UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 57-vii
House of COMMONS
MINUTES OF EVIDENCE
TAKEN BEFORE
DEFENCE COMMITTEE
LESSONS OF IRAQ
Wednesday 21 January 2004
LT GENERAL ANTHONY PALMER CBE, GROUP CAPTAIN BARBARA COOPER CBE, GROUP CAPTAIN NIGEL BEET and COLONEL ANDREW COWLING OBE
Evidence heard in Public Questions 2089 - 2217
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
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Oral Evidence
Taken before the Defence Committee
on Wednesday 21 January 2004
Members present
Mr Bruce George, in the Chair
Mr Crispin Blunt
Mr James Cran
Mike Gapes
Mr Mike Hancock
Mr Dai Havard
Mr Frank Roy
Rachel Squire
Mr Peter Viggers
________________
Witnesses: Lt General Anthony Palmer CBE, Deputy Chief of Defence Staff (Personnel), Group Captain Barbara Cooper CBE, Deputy Director, Service Personnel Policy Operations and Manning, Group Captain Nigel Beet, Deputy Assistant Chief of Staff, J1 (Personnel and Admin), Permanent Joint Headquarters, and Colonel Andrew Cowling OBE, Deputy Chief of Staff, 1(UK) Armed Division, examined.
Q2089 Chairman: Thank you very much for coming. The purpose of this session is to see how the MoD plan for the needs of its personnel taking part in Op Telic, and how in practice these needs were met or not, and how this affected personnel and their families and, thirdly, how personnel policy more generally has been affected by Telic. The first question is not meant to be critical of you but you were back home, I understand, and away from the military action. How did you ensure that the picture that you were receiving from theatre was accurate and not being bowdlerised on its way up the chain of command?
Lt General Palmer: Thank you, Mr Chairman. Would it be acceptable to introduce the team, because we have got somebody here from the MoD and from PJHQ but also who was responsible on the ground, so we have tried to cover all the areas so that we can give you comprehensive answers to the questions you have.
Q2090 Chairman: We know who you are but it would be helpful to do that.
Colonel Cowling: I am the Deputy Chief of Staff of the 1 (UK) Armed Division, and I have been in that post since Ex SAIF SAREEA in 2002 through to date. I am responsible within that division for personnel and logistic issues.
Group Captain Cooper: I am Deputy Director of Service Personnel Policy, responsible particularly for operations and manning, and was responsible for the United Kingdom prisoner of war information bureau during Operation Telic
Group Captain Beet: I am the Deputy Assistant Chief of Staff J1 at PJHQ which means my responsibilities cover personnel and administration. I put together the personnel and administration annexe in the Chief Joint Operations Directive to National Contingent Commander, and produced operational level guidance to the component to Command Headquarters Deployed.
Lt General Palmer: So really, in answer to the question, Group Captain Cooper and I are policy; Nigel Beet represents the deliverer of the capability, and Andrew Cowling represents the person on the spot who was taking delivery and discharging the responsibility. How did I keep in touch and how did we keep the thing moving in the right direction? For a start I sat every day on the Chiefs of Staff committee, so I was in touch with reports that were coming from theatre and any needs that arose from the operation, either from the Commander personally or from the PJHQ, who were linked into the Chiefs of Staff session, as you know, by video were able to be picked up by me as overall responsible person for policy, but in the war I became slightly more than just responsible for policy and was responsible for making sure that the Chiefs were briefed on the personnel issues that were extant at the time. Secondly, my staff, and indeed myself, had a very close relationship with PJHQ and the two people who basically talked most often, hourly, are sitting on my left here, and the PJHQ had a direct line to 1 Armed Division in theatre, so I think we pretty well comprehensively covered all the personnel issues and we did our best to meet the needs of our service people as they arose.
Q2091 Chairman: Can you give us some idea then, despite your positions, of the different ways in which information was fed to you? Did you telephone the theatre? Were you working your way down the units? What were they sending up so that at the end of the day you felt you really had a handle on the issues?
Lt General Palmer: If we start from the divisional end, Colonel Cowling can explain how he got his information. He, if he needed to, either dealt with it in theatre or passed it up to PJHQ and they either dealt with it or, if they could not deal with it because it was a big policy issue, they passed it up to the MoD.
Colonel Cowling: Just to make my position clear, I commanded the HQ Divisional Support Group and I was in my logistic headquarters as distinct from main headquarters. I received regular daily reports from all of my units and consolidated that information and passed it up to the chain of command, and I did this by secure voice and e-mail when strategic communications were available to me, and colleagues of mine also did it by VTC with the various headquarters.
Group Captain Beet: We were on the receiving end of those video teleconferencing links at PJHQ which not only linked us with HQ 1Div but the Maritime Component HQ, the Air Component HQ, and the National Contingent HQ. As has been said, telephones were used regularly and when it was appropriate people went on staff visits to theatre to see for themselves, and regular use of e-mail.
Group Captain Cooper: If I may add, certainly Nigel and I, as the General has said, were in regular contact with each other but where there were issues of policy that needed to be addressed quickly, we would very quickly organise a quick working group in person to sort out issues, agree a policy and work from there, and that worked very well.
Q2092 Chairman: So you all felt you had a real handle on what was happening in Iraq?
Lt General Palmer: Yes.
Q2093 Chairman: Secondly, Group Captain Beet, what personnel issues reached you in Northwood from theatre, and what resources were you instrumental in arguing for?
Group Captain Beet: Every manner of personnel issue came to PJHQ in some form or other, like requests for additional manpower, requests for delivery of additional aspects of the operational welfare package or disciplinary issues whether it was a question of starting an investigation through the SIB, or through other similar bodies.
Q2094 Chairman: Did anyone do any filtering before it came to you?
Group Captain Beet: We could get it directly but, inevitably, the way PJHQ is structured is it is the operations division, the J3 division, which is the cornerstone, and it is the Middle East operations team desk that we work to, so basically there would be something along those lines and you would, of course, be getting direction from the Chief of Joint Operations or his staff.
Q2095 Chairman: When the communication came to you, what would you have to do to any request or document?
Group Captain Beet: If it was a personnel request, for instance, where we needed additional manpower or personnel for a particular unit, that inevitably would be dealt with by HQ Lands and they would invariably have visibility of the same assessment report, the same e-mail, but ordinarily what we would do is discuss it with the people within PJHQ and if we thought there was definitely merit and support for the case coming up from 1Div, for instance, we would then engage with the defence augmentation cell and resource the manpower accordingly.
Q2096 Chairman: Colonel Cowling, what personnel issues were most regularly reported to you as Deputy Chief of Staff on the ground, and how did you assess the seriousness of these issues?
Colonel Cowling: I have to say that in a normal day there would have been many, many issues ranging from concerns outside perhaps the interests of this particular meeting, namely, equipment through to personnel issues that perhaps involved casualties and/or domestic crises and the like, so I have to say the spectrum you have asked me to explain is just so broad. I dealt with those on a daily basis. On the second part to your question, I took the advice of my staff, looked at the severity of those various issues, would have related them to the operational intent, the risk of life and a number of other factors at the time as advised by the staff and then, as you say, I would have prioritised that request back normally to PJHQ.
Q2097 Chairman: Can you give us a few more examples of the kinds of things that came up the chain for you to take action on?
Colonel Cowling: Inevitably the well-known issue of shortages in various areas, certain pinchpoints of equipment which range from the well-known boots to desert combats issue, but also welfare issues that might have covered concerns about family back in the United Kingdom or Germany, or concerns over feeding, air conditioning and the like. I could go on for a very long time with a very long list I am afraid, but that is what I did every single day. That is what I do.
Q2098 Mr Viggers: My experience is that the Armed Forces performed magnificently but the start point was that they were undermanned generally, they were seriously undermanned in certain specialties, their tour intervals had been too short giving them less time with their families than they would wish, they were facing the Fresco operation (firefighting) as well, and there was a significant number medically down-graded. So how has undermanning in the forces and all the issues I have mentioned affected the pressures the personnel have been under, and how do you seek to manage and mitigate these pressures?
Lt General Palmer: Very fair question. The force we put together was self-evidently sufficient to do the job. That does not mean to say there were not gaps we had to deal with at the time in some of the specialities you mentioned, and we did that either by using augmentation, taking people from other units to fill those slots, or we used the Territorial Army who are there exactly for that purpose, and I think the fact is that the result was achieved very quickly. As far as stretch is concerned, it is something that as the head of personnel I am always very concerned with, and there was a genuine concern to reduce the numbers of people deployed in Iraq as quickly as possible and, indeed, the figures have come down now. I think at the most they were 46,000 or 47,000 and they are down to 10,000 already, which is evidence that we addressed the problem of stretch very quickly once the major conflict was finished and which moved on to the next phase of, if you like, nation building. As far as tour intervals are concerned, it is fair to say that in the Army they are still a significant concern: we use various guidelines to try and make sure that the commitments are in line with our ability to meet them and one of those, as I am sure you are aware, is that units doing a six month tour should basically have 24 months to recover thereafter. That is, of course, a guideline and everybody, certainly in the Armed Forces, accepts that when an exceptional operation occurs then guidelines tend to go by the board, but the key point is to return to those guidelines as quickly as possible. I have to say we are not there yet by some distance, but the level of commitments, as I have said, has come right down: the numbers in Iraq are considerably reduced, and I personally have a responsibility to make sure the Chiefs, when considering both current and future deployments, are fully aware of what the personnel implications of those deployments are in terms of the strain that we are putting on our service people and, of course, their families, who do find the amount of separation difficult but who have along with the forces themselves coped pretty magnificently. But we are not in any way complacent and, as I said, we are looking to reduce the levels of commitment which are high at the moment.
Q2099 Mr Viggers: But you have been way off the 24 month guideline for some time, have you not, and Iraq must have made it worse?
Lt General Palmer: As I said, it certainly did. I am not exactly sure what the tour interval was immediately before Iraq - it was not 24 months but it was something a lot closer to it than it became when we went to Iraq, when it really did go down. I think the lowest it went down to was eight but that also disguises the other point you have made that specialists who are most in demand are under more pressure still and it is a continuing concern, but we are there to go on operations. We had to put together the force that was required to do the job and do it quickly, which self-evidently was done, and everybody from ministers downwards was very concerned to get recuperation quickly back as near normal as we possibly can.
Q2100 Mr Viggers: Do you monitor the 24-month guideline, not just arithmetically but also in terms of domestic and operational issues? Do you watch the troops, monitor them and try to keep a finger on their policies?
Lt General Palmer: We definitely do. For the Army, as far as units are concerned, we know exactly which unit has got what tour interval. There is no problem with that. That disguises two aspects: firstly, there are certain specialist trades who act below unit level, very small numbers of them, and who, if you are not careful, do suffer the effects of stretch more than the others and the amount of separation that individuals experience. So my view is that we need to be much cleverer about addressing the issue of individual separation. It is all very well to do it at unit level but it is the individual who is really important here, and the Army have recently introduced about six months ago a separate service recording system. The Navy and the Air Force have had one for some time so I can tell you that as far as the Navy is concerned they are pretty well fully recuperated; the Royal Air Force have some difficulties in certain trades, and the Army are still experiencing difficulty with both units and certain specialist trades.
