Select Committee on Defence Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 960-979)

LIEUTENANT GENERAL JOHN REITH CB CBE, MR IAN LEE AND REAR ADMIRAL CHARLES STYLE CBE

9 JULY 2003

  Q960  Mr Hancock: A moral component; there is more than a moral component?

  Lieutenant General Reith: No, please, let me finish. Therefore, morale within those units was affected, and I accept that, but the reality was slightly different from the perception they had, that was all. But I accept that we have got to do something about that.

  Q961  Mr Cran: Mr Rapson, we have to move on, but just one question before we do. I was astonished when I talked to, and my colleagues did too, some of the units which were in Iraq, to find, and you have referred to it already, I think, this question of traceability. It seems to me quite criminal that if the equipment was there and it was all ready for distribution, what we discovered was that they could not trace some elements of the equipment. What went wrong there because that should not go wrong?

  Rear Admiral Style: It is a major lesson, and I am not going to pretend that that was a good story. We did procure an element of an American system to help us with this but it was not a complete solution and we have to put this right. It is probably not much reassurance to you to know that we had identified that as a priority within the equipment programme area, so-called Logistic C4I, but, in any event, we must do better. I hope I will not sound offensive about this but the only point I would make is that it was an enormous logistic effort, to an extremely tight timescale, that, yes, there were failures but there was a much, much greater percentage of remarkable successes. Someone told me that if you put all the logistics that went to Iraq in a bunch of containers, end to end, it went from Southampton to London, it was a remarkable quantity of material that was shifted, and the vast majority of it got where it was meant to go.

  Q962  Mr Hancock: Including lots of stuff they did not need, like blank ammunition?

  Rear Admiral Style: We attempted to provide what was asked for, and, no doubt, as always in these events when people are doing a remarkably busy thing very quickly, there will be mistakes. I accept entirely that, the tracking point, that is a major lesson and we will attend to it.

  Mr Jones: We are concentrating on clothing, which is very important, but also we have been told that in certain circumstances there was a shortage of ammunition and that people were sent into hostile situations with limited amounts of ammunition, including, I understand, when we were at Odiham, Chinook helicopters, which I know are not attack helicopters, which had a limited number of rounds, I think it was 400.

  Mr Hancock: Instead of 3,000.

  Q963  Mr Jones: Are you aware of this?

  Lieutenant General Reith: I can tell you that we had in theatre 30 days' worth of ammunition, with ten of them at intense rates.

  Q964  Mr Hancock: From day one?

  Lieutenant General Reith: From day one; before we kicked off, that was in theatre.

  Q965  Mr Hancock: Are they telling us not the truth then, General?

  Lieutenant General Reith: I do not know.

  Q966  Mr Hancock: When you get not one, all of these people, that is why personally I found your comments offensive, General, because we listened to these men and women who had been there, and to a man and a woman they were immensely proud of what they had achieved. Then they went on to catalogue the problems as they saw them, as they affected them, and many of them, including people who were working day and night to get aircraft serviced, did not have proper equipment even to clean themselves so they could eat, let alone sleep or go to the toilet properly, for weeks on end. They had no boots. The new equipment arrived, the well-tested trousers. The story was that the guy took them back, they said "What's wrong?" and he said "They ripped." "They're not supposed to," he was told, but they did. "What shall I do with them?" "Put them in this pile here," and there was an enormous pile of recently returned, new trousers, which supposedly has passed all of the stringent tests. So these people were not lying or exaggerating, they knew what was asked of them, and, you are right, Admiral, they did what was expected of them and probably far more than that. Now they are complaining, rightfully, about how they feel they were let down. We were told they did not have ammunition, General, they did not have ammunition. They told us, quite clearly, "People were guarding our helicopters, very close to the front line, and they didn't even have ceramics in their flak jackets." You had a duty of care for these people and these people were on the front line, very close to the enemy, and some of them had as little as five rounds of ammunition. Helicopters were sent with only a 40-second burst, 400 instead of 3,000, and you tell us you had 30 days' supply of ammunition in theatre from day one, then why did not these people have it?

  Lieutenant General Reith: The answer is, I cannot tell you.

  Q967  Mr Hancock: I think we are entitled to know, in Parliament, why that happened, General?

  Lieutenant General Reith: You are giving me anecdotes now of which I was not aware.

  Mr Hancock: These are not anecdotes, General. Some of these are very experienced service personnel who have done 20 years in the Services, some of them had been in four different theatres in the last three years. These were experienced combat soldiers, men and women. They do not have to tell tales, they were telling the truth, because there were too many of them all to be lying.

