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Oral evidence Taken before the Defence Committee on Wednesday 4 June 2003 Members present: Mr Bruce George, in the Chair __________ Witnesses: DR BARRY POSEN, Professor of Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; PROFESSOR CHRIS BELLAMY, Cranfield University; and MR PAUL BEAVER, Ashbourne Beaver Associates, examined. Q103 Chairman: Gentlemen, thank you very much. Before we start, just a brief word. There is a vacant seat over there. Our Committee tends not to take a serious interest in journalists generally and it is only by inviting former journalists that we can get one into our proceedings, it appears. However, there was one who was a great exception and that was Francis Ponsonby who wrote for The Officer - not one of the mainstream journals. Francis died earlier this week and I would like on behalf of the Committee to pass on our condolences to his widow and his children. He was a really good guy and he will be sorely missed. He is proof that you do not have to be a trained journalist to write very good prose that can be easily read - in fact, that might be a lesson to others to follow suit. Thank you, Dr Posen, for making the great journey over the Channel, and Paul Beaver and Chris Bellamy. As you know, we have begun our inquiry into Lessons of Iraq; the Secretary of State came a couple of weeks ago and now we have a distinguished panel of experts who we look forward to listening to. When we ask the questions, please do not think it is obligatory for all three of you to answer. If you do not have any particular interest or expertise in that question then do not join in, because we can use your expertise more obviously. If I might start by asking you all this: apart from the obvious eventual strategic success of the campaign, how good do you believe the war plan was? Dr Posen: To the extent that we know what the war plan was, on the whole I think it was a pretty decent plan. It did not overestimate Iraqi military capabilities: it aimed to leverage certain strong suits in which the west, in particular the United States, had invested for many, many years, particularly air power: it took advantage of the fact that much of the Iraqi military could be counted upon to be fairly unreliable so you could risk these kinds of deep penetration operations that essentially were done: so on the whole I think by the time they got to the actual plan that they used they were in pretty good shape, with the caveat about whether the plan was entirely adequately resourced once the Turkish option was lost. I think once the Turkish option was lost, the plan was not adequately resourced. It seems entirely reasonable to me that there should have been another division in the theatre before they started. If not, there should at least have been pre-positioned material to make it easy to bring another division into the theatre. That is where you have key issues - not only about the campaign itself but how you would transition from the campaign to essentially pacification. Q104 Chairman: I will ask later what the British contribution was - there is no need to answer that at this section. Mr Beaver: I think I agree with Dr Posen on that. On the resourcing of it, until 14 January it was anticipated that there would be an attack from the north and although there were plans to be able to sustain a military operation in the north of the country by using heliborne troops I believe that that perhaps could have been better resourced. Certainly it seems to me that the campaign probably started about two to three weeks ahead of a schedule that may have been there, and the reason is that, if you look at the disposition and the way in which troops were being deployed, they perhaps went across the startline slightly earlier than the military would have particularly wanted. The one area there was a failure was in the appreciation of the relative strengths and weaknesses of the Iraqi forces. I think that the capability of the Republican Guard was overestimated and it seems to me that the one failure was in tactical intelligence - the fact that there would be Fadayeen groups, suicide bombers, even though in smaller numbers, and a case of ordinary people fighting which gave the Americans in particular a problem with their rules of engagement. Q105 Chairman: I will come back to you on this if I may. Professor Bellamy: I also agree with my two fellow witnesses that the plan for the war was a pretty good plan. There is a famous saying that no plan survives contact with the enemy and of course the plan, 1003 Victor, was continually changed. Probably the most radical change occurred around Christmas because, as you probably know, the British were originally part of the northern front with the Turks. However, even before Turkey became publicly opposed to allied troops using its territory as a base, General Franks had switched to an all-south option. Paul said 14 January: my understanding was the 6th, but obviously there are other witnesses who can confirm. It was around then. 3 Commando Brigade were always going to be in the south of Iraq but 7 Brigade and another brigade, and at one stage I understand it might have been 4 Brigade, another armoured brigade, were for the north. The Turkish resistance to the deployment of British and American troops on their territory was a gift for General Franks in terms of deception because he maintained the effort to open up a northern front and convinced, I believe, the Iraqis that a northern front was essential to the point that the Iraqis deployed two corps and some of their best troops in the north, so although 4th Division actually existed, unlike the fictitious 1st US Army Group at D Day, nevertheless it fulfilled the same role in diverting the Iraqis. As we know, the Operation Phase 3, the war fighting bit, went extremely quickly. It was a high-risk operation, and I agree with Dr Posen that if the Iraqis had put up more of a fight we might have had considerable problems - but we are not into counter factual history; we are into history. Q106 Chairman: There is an interesting article in today's Telegraph by John Keegan saying how inept the Iraqis were in not using their Republican Guard up forward, keeping them back, and then they melted away. Did you look at the article? Do you think he got it right. Mr Beaver: I have not seen it. Professor Bellamy: I have not seen it. There were very basic things that the Iraqis could have done - for example, blowing bridges over the Euphrates. When the Germans failed to blow the bridge at Remagen, and you have probably all seen the film, the Major was shot. He had tried to blow it but the explosives did not work, so very basic military things the Iraqis did not do, and I therefore believe there was a reluctance among senior members of the Iraqi military leadership to fight and I am sure that the allied planners had intelligence to that effect which gave them the confidence to put in what, by any normal military criteria, was a high-risk plan. Q107 Chairman: Perhaps, Dr Posen, you would be well placed to answer this question. Cheney got into a lot of trouble earlier in the campaign for having chosen rather too light forces and all of the academics were telling him how he had made a mistake. Can you just give us some sort of background to that debate in the Department of Defence between allegedly Cheney on the one hand and General Franks on the other; the Army wanting to go in heavier, in greater numbers and Cheney wanting to go in rather light? Was he vindicated? Dr Posen: I think people have different perceptions -- Q108 Chairman: I mean Rumsfeld, I am sorry. Delete Cheney; insert Rumsfeld! Dr Posen: They may talk to each other so you may have it right after all! It looks to me like perhaps the concepts of operations went through a number of iterations. I think in the beginning a group around Rumsfeld believed the regime would be quite easy to topple, so you had a lot of talk early on of very small forces based a lot on special operations forces, air power, the idea being that this regime would succumb to a sharp rap and it would collapse. This was an argument that the US military was not destined to be comfortable with and they were not, and Franks as a good Army soldier pushed back, and in the pushing back the force grew. Now, there is this second part of the tale about how Franks came up with a rather large force and then there was a kind of a guerilla fight by the people around him to keep control over some of these forces, so you still had an argument between Franks and Rumsfeld about the size of what was becoming the larger force, and I think circumstances in a way intervened to make the force lighter than what Franks wanted. I cannot believe he did not want another division in the theatre. Everybody I knew looking at the build-up beforehand was sure that another division was coming. Everybody I talked to was sure they were going to wait. This was the conventional wisdom and I personally think it was right. I think in retrospect it would have been intelligent to have another division in the theatre, and we already talked about the Turkish problem. As for vindication, I think it is central to admit or to observe that the key battles, to the extent there were battles - the key encounters - with Iraqi heavy ground forces were done by western heavy ground forces. In other words, the key fighting units were the heaviest units that were sent to the field. There were three heavy brigades in the 3rd, two heavily reinforced marine brigades that essentially turned them into mechanised brigades, and the heavy unit, the British 7. These were the units that carried all the weight in terms of pressurising the bad guys. The 101, which was an air cavalry helicopter unit, which was in some ways the pacer for when the war started - they did not want to start until they had the 101 in theatre - by the admission of the division commander was never used as a division. The 101 ended up essentially being a provider of forces and assets to other units - extra attack helicopters after the 3rd lost many of its attack helicopters in that initial misplanned raid, suppliers of infantry units to secure the line of communication once it ran into trouble - and ultimately, had there been a brawl for Baghdad, that unit would have had to supply the extra infantry necessary for the street fight. So when you look at the ground fights that were fought there were, at least in the American part of it, five very heavily armoured units centred around traditional stuff that would have been familiar to any central front NATO pack commander that wildly outclassed anything the Iraqis could put in the theatre, and therefore these units could afford to take terrific risks - and did - partly because of their confidence in their own equipment and tactical superiority and partly because of their confidence in the incredible massive responsiveness of air power, and it is the massive responsiveness of American air power today which makes a plan that twenty years ago would have looked insanely risky look bold but still well considered and, on the whole, still prudent. Mr Beaver: I would like to add to what Dr Posen has said -- Q109 Chairman: Please feel free to disagree as well! Dr Posen: He will get round to that. Mr Beaver: I will when we talk about aviation but what I would like to add is that the Americans, in a Blitzkrieg type operation which would not have been out of place to a German mind in 1940, in the way they went straight to Baghdad around the centre of population, did it because they had not only the confidence in their vehicles but also in their logistic support, which is a very important lesson that has come out of this. You cannot go hell for leather to Baghdad unless you know you can be supported, and the US Army and the US Marines have a very good logistic tail that works. They have a very good series of equipments and they plan around it. The one area that was very bold of the Americans was that they did not add armour to their main battle tanks. They went all the way with their vehicles without appliqué armour on, which meant when they did lose vehicles - they lost three main battle tanks - they were lost to relatively simple anti armour weapons which indicates that had the Iraqis put up anything like a fight the Americans would have had a serious problem because they did not have that appliqué armour in theatre. Dr Posen: You mean reactive armour? Mr Beaver: Not necessarily reactive. The British do not use reactive, for example. Professor Bellamy: We just bolted extra plates on the outside. On this question of the number of forces, I would just like to say that a risk was taken by going in, as has been suggested, a division light but more troops really were needed, of course, in Phase 3B, the grey area between war and peace, and in Phase 4 which is now, which is the peace support operation phase. That, of course, is where you need more bodies and that is where an extra division perhaps more specifically configured for a peace support role would have been particularly useful. Q110 Jim Knight: Picking up on the comments about getting into Baghdad quickly and the logistic support and following on from what Chris Bellamy has just said, it was fine to get in quick and do the job they did in Baghdad but they then did not have the logistic support to do the reconstruction and humanitarian work that they had to do, and seemingly failed to do. Is that right? Mr Beaver: I agree. The impression I get is that the thinking through to capturing Baghdad and removing Saddam Hussein from power was a well thought out and well executed plan - full stop. The next phase, Phase 4, in Baghdad and the American area in particular, was not thought through. There was a real feeling that somebody else would come in and do that, or some other force would be there. One of the areas that the Americans overestimated was the number of Iraqi soldiers who would come over and surrender without a fight. I think they hoped that there would be formed units of the Iraqi Armed Forces that they could use, perhaps putting British or American officers and senior NCOs there - creating a force where the engineer battalions, for example, in the Iraqi Armed Forces could have been used. But we did not have that; we had the Iraqi Armed Forces melting away in effect, so nobody quite knows who was who. So that was a failure, I agree. Going to Baghdad, full stop - a success. After that, history will probably show it was not quite as well thought out. Professor Bellamy: I agree that there was a hope that formed units of the Iraqi Army would come over en masse, and in fact very few did - instead they just went home. Also there was a feeling among the British troops in Basra that the peace support operation would be done by some sort of follow-on force. Well, it did not work that way; the troops are now doing a magnificent job but not a job that they were expecting to do. That is my understanding. Q111 Chairman: Perhaps when they start a retrospective war game they should calculate what might have happened had the Iraqi military operated rather more effectively. You think then it would have been not a damned near run thing but much more difficult. Secondly, I was getting very nervous with the speed of the advance fearing that some kind of guerilla operations would more effectively operate, leaving the Americans way out in front of their fuel and much more vulnerable. You say, Dr Posen, that the Americans did very well on the logistic supply, but were they effective therefore in protecting the hundreds of miles of road that, had guerilla operations been more effective, might have caused considerable problems? Dr Posen: I think what you are calling guerilla operations did cause some trouble and the great speed of the advance caused a trouble. I think militaries are experiential learners, and however you do the arithmetic I am not sure you are really ready for the wear and tear on vehicles in such a long, fast dash in such difficult circumstances. Most of the vehicles were pretty beaten up by the end of it and fuel and whatnot was hard to keep up. One of the lessons that the Americans should be learning or relearning from this experience is an old lesson from mobile armoured warfare and that is that, if you are going to make these bold deep thrusts, you have to fix your line of communication in a way that it is prepared to fight. Towards the end of the Cold War there was some reapplication of attention to the problem of getting logistics units to relearn the fact that they might have to defend themselves and have to fight. There was some little bit of attention paid to improving the armaments. Similarly, towards the end of the Vietnam war, when American combat units began to become more sparse, you had to start getting the line of communication troops to think about defence and start armouring up those forces a bit, and we had to improvise that on the fly in this particular operation. My own guess is, if they want to do this again - and I do not say they want to do Iraq again but it is entirely possible they are thinking about another war - one of the lessons they are going to learn, I hope, is that some attention to hardening this long line of communication is going to have to go into not just the planning and the operation but the training of the line of communication troops. They have to be more attuned to the fact that they are likely to end up in brawls. Mr Beaver: What I noticed was there was no front line in real terms in this. The first casualties of the Americans were a mechanical engineering team who took a wrong turning. They were not properly trained; they could not read the maps; they did not know how to use their GPS properly; they had no weapons to defend themselves - and I think that is a lesson for us. We have to remember we cannot have a two-tier Army, and we cannot have the service support operations like the REME being given, for example, SA 80 A2 with iron sights. They have to have them with the proper sights; they have to have the proper equipment; and that is something we have had to learn out of that. The other thing