Q2101 Mr Viggers: I know from my own constituency experience that defence medical services are overstretched and tend to get deployed more frequently than is desirable, but I do not understand why 26 Regiment Royal Artillery, for instance, were deployed to Iraq in March-April as part of 7 Armoured Brigade but then were back there again as part of 20 Armoured Brigade. Can you account for that specifically?
Lt General Palmer: No, but, as I think I have already acknowledged, there is a significant number of operations that are going on which all have to be manned, and the ministers and the Chiefs are very concerned at the level of commitment which is why we are consistently trying to reduce it and are having quite a lot of success, but there are units who are back in Iraq now who fought in the original conflict and there are units now deployed in Northern Ireland who were in Iraq and, as I have said, there is a concern on the level of commitment, but we are trying to reduce it and it is something that is taken extremely seriously at the highest level.
Q2102 Mr Viggers: Including helicopter crews where the MoD's own Flight Safety magazine refers to impact of tight manning schedules and fatigue? Are you looking at that area?
Lt General Palmer: I can certainly look into that specific area but I am sure, if it concerns safety, there will be some very close attention being paid to that.
Q2103 Mr Viggers: From your remarks we can therefore assume, can we, that much more thought has been given to recycling of personnel through overseas postings?
Lt General Palmer: I think you can deduce that there has always been a concern to make sure that the force structure matches the commitment and that, since the beginning of the operation last year, that has been exacerbated. Everybody is very well aware of it, I am keeping my finger very much on the pulse, and I am making ministers and the Chiefs aware of the impact on personnel of continuing levels of high commitment. Having said that, the other measurements that we use other than just looking at separated service and tour interval are on retention and recruitment, and in that regard I can report that retention - and I am talking about 2003 rather than 2004 - was significantly better last year than the year before. The outflow of trained strength was significantly better by some 5 per cent, and although we are not meeting the recruiting numbers we did last year because last year was a particularly bumper year, we have no cause for concern on the level of recruitment at the moment. These are very important indicators particularly as to retention and as to how the service people regard the level of commitment. That is why a lot of the younger ones join the Armed Forces, they like doing those operations, but there has to be a balance struck between those people and the more experienced, the older ones with families, who find the levels of separation much more difficult. I am in no way complacent about it, but it is a situation that we are managing.
Mr Viggers: I think the Committee would be reassured if it felt there was a greater interest and concern about the sequence of overseas postings
Q2104 Mr Roy: A recent National Audit Office report highlighted shortfalls in undermanning and medical specialisation and, indeed, it also speaks about additional shortfalls in signals, communications, maintenance, technicians, engineers, chiefs and so on. Did Op Telic exacerbate that undermanning in the specialisations?
Lt General Palmer: Not insofar as we had greater shortages afterwards than we have now because, as I say, recruiting and retention have held up incredibly well, but it was an issue for us that we were undermanned in these specialist traits.
Q2105 Mr Roy: You say that recruitment has kept up very well but you also said a few minutes ago it was more than last year.
Lt General Palmer: The year 2002 ending April 2003 was a bumper year; we have never recruited so well. The year starting 2003 and going on to April 2004 which has not yet finished has not been such a bumper year but it looks though we will be round about the targets set at the beginning of the year, so in that regard it is a positive. It is not so good as it was the year before, but it is better than it was the year before that. We are not concerned about the level of recruiting at the moment but we are not complacent. To answer your specific question, on those key specialist skills that we require for all operations, and they are people who tend to get the most over commitment, there is lots we are trying to do about this which range from financial retention incentives to transfer bounties from people from other, better manned calls transferring to the less well manned ones, assuming they have the skills, to rejoining bounties trying to get in contact with a chef or mechanic or signaller - whichever trade - in order to try and encourage them to come back to the services, and we are having some success, but if you have a significant deficit --
Q2106 Mr Roy: Any failures?
Lt General Palmer: I was just going on to say that when you get into a situation, as we did, where you have shortfalls in specialisms, it is very difficult overnight to make up that shortfall, not least because the skills like mechanics, engineers or whatever take a lot of training, so there is a two-year training requirement for these people which is quite difficult which is why we are trying to concentrate on rejoining bounties and getting people transferred who perhaps need less training so we can make up the difference quicker.
Q2107 Mr Roy: I understand. What about air crew? Where are we on that?
Group Captain Beet: For Op Telic, the operation itself, there was no shortage of air crew. In terms of today and the shortage of pilots and navigators, in some areas there is a shortage.
Lt General Palmer: There is but the point is that there is a major financial retention incentive measure which we put in place last year with the full agreement of the Armed Forces Pay Review Body to address the shortage of air crew, and that has significantly increased the number of pilots and navigators who are staying in as opposed to who might otherwise have left.
Q2108 Mr Roy: So staying on that subject of last year, and I welcome the moves you are making now post Op Telic, everyone on the ground knew what was going to happen last year, so could you tell us what measures you took before Op Telic to look towards limiting loss of personnel?
Lt General Palmer: The measures I am talking about were all before Telic, or even the thought we might be going on a major operation in Iraq, so this has been going on since the day when it was appreciated that there was going to be a significant shortfall in some of these numbers, particularly on the air crew side, which is why we put the FRIs in place well before Op Telic, and those were geared to retention.
Q2109 Mr Roy: So is there any difference between what you did before, and what you did after? Has anything been learned that you did not realise was going to happen, or whatever?
Lt General Palmer: No. Air crew recruiting and training takes a long time therefore the emphasis, I think rightly, was put on retention, ie stopping people leaving. Now a lot of this was associated with the airline industry expanding and then contracting so it is quite difficult to put your finger on exactly what makes people leave and what makes people stay, but certainly the significant amounts of extra money we gave to air crew made a big difference, and I can give you the exact figures on that.
Q2110 Mr Roy: I would have thought that Op Telic must have changed people's minds, surely. For example, we have had letters from people in medical specialisations who were fine with what they were doing, who went to Op Telic but whose minds were totally changed when they came back, and they had many negative statements to make about the way they were treated in Op Telic and, as a consequence of Op Telic, they have now decided to leave. Surely, therefore, you are not going to tell me there was no difference and no need for a difference before and after? There must have been a change.
Lt General Palmer: I do not accept for one minute, and I have given you the figures, that Op Telic has led to a lot of people leaving the Armed Forces. I am not going to sit here and say that some people have not decided to leave as a result - that would be plainly stupid; what I am saying to you is that the manning situation is getting better, retention is significantly better than last year, recruiting is maybe not as good but it is all right, and the fact is that a lot of people from the Territorial Army, some 10 per cent, have opted to join the regulars as a result of their experience on Op Telic. Of course some people will leave, and for a variety of reasons. For instance, they may leave because they have joined the forces for operations, they may feel they have done their operation and now want to move on somewhere else, but what I am telling you is that our monitoring of the manning figures post Telic show that there is not a significant reduction in people; furthermore, that retention is holding up very well. I am not going to say that in two or three months' time we will not get a few more people leaving - I do not know whether we will or not. All I am saying is we are making every effort to get back to normality in terms of recuperation so that we do not lose good people who might otherwise feel the pressure of the job.
Q2111 Mr Roy: You said earlier that you were in no way complacent about family separation. We all know that excessive levels of separation for families can be hugely demoralising, and everyone would agree with that. Could you tell me what alleviating measures you are trying to bring in place to tackle that problem?
Lt General Palmer: For the families particularly?
Q2112 Mr Roy: For both.
Lt General Palmer: The first is that we are very significantly reducing the level of commitment. To give you a figure, 62 per cent of the Army was committed at the maximum commitment level - historically we have never been higher - but that level of commitment is now down to about 30 per cent, so we have practically halved it and have been making sure people took their leave when they returned from Telic and had maximum opportunity to have a more normal life - and by that I mean more stability and more predictability. Having said all that the levels of commitment are still high and I cannot disguise that, but Group Captain Cooper might like to say a word about families because families are such an important part of our consideration and have been throughout, particularly through Op Telic and now, and I think we have done quite a lot to try and alleviate some of the concerns they have about separation.
Group Captain Cooper: Thank you. There are two aspects to this, and this partially answers your question about what we do for the troops in the field which I invite Nigel to give more detail about. Since we have started doing what we would call expeditionary operations, and I am sure you are familiar with that, we very much recognised the need to have a far more coherent welfare package to give to everybody on operations, long-term exercises and so forth. Hence the birth of the operational welfare package. As we know, it is well-motivated troops who win wars, and the welfare package is very much an element of that. There are four key elements to it, and communication need is probably one of the most important ones where we provide twenty minutes of free telephone calls per week, internet access, the bluey system - and we now have electronic blueys which are electronic postcards - and all of those are a form of keeping in touch with families which is very important and we have had immensely good feedback from that. So that is the first and most important element of it. There are also relaxation elements of it, and leisure needs, television, SSVC, radio, gymnasium equipment, DVDs, libraries, newspapers - all those sorts of things. Also there are the families' needs. It has been a longheld ambition of ours to do something similar to the operational welfare package for families. Over the years it became rather a large elephant because there was so much we wanted to do and it was difficult to progress it, and as Telic came to fruition we realised we needed to do something very quickly and the families element of the operational welfare package is now that, for every person on operations who qualifies for the operational welfare package, the sum of one pound per week will be paid to the unit commander of that person so that, at the end of quite a short period, there will be a pile of money that will help enhance primarily communication aspects - to buy more computers for the hives so that families can keep in touch with their loved ones overseas; to have coffee mornings; to have meetings, open days - all those sorts of things. Again, that has been very well received, and it sent exactly the right message that we were concerned about the welfare of families and about keeping in touch with them.
Q2113 Mr Roy: Did you ask the families what they wanted? This did not just come downward?
Group Captain Cooper: We did. We did quite a lot of research before Operation Telic into what people wanted. Certainly communication was high on their list and came up time and time again during our review of the operational welfare package. It is clear communications are the most important element of it. While in the big scheme of things we looked at a range of issues that families would really like, we simply were not able to do that within the timescale. This was deemed to be the single most important item that we could do in the timescale and it seems to have hit the nail on the head.
Lt General Palmer: Adding to that, I pay tribute to the unit families' officers who were left back in the United Kingdom looking after the families when the unit had deployed overseas. They put immense effort, almost 24 hours 7 days a week, weekends included, to look after the families and the children and to address the problems of the wives that would otherwise have been addressed by the husband or the wife who was serving overseas. I visited them and the wives to find out exactly whether or not they felt they were being well looked after, and all of them paid fulsome tribute to these individuals, normally at Captain level rank, who used incredible imagination and initiative to make sure the needs of the families and the children were taken care of.
Q2114 Mr Roy: So no one was resting on their laurels?
Lt General Palmer: No, indeed not, and we are involving families in our post tour evaluation of what was done in order to try and make it better for the future. We do our best.
Q2115 Chairman: This is a googly for which I apologise. Do you detect any difference in welfare packages, care and family orientation between the traditional regimental structure and their welfare package at county regiment, and those units in the Royal Navy, Army or Air Force which are more transient and do not have any sense of commitment to an historical unit?
