Select Committee on Defence Minutes of Evidence


Examination Witnesses (Questions 180-199)

DR BARRY POSEN, PROFESSOR CHRIS BELLAMY AND MR PAUL BEAVER

4 JUNE 2003

  Q180  Patrick Mercer: A brief look at Hansard will show that cluster bombs are a munition that have never been so widely misunderstood by Parliamentarians or the public. Bear that in mind when you answer my questions, this type of munition, given the style of the opposition and the style of the operation was their use necessary in your opinion?

  Mr Beaver: Yes. The main reason you use cluster weapons is to engage the enemy in the open and destroy them in their light vehicles and their troop concentrations. This is war-fighting, this is about killing people, sadly. I do not know if there is another cost-effective way of doing it.

  Professor Bellamy: Unfortunately, yes, I agree.

  Dr Posen: You have to distinguish two kinds and you have to distinguish the situation. There is the bombs and there is the artillery shells. When you are engaging adversary conventional forces in the field they are very useful, particularly the cluster artillery shells and rockets shell are great for counter-battery fire. When we were bombing through the sandstorm, when we thought the Iraqis were trying to re-locate we were able to locate some of those units on radar. I do not think you can target them with any kind of precision guided munitions. It seem to me where the issues arise is in the cases where cluster artillery may have been used in an urban settings, that is where you should be asking some questions.

  Q181  Patrick Mercer: Was anything learned about their use from the Afghan engagement?

  Dr Posen: The only thing that I know they learned was they should change the colour of the humanitarian meal ready-to-eat so it does not have the same colour as a cluster munition, which is a simple thing you should not have had to learn but it was learned rather than deduced.

  Mr Beaver: In any conflict you have a duty once you have won to go and sort them out, that is a labourious process, we know we lost two engineers in Kosovo as a result of doing that, mainly because the information about the particular weapon was not forthcoming from the United States.

  Q182  Jim Knight: The major combat phase was self-evidently successful. Right at the beginning I mentioned the post-conflict phase, did the coalition have sufficient forces in theatre ready for the transition to that phase?

  Dr Posen: No

  Professor Bellamy: No.

  Mr Beaver: No.

  Professor Bellamy: The post conflict phase or Phase IV, everybody who thought about it knew that was going to come with the priority being, (a) to guard against possible attack by weapons of mass destruction and win the war as quickly as possible. Clearly the focus was not on Phase IV but on Phase III. What happened was a classic manifestation of something which scholars in this field have been writing about for a while, that is a so-called security gap opened between the war-fighting phase and the peace support operating phase. If you think of it as a circle going conflict, post-conflict, pre-conflict the ring broke and clearly with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight there should have been battalions of military police, people like that, ready to go in because, as is well known, once the war fighting finishes you really do not need soldiers you need policemen. Very interestingly the first British armoured division halfway through the war-fighting phase realised that in order to run a city like Basra with 1.3 million people in it they were going to need a senior police officer and a request went out for somebody at assistant chief constable level and one from the Hampshire Constabulary arrived, but two months later, so a clear example of the security gap. That is something that should have been foreseen, could have been foreseen but for reasons we all know was not acted on.

  Q183  Jim Knight: If the Ba'ath regime had proved to be more brittle and collapsed more quickly could it have been even more disastrous in the post-conflict phase? Would the gap have been much greater?

  Professor Bellamy: The gap would have shifted forward in time, I do not think it would have been any different.

  Mr Beaver: What concerns me is that in 1945 allied forces went into Germany and about two minutes behind the armoured thrust came the military government. If you look back at the history of the way in which the allies ran round on the Axis nations there was a very good system that came in behind. Mind you there were six years to plan for that.

  Q184  Mr Jones: When we went to the Pentagon earlier this year, before the actual conflict, we got a good briefing, elaborate suggestions about what was going to be planned for after any conflict, including details of humanitarian relief but also government, what went wrong? I was under the impression that there were well advanced in terms of thinking? What do you think went wrong if that type of thinking was taking place in February? What went wrong in terms of why that was not coming in, as you say, two minutes behind? Was that not thought about?

  Mr Beaver: I can imagine something political.

  Professor Bellamy: I think the fact that the United Nations was rather kept out of matters may have had a major influence. In other situations like this who provides the policemen? Answer, the UN civ pol, the civilian police. If there is no UN clearly it is more difficult.

  Q185  Jim Knight: Do you think the discussion between Rumsfeld and Franks you alluded to at the beginning of the session may have informed this?