the Americans have an advantage with that we do not is that all of the logistical support could move at the same speed as their forward units, so as their armour went forward all of their back-up came with them. We do not have that luxury in the British Army; we are using vehicles that are 33 years old in terms of the engineer support vehicles; we have vehicles that break down more often than they run; and that is another good reason why perhaps it was not a joint military operation -- Q112 Chairman: That is why we were given Basra, then, you think? Mr Beaver: It could well be. We were given what was within our capability. In fact, I think the United Kingdom requested what was in its capability. Its capability was southern Iraq going into just south of Nasariyah and that was what we could do, and so the United Kingdom did what it could handle. A lesson for us there is if you are going to move in a Blitzkrieg type operation, as the Germans proved to us and as lots of things have proved to us before, not only have you got to have the right kit but you also have to make sure the people are trained in the same way, and you cannot have a second tier in your Army. It all has to be first tier. Q113 Patrick Mercer: I am fascinated by all of your comments but particularly, concentrating on the logistics side, my personal experience was you could not fault the Americans on their logistics - they have always been superb - and yet we had this unprecedented account on about day 5 of, "We are only getting one meal. Our logistics have broken down so badly, we are only getting one meal a day and running out of ammunition". That is the first point. In line with that, when the concept of manoeuvre warfare was ladelled upon the British Army after the first Gulf War, the idea of deep, close and rear operations I thought was extremely welcome because at last there was this business of a line of communications having to be able to fight and defend themselves and being vulnerable not just on the central front to the idea of Spetznatz but also Fadayeen as it came up very clearly this time, but I was shocked to hear American troops saying, "We took the wrong turn; we could not read a map; we had no weapons to hand; the weapons we had were jammed with sand" - and then the remarkable comment, "We could not even mount a bayonet charge". Well, it does not sound to me as though they were trained to mount a bayonet charge. Dr Posen: I think you are saying in a stronger way what I was trying to intimate, which is that in modern high technology armies the division of labour is very intense and a terrific amount of action in the rear has to happen for what appears to the naked eye to be a relatively small amount of combat power up at the front. Obviously on the receiving end it does not seem like a small amount of combat power but relative to -- Q114 Chairman: Could you slow down, please? We have some very fast speakers here today. Dr Posen: It is an old problem of mine. It does look as if, over the last eight or ten years, this is an area that the US Army in particular let slide a bit. I am guessing they will not let it slide again - they are pretty good, pretty quick learners - but I do not think it is a crashing indictment. It is striking, as Paul said, that you can uncoil this line of communication behind you over such a long distance in so little time and move as much as needs to be moved. When an American armoured division is on its best day, several thousand tons is needed to feed this beast with ammo and fuel and everything else and that is a lot to drag over, and it is impressive that they did it. Yes, there were some mistakes and they paid the price, but I think it is impressive that they did it and the next time they do it they will be better. Mr Beaver: I think it is interesting they had one meal a day; the Iraqis did not have any meals a day so I think that is an advantage. Dr Posen: Well, if you know the meal a day they were eating, the meal ready-to-eat, nobody could eat more than one of those a day anyway! Mr Beaver: As you say, this is a tactical thing about going to central messing as opposed to going to combat rations and that sort of thing. Q115 Patrick Mercer: No. As I say, this was about day 5 when suddenly we started seeing pictures desperately reminiscent of Vietnam of mud-laden soldiers and there was a perception, rightly or wrongly, that they would be in Baghdad already by this time, particularly amongst the civilian community, and yet suddenly here was the operational pause. Is it an operational pause or have they been stopped in their tracks? "We only have one meal to eat", and the American Marines are saying, "I have no ammunition". Professor Bellamy: I am also a former journalist, as the Chairman knows, and I think here we have to be wary of taking a report and saying "We are only getting one meal a day". Let's look at the big picture. As the crow flies it is about 300 miles from the Kuwaiti borders to Baghdad; by road it is about 500 miles. 5th Corps did that in ten days - that is 50 miles a day. Rommel, Guederian and Patten did not achieve that rate of advance with an entire corps ever, I believe. Okay, you may say the Iraqis did not put up a fight and if they had put up more of a fight then maybe that would not have been achieved, but that is a rate of advance on a scale which I believe is unprecedented in recent military history, and if we are getting people whingeing about on "We only had one meal yesterday" then, frankly, you should not have joined the Army. Q116 Mr Cran: I want to be clear on this because I am not sure I am. Following on from what Patrick Mercer has said, it is easier with hindsight to say what you have said and we would be in the same position, but I do recall - and I cannot give you the dates - that there was intense political pressure exerted particularly by the media, and therefore Professor Bellamy you might tell us why, at the daily press conferences about the fact that everything had stalled. What I want to be clear in my mind why that occurred. Was it because of what you have all said about the logistics tail and they had to wait for a few days for everything to catch up then relaunch the attack again, or was it something else? Dr Posen: I think it is reasonable for you not to be clear because I do not think we understand history all that well yet. It seems to me it is probably a concatenation of three things: it is the line of communication probably not fully keeping up with the guys at the business end, and those guys did need a kind of pause. Secondly, the weather closed in - there was that rather nasty sandstorm and people looked muddy because then it rains through the sandstorm and there is this nightmarish occurrence - and thirdly, there is the tactical surprise. The Fadayeen or whatever you want to call them - these party militias - from Basra all the way north were making not as much trouble as they could but as much as they knew how to make, and in some cases it was a fair amount of trouble, and I think the commanders on the ground quite rightly became somewhat cautious for several days until they could convince themselves that that line of communication was going to be secure, so it is those three things working together with some degree of force for each one of them. I cannot put a number on it but I think they were the key. Mr Beaver: And then the fourth includes exhaustion of the troops. You can only fight for a limited number of days. To have moved forward and spent that time doing 50 miles a day, engaging the enemy most of the time at night as well - and remember this is a 24 hour battle with the Americans using their advantage of having night vision equipment so they could operate at night - after about five days of 24 hour battle it does not matter how much Dexedrine you have taken or how much kip you have had in the back of a vehicle for half an hour, you are going to be exhausted. Q117 Mr Cran: Is it too unfair to say that these elements could have been foreseen, one or other? Mr Beaver: I think they probably were. I would imagine that there was a pause sort of in the mind of General Franks at some stage. He is an experienced military officer and I would imagine he did not think he could go all the way. He is not going to be compelled by the Hollywood mentality of flags flying and driving hell for leather for Baghdad. I would imagine he would have expected there to be problems. He certainly would have expected to have had to put bridges across in places where he did not so. He would have had that in his mind anyway, which would have given him an operational pause to allow his soldiers to get a bit of rest and to do simple maintenance to vehicles. There are things you do on the move where sometimes the tank will keep going but it would be so much better if you stopped for two hours, get out, get the tool box out and do some maintenance. Dr Posen: This business about sleep is really quite critical. This is not just a kind of a comfort issue: this is a safety and rationality issue. Commanders who do not get enough sleep do not think clearly - we know this - and troops that do not get enough sleep will fall asleep driving the vehicles. You have these stories from this war and the last of a group of tanks trying to do something and the unit commander will notice one wandering off, and it is because the driver is asleep, the commander is asleep - everyone in the tank is asleep, not because they are negligent but because the human body ran out. So the idea that people need a rest is central. I think it is tempting for commanders to stress to people as much as they can when they see opportunities to fight all day and all night and run as hard as they can, but sooner or later you are going to run up against these human limits. Chairman: Now, we have new hours in the House of Commons that is not going to happen here. It used to, but not any more. Also, we cannot be accused of a rush to Baghdad - I have worked out we have asked three questions and there are 52 to go so we are going to have to step up the pace otherwise we will be here until midnight, and I am sure you have a train to get back to Belgium before that! Q118 Mr Howarth: You have referred in your last answers to some of the surprises that were encountered, and I wonder if you can tell us whether there were others? I have detected a difference of view between you, Dr Posen, and Paul Beaver. You, Dr Posen, suggested that the United States had deliberately calculated that the Iraqis were going to be a less difficult obstacle than some people were suggesting they might be and you, Mr Beaver, suggested that the capability of the Republican Guard had been overestimated. Frankly, I share your view. It seems to me astonishing that the Republican Guard were so inactive, but were there any other surprises? Dr Posen: Just to be clear, my view at the time, and I think the military's view, was that it was the Iraqi regular Army that they thought they could discount relatively. Paul is right, they probably overrated the Republican Guard, but I think almost everybody did - in other words, if you read the ISS Military Balance they did. On the whole, I think you are better off slightly overrating your adversaries than slightly underrating them. That is the difference. If you want to know about other surprises that I think the Americans faced which I do think could have been or should have been foreseen, some proved quite destructive and others did not. This one attack helicopter operation that the 3rd ran against the entrenched Republican Guard units essentially ran into a lot of rather old-fashioned anti aircraft automatic weapons which basically put a lot of metal in almost every helicopter that flew, and most of the helicopters that came back were not flyable for some days. Q119 Mr Howarth: We were lucky to have ours grounded, were we? Dr Posen: I think you were, actually. Q120 Mr Howarth: Or "hangared", I think they were. Dr Posen: Whatever you want to call it I think this was a surprise, and it ought not to have been a surprise because the same thing happened in the Anaconda fight in Afghanistan. The US Army insists on operating attack helicopters in ways that simply did not make sense - not everywhere but sometimes they insist on sending them out more or less by themselves and I think that was a problem. You already alluded to the Fadayeen militia and their use of really semi urban areas and I think that was a bit of a surprise. People forget that, towards the very last days of the war, some Iraqi missile gunner managed to put a rather crude surface-to-surface missile right into an American brigade headquarters and did a lot of damage - as far as I could tell quite a lot of damage in that 15 vehicles had to be written off and several people were killed - and this reflects some kind of intelligence failure on our part, I think. This is a case where I think we may have underestimated the adversary's intelligence capabilities, or whatever they used to find this unit, and I think the Americans got a bit sloppy. Those are some of the examples that occur to me. Mr Beaver: I think on the aviation side the lesson that the Americans had to learn again was about tactics. The British doctrine for air manoeuvre does not include operating helicopters in quite the same way. The incident talked about was when the 11th Aviation Brigade did a deep attack against I think it was Nebuchadnezzar division, I am not sure, and they basically were ambushed. What happened was they were operating at night and the Iraqis could not see them but they could hear them, and a lookout with a cellphone called the electricity substation where there was a man by the switch. They flashed the switch on the lights in the substation and that was a signal to everybody in the town of Hillah to come out with their machine guns and fire into the air indiscriminately. They hit 30 out of 35 helicopters doing that because the American commander had not put his reconnaissance in first, he had no idea what was there, he had no scout helicopters and no capability of addressing the ground fire, so they learned the tactical doctrinal lesson there and hopefully, when we come to use Apaches in the British Armed Forces, we will not fall into the same trap. But the lessons that the Americans learned in terms of helicopters were very much the case that helicopters and dust do not mix. It does not matter how good your helicopter is - they do not mix and it is as simple as that. The surprise if you like was one that they really should have known because in Anaconda they had exactly the same problem. Professor Bellamy: You asked about surprises. I suppose the biggest surprise, thank God, was that the Iraqis did not use weapons of mass destruction because the allied forces were completely prepared and expecting the use of weapons of mass destruction. There were many alerts, and of course with hindsight it is easy to talk about the lack of planning for Phase 4, but remember that weapons of mass destruction and their potential use are the wolf that is closest to your sledge, and I think whenever we think about lack of planning for Phase 4 and whenever we talk about operational pauses we must remember that, to the troops and the commanders on the ground, the possibility of the use of chemical weapons in particular was very real and it did not happen.
Q121 Mr Howarth: We are going to come on to WMD in a moment but can I ask you this question which only requires a short answer: has the United Kingdom been shown to have the right mix of forces equipment and training appropriate for coalition operations such as Operation Telic? Mr Beaver: The answer to that sounds as if it needs a dissertation! I think there were a lot of important lessons that were learned. One is that we can deploy up to a certain level an armoured division with its assets in place - there is no doubt about that. I think we have also learned that we are now equipping the infantry soldier probably better than ever before in terms of personal weapon, machine guns, grenade launches, their clothing, their body armour and, hopefully, soon communication equipment. The other area that we have not talked about which is in terms of air operations is that, in terms of the tactical air capability of the United Kingdom with Tornado and Storm Shadow, Tornado F3 and ALARM, with precision guided weapons, it is a very potent force. It is not very large but if I steal something from an RAF website they say that pound for pound, person for person it is probably the most efficient force there is and I think you can say that in terms of what was deployed. But what did show up was that it was very lucky that we did not have to go very much further up the road than north of Basra because we do not have that capability and that sustainability, and the problem we have is that to put that deployment in place we had to rob Peter to pay Paul. To get almost an aviation regiment there we had to rob helicopters and people from other regiments and people from other regiments and most infantry battalions had to have extra companies that came from other people to support them, so we do need to look at force structures to see, if we are going to do this sort of thing, whether we are capable of doing it. I am sorry - it is a slightly longer answer than I am sure you wanted. Q122 Mr Howarth: I accept it is not capable of a simple answer. Dr Posen? Dr Posen: I am not going to say too much but I did look at an Air Force document that just appeared recently that had some numbers in it about delivery of PGMs and sorties and so on. Of the total PGMs fired in the war the British delivered about 3 per cent, which is not a lot - it is not bad but it is not a lot, 20,000 precision guided munitions were fired in the war and the British delivered under a thousand of them. That is not bad but if you think that the other 19,000 mattered a lot to the outcome of the war you want to calibrate what you think your own capabilities are in terms of that ratio. Secondly, something that is a little odd -- Q123 Chairman: Do the stats say what percentage actually got anywhere near the targets? Dr Posen: No, of course not. Those arguments will come later. Also we have some statistics on intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance aircraft and the British contributed a nice percentage of the aircraft but it appears that British intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance aircraft worked about twice as hard as American, and you might want to talk to the people who flew those to see if they were overworked, and if that level of activity is necessary in order in some sense to keep up with the Americans. They might be under-resourced and you might want to figure out if that is the hypothesis that developed. Professor Bellamy: You say that 20,000 PGMs were fired of which 1,000 may have been British or so, but of course there were 1,000 American aircraft to 100 British aircraft so although those figures do not exactly match the general ratio of forces in theatre, there is not such a disparity as you might at first think. Dr Posen: The British provided about 9 per cent of the fighters but fired about 5 per cent of the plausible fighter delivered precision guided munitions so they are not delivering PGMs at anything like the rate the Americans are - even in fighter conditions, and once you include the bombers it is off the map. Mr Beaver: The point, Mr Chairman, is that there is a precision guided bomb competition under way at the moment in the United Kingdom. We only have interim PGMs; we do not have the kit yet.
