Select Committee on Defence Minutes of Evidence


Annex A

COMMAND AND CONTROL OF TERRORIST INCIDENTS

  1.  There are a significant number of stakeholders and structures involved in crisis management. These include political structures, professional structures, scientific and technical interest groups and agencies, which for important legal and constitutional reasons are operationally independent. In broad terms, the purpose of the command structure is to co-ordinate all participants involved in managing the crisis.

Command and Control of a terrorist incident

  * * *

  2.  The following should be noted:

  * * *

  3.  Command and Control arrangements for a civil contingency, including consequence management, are outlined below:

  4.  The following should be noted:


    —  The Prime Minister, the Home Secretary or senior Minister present can chair the CCC (Ministerial), or CCC (Officials) as well as a Minister from the lead department.

    —  CCC has representatives from all interested departments and agencies.

    —  CCC is responsible for formulating and advising upon policy. There is no formal chain of command below CCC (Officials) (except in the case of the normal military chain).

  5.  As is shown in the above diagrams, both COBR and CCC operate at two levels:

    Ministerial Level. MoD representation would usually be the Minister for the Armed Forces.

    Official Level. At Official level the MoD representatives would usually be at 1 Star/Senior Civil Service level.

  6.  Within the MoD, terrorist incidents are handled by the Defence Crisis Management Centre in the same way as for other operations.

  7.  At the scene of any incident, the Army will be the lead Service for any bi- or tri- Service MACA deployments, utilising HQ LAND and the regional Divisional/District HQs or HQ Northern Ireland, as appropriate. * * *

  * * * Throughout any incident, all military forces will operate in support of the appropriate civil authority, but never under its command. This basic command structure has not changed since 11 September.


 
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