Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1160-1175)
LIEUTENANT GENERAL
ANTHONY PALMER
CBE, BRIGADIER THE
DUKE OF
WESTMINSTER KG OBE TD DL, BRIGADIER
ANDREW FARQUHAR
CBE, AIR COMMODORE
DAVID CASE
AND CAPTAIN
CHRIS MASSIE-TAYLOR
OBE
22 OCTOBER 2003
Q1160 Mike Gapes: Can I ask some
questions about the future organisation of the reserves? Brigadier
Farquhar referred to formed sub units, that was the expression,
what is the rationale for keeping the TA as it is organised at
present in an era where we have moved to expeditionary forces
and changed the way that we work? Is there not an argument that
it needs a fundamental rethink? Is the TA to provide individuals
or is it to provide units or sub units?
Lieutenant General Palmer: I think
the initial contention that we have now moved into an expeditionary
age and we should be looking to reorganise the TA is not one that
I subscribe to because that is exactly the basis of what the SDR
looked at and that is why it changed because again it was expeditionary
operations and rather than the TA being large and never used it
was going to become smaller, more effective and used all of the
time. That has proved to be the case not just in Iraq but in a
number of other smaller operations that we have conducted, Afghanistan,
Sierra Leone and Yugoslavia where between 10% and 15% of the force
have been made up of reserves. By and large the structure that
was produced at the SDR has stood the test of time. That does
not mean that we will not be looking at it to see whether or not
it is right for the future. By and large we have got a TA organisation
which reflects the expeditionary nature of operations.
Brigadier Farquhar: Again I support
that. The current structure has worked remarkably well and has
stood the test of operations in Iraq extremely well indeed. We
forever learn and as the Secretary of State has trailed in his
recent lecture and in several comments in the House of Commons
that he has made we are looking at our structures at the moment,
and the reserve is part of that on-going work.
Q1161 Mike Gapes: What size of a
reserve force do we need for a 10% or 15% contribution to all
future deployment?
Lieutenant General Palmer: Insofar
as we have deployed it not just in Iraq but on other operations
it has sustained the force and will continue to do so and we believe
that the structure is just about right.
Q1162 Mike Gapes: The size?
Lieutenant General Palmer: For
the TA roundabout 40,000.
Q1163 Mike Gapes: Do you not think
it needs to be larger than that?
Lieutenant General Palmer: Again
we will keep it under review. By and large 40,000 seems to be
in the right order.
Q1164 Mr Howarth: The Secretary of
State has already said he has made a mistake cutting the number
from 58,000, are you saying the Secretary of State is now wrong?
Lieutenant General Palmer: I have
not discussed it with him recently. All I am saying is so far
40,000 seems to be about right.
Q1165 Mike Gapes: What about the
direction we are going in? So far it is about right, does that
mean we are moving up again rather than down, which was the thinking
in the past?
Lieutenant General Palmer: When
we restructure some bits move up and some bits move down.
Q1166 Mike Gapes: Overall?
Lieutenant General Palmer: I maintain
my view, it is just about at the right level.
Mike Gapes: Okay, we will see.
Q1167 Mr Viggers: I would just like
to follow this, the regular army is about 10,000 short in strength,
the Territorial Army has dropped from 39,200 in March of this
year to 37,300 now, if you look at the ratios of regular forces
to reserve forces in other countries the ratio in Canada is 73
reserves to 100, the ratio in the British Army is about 34 to
100, the ratio in Australia is about two regulars to three reserves,
on the basis of the figures I have just described there was some
concern and in some cases dissatisfaction that arose out of the
recent operation that we are drifting and the situation will get
worse.