Q124 Chairman: Whatever the statistics, if you look back to the lessons in Kosovo the hit rate was pretty spectacular for the British and was clearly an indication of the journey they travelled from the Kosovo war to the present. Professor Bellamy: You talk about equipment. It might just be worth recording that one quarter of the British troops did not have desert uniforms or desert boots, for example, because they just had not arrived in time, so I accept what my colleague Paul Beaver says about the excellence of much of the British equipment but the point is if it is not there then it is not a lot of good. Mr Beaver: Are you going to cover Urgent Operational Requirements, because we could spend quite a lot of time on that? Chairman: Yes. Q125 Syd Rapson: Some of us are a bit romantic about British planning and military affairs, and in the whole scenario for pre planning we assumed the British were in there playing their role. What, in your opinion, was the British contribution to the military plan and did it really matter? We were junior partners and we played a significant role but the planning and the way it operated seems to have been very American driven, and I cannot imagine from my history and my romantic vision about planners that that was true. What is your opinion? Professor Bellamy: May I answer that first? This operation could not have happened if the British had not had planners embedded at central command headquarters in Tampa, Florida right from the start. In fact, British planners have been embedded at Tampa since just after 11 September 2001, and the team who were involved in the late Gulf war were there from August. Australians who were also involved in this have said that they feel that they should have their people at PJHQ at Northwood because in three of the last wars - the 1991 Gulf War, Afghanistan and the late Gulf War - we have worked with the Australians, so the British played much more of a role in the American planning than I think you inferred. I would also say that the air tasking order takes about four days to prepare and all the targets have to be heavily lawyered to make sure they are politically correct targets, however on many occasions I understand that Air Marshal Burridge and/or his Australian colleague said to the Americans, "I do not think you should hit that" and every single time the Americans said, "Okay, fair cop, we will not", so I believe that the British were very heavily involved in the planning and that this operation could not have taken place if they had not been, and the maintenance of planners in allied headquarters is one of the key lessons of this war. Q126 Syd Rapson: Because the question implied it, it does not necessarily mean to say I believe it but were the British involved in all of the planning or were they isolated down to the southern part, that is your part, with the Americans dominating the planning for the long dash to Baghdad? Was there British advice on the long dash to Baghdad and the supply chain and protecting them at all, because this seems very naive when the American engineers were ambushed and taken prisoner. British understanding is that we imagine they would surely have been prepared for that; in hindsight it was not very clever. Professor Bellamy: First of all, a large British contingent originally was going to go in the north. The planners produced a simulation of a helicopter flight over the route from Turkey down into Iraq and I believe it ended up somewhere near Kirkuk or Mosul because the objective when the northern option was under consideration was to drive straight for those oilfields. I have spoken to somebody who saw the CD ROM with that simulation on it, and it is one very long, awful route involving a mountain crossing and a major river crossing. Had the British had to do that, just about every engineer that we have including everybody in training regiments would have had to have been deployed to secure and maintain that route, so with the benefit of hindsight it is very fortuitous that General Franks was obliged to go for an all southern option. One of the reasons he was very glad to have the British in the south is that we had certain capabilities that the Americans did not have, and we are talking here particularly about amphibious engineering. Our bridging is slightly bigger than the Americans'; we have floating bridges that the Americans do not have; we have very reserve engineers who work for oil companies in their civilian lives who are just the people you wanted to send into oilfields because (a) they know their way around an oilfield like the back of their hand and (b) because they are Territorial Army Royal Engineers they also know to look out for booby traps and mines. So we were requested because we had certain capabilities that the Americans did not have, and I think that should be placed on record. Q127 Mr Howarth: How effectively did the British command structures from the United Kingdom to the forces in the field operate bearing in mind they went from PJHQ to Air Marshal Burridge and then out to the field? Mr Beaver: It is interesting because there was a question that the chain of command and who was in charge is something which appears in a large number of post operational reports from individual units. There seems to be a feeling that subordinate commanders were concerned that they did not know what the chain of command was at times. They did not know whether their orders were coming from the Ministry of Defence, PJHQ, the Americans, the NCC or, to be quite frank, Alistair Campbell. There was a feeling that at times they were not sure where that chain of command was coming from, and I think one of the reasons was there was a communications problem, a simple matter of there not being sufficient means to communicate in some units between them and their one-up or two-up formation command. Q128 Mr Howarth: Was this a physical problem? Mr Beaver: Yes. We are talking of a physical problem here rather than one of concern about who was giving the orders, but there was a feeling lower down the scale that at the very top end they were not sure where their orders were coming from and what they were supposed to be doing, so I think they were suffering from not having enough command and control physical assets, but also perhaps there not being enough mission command in the sense of people not quite knowing who was doing what to whom. Q129 Mr Hancock: Why would a subordinate officer worry when he had been given a direct order from his superior to do something where that order emanated from? Mr Beaver: It is normal practice to want to know what is happening one or two formations above. It is a part of mission command. The way the British Army is trained is you want to know what your commander's commander's orders were in order that you can execute your commander's. Our soldiers are not like the Wehrmacht or the Soviet Army, or the Iraqi Army. They are not told, "You three go over there and stand and shoot". It is a matter of trying to be directed into doing something which then the subordinate commander takes his own decisions on. Q130 Mr Hancock: So what difference would it have made if they had known where it had come from? Say, for example, they had a debate amongst themselves when the order came down and said, "This is from Alistair Campbell. What do we do about this one then?" Mr Beaver: I was being flippant when I said that -- Q131 Mr Hancock: So was I but why would a fairly senior officer want to know where the actual order emanated from, and why would that cause him concern? Mr Beaver: I think the concern that people were expressing in the note that I have got here is that they were concerned about there being a mismatch in orders and the fact that their orders were not coming as quickly as they would have thought. So we are talking really about the physical means not being available and also there seeming to them to be some sort of discrepancy. I do not I am afraid have examples to be able to give you on that; perhaps I could see whether these people would be prepared to come and talk to you about it. Q132 Mr Hancock: I think the worrying aspect of that is the fact that, if I had been a commander there, I would have been nervous, if I could not first gauge where the actual order had come from, that the other parts of the coalition might not be aware of where I was being moved to and then friendly fire comes into play. Mr Beaver: That is part of it. There is also concern about, "Am I going to be moving up and losing contact with those people on my flank", but also it was a case that people were concerned in the British area that they might be going off to do something for the Americans and we have had reports of British troops complaining that they could not get close air support because that close air support was being held back for other units. That is a matter perhaps that I am not really able to address properly. Professor Bellamy: On the chain of command, you had the Permanent Joint Headquarters in Northwood with Lieutenant General John Reith as Commander of Joint Operations, you then had the National Contingent Headquarters in Qatar under Air Marshal Burridge, and under him you had Maritime, Land and Air components. Special Forces did not report; Air Marshal Burridge had no direct control over Special Forces - they reported directly up their chain - but this was not, I understand, a problem. There is a feeling which has been expressed that creating this National Contingent Headquarters was creating an unnecessary level of command, one level of command too many, and that what perhaps should have happened would be that you had a forward PJHQ perhaps commanded by the Commander of PJHQ himself in theatre. To me, the arguments are fairly evenly balanced. One of the good things about having the National Contingent Headquarters in Qatar is that PJHQ shielded it from government, and that all the political influences which have been referred to were fielded by PJHQ and the National Contingent Headquarters in Qatar was able to get on with running the British side of the war so I think it is fairly finely balanced, but it is an important question and a question which has raised a lot of interest among people in theatre. Q133 Jim Knight: To some extent, going back to something we discussed earlier, when the Secretary of State came to see us on 14 May he said that the decision to place British forces in the south was something we readily agreed to not least because obviously it gave us much shorter lines of communication, and that is something that has been reinforced in our discussion earlier on. Are there other reasons why the British were assigned the southern sector around Basra? Mr Beaver: Probably there are two overriding reasons. One is there was a limit to what the British could do, the size of the contribution and the capabilities of the British Army, and so that is if you like going a bit further than what the Secretary of State said, and I think we lobbied for that so that we would do that role in particular. The other is that there were two key urban targets that had to be engaged and one was Baghdad, the centre of the regime. That was obviously going to be a more difficult target and that was where the Americans could bring most combat power to bear. Basra was a smaller, closer target but no less key in some aspects, particularly because of its proximity to the Iranian border and also because of the nature of the population there. My understanding is there was a political concern that the Shia there may not be as happy to see the Americans; that they might be more happy to see the British if they did not believe the British had "let them down" in 1991, so I think there were those reasons as well. Also the sort of terrain there is rather reminiscent of some places in the United Kingdom like South Armagh; there was a feeling that British light forces were best capable of dealing with that sort of operation and had a better capability than the Americans - and when I say South Armagh I do mean in terms of the physical geography, not necessarily the climate! Q134 Jim Knight: Are you aware of any moments during the campaign, for example, when things got a bit bogged down in Nasariyah, when there was any request for us to do any more than the area around Basra? Mr Beaver: I am not aware of that. Professor Bellamy: I am not. Dr Posen: All I know about Nasariyah is the arguments about whether the Marines needed to send more forces in there, which they ultimately did, as I recall. Q135 Jim Knight: If we had been asked to send, say, an armoured division up to help them out, would we have been capable of doing it? Mr Beaver: No. Dr Posen: You were bogged down in Basra.
Q136 Jim Knight: Similarly, could we have coped with the northern flank option given the long lines of communication? Mr Beaver: I would add to what Dr Posen said there. Professor Bellamy: I think it would have been very tough. Mr Beaver: You probably would have found a hollowed-out Army as a result. The key elements of the British Armed Forces were the order of battle. The assets that the United Kingdom has we just do not have enough of - engineers being one of them and logistics support - and to move that sort of thing in terms of things like shipping, to divide shipping up between sending them to Turkish ports and sending them to Kuwaiti ports, the sum of those two is just too great. Q137 Jim Knight: So if it was our idea to go with a northern flank option in a two-clawed approach then we would not -- Mr Beaver: I think we would have done one, the northern flank. Q138 Jim Knight: But we would have been very ambitious in seeking to do that? Professor Bellamy: The Commando Brigade would still have been committed to the south but the northern flank option, as I understand it, was two brigades. As it turned out, of course, with the help of the Kurds the north largely sorted itself out but it is probably very fortunate for the British that the Turks were intransigent about allowing American and British troops to base themselves in their territory. Q139 Chairman: If we had been operating alongside the United States, would the communications divergence have been difficult? Ours is one step beyond the Apache system of communicating - and I do not mean the Apache helicopter. Mr Beaver: If there had been for political reasons a joint approach to Baghdad, we would have found that we would not have been able to keep up with the American logistics capability. We had problems in 1991 of doing that, as I recall. There would have been physical problems in talking. The Americans were using very much what they call network centric capability, real time digital capability - I cannot believe you can have something that is network and centric at the same time! - so they were using real time data and voice and we just did not have that sort of capability. So that was never an option. I do not think we were ever going to be in a position where we were going to do a joint thrust at Baghdad, politically good fun though that might have been or where the Desert Rats might have thought that was a thing they would have wanted to do. We did, I think, well in what we were capable of doing. Q140 Jim Knight: Do you think our kit could have done it, given that it is a nice tarmac road up to Basra, and airfields were not such an issue as they could have been? Mr Beaver: Airfields were not really an issue where we were once that operational requirement had been met. It was more the sustainability of it. We have yet to get into service the wheeled tanker vehicles that the government announced the order for a couple of months ago, so we would not have had that level of logistical sustainability. Professor Bellamy: As it turned out, the British ended up working with the US Marines which was very fortunate because doctrinally and in many respects the British Armed Forces are closer to the US Marines than to the Army - indeed, the British Armed Forces are about the same size as the US Marines - so that was a fortunate accident, I think. We are able to operate much more easily with the US Marines than we are with the US Army. Q141 Mr Hancock: In the planning stage when northern Iraq was still a possibility and it was down to us to do it, have you picked up any indication at any time at all that there was serious consideration given to allowing Turkey to occupy at least part of northern Iraq as part of a deal to go in from the north, or was that definitely never on the agenda? Mr Beaver: I always thought there must be a deal. I could not see why Turkey would want to allow that to happen unless they got something out of it. I could not see what the Turks were going to get out of the deal unless there was something there, but