical services—and
their own medical services—to back them up, people they
know and understand from the QAs and elsewhere, and I am sure
you have talked to Rick Jolly about this in the Falklands campaign,
is very important.
(Mr Webb) The first line I said was that we prioritise
medical forces for operations for exactly the reason you mention
so it is not particularly surprising that, if you are going to
have other coalition partners, you find them on the exercises
and the national capacity on operations and you have to get your
friends to help you with running some of your exercises. What
you say is absolutely right but it is also the case that the world
has moved on a bit here. In the Balkans, for example, there are
two multi national hospitals. I cannot remember when the Committee
was last in the Balkans but sustaining those kinds of operations
is important too. Both in Bosnia and in Kosovo there are multi
national hospitals, and I have never heard anybody say they did
not get absolutely cracking treatment from them.
73. So if we turn to the overall lessons to
be learned, do you think that the lessons you have now learned
enable you to put into practice the ability to sustain a large
scale operation like you carried out in the Gulf War as a result
of the Saif Sareea experience?
(Mr Webb) I think we learned a lot which was relevant
to sustaining a large scale deployment. As you yourself mentioned,
the particularly interesting part about Saif Sareea in a way was
the logistics, and that was on a somewhat larger scale than a
classic medium scale so there are lots of relevant lessons in
there. I think it has put us in good shape and there are things
in your report that you will have seen about learning how to make
use of contractors, for example, when you should and when you
should not and that kind of thing, which is all very valuable
I think for large scale deployments, and the whole management
of large scale deployment logistics with the new logistics brigades
on the army side and some of the very sophisticated new methods
the Royal Air Force have developed—there is lots of good
stuff there for the future.
Chairman: Following on from my colleague,
in my area if we only agreed to be treated by English born doctors
we would all be dead at this point. We were due to visit a field
hospital because it was located very close to where a DROPS exercise
was taking place but there was a road accident and a fatality,
as it transpired, and we could not go, but you know, Mr Webb,
our long interest in the defence medical services which will continue.
Rachel Squire
74. Talking about logistics support and when
we visited Saif Sareea my question at the time we were there and
my question to you now is that obviously the exercise was conducted
in what is described as a benign environment. One of my thoughts
is, if you are in a hostile environment, what kind of preparation
is there for losing something that is vital, like your tanks of
water? I am just interested in how that has been looked at and
prepared for if it has not been part of even a medium-scale exercise
like Saif Sareea?
(Mr Webb) Thank you for that. If I may say so, there
are probably not many countries in the world in which one would
be pressed about "Are you serious about war fighting?",
which is what you are asking about, and the answer is that we
are and I will ask General Fulton to talk about that, but you
are absolutely right to say, "Are you ready to fight in a
hostile environment?", because that is the sort of job which
we ask our armed forces to take on. The answer is I think there
is a degree of redundancy in the sense that you have more than
you need of each item in order to account for battle losses, and
there is a lot of operation analysis and modelling that goes on
to try and spot how to avoid that. It is one of the reasons why
some people say, "Well, you seem to take out a lot more kit
than you use". Well, that is partly the answer to that issue
but being able to do this in a hostile environment is indeed a
skill which we need to keep up.
(Major General Fulton) Picking up that last point,
one of the things that certainly came out and has come out on
a number of other exercises and operations that we are not very
good at is asset tracking within the logistic chain, and we recognise
that weakness and seek to do something about it. It is not necessarily
simple and straightforward to do but it is something that commercial
companies do and there is clearly, therefore, technology from
which we can learn. I think what we will have to do is take that
lesson and apply it with some care. There is clearly a balance
to be struck between having your logistics chain so finely tuned
you know where everything is and you pare it down to the bare
minimum, and having sufficient fat within the chain to do what
you have just described. Clearly the more fat you have in the
chain the less efficient it is, the more airlift you need, the
more space, the bigger the area you have to protect and so your
circle goes, so there is a fine balance, but the area that we
clearly could improve on is logistic asset tracking.
Chairman: We have a series of questions
now on equipment reliability and I will take questions until twenty
to one. That will leave us twenty minutes to talk about the financial
implications, so we will kick off with Frank Roy followed by Patrick
Mercer.
Mr Roy
75. Saif Sareea flagged up problems regarding
some equipment, and I am thinking especially of Challenger tank,
communications, uniform, boots, etc. I know that my colleague,
Mr Mercer, would like to delve deeper after this but to the layman,
it seems to me that 1991, with the desert and the heat and the
sand was exactly the same as it is now, and it worries me greatly
that it seems we have not learned any lessons from the desert
environment from the Gulf War. Is that the case, and why is it
the case?
(Mr Webb) I think, Chairman, we are not the team which
is absolutely tuned up on all the detail of this but let us have
a go and no doubt colleagues who give evidence to the PAC next
week will improve on what we say. We took a decision—
Chairman
76. Excuse me, are you assuming that the A team
on equipment only talks to the Public Accounts Committee, because
this is equally as important as the Public Accounts Committee?
We visited Oman.
