Examination of Witnesses (Questions 543
- 559)
WEDNESDAY 5 FEBRUARY 2003
AIR VICE
MARSHAL IAIN
MCNICOLL
CBE AND MR
HUGH KERNOHAN
Chairman
543. Good afternoon, Air Vice Marshal. Could
you introduce your team behind you and tell us what their jobs
are?
(Air Vice Marshal McNicoll) I am sure I can let Mr
Kernohan speak for himself, but if I can turn round and speak
about the people in uniform behind me, on my left I have my Military
Assistant, Lt Commander Mark Hart, who is taking notes for me
so that I can write something coherent at the end of this. Behind
me on my right I have Lt Colonel Rupert Wieloch, who was one of
the JDCC staff who was closely involved in the SDR New Chapter
work that I have just explained, and I have also behind me Commander
Steven Haines who was drafter—perhaps one would say the
lead author—of British Defence Doctrine.
544. I cannot say welcome as I would normally
as this is not our territory; it is yours. It is not often that
we travel abroad to pursue our search for truth and I hope this
is a most informative session. Can you start by giving us a little
background on how the team was got together and how it has been
operating? What time did it take to find the staff, to get up
and running, how long since you started working on the doctrine
itself?
(Air Vice Marshal McNicoll) If I talk about the Joint
Document and Concepts Centre and where it started from I hope
that will cover it. It was of course part of the Strategic Defence
Review 1997-98 which suggested that there should be a centre responsible
for pulling together the three services, thinking about both doctrine
and concepts. That was mid 1998 when the SDR was published. The
Chiefs of Staff endorsed the recommendations after a study on
a Joint Document and Concepts Centre in February 1999 and the
Centre was up and running by September 1999, so it has been in
operation for just over three years now. We were at full establishment
in October 2000 so it was almost a year to get everybody up to
full establishment. The principal outputs in the first three years
of operation were concentrated at the top level of both doctrine
and concepts in the British Defence Doctrine which I believe you
have had copies of.
545. This (indicating) is one of the
earlier ones. What date was that?
(Air Vice Marshal McNicoll) This was signed by the
Chief of the defence Staff in October 2001 and Joint Vision likewise
came out in the second half of 2001. That said, I think the team
was up and running pretty quickly and got on with a lot of other
work which I could expand on later if you wish. As I say, it has
now been in operation for just over three years and is getting
at the heart particularly of the doctrinal and increasingly the
conceptual side.
546. Who chose the staff?
(Air Vice Marshal McNicoll) The first Director General,
my immediate predecessor, was Major General Tony Milton whom I
believe you have met, and he had a major input into who the staff
were, but the single service posting systems also had a major
input to that and the service secretaries and manning authorities
from each of the three single services proposed people to fill
the posts on the establishment.
547. Had all the people who had been selected
had sufficient experience in jointery, because if you are devising
a joint doctrine one would assume that all the people involved
were imbued with the spirit of jointness?
(Air Vice Marshal McNicoll) You have to start from
somewhere and if you start a Joint Doctrine and Concepts Centre,
never having had one, then inevitably you are starting with single
service building blocks and trying to pull it together. That said,
there were other joint organisations and you have just been to
the Joint Service Command and Staff College, so people had come
from either a joint staff training background or indeed, if they
had been at the Permanent Joint Headquarters, from a joint operational
background as well.
548. That is what I was really getting at. We
have interviewed very senior people in the military who have never
served outside their single service. Some have got to a very high
position. I presume younger people now will have been compelled
to go through quite some experience of working with other services.
(Air Vice Marshal McNicoll) I am not sure if they
have been compelled. I hope some of them want to but yes, I think
you are absolutely right, Chairman, that the times are definitely
changing and it is unusual now to find an officer of middle rank
who does not have joint experience.
549. Can you give the Committee some insights
into how the functions of the JDCC have developed? You talk about
timing. Perhaps you can answer the question thematically, conceptually.
(Air Vice Marshal McNicoll) The Joint Doctrine and
Concepts Centre was really set up to do three things, so its mission,
if you like, has got three parts to it. In general it is the centre
of excellence for developing Joint Doctrine and a future Joint
Vision for the armed forces, but the three parts of that are to
formulate, review and develop the Joint Doctrine at the military
strategic level down to the Joint Tactical Level, to co-ordinate
the single service tactical doctrine and also to provide the UK
input to allied and multinational doctrine. That is the doctrine
element out of the three bits. On the conceptual side we are required
to provide the long term conceptual underpinning for the future
operation of the three armed services involving such aspects as
systems doctrine, force development and indeed we contribute to
the MoD's defence planning process as well. I should mention that
the JDCC is part of the policy area of the central staff of the
Ministry of Defence. The third part of our mission is to formulate
doctrine for peace support operations and also to promote the
UK approach to peace support operations and that is a separate
function of the organisation. I think that describes our mission.
550. Once you have put out the document what
is the timescale for implementation, real implementation? Are
we talking about a year, five years, ten years?
(Air Vice Marshal McNicoll) To answer that I would
separate out the doctrinal side from the conceptual side. If we
are looking at the doctrine, once a doctrine publication has been
signed off, and at a higher level that might be by the Chief of
the Defence Staff on behalf of the Chiefs of Staff; at a lower
level it might be by myself, that is then immediate. That is the
current way of doing business. If we are looking at the conceptual
side of the business then it is much more a question of how we
influence thinking. What we are trying to deal with is looking
as far as we reasonably can into the future and that may be some
considerable time. It may be ten, 15, perhaps even 30 years into
the future. What we are trying to do is influence thinking about
how the military develop across all the lines of development,
whether that is equipment or personnel or sustainability. A concept,
when it is delivered, does not mean that that is how we are going
to do things immediately. It is an idea about how we might operate
in the future.