I think politically even the most hawkish people in the White House would have seen the flaw in that. In terms of providing perhaps flanked protection or some rear area support, however, certainly there would be room to work with the Turks but crossing the border in would have been very difficult because it would have alienated the Kurdish population. Q142 Chairman: You talked about an affinity between the British Army and the US Marines. What happened between 1991 and now because the original plans, as far as I recall, with Schwartzkopf was that the British Army would be working with the Marines and then we objected because the US Marine Corps does not operate alongside us in NATO and the reason we argued why we should go along with the American Army was because we in NATO had worked more closely with them. What has happened to reverse the argument, because you are now saying we are closer to the Marines Corps? Professor Bellamy: What has happened is that the Cold War, when we were lined up alongside the American Army in Germany, is over and we have a new doctrine of expeditionary warfare -- Q143 Chairman: More exercising? Professor Bellamy: Yes, with a lot more close discussion with the US Marines, and now on doctrinal matters we take our lead from Quantico and the Marines so things have changed in that 10/12 years. Dr Posen: There is another bit of symbiosis here between the Marines and the British in that the Marines operate on a somewhat shorter bankroll than the rest of the American military, so there may be some closer technological relationship of quality and quantity. I do think there is a set of questions you want to ask down this line about the British capability to go north, had they been asked. Part of the question is, as we have said, about line of communication, it is just the ability to get material up there, but I think it is noteworthy that the Americans had essentially a corps headquarters commanding two divisions. Now, you do that because you are trying to bring in lots of very high level information: you are trying to co-ordinate a terrific amount of combat power outside of divisions - rocket supports, helicopters, all this kind of stuff - and this generates a big tail. This is a big thing to run, this intercorps headquarters, which at least to the naked eye appears to be a rather small force package, and what would be useful is to try and figure out how much of that capability that the Americans dragged along with them is there in your institutions, and do you have these capabilities at all? For example, the American Air Force proudly claims to have used the product of almost fifty different space satellites for this war, and it is at corps level where you have the ability basically to bring all this intelligence from the outside together. Is this capability there in the British military deployable and able to go 200 or 300 miles and still do this operation? These are questions you want to ask. They are not necessarily capabilities that Britain wants but I think you want to ask whether you have these capabilities. Q144 Rachel Squire: Can I pick up on some of the points you have made about doctrine? You talked, Professor Bellamy, about the end of the Cold War and the move towards expeditionary warfare and how the US Marines and the British Army were in many senses more compatible. My original question was how compatible are British and American war fighting doctrines, but I would extend that now to ask is the reality that the war fighting doctrines are more compatible in different sections of the Armed Forces of the United States and the United Kingdom than in others? Taking your comments about the US Army, for instance, I made a memorable visit not so long ago to the National Army Training Centre at Fort Irwin which was very impressive but with rather a different outlook, a very "mass combat" outlook, from the one we are used to, so I am interested in your views on the doctrine compatibility between British and America in respect of all three main armed services. Professor Bellamy: The United States Armed Forces are so much bigger than ours that jointery - to use the current jargon term - is far less advanced within the American Armed Forces as a whole. The United States Navy, Army and Air Force all approach things in quite different ways, still. The United States Marines has within it ground, sea and air elements. Talking about compatibility, remember it was the United States Marines who bought the Harrier. The United States Marines are also the same size as the British Armed Forces. If one were to be extremely radical and looking as reorganising the British Armed Forces as one force the United States Marines might be a very good model, but I do not want to get into that. That is the reason why British defence doctrine, to use the title of the slim volume which has recently been published, has much in common with the approach of the US Marines. The US Marines, of course, also have a long history of expeditionary operations and those are the type of operations that the British increasingly expect to be involved in. It is not surprising that they are the people to whom we now feel the closest, although that was not the case 12 years ago. Q145 Rachel Squire: Is there any indication with the other services it is becoming more compatible with the British Forces or less so, the relationship between the US Navy and the British Navy or the US Air Force and the Royal Air Force? Professor Bellamy: The US Navy and the British Navy have worked together, particularly in the submarine area, a great deal. There are also similarities between the particular services of the two countries. In terms of day-to-day operations it was helpful, and this has been a comment made by many people who served in the late Gulf War, that we were working with the US Marines rather than with the US Army. I have no doubt that we could have worked with the US Army, of course. Q146 Rachel Squire: To what extent do you think the friendly-fire incidents that occurred were the product of either incompatible doctrines or incompatible equipment? Mr Beaver: There are a number of incidents which happened and in my mind at least two of them were completely avoidable and are as a result of a complete lack of good discipline, professionalism and training on the United States' part. The destruction of a tornado GR4 by a Patriot battery when that aircraft was using the very latest IFF, Identification Friend or Foe technology, transmitting the right frequency in the safety corridor in case the transmissions were not picked up, talking to the AWACS aircraft, that was talking to the ground command and still the US soldier pressed the button. I believe that is outrageous. I believe that the A10 aircraft, which twice strafed a British convoy, even though soldiers were carrying aloft the Union flag, I presume that was because the Americans were not trained in that. The thing that the British Army discovered on 6 January, which alarmed the British Army enormously, was the fact that the American Air Force had not been taught British vehicle recognition before this operation. They had been taught to recognise their own vehicles, hence when British vehicles were kitted out with recognition symbols. All of our vehicles were marked as American vehicles, in that way it was hoped there would be a way of trying to decrease the risk of friendly fire. We have to also point out it was not just them hitting us, they managed to destroy three of their own combat aircraft, an F16, an F15 and an F18, probably a helicopter, they lost a Patriot missile system because it tried to engage one of their own aircraft, who just retaliated - probably the thing most of us would have done. We are four years away from having a technical means on vehicles that can talk to aeroplanes. The problem we have with it is although the solution and the chairmanship of that Working Party is four nations: Britain, France, Germany and the United States, the chairmanship of that is British but we have to have the agreement of all four nations and there are two nations at the moment that do not want to talk to the other two nations about doing it because they have different political views. The system is perfectly feasible but you have to remember at the end of the day a British Challenger engaged another British Challenger and there was no way of stopping that, no technical means of stopping that. We had tired, exhausted, possibly frightened, tank crews, they saw what they thought was the right target. It is still under investigation, we do not know all of that, we only know that the vehicle was completely destroyed. The result of friendly fire - I do not like the term because I cannot believe any fire can be friendly - blue-on-blue engagements in my mind is something which has happened throughout history and will continue to happen because at the end of the day there are people involved and we are as human beings sometimes fallible. Q147 Rachel Squire: I can accept that point but when you were talking about equipment identification earlier surely was that not one of the lessons to be learned from the friendly fire incident of 1991? Mr Beaver: There has been a programme since 1991 which has not had perhaps the funding from her Majesty's Treasury that those involved in it might wish to see. I believe about six months ago there was a Committee, Chairman, who looked at combat identification. Q148 Rachel Squire: It is not just a United Kingdom issue, it is also a US issue. Mr Beaver: It is an issue of coalition. If we are going to be fighting in a coalition, which we are undoubtedly going to be doing, we must make sure that the systems are compatible. At the moment we do not have the capability of talking on the radios to each other. The classic example was four years ago in Kosovo, where British paratroopers were being flown in by Royal Air Force Chinook helicopters and they were escorted by Apaches from the US Army. They actually did not expect the Apaches to be there, they could not talk to them and they were really worried when they put down the forces that they could not tell them where they were going and the fact they were friendly forces. If we cannot get that right it is going to be a while before we get combat ID right. Combat ID is a major concern but it has to be done on a coalition-wide basis, it has to be done so that at least the British and Americans talk together. Who knows, we may well be going to war in a coalition or going on operations in the Congo with the French, so we have to be able to talk to the French as well. Ms Squire: In their language! Chairman: This is the question that will get you all on television tonight and Mr Jones as well I suspect. Q149 Mr Jones: The issue of weapons of mass destruction, to what extent was the finding and securing of weapons of mass destruction part of the actual campaign? Two other brief points, why do you think the coalition have failed to find significant evidence of the WMD to date? What will be the fallout, do you think, if there are not significant finds of WMD in terms of the legitimacy of the overall campaign operation? Mr Beaver: This is a difficult one. Can I start the ball rolling? How much was it part of the military campaign? I do not believe it was a major part of the campaign at all. I believe the military planners had a job to do and that was to get to the enemey's centre of gravity and destroy the enemy. War fighting is a really nasty business, we are talking about, to use the old parlance, closing with Her Majesty's enemies and killing them. Looking for weapons of mass destruction on the way, yes, maybe, possibly but it was certainly not the primary or I would imagine the secondary thought in General Franks's mind. Q150 Mr Jones: I accept that the main purpose was to secure Baghdad, was it part of the plan in terms of Phase III or Phase IV? Mr Beaver: It must be part of Phase IV. There were 87 sites that have been identified that have all been visited. I still have that sort of feeling that it is still a bit soon, it has only been two months. After all we are still finding relics of the Second World War 60 years later in Germany, Britain and the Low Countries. I have a distinct impression we have given Saddam Hussein so much notice that something is going to happen that any sensible dictator would have put his weapons of mass destruction - if he had them - out of harms way in another country, in such a location we have yet to find them, a variety of places. I think it is early days to say there are no weapons of mass destruction. I would like to have seen some from the point of view of the justification. In terms of legitimacy I think the soldiers that I have talked to who have come back believe they did a good thing, they destroyed an appalling dictator and they were able to rid that country of that person. In terms of the legitimacy I am not too sure. I think I would leave it at that from my perspective. Dr Posen: For this meeting I was reviewing some of the briefings from the war and several times this question was asked directly and senior briefers said, our notion of the war is we fight the war first and we look for weapons of mass destruction second. I credit what Paul has said, fighting a war is a pretty hard business and doing this kind of thing along the way may have seemed complicated. I think if you take seriously WMD as the rationale for the war then they should have tried to do this complicated thing regardless. The purpose of this war was to make sure that these weapons do not end up in the wrong hands, they could just as easily have ended up in the wrong hands in the middle of the chaos of a war in which they were not picked up at the right time as Saddam Hussein deliberately giving them to somebody. I personally think while I understand why they made this calculation this is another part of the plan I would have considered to be under resourced. Q151 Mr Jones: I accept it was not part of the campaign in terms of the main substance, the main purpose. Have you come up with any evidence that, for example, there were certain sites that were either targeted or it was imperative they got to very quickly because they thought WMD was there? If it was going to be used it would be very important to destroy those sites or get there very quickly? Dr Posen: In the light of what they said and what they have not said. What they do not talk about very much is special operations. We know there was a big special operations component in this war. One would be entitled to suspect that special operations people were trying to get to sites that intelligence suggested were promising. That is a question that you would have a better chance of getting an answer on than I would. Q152 Chairman: No, we would not. Dr Posen: I said a "better chance". The second thing is that if you look at the list of targets they were concerned about what they thought might be promising delivery systems for chemical and biological weapons, particularly everything they thought was associated with a missile, and they claimed they were going after those things. I credit them with their word but I think it is pretty striking if you look at what has been said in these briefings about when short range surface-to-surface air missiles were still fired and when large stocks of them were discovered they were being fired fairly late in the war which does not say they did not try and get these things, it may say they did not put as much effort into it as they implied or it may just be these are very, very hard things to find. I tend to think they are just very, very hard things to find. The inattentiveness to the WMD sites while the fight was going while understandable in a pragmatic strictly military sense it is not understandable in terms of the larger strategic logic of the war. I personally think there is some kind of issue there. On the failure to find weapons of mass destruction already I think it is a bold person indeed who is prepared to stand up and say, they are never going to find any because there are not any. It does seem to me there is something else that you can say that is fair, if these systems are hidden away as well as they would need to be hidden to have evaded our search so far the adversary had no intention to use them during the war. I am not sure we will ever get an answer as to why that was so but I think that bears on the original political calculation for the war, because the original political calculation for the war suggested that the other guy, Saddam Hussein & Co were extremely ferocious, they were holding these weapons for some last ditch defence and if he has them this is certainly not the way they were organised to be used. That raises some questions. Professor Bellamy: I have very little to add to that. I go back to my previous reference, you shoot the wolf nearest the sledge. Your aim is to win the battle, to capture the centre of gravity and you are very, very wary that the Iraqis might launch chemical weapons at you, therefore you go for surface-to-surface missiles, you go for multiple rocket launchers, you go for artillery, you go for anything that might launch weapons of mass destruction. Bunkers and storage sites where WMD might be stored but which are not obviously being deployed to be used are a secondary priority and you would isolate such a site, secure it and then go and inspect it later. I think that is the approach that was used. Q153 Mr Jones: There has been a lot of discussion recently about the chain of command in terms of the Iraqi Armed Forces, about how they would be used? That was possibly one of the reasons why they were not used. Have you come across any evidence that orders were given or there was some kind of break down in command? Professor Bellamy: I understand that Saddam's son Uday was placed in charge of weapons of mass destruction forces. The same question was raised in the previous Gulf War, did they not use them because they were deterred or because they were overrun so quickly. I think if the Iraqis had had any intention of using weapons of mass destruction they would probably have been able to get a few off, but that is