UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 57-viii

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

DEFENCE COMMITTEE

 

 

Lessons of Iraq

 

 

Thursday 5 February 2004

RT HON GEOFF HOON, MP

Evidence heard in Public Questions 2218 - 2323

 

 

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

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Oral Evidence

Taken before the Defence Committee

on Thursday 5 February 2004

Members present

Mr George Bruce, in the Chair

Mr Crispin Blunt

Mr James Cran

Mr David Crausby

Mike Gapes

Mr Mike Hancock

Mr Dai Havard

Mr Kevan Jones

Mr Frank Roy

Rachel Squire

Mr Peter Viggers

________________

Witness: Rt Hon Geoff Hoon, a Member of the House, Secretary of State for Defence, examined.

Q2218 Chairman: We are delighted to welcome you, Secretary of State, and Mr Rapson, who until recently was on this side of the fence. I hope he did not regret his metamorphosis to the executive. This, Secretary of State, is the concluding evidence session of our inquiry. As you will recall, we began with evidence from you in May last year. Since then we have heard from a wide range of those involved in the operation, from the National Contingent Commander to individual service personnel. This is the nineteenth evidence session of this inquiry. We have undertaken more than 12 visits, including to many of the units which fought in Iraq. Through you, Secretary of State, can I express our thanks to all those who have assisted us. We have been twice to the United States and, of course, to Iraq itself and Kuwait, as well as Germany, and we have made many visits within the UK. Our inquiry has been the work of many months. Much of it has gone completely unreported, but in my view, it has been the most comprehensive study of the military operations in Iraq outside the MoD itself. We will produce our report in due course, probably in the middle of March, but I am sure we can all agree now that the men and women of our armed forces deserve the highest praise for their courage, resourcefulness and professionalism, which they have again displayed in these operations. In today's evidence session we will inevitably focus more on the things that went wrong or might have been done better than on what went right. But our report will be balanced, it will recognise clearly what went wrong and it will report on the many things that went perfectly well and in many cases exceeded expectations. I understand, Mr Hoon, that you wish to make an opening statement. Welcome once again.

Mr Hoon: Thank you, chairman, and indeed my thanks to members of the Committee for inviting me here today. I should begin by congratulating the Committee on what I know has been a very thorough inquiry into Operation Telic. I will not pretend that this process of scrutiny is always entirely comfortable for those who sit on this side of the table. You referred to Syd Rapson's transition. I can only get you one at a time across here but... All those who care about defence will certainly welcome and applaud the inquiry. It is a serious and appropriate examination of what are extremely important issues. When I gave evidence to this Committee on 14 May last year we were in the very early stages of our own work on the lessons of Operation Telic, only two weeks after major combat operations had concluded. I said at the time that, notwithstanding the overall success of the operation, we owed it to our people to be rigorous in analysing our performance and to be ready to identify the things that did not go quite so well. Since then we have published two substantial reports, and the National Audit Office has also published the results of its own inquiry. These reports have both underlined our overall successes and revealed some weaknesses. Let me begin with some of the things that did not go as well as we would have wished. In my evidence last May I acknowledged that there were bound to be some problems in a logistics operation of this size, and that some of our personnel may have experienced shortages of equipment. Our subsequent work has shown that these shortages were more widespread and in some respects more serious than we believed to be the case at that time. In general, this was not the result of a failure to obtain and deploy the equipment required. There is certainly room for debate about the balance between routinely holding items in our inventory and relying on our ability to generate operation-specific equipment in short timescales, although the Committee will appreciate, I am sure, that the answer to this question may have major resource implications. A major problem, in our analysis, was that there were serious shortcomings in our ability to track consignments and assets through theatre. Despite the heroic efforts of our logistics personnel, the system struggled to cope with the sheer volume of matériel with which it had to deal. As a result, there were too many instances of the right equipment sitting in containers and not being distributed to units as quickly as it should have been. On the whole, as we said in our report Lessons for the Future, these shortages did not adversely affect operational capability. Our commanders judged that they had full operational capability by 20 March, or indeed earlier, in other words, before the land forces crossed the line of departure. The subsequent performance of our forces, I believe, speaks for itself and vindicates the operational judgements that the commanders made, but I do accept that a situation which seems satisfactory to those looking at the bigger picture can nonetheless be very different for the people who are affected personally by the things that go wrong. I also accept that our inability fully to distribute items such as desert clothing and boots, although not considered operationally essential by commanders on the ground, certainly had an impact on morale. It is understandable that people lose confidence in the supply chain if it is not providing them with what they expect to receive, and this is true regardless of whether the system is meeting their commanders' priorities. There were also, as we know from the tragic case of Sergeant Roberts, problems in providing important equipment enhancements to all personnel in a timely fashion, even when the requisite quantities had actually arrived in theatre. So Operation Telic has underlined the need for us to make more progress in improving our asset-tracking systems, and this will be a high priority. We have also identified the need for a senior focal point for logistics in the central staff of the Department, and have therefore established the post of Assistant Chief of the Defence Staff (Logistics Operations). We have also identified numerous other areas for further work. For instance, although, as I have mentioned, there are limits to how much kit we can routinely hold in our inventories, we have increased our stockholdings of desert and tropical clothing and boots and NBC individual protection equipment sets, up to a total now of 32,000 sets. We have also recognised that our procedures for mobilising reservists need to allow for greater notice than was possible in January last year, and I am pleased that we have managed to do a bit better in subsequent mobilisations, meeting our aspiration to provide 21 rather than 14 days' notice. Whilst recognising those areas which did not go as well as we would have wished, it is obviously important that we retain an overall sense of perspective. In this respect, I can do no better than to quote the conclusion of the National Audit Office, that "Operation Telic was a significant military success" and "The logistic effort for the operation was huge and key to success." Among the many elements of this success, I would highlight first the performance of our people, military and civilian, if I may say so, Chairman, at all levels, both in theatre and at home. This is, of course, a testament to their personal qualities, but I also believe - and I think that all our commanders would agree with this - that Operation Telic is a testament to the quality of the training that our people receive throughout their careers. Secondly, I think it is clear that the performance of our equipment was good, and its generally high levels of availability represented a significant improvement on Exercise Saif Sareea II. This in turn underlines the value of testing ourselves through challenging exercises and then learning the lessons from them, and it reinforces the point I have just made about the quality of training. Thirdly, although we have identified significant issues in the logistics area, we should not lose sight of the exceptional achievements in the deployment process. As we have said before, we deployed roughly the same size of force as in 1991 in roughly half the time, despite the challenges posed by switching our planning from the North to the South. Overall, therefore, we judge that Operation Telic has confirmed the emphasis we have placed since the Strategic Defence Review on an expeditionary strategy, and has demonstrated some of the progress we have made in that direction. It has also reinforced our belief in the importance of network-enabled capability for the rapid delivery of precise effects. A good illustration of this was the air operation on 11 April in which British and American aircraft were tasked in real time by a US officer who was remotely operating a Predator UAV from 8,000 miles away. Our lessons work has been focused mainly on the preparation, deployment and combat phases of the operation, but I would also like to mention the outstanding work that our forces have been doing in supporting the reconstruction of Iraq and repairing the damage done by a generation of Ba'athist rule, which in many respects proved to be worse than we had expected. We have identified important lessons about planning for post-conflict activity, which we are working on with other government departments. But despite the limitations of coalition planning in this area, British forces have displayed great versatility and initiative in what remains a difficult security situation. It has often been noted that they adapted seamlessly to a transition from combat to peace support operations, but it is worth underlining the sheer variety of activities in which they have been engaged. These have ranged from helping to repair the utility systems, to refurbishing schools, to assisting the development of local government to providing security for a very successful currency exchange programme, whilst continuing to deal with the threats posed by anti-coalition elements. Many of our people, both military and civilian, have filled positions in the Coalition Provisional Authority and are working tirelessly to set Iraq on the path to self-government. We are very proud of them all, and I am sure the Committee would wish to endorse that. Thank you, Chairman.

