Examination of Witnesses (Questions 240
- 259)
WEDNESDAY 3 NOVEMBER 2004
GENERAL SIR
MIKE JACKSON
KCB CBE DSO ADC GEN
Q240 Mr Viggers: Can you please say
in which of the five areas the troops will be deployed and how
many are going to each of the five categories?
General Sir Mike Jackson: I cannot
give you accurate figures yet. That is still being worked through.
I think it is clear, however, that that manpower will be reinvested
into those parts of the Army where establishments at the moment
are tighter than we would wish them to be—including the
infantry itself. So about 500 of those posts will go to the remaining,
36 in due course, infantry battalions, and also to other parts
of the Army where we need to get establishments more robust, so
that we do not have to reinforce a unit when it deploys; that
it is ready for deployment as it is.
Q241 Mr Viggers: So 500 to "stronger
and more resilient infantry battalions"?
General Sir Mike Jackson: Correct.
Q242 Mr Viggers: Are you able to
give us some idea—I understand that you will not necessarily
have the exact numbers—how many will go to command and control,
engineers, signallers, extra logistics? Which of those would you
regard as the most likely?
General Sir Mike Jackson: I do
not have those figures with me and I am not sure that they have
been finalised yet, but you might want to be given a note in due
course. I can certainly do that.
Chairman: Yes, thank you very much.
Q243 Mr Viggers: Finally, what will
happen to the manpower freed up by the reductions in the Royal
Armoured Corps and the artillery?
General Sir Mike Jackson: For
the artillery, possibly—again, we are not quite certain
yet—there may have to be a small redundancy programme, as
there may have to be for the infantry. That is not yet clear.
The Armoured Corps remain much as they are in terms of manpower.
Some of the equipment is changing, in the sense that—and
no doubt you will want to come on to this—we are converting
a main battle tank regiment into armoured reconnaissance, for
example. So the equipment is different but the manpower remains
much the same.
Q244 Mr Havard: On the question of
rebalancing the resources and people becoming free to do a new
set of tasks, as I understood it the increase in the logistics
and the support capabilities is partly what this is about, because
you need to sustain this brigade thing, whatever it looks like,
in operations. The Ministry of Defence memorandum to us in September
said, "By increasing the arms plot, the Army will have most,
if not all. of the thirty-six (post . . . Future Army Structure
. . . ) infantry battalions".
General Sir Mike Jackson: Mr Havard,
I think you said "by increasing the arms plot"?
Q245 Mr Havard: That is what it says
here.
General Sir Mike Jackson: That
cannot be right. By abolishing it, I think.
Q246 Mr Havard: I am sorry, I should
have said "by ceasing". By ceasing it, not increasing
it, they will be available at its disposal all the time. That
is the point I want to get to. Surely if this restructuring is
completed—and most if not all of these are available for
operations, and this is what is being said to us—there will
still be public duties, support tasks and so on. So the reality
is that there will be a graduated system of readiness. Available
resources will be targeted at those who are at a higher state
of readiness. We have been given the impression that there is
a quantum leap in the available capability of the Army, but that
is slightly misleading, is it not?
General Sir Mike Jackson: I would
not wish in any way to mislead. I think that there is something
of a leap here. There are certain ongoing tasks. You mention public
duties, although do not forget that the public duty battalions
do take their turn from time to time. There are the two battalions
in Cyprus, for example. So there are certain fixed tasks, if you
like, but they are constant. Of the 40 battalions that are currently
in the order of battle, at any one time under the arms plot regime
you have seven or eight that are not available. Indeed, the planned
number of battalion moves for 2004-05 was 22. Many of these moves
involve re-roling, and that means retraining. If I can give you
the most obvious example, and the most complex one, that of converting
to armoured infantry, the formal training for that is six or seven
months, but the received wisdom is that a battalion is not fully
on top of that role until it has been in it for 18 months to two
years. So what the arms plot built in was the unavailability for
deployment for operations. As I was saying, there are seven or
eight battalions and, whenever you take the snapshot, it goes
up and down, depending—but it is of that order. The Army
Board concluded that this was not a way in which it was sensible
to continue to run the Army, and the infantry in particular. Not
only because of the inefficiency of that, but perhaps I may give
you another example. The Irish Guards, who were with me in Kosovo
in 1999 as armoured infantry, were in Iraq last year as armoured
infantry. They have arms-plotted; they are now on public duties.