speculation. Mr Beaver: We managed to fire 16 surface-to-surface missiles in Kuwait. If they wanted to do it that would have been a target that they would have been able to use. Q154 Patrick Mercer: The thing that used to puzzle me about all this, and I wonder if you have a view about it, why was their nuclear, biological and chemical warfare protection kit so far forward and why was it in the trenches with them? I assume they knew we did not have the capability. What is your thought on that? Mr Beaver: I remember seeing footage of it as far forward as Nasiriyah and certainly in some areas in Basra they had the equipment there. If we put our own experience on to that then you have that equipment because you believe the enemy has it or because you are going to use it yourself. There was some talk about the United States using CS gas, if you use CS gas you would use a respirator, you would not need to have a full chemical suit. I just wonder how long that equipment had been there. It would be interesting to see the sell by date on it perhaps. Q155 Mr Hancock: I am interested in the ideas that you might have of why they did not use them if they had them? Mr Beaver: I personally do not believe that Saddam Hussein had any intention of using them. If you look at the way he used them before, he had used them against his own people, he had used them in one part of the campaign in the far peninsula, when Iranian forces were so close to Basra that it seemed they were going to overwhelm them. That was a different sort of war, he was using everything in that war, he was using his artillery, he was using his helicopters dug in and firing from static positions, there was a sort of last ditch stand. I did not see anything in his military planning or his military execution that indicated anything like the defences that were put in place in 1980 to 1988. Q156 Mr Hancock: That poses the question, one of the lessons of Kosovo was that nobody really had got to grips with the psyche of Milosevic, do you think we were equipped well enough to understand the senior echelons within Iraq and once again the security and intelligence service did not really know their enemy well enough? Mr Beaver: One of the problems we had was a lack of human guide intelligence because of the nature of the regime. Normally in regimes you would normally expect there to be people in place you could use, there would be sleeping agents, there would agents of one sort or another and you would be able to get good human intelligence that would give you the ability to be able to profile these people properly. I am not saying somebody sitting watching a video of them saying, he is not looking too good today and not knowing if that was actually today's video tape. There was a lack of human intelligence. We found that before, that is not the first time that has happened. Q157 Mr Hancock: That happened with Milosevic. In such a short period of time it appears we have fallen into the same trap again. Mr Beaver: Is it a trap we can do anything about or is it something we have difficulty in dealing with? Q158 Mr Hancock: You were not finding weapons of mass destruction but you were surprised or the American and British troops on the ground were surprised when they found mass graves of people who we knew had been killed 12 years ago, presumably he had to bury them somewhere, but we seem to have spent a lot of time digging up the bodies of people we knew had been killed - for all the right humanitarian reasons. It appeared to me, and I am sure to a lot of people, this was once again a distraction because they were unable to find the weapons of mass destruction? Mr Beaver: I wonder whether it was the fact there were television pictures of them, and it was something that was televisual and we were able to see it? Q159 Syd Rapson: Would you also agree that if our troops were encumbered by protective suits and that was very difficult in the heat and the Americans, the British and the journalists were suffering by putting on this kit every five minutes thinking there was going to be an attack the military planners believed 100 per cent that there were weapons of mass effect available and could be used, they actually believed that, and they were not playing a game of knowing it was not true but playing to the audience? Mr Beaver: Certainly all of the people I know in the military and certainly in terms of what I have seen there was a perceived and real threat that there would be chemical or biological. I do not think there is a nuclear threat, there may be a radiological concern from a terrorist perspective. Everybody that I have talked to sincerely believes that there was a threat. A lot of time and effort was spent in training to do that. Journalists were made to go through the training process. Several were removed from theatre because they did not do it and did not think it was necessary and they were taken out of the embedded system. Q160 Mr Cran: You said everyone to whom you talked, who are we talking about? At what level? Mr Beaver: Up to very high level, to star level. Q161 Chairman: You have pretty good contacts. Dr Posen: It was reported, it was not early in the war, it was day 15 or day 20 but I believe the Commanding General of 101 told his troops at some point they could stop. On the basis of on-going intelligence and experience he developed a belief that it was not going to happen and it was more aggravating than it was worth to keep putting the suits on. At some point the view changed. I think you can ask another question here, on the one hand we have evidence of this very energetic effort to train the troops and the journalists, but what was the actual level of energy that went in to protecting the Kuwaiti population against chemical and biological attack? They were vulnerable to these missiles, we know missiles landed in this area. It is my impression that not all that much was done. This raises some questions for me about what kind of threat people thought there would be. My guess is that the most credible intelligence we had was about artillery delivered chemical munitions, which the troops would expect to face but which you would not really expect the Kuwaiti population to have to face. This is my guess and based on briefings and talks I heard last summer from people who had been in the previous weapon inspections regime my impression from them was the thing they thought the Iraqis might have was chemical weapons delivered by of artillery and multiple rocket launchers, short range stuff 15 to 20 kilometres. Q162 Mr Jones: Have you come up with any evidence? Somebody made reference earlier to weapons being moved out of Iraq to neighbouring states, likewise if they were not there ready to be used against invading troops is it the case that also possessing them, how long in your opinion would it take to actually weaponise if you had stocks of chemical or biological weapons? Dr Posen: You would have to ask somebody who is on the inspection side and the chemical weapons side, I could not begin to answer that. Q163 Mr Crausby: I have some questions about logistics, the Secretary of State and the Ministry of Defence painted a pretty rosy picture of the logistics operation. He said to us: "We are engaged in the largest logistic effort since the Gulf War, deploying the same number of personnel and material but in half of the time". What is your assessment of the success of the logistics operation? Mr Beaver: I think the logistics operation worked well within the limits that it could work within. I believe that there was time pressure put on the Defence Logistics Organisation which quite frankly was a unnecessary strain on their resources. The way in which a lot of the military equipment and preparedness for the troops was organised was by means of Urgent Operational Requirements, in other words not all of the equipment because of the austere conditions currently imposed on logistics in this country of not holding stocks but keeping them in industry or manufacturing them and it was necessary to buy them in. There were something in the order of 197 Urgent Operational Requirements, something like 124 sustainability requirements, now these are ones that are basically in the logistics areas. These started to be discussed between suppliers and the Ministry of Defence or rather by the military and the suppliers in May of last year when there was an indication that there might be military operations. Requests were made for the financing of that to be moved, that was denied until round September. The reason that was denied was it would be a combat indicator, if you go and get dessert uniforms from somebody that is an indication you might be going to the desert, experience would show that is not necessarily the case. One of problems is that in terms of supplying us with those uniforms, and there were 110,000 sets in the theatre, is there is no British manufacturer of the dessert uniforms, they had to be obtained from Indonesia, Romania and Bolivia. That meant there was going to be a logistics problem in doing that, you had to go there. First of all you had a political barrier to overcome, the political barrier was, yes you can start talking to people and that was not forthcoming in the last year. Once you have got through that and you have the political nod you then have the higher and steeper problem to deal with of the Treasury barrier. The Treasury is very happy to prepare and give half a billion pounds for Urgent Operational Requirements but it is a matter of getting the money out of the officials who are less than keen to do that. You eventually have a mad rush in the December, January and February time to get that all that equipment in place. Then you had to fit it and then you had to train on it. Before doing any of the fitting and training you had to get it there. There was a period in January when there was not a western merchant ship available to transport anything because everyone was picking them up, the Americans, the Australians and moving things. It began to be a logistics nightmare created in that regard as well. I think that the Secretary of State is probably right to say that the logistics worked well. I think that the Defence Logistics Organisation and the military should be congratulated on it but because despite the best efforts of Government and perhaps I could say the Civil Service to thwart the free flow of logistics it actually did happen. How long we can sustain it for is another matter. When you look at logistics it is not just a matter of can we get the outflow of ammunition and equipment but can we sustain it while we are there. Luckily the war was 28 days, or whatever it was, I think we would have had some problems after that. You have to remember where that has bitten into funding for other projects in what is called the Equipment Programme and there are now some serious holes. Professor Bellamy: I would agree with that. One of the reasons why the timescale for getting the logistics out there was compressed was that obviously there was a delay in pressing the political buttons back here to initiate that process. Therefore a lot of material only arrived Just in Time. The classic example I understand is some bolt-on armour for fighting vehicles, which was bolted on just before they went across the border. There were one or two minor problems, one problem I heard about was the desert nuclear biological and chemical filters for Challenger 2 tanks, which were dispatched on a ship with most of the rest of the stuff but have not been found. I think the logisticians call it asset tracking. There was clearly an asset tracking problem there, they never got there. Q164 Mr Crausby: Do you think they might be with the weapons of mass destruction, in the same place? Professor Bellamy: They might be in the next container, yes. Q165 Chairman: What did they do to overcome the problems of the sand and the lack of filters? Professor Bellamy: I do not know. All I know is they did not get there. Mr Beaver: They had sufficient reliability, on the Challenger 2 it was 98 per cent. Q166 Mr Crausby: Did they learn lessons from Saif Sareea on sand? Mr Beaver: There were two crucial lessons learned from Saif Sareea - you are going to hate this expression - the sand is different in Iraq from in Oman, it is talcum powder as opposed to rock sand. The second is that Saif Sareea was an exercise designed to find out what the problems were and the fixes were put in place. It was not desertification of the tank, we did not create the export desert version of Challenger 2, what they created was a vehicle that could mitigate the dust and they could work their way round it, it is a very British solution to these things. If I can come back on Just in Time, Just in Time is something that we have suddenly adopted in the military and I do not believe it works. I believe it is a serious flaw in our doctrine. There would be at least one soldier alive today if Just in Time did not apply and that is Sergeant Roberts of the Royal Tank Regiment, because his body armour had not arrived. There were insufficient ceramic plates for the body armour because the way in which it was ordered, because the monies were not released, because we do not keep them as standard stock they did not arrive in time. I think that is something. The other area is that we did not have sufficient hand grenades. Our hand grenades are ordered on a Just in Time basis from a company in Switzerland. The Swiss Government decided it would not allow the export of hand grenades to soldiers who were going to fight wars, presumably you can have them in Switzerland if you are not going to fight a war. They would not deliver them to a war fighting nation. That is the problem we have with Just in Time Q167 Mr Hancock: We did not know that. It is a bit like the Belgium bullets in the Falklands? Mr Beaver: In the 1991 war it was the M109 ammunition from Belgium, it was the spare parts for the tornado, it was the Lynx helicopter parts. Q168 Mr Hancock: We did not know about the hand grenades? Mr Beaver: We presumably should have done but it is not part of the process. We do not stockpile hand grenades. Q169 Mr Crausby: Will Just in Time ever work with a large deployment? It is not a question of learning lessons, is it not possible to conduct a deployment of this size with a Just in Time policy? Mr Beaver: I do not like Just in Time at all because Just in Time can be sometimes be just after and that does not work. Just in Time if it really is Just in Time is fine. With military operation requirements that tend to be Just in Time you get the situation you have in Afghanistan and the Congo, where 2 Para received night-vision equipment, this is really good night-vision equipment, but there is only enough for the battalion that happen to be there, when 2 Para came home - CO 2 Para will hate me for this - they forgot to leave it behind in Afghanistan, so it is now in Colchester. They had to then procure one. That is a difficult thing. Q170 Syd Rapson: There were some firsts in the conflict, not least Storm Shadow, the RAF's new weapon was deployed for the first time, and very effective as far as we know, 950 cruise missiles, 8,600 laser-guided bombs and 6,500 GPS guided weapons, what equipment lessons have we learned from the conflict so far? Can we split that into an American version and a British one? Have we learned much other than Storm Shadow was ideal and our rifles were magnificent? Mr Beaver: We want to see what they are willing to say about what hit what and when. We have been seeing an accelerating use of air- launched missiles by the American military. I think in the Afghan War and this war what you are seeing is a kind of second nature assumption of plenty as far as PGMs are concerned, they expend these things liberally now. To do that they produce them liberally. I think this is a new fact. As we used to say in the Warsaw Pact the quantity has a quality of its own, well quantity of quality has a quality all of its own. The US military now expects to order of the order of 200,000 Joint Direct Attack Munitions. I think that is the stated requirement at this point, whether they are getting them all is anybody's guess but they are going to get a lot of them. They are ramping-up the production capability, as I think you know. This is a new fact. At the other end of the spectrum on equipment I think the tankers are going to have to get a chance to make their argument again, because the safest vehicles to be in turned out to be tanks. Almost anything else you had was vulnerable, even to the least capable weapons. The other side had weapons that are distributed round the world in vast numbers, like RPGs. This should cause, it may not, some reconsideration of this eight year obsession with light armoured vehicles that has occurred in the western world and has begun to take over the US military. At the other end this is an important issue. The US Navy periodically reminds itself or is reminded by others that littoral warfare is a special area. While the Iraqis did not make good use of what they had it is clear that even what they had as badly used. It was a complicating factor for us and could have turned out to be dangerous. The synergies you get from naval mines, bottom mines and truck mobile anti-ship missiles are important. These systems are clearly hard to find. We had virtual command of the airspace over Southern Iraq long before the war started, we were looking for these things and yet many of them managed to survive and some of them were fired. If the US Navy is objective about this war I think they should redouble their efforts in the littoral warfare area and should be looking for help from others. In this war the British provided obviously terrific assistance on the mine area. Q171 Syd Rapson: We were talking about plastic tanks at one stage. Dr Posen: Nothing can stop them from chasing this dream. The American military has $300 billion a year to spend and they are going to chase the dream. The dream is to have a weapon that can fight on the land, take any hit or avoid any hit and be rapidly transferred by air. They are going to keep chasing this dream. I hope or I suspect that