Lt General Palmer: I know exactly what you mean and it is a googly! I cannot give you an answer because I know that all units do it although it is clear that some units do it better than others. The areas I would like to concentrate on for the future, the weak points, are probably the much smaller units and the reserves. One of the areas I was most concerned about was to make sure the families of the reserves who recruit locally who do not have that great support structure round them were getting the same degree of attention as the regulars, because they certainly were not in all cases. Although we made great efforts to involve them it simply was not as easy because the communication is difficult.
Chairman: We may be discussing this issue later on in another inquiry, General.
Q2116 Mr Cran: General, on the subject of training, you will know as well as I do that in the MoD's own documents, Operations in Iraq: Lessons for the Future, the subject of training was mentioned and said to be of a very high order. That would reflect what the Committee sees as it goes around various establishments in the United Kingdom - our Armed Forces are exceedingly well trained. The danger, however, is simply that, with the pace and the number of operations the UK is engaging upon, the effect on training might be very adverse indeed. Could you canter over your view of whether the Committee's fears are justified or not?
Lt General Palmer: The first and probably most obvious point is that no soldier or sailor would be sent on operation if the Commander felt he had not got adequate training, so I take that absolutely as read. Having said that, of course, one of the implications of not achieving a reasonable tour interval, 24 months, is that the unit and the collective training that is done in that period does not get done, so there is going to be an impact and that impact is felt more at the higher end of the operational spectrum, armoured operations, than at the lower end. The answer to the question, therefore, is that you are either doing commitments in a particular role or you are training for another role - you cannot do them both at the same time. So there is no doubt that commitment and stretch does have an impact on our ability to do other operations, and it would be foolish of me to deny that. That is why ministers and the chiefs are so concerned to reduce the level of commitment, as they are currently doing, so we can get back on to a cycle of training which will allow us to meet our commitments for the future.
Q2117 Mr Cran: I understand the words but let's just take an example. If the United Kingdom, let's say in the next six months, was called upon to enter into yet another commitment, a fairly significant one that may not be the size of Op Telic but another peace-keeping commitment, could the United Kingdom's Armed Forces undertake that from the point of view of providing properly trained soldiers?
Lt General Palmer: Firstly, from the personnel aspect, because I am not the person responsible for the collective training of the forces, that is the job of the commanders --
Q2118 Mr Cran: But you do know about it?
Lt General Palmer: I do but it is the job of the commanders in chief, so my particular field of concern would be the one I mentioned before which is to ensure that whatever that commitment was that we were about to undertake potentially, the chiefs and ministers knew from me personally what the impact was going to be on the people. I can assure you that I have done a lot of that because I am totally involved in the debate about whether or not we should enter a new commitment from the personnel perspective. Others will enter that debate from the training perspective but it is inconceivable that we would send a force we did not consider was trained or properly constituted to undertake an operation. At the moment, from my perspective as a soldier rather than as head of personnel, quite clearly there are operations we can not do at the moment while we are recuperating from Telic.
Q2119 Mr Cran: But, General, you would surely accept, as any reasonable person would, that training is not black and white. It is not a question of "not trained" and "trained": quite often it will be shades of grey in between. Surely you could not say to me or the Committee that every member of the Armed Forces sent into operations is one hundred per cent trained?
Lt General Palmer: I would certainly say to you that no Commander would send an individual or a sub unit into an operation unless he felt they were trained for that operation. What you mean by "one hundred per cent trained" is trained for everything. He would certainly be trained sufficiently to undertake the task that he or she was being asked to undertake.
Q2120 Mr Cran: So from the desk you are sitting at you are telling me that you are not overly concerned at the minute?
Lt General Palmer: No.
Q2121 Mr Cran: Let's take a specific then. The information that the Committee has is that training levels, I think it is called CP4 and 5, have been cancelled. Is that the case or not, because you can see the implications immediately.
Lt General Palmer: Yes, but with respect you are talking to the wrong person. I am not the person --
Q2122 Mr Cran: Is there nobody here who can talk about training?
Lt General Palmer: The responsibility for collective training is with the Commanders in Chief. They are responsible for delivering the forces trained and ready to the PJHQ, who then are responsible for deploying them and then the operation commences on the ground. That was no different in Telic and it will be no different in the future, so that is where the responsibility lies. All I can say, and I think I am a reasonable person, is that if exercises have been cancelled and collective training is not being done then it is inconceivable that those troops missing out on those exercises and that collective training would be committed to an operation that required them to have that training.
Q2123 Mr Cran: I entirely understand that the responsibility lies elsewhere for the training but, dash it all, I would expect the Deputy Chief of the Defence Staff (Personnel) to know a little bit about it too. I would expect all of these people doing it operationally would be coming back to you and saying, "Hey, General, this is what I am doing". I presume they do?
Lt General Palmer: Of course they do but I would say in my defence that personnel covers an enormous area. In fact, you could say everything has an impact on people - of course it does, and I completely understand that. I am responsible for the people policy aspects in all their facets and, as I said, although collective training is not my responsibility, I am senior enough and take part in Chiefs of Staff discussions to know that those people who are responsible for training would not dream of committing troops without --
Q2124 Mr Cran: Well, you have said that four times already and I entirely accept that. It is just that we are trying to get below that to make an assessment about the words you are using and what they mean, that is all. So in answer to my specific question about CP levels 4 and 5, how much training at those levels has been cancelled? Are you in a position to tell me?
Lt General Palmer: I am not in a position to tell you how many of those exercises have been cancelled. All I can tell you is that I am concerned to make sure, as I have said earlier, that the pace of life of personnel is reduced and if that means the odd exercise has to be cancelled because otherwise people have not got the breaks they require from operations and they cannot take their leave and have some time with their families, then I would be all in favour of that. If that has implications for whether we can conduct an operation then so be it, but if we do not get the recuperation aspects right, which may mean cancelling the odd exercise, then we will not have Armed Forces to conduct exercises because they would all leave, and I am sure you would understand that.
Q2125 Mr Cran: Colonel Cowling, you are at the sharp end of all this, as I understand it, because you are Deputy Chief of Staff for 1 (UK) Armed Division so you are at the users' end of all of this rather than in the General's position of being a Director of Personnel. Can I ask you, therefore, what your observations on training happen to be? As a practitioner are you worried about the effect that overstretch might have on training?
Colonel Cowling: All I can say is that within 1 Division, which is made up of three brigades of course that comply with the FRC, I have 1 Brigade in Basra at the moment and they were fully trained while I was on Telic 1 in Germany to the requisite standard at the time and they have now deployed. I have got 7 Brigade in its other tasks year, which is focused very much on Bowmanisation and digitisation, and that is its task for the coming year, and finally I have 4 Brigade that will go on Op Telic 5 in due course. It will train in BATUS to Collective Training Standard 3: it will not achieve 4 and 5 because it will have moved on from its FRC war-fighting training to pre Telic training, and that is what it will focus on later on in the year. To answer your question, therefore, if I compared this year to last year - no change.
Q2126 Mr Cran: So again, if I put the same question to you as I put to the General, and the 1(UK) Division was called upon to undertake another exercise in nine months' time, the training aspect of what we are pursuing at the moment would not be a concern to you as an operational --
Colonel Cowling: It would not, with the exception of those forces that are inevitably already committed to Telic that would not be available for it.
Mr Cran: That is reassuring, thank you.
Q2127 Mr Hancock: You said you were a reasonable man, General - and as somebody who supports Portsmouth I would say that is very hard for a Southampton man! - but you also did say on four occasions that you felt that it would be very unusual for an untrained soldier to be sent on an operation like Telic. We were given evidence by an officer who said that there were TA units where some of the TA soldiers who were sent had not even completed one session of full TA camp training, so how come they were there?
Lt General Palmer: We had a two and a half hour session, as you remember, on reserves before Christmas and we went into that point with the Director of Reserve Forces and Cadets. Again, if you can give us the detail of which unit this was we can go into the detail of what training it did or did not receive, but my information is that the TA units were well trained and that certainly the TA I have spoken to - and I have spoken to a number - felt they were well trained, and it was frequently commented on that the difference in standard very quickly became hardly noticeable between the TA. All I am saying is if you can give me chapter and verse of which unit this was I will get back to you with exactly what the training programme was that they went through. In fact, I did this in answer to a question when we did talk about reserves investigating a complaint.
Q2128 Mr Hancock: So when you were being asked about certain units that were being put together, were you satisfied that all the information you were given as head of personnel led you to believe that all of the troops deployed had gone through whatever could have been expected of them in the way of training what they would have to do when they were in a combat situation?
Lt General Palmer: Yes.
Q2129 Mr Hancock: And you were given evidence to support that, that a unit supplying 30 men or women were all properly trained up to the required level so when they were put in harm's way they would be able to do the task that was expected of them?
Lt General Palmer: Yes.
Q2130 Mr Havard: On the question of levels 4 and 5 and 3 and so on, what concerns me is you can say that this higher order of training, as I call it, 4 and 5, if they are not going through that part of it, helps you in terms of people having less separation and gives you more time to do all the other training and so on, but what is important about it is, as I understand it, that this is the very level at which they are getting joint and combined training?
Lt General Palmer: Yes.
Q2131 Mr Havard: And more and more on your pre Op Telic training that is the very element they need if they are going to engage in expeditional warfare in coalition circumstances, so while it may be expedient at one level in terms of the training regime and separation it saves, you may be sacrificing a lot at other levels. You are struggling with that lesson presumably, are you not, and that must be something that is screamingly obvious coming out of the circumstances we have just seen after Telic. What are you doing in order to balance all that up?
Lt General Palmer: As I said, I play a very major part in making sure ministers and chiefs know about what level of commitment I believe is sustainable from a personnel angle, and people understand that if we go on committing our service people endlessly they will all get fed up and leave, so there is no choice here really. You have to get the balance right otherwise you will have a recruiting and, more importantly, a retention problem.
Q2132 Mr Havard: And maybe an operational problem?
Lt General Palmer: An operational problem of course, yes, insofar as there are some things you might not be able to do immediately because the training has been stopped in order to allow people to recuperate, and therefore the decision would have to be taken in terms of how long it would be before that force was considered fit to take part in an operation having completed its level 4 and 5 training. We can do level 4 and 5 training relatively quickly; it is a matter of making available a training area in Canada and getting people together but, as I say, that has to be a balanced decision.
Q2133 Mr Cran: General, lastly, we go around the establishments too and we speak to the troops, and there is a concern that comes up time and time again to us that, because of the number and places of operations, they are simply not getting access to the longer term training programmes they need for promotion and all the rest of it. Now, do not ask me for names because I am not going to give them to you; you must just accept that this is something the Committee is told time and time again. Are you concerned about that?
Lt General Palmer: I do accept that because individuals want different things out of life but out of the Armed Forces in particular, and some of the younger ones want to be doing either operations or training all the time, and they are part of units which have a balance between young ones, slightly older ones, the NCOs, the senior NCOs, etc, and they have different needs, requirements and expectations. It is quite difficult to keep in balance those who want to see their families because they have them and those who are single who have no families or responsibilities and want to be roaring around doing things all the time. It is a balance.
