Select Committee on Defence Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 40 - 59)

WEDNESDAY 15 SEPTEMBER 2004

RT HON GEOFF HOON MP, SIR KEVIN TEBBIT KCB CMG AND GENERAL SIR MICHAEL WALKER GCB CMG CBE ADC GEN

  Q40  Mr Blunt: No, I want to move on, because we do not have very much time, to a theme that runs through a lot of this, which is "cuts today for jam tomorrow", and if I can deal with the Army. Given the difficulties encountered on Operation Telic to find enough tanks to equip one armoured brigade, is it not unwise to cut the number of Challenger tanks several years before FRES is going to be ready?

  Sir Michael Walker: Can you substantiate your initial statement?

  Q41  Mr Blunt: You are taking four squadrons of Challenger.

  Sir Michael Walker: No, no, I have said, given the difficulty of finding enough Challenger tanks to equip the armoured brigade for Operation Telic—

  Q42  Mr Blunt: The evidence the Committee has received is that in order—and certainly the experience I was familiar with as far as Gulf War I is concerned and my understanding is that Gulf War II has been the same, is that in order to produce an armoured brigade in the Gulf you have had to take spares and equipment from other Challenger regiments to produce a regiment of full war establishment on operations in the Gulf. If that is not the case and we now have armoured regiments that are able to go to war without borrowing anything from any other regiments that is marvellous, but I would be rather surprised if it was?

  Sir Michael Walker: No, no, it is true that the priority of the spares would have changed to the brigade that was going there, but there was nothing like the cannibalisation that went on in Operation Granby, absolutely nothing like.

  Q43  Mr Blunt: One hoped that lessons would have been learned from that, but the point at issue is that you are going to withdraw tanks from the front-line, before FRES is even suggested to be ready, in 2009?

  Sir Michael Walker: No, what we are doing is, and this is why you need to look at the future Army structure . . . The cavalry, of course, are reorganising into, as you know, some reconnaissance regiments, so the withdrawal of the tanks is not that so much as a conversion of these armoured units into reconnaissance units. That is what happened. Nobody is going to be left wandering around looking for a piece of equipment to fight with.

  Q44  Mr Blunt: No, I understand that, but before the medium-weight vehicles come in, FRES, which has a proposed in-service date of 2009—and I do not know of very many people who actually think that has got a cat in hell's chance of being met—you are moving forward with the changes to the Army's operational structure. Part of those changes involve significant reductions in the Army's military fall-back, which includes seven Challenger II armoured squadrons, six AS90 batteries—those will be withdrawn by 2007—the reduction in the number of Rapier anti-aircraft missile launchers, a reduction in the number of high velocity missile finds, for example. Focusing on the armoured element of this, you are reducing the heavy capability before you get the new equipment that is going to provide the medium-level capability which to a degree is replacing it?

  Sir Michael Walker: No. What is happening is that we are moving to a different structure which allows the servicing of a medium-scale and two small-scales, two medium-scales or a large-scale so we have the capability to generate what force structure is necessary to service any of those, and that remains in service. What we are doing is shifting people out of heavy armour into medium reconnaissance, and in due course that medium reconnaissance will be replaced by the FRES variant of the armoured vehicle when it comes into service. That is the longer term plan. So this is not about taking tanks out of service and leaving us with low capability, this is about the change of the structure to give us a different capability to respond to the most probable sort of activities we are under. We only had two armoured regiments fully employed in the Gulf in the last operation in the Gulf.

  Q45  Mr Blunt: Can I ask you a specific question about an armoured battlegroup. Under SDR the first session of the Joint Rapid Reaction Force, in other words those forces which are held in very high readiness for early entry operations, included an armoured battle group. Will this still be possible under the proposals in Future Capabilities?

  Sir Michael Walker: Absolutely. We remain two full armoured brigades; absolutely.

  Q46  Chairman: How many Challenger IIs will there be after re-organisation?

  Sir Kevin Tebbit: There will be 18 squadrons instead of 25.

  Q47  Chairman: I failed O-level maths, so how many is that?

  Sir Kevin Tebbit: I cannot do the arithmetic immediately in my head. The CDS probably can!

  Q48  Chairman: Can you let us know. Are we going to give away the surplus or keep them in storage?