Lieutenant General Palmer: I will
ask Brigadier Farquhar to talk about the numbers in the TA, it
is certainly true that on a monthly basis they have gone down
by 100, but they have not gone down any more. The principle has
to be that regular armed forces, full-time armed forces are kept
at no greater strength than is needed for normal peace time operations
and some emergencies. Therefore when you do go on operations,
this is an integral part of the SDR, you are going to need to
call up reserves. Depending how you define the requirement in
terms of the commitments that you are going to take on, the brigade
for war fighting and the brigade for peacekeeping you have to
work out what regular forces you need to do that and cover emergency
small-scale operations. If you are going to go bigger you will
need to have reserves, it is a balance between the regular army
and the reserves, keeping no more regulars than you need to fulfil
your day-to-day duties, accepting you are probably not going to
have a major war on current history more than once in five or
six years.
Q1168 Mr Viggers: If you accept that
the numbers for the Territorial Army are below strength can the
cadets as an important part of recruiting for the reserves and
the regulars do more?
Brigadier The Duke of Westminster:
As a matter of policy I think the cadet organisations in the three
Services are really very strong and it has been a success story
for some years now. However, to overtly recruit or indeed use
the cadet organisation to fill some gaps I am not sure is entirely
what the cadets were set up for. Cadets are really a youth movement,
run by ourselves the Army, the Air Force and the Navy. We are
studying this in the three Services at this particular moment.
Brigadier Farquhar: On the cadets,
we see that as a youth movement which the Army sponsors. Because
of the good experience these members of the country's youth gain
through the cadet movement a lot do join a uniformed Services,
be it the Army, Navy, Air Force or the Police, or whatever. We
see that as a very gratuitous by-product but it is our youth movement
rather than a machine for replacing man power, if I may put it
like that. On to the size of the Territorial Army, clearly size
is one thing but structure is another. This review is going to
look at the structure as well. As we have alluded to it is about
right, there are some lessons that we have learned which we will
put in place in the fullness of time. Lastly on the strength issue,
you mentioned the dramatic drop over recent months, the reason
for that on the bald figures alone is that within the TA figures
we place the university officer training corps and we have about
three and a half thousand members of the officer training corps
and each year a third of those leave, so within that figure of
a dramatic drop of almost 2,000 you are seeing about 1,300 to
1,400 officer cadets who have reached their final year and depart.
As a general trend the manning across the Territorial Army has
stood up remarkably well, it varies month-by-month, it is between
50 and 100 a month that it seems to be adjusted by. That has been
the enduring norm for several years now.
Q1169 Mr Havard: In a similar area,
what are the implications for the method of deployment of reserves
in future missions (formed units as against individual back-fillers)
of the establishment of the 14 Civil Contingency Reaction Forces
in each of the brigade areas?
Lieutenant General Palmer: What
we can do is give you a note on that because we have not specifically
come to talk about that. Clearly in the context of how we restructure
the TA the CCRF are going to be really very important because
this is a new role for the TA.
Q1170 Mr Havard: Can I just press
this, what concerns us is if you had another major deployment
of this nature given you have had the structure could the reserves
provide a similar level of commitment if the 7,000 people
who are involved in this organisation were otherwise committed?
Lieutenant General Palmer: I am
going outside my brief here. The discussions on the CCRF are not
fully developed. I would say in the context of TELIC had we had
an emergency that we would have needed to use the CCRF we could
have done it. In the first stage of TELIC we used very, very little
infantry By and large, and I am not expert on this, this is going
to fall on the infantry to provide, that is not to say in a future
conflict we might need not more infantry than we used this time.
The structure has to take into account the planning assumptions
that we should be able to provide a brigade in places like Yugoslavia,
and the Civil Contingency Reserve Force will be factored in.
Brigadier Farquhar: All I would
say is that we are very conscious that we have a home and an away
dimension to our reserve operations. Whilst we are very keen to
Services the away operations as necessary, we have an eye on the
home operations as well. As the General has alluded to, throughout
TELIC we were watching this emerging capability we have called
CCRFs and making sure that we had balance there. We believe because
we are generating 14 of these groups of 500 individuals we can
maintain that until we get a mobilisation requirement that is
beyond the scope of that which we have just seen in Iraq.
Q1171 Mr Havard: Given the constraints
of time and this balance perhaps you can give us some more information
in writing?