  Syd Rapson: I am sure it is going to be taken on board, and it has been refuted fairly strongly from the evidence we have received, so there is a difference of opinion. If you can give us anything positive at this moment, if not, we would prefer a follow-up afterwards?

  Mr Cran: Mr Rapson, may I suggest, the Committee really is very concerned and exercised about this, and, I do not know about my colleagues, but I, for one, would like to see a note from the MoD on this whole question of equipment shortages but particularly ammunition and the ones we have mentioned, because this is concerning.

  Q968  Mr Hancock: Air Marshal Burridge had exactly the same opinion as you did, General, and I find that even more of a—

  Lieutenant General Reith: Could I make one comment. I am a soldier with 35 years' and considerable combat experience. I find it inconceivable that a commander at any level will give a soldier just five rounds of ammunition. We have a chain of command, we have experienced people in that chain of command who have a duty of care, you are absolutely right, as I do, and I am surprised by what you have said, and clearly we will follow it up and give you a note.

  Q969  Mr Roy: I hear what you are saying, General, on the duty of care. One anecdote, if you like, which worried me, for example, was when I spoke to an officer in Germany a fortnight ago, and he told me he was in a Manned Vehicle and, as an officer, he took off his body armour and gave it to the man who was going to be first out of the door. I accept that is a duty of care but it is totally and absolutely unnecessary and just not acceptable, whereby an officer in a Manned Vehicle has got to take off his plates because the poor guy who goes out of the door first, he does not know what he is going out to, he does not have any plates. That is coming straight from the horse's mouth, from people in the front line. Can I ask you, specifically on equipment shortages, what shortages were reported to you during the campaign itself from your subordinate commanders?

  Lieutenant General Reith: We were aware of the problem over the plates for the body armour. We knew they were in theatre but it was this asset tracking problem that we had, and there was a conscious decision by commanders on the ground to redistribute to ensure that those that were going to be going out of the armoured vehicles, who clearly were those who were going to be most vulnerable to small arms fire, would be issued with the body armour with the plates. I would be surprised if that changeover occurred while they were going into battle, because, by my understanding, the decision was made some days before to do that redistribution by the commanders on the ground. That I was aware of, and the commanders on the ground were satisfied that, by the redistribution, they had sufficient for the task, working on the principle that those who did not have the plates actually were inside armoured vehicles and were either drivers or gunners.

  Q970  Syd Rapson: We were told by Bill Neely, the ITN embedded journalist with 42 Commando in Basra, that 60,000 rounds of heavy ammunition, Belgian ammunition, which the Royal Marines had, failed at a crucial time. It was in a public session, so it quite surprised us. I do not know if you knew about that, or whether it is something else you can look at, and that is quite a serious problem?

  Lieutenant General Reith: I am not aware of that particular incident.

  Rear Admiral Style: Can I add just one thing. Our perception on this ammunition issue, from the Ministry of Defence end, and I did check this this morning, is exactly as General Reith said. The ammunition we expected to have to deliver, or the DLO expected to have to get out there, got out there, to the very best of our knowledge and information; 36,000 body armour elements definitely got out there, and you can repeat this story in one or two other places. To use your word, there are anecdotes, there are reports, around the bazaars, where those bits and pieces, it seems, did not end up exactly where they were required, and obviously that is a distribution issue, it is a fog of war question. I do not excuse it, but I do say that when operating at high tempo, moving fast, with very complicated and unexpected situations, such difficulties sometimes will arise. I think it is difficult for us to respond to specific reports of specific issues; what I can tell you though is that all these reports are being gathered at the moment and we will analyse them. Sometimes there will be an answer that this was a local breakdown of a truck or a delivery, or something that you would never be able to eradicate entirely, and sometimes I expect we will discover that there was a distribution lesson we really need to learn. All I can assure you is that we are taking that aspect of the `lesson identified' process very seriously.

  Mr Hancock: I would ask you not to treat these as hearsay stories. We were in a room where a young lady, a 19- or 20-year-old RAF regiment airwoman, told us she was wearing a flak jacket which did not have the plates, but what was even more worrying was she did not realise that there had to be plates in there. It was only when she was given another flak jacket that she realised that, for several days, she had been wearing it. She stood up in front of seven Members of Parliament and 40 other members of that establishment and told us that story. That was not a hearsay incident, this was a young lady who had the courage to get up and tell us her own personal situation, and, to be honest with you, I think she was thoroughly cheesed off that she had been let down, she could have been killed.

  Q971  Syd Rapson: That is a genuine story and I witnessed it as well, but you cannot be expected to answer that particular one.

  Lieutenant General Reith: We have taken that point very clearly and we are as concerned as you.

  Mr Hancock: She was not alone.

