Select Committee on Defence Minutes of Evidence


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.


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