Lieutenant General Palmer: Remember
of course that we did have, and I cannot remember the exact figure,
up to 16,000 mainly infantry on the firemen's strike standing
by while we were in Iraq, which gives me some confidence that
the structure that we have in the SDR is able to cope with that
sort of TELIC work and would be able to cope. Even if there was
a firemen's strike we could have used the forces that were there
because if there was a national emergency such as envisaged under
CCRF the firemen's strike would have gone by the board, so we
could have done it.
Q1172 Mr Jones: Finally, gentlemen,
there appears to have been real pressure between employers and
employees in terms of TELIC would you think that was unique to
circumstances surrounding TELIC and what are your views in terms
of retention and recruitment of the people post TELIC, is it getting
more difficult? How many other people have left post TELIC?
Lieutenant General Palmer: This
is an extremely good point and one that we are looking at. It
is quite clear that in future we are going to have to do more
and better with employers by putting various processes in place
to do that. This business of better communication with employers
is absolutely at the heart of our ability to sustain our reserves
and get employers' support for future deployments. It is a very,
very key lesson and we ignore it at our peril because at the end
of the day we rely on the reservists who volunteer and on their
employers to make them available. We do need their goodwill and
it is something that we have to work a lot harder at. A lot of
employers did not realise some of their people joined the reserves.
Q1173 Mr Jones: Is it going to be
difficult to recruit people to the reserves? Traditionally the
TA was seen as a weekend hobby, you were not going to put yourself
in real danger, quite clearly now the reserve forces are used
in this country and there is more of a chance you are going to
be put on operations, do you think that is going to put people
off, realising they may not only be signing up for a nice occasional
weekend but occasionally put their lives in danger?
Lieutenant General Palmer: What
is important is that those people who join the reserves realise
and understand they are very likely to be deployed and their employers
have to understand that as well. We have a real responsibility
to make employers aware that this is going to happen and to communicate
much better, frankly, than we did in the last operation when this
was all relatively new and neither employers or reserves realised
the commitment they made when they joined the reserves.
Brigadier The Duke of Westminster:
If I can just say one thing on employers, we have heard a lot
about some of the difficulties we have had with employers but
I have to say that the majority of our employers have been tremendously
supportive. We have had a lot of employers who have been topping
up the pay of their employees while they have served overseas,
and all sorts of examples of really very good practice indeed.
I would like to stress that to the Committee lest you are left
with the illusion that our relationship with employers is not
that good, they are very good. We have had some tremendous, supportive
employers and we could not have managed the operation unless we
had.
Air Commodore Case: Our experience
in the Royal Air Force is actually that although there has been
a lack of understanding once we have been in communication the
employers have been very supportive. What we have tried to do
is build the three-way relation between the Department, reservists
and the employer. As far as recruitment and retention is concerned
our understanding at present is that there is no discernible outflow
but it is early days yet, particularly as the end of the normal
bounty payment year does not take place until the end of March
and there is a natural outflow at that stage. Interestingly enough
recruiting interest does seem to have gone up in certain quarters,
it may have an adverse effect to some who have been turned off
the idea but it has certainly had the other effect for other people.
Brigadier Farquhar: I support
David's view that at the moment we do not see a mass exodus at
all. Indeed, between 9% and 10% of individuals returning from
mobilised Services have indicated an interest in joining the regular
forces. Time will tell. The ethos now with reserve forces is that
they will be used in a more meaningful way and currently that
does not seem to be changing their mind about becoming a reservist.
Q1174 Mr Howarth: Gentlemen, I do
hope that you give every encouragement to the employers of two
particular reservists, Desmond Swayne and Surgeon Commander Andrew
Murrison whose employers are their respective constituents. I
hope that you congratulate their constituents in taking great
admiration in the work their Members of Parliament are doing as
full-time reservists out in Iraq.
Lieutenant General Palmer: It
would be a pleasure.
Q1175 Mr Howarth: Two employees of
the House are taking part in operations in Iraq.
Mr Crausby: Can I say thank you very
much, it was a little rushed, we are extremely grateful.
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