Six years of experience, expertise and training, are now gone,
and we are having to train a new battalion into that role.
Q247 Mr Havard: The point I am trying
to get to is that, once you have moved to this and you cease the
arms plot and it gives you these advantages, it is not that all
of them are always going to be, all the time, ready to go. There
will still be a graduated system.
General Sir Mike Jackson: I am
sorry if that was a misleading remark. It certainly was not meant
to be. The contrast I was attempting to draw was that, without
arms plot, those battalions which are not available today, because
they are moving, retraining and re-roling, become available. That
is not to say there will not be certain fixed tasks in the future,
as there are now. In the sense of 36 battalions available, therefore,
they are available for whatever task, whether that be public duties,
or Cyprus, or deployment; but we will not have, in the future,
these battalions which are unavailable because they are in baulk—as
the phrase has it—because they are moving, retraining, re-roling.
Q248 Mr Havard: So ceasing the arms
plot makes this more advantageous and makes it easier to do, but
it is not necessarily a quantum leap, is it? It is just an improvement.
General Sir Mike Jackson: I believe
it is a remarkable improvement in getting more military capability
out of the resources I have.
Q249 Chairman: Will it mean less
versatility? When you were in Bosnia, the King's Royal Hussars
took tanks, armoured infantry, cavalry, hiring horses to go round
the mountains, very good at knocking heads in public order demonstrations,
paramilitary policemen—just half of a battalion. Will the
new changes mean that this versatility will decrease and guys
who drive tanks will not, because of Northern Ireland now, have
more expertise in being infantrymen? Will there be much more specialisation
and will we lose a lot of the advantage that we now have of, not
being jack-of-all-trades, but being the perfectly versatile soldier,
capable of performing multifarious and very contrasting roles—which
would be a shame?
General Sir Mike Jackson: I take
that point. Much of that versatility, in the sense of soldiers
knowing what to do—not necessarily individually having done
it before but collectively—in less-than-war-fighting situations,
is drawn from our 30-plus years of Northern Ireland experience.
I very much hope that Northern Ireland experience will dry up
because Northern Ireland will have come to a settlement, and therefore
we cannot in the future presume that we will be able to draw on
that specific experience. While it is true that battalions will
largely be fixed in geography in the future, and certainly by
role, that does not mean to say that properly trained battalions
will not be versatile. Furthermore—and no doubt we shall
be getting on to this subject as well—one needs to have
a system in which officers and senior NCOs in particular gain
their personal breadth of experience by moving between battalions
with different roles, and they gain it in that way. Given that
the return of service of the average infantry soldier is about
four and a half years—that is the average—the versatility
argument, by moving complete battalions every two, three, four
years, does not really hold up because, more often than not, soldiers
will only be doing one of those tasks. So you make a very fair
point, Chairman, but it is one which we have thought about in
some depth and are satisfied that we can achieve that under the
future system.
Q250 Mr Hancock: May I ask one other
question relating to the ceasing of the arms plot? It makes so
much sense when you explain it, General, and one wonders why it
has been resisted for so long. What is your view on that?
General Sir Mike Jackson: To cease
the arms plot, as the decision was taken a couple of months ago
by the Army Board, inevitably brings you to reconsider the structure
of the infantry. It is, I am afraid, a clear deduction that under
a non-arms plotting system the future infantry cannot run with
half of it on single-battalion regiments. I think that we are
all clear in terms of the very understandable—and again,
no doubt you will be asking me in due course—and I am very
sympathetic to the difficulties and, to be frank, the emotion
which lies behind famous names becoming something which they were
not. Choosing my words as carefully as I can, I know of at least
three occasions in my own service—which I think is coming
up to 42 years—when the Army Board has considered stopping
the arms plot, knowing that it was not a very good way of bringing
capability, but had come to the view that the difficulties of
dealing with the aftermath of stopping the arms plot were more
than they wished to take on at that time.