Chairman: Thank you very much. We will arrange for copies of your opening statement to be distributed some time during the meeting, Secretary of State.

Q2219 Mr Viggers: Secretary of State, I would like to ask a couple of questions about causation. The Hutton Report on page 138 refers to the creation of the dossier, and reports Jonathan Powell, the Prime Minister's Chief of Staff, sending an email to Mr Campbell and Mr Scarlett quoting, "Alastair, what will be the headline in the Standard on day of publication?" "What do we want it to be?" The actual headline in the Standard, following the change in the dossier, which is well recorded, was "45 minutes from attack" and there were other references. The Sun headline, for instance, "45 minutes from doom" and the dossier itself in its foreword has a reference from the Prime Minister, talking about Iraq, "Military planning allows for some of the weapons of mass destruction to be ready within 45 minutes of an order to use them" and there is a map which includes areas of Egypt and, of course, Cyprus as areas where weapons of mass destruction might come.

Mr Hoon: I apologise for interrupting you. We are talking about figure 7, I take it?

Q2220 Mr Viggers: We are talking about figure 7 on page 31 of the dossier.

Mr Hoon: That is headed "Current and planned potential ballistic missiles".

Q2221 Mr Viggers: Yes. The news headlines are quite dramatic. You have a press department, of course. Do they provide you with a press cuttings service?

Mr Hoon: Certainly when I am in the United Kingdom, yes.

Q2222 Mr Viggers: When I was a Minister, I had a press cuttings service and read it every day. Do you read your press cuttings service every day?

Mr Hoon: Most days, yes. I could not say that I read it every day, no.

Q2223 Mr Viggers: Having seen these headlines, knowing that the weapons of mass destruction were specifically battlefield weapons, you knew the nature of the weapons.

Mr Hoon: There are a number of points in your question, but the one that I first of all have some difficulty with, and I am perfectly willing to explain to the Committee why, is the premise "having seen the headlines". I did not see those stories at the time. I realised that I had not seen those headlines when I watched the Panorama programme some weeks ago, in which those headlines, the front pages, I think, of the Sun and I think of the Evening Standard, were flashed up on the screen. I realised at that point that I had not seen those newspapers. As a result, I checked my diary for that period, and I was out of the country from 9 o'clock on 24 September until 5 o'clock on 26 September, visiting Warsaw and Ukraine. I simply did not see any of that coverage.

Q2224 Mr Viggers: You knew that these were battlefield weapons only.

Mr Hoon: Again, I apologise for not being as precise as I would like to be. Shortly after the publication of the dossier, I asked within the Ministry of Defence what kinds of weapons were in effect being referred to as part of the so-called 45 minutes claim, and the answer within the Ministry of Defence, an assessment, in effect, of the intelligence, was to the effect that they were of a battlefield kind, but of course, that does involve the potential to deliver chemical-filled shells quite long distances, as far as 40 km. Certainly that was the interpretation provided to me of the intelligence by members of the Ministry of Defence.