  Mr Hoon: That is not a decision we have taken yet. I suspect, for historic reasons, we may choose to keep a significant number in storage. We have paid for them; they are ours.

  Q49  Chairman: It is a very good tank?

  Mr Hoon: It is a very good tank. Absolutely.

  Sir Michael Walker: It will match the whole management concept that is coming in over the next few years as well.

  Sir Kevin Tebbit: Can I just say, I quite accept you needed to move on, but, since I am Chairman of the Defence Management Board the CDS referred to, I ought to say that of course we operate within a resource environment and framework but the judgments we made about the future structure were based on a serious appraisal of the future, as we saw it, in terms of requirements together with which areas we really needed to concentrate on to meet those requirements and where we over-matched or out-performed any possible adversary that we could contemplate within the timescales of the review. That was not just unilaterally as the UK, it was also against assumptions of operating in coalition with others, whether European partners or whether the United States, and taking a balanced judgment about those areas where we had enough or more than enough to meet our guidelines and those where we needed to do more, particularly in the sort of future technology area in order to meet the requirements. We had to take into account judgments like precision guidance, network enabled capability, giving us much more effect per platform than before, as well as things like a reduction in the nuclear threat, which had an effect of how many ASW frigates we require, a reduction obviously in the air threat, which had relevance to air defence capabilities. So the reason we have come forward with the proposals was a serious, considered, detailed political and military assessment of the future, together with a detailed analysis about capability, strengths and weaknesses, which we took on board. That is really, I think, why the CDS said it is not just a question of affordability.

  Q50  Chairman: Is this document an unclassified version or could we look at the document that is figuring so prominently in your analysis, or do we have to make do with what is publicly available at the moment?

  Sir Kevin Tebbit: The Secretary of State has made all of the statements relevant to that issue. This is the 21st July statement and the material produced at that time.

  Q51  Chairman: That is what you are operating?

  Sir Kevin Tebbit: Which were the force structure consequences of the White Paper produced last November.

  Mr Hoon: I can provide the figures on Challenger tanks.

  Q52  Chairman: Yes, go on.

  Mr Hoon: The current total is 385. Although we will be reducing squadrons from 25 to 18, in fact we judge that we will take less risk with the remaining squadrons, so we anticipate a reduction in the order of 40 Challenger tanks. So 40 from 385.

  Q53  Mr Viggers: That is interesting. The advice we were given was that between 80 and 100 tanks would be withdrawn, but, of course, the Challenger II is a world winning, world beating tank and the AS90 155mm gun, I have not heard anyone comment as being out of date. So you are phasing out modern powerful respected equipment and you have given a firm date for that, which is March 2007.

  Mr Hoon: I am sorry to interrupt you, Peter, and I would not normally, but the premise implies somehow that this is because we have not utilised sufficiently the Challenger II tanks. The reason for the phasing out is not because we are in any way uncomfortable or unhappy with this modern very successful main battle tank, it is because a judgment has been made, given the strategic global environment in which we have to operate, that it is important to have more medium-weight forces available, that we cannot get to a crisis with main battle tanks as quickly as we might like and that, therefore, a medium-weight capability, an enhanced medium-weight capability, will be important in the kind of conflicts that we have to deal with currently, which is one of the reasons why I am edging towards the idea of storage because I accept that that could change. We will still have a significant requirement for main battle tanks, but it is not as great as we might have anticipated given the kind of conflicts we thought we might be facing.

  Q54  Mr Viggers: Yes. Paragraph 2.12 of Future Capabilities makes a valiant attempt to explain how Apache helicopters and other facilities will be used to redeploy armed forces, but my worry is the availability of the future rapid effect system. Anyone reading paragraph 2.11 quickly would read: "FRES will operate alongside a new generation of command and liaison vehicles, which will begin entering service in 2007." You might think that FRES is coming along in 2007. It is not. FRES will really start coming through in about 2009 and it will be the simplest of the array of vehicles in the FRES arrangements which will be available first. So, I suppose, if one is putting the point at its crudest, it is that you are phasing out first-class and effective equipment for an artist's impression of what you hope will be available in the next—

  Mr Hoon: General Walker has already answered that question.

  Sir Michael Walker: We do not have a medium capability now. We never have. We have been living without this capability. So we should be celebrating the fact that we are bringing one in for the first time in the history of the British Army.