Q251 Mr Hancock: I am delighted you
are where you are then, General. It obviously means that somebody
was prepared to take the issue on. I think that the British Army,
in the long term, will be very grateful for that role, if nothing
else.
General Sir Mike Jackson: Some
are not so, at the moment.
Q252 Mr Hancock: I am sure, but there
is a rather selfish element there somewhere, is there not? Perhaps
I could draw your attention to the Future Capabilities
report. It identified the issue of logistics and the provision
of them—and we heard from the Secretary of State and the
Permanent Secretary the need to beef up the logistics side of
the Army support—but there is real provision in there for
increases in the fuel supply and the port and maritime capability.
Where do you see the other issues being covered?
General Sir Mike Jackson: We have
a major study running, which I am sure the Committee will have
heard of. It is the so-called end-to-end logistics review. That
is still running, and I think that it would be wrong of me to
try to prejudge what they are going to recommend. All aspects
of land logistics are being looked at under that study. Part of
the future Army structure will be to place within brigades in
the future a greater logistic capability than they have now. I
do not want to get too technical, but we have held a lot of that
at divisional level, at the two-star command level, and they have
farmed it out as required. But it is quite clear from recent history
that the most likely level of formation that we will want in today's
operations is the brigade. That has become very much the building
block. So part of the future Army structure is to increase not
only the logistics at brigade level but also some of the combat
support—engineering in particular.
Q253 Mr Hancock: In that case, can
I draw your attention to the additional resources that are being
put into Future Capabilities? Could it not be argued that
those resources were only sufficient to fill existing gaps and
not to increase capabilities? Are you sure that the resources
match your ambitions?
General Sir Mike Jackson: We have
already touched on reinvestment of some of the infantry manpower
from those four battalions which are coming out, going into logistics.
I do not like the phrase but it is the jargon—there are
certain pinch points, certain trades, which are short and which
are in great demand operationally. EOD is one particular obvious
example. There is an increasing demand for explosive ordnance
disposal. So some of that manpower is being invested into logistics,
but also we will get more from it by restructuring the levels
at which we find logistic support—and I will not rehearse
the brigade embellishment again.
Q254 Mr Hancock: Do the force structure
tables in Future Capabilities represent, in your opinion,
a significant increase in the deployability of the infantry, for
example, and other units, i.e. the Armoured Corps and the artillery?
Does it mean that their ability to be deployed more quickly and
fully is built into this plan?
General Sir Mike Jackson: We are
very clear that we live in an expeditionary era. If the Army cannot
engage in expeditionary operations, then we are not doing our
job. I can assure you that at the forefront of our mind in putting
together the thinking about the future Army structure has been
the ability to deploy as quickly and easily as we possibly can.
You will be aware, I know, that at the moment the field Army comprises
seven brigades, three armoured -
heavy, if you like—three mechanised, with
some indifferent vehicles, Saxon—good at what it does—and
a single light brigade, 16 Air Assault Brigade. It has been shown
pretty conclusively that the lighter end of that spectrum has
been used and the demand for it has been greater than for the
so-called heavy end. It is for that reason that we decided to
reduce from three to two armoured brigades, and to use that freed-up
brigade to become a second light brigade; and, further downrange,
to convert those three mechanised brigades in the middle into
proper medium-weight capabilities—and we may well get on
to FRES and the importance of FRES in that context. The idea here—and
you will not solve it completely because the laws of physics come
into it—is that the armoured brigade, very powerful in combat
power on arrival in theatre, takes a long time comparatively and
a lot of shipping to get it there. Conversely, the light brigade,
on arrival—you can get it there pretty quickly—but
may not have adequate combat power for the task in front of it.