those Army guys who like a particular piece of metal are going to have a stronger argument now. Mr Beaver: It is interesting that from the British perspective that the tank has been proven to be still viable but the future is not necessarily in protection it is in survivability. The British attitude is to look for something intermediate, something less than 30 tonnes. You are probably aware of something called the Future Rapid Effect System and it does seem that in general terms this war has borne out to a certain extent the defence planning assumptions which call for FRES to be there. One of the difficulties is you look at a war and say, lots of lessons identified here let us apply them straight away. Each war is different in that regard. There is no doubt that there has to be some care. My understanding is that the Army Board is looking at seven factors as a result of this war. The command and management of the battle space is a generic title, in other words situational awareness. Do we know what is going on? Where our forces are? What the other people's forces are at any one time? This awful thing called Network Enabled Capability, which is the British way of saying it, and ISTAR, intelligence surveillance, target aquisition and reconnaissance. The creation of a medium force perhaps as a way of re-roling 3rd United Kingdom division. Basically we have learned a lot of positive lessons about air manoeuvre and how we would use Apache. For example in American Apache operations they have no support for them. We would have something called the BLUH LYNX, the British Light Utility Helicopter Programme, where we would be able to pick up downed crews, which is something that the Americans cannot do. When an Apache goes down they cannot pick the crew up, they have no means of doing that without calling in another unit. There is no doubt that we have to improve our combat service support. There is no doubt we need to have an indirect fire weapon with precision effect, in other words something we can fire longer distances - up to 10 kilometres and destroy something. We are worried about force protection. We are worried about controlling our flanks. The 16 Air Assault Brigade, the very lightest of our formation, was not used. There is now a question as to where that goes, do you keep it as a helicopter force or do you split it and create 5 Brigade again, a Para and air landing forces, or do you create a helicopter battalion? In terms of equipment just about all of the heavy equipment had a reliability range of more than 90 per cent: Challenger 2, the AS90 Warrior. What was interesting was that the CVR(T) was 33 years old and on Saif Sareea had a 49 per cent reliability that had gone up to 90 per cent in this conflict because of the lessons learned from Saif Sareea. We knew that the Combat Engineer Tractor was a load of rubbish, less than 50 per cent availability, that is going to be replaced soon. The SA80A2, the assault rifle, excellent performance, even the Royal Marines liked it, that is going some way. You were talking about Storm Shadow, there were nearly 30 launched and all of them that were launched hit their target. The difference about Storm Shadow compared to the American system is it can attack a bunker but it does not have to use gravity to do it, it does not go in vertically it goes in at a slant angle. They were able to engage a bunker under a school by going in via the car park and not hitting school, which is something that the Americans cannot do. Hopefully it is something we might be able to persuade them to buy. For the first time the British had a SEAD aircraft, a suppression of enemy air defence aircraft allowing missiles on Tornado F3 fighters. Rapier was not used but it was serviceable. Helicopters as much as they could be used, sometimes the weather hampered that. What I think was interesting was in terms of supporting ground formations the Army Air Corps 3 Regiment had the largest ever area to control, 60,000 square kilometres of Iraqi battle space and under command they have RAF helicopters and inventory material, so it is an all-arms air manoeuvre battle group which shows the way forward. That has been a list out of Jane's "All the World Somethings". It is important to see that in terms of equipment that things happened and worked well. Q172 Syd Rapson: If I can ask a chicken and egg question, did the conflict vindicate the network-centric warfare, to use an American term, or did the Iraqis just not want to fight? Mr Beaver: From the allied perspective it was great because it really worked and everyone knew where they were. Whether the Iraqis were there or not I think they still would have played with it. Professor Bellamy: I am glad that Paul talked about lessons identified, which is the correct military phrase nowadays, we no longer have lessons learned. We have lessons identified, which is perhaps a bit sad. I do not know whether this comes under logistics or interoperability or lessons identified but one of the most striking things which I thought was very impressive was the fact that the British and Americans were using the same fuel, F34-JP8 AVTUR. You can put this stuff in anything, you can put it in aeroplanes, in tanks, you can put it in trucks and it substitutes for petrol and it substitutes for diesel. I am amazed you cannot buy it on the forecourt. It worked. The British had misgivings about this before it was used but basically it worked very well. In terms of contribution to a combined operation the fact that everyone at last is running on the same fuel must be a really major contribution. Q173 Syd Rapson: We have used it for 30 years in the United Kingdom. I used it when I was in the service. Professor Bellamy: Right. Q174 Syd Rapson: Can I ask about close air support, the US 3rd Infantry Division and the US 1st Marine Expeditionary Force both had their own aircraft and close support, they were fully engaged with joint land/air components whereas the British contingent were relying on a pool of air support, which meant a delay, as I understand it from letters received in Parliament, of about 48 hours sometimes when close air support was called in. The worry was how that functioned. Is that true? Clearly the British are going to feel left out when the Americans make the main decisions and they have much better liaison. Mr Beaver: Things like the MEF, the Marine Expeditionary Force have an integrated air component, 384 aircraft - I sound like a spotter - we do not have a similar formation that has that sort of numbers. The concern that I have heard was that we pooled all of our close air support assets, there were Harrier GR7s that were somewhere in the west, they came home and everyone said that is very interesting we did not know where they were and we still do not know officially where they were. There were Tornados and I think the British Army expected those aircraft to be available for British formations when they were required. What they had instead, it was not really support in the same way, there were helicopters, the Lynx TOW a combination from both the Royal Marines and the Army Air Corp, it is not quite the same as having a Harrier because it does a different job. There were not that many of them, and I go back to this urgent operational requirement area. It my understanding that when you go to war in coalition your air assets are pooled, your organic assets, your imbedded assets, the kit stays with you, the helicopters of 16 Air Assault Brigade would have been with them had they been used. That is probably an area that does need to be better examined. Since the 2nd Tactical Air Force in Normandy I do not think there have been cab ranks of aircraft available to be called in when there has been a coalition in operation because we had expected the Americans to do that. The fact that they did not is all to do with the way in which they prioritise their tasking. Q175 Mr Howarth: That is a significant issue. If you are saying, you are confirming that they priorities the targets, which meant that our forces were not able to rely, not able to call in air support when they needed it this has implications, a number of implications not least for the next coalition action and the pooling of air assets but it also clearly has implications for the future of the Sea Harrier because the Sea Harrier's withdrawal been justified on the grounds that the air defence of the Maritime Force, currently provided by the FA2, will subsequently be provided by the coalition forces. What do you think are the implications for force protection? Mr Beaver: In terms of force protection on the ground battle the next time, and there will be next time we go to war, we should have the initial operating capability of Apache, which will give us that extra capability. Lynx TOW with a range of two kilometres, yes, it can defeat bunkers and buildings and, yes, they were using it in that regard but there were not that many assets available. The next time we go to war there will be sufficient Apache capability of engaging targets. Q176 Mr Howarth: You just explained to us earlier on the difficulties which the Apache ran in to. Mr Beaver: Those are American Apaches. This is the British way of doing it, the doctrine is different. This is a very important doctrinal difference, Mr Howarth. What we do not have is we do not have the same close air support capability, that is something which politically that has to be worked out between coalition partners. Dr Posen: On the Apache you want to be clear, the US Army uses Apaches in many different ways. At this particular time they got into trouble they were stretching the envelope of their aircraft and the envelope of their tactics. They were essentially using it as a deep interdiction aircraft, which is a kind of air force wannabe-ism and they should not have been doing it. When you have used Apaches in close proximity of your troops in a typical close air support kind of mode, where you have these hugely supporting fires and artillery to do suppression you are usually going to be better off. If the lacunae for the British was in true close air support then the arrival of the Apaches will give the ground force a responsive close air support asset that will be pretty reliable but it will not substitute for aeroplanes and all missions, you still have the aeroplane question. Then the flip side is that you want to investigate how much of the fixed-wing aviation was controlled by the marines on a day-to-day basis? How much of their own close air support did they have direct control over versus how much was centrally controlled? I am betting a lot of their longer-legged aircraft, their F18s, probably fell into the air pecking order like anything else. The question for you is, did the Marines manage to hold on to their own Harriers, whereas you did not manage to hold on to your own Harriers? I think that is the question that you want to ask. Q177 Mr Hancock: I have three questions, it is one thing saying that the prioritising of close air support was decided by the Americans in a different way, I think we need to know on how many occasions it was requested and was not available? It is one thing saying that it was not available and another thing being told it was turned down. I think we need to have some clarification on that, we can say, and it is pointless if it was never asked for in the first place and we just assumed it was there. Secondly, going back to your point about the tank, I hope we do not revisit the issue of the tank based on this because the tank was a pretty safe place to be in because tanks were pretty safe because they were not fighting out in the open and there was no aircraft coming at them, so the tank was a safe option. If there had been hostile aircraft in the air the tank would have been as vulnerable as anything else presumably. Maybe the tank survived this battle well because of the opposition and the location, they were ideal for in cities and along the edges of cities, giving protection to troops to take out buildings. I think we have to bring that into perspective. My third question goes back to what you said, I thought you said a very damming thing about the Treasury, particularly about the sergeant who was killed because of the ceramic armour, we now that he died, the important question - and Geoff Hoon was not willing to answer it - was how many of our troops who were in the frontline on active duty, liable to be shot at did not have the right armour? We know one did not because he died sadly. You more or less put the blame well and truly where it belongs for that. Mr Beaver: I would imagine that we are probably talking of several tens. It is interesting that it should be that in a frontline unit, in a battle group that somebody did not have the ceramic plates that go in the armoured vest, they were missing. The reason they were missing was they were in the theatre but they had arrived late and they did not get out in time for the war to start because the war started earlier than the logistics chain thought. Q178 Mr Hancock: There was a specific order saying that no troops should be engaged in war fighting without the proper equipment, that was a specific order given, was it not? Somebody somewhere overruled that order Mr Beaver: That is probably a question better addressed to the Ministry of Defence. Mr Hancock: Absolutely. There was a specific order that troops should not be exposed to hostile fire without the proper equipment. Q179 Patrick Mercer: Can you confirm that Sergeant Roberts did not have plates available rather than the fact that he left them in his tank, as an awful lot of armoured troops do? Mr Beaver: This is still subject to an SIB investigation. My understanding is that he had not been issued with the plates. Professor Bellamy: Can I say something about air support. I have heard reports that it was alleged that the Americans appeared to give priority to their own troops rather than deploying aircraft to support the British troops. As I said, there were about 1,000 American aircraft and 100 British in the theatre and under those circumstances it made total sense to pool the aircraft. When you call for air support you do not necessarily get it. I do not know what the proportion of air support requests that are not fulfilled is, it could be, for the sake of argument, 50 per cent, I would be very careful to investigate whether the number of requests that were made and not fulfilled actually exceeded the norm for any other conflict. The interoperability between the British and the Americans for fire support was, in my view, very good. The Americans had Air, Naval and Land liaison officers, or Anglicoes as they were known, deployed to the British brigades, one company with each UK brigade, and they were deployed down to battalion level. Of course looking at the whole picture it might well be that the decision was that the priority is there and not there. I do not know. I am a little bit sceptical about that particular allegation. Mr Howarth: Can anybody say anything about the Sea Harrier? Chairman: No, if you want to you can write. We have at least eight blocks of questions. I suggest each block should be no more than seven or eight minutes max. Q180 Patrick Mercer: A brief look at Hansard will show that cluster bombs are a munition that have never been so widely misunderstood by Parliamentarians or the public. Bear that in mind when you answer my questions, this type of munition, given the style of the opposition and the style of the operation was their use necessary in your opinion? Mr Beaver: Yes. The main reason you use cluster weapons is to engage the enemy in the open and destroy them in their light vehicles and their troop concentrations. This is war-fighting, this is about killing people, sadly. I do not know if there is another cost-effective way of doing it. Professor Bellamy: Unfortunately, yes, I agree. Dr Posen: You have to distinguish two kinds and you have to distinguish the situation. There is the bombs and there is the artillery shells. When you are engaging adversary conventional forces in the field they are very useful, particularly the cluster artillery shells and rockets shell are great for counter-battery fire. When we were bombing through the sandstorm, when we thought the Iraqis were trying to re-locate we were able to locate some of those units on radar. I do not think you can target them with any kind of precision guided munitions. It seem to me where the issues arise is in the cases where cluster artillery may have been used in an urban settings, that is where you should be asking some questions. Q181 Patrick Mercer: Was anything learned about their use from the Afghan engagement? Dr Posen: The only thing that I know they learned was they should change the colour of the humanitarian meal ready-to-eat so it does not have the same colour as a cluster munition, which is a simple thing you should not have had to learn but it was learned rather than deduced. Mr Beaver: In any conflict you have a duty once you have won to go and sort them out, that is a labourious process, we know we lost two engineers in Kosovo as a result of doing that, mainly because the information about the particular weapon was not forthcoming from the United States. Q182 Jim Knight: The major combat phase was self-evidently successful. Right at the beginning I mentioned the post-conflict phase, did the coalition have sufficient forces in theatre ready for the transition to that phase? Dr Posen: No Professor Bellamy: No. Mr Beaver: No. Professor Bellamy: The post conflict phase or Phase IV, everybody who thought about it knew that was going to come with the priority being, (a) to guard against possible attack by weapons of mass destruction and win the war as quickly as possible. Clearly the focus was not on Phase IV but on Phase III. What happened was a classic manifestation of something which scholars in this field have been writing about for a while, that is a so-called security gap opened between the war-fighting phase and the peace support operating phase. If you think of it as a circle going conflict, post-conflict, pre-conflict the ring broke and clearly