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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