551. Would you prioritise and tell people or
would they assume, "This is short term", "This
is medium term", "This is long term"?
(Air Vice Marshal McNicoll) Yes, very much so. It
would be clear from what we were producing whether that was intended
to be for now or for later.
552. Mr Kernohan's presence here indicates that
the MoD is not very far away from the process, so where would
they fit into what you do? I do not suppose you are allowed too
much freedom because they will seek to influence what you are
doing.
(Air Vice Marshal McNicoll) As I said, we are an integral
part of the policy area in the central staff of MoD. We have strong
interactions within the policy area with the Director of Force
Development and with the Director of Policy Planning. Also in
the central staff we interact closely with the equipment capability
area, with the science and technology area and with the resources
and programmes area and, in the single services, both with the
single service from my level, the single service Assistant Chiefs,
effectively with the single service view, and also with their
doctrinal and conceptual organisations. In terms of how much we
are let off the leash, obviously there is a higher level endorsement
of what we are doing, particularly if it is the immediate work
for doctrine, but the majority of our work in the conceptual area
is pushed from our side as much as it is pulled from elsewhere.
553. Would you not have been better off in the
main building somewhere, assuming it was functioning? What is
the advantage of being in this part of the world?
(Air Vice Marshal McNicoll) There are pros and cons
to the location.
554. I do not want to know about housing prices.
Tell me the pros and cons.
(Air Vice Marshal McNicoll) On the pro side we are
not in the daily round of business all the time with immediate
deadlines and answers required by tomorrow, so there is space
and time to think. Also on the pro side we have got good interaction
with the Staff College and with the Royal Military College of
Science. There is with the Defence Academy that academic and educational
and training link. We also interact with the single service organisations
and they are not necessarily in the centre of town. The Maritime
Warfare Centre is down near Portsmouth; Upavon for the Army's
Directorate General Doctrine and Development and, in the case
of the Air Force, they also have an Air Warfare Centre which is
in Lincolnshire. Being in town or being in the country does not
make a lot of difference. On the down side—
555. Be careful now. I do not want you to end
your career. The MoD does not like people talking about the down
side of anything. Mr Kernohan is at least three feet away from
you so do not look at him, or watch his right foot. Do tell me
the down side.
(Air Vice Marshal McNicoll) There is only one down
side and that is that obviously I have to interact with all the
people that I listed to you earlier and that does involve travelling
into London more than it involves them coming to visit us here.
Similarly, for all the staff, they do not just sit in an ivory
tower developing it. They do need to be in town frequently.
556. How do the single service doctrine writers
feed into the process and how do you try to unravel what they
are thinking about as opposed to the approach that you are taking?
(Air Vice Marshal McNicoll) We are the owner, if you
like, the process owner, of all the joint doctrine and anything
above a certain level now is joint. For single service tactical
doctrine we are also the co-ordinator of that part. I chair the
Joint Operational Doctrine Committee which has representatives
from each of the three services, and my Assistant Director Doctrine
chairs the Joint Tactical Doctrine Committee. We have a regular
formal basis therefore for ensuring that we are on the same sheet
of music but we also have regular informal contacts and my Assistant
Director Doctrine and his team of doctrine people are interacting
daily with me and with people from the three service organisations.
557. How do you interact with NATO and the French,
the Germans, the two other major significant military powers in
the region, and the United States and others? Is it possible for
us to go swinging off in one direction whilst jointery as seen
in the United States or in other parts of the alliance is moving
in another direction? How do you calibrate all the different shooting
stars?
(Air Vice Marshal McNicoll) If I take NATO first,
can I say that the UK adopts NATO doctrine unless there is a good
reason not to, and that means that we adopt NATO doctrine in most
cases, and we are also heavily involved with the NATO doctrine
production because even though the NATO Standardisation Agency
under Rear Admiral Eriksson owns NATO doctrine, we, the UK, in
the shape of my deputy for doctrine, chair the Allied Joint Operational
Doctrine Committee and we are also the owners of some key publications
for NATO, including intelligence, peace support operations and
in fact the top level allied joint publication as well. What we
find, looking at the European nations, is that the UK—and
I hesitate to boast about us; I do not mean it in that sense—is
actually the fleet leader amongst NATO nations. I do not think
we have a problem at all in the European theatre and we are well
linked up. The US situation is rather different because the US
obviously is much more diverse and they have forces which are
not assigned to NATO or part of NATO, whether they are working
in the Pacific or elsewhere, and their single service organisations—and
of course they have four if you include the US Marine Corps in
it—have very powerful doctrine organisations and development
organisations themselves. For instance, the US Army has TRADOC
which is a leader in US thinking. We do though have interaction
with Joint Forces Command and again my Assistant Director Doctrine,
who I regret is not here because he is employed on operations,
is a key participant with the US on bilateral joint doctrine development.
I will not pretend that the challenge in interacting with the
US, given its size and diversity, is not in some ways greater
than it is with the rest of the European NATO operation.
Chairman: Yes, I think you are right.
Patrick Mercer
558. How are the efforts of each service and
the JDCC fully co-ordinated?
(Air Vice Marshal McNicoll) Could you just expand
on the question please?
559. Each of the services works on its own individual
doctrine. How do you pull that together?
(Air Vice Marshal McNicoll) We manage that through
the Joint Operational Doctrine Committee and through my personal
interaction, for example, with Major General Bailey who is Director
General Doctrine Development for the Army and, similarly, with
the Air Force and Navy equivalents. It is a personal interaction
and it is a process interaction. As I said earlier, we are the
acknowledged process owner for this level of co-ordination.
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