Q2134 Mr Cran: But that is not the proposition I was putting to you. I accept what you say but these are courses which the Armed Forces themselves would like the soldiers to go on but the soldiers cannot go on them because of the situation I have outlined to you - because they have no time and are in operations or whatever. Now, that has to be of concern to you, has it not?
Lt General Palmer: It is of concern --
Q2135 Mr Cran: So what are you going to do about it?
Lt General Palmer: I can tell you what we are doing about it: training courses lead to promotion and promotion leads to more pay and clearly, when people cannot go on their promotion courses, they are very fussed about it. But when you are fighting a war you cannot have people going on courses at the same time and there has to be a balance struck. What we are doing, therefore, and part of the recuperation process is dealing with this specific issue, is trying to recover the ground that was lost for individuals when they were prevented from going on courses because of the war. We cannot suddenly go from a situation where lots of individuals lost their courses to where they have all got them because of vacancies on the courses, etc, but we are gradually getting there. Perhaps Colonel Cowling could talk about this because I was in 1Div about four months ago addressing this very concern with 1 Division, how were we going to make sure people did not miss out, and what we did was to say, "Right, you could get your promotion because you got your pay, but it is then conditional on you completing successfully the course you have been prevented from doing because you have been on the operation".
Q2136 Mr Cran: At some time in the future?
Lt General Palmer: Yes, so you get promoted, get the pay, and then you do the course, and the consequence, if you fail the course, is you have to come down, but at least you will not have been disadvantaged. Now I am not saying that in every case that has happened, but it was one of the solutions we looked at to this problem.
Colonel Cowling: Sir, within the Division the tempo is clearly a concern but we now have a lesser number of troops on operations within the Division and we have looked at all of our training activities and sought to reassure ourselves that we are doing the right number of activities and no more to meet those training standards. We have also given commanding officers many freedoms to ensure that their soldiers get their leave and they are indeed eating into a backlog of lost leave. We anticipate there will be some unfortunate individuals who will still have leave untaken at the end of the year, but we are addressing that and there will be carryover as well. Commanding officers are also putting in place imaginative programmes both for their soldiers and their families to retain their interest and look at those aspects to reinforce retention. When it comes to individual courses that is another concern, but we have sought to free up within the programme time for the commanding officers to send individuals away. In the context of Telic, certainly on Telic 1 there were a lot of individuals who failed to go on their career courses. We are now into Telic 3 moving on to 4 and 5 in due course: the manpower pressures to keep those individuals in theatre are not as they were and I would anticipate for my next brigade to deploy, and indeed the one there, that commanding officers through the Brigade Commander are releasing individuals to go on those courses. Some are harder than others. For an individual to go away on a driver training course, or a qualification it might be three weeks. For some of the platoon sergeants' courses, for example, at Brecon, where there is significant preparation for very lengthy courses which are limited in numbers, it is much harder to programme that all in. I personally would put the responsibility of that at the commanding officers' feet, and I expect him to manage that within those commitments.
Q2137 Mike Gapes: Can I ask you some questions about equipment? It is quite clear that the mass media, including the BBC, have given a great deal of concentration on the issues of equipment shortages but it is not clear to me that there is any difference in the situation today from what it has been in the past. Would you agree that in the past people wrote letters home to their families about shortages or maybe twenty or thirty years later wrote about it in their memoires, but now they are writing anonymously - or perhaps not - to tabloid newspapers, and therefore the stories are appearing in the public domain immediately. Would you agree or not?
Lt General Palmer: Yes. I think the situation has definitely changed. As you say, young people today express their views much more openly than before and I do not necessarily think that is a bad thing. In a lot of ways I think it is a very good thing. Internet chatrooms, and journalists who obviously to a certain extent feed on these stories, do make life much more difficult. The danger for us is that, from particular instances, people come to general conclusions.
Q2138 Mike Gapes: Do you think that the way in which journalists were embedded and involved in the operation, as well as the non-embedded journalists, has played a bigger role in publicising issues, or do you think it is a wider issue than that?
Lt General Palmer: I think it is a wider issue than that.
The Committee suspended from 4.03 pm until 4.13 pm for a division in the House.
Q2139 Mike Gapes: Before the division I was in the middle of a number of questions to do with expectations and equipment shortage and media coverage, and my question was whether the fact that there were embedded journalists and also a larger number of so-called freelance operators in theatre was a factor in the nature of the media coverage that we have had subsequently, as well as before and during the conflict?
Colonel Cowling: I do not know about subsequently but there are a number of types of media. This is not my area of expertise but nevertheless it was clear that we had embedded media within the battle groups, and I would judge that that gave them access to some very good video coverage, but not necessarily a broader perspective. Secondly, there was a similar amount of media in the press information centre who were receiving daily briefings from the staff, and I think they were perhaps better informed but were frustrated by the lack of freedom that they had by being marshalled together in order to get these briefings, so there are two types. There is a third type, too, which is the independent, and sadly it will have been recorded that a number of them died by virtue of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and some of those gave you a picture with different characteristics.
Q2140 Mike Gapes: The General said earlier that he agreed that things have changed in terms of e-mails. There have been suggestions that some tabloid newspapers were paying people money to send e-mails that they had received from people who were serving away from their families or whatever. Have you any evidence of that?
Lt General Palmer: No. I dare say it happens on the odd occasion but generally speaking the embedded journalists I talked to had nothing but praise for the people they were embedded with. The units had become quite close to them so the opportunity for getting information is obviously increased, but the vast majority of them I would say were thoroughly responsible and were trying to do a good job. There are exceptions to that, however, and we have all seen them. I think it is true that some of the press reporting has not been very good and it does cause me concern because it affects sometimes the way that our service people see themselves.
Q2141 Mike Gapes: And that is why we have had all these stories about desert boots and desert clothing and other issues, to a prominence that has not normally been the case?
Lt General Palmer: I agree and it is a cause for concern, not only because a lot of it is inaccurate about individuals not having the kit they should have done - we know that and we have talked about that in another meeting of this Committee - but that generally speaking, and this is what they know because they were part of it, things went pretty well and they have never been, certainly in my day, half as well equipped and the equipment did not work nearly so well as it does today.
Q2142 Mr Blunt: General, that takes us on to this issue of expectations. The Department says in its lessons learned document, "... there is continued pressure from service personnel to expand and improve facilities. Such expectations need to be managed... Particularly in a war-fighting theatre." How do you intend to manage the expectation of service personnel, their families and the media?
Lt General Palmer: If I take the service personnel and their families, firstly one has to be very honest and open with them about what they can expect and the circumstances under which they can expect it, thus we on exercise now, soldiers who are used - and the other services perhaps to a lesser extent - to having mobile telephones and instant communications and so on have to be conditioned to expect the fact that if we go to war they will not be given that facility, and that needs to be practised and that expectation needs to be managed. Similarly, we cannot immediately provide access to the latest football matches, although I would like to take the opportunity of paying great tribute to SSVC and BFPS who have done a fantastic job, but the fact is that war is war, as you know yourself, and it is a very robust environment and some of the creature comforts that you can expect when you are not in that environment need to be taken away but in taking them away you do sometimes create a problem, because if someone is used to using a mobile telephone and has it removed they sometimes can feel aggrieved. So you have to manage that expectation.
Q2143 Mr Blunt: You alluded perhaps to some but are there areas in which you think service personnel are right to expect rather more than they are getting now, and are there other areas where perhaps their expectations are somewhat unreasonable in a war-fighting environment?
Colonel Cowling: If I may, sir, I endorse what the General says in terms of general management of expectation; it has to be through communication, education and training, and practising going without in certain circumstances during the course of the exercises. From what I saw, our soldiers did not have high expectations when it came to OWP, the operational welfare pack, at the beginning of the conflict. They knew they were going war-fighting, they were trained for it and they expected it. They were pleasantly surprised when they got their satellite telephones, when BFPS radio was there and, indeed - and I cannot remember the exact date - they were in a position to watch the first of the Six Nations rugby matches in theatre having only been on the ground a number of weeks. I thought that was outstanding. Where we had some difficulty was post the conflict, and we are moving into the PSO phase. When it came to providing everything that we felt we ought to for those soldiers who had fought so hard, such as better accommodation, air conditioning and so on and so forth, we were working extremely hard to provide that but in truth, in certain areas, as a result of market forces and technical competence we were unable to meet some of their expectations in improving their quality of life immediately after the conflict.
Q2144 Mr Blunt: You are focusing on the operational welfare package, but perhaps you could look at this more widely in terms of expectation about equipment, and their capacity to fight?
Colonel Cowling: In my experience of the whole conflict the equipment was absolutely superb, with the exception of the shortages that are well recorded.
Q2145 Mr Viggers: Are you concerned about the number of soldiers who spent their own money on equipment before or during Operation Telic?
Lt General Palmer: Not really. Soldiers, myself included, have always spent money on personal equipment. Where I would have a real concern is if they were spending money on equipment that should be a standard issue. My view on the issue of equipment now is it is far, far better than it has been for a very long time. But they are individuals and they can spend their money on making themselves more comfortable and doing this or that. All soldiers will do that, and I have done that myself. I do not see it as a big problem or a big issue.
Q2146 Mr Viggers: Have you carried out research as to which items have been bought by soldiers for themselves, and why?
Lt General Palmer: We did some research into the sort of stuff that was being sent into theatre by the families to see whether or not it should be provided in theatre and on the whole the answer was no, they were things that made their lives much better. Wet wipes, for instance. Colonel Cowling was there so he can tell you what the items were that were demanded.
Colonel Cowling: Toiletries, probably, and that is not really the equipment issue you are talking about. I would say that the soldiers wanted reminders of home: they wanted their mail, they wanted toiletries - small things that made their life better. They were sent most of this by their families. They were sent sweet things because our diet was a little bland and that is how it was at the time, but in terms of equipment, as the General said, we are all part of this culture that likes to adapt military equipment once issued and we have our particularly ways and the things we like to have beside us, but at the end of the day I am not aware of any particular equipment shortages and I think the quality of our equipment is as good as any other nation in the world.
Q2147 Mr Viggers: Whilst I accept what you say and, indeed, I share your experience, if a soldier says that the sleeping bag as issued does not really roll up well enough to go into the container and that it is easier to get a commercial one, would that concern you?
Colonel Cowling: It would not concern me. I agree it is a large sleeping bag but it is also an excellent sleeping bag, and you can always go on to the market and buy something smaller.
Q2148 Mr Hancock: I found your answer, General, very similar to what other senior officers have told us but the complete opposite to what people on the ground have told us, and I find it absolutely amazing that you can say it and keep a straight face answering Crispin Blunt about the equipment. We had evidence given to us from one unit - and for your information, General, the unit concerned was the 7th Para Royal Horse Artillery - that they had no oil at all for their rifles. Now, we were told that one of the things you had to do with these rifles was keep them well oiled, but they had no oil at all and many of them ended up taking weapons off Iraqis to use them, and we have a direct quote from one officer who had no bullets for his pistol. "When Major X went forward he had no bullets for his weapon, a 9mm pistol. He tells me the QM offered to take a couple of bullets off the unit doctor and one or two from the other officers so he could have five rounds. In the event he had none" - and you can smile, but this is the complete opposite of what you say. "[He] profited from the misfortune of one of our soldiers who had a traffic accident. He was able to take his SA80A2 rifle off him as well as 75 rounds. The normal [bullet allocation] would have been in the order of 150-125 rounds" - and even that was insufficient. "A day later, the new modified rifle was rendered unserviceable [because of lack of oil] it jammed solid. Major X gave it back and like many of his colleagues got an AK47 off a prisoner. He had plenty of ammunition [for the weapon]." Now, how do you square what you said with a smile on your face, Colonel, with what people doing the fighting told us?
