Select Committee on Defence Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 200 - 219)

WEDNESDAY 20 OCTOBER 2004

AIR CHIEF MARSHAL SIR JOCK STIRRUP KCB AFC ADC

  Q200  Chairman: I recall their High Commissioner as saying that they had pilots without aircraft and we had aircrafts without pilots. That was not true but it made the point. What are they actually doing now? It must be three or four years since we brought them over.

  Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup: They are in use across our structure. We have some in Jaguar force, we have some instructing, we have some in other forces, and they are all doing well.

  Chairman: I am delighted to hear that. Frank please.

  Q201  Mr Roy: It has been announced that RAF manpower will fall by 7,500 or 15 per cent by April 2008. Given the demanding operational tempo which the RAF, in common with the other Services, has found itself in, how do you justify that decision?

  Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup: We justify it by instituting ways of working that require fewer people and when I say instituting I am not talking about me or my commanders-in-chief instituting, I am talking about those that actually do the work. If you go to Lossiemouth, if you go to Leuchars and you look at the aircraft servicing flights there and you look at the way that they have reduced, for example, the time that an aircraft needs to spend on the hangar floor undergoing a primary from 14 or 15 days down to two or two and a half days this is through the work of those on the shopfloor—the senior NCOs the corporals, the technicians—who have employed their knowledge, their skills and their talent to driving out inefficiency. All of this of course reduces requirement for people. I have given you one example but there are many others in this leaning process, as we put it. Similarly, bringing the different parts of the logistic supply chain together in one place, the depth support and the forward support being done together, gives you economies of scale and gives you economies in the use of resources which reduce the overall requirement for people. In all of this we have watched very carefully implications for our Harmony guidelines and we are very clear that we are able to do this without impacting on those.

  Q202  Mr Roy: Sir Jock, 7,500 men and women losing their jobs is a very, very serious matter no matter what sector they are in. What proportion of the reductions that you have been speaking about will be through the dreaded compulsory redundancies?

  Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup: We do not have an answer to that yet because the detailed numbers are still being worked out but it will not be the major portion.

  Q203  Mr Roy: When will those numbers be worked out?

  Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup: I would imagine by around the end of the year.

  Q204  Mr Roy: And that presumably would then be passed on to the workforce?

  Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup: Absolutely. I would just say that none of us likes a redundancy programme but it is very important at the end of this reduction that we have a structure that provides the operational capability we need and provides good opportunities for the people within it that is able to reward talent and good work.

  Q205  Mr Roy: It is also very important not only for the people within it but for the people you have paid off? It is also very important to those people, for example, who will be given the opportunity to retrain.

  Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup: Indeed so and the redundancy provisions will be precisely in line with those that are laid down in Queen's Regulations for the Royal Air Force.

  Q206  Chairman: Just a couple more questions. I go back on the Defence Committee so far that I remember being very critical of the Phoenix, all of which kept crashing. I am delighted to say it has metamorphosised into a very effective Army resource. UAVs are Army but anything that goes up in the air obviously, Sir Jock, you have an interest in and UAVs may come closer within your remit in the years ahead. I want to ask you on Watchkeeper, which is planned to deliver a tactical UAV capability in 2006, what role do you see for the extended range UAVs in support of air capabilities in the coming years? I will link to that because you might move into it without being invited. Are armed UAVs a realistic prospect in the next 10 to 15 years or perhaps even earlier?

  Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup: Chairman, you know my views on this particular subject, we have discussed it before. As you are aware, I was a key part of setting up the joint UVA experimentation programme in my previous job so it will not surprise you when I say that I believe UAVs in a whole variety of shapes and forms and capabilities will play a key part in our future force structure. We are not yet able to say precisely how, in what numbers, doing what because we have much more to learn. So the key is to get on with learning what they are good at, what they are less good at, what their competitive advantage is, if I can put it that way, and how we leverage that. That of course is one of the fundamental purposes of the joint UVA experimentation programme in which we are fully engaged. I also believe that an unmanned combat aerial vehicle will play a key part in our future force structure and we have a lot of work in hand to again understand what advantages it would offer us, what changes it would mean in our force structure, doctrine, processes, command and control, organisation, and so on. I do not want to go into the details of precisely what we are doing but we have a lot of work in hand and it is a key priority area for me. We are driving it very hard.

  Q207  Chairman: Can you strap a missile to your projected Watchkeeper?

  Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup: First of all, I cannot answer that specific question. I am not sure, though, that that is the route that we would take. Watchkeeper is being procured as a total system of which UAV is a part specifically to meet a land commander's information requirements, and that is what it must do, that is what it must deliver. The important point I would make is that we must not constrain that information purely to the land commander. It must be made available through our network enabled capability to a wide range of people. However, that is the purpose of that system and that is what it must be focused on. However there are, as we know, a wide range of UAVs which can carry and deliver weapons now.

  Chairman: Thank you. Mike for the last few questions.

  Q208  Mike Gapes: Helicopters. It is clear to our Committee in evidence that we have seen that helicopter crews in Op Telic were overstretched and under pressure and there were reports of fatigued crews and other issues subsequently, yet despite that we seem to be in a situation where the reduction in tensions in Northern Ireland is being used as a reason to reduce the Puma force by six aircraft and nine crews there even though the National Audit Office have reported that military tactical airlift capability is already 40 per cent under strength. Helicopters operate in all three Services and my short question is are you the champion of the helicopter?

  Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup: I am certainly a champion of helicopters. When I was AOC1 group, before the introduction of Joint Helicopter Command, I had all the RAF support helicopters under me. Although my background is as a fast jet pilot I flew both the Chinook and the Puma and qualified as a captain on the Puma, so I am deeply interested in support helicopter and wider helicopter issues for that reason, and of course for the reason that they are a critical defence resource. However, I am not the sole champion of helicopters. I am sure the First Sea Lord would want to claim a role there not least for his anti-submarine warfare and airborne early warning capabilities mounted from his ships and of course the Chief of General Staff has a distinct interest in battle field helicopters and not least in Apache. So if you are asking me is there one helicopter supremo in the Ministry of Defence then the answer to that is no. On the other hand, if you have got all three chiefs-of-staff swinging for you I would have thought that was a distinct advantage.

  Q209  Mike Gapes: Should there not be one? Is it not time that we had a more logical way of looking at this and, as has been argued by some people, to have one of the three Service chiefs taking overall responsibility for helicopters?

  Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup: I do not think so because helicopters are not a capability, helicopters are a means of delivering capability, and so the real issue is what is the nature of that capability and what is the environment in which it principally operates.

  Q210  Mike Gapes: If I can be clear, you do not think it would be helpful to have a sense of co-ordination where helicopters overall were looked at rather than each of the three Service chiefs doing things in their own areas when in fact the helicopter has such flexibility that it can move from one role to another, and as we saw in Op Telic helicopters were used over land that were not designed for use over land.

  Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup: But the chiefs do not do their own thing in different areas. We have a Joint Helicopter command which is at the moment commanded by an RAF Two Star but is part of Land Command. That co-ordinates all of these activities across the support helicopter force. The Navy's AW and AWS helicopters operate under a different chain because of the specific nature of their role and the way in which they are tied to surface vessel platforms and that makes sense, but the Services are not doing their own thing with helicopters. Equally, in terms of the future programme we have an equipment capability area that looks at things in capability terms rather than Service-specific terms and they at the moment are engaged in a series of studies looking at the best solutions to our future rotorcraft needs across the board.

  Q211  Mike Gapes: Could you clarify then, Sir Jock, your own responsibilities and the responsibilities of your Service for the defence helicopter fleet?

  Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup: My specific responsibilities centre on the fact that full command of the Royal Air Force Support Helicopter Force rests with Commander-in-Chief Strike Command who is under me as Chief of Air Staff but the operational control of those forces rests with Land Command. Equally, I have an interest, if not a direct responsibility, because I am a member of the Defence Management Board and Chiefs of Staff Committee and this is a critical area of defence capability.

  Q212  Mr Roy: Can I come in on that in relation to Joint Helicopter Command and ask whether the first commander of JHC David Niven asked specifically that one of the three Service chiefs assumed the overall responsibility and that was declined because of lack of interest?

  Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup: I do not recall him asking that. I do not know whether he did or not. I find it difficult to believe that if he did ask it it would have been turned down through a lack of interest. I think there might have been some other reason. The bottom line is I do not know if he said that and if he did what the response was.

  Q213  Mike Gapes: This relationship between yourself and Land Command, is it not a rather strange situation where the Joint Helicopter Command comes under Land Command yet significant parts (and the information I have got is that all Chinooks and Pumas, 20 per cent of Sea Kings and 35 per cent of the Merlins) are manned by the RAF? Would it not be more logical and sensible to have a different structure?

  Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup: You can make arguments for all sorts of structures but I think the important point is that this is a joint force which draws together the equipment and people of all three services operating to a common agenda and all of us have an interest and a stake in the Joint Helicopter Force. The fact that it is controlled by Land Command in many ways is neither here nor there. There are reasons for it being in Land Command, you could advance reasons for it being in some other command but that would not alter the fact that the critical element is that it operates not as a part of the Army or the Air Force or the Navy but as a joint force.

  Q214  Mike Gapes: How concerned are you about the recent pressures on helicopter crews which they have experienced on recent operations, on Telic and elsewhere?

  Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup: I am very concerned and that is one of the reasons why we have set in hand a comprehensive study to look at our future rotorcraft needs and the most efficient way of meeting those looking precisely, as you say, across the board rather than in specific stovepipes.

  Q215  Mike Gapes: I understand that the Chinooks are currently being updated at Boeing. When you do you expect all eight to return to service from the systems update?

  Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup: I am not quite clear which Chinooks you are referring to here.

  Q216  Mike Gapes: I understood, and the information I have may not be accurate, that there are eight currently being returned to service at some point which are being updated at this moment.

  Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup: I am not aware of any specific programme other—

  Q217  Mike Gapes: I think it is the Mk 3.

  Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup: They are not being returned at the moment, the Department is still trying to decide the way ahead on Chinook Mk3, which is not a happy story. It is not my place to go into the audit of what happened on the Chinook Mk3. We all recognise that there were some significant shortcomings in the process and some serious lessons to be learned, but the important thing is how we actually get these aircraft into operational service. There are a number of options being looked at at the moment, one of which is an option to modify the aircraft to bring them up to an acceptable operational standard, but there are other options as well which would involve selling them. We have not got a defined way ahead yet but there is a lot of urgent work going on.

  Q218  Mike Gapes: So you cannot give us any idea as to whether or when they will come back into service?

  Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup: No, because the decision has not been made on what to do with them.

  Q219  Mike Gapes: It is possible that they may never come back into service?

  Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup: If somebody else wanted to buy them one option would be to sell them and to go down another route. The option which is being worked and which is being costed at the moment is referred to as the fix to field operation, which is to get them modified and bring them up to the standard so that we can use them operationally.


 
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