Examination of Witnesses (Questions 260-279)
20 APRIL 2004
GENERAL SIR
MICHAEL WALKER,
ADMIRAL SIR
ALAN WEST,
GENERAL SIR
MIKE JACKSON
AND AIR
CHIEF MARSHAL
SIR JOCK
STIRRUP
Q260 Mr Blunt: These are all NATO members.
General Sir Mike Jackson: And,
of course, Allied Command for Transformation will no doubt assist
the process with NATO members. More difficult sometimes is non-NATO
members who do not have a history, who do not have the commonality
of procedure and exercises and all of that and whose national
governments could, because they are outside of the alliance, be
taking a more independent position than a NATO member may.
General Sir Michael Walker: We
had this big exercise across in the States, Colorado Springs,
which was addressing this whole question of speed of decision
making within the political arena of the NATO captains. The good
old Dr Klaus Reinhardt quotes 49 different states of constraint
that sat on the very many contingents he had. Some of them are
only minor but they do introduce exactly the sorts of thing you
have there and there is a big drive in NATO to try and get those
down. I actually think that at the end of the day it will not
happen. If, for example, you face the German government with some
of these questions, they are very clear about changing them to
the extent of giving the flexibility to their commanders that
we would have because they have a very rigid process of going
through the Bundestag to get to those sorts of things. I think
those will continue. There is recognition that these constraints
must be moved. Even Germany has moved quite significantly in terms
of being able to deploy its own troops in Afghanistan and that
will continue. I suspect you as a Committee would not wish your
own government to release all constraints of the use of your armed
forces around the world so that the red card system will always
be in operation for any contingent.
Q261 Mr Blunt: Members of this Committee,
not me, went to Afghanistan and there have been reports then and
since that the Germans provided about five times as many soldiers
as we did at that stage of the operation and they appeared to
be concerned primarily with force protection. They had some people
killed in a bus bomb and in some other activity which meant they
had reined in their activity completely to protect their own force
and their willingness to go out and conduct searches and to act
effectively in support of the Afghan government was, frankly,
such that they might as well not have been there. That causes
big problems for the smaller British and Canadian forces who are
acting much more rigorously and it puts a greater burden on them.
This is an issue that does need to be faced up to because if there
are a lot of troops on the ground who are not doing anything then
that continues to put a burden on the players.
General Sir Michael Walker: I
take your point exactly, but I would want to point out that any
military commander working under a political leadership will always
have to respond to the result he gets from that. If there has
been a crisis nationally and they say, "Right boys, get the
troops off the street," even we would have to do that in
those same circumstances. The system has recognised this as a
problem and people are really trying to address it in a way in
which they never have before. I suspect we will always have some
sort of constraint apart from the political level.
General Sir Mike Jackson: It is
more politics than it is military matters and domestic law has
something to play in this too. Different nations have different
laws about the use of force to defend property for example.
Q262 Mr Blunt: Can I just ask Sir Jock
about the possibility of putting an air package together in these
circumstances. Could you give us a brief view of how difficult
a challenge that becomes with the coalition operation?
Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup:
I think the difficulties are less for us. We have been putting
together multinational air packages for quite some time. Within
that context, NATO standards still remain the bedrock of being
able to do that. As far as RoE differences are concerned, it is
again perhaps easier to accommodate these. We have seen in all
operations that enabling capabilities are crucial to success.
Things like air transport are always in short supply, surveillance,
support helicopters. So there are lots of areas here where nations
can contribute without having to address some of those difficult
RoE questions. The main challenges tend to be the passage of information,
the technology to allow that to happen and in some cases defensive
aids. We have a very good mechanism for dealing with that certainly
within Europe which is called the European Air Group, which is
based at High Wycombe, and they work through real world inter-operability
issues between European air forces and introduce effective solutions
to a number of those. We do have mechanisms to address them, but
I think the constraints, and particularly the RoE ones, are rather
less for us than they are certainly for land forces.
Q263 Chairman: Thank you. When Crispin
asked questions on divisions between allies, NATO and non-NATO
and he got as far as Sarajevo airport he was straining terribly
close to Pristina airport and I would have ruled him out of order
completely until after the session had terminated, but maybe one
day you can elaborate more fully on how decisions made at a tactical
level can have strategic implications.
General Sir Mike Jackson: Yes,
a small amount of Clausewitz-ian friction.