Colonel Cowling: I do not know of those particular incidents and therefore I cannot dispute them. I find what you say quite possible because, if I could just remind you, we deployed a Division at considerable speed and that speed brings with it some inefficiencies, and the inefficiencies, which are well documented as a result of asset visibility failure and our inability to resources within theatre, almost certainly mean that someone within the force was without something, but rest assured that across the Division, when it came to ammunition in the round and oils and lubricants, there was no shortage. Although a number of individuals in a particular unit said he did not have them, I could not drill down and look at this particular issue without going to that Quarter Master and saying, "Now describe to me what were the circumstances that you were in, and what action did you take?", so that I could address the issue.
Q2149 Mr Hancock: How do you answer the question then about another piece of evidence we had from one unit that Division staff had established that, "There were inadequate supplies of special batteries for the equipment needed to detect chemical or biological weapons, and so bad was this shortage that they had planned to send some of their NBC specialists back to the United Kingdom to hunt down commercially the batteries they needed for the potential supplies. A decision was also made to withdraw all equipment from every unit and then redistribute those that had the requisite batteries. In fact, they had a reduced protection for that whole Division". But you say you have no record of any of this. Are you telling me that somebody at divisional level, who reported they did not have the required batteries to protect themselves by having this equipment which sends out the alarm signals if there is a chemical or biological attack, did not have them and it did not get back to you, Colonel? The General in charge of that Division must have been aware of that.
Colonel Cowling: Within that particular area, that of NBC consumables there are a number of shortages, and that is well documented. After the war we redistributed those assets across the Division. When we crossed the start line that redistribution had taken place, and I am content, I am clear, that there were sufficient resources to work those NBCAs at the time we went across the start line.
Q2150 Mr Hancock: Are you aware of this, then, Colonel: "I am aware also that a command decision" - presumably taken by a fairly senior officer" - was taken in theatre not to test the respirators of troops before the conflict. There were not enough spares to replace any failures. Doubtless it was concluded that a failure that could not be rectified might have an effect on morale."
Colonel Cowling: We introduced a testing system for the respirator prior to the conflict. It was used both before and in theatre, and it tested the respirators to a standard higher than that we were accustomed to.
Q2151 Mr Hancock: All of them?
Colonel Cowling: No, it did not test all of them; it was an on-going process. I am not aware of any shortages to make amendments to any respirators.
Q2152 Mr Hancock: I just want you to answer yes or no: were any of you made aware of a command decision taken in theatre not to test the respirators of troops before the conflict because there were not enough spares available to replace any failures?
Colonel Cowling: No.
Lt General Palmer: I certainly was not.
Group Captain Cooper: No.
Q2153 Mr Hancock: Could you check then --
Colonel Cowling: Yes.
Q2154 Mr Hancock: -- to make sure that is a factual statement that that decision was not made at any command level?
Lt General Palmer: We can check but, as I said --
Chairman: Excuse me, I have been very tolerant but those questions are coming later, so if you can pause for a while Mr Gapes is going to explore this later, and we will keep to the questioning that we have agreed beforehand.
Mr Hancock: I was following Mr Viggers' line, Chairman.
Chairman: The impression I had with the initial question was that it was about personal clothing, boots and general accoutrements and not equipment.
Mr Hancock: As the Colonel said, he was not aware of any failures and he said it with a smile on his face.
Chairman: I suspect he was talking about personal hygiene and not equipment, but we will come on to that later. Rachel?
Q2155 Rachel Squire: I want to pick up on the issue again of operational welfare some of which I know Colonel Cowling, the General and Group Captain Cooper have already touched on. Can I firstly pick up on what you said, Group Captain Cooper, about how welcome the telephone calls, the e-mails and this new operational welfare package has been, because certainly that has been very much backed up by what we ourselves have heard from various ranks. Can I ask you about the review that I understand is being conducted at the moment and some of the proposed enhancements under way? Can you say a little bit more about the progress being made in the review of the operational welfare package, and what kind of enhancements are being considered? I am not sure whether, for instance, your mention of the family welfare fund is one of them, so could you say a little bit more?
Group Captain Cooper: Certainly. On the family welfare fund, that extra one pound I mentioned, that is now an integral part of the operational welfare package and will run in perpetuity as long as the operational welfare package exists, so we are very pleased that that has been introduced. The review of the operational welfare package was conducted as a matter of course, not necessarily as a result of Operation Telic, but having Telic as an experience has been extremely useful in seeing where any gaps have been. In the main we are very happy that the constituent parts of the package we offer, as I described to you earlier, are about right to meet the needs of the individuals. When we go to the troops in the field, of course they will always ask for more and we have to look at what is fair and reasonable - whether they can have another twenty minutes' telephone calls because most of them have parents and girlfriends and brothers and sisters and so forth - and we have to draw the line somewhere. The area we are most focusing on is filling the gaps, the most noticeable of which was the early entry forces, those personnel that went to set up the organisation, the logisticians and so forth, who really benefited hardly at all from the OWP to start with, and that is really where we are focusing, perhaps to come up with an early entry pack which can go out in theatre with the individuals so they have a box of whatever - communication, facilities, books, and so forth, everything that I have described - so that the commander at the time can decide when those can be brought out and used. That is really our main focus at the moment.
Group Captain Beet: This is an issue PJHQ has been working on with the frontline commands from when we all got back from Telic with the particular interest of 3 Commando Brigade as well, and it is the communication side which is most interesting because we did get into the development of issuing satellite mobile phones for units which deployed early, for instance the Royal Marines when they went off at the very beginning of January, and we went out to Germany to meet up with Andy's divisional headquarters staff, and we recognise that is a very important area and we are going to press ahead with that. There are operational issues which go with it, that of operational security and mission control, etc, but that is going to be for the Commander to decide. The other step we also took during Telic was on the ratios as mandated by the policy, so that for those troops which were manoeuvre forces who were not going to be in a static location like the Air Force, or an operating base, we got a special dispensation to change the telephone ratio from one phone to fifty troops down to one phone to thirty, because it is the ratios that we are interested in as well.
Group Captain Cooper: And although the operational welfare package as we are discussing here relates to Operation Telic, of course it is applicable around the world, and for all operations of greater than two months' duration and exercises.
Q2156 Rachel Squire: Thank you. You have also touched on my second question which was to ask about the early entry forces and the particular stresses and pressures you are under that you certainly referred to earlier, General. It does seem that you have got measures in place and you are looking at what can be done to compensate troops for the particular demands that are made on them.
Lt General Palmer: Yes.
Group Captain Cooper: Yes.
Q2157 Rachel Squire: Finally, do parcels come under the heading of "operational welfare"?
Group Captain Cooper: They are not specifically part of the operational welfare package, the letters, the e-blueys and all of that, but I believe you are alluding to the packets up to 2 kgs that are currently being sent free of charge?
Q2158 Rachel Squire: Yes.
Group Captain Cooper: That is quite separate to the operational welfare package.
Lt General Palmer: But it is our responsibility.
Q2159 Rachel Squire: And has there been a review of certainly some of the complaints that were publicised about problems with getting parcels out, or getting them delivered?
Group Captain Cooper: I am not aware that there were any problems with delivering. Can you be more specific?
Q2160 Rachel Squire: There was certainly media coverage of families complaining about, I think, both the payment that was being initially asked, the limit on the actual weight, and the fact that through e-mails and telephone calls they were hearing from their husbands and wives that the parcels had not yet got to them.
Lt General Palmer: I think this comes back to expectation management. Two kgs is quite a big parcel, and I think it was very justified and very welcome initially when access to Navy, etc, was far less than it is now but we have to think seriously about the cost of such a measure and whether or not we can afford to go on doing this for free. The other point is we are only doing this for Iraq but what about Bosnia and Afghanistan, and what would be the overall cost related to the cost of introducing an early entry package as part of the OWP? So all of this is being looked at to see what is possible here. The other point about the initial stages is that it did require a lot of extra manpower, as you can imagine, to deal with the increase of packages - again because it was all free - and in some respects putting a constraint on in terms of saying, "Okay, you can send them but it will be at a reduced cost, not be completely free", may be somewhere we might want to go in the future.
Q2161 Rachel Squire: Just out of interest, post Op Telic 1, was the parcels issue an issue that the families raised with you as a priority?
Group Captain Cooper: No, it was not.
Lt General Palmer: No.
Q2162 Mr Havard: We have had a lot of discussion about kit, rations and everything else - there are a lot of things affecting morale and having different effects, not the least of which is money and pay. In terms of learning lessons, if you are going to have expeditionary activities in the future, it is particularly important to learn about problems now in the general payment system, particularly with transfers. In Soldier magazine there was an article, for example, saying that there are something like 9,000 individuals who have problems with their pay. I know mechanisms have been put in place so they are not particularly disadvantaged, but this whole area of activity has a particular resonance on the ground. I have had reports myself from reservists, for example, that when they got out there they were not understood, that very often the people on the ground understood the regulars but not the reservists, so there were problems in terms of administration at the time and lessons to be learned from that. Now I know you are going to set up some tri-Service structure and perhaps I could come back to that later but, given that there were these problems experienced and equally that the troops in Afghanistan are going to be out there for some time, when are you going to solve this problem?
Lt General Palmer: Thank you, and I acknowledge that it is a problem. On the reserve side we have now as a result of lessons learned realised that we probably should have sent a reserve unit for pay and administration out much earlier so that the reserves would feel they had somewhere in theatre that they could plug into and get their queries answered, and that indeed will happen in the future. That was a local problem that we have now addressed and I think you will find, and certainly this is my information, that the pay of reserves - and we have extensively debriefed them when they have come back through the RTMC at Chilborne - has not been a major issue. As far as the regulars are concerned this is a different non Telic issue that is my responsibility, and it is something that the AFPRB and Baroness Dean is also concerned about which is the level of mispayment particularly in the Army - it is not a problem in the Royal Air Force or Navy. This is partly associated with change to Pay 2000 and partly due to fairly antiquated computer systems that we have used for some time to pay people, and correcting it is very complex. Now I could go on for about twenty minutes on what we are doing, but what I would like to do is give you a copy of the letter I have written to Baroness Dean on this subject saying that this is a problem and this is what we are doing to tackle it.
Q2163 Mr Havard: That would be extremely helpful but what we are concerned about is that Op Telic came when it came, and the payment system being put in, the tri-Service system, as I understand it, is not being put in until 2005 --
Lt General Palmer: It is rolled out differently for each of the services, starting with the RN.