(Mr Webb) Can I just say that the Public Accounts
Committee I think are devoting themselves to a whole session on
Saif Sareea and when I selected the team to come and do my best
for you today I had to bring a more general purpose team able
to deal with a range of other issues, but I am still going to
give some answers, so here we go. Going back, the objective of
Saif Sareea was to demonstrate key elements of the JRRF concept
and I think I said right at the start that it was the getting
there, the deploying, the joint, which was the key element that
we were after, and for right or wrong I remember the question
coming up of "Should we spend X million"—I think
it was quite a lot of millions actually—"to do `desertification'"—General
Fulton will get me right on precise terms—"of the Challenger
tank fleet for this exercise?", and we decided that we would
not because we were not trying to prove something about the desert
performance of tanks; what we were trying to do was improve the
rapid reaction concept. You have to make choices in a budget and
so we decided that we would rather spend our money on something
else than to test our Challenger tanks. That was not the point
of the exercise. To that extent, although we learned a number
of things very specifically, and I suspect uniforms is an area
where you probably under all circumstances want to make sure people
are in good shape, it was not an equipment trial; it was a rapid
reaction deployment concept. We specifically decided not to spend
some money on tanks, as I recall. Am I right?
(Major General Fulton) Yes, that is right. You will
well know that the Challenger tank was designed for north west
Europe and over the years various considerations have been given
to either globalising it, ie making it able to cope with the widest
range of climatic conditions, desertising it to cope with the
extremely hot temperatures, or to go through a process of what
I understand is called dust mitigation and, as Mr Webb has said,
the decision was taken that that should not happen and, as I think
the report reflects, the dust concentrations, certainly around
the Challenger tank air intakes, were higher than predicted with
the effect on air filters that you know. We are looking currently
at a programme that would provide limited desertisation and dust
mitigation which would go through the process of not entirely
globalising it but fitting extended skirts, improved air filters,
oil filters and re-designing the engine lubers and so on, and
that is a programme that we are looking at at the moment but it
was not done before Saif Sareea.
Mr Roy
77. I understand that but you said that the
problems were higher than predicted and my point is why, when
we are in exactly the same climatic conditions as we were 10 years
ago? I have a real fear that in ten years' time this Defence Committee
is going to be asking people sitting in your seats, "What
did we learn ten years ago when we put people into Afghanistan?"
It seems to me it is a false economy to say that this is all about
rapid reaction and getting there, and when we do get there it
is about loss of money because we did not learn the lessons ten
years ago.
(Major General Fulton) I think my point about it being
higher than predicted is that the predictions would clearly have
been based on previous experience. I cannot speak for whether
those predictions were either justified or valid but certainly
a prediction was made and that is the basis on which the decision
was taken.
(Mr Webb) I think it is important to get this into
context: that in terms of the exercise objectives which were listed
at Annexe A in the document you have seen, one of the objectives
was to "practise combined joint land warfighting operations
centred on an armoured brigade and train that armoured brigade
to CP5", and the conclusion was achieved so in terms of what
we are trying to do on the exercise we achieved it. What we were
not trying to do was to do a trial on Challenger tanks.
Chairman
78. I know civil servants are usually smarter
than Members but I really cannot understand how you have a prime
goal to prove if you can deploy our forces quickly and fight with
the Omanis if there is not going to be a corollary, an imperative,
that surely the equipment that you spend so much money getting
out there actually works? Challenger 1 was the world's worst tank;
Challenger 2 is one of the very best tanks. I hasten to add, and
I have said it so often people think I am on the payroll of Vickers,
that it is a wonderful, wonderful tank but it is pretty obvious
that as the Omanis spent a lot of money in desertising Challenger
2, and as it was pretty obvious to the MoD that we were not going
to fight a war stopping the Germans coming through the Falaise
Gap, and as it was very likely if not inevitable that we would
be fighting a war in some desert environment, I cannot understand
your explanation that we were not testing equipment and therefore
it perhaps came as a little bit of a surprise that our tanks broke
down. We were there, we were surrounded by twenty guys looking
like Lawrence of Arabia in a tent, and they were telling us that
the tank did not work. It did not require a great deal to put
them right again but you spent £100 million improving our
brilliant military defences and then you blow it all because the
press are only interested in disintegrating army boots and tanks
that fail because—surprise, surprise—dust or—surprise,
surprise—sand gets into the mechanism and they break down.
Whoever chose not to exercise equipment should now be in army
pensions or something like that because it was obvious equipment
performance was going to be central to the way in which we were
validating the exercise.
(Mr Webb) No it was not, Sir. We were not engaged
in simulating large scale armoured warfare. There was not an opposing
force to do that. You have to make choices about what you are
going to spend your money on to test and the conclusion was made
that was one area which we should not spend the money. We have
to make these choices. If you spend all the money on desert improvements
for tanks for that exercise then it is money that is not going
to be spent on improving accommodation somewhere else. There are
choices to be made. The commanders and the Ministry of Defence
are extremely hard minded about this. They go and prove the things
they need to prove. Sure it could be nice to have an add-on to
an exercise but you cannot always afford an add-on.
79. My parting shot is you all must be bonkers.
If you have an exercise of the significance of Saif Sareea where
there is quite a lot of sand in Oman which people should have
worked out well in advance you should have known that filters
would have to be replaced very quickly. They would not have to
have an emergency supply sent out. Frankly if that is the level
of planning within the Ministry of Defence Saddam Hussein can
be celebrating not only his 100 per cent turn out and 100 per
cent vote but the fact that British tanks are going to have some
difficulty unless some substantial decisions are made in operating
at length. Please reassure us that any lessons learnt in Saif
Sareea in relation to tank mobility and the ability of tanks to
withstand sand have been learnt and in fact that the lessons will
be deployed pretty damn quickly in case the worst happens and
our forces are deployed.
(Mr Webb) We have absorbed, obviously, the technical
lessons in the way that General Fulton has described. The point
of exercise is to learn very specific lessons and I think we have
achieved that.
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