  Dr Posen: There was another discussion between Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Shinseki that happened in front of the American Congress. When General Shinseki, the Chief of Staff of the Army was asked: "What do you think the requirements will be to police Iraq after the war?" He said: "Several hundred thousand soldiers". From a political point of view this was the wrong answer. You are trying to sell a war to the American people and your senior Army general is telling you are going to be policing this place forever with what amounts to, lets be conservative, half the American field Army, this is the wrong answer politically. Wolfawitz just shrugged his shoulders and said: "No, no, it is going to be much less than that". Since the war I have heard two or three senior people say it is going to take a least 100,000 people for quite a while. Just to finish the thought, there is a well known article that is widely circulated in the United States of America by James Quinlivan called Force Requirement for Stability Operations. Quinlivan is a senior RAND analyst and did this work for the Army. I am sure General Shinseki was relying on this work, it is a very simple and easily understandable piece of work and the basic message is that force requirements for stability operations. You can police the United States with about two people per thousand and when things were pretty bad in Northern Ireland it took about 20 soldiers and police per thousand, you can do the math for a country of 22 million and you end up with big numbers. This is what I think the Army who had thought about these matters knew and this was a fact that was devastating politically and needed to be suppressed.

  Q186  Jim Knight: Profesor Bellamy, you referred earlier to some of the thinking as we went in to Basra, obviously the situation in Basra was much easier than Baghdad, do you think the UK were better at this stage than the US?

  Professor Bellamy: Yes, I do simply because of our experience in places like Northern Ireland, Bosnia and so on. Culturally and historically for a very long time, and before that Malaya, the British Armed Forces have been experienced in doing peace support operations. You are familiar with the famous quotation from Condaleeza Rice a couple of years ago, "we do not want the 82nd Airbourne escorting kids to Kindergarten". A prevalent attitude in certain aspects of the United States military is that peace-keeping is for wimps. This showed the difference between Basra, where the Brits took off their steel helmets, put on their berets and got into doing what they had done in Northern Ireland, in Bosnia and in Kosovo. The Americans said, "we do not do peacekeeping". I think that difference is clear. I think it was a cultural thing of the two different groups of Armed Forces, I do not think it was necessarily a doctrinal thing

  Dr Posen: I think there is a lot of truth in this but I also think you have to distinguish between the areas. In the South most people in Basra did not want to live under the Saddam regime any more, the only people he had there were friends who were really close, supportable loyalists who were installed there. The story is that insurgence swam through the people like fish through water, but there were no real people in the Ba'athist regime to swim through in the South. Baghdad is full of Ba'athist sympathisers; areas north of Baghdad are full of Ba'athist sympathisers, it is a much tougher security problem. You cannot bring the fighting phase to a clear end. The Americans do not really want to say it, but is it not basically true that the war is still going on in Baghdad and the North? Let's be honest about the different situations. Everything you said about the cultural differences and the experiential differences is all true but you also have to crank into this the difference in the situations.

  Mr Beaver: Nevertheless, you have to look at Kosovo, and the American way of doing peace operations there was only from vehicles wearing body armour looking like "Imperial Storm Troopers". The first thing the Brits do is to take off their body armour and get amongst the people. There is a difference in doctrine and it is based on something called force protection. The American primary objective is to protect their own force, ours is to do the job, and I think there is a subtle difference.

  Q187  Jim Knight: In Afghanistan we had both peace-keeping and combat forces, two separate forces. Should we have had something similar?

  Dr Posen: It is almost too much to ask. We needed to have a plan for transition.

  Mr Beaver: And the resources to do it. That is the problem.

  Q188  Patrick Mercer: Earlier on, Professor Bellamy, you said that British forces were not expecting to move into peace-keeping operations. My understanding, and it was a correct and proud boast of 7 Brigade, is that peace-keeping operations were going on at the same time as humanitarian operations at the same time as war-fighting operations, and that actually the transition from war-fighting through humanitarian into peace-keeping seems to have gone very smoothly. My impression is that they were entirely expecting to go to peace-keeping, not least because of the culture.

  Professor Bellamy: People to whom I have spoken said, for whatever reason, that they did expect there would be peace-keeping but they thought somebody else would do it.

  Q189  Patrick Mercer: Follow-on forces.

  Professor Bellamy: Yes.

  Dr Posen: It is what comes next, I do not think it is the transition.

  Professor Bellamy: Another thing, which we have alluded to earlier, is the fact the planners did expect formed Iraqi units to come over and that they might use those in certain of these roles, but as we know that did not happen.

  Q190  Jim Knight: You said we could not have done two separate forces, could the UK have deployed more? We are now deploying Reserves, is that a good use of Reserves now that the war is over given the relations they have with their employers? Could we have done any more than we have done now? Should we have done?

  Mr Beaver: There is a school of thought which says that the Territorial Army could have coped with a mobilisation of more people in formed units—one or two formed units only—to do that. The problem is the Territorial Army is not trained in this role. Secondly, in order to do this, if you mobilise one company, you then have to have two others underway because you have to replace that company and you have to have that company coming back and then have the next one and so on. I actually do not think there will be a sustainable option. I believe the only option there would be to use other nations to do that.