Q2225 Mr Viggers: But you knew that the headlines in the newspapers were misleading.

Mr Hoon: I am sorry to go over the ground that I have just dealt with. I did not know they were misleading because I had not seen them at the time. I was out of the country. Even allowing for a cuttings service, they were not faxed to me in either Warsaw or Ukraine. One of the reasons why I particularly remember my visit to Ukraine was that there were some hugely sensitive issues that I had to deal with in the course of a meeting with the President of Ukraine. I have to say that, going from what was a NATO ministerial meeting to these rather important discussions that I was having with the President of the country, my concentration was on that, and I certainly did not see the front page of either the Sun or the Evening Standard for the reasons I hope I have clearly set out.

Q2226 Mr Viggers: Months passed, and the public was under a misapprehension.

Mr Hoon: I am not sure that that is true. I do not recall at the time a great concentration or attention on the so-called 45 minutes claim. It seems to me that that became an issue for the public, and certainly for Parliament and opinion formers, the media and so on, only really after the unfounded claims made by the Today programme. I am perfectly willing to discuss any evidence that you might have to the contrary, but it was not my sense that this was something that concerned parliamentarians, members of this Committee, or, for that matter, the public.

Q2227 Mr Viggers: But the Prime Minister did not appreciate that the weapons were merely battlefield weapons.

Mr Hoon: As a matter of record, he said that in the House. What I would want to emphasize to the Committee is that we both had access to the same intelligence. That has been dealt with in the Government's response to the ISC. As I have explained, I asked within the Ministry of Defence for an assessment of that intelligence, if you like, in military terms, which is what I think the Committee would expect a Secretary of State for Defence to do, and I did that.

Q2228 Mr Viggers: As Secretary of State for Defence, did you not feel any duty to ensure that your Prime Minister was properly informed before he took the country to war?

Mr Hoon: I obviously briefed the Prime Minister on a regular basis, and had this been a significant issue in terms of the decision to take the country to war, I am sure that this issue would have arisen in conversation between us, but, as I emphasize, it was not a significant issue. The Prime Minister did not mention the so-called 45 minutes claim in his speech to Parliament immediately before that decision was taken by the House of Commons. All I am emphasizing to you is that I am sure had this been a big issue for this Committee, for Members of Parliament, and indeed, for the public, then this matter would have arisen. Since it was not a big issue at the time - I accept that it has become one since - this was not a matter that we discussed.

Q2229 Mr Viggers: You are content that headlines like "45 minutes from doom" can remain on the record without any need for correction?

Mr Hoon: I was asked that question approximately a year later, when I gave evidence to the Hutton inquiry. In the course of that year, and again, I cannot say precisely when, I was aware that such stories had been written, but I made the point that I spend more time than I care to in trying to correct misleading impressions given by newspapers and in the media. My general experience is that they are extremely resistant to even the most modest of changes, and this was an area where I did not judge that the Government would have had any greater success.

Q2230 Mr Hancock: You mentioned the role you have of dealing with the press and putting these issues right. Were you aware that the Prime Minister actually himself, on 21 October 2002, linked a question he was asked about 45 minutes and long-range weapons together? Did the Ministry of Defence have any input into the response that he gave when he was asked specifically about weapons deployed within 45 minutes and long-range weapons? He did not choose to distance himself from the linkage together; he actually said that he was confident that we had proof that they could fire a missile 1,000 km. He did not say, "This doesn't cover weapons of mass destruction and the 45 minutes" at all. He went on to answer that question. Were you aware of that?

Mr Hoon: I think it would be helpful if you gave me the specific reference.

Q2231 Mr Hancock: Hansard, 21 October, column 78.

Mr Hoon: Perhaps you could tell me what the Prime Minister said.

Q2232 Mr Hancock: Llew Smith asked the following question: "To ask the Prime Minister (1) on what basis is the assertion on page 17 of his dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction that Saddam Hussein is determined to retain those weapons, and (2) if he will set out the technical basis for the assertion made on page 19 of the dossier that Iraqi weapons of mass destruction could be deployed within 45 minutes." The important thing there, of course, is you said you were the one involved with the technical detail and the Prime Minister was not. So I assume that when he was asked a specific question about the technical detail, it must have gone to the MoD to check. The third question was "On what basis is the assertion on page 30 of the dossier on weapons of mass destruction that Saddam Hussein remains committed to developing a long-range weapon?" The Prime Minister's response was that they had an abundance of intelligence information that they had developed weapons that could go 1,000 km.

Mr Hoon: This is precisely the point that I was making when I apologised for interrupting Peter Viggers, because figure 7 does refer to current and planned potential ballistic missiles, and most recently the ISC have indicated the fact that there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein was seeking to develop and had developed missiles that had a longer range than those allowed under relevant UN resolutions. I do not see any inconsistency in that.

Q2233 Mr Hancock: Secretary of State, you said in your reply in the Commons yesterday that you had asked, because you were at the technical end of this, and you did not expect the Prime Minister to go down that line. I would believe - and you would have to be extremely naïve - that with a specific question which targeted both the 45 minutes and the long-range ability to fire a weapon of mass destruction to 1,000 km, someone, somewhere would have sought advice. Are you saying that, in answer to a fairly specific question, Downing Street did not seek the technical advice that the intelligence had about these two things? In the report you actually mention Cyprus and the sovereign bases three times as potential targets. You do not attempt to distance yourself from the suggestion that the weapons deployable in 45 minutes would not be capable of going there. It does not say that. It actually says our basis in Cyprus and British tourists could be potential targets three times in that part of the report, and in the specific question that the Prime Minister was asked there was the link between 45 minutes and the long-range delivery capability.

