Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20-39)
15 OCTOBER 2003
MR SIMON
WEBB CBE, DR
SARAH BEAVER
AND MR
PAUL JOHNSTON
Q20 Mr Hancock: It is more important
if it is going to go that route, is it not? It is going to be
very difficult to get a coordinated military solution because
the competing elements within the sort of framework you describe
would always be against that happening?
Mr Webb: No. Strictly speaking,
and that is preserved in the new structure, although I said the
civil instruments were close—I mean, they are geographically
close, in the same building or on the same roundabout in Brussels—they
are under separate decision making. So the military operation
is under the control of the Political and Security Committee and
obviously aid instruments and a lot of the other things are under
the control of currently different pillars of the EU. So at the
moment, and to some extent it is preserved in the new Treaty,
they are under separate decision making so it is not possible,
if you like, for the civil bit to interrupt the decision making
on the political security part. Judging by the pace of the decision
making on the Bunia operation, which was the first autonomous
operation undertaken by the EU this summer, the French lead, the
political decision making on that was very snappy, there was no
doubt about it so I did not have that sense.
Q21 Mr Jones: Mr Webb, could I now
turn in relation to the US. Two points first of all before I ask
a question. The US Ambassador to NATO on 30 September said that
what our European allies really need are greater military capabilities,
not more office headquarters but without troops and without capability.
We were in Washington about three weeks ago and we also picked
up from I think some quite senior people both in the Pentagon
and the State Department certainly a reference to France, Belgium
and Luxembourg. I think they called them "chocolatiers".
What do you think the US view is of proposals other than ESDP
at the moment? Has it changed over the last twelve months or so,
certainly in the light of France, Belgium and Luxembourg?
Mr Webb: I cannot improve on what
my colleague said last week, which is that there have been some
"anxieties and concerns" about the 29 April mini-summit,
which I think are reflected in the quote you have just made, particularly
I think from the NATO end where some of us have been working quite
hard to reduce the number of NATO headquarters from 20 to 11.
Q22 Mr Jones: Just on that point,
I think it was also reported a few weeks ago that possibly the
Prime Minister's position on this has changed somewhat. What is
your view on that?
Mr Webb: You know I am going to
say I cannot improve on what the Prime Minister's official spokesman
has said since I noticed that the House missed the opportunity
to ask him personally at lunchtime.
Q23 Mr Jones: It is your opportunity,
Mr Webb, to tell us clearly.
Mr Webb: Yes. Thank you very much.
After the occasion you have referred to—which was an informal
meeting, I think it is important to say—the Prime Minister's
spokesman said: "It is important to recognise our position
on the fundamental point relating to the separate operational
and planning HQ as proposed by the Tervuren group"—which
is the 29 April thing we have been talking about—"remained
unchanged. We did not think it was the way forward."
Q24 Chairman: What date was that?
Mr Webb: That is the press briefing
on Monday, 22 September after the Berlin meeting.
Chairman: That is a fortnight ago.
Q25 Mr Jones: Is that the MoD's position?
Mr Webb: Of course.
Q26 Mr Jones: Just in terms of the
clear anxiety that we picked up on this, because clearly the Conservative
party in this country will latch on to this very quickly as a
way of exploiting the fact that it means that Britain is having
to choose between Europe and the United States, clearly the anxiety
is there—we picked it up, you have picked it up—what
is being done to try and reassure the Americans that this is not
going to be just another pole of power against NATO which perhaps
the French will not want it to be? Are you having to work quite
hard to actually roll back some of this?
Mr Webb: We have obviously talked
to the United States about this. The overall approach I think
we have taken—and it goes to the sort of Berlin Plus agreement—is
about transparency on ESDP as a whole and we consider it part
of our day to day job to be transparent not only with the United
States but I might say I have had these conversations myself when
I visited Ankara two weeks ago. So I do consider it is for us
to explain the debate and what the issues are and to make sure
that at least we do not have any sort of surprises and that what
can sometimes be reports of one individual position or a small
group position is not necessarily assumed to be the views of everybody.
Q27 Mr Jones: So what is your interpretation
of what France, Belgium and Luxembourg are up to?
Mr Webb: Well, they set out their
menu at the 29 April summit and although there was a communicator
in that I do not think it has changed much.
Chairman: We will be coming on to that
later in more detail so you will have more time to consider your
response.
Q28 Mr Hancock: Could I take you
back to last week when at least two of you were giving evidence
in the House of Lords and the issue of the expansion of the Petersberg
tasks was discussed in some detail. There was a very interesting
sentence which was made, which was that the expansion of the Petersberg
tasks constituted a "rounding out" to reflect reality.