Chairman: I was going to ask if that
was a Clausewitz-ian example!
Q264 Mr Havard: I would like to ask a
few questions about jointery. Sir Michael, you have said in a
speech that "training and deployments will increasingly be
with joint units and we shall have to harmonise conditions of
employment while retaining individual service identity and ethos
. . . " That is an issue that is well discussed within each
of the services and between them and comes to us. Given that is
the case, how are you going to achieve your intention of individual
service `identity and ethos' in an era of increasingly joint training
and deployment?
General Sir Michael Walker: You
have got us on a subject where we could be waxing eloquent for
about four hours. I think it is clear to all of us that one of
the best characteristics of the British armed forces is the fact
that their services are filled by people who want to be soldiers,
who want to be sailors, who want to be airmen or women and to
us it seems inconceivable that we should try and tinker with the
ethos that creates that because that is where the fighting spirit
comes from. Having said that, to use that as a sole reason for
not doing things in a joint manner would be—and we fully
recognise this—quite wrong. Where you get into combat operations,
where you get into logistics operations, where you get into support
operations, the creation of joint structures to do that makes
sense. Equally, you want to be careful that you do not, in creating
those joint structures, also create some part of the structure
which begins to erode the single service ethos and so that is
really what I meant by that, the special nature of the British
armed forces is the colour of the uniform. You are not going to
get a young lad from Birmingham saying I want to join the defence
force or I want to join the Army, he is going to say I would like
to join such-and-such a regiment and become a member of the Royal
Navy, or I want to go and fly for the Royal Air Force and that
is the strength of our system. We ask a lot of our people and
a lot of that is given because they feel they want to be part
of what is a very special organisation and by and large better
than everybody else's organisation, whichever one they are in.
Q265 Mr Havard: The question really is
about how all this works in practice. It would appear that the
recent operations have been very successful in terms of the joined-up
activities of the three services and rightly so. What do you see
as the improvements that could be made for that to work better,
because doubtless there will have been these Clausewitz-ian or
other frictions in all of that? What improvements could be made
to make it better?
General Sir Michael Walker: If
you look at what we have done over the last four or five years,
the number of organisations we have set up as joint organisations
range from some of our training establishments through to the
joint headquarters, through to some of the organisations which
provide joint combat effect. So, for example, our joint force
helicopter headquarters provides a joint force capability. If
you go to Basra you will find the joint force helicopters working
in an integrated way, as part of the division, working in the
building there. There are all three services there flying, supporting
and tasking on a common line. That is the sort of approach that
is producing a force multiplier in terms of combat effect for
the amount of resources applied to it. We do that with aircraft,
with helicopters and increasingly we are doing it with people,
the paras, infantry, the Royal Air Force regiment all working
together to cross the lines that used to be drawn as to the sort
of tasks they might be prepared to carry out. For example, again
if you go to Basra, the Royal Air Force regiment have done a much
greater amount of force protection tasks, they have done a lot
of patrolling. It is those sorts of things where it seems to me
we need to act, making sure that we do not draw false boundaries
and we try to make things joint where we can. We do it with a
number of other things, but I do not think at the moment there
is anything that we have identified other than the ground-based
air defence where we need to move again in that direction. We
still have to do quite a lot in that direction.
Q266 Mr Havard: How much further does
it need to go in terms of command structures, co-location units,
common facilities, common recruitment possibly? How much further
can this `purplisation' process go?
General Sir Michael Walker: There
is a quite a lot of common recruiting undertaken in terms of wider
publicity. You cannot go for common recruiting if you are looking
to persuade people to become a fast jet pilot or to become a submariner,
you have to target that pretty carefully. There are not a lot
of people out there queuing up at the doors, you have to go and
find them. The recruiting effort does need to be fairly well targeted.
We have addressed most of the areas over the last five years where
we see there being profit in making seriously joint efforts. There
will be more and if people come up with suggestions where we could
do things better on a joint basis without disturbing the wider
ethos, I think we would go for that.
Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup:
Joint units are very important and they are very helpful but they
are not what jointery is about. We are all about jointery. Jointery
is an attitude of mind, it is a method of working and operating
and we are all in joint businesses whether we happen to belong
to a specifically named joint unit or not. We must be careful
to remember that joint units are the tool which will help us to
increase the level of jointery, but they are not in themselves
jointery.
