Examination Witnesses (Questions 120-139)
DR BARRY
POSEN, PROFESSOR
CHRIS BELLAMY
AND MR
PAUL BEAVER
4 JUNE 2003
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%, 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%age
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% of the fighters but fired about 5% 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 PGBs;
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.
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