Q2164 Mr Havard: Please write to us about the detail, but the lesson we are learning here is that the tempo at which this is happening now is different to the past and the extent to which the systems are in place to support the pay and allowances, whilst that new reality is in place, has a material reality on the ground in operational circumstances, so we are concerned that it is being addressed and that those lessons have been learned for those reasons, as much as for welfare and other reasons.
Lt General Palmer: I entirely agree.
Group Captain Beet: If I may say so I completely agree with that point, and I think that when the forces deployed the reservists suffered because they did not have a TA cell, a joint force logistics component, but as Telic went on it was established. There was a major and a sergeant who set it up specifically, and that function now exists in the National Support Element Headquarters as the focus for the TA guys who are in theatre to work their problems through. In fact, as Andy Cowling was leaving, when 1Div were handing over to 3Div, that cell was then taking impact. You are right that in the future there has to be more of a reserve cell in that support headquarters to be able to understand those pay issues while the longer term issues are resolved.
Q2165 Mr Havard: You will understand as well that whilst the letter you write will deal with the payments issue, about which we will doubtless get more and more concerns expressed in general, this is the first time in modern circumstances we have had the compulsory nature of the reserve callups, and that will happen more and more, and you have made the point yourself in the past about the TA being used more, so could you include those issues when you write to us?
Lt General Palmer: We will gladly do that.
Q2166 Mr Cran: Going on to the question of desert clothing and boots, you said, Colonel, in answer to an earlier question that "somebody was without something somewhere", and it was perfectly clear that you and the Secretary of State talked to one another because he said to the Committee on 14 May that, "The occasional soldier was not supplied with the right size desert boots on the particular day that the story appeared in the [Times} newspaper, but the truth is that when they went into operations all of our forces were given the right boots", and that contrasts very much with what the National Audit Office said about the whole procurement of desert clothing and boots. It said the procurement was regarded as of limited effectiveness because few troops received the full compliment and mismatches and sizing remained into the post conflict phase of the operation. Well, I do not mind who answers but do you think that, from a personnel point of view or an operational point of view, is satisfactory? Whose arse, if you will excuse me saying so, Chairman, was kicked?
Lt General Palmer: Again, there are personnel aspects to people not having the right kit and morale aspects and I acknowledge that those people who did not have the right kit may have suffered from a morale spin but I do not believe it was as significant as it has been made out to be, although I acknowledge that it should not have happened. Again, however, the pace of the operation was such, the inadequacies of the logistic tracking system were such that it did happen, and no one is denying that and no one is saying that we should not do better in the future.
Q2167 Mr Cran: It happened on a fairly large scale?
Lt General Palmer: The National Audit Office report, as far as I am concerned as the personnel guide, is the definitive document in this case but it also refers to the success and the complexity of providing the degree of logistic support that was provided in the very short timescale, so one has to come to a balanced judgment here.
Q2168 Mr Cran: I am just bound to say that for the first time I do regard that as a complacent answer because, I do not know about everybody else but if I happened to be one of the troops you are talking about and I was out there and I did not have my desert clothing or my boots were the wrong size or something else, I would expect something better than the answer you have just given me. Would you like to say any more?
Lt General Palmer: No.
Q2169 Mr Cran: I will come back to you then. Operationally, would you, Colonel, like to tell us what effect this disgraceful situation had? Are you in a position to tell us?
Colonel Cowling: Within the Division at the start of the operation the majority of troops deployed were in green combats and what I would call North European boots. At that time the temperatures were not as high as they were later on. As time moved on it got hotter and greater supplies of combats and desert boots ever became available. At the time that the Division crossed the start line, temperatures were not intense: by the time we finished the operation from my perspective on July 12th they were intense, and the need for combats and boots became ever greater. As far as I am aware, when I left the theatre, with the exception of a number of outsize individuals --
Q2170 Chairman: Careful what you say now!
Colonel Cowling: -- the supply of desert combats was complete for the whole Division.
Q2171 Mr Cran: Just so we may be absolutely clear about this, how does your answer square with the National Audit Office's reference to limited effectiveness because few troops received the full compliment and mismatches and sizing remained into the post conflict phase? I need to be able to marry that with what you have just said, because it paints a wholly different picture.
Colonel Cowling: I cannot dispute the figures but what I will say is that an ever decreasing amount of individuals were without the kit and, as far as I was aware, with the exception of a few individuals, by the time I got to the end of that operation, we all had the equipment. I was one and I was wearing green combats and green boots well beyond the conflict stage but, at the end, I had the right kit.
Q2172 Mr Cran: General, the Colonel is not able to tell me why the NAO's statement on the one hand and his experience on the other do not come together. Are you, as the, as it were, Director General Personnel in the MoD, able to bring them together?
Lt General Palmer: No, I am not. Although I have a real interest in this as the guy responsible for personnel and to a certain extent obviously, therefore, morale, etc, you have had evidence from the logisticians, you have had the NAO report and I cannot add anything to the debate here. We regret, and everybody from the Secretary of State downwards has regretted, the fact that people did not have the right kit at the right time but set against that is the NAO report which testifies to the enormous success of the overall logistic operation, and that is where the matter stands as far as I am concerned. I cannot add any more to it, I am afraid.
Q2173 Mr Cran: Let's accept that for the minute, but you did also say earlier on that, as the Deputy Chief of Staff (Personnel), morale issues are ones for you, without any doubt at all?
Lt General Palmer: Absolutely.
Q2174 Mr Cran: Could you tell me what you have done to find out what the morale of our troops was in the operation who did not have any of this equipment, if the NAO is to be believed - and I do believe them.
Lt General Palmer: I have been out post conflict, I have talked to members of your Committee, I have talked to members of the Armed Forces and a lot of independent bodies, and whenever the subject of morale comes up almost uniformly they testify not only to high morale now but then. The fact is that the significant operational success, in my view, and what has gone on afterwards, could not have been achieved by soldiers, sailors and air men and women without high morale, so, although I accept at one level that if you do not have the right kit your morale suffers, I do not in any way accept that this had a major impact on the operational effectiveness of the force.
Q2175 Mr Cran: Well, there is your answer, but I am bound to say that the Committee having been in Iraq, these wonderful people whom we call our troops - and there is no doubt they are wonderful and that is where you and me and all of us would agree - in very understated terms made it clear to us - individually perhaps but nonetheless - that those who provided this equipment could have done better, and I guess you would agree.
Lt General Palmer: I would agree with that.
Q2176 Mr Cran: That is something! Lastly on this, in relation to desert boots and those who were not supplied them in time - and there is no doubt since joining this Committee I have discovered that boots are a most extraordinarily important item, far more than I would ever have imagined but there we are - do we have statistics about the medical effects of not having these boots?
Lt General Palmer: I would have to get you that information.
Q2177 Mr Cran: We would be obliged?
Lt General Palmer: Behind me is an officer from the medical organisation, and he will give you the answer you seek.
Q2178 Mr Cran: Colonel, you were shaking your head. Why?
Colonel Cowling: I am sorry.
Mr Cran: I was hoping you were disagreeing with somebody!
Q2179 Chairman: Some of the Colonel's facial expressions have attracted an enormous amount of interest. General, were you around in the Falklands? I recall a set of army boots actually brought in front of our Committee, and we spent an hour talking about how awful they were and how the British Army could not invent or deploy to the field a proper army boot; so the question of quality and quantity and distribution is not something that has just slipped on the radar screen on this occasion. As there is such a discrepancy between what the NAO says and what is officially being said by the Ministry of Defence, could you rustle up any documentary evidence to sustain the position you are taking? Is there some form of invoice that would say that X thousand were issued on a certain day, or Y thousand?
Lt General Palmer: Absolutely, yes.
Chairman: Would you supply that for us, please, a paper trail to sustain the argument that you have made.
Q2180 Mr Hancock: I am curious because you have sitting behind you, I assume, at least three members of your staff of the MoD and the MoD liaison officer here, who comes to every meeting. I wonder whether or not anybody in the MoD actually reads the evidence your colleagues give to us, because in November 2000 the Chief of Defence Staff, in answer to a question on equipment, particularly on boots, said this: "You will be fully justified in being angrily cross if we went into an operation and found that we were living with some deficiency or something which diminished our operational capability as a result of lessons learned as recently as 2001." I remember that evidence session by the then Chief of Defence Staff, because he went on to say how important he felt it was that soldiers and military personnel were properly equipped. I assume that when he was giving that evidence to us in November 2002 he was well aware that we were building up towards Operation Telic. What mystifies me is that nobody else seems to have heard what he said to us. I would have felt that when he gave that assurance to this Committee, some five months before the conflict started, that steps would have been taken to make sure that he was not proven wrong. It appears however that nobody listened to him, other than the eleven members of this Committee.
Lt. General Palmer: I cannot comment on that. You will have to ask the logistic people.
Q2181 Mr Hancock: Did you not, in Personnel, when you read this, say, "goodness me; when we get our personnel act together, let us make sure we do not ...."
Lt General Palmer: I concede the point, obviously, that kit is important. It is important for -----
Q2182 Mr Hancock: So do you see -----
Lt General Palmer: I see what you are saying, and I have already said that we could have done a lot better in providing particular kit; but Colonel Cowling has told you the situation. There are faults. There are problems, and we will seek to learn the lessons and put them right. But from the personnel perspective, I cannot answer detailed questions on the logistics side. I am not trying to avoid it, I am just saying that I am as concerned about morale as anybody else is, and I want to see everybody in the right kit, but the logistic chain is the logistic chain, and it is slightly separate from personnel.
Q2183 Mr Hancock: I get the sense that you and your colleagues sitting on the top end of the table think everybody who complains is a whinger, and -----
Lt General Palmer: Certainly not.
Q2184 Mr Hancock: There is a letter in the Telegraph today from a former RAF officer, who spent 12 years in the RAF. He ends the letter by saying: "To any Serviceman who complains, the answer is always: 'Sour grapes, old boy, just sour grapes. The man should never have joined up in the first place.' So the campaigning is left to people like Samantha Roberts." I do not want that impression to be the case, but certainly everyone above the rank of Colonel - I would not say Brigadier, but Colonel, seems to think "no problems"; everybody below that we have spoken to has indicated to us, including senior officers who were in command of men on the ground, have made very, very strong complaints to us about the equipment failures, the lack of equipment, and the fact that their personnel were not given what they should have got. Why is that?
Lt General Palmer: Well, I strongly refute your characterisation of the answers that we have tried to give you today as being that we are oblivious of what people are saying to us on the ground. We have made strenuous efforts, with our soldiers, sailors and airmen, and with the families, to find out how we could have done better and to learn the lessons. To say that we do not listen, frankly, is just plain wrong. In the issue of the equipment, we have acknowledged that we could have done better. We have acknowledged the problems with the asset-tracking. We will do better in the future. I cannot say any more than that.
Q2185 Mr Blunt: General, in exploring this link between personnel and logistics, I cannot help but reflect that 25 years ago my father was Assistant Chief of Defence Staff Personnel and Logistics, and I suspect that is how the obvious link between the two may have been handled then. How would you characterise Sergeant Roberts's morale immediately prior to his death, from the information you and I have seen?
Lt General Palmer: I have no idea. As you know, there is a Special Investigation Branch investigation going on, and I am not prepared to speculate.