General Sir Michael Walker: There
was a suggestion about terms and conditions of service. As you
know, we are doing a joint Armed Forces Act together. That has
been a major labour for the boys and the lawyers trying to put
it all together. Insofar as we can we are trying to make conditions
of service common, but it is a very complex area for all sorts
of reasons. If you go to sea for long periods of time your individual
requirements are quite different to somebody who gets deployed
into the desert or at an air base. Even there I do not think we
are ever going to be able to achieve absolutely common terms and
conditions of service. There is always going to have to be tolerable
variation in order to cater for the different circumstances each
of the services find themselves in.
Q267 Mr Havard: David asked earlier about
air and land together and all of that sort of thing and the way
in which the services have presumably done their own force readiness
training processes and some sort of commonality of approach in
relation to all of that. What thinking is being done there? Whilst
they need to be trained to be sailors or airmen or infantry personnel,
whatever it is, they also then need to be somebody who is able
to work in the context of working together. What thoughts have
been given about that process being more common as opposed to
each service carrying out some training options and then coming
together at certain times? Is that going to continue?
General Sir Michael Walker: I
think one needs to understand the training requirements of each
of the services and the chiefs may wish to add to this. Clearly
you need to train everybody up to a certain basic level to put
the uniform on.
Q268 Mr Havard: Are you bringing it into
recruit training?
General Sir Michael Walker: You
then need to train them in their specialisation. There are 144
specialisations in the Army alone ranging from petroleum operators
to signallers, to gunners, to whatever. So you have got to get
the chap to be master of his own skill and trade before you actually
start injecting him into collective training. Collective training
needs to take place in teams in all three services. The ship's
crews need to be able to train to make sure they can operate the
ship, they can face every situation. Only when you have done that,
when you have a trained workforce in their own work skills, can
you then bring together joint training. Joint training is undertaken
by our joint headquarters where we have part of the machine there
which designs that joint training. We all look for every opportunity
we can to turn something as single service in collective training
into a joint event and if it is possible we try to do that as
well. You have got to remember that in the days of the first British
corps, which was 48 hours, you needed to turn that corps out about
four or five times a year to make sure it was up to the mark and
so joint training needs to be very carefully done, you want to
do it for a purpose and therefore you need to target it very carefully.
Admiral Sir Alan West: I will
give you an example of how we pull in some joint training to what
historically used to be our slightly more advanced unit level
training. The joint maritime course, which primarily was designed
to do tier two training for the maritime, we now have a very large
number of Royal Air Force and Army involved in and foreigners
as well. Beyond that, when we go into the more complex exercises
such as the one that has just happened in north Norway and the
one that is happening off the east coast of the States, which
clearly are very joint and they have a Joint HQ, we need to slot
those into the programme to enable that sort of training to be
done. I do not know if your question was referring to further
back down the track in terms of some of the training where there
is no doubt the DTI is looking at being able to have common training
for things which make sense to have common. For example, some
of the naval air engineers train with the Royal Air Force because
it is the same skill effectively you are using. There might be
a little bit of fine tuning needed on that but primarily it is
the same skill. Their initial training was to make them a sailor,
so they arrived for their training in being an air engineer already
a sailor, but then the training they are getting is similar so
let us do it in the same place. It would be madness to have it
in two places. More and more we are trying to rationalise that
and we are looking at those aspects quite clearly to see what
can be done.
Q269 Mr Havard: What are the effects
in relation to the morale of people? The really important thing
is they come in, they join a particular service. One would assume
this is largely beneficial but maybe not.
General Sir Michael Walker: We
do not know because we have not done it. If you take the course
for about major level people (33 to 36) in this case all brought
together, they would tell you now, because we were worried about
what it was going to do to the ethos, that they cannot imagine
it happening in any other way and the output of that training
has been proven consistently over the last five or six years.
It has not in any way affected what we might call the ethos of
the single service. Now that is quite a special group so there
is more risk, I think, attached to taking a youngster straight
out of basic training and putting him into a joint arena. Hopefully
in his basic training he has become a soldier, a sailor or an
airman.
Q270 Chairman: This is maybe something
I should know—probably do but have forgotten—is there
some process with some rigour in it then that is going to examine
this question of some of the mysteries of the Ministry of Defence?
General Sir Michael Walker: There
is no mystery. The process has designed, if you like, the training
machine to ensure that there is sufficient military component
to it which will allow that ethos to stay alive.