Therefore this is squaring the circle to some extent by putting
more emphasis on the medium piece. I am sorry, it is a rather
discursive answer, but it is a very deep question you ask me.
Q255 Mr Hancock: It is very helpful.
General Sir Mike Jackson: That
structure lies behind the concepts which together form the future
Army structure. Inside of that, of course, are individual units
and all the rest of it. If I have been able to give you a feel
of our conceptual approach, I hope that goes some way to helping.
Q256 Mr Hancock: That is helpful.
One of the issues that have been explored considerably in this
Committee over various operations over the years has been the
failure, in one way, of the Army and others to keep up with the
communications needs of the services. There have been some pretty
dramatic failures in some ways. Are you satisfied that, built
into the capabilities plan, there are sufficient resources to
bring specialists in who will run those sorts of transport hubs,
and will be able to satisfy the needs on communications, to increase
the reliability of satellite communication, and indeed to be able
to pre-plan in appropriate, short enough periods of time, to deliver
your rapid reaction force in the right place at the right time,
and to meet the requirements of then being able to do what they
are tasked to do?
General Sir Mike Jackson: Perhaps
I could start with communications—always important, but
increasingly so in today's world. That brings us, I suppose, very
neatly on to network enabled capability, because it is a rather
well-worn phrase now—and a bit of a tongue twister. It does
not represent one single gee-whizz piece of equipment which, when
it arrives, waves a magic wand over all of that. On the contrary,
it is almost a concept of being able to link together, much more
neatly, quickly, efficiently and securely, those who need to produce
military effect—from seeing a target, engaging a target,
orders, appreciation, and all of that. As you know, we have recently
started what is a very major programme for the Army of digitisation,
by bringing in the new Bowman range, not only of radios but data
transmission—which is very much part of the point you were
making. It is quite early days yet. It takes a brigade out of
the order of battle for six to nine months at a time to do this
conversion, with every vehicle having to be fitted. Then, much
more importantly than the nuts and bolts, actually taking it into
the field so that people learn how to use it. So we have started
on quite a communications revolution. Add into that new trunk
communications—Falcon, for example, replacing the old Ptarmigan
system—and there is quite a big programme there of new communication
equipments at every level. The second part of your question, I
think, was again centred on logistics and our ability to move
this expeditionary army. It would be wonderful to have 20 C17s,
30 fast ro-ros, et cetera, but we have to live in the real world
and we have to match our cloth. I do believe that we have proved—and
we proved it last year, and it is getting a bit of an old saw
now—that it is the same number of people, the same amount
of material to the same place but in half the time as it took
in 1990-91, Gulf War I. That says we are making strides in all
of this, and I believe that we will continue to do so.
Q257 Mr Hancock: Would it be to your
advantage—if I can explore the argument of the specialist—bringing
the regiments into a new regime, the battalions into a new set-up,
to have professional logistics officers who would be permanently
with that new unit and who would not move on? So that you have
the specialist skills maintained within that unit for their period
of time in the armed forces and they become career specialists
with that particular unit. Others may move on, but they would
stay.
General Sir Mike Jackson: As logisticians?
Q258 Mr Hancock: Yes, within the
specific units—as being a great advantage?
General Sir Mike Jackson: It is
an interesting idea and I have not thought of it in quite the
terms you put it. That said, if you go to pretty much any field
force unit and you address the quartermaster about these things,
I think you will find that he is a pretty specialist logistician
in his own right. There is not much you can tell him about what
needs to be done to move and logistically support a battalion,
an armoured regiment, or whatever. That sort of expertise you
are talking of, of course, is found in the Royal Logistics Corps
right now, in its many and varied functions. I can assure you
that, within a brigade, a battalion for example is very closely
supported by its close support logistic squadron. I think that
what you are saying is should we put them together permanently.
Q259 Mr Hancock: Yes.
General Sir Mike Jackson: I am
grateful for the thought, and I will take it away with me.
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