Mr Hoon: Perhaps I could invite you to read out his answer. So far you have only paraphrased it.

Q2234 Mr Hancock: "These points reflect specific intelligence information in the area of long range weapons. Paragraph 28 of the dossier also explains the significance of the new engine test at Al-Rafah, which has a capability to test engines for missiles with a range of 1,000 km." So even in that response he did not choose, and nor did any of his advisors, to unlink the 45 minutes and the long-range capability.

Mr Hoon: I think I follow your reasoning correctly. What I do not understand is where the link in that answer is. The answer refers to long range ballistic missiles, which is a point that I am making in relation to figure 7. We undoubtedly set out in the dossier - figure 7 is an illustration of it - the capability we judged Iraq had under Saddam Hussein to fire longer range missiles.

Q2235 Mr Hancock: Secretary of State, he was asked if he would set out the technical basis for the assertion made on page 19 in the dossier of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that chemical and biological weapons could be deployed within 45 minutes of an order to do so. His reply talks about a 1,000 km distance capability. Anybody reading that would assume that the two things undoubtedly were answering the same question, that they had a longer range capability that could be deployed with a weapon of mass destruction in 45 minutes.

Mr Hoon: I do not see the link in the answer.

Mr Hancock: I am amazed.

Q2236 Chairman: Secretary of State, given the uncertain nature of intelligence, and with the benefit of hindsight in this particular case, would you agree that building a political case for military action at a particular time on evidence principally drawn from intelligence sources was and is unwise?

Mr Hoon: No, I do not, and I think the world is changing in terms of the way in which governments can set out their justification for taking military action. I think we live in less deferential, more demanding, more enquiring times, and I think this Government has responded to that by the publication of intelligence material which, frankly, previous governments would have resisted. We have published two similar intelligence-based accounts, and I think that reflects the kind of society in which we now live. I suspect previous governments would not have needed to do that, largely because previous governments probably would have enjoyed a greater understanding of the need to keep such matters strictly confidential and yet, in making that balance, we judged it right - and I still think it was right - to publish that material.

Q2237 Chairman: Following from that - and we will obviously go into this in more detail - in the global war against terrorism, where one of the major dangers is the coming together of WMD technology and terrorist organisations, it seems highly likely that we will have to rely on intelligence to identify where those threats emanate from. We may then need to act against them quickly. This proposition is central to your recent Defence White Paper, as it was in the New Chapter to the SDR, but if intelligence cannot be relied on, or its credibility may be damaged - in this case it might have been exaggerated or unfounded - how will that affect our ability in the future to persuade allies or public opinion of the need to take military action?

Mr Hoon: I think, unfortunately, your question assumes the outcome of an inquiry that is only just beginning, and obviously, the reason for establishing the inquiry under Lord Butler is to examine precisely those matters. I think it is important that we allow that inquiry to investigate and reach conclusions.

Q2238 Chairman: I did not think I would be the one to have that put-down, Secretary of State. I walked into that pretty unwittingly!

Mr Hoon: I apologise. It was not in any way meant to be a put-down. I simply think that the premise of your question depended on the results of an inquiry that is only just beginning, and given the inquiry, I am not sure it would be wise of me to anticipate its results.

Q2239 Chairman: I thought you used that answer to the earlier questions. Following on from that very successful question - and I think I know the answer but I am still asking it - do you think the war in Iraq has undermined our ability politically to take the sort of pre-emptive actions which the SDR New Chapter identified as likely to be necessary against the threat from international terrorism?

Mr Hoon: No, I do not believe that it has. We have made clear that in dealing with threats to the people of the United Kingdom, it is necessary to take action against those threats where they arise and not simply wait for them to manifest themselves in the United Kingdom itself. In a sense, operations in Afghanistan were an illustration of that, and the operations there, which continue, have not only destroyed the training camps that were previously available to Al-Qaeda, but they have also disrupted significantly their command and control and their communications. That continues to be operationally necessary, but it is a very good illustration, I think, Chairman, of precisely the point that you were making.

Chairman: We look forward to seeing what recommendations the Committee of Inquiry makes to minimise the risk of any failures, if failures there were, in intelligence.

Q2240 Mr Havard: Much of the discussion, obviously, in Westminster village is all about the things that happen in Westminster village, but I am interested in what intelligence and what advice was given to operational commanders on the ground from all of this, presumably expecting to go into a situation of present danger and a threat and all the rest of it on the basis of the intelligence assessment. We know you did not have "Jones the Spy", which is a bit of a problem in Iraq, because you could not grade a lot of the intelligence, but we have heard stories that this is the most photographed country in the world, yet when troops engaged, the maps were wrong, and boys were drawing things on bits of paper and swapping them around. There were serious problems with basic intelligence and information. What I would like to know therefore is what in fact was said to the troops and the operational commanders. Were they expecting the weapons of mass destruction to come via a boy with a bag on his back pretending to be a shepherd rather than it being an inter-ballistic missile? In other words, I would like to know the advice about the asymmetric threat but also the direct military threat. What advice did they get?

Mr Hoon: Troops were prepared to deal with a number of potential threats in the way in which weapons of mass destruction might have been deployed. I am sure all of us can recall some early television clips of missiles coming into deployed forces in Kuwait and people making the appropriate response by getting into their chemical protection suits. It was a very vivid image at the start of the conflict.