Admiral Sir Alan West: And each
of the single service chiefs is responsible for the morale of
their Service. We make absolutely certain within our service that
this is not having an impact on it. What I think is marvellous
is when they have finished their staff training each recruit is
absolutely convinced they made the right decision about which
service they went into.
Q271 Chairman: When we had Mr Hoon and
Sir Kevin with us a few weeks ago you were probably told in your
briefing that there was a little spat over the regimental system.
Some of us have gone through the process before. Can you give
us some indication of what thinking there is going on as to recruitment
to the army—perhaps specifically addressing this question
to General Jackson—and are there discussions going on over
whether the regimental system as we know it today will survive?
I think it was John Chapple—I might be wrong—during
the early stage of Options for Change who argued very strongly
that this was the wrong base to recruit over, people should be
recruiting into the army, in the same way as they recruit into
the navy or the air force, not on the basis of loyalty to a ship
or a single aircraft wing and it would be far more efficient if
that was done. Having read Mr Hoon's comments I am still a little
anxious about what might be going on within the Ministry of Defence,
so I know it is a rather delicate subject, General, and you will
tread carefully but we need to be given some information. My own
regiment is about to celebrate its 300th anniversary, not a very
good time to write it off historically, I must say.
General Sir Mike Jackson: The
regimental system, as that phrase was often used, of course has
changed down the decades and the centuries quite considerably
indeed. What are now famous names, 120 odd years ago there were
no names at all, they were all known by numbers, every battalion.
Q272 Chairman: But you know where each
number recruited.
General Sir Mike Jackson: Yes,
although that varied a great deal as well. I think it was the
92nd foot which was Midlands now Wales. The point I am making
is that the regimental system has never been immutable in its
current manifestation. What I think is immutable, and it is probably
a peculiarly British thing because it is very strong, is that
what makes men—and it is still men since we are talking
about basically the infantry—hang together when the going
gets very rough and very dangerous is not great broad appeals
to patriotism and Queen and country, it is to that small group
and what makes a man keep going, perhaps more than anything else,
is not to let his mates down. That small group identity and that
sense of honour being at stake is represented by what we call
the regimental system. In my view, the regimental system is bedrock
to having the defining capability of the infantry which we have
today. Now, all of that said, there is no guarantee, it seems
to me, that the size of the infantry we have today is set forever,
I simply do not see that. I have already touched in an earlier
answer on the fact that if and when so-called normalisation is
achieved in Northern Ireland there are relatively a large number
of battalions which are predicated on that military support to
the civil power. No doubt at that point there will be a debate
about how many battalions will be appropriate since you have 26
of them predicated on Northern Ireland, which is a large number,
over half of what we have. If there was to be a change to the
number of battalions in the order of battle then there will be
some difficult questions about which battalions would cease to
have existence. We have been through this hoop before, have we
not, on several occasions in my memory and I am not sure that
the result has always been entirely satisfactory. All I am prepared
to say to you is that we have an open mind on this and we are
looking very hard at whether the structure we have now is going
to be the right structure for ten, 15 and 20 years' time. The
structure at the moment means that we move people very often,
for very good reasons, for experience, to even out the good and
the bad roles, the good and the bad locations, etc., there may
be other ways of doing this. You will forgive me if I say I am
not looking at this or that future structure but just that it
is essential we keep an open mind about this. We should not allow
the effectiveness of the army, which is what we are talking about,
to be jeopardised by other thinking, shall we say. I hope that
lays it out for you as best as I can.
Q273 Chairman: I am sure you are passionately
loyal to that regiment and its predecessor, General.
General Sir Michael Walker: All
I would say is that Mike is absolutely right. What I think both
of us, and I think most of our senior generals—and I talk
as a general here rather than a CDS—believe is that regimental
fighting spirit is what makes the British army what it is. Now
the way by which you achieve that has many different courses of
action which you could follow. It does not have to, as CGS says,
be exactly as it is today for the future nor is it today what
it was 15 years ago. You have to modernise the regimental structure
that we have to make sure that it is relevant to what we are doing,
that it meets what defence policy requires of us and it does provide
the regimental fighting spirit. I see no difficulty or tensions
between those things.
Q274 Chairman: Can you give us any indication
as to when internal thinking might reach a point at which it can
be presented before this Committee?