with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight there should have been battalions of military police, people like that, ready to go in because, as is well known, once the war fighting finishes you really do not need soldiers you need policemen. Very interestingly the first British armoured division halfway through the war-fighting phase realised that in order to run a city like Basra with 1.3 million people in it they were going to need a senior police officer and a request went out for somebody at assistant chief constable level and one from the Hampshire Constabulary arrived, but two months later, so a clear example of the security gap. That is something that should have been foreseen, could have been foreseen but for reasons we all know was not acted on. Q183 Jim Knight: If the Ba'ath regime had proved to be more brittle and collapsed more quickly could it have been even more disastrous in the post-conflict phase? Would the gap have been much greater? Professor Bellamy: The gap would have shifted forward in time, I do not think it would have been any different. Mr Beaver: What concerns me is that in 1945 allied forces went into Germany and about two minutes behind the armoured thrust came the military government. If you look back at the history of the way in which the allies ran round on the access nations there was a very good system that came in behind. Mind you there was six years to plan for that. Q184 Mr Jones: When we went to the Pentagon earlier this year, before the actual conflict, we got a good briefing, elaborate suggestions about what was going to be planned for after any conflict, including details of humanitarian relief but also government, what went wrong? I was under the impression that there were well advanced in terms of thinking? What do you think went wrong if that type of thinking was taking place in February? What went wrong in terms of why that was not coming in, as you say, two minutes behind? Was that not thought about? Mr Beaver: I can imagine something political. Professor Bellamy: I think the fact that the United Nations was rather kept out of matters may have had a major influence. In other situations like this who provides the policemen? Answer, the UN civ pol, the civilian police. If there is no UN clearly it is more difficult. Q185 Jim Knight: Do you think the discussion between Rumsfeld and Franks you alluded to at the beginning of the session may have informed this? Dr Posen: There was another discussion between Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Shinseki that happened in front of the American Congress. When General Shinseki, the Chief of Staff of the Army was asked: "What do you think the requirements will be to police Iraq after the war?" He said: "Several hundred thousand soldiers". From a political point of view this was the wrong answer. You are trying to sell a war to the American people and your senior Army general is telling you you are going to be policing this place forever with what amounts to, lets be considerate, half the American field Army, this is the wrong answer politically. Wolfawitz just shrugged his shoulders and said: "No, no, it is going to be much less than that". Since the war I have heard two or three senior people say it is going to take a least 100,000 people for quite a while. Just to finish the thought, there is a well known article that is widely circulated in the United States of America by James Quinlivan called Force Requirement for Stability Operations. Quinlivan is a senior RAND analyst and did this work for the Army. I am sure General Shinseki was relying on this work, it is a very simple and easily understandable piece of work and the basic message is that force requirements for stability operations. You can police the United States with about two people per thousand and when things were pretty bad in Northern Ireland it took about 20 soldiers and police per thousand, you can do the math for a country of 22 million and you end up with big numbers. This is what I think the Army who had thought about these matters knew and this was a fact that was devastating politically and needed to be suppressed. Q186 Jim Knight: Profesor Bellamy, you referred earlier to some of the thinking as we went in to Basra, obviously the situation in Basra was much easier than Baghdad, do you think the UK were better at this stage than the US? Professor Bellamy: Yes, I do simply because of our experience in places like Northern Ireland, Bosnia and so on. Culturally and historically for a very long time, and before that Malaya, the British Armed Forces have been experienced in doing peace support operations. You are familiar with the famous quotation from Condaleeza Rice a couple of years ago, "we do not want the 82nd Airbourne escorting kids to Kindergarten". A prevalent attitude in certain aspects of the United States military is that peace-keeping is for wimps. This showed the difference between Basra, where the Brits took off their steel helmets, put on their berets and got into doing what they had done in Northern Ireland, in Bosnia and in Kosovo. The Americans said, "we do not do peacekeeping". I think that difference is clear. I think it was a cultural thing of the two different groups of Armed Forces, I do not think it was necessarily a doctrinal thing Dr Posen: I think there is a lot of truth in this but I also think you have to distinguish between the areas. In the South most people in Basra did not want to live under the Saddam regime any more, the only people he had there were friends who were really close, supportable loyalists who were installed there. The story is that insurgence swam through the people like fish through water, but there were no real people in the Ba'athist regime to swim through in the South. Baghdad is full of Ba'athist sympathisers; areas north of Baghdad are full of Ba'athist sympathisers, it is a much tougher security problem. You cannot bring the fighting phase to a clear end. The Americans do not really want to say it, but is it not basically true that the war is still going on in Baghdad and the North? Let's be honest about the different situations. Everything you said about the cultural differences and the experiential differences is all true but you also have to crank into this the difference in the situations. Mr Beaver: Nevertheless, you have to look at Kosovo, and the American way of doing peace operations there was only from vehicles wearing body armour looking like imperial storm troopers. The first thing the Brits do is to take off their body armour and get amongst the people. There is a difference in doctrine and it is based on something called force protection. The American primary objective is to protect their own force, ours is to do the job, and I think there is a subtle difference. Q187 Jim Knight: In Afghanistan we had both peace-keeping and combat forces, two separate forces. Should we have had something similar? Dr Posen: It is almost too much to ask. We needed to have a plan for transition. Mr Beaver: And the resources to do it. That is the problem. Q188 Patrick Mercer: Earlier on, Professor Bellamy, you said that British forces were not expecting to move into peace-keeping operations. My understanding, and it was a correct and proud boast of 7 Brigade, is that peace-keeping operations were going on at the same time as humanitarian operations at the same time as war-fighting operations, and that actually the transition from war-fighting through humanitarian into peace-keeping seems to have gone very smoothly. My impression is that they were entirely expecting to go to peace-keeping, not least because of the culture. Professor Bellamy: People to whom I have spoken said, for whatever reason, that they did expect there would be peace-keeping but they thought somebody else would do it. Q189 Patrick Mercer: Follow-on forces. Professor Bellamy: Yes. Dr Posen: It is what comes next, I do not think it is the transition. Professor Bellamy: Another thing, which we have alluded to earlier, is the fact the planners did expect formed Iraqi units to come over and that they might use those in certain of these roles, but as we know that did not happen. Q190 Jim Knight: You said we could not have done two separate forces, could the UK have deployed more? We are now deploying Reserves, is that a good use of Reserves now that the war is over given the relations they have with their employers? Could we have done any more than we have done now? Should we have done? Mr Beaver: There is a school of thought which says that the Territorial Army could have coped with a mobilisation of more people in formed units - one or two formed units only - to do that. The problem is the Territorial Army is not trained in this role. Secondly, in order to do this, if you mobilise one company, you then have to have two others underway because you have to replace that company and you have to have that company coming back and then have the next one and so on. I actually do not think there will be a sustainable option. I believe the only option there would be to use other nations to do that. Q191 Patrick Mercer: Can I broaden out the question a little and pick up a couple of things you said earlier. Mr Beaver, you referred to an armoured division we deployed. We did not deploy an armoured division. The Royal Navy deployed a brigade, there was an air mobile or an air assault brigade deployed, and there was one armoured brigade deployed. Mr Beaver, you were talking about the northern option and the possibility of deploying two armoured brigades. Professor Bellamy: Seventh and Fourth - I cannot remember whether the Fourth is mechanised or armoured. Q192 Patrick Mercer: It is armoured. First question: did we need more or did we need more armoured formations? One of my sources says, "Do bear in mind, 16 Brigade was fixed, it could not move, it could not operate, because it was not armoured." Secondly, could we do it? Could we really provide the armoured division? Q193 Jim Knight: And was there so much cannibalisation in order to get there? Mr Beaver: When I talk about an armoured division here, it is divisional headquarters with a brigade plus, because they had to take elements of 4 in order to make 7 work. Q194 Patrick Mercer: Forgive me, it was one armoured brigade formed out of the bulk of at least two if not three armoured brigades. Mr Beaver: Correct. Dr Posen: Exactly a brigade plus. Mr Beaver: It was a brigade plus because it was extra elements. I think it was one extra battle group. What you have to remember is that our force structures are wrong in the United Kingdom. We have a peace time structure and a war fighting structure, we should actually only have a war fighting structure, because that is what we do. What we should have are infantry battalions with four companies, not infantry battalions with three companies who borrow a company from somebody and then they go off to borrow another company from somewhere else. By the time you have finished, you are in this magic circle and nobody quite knows which battalion they belong to. So our problem is that we are not as prepared for war fighting as we should be. I think that is something which the Army will be looking at. I think we will see a change of structure. I have a personal interest in this perhaps but I can see a role for the Territorial Army in the future in providing that extra company or that extra squadron if it is the Royal Engineers or the Army Air Corps or whatever in terms of mobilised capability so that we can do something with that. So, for example, the First Battalion Royal Green Jackets will have elements of what used to be called 4th, 5th or 6th Royal Green Jackets, the TA Royal Green Jackets - whatever they are these days because I have rather lost track of where some of these units have gone - so we could have a TA formation which could train with their Regular counterparts. That would get away from all this thing about STABs, about the TA being useless and all of these things if they worked with a definite unit. Q195 Patrick Mercer: You might have to define STABs. Mr Beaver: I would probably prefer not to. It is an expression used by the Regular Army to describe TA soldiers - "stupid TA bastards" - and it is unfortunately still prevalent in the Army today. Q196 Chairman: What do they call the Regulars? Mr Beaver: They tend to call them neanderthals actually because they have not moved on. Q197 Mr Jones: Is there not a difference? For example, the Royal Marine Reserves did integrate very closely but ---- Mr Beaver: There are formations in the British Armed Forces, Reserve Forces, which do work. For example, elements of the TA Special Air Service Regiment are fully integrated with their Regular counterparts. Q198 Mr Howarth: Do we know anybody associated with that regiment? Mr Beaver: I know a number of people associated with that regiment. They are very capable of working with the Regulars and are accepted by the Regulars. The Royal Marine Reserve is the same. There are elements in other formations as well. But, as a whole, there is that problem. However, Chairman, you could have a separate inquiry into the relationship between the Regulars and the Territorials. Chairman: We have about had five inquiries and probably a few more in the pipeline. Q199 Rachel Squire: Sorry to draw us away from an interesting line of discussion and in fact you have already touched on some parts of my question. The first one is coming back to military planning and the avoidance of civilian casualties. There was a clear decision to try and do the utmost to avoid targeting civilian infrastructure and to minimise civilian casualties. In your view, was that decision taken, one, to emphasise to the Iraqi people that these were forces of liberation or, two, as a necessary element in trying to ensure there was Allied domestic support, or was it a combination of both or did other factors come into it? Professor Bellamy: Both and another factor. The other factor is that dropping bombs on civilians is a waste of bombs. Dr Posen: The planners knew we were trying to take over this country which meant that we had to run it afterwards, and you have a pretty strong interest in not destroying the infrastructure if you are going to inherit this thing. As bad as the infrastructure is, it beats what would have been there after the fact. We were planning a short war, so it is not clear what the advantage would be of destroying the civilian infrastructure. You usually destroy civilian infrastructure because you are trying to destroy the other guy's industrial mobilisation base. Well, Iraq practically did not have an industrial mobilisation base to speak of. Certainly they were concerned about public support here and public support abroad, and they were concerned that it might turn at least some people in Iraq to the Western, Coalition side. I think all those reasons came into play. I would not assume that the situation would necessarily be replicated in another war. I think that under the right circumstances you would be where you were at the end of the Kosovo war, where you are more than happy to destroy your adversary's infrastructure. I would not assume there is a sea change in attitudes. Mr Beaver: Nothing to add really. Q200 Rachel Squire: The other part of the question you have really touched on and I do not know whether you want to add any more to it. One was the contrast between British and American approaches to capturing and later stabilising Basra and Baghdad. You seem to agree that there were differing approaches and that reflects a different general approach, experience and background. The other part of the question was talking about post-conflict reconstruction playing an appropriate part in the military planning. Basically you have said, no, it did not, that they should have had security forces lined up to come and help establish some degree of law and order and not expect the troops to do it. Was there anything else you wanted to add to those issues of differing perspectives and ways of dealing with Basra and Baghdad and the lesson of learning you have to plan ahead for who comes in after the war has finished? Dr Posen: There is one thing which is different about Baghdad and Basra, which is that nobody believed you could end the war in Basra and everybody believed you could only end the war in Baghdad. That strategic difference is going to affect everything you do with military operations. So when the Americans saw their opportunity, knocked on the door of Baghdad and saw that the door was not locked, they were not going to stop and say, "Maybe we should be more cautious, maybe we should surround the place", whatever. They were going to try and kick the door in. We do not know much about the fighting which did happen in Baghdad and the effects on local people, we do know that those units which tried to stand against the Americans were essentially shot to pieces, which is only to be expected. I think that makes a difference and the Americans were certainly fixated on the idea that victory was to be found in Baghdad. It may be that the quite understandable focus on victory might cause you to under-plan for, in the first case of our discussion, the WMD policing, and in the second case the transition from regime collapse to what happens next. Chairman: Two more questions which are rather contentious. First, Special Forces. Q201 Patrick Mercer: A huge question on Special Forces but if you can be as brief as possible please. What lessons do you think have come out of the role and the way in which Special Forces were used in the Iraq conflict? Dr Posen: Special Forces do not want me to know about them and I do not really feel that I yet know much. I really do not. I think we have a much better sense from the Afghan war about some Special Forces issues than we do from this war. Professor Bellamy: I think this war falls into two bits. Because the Turkish option was foreclosed, it was inevitable that the northern part of the country would be dealt with using an Afghan-type war, that is to say with Special Forces acting as liaison with local groups. The way American Special Forces - one brigade of American Paratroops, 173 Brigade - operated with the