Q2241 Mr Havard: Is that because they did not know?

Mr Hoon: It happened on a number of occasions. It was clear that those people had been properly briefed to expect a threat from a weapon of mass destruction, and they took appropriate action. I can recall embedded journalists describing that process as their cameraman took the pictures, and we all saw those pictures on our television screens. It indicates that they were properly prepared for that threat. As the operation developed, there were examples, particularly affecting American coalition forces, of attacks of an asymmetric kind. By then I think we were more in control of the territory from which, say, missiles could have been launched.

Q2242 Mr Havard: What you are really describing is they did not know so they tried to protect themselves against anything and everything.

Mr Hoon: That is probably a prudent preparation for any kind of military conflict.

Q2243 Mr Havard: Is that good enough though?

Mr Hoon: I do not understand why you say it was not good enough.

Q2244 Mr Havard: If you are an operational commander on the ground, you would expect you might get a little bit of graded intelligence as to what it is you are facing.

Mr Hoon: I have indicated, I think, the clearest possible example of what they were prepared to deal with and why they did it.

Chairman: We are coming on to this again, Secretary of State, on NBC defence.

Q2245 Mr Havard: My question is actually about embedded officers in the process, and it does follow on, in a sense. What we have learned is we have had embedded officers in Tampa and then in Qatar as part of the planning process, which I think quite clearly was thought to be, in terms of what was described to us as a "bottom up" process, very successful and very helpful, I think, in terms of doing what one of the officers called "We influenced the planning for the better" and I think some of them were afraid of the planning that they saw when they started. They were quite clearly only brought into the planning at certain stages, and I wanted to ask you about the timing of that. We know they were there after 11 September, and they had been there for some time. We are told that they discovered a "no foreigners" planning exercise going on in May 2002, in other words the Americans were excluding everyone, including the Brits, from that process. They were eventually involved in June and July 2002, and they got some authority to then carry on and do some pre-planning. But what they also told us was that what they discovered was that there were two windows for this exercise to happen in, the spring or the autumn. We know the war happened in the spring. You know the suspicion is that the Americans were always going to go in the spring anyway, no matter what the intelligence told them and no matter what the planning was. The question we want to ask is how successful do you think they were in terms of not only the political activities that were involved in the planning but also the operational side of the planning, on matters such as targeting and so on? There are two questions: one is about the military efficiency of these people's involvement and also their political involvement.

Mr Hoon: First of all, they did a tremendous job, and I think I need to distinguish between the regular liaison that takes place between Britain's armed forces and Centcom, not least after Afghanistan, where we again had British officers working very closely with their American counterparts in preparing operations. That cooperation continued, and involvement in the planning of specific operations, obviously, in relation to Iraq, where again - I do not actually have the exact numbers but wherever I went in visiting forces, in preparing for the operations, British forces were significantly represented, and whenever I have spoken to either military officers or their political leadership in the Pentagon, there has been great praise for the contribution British forces made, but I would not want to be nationalistic about that, and I am sure you were not being. The development of military planning is a process, and I am pleased that British officers were able to contribute significantly to that, but I do not think necessarily they were any better or any worse than their American counterparts. They did an extremely good job together.

Q2246 Mr Havard: I am critical personally of the question about how they go about picking out targets, and I think the fact that the British were there helped that significantly, because they would have bombed a lot of things that otherwise they did not bomb because there was perhaps more intelligence from our side. It links back to the intelligence process. What I am really interested in is were they influencing that timetable, where they also being incorporated into the process, was this part of a political incorporation process or was it really about military planning for military effect? There is a tension between those two things, and it is quite clear that we are going to have to cooperate with the Americans for a long time in the future. Perhaps you can say something about how you see that moving on from the lessons learned here, how you are safeguarding, in a sense, against the incorporation problem whilst enhancing the real effect that they may have in terms of military planning.

Mr Hoon: On the question of targeting, this was a completely integrated process. The air campaign was about as integrated between the US and the UK as it could be. Indeed, I can recall occasions on which aircraft were in the sky, receiving their orders to take out particular targets, and it depended entirely on which aircraft were available, whether they were US or UK. That demonstrates the level of integration of targeting. So I would not accept that there was any kind of difference in approach between the US and the UK in the planning or preparation or indeed in the execution of that process. As far as the embedding of officers in military planning is concerned, their job is to produce the best military plan available for coalition forces. As I say, I believe that British forces played a significant part in the planning and did a tremendous job.

Q2247 Chairman: Is this likely to be permanent, Secretary of State, or just a series of ad hoc arrangements?

Mr Hoon: I said in answer to the earlier question that there has been regular liaison and exchanges between Centcom, for example, and indeed other American command headquarters, and British forces. I do not think they are ever based on a permanent arrangement as such, but nevertheless, the level of exchange over the years is such that in effect there have always been British officers there, to the best of my knowledge, certainly in my time in this job.

Q2248 Rachel Squire: First Reflections and your Lessons for the Future report highlighted the competing pressures of diplomatic negotiations and military preparations. It is clear that in seeking to avoid undermining the diplomatic phase of the crisis over Iraq, some decisions in respect of military preparations were delayed. Would you consider that it is inevitable that where military operations are just one part of the spectrum of diplomatic and political activity, the need to keep the political processes on track for as long as possible will act as a constraint on military preparations?