Q2186 Mr Blunt: What is undisputed by the Sergeant Roberts case - and we take it to illustrate the issue of body armour - is that he, across the start line in a tank, with ceramic plates and his body armour, was instructed by his commanding officer to give those ceramic plates to the company infantry, who did not have them, in the expectation of course that they were not going to be in tanks; they would be more vulnerable. Then Sergeant Roberts was shot in the chest on 24 March, manning a vehicle checkpoint. We are agreed with that. There is no dispute as to that, I take it.
Lt General Palmer: As I said, it is the subject of an investigation, and I am not prepared to comment on the circumstances of Sergeant Roberts's death.
Mr Hancock: His morale is not being investigated, is it?
Q2187 Mr Blunt: Let us take the Government's intention to be ready to undertake the operation we have just undertaken, at short notice and at greater range; and given that this is the fifth war of choice in six years that the Government has entered into - it is not an unreasonable expectation. Why is enhanced combat body armour held centrally in limited quantities, rather than being a personal issue item?
Lt General Palmer: You are asking me here a logistic question. I will try and give you an answer, because I have clearly discussed the issue. We are looking at the whole business of how enhanced combat body armour should be deployed in the future. One of the options is to make it personal issue, but that is just one of many. The whole subject is, clearly, very high on the agenda, to make sure that we learn the right lessons from it.
Q2188 Mr Blunt: It was high on the agenda before the conflict because at some stage someone took a decision to spend £3 million on purchasing more of this stuff. When was that decision taken?
Lt General Palmer: A decision was taken that the service people going to the Gulf would have body armour. We have gone round this buoy before. You know that the issue is of asset-tracking; that sufficient amounts of body armour were in theatre, but they did not get to the right people at the right time. That was an issue of asset-tracking. We are learning that lesson and trying to do better next time. That is all I can say on this.
Q2189 Mr Blunt: It is not entirely. Here is a very important issue that has now exploded around the Secretary of State because of the recorded comments of Sergeants Roberts and his complaints before his death. Plainly, personal protection is an issue that is absolutely fundamental as a personnel issue as well as a logistic issue. It is not simply a question of asset-tracking; it is also about the whole issues that sit behind the issuing of an urgent operational requirement for personal protection kit of this kind - whether or not that equipment should have been deployed beforehand and not the subject of a UOR, and, equally, the whole conduct of the UOR process.
Lt General Palmer: You are talking of an issue, a process, which is a logistic issue. If you want to talk about logistic processes, then the people to talk to are the logisticians. They are the people with the detailed knowledge of the logistic chain. I have told you that it was the intention to issue people with enhanced body armour. I have told you there was a problem with asset tracking, which meant that some redistribution had to take place, which, in the judgment of the commander, was giving the body armour to the greatest need. I have told you that there is an investigation going on into the events around the death of Sergeant Roberts, which makes me unable to comment on this particular case. I have also told you that we are very concerned to make sure that the lessons are learned and that we do better in the future. If you wish any more, I am afraid you will have to ask the Secretary of State when he comes in front of you. I have given you my view, and I cannot expand on it for the reasons I have given you.
Q2190 Mr Blunt: I am sure we will ask the Secretary of State, but the issue at stake here now is what lessons are going to be learnt from the death of Sergeant Roberts and the fact that in his view, as recorded - and obviously in Mrs Roberts's view - he was not properly protected.
Lt General Palmer: I have answered the specific question you asked me about Sergeant Roberts and I have answered the question generally about morale. I do not think I have anything more to add.
Chairman: We will draw stumps on that question and on boots. We have other issues than boots and armour, very important though they are.
Q2191 Mike Gapes: Can I go to the issue of NBC protection? The Secretary of State has told the House that the operational requirement for NBC equipment was fully met, but the National Audit Office identified significant shortfalls in a range of NBC equipment. We have been told by an NBC expert that if there had been a chemical attack, there would have been a significant number of casualties because of the inadequacies related to warning and detection equipment. We also have spoken to some of our personnel, who told us that there were false warnings of a chemical attack, when in fact there was not a chemical attack in theatre. Lt General Horton, in evidence in answer to questions that I asked in the previous session to do with equipment, said he was aware that there were difficulties over supply of the NAD, the nerve agent detector, which is not normally held in units but was issued; and it did not work as well as the new equipment will, when that comes into service. Putting all that together, are you prepared to accept that these shortfalls and inadequacies would have had serious operational consequences if our forces had been subject to an NBC attack; and the fact that there were false warnings also could have impaired our operational capabilities?
Colonel Cowling: I am not an NBC expert, but I can tell you what happened and help you draw a conclusion. As I said earlier, there were shortages in consumables for NBC detection systems, and these were at unit level. We re-distributed, prior to the start of the confrontation, to ensure that there was equity of assets throughout the units. Such shortages were not the case for the joint NBC regiment, which was giving us a broader detection capability. Details of that are not within my expertise. With regard to the false alarms, I am sure there were many, and I myself suffered those; but of course in such situations one takes the worst case, and if in doubt one takes cover - of that I can assure you. There were surely some false alarms, yes. With regard to the potential injuries that you have referred to from an expert, I am not competent to pass judgment on that. In summary, there were shortfalls. We know that and are addressing it in the future, but the consequences in theatre of those shortfalls and a chemical attack which did not take place, I am not competent to answer, I am afraid.
Q2192 Mike Gapes: Given that we were going into a conflict where the Government, the Americans, and even Dr David Kelly, had the very strong view that it was likely that the Iraqis had, and if attacked would use, chemical weapons; is it not inadequate that we have this situation?
Lt General Palmer: We have given you the best answer that we can.
Q2193 Mike Gapes: It may be the best answer, but would you at least accept that if the Iraqis had used chemical weapons, there could have been some very, very serious consequences for our troops in that situation?
Lt General Palmer: I defer to what Colonel Cowling said; that we had adequate capability to deal with that. We had protective clothing; we had monitors. Although they had false alarms, probably too many false alarms, it was adequate. I keep coming back to this point: the equipment is the speciality of the equipment people. We are talking about personnel. If I cannot give you the expert answer that you are looking for, you must ask the people who can. I am not prepared to speculate on a subject on which I am not expert. In a nutshell, you are asking the wrong person the question.
Q2194 Mike Gapes: I have already asked Lt General Horton as well. Frankly, I am asking everybody these questions because I think there is an issue here about whether our people's lives are put at risk in a situation where chemical weapons might be used. Is there adequate NBC equipment and does it work well; do the right people have it at the right place; and do we get false alarms? That is a relevant question to be asked right across -----
Lt General Palmer: In general, I can answer that the operating capability would not have been declared if it were not sufficient to cover the threat.
Q2195 Rachel Squire: You have emphasised that you are dealing with personnel rather than logistics. When we come to deal with sleeping and living accommodation, it certainly has a direct impact on personnel. Picking up your earlier comment, Colonel Cowling, about the heat on July 12 being intense, you will be pleased to know that myself and other members of the Committee who arrived Iraq on July 14 would certainly testify to that, and had a taste of what it is like to try to live and sleep in those sorts of temperatures. Can I ask what the MoD's policy is for providing climate-controlled and air-conditioned accommodation; and how does that policy balance the need for personnel to acclimatise with improved quality of sleep and better working conditions for those who can take advantage of them?
Lt General Palmer: I think the policy is relatively easily stated, which is that as soon as possible on completion of the conflict stage, all service personnel should be given the best accommodation that we can manage, and that is indeed what we tried to do. I would say whether we did it quick enough or not I am not sure. Certainly, it was a lot better than we managed to do in Afghanistan; we got much better accommodation up much quicker. So I think we did learn the lessons from that.
Colonel Cowling: I would agree totally. You must provide as best as you can post-conflict, in the shortest possible time. I think if one were to compare this operation with its predecessors, possibly for example the speed with which we have put in place two sorts of accommodation, TFA and TDA, we will be able to look back and be pleased with our performance. Nevertheless, at the time that you would have arrived in theatre on July 14, there would have still been individuals that were still located in what I would now call sub-standard locations, in all senses of health and hygiene, and air-conditioning would not have been available. As I indicated earlier, we were at the limit of what the market could bear in terms of purchasing, what was already resourced, and what we had in terms of the engineers to put it in place. If one goes back into theatre, I am reassured - I have not been back since then - that the living conditions of the soldiers, with the exception of those that result from an all-batts change, i.e., change of a battalion very recently, a slight organisational change, they are well placed in air-conditioned accommodations.
Q2196 Rachel Squire: I would certainly hope so, Colonel, but I understand that in the MoD's flight safety magazine of December 2003 it was stated - and I cannot remember the actual period - that fatigue was experienced by helicopter crews, both Army and RAF, and was at least partly induced by the lack of air-conditioned accommodation, which impaired their sleep. I have listened to what you have said about post-conflict, but expeditionary operations are far more likely to be mounted from bases that do not possess such facilities. Has the move to expeditionary operations, or will the move to it more and more be reflected in the increased provision of air-conditioned mobile accommodation?
Lt General Palmer: The exact amount of air-conditioned accommodation we have got I can give you a note on. Certainly, there has been a significant increase in the amount that we are able to deploy forward quickly in order to provide the air-conditioned accommodation to which you refer. I can let you know exactly the figures.
Group Captain Beet: Currently, of the personnel in Iraq, 90 per cent are in air-conditioned accommodation. Where it is not higher than that, it is because of the addition of recent forces gone in, and in fact where some of the people are actually working, which is not on a main base like the Shaibah base for instance; and there is a mix of what is called temporary deployed accommodation, which is part of the UOR work that is more the logistics field, which is soft-skinned; and now what is going on is construction of temporary field accommodation, which is hard-skinned, which is air-conditioned. That is what I believe to be our current position.
Q2197 Rachel Squire: We visited the Shaibah Base so I certainly hope that by next summer they too have air-conditioned and climate-controlled accommodation.
Group Captain Beet: I completely agree, and that is the intent of JBOYD865 for working with CJO to make sure that we give more air-conditioned accommodation to our forces.
Q2198 Chairman: We stayed in air-conditioned accommodation at Basra Airport, i.e., a fan. Is that air-conditioned? What is the terminology for air-conditioned accommodation?
Group Captain Beet: There is certainly an air-conditioning unit.
Q2199 Chairman: It is a unit.
Group Captain Beet: As opposed to a fan.
Chairman: I am very glad that other people had more comfortable evenings.
Q2200 Mr Havard: On the question of casualties and the notification, and the question of next of kin and so on: the traditional position has been that nothing is said until the next of kin are informed and so on, and there were some problems with this and changes were made. We moved to what seemed to be this new policy of earliest possible release of information.
Lt General Palmer: Yes.
Q2201 Mr Havard: We can all readily understand what the tensions were and modern communications, and it was very different in the Crimea to what it is in this case; but nevertheless there are concerns for the families that are particularly affected and also the wider communities and families who are wondering whether they are or are not affected. Given that this policy was reviewed during the course of Operation Telic, when we saw some changes made, can you say how that was done? This seems to have been less of a problem in previous conflicts than this one. Can you make some comments about that?