General Sir Mike Jackson: There
are two aspects, Chairman, to your question, I think. One—and
I am sorry to repeat myself—a normalisation in Northern
Ireland would immediately, certainly in the Treasury's eyes if
nobody else's, bring into question the justification for maintaining
exactly the same number of battalions which we had whilst we were
helping in Northern Ireland. That would be a clear visible trigger,
I think, to then engage in some hard thinking. In one sense, one
hopes, of course, that Northern Ireland does normalise. The results
may be a little bit difficult to deal with but the greater good
is there, without a doubt. Should that happy state of affairs
not be achieved in the foreseeable future then it will be more
difficult, I think, to be clear about what is a time or a trigger
to do any form of rethinking because then you are looking at the
future and you are saying "Is what we have now going to be
right in 10, 15, 20 years' time?" and at some stage one will
need to come to a judgment.
Q275 Chairman: But that judgment could
be the same judgment as displayed by the MoD in the early 1990s
when Archie Hamilton came before us endlessly and said "The
cold war is over, now we can reap the peace dividend. We do not
require the same number of infantrymen and therefore we can embark
upon a process of reorganisation". It did not take too long
before that whole philosophy was shown to be absolutely spurious.
General Sir Mike Jackson: Chairman,
I must say that whilst we have the Northern Ireland responsibility
and whilst we have the current operational commitment, the 40
infantry battalions we have are working pretty hard and they are
not making their 24 month tour interval. It is quite a crude indicator
but it is quite a powerful one as to how hard we are working.
I am not volunteering for any guardroom here, please do not misunderstand
me.
Q276 Chairman: Let us hope Northern Ireland
does resolve itself but my four local regiments have been backwards
and forwards to Ireland now since 1705, or just after 1705 in
most cases. I do not anticipate Northern Ireland disappearing
off the planning cycle but it is very contentious. You know, General,
how immensely contentious—it is far more contentious than
the European Union constitution—regimental reform is. One
would be very reluctant to destroy that concept on the basis of
some form of national expediency.
General Sir Mike Jackson: I hope
that is not your conclusion, Chairman. I do not think anything
I have said should lead you to conclude that we are binning the
regimental system because, on the contrary, the regimental system
is bedrock. It is just how we use it in the best way.
Chairman: You are absolutely right, regiments
have to be flexible and governments and the Ministry of Defence
have to realise too what you said in the first part, not being
able to qualify before you outline the second part of your analysis
and in the army loyalty is very important, in all services but
particularly in the army. I will not ask the rest of the questions
because General Walker and Crispin have to get away for lunch!
So do I! I will stop and I think it is Dai to ask the last questions.
Do not tamper with the Welsh regiments either. Whichever brain
dead character sought to put together the Royal Welsh Fusiliers
with the Cheshire Regiment, I hope has long since left the service
of the Crown. We have had some pretty harebrained schemes.
Q277 Mr Havard: My question is really
about where people are going to be based because with all the
discussion about how the future is going to look and the question
about where people are going to be based in order to be deployed
it links it back a little bit to the jointery stuff and the stuff
about regiments because there we know there is a huge identity
with communities and placing resources as a relationship to that,
particularly for the army. If I could ask, it seems to be, as
I understand it, 70% of the army is at home anyway at the moment
but it is a question about where people are going to be. The argument
is going to be that more of it is going to be possibly back on
the mainland. There is this discussion about super-garrisons or
super barracks and whether there will be three of these, for example.
Have you got any comments you would like to make about that and
how that would mean they would integrate with some passion with
the communities? Are they going to be predicated largely on the
areas in which there is currently some successful recruitment?
How is this going to work? Are you moving away from the South
East?