Mr Hoon: It could. I do not believe that it did as far as this particular operation is concerned. Inevitably it is my job to ensure on behalf of the armed forces and the Ministry of Defence that there is a consistent approach both to a diplomatic effort as well as to a military effort, and I believe that that consistent approach was carried through.

Q2249 Rachel Squire: You say that you do not believe it did in relation to Operation Telic. Are you really confident that there was no effect of the political diplomatic process on the holding of stocks of military supplies or in being able, for instance, to place orders early enough for matters for urgent operational requirements so as to allow their delivery to be just in time rather than just too late?

Mr Hoon: That is a perfectly proper question, which I will try and deal with. As far as stockholding is concerned, a judgment was made - the Committee has, I think, discussed this in the past - about the appropriate level of equipment in store immediately available for a rapid reaction in terms of an international crisis. A judgment was made that that should be sufficient to equip the rapid reaction force at around 9,000. Thereafter the judgment was made that urgent operational requirements and the process of supplying those extra pieces of equipment would require sufficient time in order to be able to put a larger force into the field. That judgment, as I indicated in my introductory remarks, perhaps required some updating in the light of the kind of operation that we have just carried out in Iraq, which is why I have decided that there shall be larger stocks immediately available. That is in the light of the lessons that we have learned from this operation. As the NAO, I think, makes clear in its conclusions, there is always a balance to be struck between having equipment available immediately, given the cost of that, as against the process that we went through in relation to making sure that our troops were sufficiently equipped to conduct military operations in Iraq. It is a balance. It is a judgment. I judged that the previous level was not sufficient, but it could be the case - and I well recall this when I was first appointed - that we end up not using stock because it becomes time-expired and the money is thereby wasted. One of my early jobs was to close down various warehouses full of spare parts for equipment that had gone out of service and that had never been used. I have a responsibility not only to the taxpayer but also to the armed forces to make sure that we spend scarce resources as effectively as possible, and destroying stock that has never been used because it is no longer relevant is not something that I think is necessarily the best use of those scarce resources, either from the point of view of the taxpayer or, crucially, from the point of view of the armed forces, because I could have spent that money on something more useful as far as they were concerned. It is a judgment; it is a balance. We have got to get that judgment and balance right. My view is that we did what was necessary in Iraq, but perhaps learning the lessons that we hold larger stocks for the future than we did at the time. Those judgments evolve in the light of experience.

Q2250 Rachel Squire: Can I then ask you whether, in terms of learning those lessons, there was any consideration of whether international political processes could impact on the urgent delivery of supplies and equipment that had actually been manufactured outside the UK.

Mr Hoon: I do not think we had a particular problem on this occasion, but there will be plenty of people in this room that can recall the difficulties that we had on previous occasions in securing ammunition from particular countries. I had probably better not name those countries, to be diplomatic, but I think everyone knows what I am talking about. Obviously, the reliability of supplies is crucial, and that is again something that has to be taken into account as part of this process.

Q2251 Chairman: We are just trying to remember. Switzerland and Belgium. Apologies to any Belgians and Swiss.

Mr Hoon: So much for diplomacy, Chairman!

Chairman: I was never skilled in that, Secretary of State.

Q2252 Mr Blunt: Secretary of State, before following up on issues about equipment, can I just say that I spent two and a half years as a special advisor to one of your predecessors, and I have a vivid memory of reading a cutting from the Sun in Warsaw about a story about a Wren who had gone AWOL and was causing some concern, Wrens having just been introduced to the ships. It would be extraordinary, given the sensitivity to the press of the administration that you represent that your cuttings service is not being sent out to your private office on a daily basis when you are overseas. Not now, but could you please investigate and confirm that your private office received the cuttings service in question on those dates that you were away in Warsaw and Ukraine?

Mr Hoon: I will certainly investigate that.

Q2253 Mr Blunt: Let me begin with something that I hope we all agree on. I want to declare my interest as the son and grandson of two senior military logisticians, who I think would have taken huge pleasure from the unprecedented achievement in modern military logistics, which you described in your opening statement as heroic, in getting the equipment out to the Gulf for Gulf War II. Would they be right to take huge pride in that achievement, if they were still alive, and would they also be right in saying that the scale of their achievements - including all the civilian agencies involved - exceeded everyone's reasonable expectations?

Mr Hoon: I am grateful for that observation, because it is my view that the logisticians have not always been accorded the praise that I think they rightly deserve. They tend to be people who are rather taken for granted in the process, and I must say I was particularly impressed when I went to exercise Saif Sareea.

Q2254 Mr Blunt: I fear we do not have very long, so "yes" will do.

Mr Hoon: It is important that I answer the question. I recall going there towards the end of the exercise and at that stage there was the process beginning of getting the equipment and people back to the United Kingdom, and I must say that was a remarkable effort and, as you have properly said, this was something which was duplicated in our operations in Iraq this time.

Q2255 Mr Blunt: Therefore, Secretary of State, it is correct that the failures of supply that have been identified by the NAO are actually rather more to do with the strategic issue of the timetable to which the logisticians were working than any lower order issues such as efficiency in the supply chain about asset tracking that you are talking about. You have talked about the sheer volume of matériel that the logistic chain is having to deal with in a very short space of time. You, as Defence Secretary, were responsible for the timetable. Is that correct?

Mr Hoon: Yes, but if the implication of that is that there should have been more time, then I am sure your father and grandfather would have recognised as the logisticians that they were that the time is the time that you have available, and the job of a logistician is to ensure that the equipment is moved from, in this case, mostly the United Kingdom to theatre in the time that is available. That is the job they did, and that is why they did it so heroically.