  Q55  Chairman: Are you now claiming to be Director of Public Relations, General, because you are singing a very happy song of rejoicing with those words before!

  Sir Michael Walker: Do you wish me to answer, Chairman, or not?

  Q56  Chairman: No; privately afterwards!

  Sir Kevin Tebbit: The reason for not coming forward with a more specific FRES in service date at the moment is the balance you always have to make between buying today's equipment which is going to be second-rate quite quickly and waiting until you have got the right technology level, mature enough to get something which is going to last you through from the end of this decade right through to the next 20 or 30 years. As of now, the technology is not quite where it needs to be for us to be absolutely certain we have got a low-risk project, something which will last for a very long period of time. Which is why we are now appointing a systems house to give us advice on who is going to have the best combination of these technologies, reliable and will work, so that we are going to bring it in at the right moment with the right level of capabilities. It is not about delaying, or pie in the sky, pushing things off, it is about making the right judgment when we can, as it were, take a serious, good decision. There are lots of people with the stuff around, but it will not be world beating in 2014, and that is what we have got to do.

  Mr Viggers: I am sure we will follow this with keen interest.

  Q57  Mr Havard: Your reply to our last observations on the White Paper said that you can make the changes to the armoured brigades irrespective of whether you get FRES. It should not be held up pending the introduction of medium-weight capabilities. I think that is the concern, that you are making the change without the other supporting element being available at the time, and is that a risk?

  Sir Michael Walker: We are still going to have two armoured brigades, three mechanised brigades, a light brigade, an air assault brigade and a commando brigade. That is the structure that we are going to. What we will have to do is introduce a medium-weight capability to the mechanised brigades when the medium-weight capability comes in, which we do not have at the moment. So the only changes we are making is a change to the number of units that exist in each of the brigades and the move out of some tanks into some medium reconnaissance vehicles and to give the light brigade some light reconnaissance so that it can operate as well. Those are the changes we are making now. The arrival of FRES is not, if you like, the basis on which we are getting rid of other bits of kit, rather FRES is an additional capability that we much look forward to taking into service.

  Q58  Mike Gapes: Can I switch the focus to logistics. Secretary of State, you said earlier on that logisticians have been most under pressure, I think was the phrase you used, and you will be aware that our own Committee's report on the Lessons of Iraq last year was very critical in some respects of aspects of the logistics supply, particularly questions of asset-tracking and the coherence of the system. You have sent us a response to that, which no doubt you can refer to, but I wanted to ask specifically, in the light of previous recommendations in every conflict in the last 20 years since the Falklands of the need to improve logistic capability, why does the Future Capabilities document only specify a few additional resources to go to this area? Is it not being under-estimated? Is not the importance of improving the boring, unglamorous but, nevertheless, absolutely essential logistical operation and the tracking of assets more important than some of these big headline things which we have been discussing up to now?

  Mr Hoon: Forgive me, I am just a little concerned at the way that you ran together, I think, two separate issues at the outset. I certainly say that we need more people trained and available as logisticians. That is not in any way a criticism of the logisticians who did a superb job in moving equipment to Iraq for Operation Telic; and there was a slight implication in what you were saying—

  Q59  Mike Gapes: I was not criticising the people, but nevertheless the Committee made very clear there were issues, and they were raised with us, about the fact—

  Mr Hoon: If we go back in a sense, back to the Cold War, and contrast the kind of organisation that we had to eventually put a large force into Western Germany to confront the Warsaw Pact, that in effect required a single logistics line of communication to support that force. What we have seen, as the world has changed, is the requirement to sustain, simultaneously, a number of different operations, and in a way we have moved beyond even the assumptions we made in the Strategic Defence Review. We have recognised that we may well require smaller operations, but those smaller operations, as far afield as places like Afghanistan, require a huge level of support, and we need more people to assist with that. More people allow us to, as I said earlier, I think, in answer to a question from Mike, use the operational capability of our infantry battalions more effectively, but those people have undoubtedly been under enormous pressure. At one stage people were being redeployed literally almost directly from Kosovo to Bosnia and back again because of the need to support the operations there. What I am looking to do—and this is a process actually that has been under way for quite a long time if you look at it—is provide more support and make sure that that chain of support for deployed operations is more effective.


 
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