Kurdish factions was I think quite similar to Afghanistan. In the south of the country we had something much closer to a classic pig iron first division war, although one side decided not to put up much of a fight, although there was a bit of an attempt at an asymmetric approach by popping up behind the advancing American troops. One of the key roles of Special Forces is liaison with local factions and local leaders, local people, and this war has certainly borne out that as one of the Special Forces' most important roles. Mr Beaver: We know very little in the public domain about Special Forces operations. We know that there were large numbers of British Special Air Service and Special Boat Service deployed but, quite frankly, they had their own air assets, their own aviation support, their own communications nets, they did not report to the contingent commander, they were under the command of the US. That is probably about the sum total of what we are going to learn until the first --- Q202 Chairman: Until the first novel appears! There must be dozens of Andy McNabs waiting to put pen to paper. Mr Beaver: Bravo Three Zero. Q203 Patrick Mercer: The logical question then relating purely and simply to British Special Forces: we have now seen operations across the Balkans, operations in Afghanistan, operations in Iraq, all depending hugely on Special Forces. Can we afford to retain Special Forces at the tiny size they are at the moment, or should we try to expand them? Mr Beaver: It is my personal opinion we should be very careful about expanding them. The United States has 46,000 people in Special Forces Command and I would ask the question, "Just how special is that?" There are people in Special Forces Command in the United States who get a patch and they become Special Forces. That would be, to people in Hereford, an anathema. I would think that we should be very careful about expanding the size of Special Forces. We have elite forces - the Parachute Regiment, the Royal Marines, some elements of the infantry - but then again we have to be very careful we do not create a two-tier Army. That I think is equally as dangerous. Q204 Syd Rapson: The Americans used a method of precision strike which was an assassination strike right at the start of the war. The exact location of these targets for GPS control must be targeted by Special Forces, so I would imagine in this conflict because of the surgical strike capability the targeting is much more important, so therefore we need more Special Forces to pick out the specific small groups to hit than we had before. Mr Beaver: We do not need Special Forces though. You can use elite forces for that, you can use artillery spotters, forward observation officers, people who are Special Forces trained but do not do the full gamut of SAS missions for example. The other thing you do of course is use civilians. In Afghanistan a large number of CIA operatives were being used to do this. It is not a difficult task, even the CIA could accomplish it. Chairman: One last small block of questions, again highly contentious. Q205 Mr Howarth: I do not know about contentious, but certainly two of you gentlemen are well placed to answer them because it is about the role of the media. Obviously one of the novelties here was the embedding of journalists with individual units and the effect that had on the perception that sometimes minor incidents were seen as major military set-backs when viewed on television here at home. How far did an accurate picture of the conflict emerge during the major combat phase of operations? Mr Beaver: I can speak from what I saw where I was, in the BBC. There was an overriding feeling of need amongst the editors to use the embeddeds whenever they possibly could, whenever they had a line, to get a snapshot. They did not know they were getting a snapshot and the problem was you had people with formations who were near Baghdad who were asked about Basra because they had them there and they wanted to ask questions. The downside of embeddeds is that you have a snapshot in time and space which is about as far as they can see, which in a sandstorm is about 20 metres. There has to be analysis to go with that. You might say, "He would say that, wouldn't he", but there does have to be the big picture. Q206 Mr Howarth: You were very good, Paul. Mr Beaver: Thank you very much. I think it is absolutely vital that if you are going to have embedded journalists then they have to be properly equipped, properly trained and properly monitored. You might ask to whose benefit is an embedded journalist. Is it to the public's benefit, is it to the Army's benefit or to the government's benefit or whatever. I think it is probably all. You do get a good and accurate picture of what is happening there just in that time and space. What you do not get is the worry that the Armed Forces have of having too many unilaterals going around, people who are not embedded. Twenty seven journalists were killed in this operation in 28 days and that is a large number of people to be killed. Almost all of those were freelance in the wider sense of the word, and were going around doing their own thing. That is a very dangerous thing to do in a war. The problem is from a reporting point of view everyone thought this was Kosovo all over again, which was a relatively benign environment. Q207 Mr Jones: I think you have put it correctly, you need embedded journalists and analysts. There was a journalist near Nasiriyah where there was a fierce fight going on where they got some nice pictures, and obviously the journalist on the ground was describing what was happening and it looked very spectacular. I think if I remember correctly that you were looking at the pictures as well and were saying, "Quite frankly, this is not really an intense battle..." ---- Mr Beaver: This was the Umm Qasr battle where the television cameras rolled for five hours and there was one building and eventually it was bombed, which was the highlight of the whole afternoon. Q208 Mr Jones: That is right. Mr Beaver: That, I am afraid, is not so much a function of the journalists but a function of the TV coverage. 24-hour news requires pictures and it was a Saturday afternoon and that was the entertainment value of it. If you compare some of the stations - for example the American television network, Fox - they were very courageous (and I use that not in the Civil Service way) in the way in which they put their camera crews right in the frontline, and it was almost like having someone saying, "Wow, gee, look at this happening, this is just amazing", it was somebody reporting really from the heart as opposed to the measured tones of, say, John Simpson in the north of Iraq. You had the full spectrum of entertainment and showmanship through to the very thoughtful and sometimes not positive coverage. Q209 Mr Jones: The Fox coverage was quite memorable. In one of the first raids into Baghdad they shot up a truck, and the journalist was explaining this was a great thing and it was basically an Army truck they were shooting up quite badly. How do you get it right in terms of trying to distinguish between, let's say, the journalists on the ground, who obviously has the adrenalin going and perhaps has not got the analytical background which you have got, and the analyst? How do you get the balance right? It does give an impression to the public, and then that is picked up by other networks and others, that there are problems or issues on the ground, whereas really what is actually happening is what would happen normally in a conflict situation. Mr Beaver: What I think is important about the way in which the media comes through is that each war is different. It is rather like the way you fight a war, the way you deploy the journalists is different, and for news organisations it is the same. Short wars are better because you can put more resources in and therefore they want a fast moving war. In terms of the lessons learnt, or lessons identified, there are still reports being written. It does seem to me that there were significant successes about this from the media perspective. They had people just about everywhere expect in the west of Iraq where the Special Forces were operating. There were some negative sides to it as well because we did not get a full picture. I would imagine that the military and Ministry of Defence would look at it exactly in the same way, they often got their message across but very often there were people in Baghdad, for example, who were upsetting the Government here because they were not necessarily following the Alastair Campbell line. Professor Bellamy: I think the key to this is to have a mix of different types of journalists. There were about 700 embedded journalists in theatre. There is an impression going around that embedding is something new, well of course it is not. There were embedded journalists with the two British brigades and British Divisional Headquarters in the previous Gulf War; in the Falklands of course all the journalists there were embedded because there was no other way of getting there. So it is not new. I think also the procedures in terms of training them and assigning them to units well before the conflict started and not allowing them to move from unit to unit - you were deployed to that battalion and that was your battalion - have been tightened up a bit. I think the editors were absolutely right to use material from the embedded journalists in the frontline wherever possible but you also needed non-embedded journalists a bit back from the front, in places like Kuwait, and you needed experienced analysts back in London or wherever who were capable of giving context and perspective. On the example which Paul has mentioned of basically a platoon attack on a building, it takes somebody who knows something about military operations to say, "Okay, it has gone on for five hours but it is a platoon attack, this is not the operational future of the war at stake here." Finally, most importantly, to me, incredibly, we did have people in Baghdad. I know that they were accused of having to spin the Iraqi line but all those broadcasts came with health warnings and everybody knew that, and I think the people in Baghdad were incredibly brave. The Iraqis could have strung them from lamp-posts just like that. So you have essentially four classes of people. I think the media coverage, in my humble opinion, was very good. Of course the British and US Government line was not always spun, but that is what journalism is about. Q210 Mr Howarth: I know you have to go, Dr Posen, would you like to make a contribution and then you can stand down and we will hold on to the other two for five minutes more? Dr Posen: I wanted to add a point to this business about having journalists further back in the theatre. My impression is that the journalists at CentCom were pretty unhappy people because they got a kind of a thin gruel every day. Where I think you saw the most powerful coverage, the most interesting coverage, of the war was when you encountered this unexpected level of resistance from the Ba'ath Party militia up and down the Euphrates and this was causing genuine problems, and they were genuine problems, and the embeds figured out they were genuine problems, the officers on the scene told the embeds they were genuine problems. The journalists in CentCom basically were getting all this information, I think they were actually talking to each other and their own embeds in the theatre, and they were doing what the military does, they were collecting field reports, looking for patterns, seeing patterns and calling it as they saw it. This caused great discomfort in CentCom. This was where you began to see the line being advanced, "You are only looking at this snapshot, you do not know what you are seeing, so stop saying things", and the journalists after a while basically dutifully shut up. They had got the story and had the story drawn away from them, in my opinion. So my own view is that you have a pretty interesting system here for getting at the basic pattern of the conflict. It proved uncomfortable for CentCom and I think they had to bob and weave a little bit to try and portray their preferred version of the conflict as it was going on. My impression is that serious people in the American military know that those middle days were cause for concern, because those middle days suggested two possible things. One, the Baghdad fight could turn out to be very nasty. Two, the post-conflict situation could turn out to be very nasty. These were two things which the public in Britain and the United States had a right to know. Even if it was inimical to the public relations part of the war, the populations had the right to know there might be tough days coming. I found it striking that in Washington and in CentCom the interest was not seen this way, the interest was seen as, "We have to spin the story a different way." Q211 Mr Howarth: It makes the conduct of war on the part of the military high command extremely difficult if you are having to contend with a public which is being taken through a serious roller-coaster as a result of immediate images on their television screens. Dr Posen: I think it is perfectly true but no one forced the military into this. No one forced them into getting this close to the journalists, into this high level of embedding, into developing this kind of relationship. The American military has been very interested in information management for ten years. They have been teaching it, they have mock journalists in their exercises, they have mock studios in their exercises, they see this as advantageous to them. When it does not go their way, they try and manoeuvre just like they would on the battle field. I think they have been pretty successful at it and in a way I think the military journalist community has now had its - I won't say "trial by fire", it is too dramatic - combat experience and the next time around I think they will be pretty tough customers. Q212 Mr Howarth: So you think embedding journalists is here to stay? Dr Posen: I cannot say that, I am not a good enough fortune teller. If the military backs away from it and tries to keep everyone out of the game, in some senses they are going to lose whatever is the advantage they think is there. The advantage they think is there is being essentially able to put their own spin on what happens. Q213 Mr Howarth: What would have happened in the United States in week two when there was the pause, with the possibility of retaliatory action being taken by asymmetric warfare, if there had been a lot of casualties taken by the United States? We know the aversion to taking casualties amongst the United States population, perhaps mitigated in part by 9/11, nevertheless if there had been a large number of American casualties, had that been shown on American television, do you not think instantaneously that would have affected the conduct of the war? Dr Posen: In this case I think it would have made it more ferocious. Q214 Mr Howarth: So it would have emboldened the American people, you think? Dr Posen: This business about the casualty-sensitivity of the American people is a strange and amorphous issue, not easily settled in one discussion. I think the American people since 11 September have been more willing to take casualties than even their leaders think they are. I was not in the United States during the war, I was living in Brussels, but I talked to my friends to try and get a sense of how it was seen, and my impression is that the public was pretty ferocious and if the American military had taken more casualties, I think the question would have been, "Who didn't send enough fire power; how do we get it out to them fast enough; whose head needs to roll for not sending enough fire power." I think that is the kind of attitude we would have got, not, "Oh dear, oh dear, let's get out of this." Q215 Mr Howarth: Can I take you back to a point Paul made about entertainment versus information. I think this is hugely serious. I represent a garrison town and the wives of my constituents who were out there fell into two camps. One camp were glued 24 hours a day, who were just looking for their husbands. The other group would say, "I would switch on in the morning, switch it off, switch it on at night for the news before going to bed, then switch it off again, just watch those two slots." It is very difficult for these people. The idea that this should be regarded as any form of entertainment personally I think is an anathema. It is trying to manage that which I think is going to be a major lesson to be learnt. Dr Posen: I could not agree with you more but different journalistic organisations have different standards. There is this slang in the United States, "infotainment", and for some that is the standard. It is the whizz, bang war and our glorious fellows and that is the way it is going to be portrayed and if there is a hot story you are going to stick a camera in their faces. That is the same way some of the media will cover any issue in the United States. I think it is a tragedy when war is covered this way. I think the only thing we can hope for - maybe I am being naive here - is peer pressure. This is a profession, the journalistic profession, and there is some peer pressure, there is pressure from people like you, to try to raise the standard. I do not think the right answer for a democracy is to suppress coverage, the right answer for a democracy is to demand a certain standard from the professionals who make their living out of it. Q216 Chairman: I think we will draw stumps. Thank you very much, gentlemen, that was very interesting. It is one of the longest sessions we have ever had, a testimony not just to the interesting subject but the very interesting way in which you were speaking. Dr Posen: I want you to know it was an honour for me to be here. Chairman: Thank you so much. If you have written anything - I am sure you have all written quite considerably on this subject - if you would not mind sending us a copy as a supplement to what you have said, we would be very grateful. Thank you very much. |