  Q191  Patrick Mercer: Can I broaden out the question a little and pick up a couple of things you said earlier. Mr Beaver, you referred to an armoured division we deployed. We did not deploy an armoured division. The Royal Navy deployed a brigade, there was an air mobile or an air assault brigade deployed, and there was one armoured brigade deployed. Mr Beaver, you were talking about the northern option and the possibility of deploying two armoured brigades.

  Professor Bellamy: Seventh and Fourth—I cannot remember whether the Fourth is mechanised or armoured.

  Q192  Patrick Mercer: It is armoured. First question: did we need more or did we need less armoured formations? One of my sources says, "Do bear in mind, 16 Brigade was fixed, it could not move, it could not operate, because it was not armoured." Secondly, could we do it? Could we really provide the armoured division?

  Q193  Jim Knight: And was there so much cannibalisation in order to get there?

  Mr Beaver: When I talk about an armoured division here, it is divisional headquarters with a brigade plus, because they had to take elements of 4 in order to make 7 work.

  Q194  Patrick Mercer: Forgive me, it was one armoured brigade formed out of the bulk of at least two if not three armoured brigades.

  Mr Beaver: Correct.

  Dr Posen: Exactly a brigade plus.

  Mr Beaver: It was a brigade plus because it was extra elements. I think it was one extra battle group. What you have to remember is that our force structures are wrong in the United Kingdom. We have a peace time structure and a war fighting structure, we should actually only have a war fighting structure, because that is what we do. What we should have are infantry battalions with four companies, not infantry battalions with three companies who borrow a company from somebody and then they go off to borrow another company from somewhere else. By the time you have finished, you are in this magic circle and nobody quite knows which battalion they belong to. So our problem is that we are not as prepared for war fighting as we should be. I think that is something which the Army will be looking at. I think we will see a change of structure. I have a personal interest in this perhaps but I can see a role for the Territorial Army in the future in providing that extra company or that extra squadron if it is the Royal Engineers or the Army Air Corps or whatever in terms of mobilised capability so that we can do something with that. So, for example, the First Battalion Royal Green Jackets will have elements of what used to be called 4th, 5th or 6th Royal Green Jackets, the TA Royal Green Jackets—whatever they are these days because I have rather lost track of where some of these units have gone—so we could have a TA formation which could train with their Regular counterparts. That would get away from all this thing about STABs, about the TA being useless and all of these things if they worked with a definite unit.

  Q195  Patrick Mercer: You might have to define STABs.

  Mr Beaver: I would probably prefer not to. It is an expression used by the Regular Army to describe TA soldiers—"stupid TA bastards"—and it is unfortunately still prevalent in the Army today.

  Q196  Chairman: What do they call the Regulars?

  Mr Beaver: They tend to call them neanderthals actually because they have not moved on.

  Q197  Mr Jones: Is there not a difference? For example, the Royal Marine Reserves did integrate very closely but—

  Mr Beaver: There are formations in the British Armed Forces, Reserve Forces, which do work. For example, elements of the TA Special Air Service Regiment are fully integrated with their Regular counterparts.

  Q198  Mr Howarth: Do we know anybody associated with that regiment?

  Mr Beaver: I know a number of people associated with that regiment. They are very capable of working with the Regulars and are accepted by the Regulars. The Royal Marine Reserve is the same. There are elements in other formations as well. But, as a whole, there is that problem. However, Chairman, you could have a separate inquiry into the relationship between the Regulars and the Territorials.

  Chairman: We have about had five inquiries and probably a few more in the pipeline.

  Q199  Rachel Squire: Sorry to draw us away from an interesting line of discussion and in fact you have already touched on some parts of my question. The first one is coming back to military planning and the avoidance of civilian casualties. There was a clear decision to try and do the utmost to avoid targeting civilian infrastructure and to minimise civilian casualties. In your view, was that decision taken, one, to emphasise to the Iraqi people that these were forces of liberation or, two, as a necessary element in trying to ensure there was Allied domestic support, or was it a combination of both or did other factors come into it?

  Professor Bellamy: Both and another factor. The other factor is that dropping bombs on civilians is a waste of bombs.

  Dr Posen: The planners knew we were trying to take over this country which meant that we had to run it afterwards, and you have a pretty strong interest in not destroying the infrastructure if you are going to inherit this thing. As bad as the infrastructure is, it beats what would have been there after the fact. We were planning a short war, so it is not clear what the advantage would be of destroying the civilian infrastructure. You usually destroy civilian infrastructure because you are trying to destroy the other guy's industrial mobilisation base. Well, Iraq practically did not have an industrial mobilisation base to speak of. Certainly they were concerned about public support here and public support abroad, and they were concerned that it might turn at least some people in Iraq to the Western, Coalition side. I think all those reasons came into play. I would not assume that the situation would necessarily be replicated in another war. I think that under the right circumstances you would be where you were at the end of the Kosovo war, where you are more than happy to destroy your adversary's infrastructure. I would not assume there is a sea change in attitudes.

  Mr Beaver: Nothing to add really.


 
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