Q2256 Mr Blunt: The point is, Secretary of State, that you were responsible for the timetable by the political decision that you took as Secretary of State for Defence for when preparations could begin. Could you turn to the chronology in your First Reflections document on page 73, the second booklet: Operations in Iraq: Lessons for the Future. As far as you are aware, the chronology is accurate?

Mr Hoon: Yes.

Q2257 Mr Blunt: There are no dates in this chronology that the MoD appears to regard as significant between 17 December 1999 and 12 September 2002.

Mr Hoon: I am sorry. That is a completely open-ended question. I would be much happier if you were rather more precise as to what you mean by that.

Q2258 Mr Blunt: You have presented a chronology of events which is very detailed about what happened in Iraq and the events leading up to Iraq, and the MoD does not appear, for the lay reader, to want to identify any events that might be important in the run-up to operations before 12 September.

Mr Hoon: Are you suggesting that there were some?

Q2259 Mr Blunt: Yes, I am, and let us go on. Could you go to the entry of 18 November, which says, "United States approaches a number of countries seeking support in the event that military action proves necessary." What conclusion are we meant to draw from that about the United Kingdom?

Mr Hoon: That we were one of the countries that had been approached.

Q2260 Mr Blunt: When did the United States actually ask the United Kingdom for help, and when did you become aware that the United States was pretty much determined on the removal of Saddam Hussein, if necessary by force?

Mr Hoon: I do not think it is possible to provide you with the precision that you would like. As the timetable indicates, there was a process. That process, as I was asked earlier, was both a political and diplomatic process, as well as a military preparation. Certainly, the first indication that we were given from the Prime Minister that planning and preparation could begin was on 28 September, in a speech that I think he gave to the House of Commons. That was really the point at which the planning and preparation of a specific military operation got under way, but obviously, no specific decision was taken to commit forces until many, many months later, once there had been a vote in the House of Commons.

Q2261 Mr Blunt: But, Secretary of State, this chronology is leading us to believe - and you have said that we were entitled to draw the conclusion from this this was the date of the request to the United Kingdom on 18 November - that on 18 November the United States asked for our help. A week later you initiated contingency planning with your announcement of 25 November in the House of Commons and everything rolled out from there. That is simply not true, is it?

Mr Hoon: As I have indicated, the Prime Minister made a speech indicating that planning and preparation could begin, and that was, as far as the Ministry of Defence was concerned, the time at which the process got under way as far as planning is concerned.

Q2262 Mr Blunt: With respect, Secretary of State, that answer is also pure sophistry. The idea that the Ministry of Defence would only be going into proper planning after the Prime Minister makes a speech in the House of Commons on 28 September 2002, not only beggars belief, but also contradicts the evidence that we received from Air Marshal Burridge and General Reith.

Mr Hoon: I can only tell you what my understanding of the position is, and if you would like to give me some evidence for your assertion, I would be delighted to consider it.

Q2263 Mr Blunt: Yes. It was referred to earlier by Mr Havard. Air Marshal Burridge and General Reith have told us there was a decision in June 2002 by the Americans to bring the United Kingdom in on their planning cycle. Indeed, British officers were even responsible for suggesting when the operation should happen. Air Marshal Burridge said, "At no stage did we say 'Here is the end date by which we are going to do this.' What we did have was a couple of windows. We said" - the United Kingdom - "ideally it makes sense either to do this in the spring of 2003 or autumn of 2003." That was a suggestion from the United Kingdom officers in Centcom planning for this operation.

Mr Hoon: Not planning for this specific operation in the way that this operation was conducted.

Q2264 Mr Blunt: No, but I want you to reflect on this point: that they were planning for military operations against Iraq, which any Secretary of State for Defence would reasonably conclude from what you knew about the intention of the United States and the view of the Prime Minister at the time. It was reasonable to conclude that the United Kingdom might very well be involved.

Mr Hoon: I am making quite clear that the decision to initiate specific planning inside the Ministry of Defence followed the Prime Minister's speech, as I say, I think on 24 September. There was then a great deal of planning and preparation that was necessary. The specific operation carried on from there.

Q2265 Mr Blunt: Secretary of State, you just told Rachel Squire that the timetable you set could have impacted on operations, but you said "I do not believe that it did." I am afraid the charge against you, Secretary of State, is that you did take decisions too late, and that you had no right to expect the logistics to work as well as they did. You have just told this Committee that they exceeded reasonable expectations, and the position our forces found themselves in, because of the timetable you imposed on them by not giving the authority for UORs, for example, to be initiated until 25 November 2002, would have been even worse. That charge is sustained by the evidence from soldiers on the front line.

Mr Hoon: I do not accept that for a moment and the obvious explanation that your father and grandfather would have accepted that, given more time, they could have moved equipment more successfully, that is self-evidently obvious and that really is all that your argument amounts to. The reality is that logisticians move equipment in the amount of time that they have available and they have to use whatever equipment they have ----

Q2266 Mr Blunt: Yes, that is ----

Mr Hoon: If you will stop interrupting me for a second - you ask questions and I am trying to give you an answer. Now, the explanation, therefore - and again if you were in a position to consult, you would find that, for example, it depends on how many ship movements you have in any given space of time, how many aircraft movements - is they were able to do this in the short time available because the difficulty you have still, notwithstanding your assertion to the contrary, is that actually British forces were ready to conduct military operations on the date, many of them even before the date, and there is nothing anywhere that you can suggest that they were not available to carry out those military operations successfully and in fact that is why the logistics effort was so successful.