Would any one of you like to develop that so that we actually
may understand what that meant?
Mr Webb: I am afraid I was at
a NATO meeting that day, but let me have a go. It is rather the
point which Mr Cran was making earlier on but more generally,
which is that as we have gone on since 1992 at Petersberg various
other activities have come to be associated with what we call
the general peace support operations world. You mentioned stabilisation
and I think we gave some illustrations of that. But it has also
been the case that of the new things being mentioned in the Petersberg
tasks, joint disarmament operations, you probably recall that
in 2001 we did a disarmament operation in Macedonia. Do you remember?
We provided a space for the Albanians to hand in their weapons.
That sort of thing had become good practice. The EU is rightly
a legal based organisation and I think the lawyers looking at
it said, "Well, I'm not sure that's necessarily caught by
the existing language," so we thought we would make sure
that it was. Military advice and assistance tasks, similarly in
the reconstruction work going on in the Balkans there is a lot
of work by the military to try and reconstitute armed forces,
as is being done in Bosnia in particular. Conflict prevention
I think almost speaks for itself. It seems a bit odd that you
are ready to do peace-keeping but you would not be ready to do
conflict prevention to stop the conflict in the first place. I
do not know which of them it was who said "reality"
but I think it was a fairly good word. Oh, it was the absent member,
I am sorry. I think that is what he meant, that these things were
going on in the context of peace support operations and it was
now time to write them into the script because the EU is a law-based
organisation and every time the EU is going to take a decision
on an operation a lawyer will come to the meeting and tell you
whether you are within vires or not. So I think it is to
that extent a bit of a tidy up.
Q29 Mr Hancock: If I may develop
that, part of the task of expansion will be this intensive post-stabilisation,
which might actually go on for a very long period of time. Do
you honestly believe that the capability exists for that scenario
to be allowed to persist for a reasonable length of time in maybe
two or three different scenarios?
Mr Webb: I think I had better
cough up here that it provides the spur to further capability
work, and I think I know that so I will explain what I mean. As
you know from things we have been talking about domestically in
Mr Hoon's speeches and so on concurrency (which is dreadful jargon
we use), doing operations simultaneously, is now an issue for
us domestically and is in this context. So I think you are right
that sometimes—look at how long we have been in Bosnia,
for example—you are going to have a range of operations
which are going to go on for a period of stabilisation and it
is also true to say that the original Headline Goal for the ESDP
was very much centred around the initial intervention. It was
not quite as dramatic as that and it talked about sustaining for
at least a year. Actually we have had more troops offered than
we needed to sustain it. You know all about 3:1 ratios and all
that. We can actually do it for rather longer. But it is in my
mind to think that accepting this task does imply, as you have
discerned, that there will be concurrent operations and that once
we go on beyond the current Headline Goal we should start to think.
This is certainly a phrase that we have been using in EU discussions
about more concurrency and what it does say is that we want other
countries to generate more stabilising forces. So you can get
on a sort of rotation. As you know, you have seen us do this in
Afghanistan, you need to have a sort of roster so that it does
not become too much of a burden for any one country and people
do not get tired. So yes, I think you are right to spot that there
is a capability driver in here and I think you can take it that
we will be pointing that out to people, in fact we already are.
Q30 Mr Hancock: But there is nothing
that will actually allow the EU to insist that the capability
is maintained, is there? We might be able to deliver a prolonged
capability maybe in three different areas for a period of time
but that is no good if there is no one behind us following through,
is there, and I do not see anything in what is before us today
which leads me to believe that the EU would be able to punish
a country effectively for not delivering its share of its capability
at the time it was required?
Mr Webb: At one level that is
part of the pluses and minuses of intergovernmental, if you had
a strong driving centre but you might not want to have a strong
driving centre for other constitutional reasons. Let us assume
we are on an intergovernmental track. I am sorry to keep coming
back to the point but that is one of the reasons why we have been
promoters of the Agency because the Agency will exactly get on
to that. What will happen here is, supposing this gets in the
Treaty, the EU Military Committee will say, "Right, what
military capacity do we need to fulfil these roles?" It will
do some scenario analysis, it will make some projections of the
kind you are hinting at already in your mind and it is going to
say, "Well, actually we need rather more," let us make
a guess, "light brigades that we already have and the logistics
and so on to sustain them." The Agency will then say, "Right.