General Sir Mike Jackson: I know
we are accused of being south-centric in terms of geography and
it is probably disproportionate. How do we see this future? Again,
we need to be thinking 10, 15, 20 years now, how will people be
wanting to live their lives then, not only the soldiers themselves
but their families and their children. Their wives—if I
may use that as the majority as it will be of the spouses I think
still—increasingly wanting their own careers, wanting their
own opportunities to be able to work, stability of education,
stability of health and dental care. In my view and in the army
board's view the pressures to give more stability rather than
less in that arena will grow. Also, we have a number of quite
isolated stations, many of them inherited from the Royal Air Force
when they ceased to be used as flying stations, which mitigate
against exactly what I have been saying. So what we are looking
towards are larger military communities, of which we have a number
now, they are brigade garrisons: Aldershot, Salisbury Plain, particularly
Bulford-Tidworth, Colchester, Catterick, they are obviously the
big ones which are brigade based. To get an economy of scale there,
and also by scale actually to be able to offer more, a nice outdoor
swimming pool for 400 people is a pretty expensive proposition,
for 4,000 it is much more do-able. It is in those ways that we
are thinking to give people a better quality of life. Now, we
have spoken of Northern Ireland and that could involve some additional
moves from Northern Ireland to the mainland depending on the political
progress; it will not be dramatic but it is possible. We are looking
where we can, where we are adding to the present company on the
mainland not to be on the southern centre of gravity, as it is,
but to be looking elsewhere and perhaps the opening of RAF St
Athan to an army presence—and, quite by coincidence, it
was the first Welsh Guards as you know—and there may be
growth potential there. We are looking, also, at the Midlands
where an army presence is not terribly obvious. You also I think
beg the question of the 23,000 in Germany behind your own question.
The army board has taken a view here, I think it must. There is
no political pressure, on the contrary, from Germany, that we
decide on the removal of those 23,000 people and the training
areas which go with them. The stark truth is here that if one
took a decision on policy grounds to bring those 23,000 back to
mainland Britain you would be looking at a huge capital investment
or an army smaller by 25%; the choice is quite stark. The capital
investment—we have no empty barracks—would be enormous.
The army board's present position on this is that where there
is an opportunity, which makes sense, we might bring a unit home
but to assume on a rolling basis, 15 years, that presence in Germany
will continue. It is not basing in an operational sense any more,
it is still a popular place for soldiers to be. The costs, frankly
there is not a great deal in it, there is a bit but not a great
deal. Sorry, I have given you a rather long answer but I hope
I have laid out how the army board is looking at it.
Q278 Mr Havard: It is very important
in the sense as well that if you are looking at it in the context
of expeditionary forces then some people are part way where they
might want to go. If I can expand it a little bit. There is this
question of are we going to see, for example, with the other services
the idea of the notion the Americans have just rejected because
is too expensive that you pre-position all sorts of things all
over various parts of the world. You have got a place you can
go and pick up the kit when you get there and move on. There is
a half way house here. There are basing questions, are there not,
about where you can put deployable forces as well as where people
will want to live. What considerations have been given there as
to whether they will always be occupied with allies?
General Sir Michael Walker: I
think our approach is to ensure that we have access rather than
bases. Clearly there are a number of bases that we do have: Cyprus,
Gibraltar, Falkland Islands. They can be used, of course, as forward
landing bases or for any other purposes while they are occupied
but in principle our aim is to try and make sure we have the right
sort of diplomatic relationships with countries which will allow
us access to use bases in times of crisis. We do not envisage
basing people forward, what we envisage is having at best small
teams of people who might be there as part of the liaison arrangements
prior to a base being activated on our behalf by somebody else
but not sending people overseas in big numbers.
Q279 Mr Havard: As I understand it—as
I understand it, I may be wrong—a reduction in the defence
estate is planned in all its manifestations, this is not just
where the operational people are, it is the support staff as well
who perhaps go with it, particularly with the navy and the air
force, what benefits do you see coming from this rearrangement
of the whole of the defence estate, both the support mechanisms
which go to you as operational people as well as your own activities?
General Sir Michael Walker: Economy
of scale really, just to reduce numbers. We all recognise our
estate is too big. We have too many buildings that require too
much money to keep them going for too long. It makes logical sense,
you heard about the army and the super-garrison idea that has
all sorts of benefits to it, there are one or two minuses, and
the same applies really across our operation now. The judgment
which has to be made is how many bases can you reduce to? Where
we need to be a bit more careful is we need to ensure that piece
of our estate which represents on land, for both the air force
and the army, training area capability, we need to keep that and
keep access to those that we have overseas. I think the navy have
led the way, to be honest, they have done a remarkable job in
coming down to really quite a small fleet. I think the First Sea
Lord will probably say we have had to pay a bit of a price in
the present representational footprint but it has not been terminal.
Admiral Sir Alan West: For example,
in the Portsmouth area, we have gone from 13 establishments to
two over the last 15 to 20 years. We have focused very much with
our people. We have tried to make our people buy houses and own
their own houses because we feel that is the best thing for them.
It is easier for us because actually our people go away and deploy
for 660 days out of every three years.
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