  Syd Rapson: We are taking this particular issue very seriously. It is the sort of thing that, as a Committee, we need to try to hammer into the MoD and planners for next time, if there is a next time.

  Q972  Mr Crausby: Can I ask some questions about the robustness of the plan. First of all, how much redundancy did you build into your planning, and could you say something about your satisfaction with the training and readiness of the forces that you were allocating?

  Lieutenant General Reith: I can give you a good story on this one. There is no doubt that the quality of the people and the equipment when we were using it was outstanding. Most of the people, particularly in 7 Brigade, had been through BATUS[1] this last year, they were all at collective level five, which means that they were at the highest standard of training, and that was why they were selected to go on the operation. Similarly, with the Commando Brigade and 16 Air Assault Brigade, because they are lead elements of the JRRF, they were also at that very high level of training all the time. They were extremely effective on the ground, and when the honours and awards come out eventually I think you will see that there was some very, very meritorious action which took place. The equipment states were outstanding, most of the equipment was 90 per cent all of the time, and that is much higher than normally we would expect from that heavy equipment. On the planning side, I would say that I had every confidence in Robin Brimms and his tactical handling. As any good commander, he always maintained an uncommitted reserve and that was available to deal with anything that was unexpected that could have happened. As it was, his plan went extremely well and he made the absolutely perfect, balanced judgment on the moment to enter Basra, so that we had almost no casualties on the civilian side and we were able to take the city without any great damage, and so forth.

  Q973  Mr Crausby: What about reserves. What was your role in the deployment and did it work well?

  Lieutenant General Reith: The reserves are obviously an important part of our order of battle. I think about ten per cent of the force were reserves, the mobilisation went very well and they were fully integrated when they went into battle. They are particularly important, of course, in the medical areas and some of the logistic areas, where they do provide a large part of the force. We have got some lessons now, on demobilisation, where we need to streamline it and make it more effective, and we are working on that already.

  Q974  Mr Crausby: Reinforcements; did PJHQ prepare in case more troops were needed, and on what scale?

  Lieutenant General Reith: We were still holding the spearhead lead element available throughout which could have been sent out to reinforce.

  Q975  Mr Crausby: If you had been asked to join the United States on a drive to Baghdad, could the UK deployment have shifted its axis and done that?

  Lieutenant General Reith: It was never in our planning to go to Baghdad, and I had tailored the logistics according to the plan and I had told the Americans we would not be going to Baghdad with them.

  Q976  Mr Crausby: That was not in the plan at all, so it would not have been possible?

  Lieutenant General Reith: It might have been possible we could have stretched things, but it was never in our plan.

  Q977  Mr Hancock: Did they ask you?

  Lieutenant General Reith: They did not ask us, because we said that we had a specific area we would go within.

  Mr Hancock: I was wondering whether you were asked, and that was your response.

  Q978  Mr Jones: Just about the campaign itself, General, once the campaign started, how closely involved were you yourself, and contact in terms of individual components of the campaign, how did it work day to day, in practice?

  Lieutenant General Reith: I was involved very closely, and personally I was doing probably a 16-hour, 17-hour day for the whole period. We had the ability in my Headquarters, through the connectivity, to see where the forces were on the ground, using a thing called Blue Force Tracker, so I could see the deployment of our sub-units on the ground. Which meant I was able to keep a lot of pressure off Robin Brimms, in particular, because we could give the briefing, and everything, in to the MoD direct without having to ask him to give us the information. So this was very much a step forward, in terms of management of information. I had the operational command, and therefore we had agreed a plan with limited tasks; to do anything more or take it further, it had to be referred back to me. I had certain delegated authority from the Secretary of State to do further things, but any things beyond those I would have had to refer, as I did on one occasion, to the Secretary of State to get authority to do more. So it worked in that way. Brian Burridge was my man, alongside Centcom, who was doing obviously the media piece but the local linkage in the Centcom to ensure that what was happening was what we had agreed, and he was holding what is called the famous `red card', so that if something was happening with which we did not agree he could say, "No, we don't accept this."

  Q979  Syd Rapson: Thank you very much. Can I thank you for a very spirited performance this afternoon. Whatever we ask questions on, we are immensely proud of what the troops did and all the back-up staff, the planners, the civilian staff as well, and our intention is to raise questions where we think there can be lessons learned to make things better for the future. Thank you very much for your evidence.

  Lieutenant General Reith: Mr Rapson, I am most grateful for that, thank you, and I promise we are not complacent and that we are learning the lessons.

  Syd Rapson: Thank you.





1   Note from Witness: British Army Training Unit, Suffield, Canada Back


 
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