Well, we've done an evaluation of what's already available to
the Union and it isn't enough." So you need something to
bridge this gap and the head of the Agency, who we believe should
be a political figure, will at that stage start saying, rather
in the way (if I may put it like this) that Lord Robertson has
been known to do within NATO, "Well, where are you all then?"
It is easy enough to sign up and have all these aspirations but
where are the troops on the ground? To be honest, I can think
of senior political figures in the EU who, given this kind of
opportunity, would do well with it and would chivvy the heads
of state and so on, served by the agency, which will give them
the raw material.
Q31 Mr Hancock: Are you satisfied
that two of the major components of the EU, France and Germany,
are actually signed up on the same basis we are and they share
the same sort of commitment to the extended capabilities that
will be needed to service the new Petersberg tasks?
Mr Webb: Yes.
Q32 Mr Hancock: What gives you that
confidence, because I do not sense it when I talk to our colleagues
in the French parliament?
Mr Webb: Well, we have worked
a lot with them on this particular area, I think it would be fair
to say. We have been working very closely on the design of the
Agency with both those countries. The Le Touquet declaration.
Thank you, Paul. I am sorry to get back into the text but we had
an Anglo-French summit in Le Touquet, which said something along
these lines. Was concurrency in that?
Mr Johnston: Yes, it was. In the
UK-French summit in February we talked about modernising the Headline
Goal and the point you raise about post-conflict stabilisation
is very relevant because the original Helsinki Headline Goal defined
in 1999 set the target of being able to deploy up to 60,000 troops
at 60 days' notice for deployment in the field for at least a
year.
Q33 Rachel Squire: Where are they?
Mr Johnston: They are there.
Rachel Squire: They are supposed to have
been there by the end of this year—June this year.
Q34 Mr Hancock: They are there on
paper; are they there in reality?
Mr Webb: Yes.
Mr Johnston: Yes, and more than
60,000.
Mr Webb: More than 60,000, yes,
over 100,000.
Mr Hancock: Really? I think you should
write to us about that with some detail. [1]
Rachel Squire: Yes. That would be very
interesting.
Mr Hancock: How many of them are ours?
Half?
Rachel Squire: You could break them down
for us by nationality—
Mr Howarth: You could break them down
by unit, I think.
Q35 Mr Hancock: You are now saying,
Mr Webb, that there are 100,000 properly trained, ready for action
in either post-stabilisation or pre-conflicts who are available
now, deliverable somewhere, 100,000 trained personnel? That is
the first time we have heard that anywhere.
Mr Webb: Well, it is to sustain
it.
Q36 Mr Hancock: For more than a week?
Mr Webb: No, the goal is to sustain
60,000 for at least a year. You know, because you are experts
in this business, that in order to sustain 60,000 for a year you
need to have more in the locker than 60,000 because you do not
want to keep 60,000 people out—
Q37 Mr Hancock: 180,000 we were told
you needed.
Mr Webb: Well, I cannot remember
the precise numbers.
Q38 Mr Hancock: NATO told us that
it would need 180,000.
Mr Webb: What, for a year?
Mr Hancock: For a year, because they
told us that you could not expect troops to be in that situation
for longer than a four to five month period of time and to rotate
them around you would need between 180,000 and 200,000 men.
Mr Howarth: I think Mr Hancock is right
actually.
Q39 Chairman: It is not a problem,
Mr Webb. When we finish our report and you say 100,000 there will
be a little asterisk next to it and at the bottom there will be
a redefinition of what you said based on further research. I think
that is what Mr Hancock is putting to you.
Mr Webb: I mean, there are other
gaps. I do not want to be misleading about this. There are significant
shortfalls against the Headline Goal but I do not think that manpower
is a substantial problem area.
Mr Johnston: If I may just clarify
the reference to 100,000. The first definition of what Member
States would offer on a voluntary basis towards this Headline
Goal target was in the autumn of 2000 when the first Capabilities
Commitment Conference took place and every Member State made a
certain number of commitments about the troops and the other capabilities
it would offer and those were added up, as it were, and assessed
and my recollection is that the total number of troops offered
was something over 100,000. The gaps identified in terms of other
capabilities like airlift and precision guided weapons were taken
forward and the work has been going on in the European Capabilities
Action Plan and various other fora to fill those gaps and it is
an iterative process with peer pressure to keep people up to the
mark to do it. The EU recognised this spring that while we had
the capability to operate across the range of Petersberg tasks
that was limited and constrained by recognised capability shortfalls.
At the point as things stand in terms of the declared commitments
that Member States have made there is not an obvious shortfall
in terms of numbers of troops but there are recognised shortfalls
in other capability areas.
1 Ev 18 Back
| 