Lt General Palmer: I think you are right. With the every-increasing speed of communications, one has to adapt one's procedures. The policy was very clear on casualty-informing, and that was that it should be done as soon as possible, but that accuracy could never be sacrificed for speed. So there was a balance here between protecting the identity of the individual until the next of kin had been informed, and relieving the anxiety of families of all service personnel who take part in the operation. The expert on this is Group Captain Cooper, who can explain a little bit more in detail about what the policy was and how it changed during the course of Telic.
Group Captain Cooper: You are absolutely right in that as soon as an incident had happened, and particularly with the embedded journalists, it was very difficult indeed to see sometimes live action on Sky Television - enormously instant recognition by media that something had happened. As the General quite rightly says, the most important thing for us is to get it right, to identify the individual who was either killed or was notifiably injured, seriously injured, and to ensure that we inform the correct people. We do that as expeditiously as possible. We do that knowing that we have a very motivated media on our tails, and we try very hard to work with them. It has been highlighted that with a very few exceptions that worked very well. What we have tried to do - and the policy change that you mentioned - is to decrease that circle of worry, if you like. So, as a random example, if an incident has occurred in the Gulf and we say no more than that someone has been killed in the Gulf, then there will be 40,000 families who will be very worried. If we say an aircraft has crashed, then that frees up an awful lot of people who can relax. If we say it was a helicopter, a naval helicopter, we get to that level where very few people are left in that circle. We try very hard to then keep in touch with that group and to try and support them until we can identify. That process of identifying and notifying the next of kin, particularly in today's society, where there will be more than one - inevitably perhaps parents are divorced and one is living in Spain. I could give you any number of true scenarios, so you will understand that. That will be a timely process and will take time to do that. We will not sacrifice that accuracy for the pressure that we get from the media; but by being able to give them a little more information as time goes on, that then helps the process; and that is of mutual benefit.
Q2202 Mr Havard: One of the drivers of that is that the wishes of the next of kin are not overridden by these changes of process.
Group Captain Cooper: That is correct. Even when they are notified, there are occasions, quite understandably, where they will ask for a delay in notifying the media while they go and notify the rest of their family in Australia or wherever. We very much respect their needs. At the same time, we will advise them of the inherent risks of doing that, because the media will only have so much patience, and they will find out by other means. There is increasing risk with any delay of being misrepresented, or of the newspapers coming up with their own version of events, rather than having something from the MoD. That is an inherent risk of it. We have found that that policy works particularly well. The other area that changed during the Operation was - hitherto, where an incident involved a number of fatalities or notifiable injuries, then we would, where possible, try and release the names of those who had been killed - not those who have been injured - at the same time. We have examples, certainly with helicopter crashes, where it was much easier to notify some next of kin. Others wanted delays and so forth. So we were as flexible as we could be in notifying some names and holding back others and so forth, and that works as well.
Q2203 Mr Havard: That is helpful because we have had comments that some of the people who had family involved felt that the old traditional policy of their wishes being respected was being changed with the newer policy of this earlier release doctrine. The explanation that you have given is very helpful in that regard.
Group Captain Beet: It is very important. We did have a meeting at PJHQ with representatives of the tri-service casualty cells to work the process through. Basically, PJHQ is a release authority to the media division within - a division within PJHQ - and then to D-News MoD. So the next of kin or emergency contacts will be notified, and where it is possible that we have a divided family where somebody else needs to be notified, and they put in an additional request for a short delay, normally not more than 12 hours, then we would agree with that - then, going back to that casualty cell which the deceased comes from, that service, final permission, and then we can release it. But the wishes of the family are very important in this process.
Q2204 Mr Havard: You have said that it seems as though the media played a game in regard to this. That is an interesting comment. More and more we are in a situation where there is joint coalition activity with other media. I would not imagine you would want to get into a Jessica Lynch syndrome on how to deal with these sorts of issues. We would certainly not want to see you in that, or colluding in that. But if this is our approach, however robust it is in terms of how it bumps up against other people's policies, that might not be exactly the same, so what assurances can you give that that will be the case not only in this current circumstance but in future expeditionary and joint activities?
Group Captain Cooper: I can really give you no assurances in that respect. It depends very much who our coalition partners are; but we have worked very closely particularly with the Americans in this respect. You will be aware that the first crash involved Americans as well, and we did work very closely with them in terms of releasing information. In that respect, that did work well.
Group Captain Beet: It is something that we are going to continue. We are working now in Baghdad with the coalition joint task force and British military people, and there is that engagement. There is like an administrative personnel officer in a Baghdad support unit who has got the right links, who can have the right links; and it is something that we would definitely wish to see pursued.
Q2205 Chairman: There are some health issues, please; and perhaps you will be able to answer them. This Committee has been obsessed over the years with Gulf War Syndrome. Are you aware of what precautions were taken this time to try to minimise the risk of repetition of what apparently happened the lat time, although I am conscious of the fact that the jury is still out after a decade as to whether there is such a thing as the Gulf War Syndrome.
Lt General Palmer: If I can use PTSD as a shorthand for what we are talking about here, and how we set about ensuring that the whole force was well aware of the issue, the first thing is that there is now a tri-service directive on post traumatic stress disorder. Briefings and leaflets are given out pre-deployment and post-deployment; and indeed we even give them to the families to explain that their loved ones are going on a potentially difficult and dangerous operation, and that they may see things that may cause them problems, and how they should deal with this if it happens. That is the policy on directives. Then, at the end of the conflict, we insisted on every person who had been involved having a period of what we call decompression, which basically meant off-duty time within their own unit to discuss and reflect on what they had seen et cetera and what they had done. That has happened. Now the emphasis is on the chain of command being able to recognise any servicemen or women who may be suffering those symptoms, so there is briefing in that regard as well. That covers the regulars. Of course, there is a whole issue of the reserves, first of all the Territorial Army, who have got a chain of command, albeit not the same as the regular one. They are being looked after by their own units through the Reserve Forces Cadets Association, and are having explained to them that even when they leave the TA they have still got access to the Gulf Veterans medical assessment package, which has been set up specifically to monitor those people who think they may be affected. For the regular reserves, who we just called up - they are not volunteers - they are being written to, because it is quite difficult to keep in touch, at the 6, 12 and 18-month point, with a view to finding out whether they have got any problems or any issues that they want to report back to us. So there is a whole panoply, ranging from documents to information being given. I think, very importantly, we try to make sure that the sort of macho ethos, which in some ways we want to encourage, does not prevent people, if they feel they have got a problem associated with something they have seen or done, coming forward to report it.
Q2206 Chairman: There are no alarm bells ringing at all.
Lt General Palmer: Well, we are monitoring it extremely carefully. At the moment, to date, my latest information is that about 32 service people have reported with symptoms associated with post traumatic stress disorder; but none of them have been admitted as in-patients, and they are being treated with a series of drugs but also counselling as well - a series of both, of one or the other, whichever is deemed to be the most appropriate.
Q2207 Chairman: Bearing in mind the losses in Mesopotamia and Palestine in the First World War, clearly the world has moved on, or the Ministry of Defence has moved on in terms of dealing with it when we were there. We were under the constant pressure of having large bottles of water stuffed under our noses, so we appreciate that we are taking more care of our soldiers, and the regime is infinitely better. We worked out that some 3.5 per cent of those deployed were returned home with illnesses of various descriptions, as a rough-and-ready calculation. Has there been any analysis of the different categories? I know this is a health matter.
Lt General Palmer: I can give you a note on exactly how many, and what the casualties were, which ranged of course from fractures to asthma, extreme cases of diahorrea, vomiting and all that sort of thing.
Q2208 Chairman: Heat-related -----
Lt General Palmer: Very much so, yes.
Q2209 Chairman: Were there any other health concerns identified as arising from Telic?
Lt General Palmer: Not that I am aware at the moment. There is also, I should perhaps mention, a study being done by King's College by Professor Simon Wesley, who is probably the country's if not the world's leading expert on this area. He is researching individual cases of people, both those who have not been on Telic as a control, and those who have, to see what the difference is on the presentation of symptoms or health issues. So the whole thing is being very, very closely watched.
Q2210 Chairman: It is good if there is an epidemiological study -----
Lt General Palmer: There is.
Q2211 Chairman: ---- before any pressure was done on the MoD to do it. That is very encouraging. Do you know when we can expect the very long-promised paper on the main health lessons identified since Operation Granby, now apparently also to include the lessons of Telic?
Lt General Palmer: I will give you a note.
Q2212 Chairman: Lastly from me, General, has any assessment yet been made of the effectiveness and completeness of the new operational medical record form? Maybe you could put that in your response.
Lt General Palmer: I will.
Q2213 Mr Viggers: You have referred already to the individual to be deployed to be used collectively for communications, so I will not go over that again, but while the reference is to families, you are now considering an extended definition of "family" to include unmarried couples, partners. Have you defined exactly how you will work this formula, and exactly what is a family?
Lt General Palmer: What is a family? That is a very good question. As far as the partnership is concerned, there are criteria that have to be met in order to get the benefits. If your partner was killed in Iraq - and there were six cases, I think - then they will get the same benefits as though they were married; but they have to establish that their partnership was a genuine partnership, and the criteria we have laid down for assessing what a partnership is. It amounts to whether there is a joint mortgage, a shared car, a shared house, et cetera. I think we have established fairly well how to define a partnership. As I said, for the first time in Telic we have given an amount of ex gratia payments as though the partnership was indeed a married one. Of course, the new pension arrangements will enshrine this, when we bring those in.
Q2214 Mr Viggers: I was thinking specifically about the provision of information in this particular context. It is very helpful to have it done in that way. This will be registered so that it is beyond doubt and clear and not -----
Lt General Palmer: We have not actually yet finally - we are doing a registration scheme. Basically what happens is, in retrospect one looks at the partnership and makes sure that it does conform to the rules for establishing a partnership. But there will not be a registration scheme similar to what the Government is proposing for homosexual partnerships.
Q2215 Mr Viggers: You can see the point of making sure in advance -----
Lt General Palmer: Absolutely. We did publicise in advance what we reckoned constituted a partnership, but it did not amount to asking people to register their partnerships. In the future we may do that, but we are not planning to at the moment, unlike, as I said, the Government's proposal for homosexual partnerships, which will form part of a registration process.
Q2216 Mr Viggers: We may come back to this in a different context. It is a broader point, but in terms of provision of information, "partners" will be included in provision of information as are families.
Lt General Palmer: Yes, absolutely, definitely so.
Q2217 Chairman: Thank you all very much. It has been a long session for you and for us too, interrupted again by a vote. By the very nature of select committee work, we point at things that go wrong, but I would say personally how spectacularly well things went. The people who read the newspapers who have a vested interest in hammering those who are involved often forget that we are on the winning side. Personnel performed very well indeed; and, frankly, my own impression is that most of the kit worked very well or well. As always, I would say to those who are involved, be they operating in Kuwait or in Iraq or back home, we owe an enormous debt of gratitude to all who were concerned and are still involved. Thank you all very much for your help.
Lt General Palmer: If I may say, I think those remarks will be extremely well appreciated by our service people that matter most to us. Thank you.