Chairman: One more question, Crispin.

Mr Blunt: I am afraid, Secretary of State, there is evidence precisely to the contrary and that evidence comes from members of the RTR who, in their account of crossing the front line, describing the Iraqi front line, said, "What was impressive, however, was the effectiveness of their camouflage and concealment, the depth of their vehicle trenches and in general the quality of their field defences and engineering. It was sobering to reflect that had they manned the position, there would have been a serious fight". In the same article they say, "We learned of several Iraqi surface-to-surface missile launches, including one which landed six kilometres away and generally the threat of WMD use was more a matter of when rather than if". Secretary of State, the timetable you imposed on our armed forces, knowing for several months that our armed forces were likely to go into action before you authorised the expenditure of funds and full preparation on the 25 November 2002, then led the Challenger 2 tanks and Warrior armoured personnel carriers to go across the front line in the expectation that they would be fighting in a chemical environment without NBC filters.

Chairman: Thank you.

Mr Blunt: No, I have not finished.

Chairman: You have. We have reached question 3 out of 14 and we have 45 minutes, so let the Secretary of State answer and we will move on.

Mr Blunt: I would like to conclude this line of questioning.

Chairman: Other people have questions to ask. I said it was the last question, Crispin. Please give me an answer, Secretary of State, and then we have to move to the fourth question.

Mr Blunt: Chairman, I protest.

Q2267 Chairman: You can protest as much as you like. Crispin, you have made some great points, but there are other people who have other points to make in the short time available.

Mr Hoon: I have made clear on the previous occasion that I came to speak to this Committee and on each and every occasion these issues have been raised in the House of Commons that there were shortcomings. The fact that the filters were not available for Challenger 2 tanks was one of those shortcomings, but nevertheless, as you well know, each soldier was properly protected from a chemical attack, training had been conducted for those in tanks to wear the appropriate chemical protection suit, each suit was available to each man inside a tank and operational commanders judged that that was sufficient protection. The further difficulty about your line of argument is of course that it depends upon a particular area of the operation. The truth is, and it is set out in the NAO's Report and it is set out in our own Lessons Learned Report, and again this is something that you are not recognising, that it was of course recognised by each commanding officer in each part of the chain of command in judging that his forces were ready and prepared to conduct offensive military operations, not a judgment made by a politician, but a judgment made by soldiers on the ground whose job it is to decide whether their forces are sufficiently prepared and safe to take appropriate action. Each one of those soldiers made that judgment and, therefore, when they crossed the line, that was their professional military judgment. If you will forgive me for saying so, I rather prefer their professional military judgment from the unjustified assertions that you are making.

Q2268 Mike Gapes: Can I take you a bit further on in this question of logistics and the planning assumptions. You have already told us when you gave evidence before that this was the largest logistics effort by the UK since the 1991 Gulf War and that it was achieved in half the time. The assumptions have been based upon the Strategic Defence Review of 1998 and the concept of the Joint Rapid Reaction Force, but Air Marshal Burridge has already told us that this was based upon balancing risks and he said that if you adopt a 'just in time' concept, you are introducing risk and if you believe that your planning assumptions are less than robust, then that risk could be significant. What assessment do you have of the risks that were entailed in this 'just in time' concept and, not getting into what we have just had but, the actual risks that were being dealt with on the ground by virtue of the fact that, as we understand it, tank units have told us that their training was affected badly because the Challenger 2 tanks were only modified just in time?

Mr Hoon: I think that is a perfectly fair point. I was just looking through the NAO Report at paragraph 8 of its conclusions and what they said was, "For any required level of readiness, a balance has to be struck between having people and equipment ready to go immediately and making good shortfalls in the time available", and really that is a question of judgment. I said at the outset that I thought that perhaps 9,000 sets of clothing available was perhaps not sufficient in the light of the experience that we have had and we are now going to hold larger numbers for that reason, but, as I said earlier, I think this is a matter of judgment. What I think is important to emphasise, as I have just been doing, is in the end military commanders at unit level and above in the chain of command judged that they were prepared to take offensive military action.

Q2269 Mike Gapes: Secretary of State, the Chief of Joint Operations, Lieutenant General Reith, told us that the actual size of the British force was only decided at a very late stage and that it was actually shaped by the task rather than the size of the force determining which task it could carry out. Do you think that is an ideal situation?

Mr Hoon: I think it is consistent with quite a significant adjustment that perhaps military historians will see in the conduct of this particular campaign. I have talked about the creation of military effect and the emphasis very much was on what effect were coalition forces trying to achieve in the deployment of their forces and, therefore, in the planning that has already been referred to, conducted with the United States, we were able to offer certain contributions to the creation of that effect. I think significantly in the air, but also on the ground, the decision was taken, consistent with the planning, to attack along certain routes and we were able to offer appropriate contributions. That makes it sound like a rather formal process, but the truth is that our integration with the United States in a military sense means, not least because operations had been relatively recently conducted in Afghanistan, that the US is wholly familiar with the contributions that we can make and it was very much an easy process to adjust our force package to the requirements of the overall operation.

Q2270 Mike Gapes: Did we say, "We have this available", and they said, "Right, we want to use it", or did they come to us and say, "We need this and can you provide it?"?

Mr Hoon: I think it is more of the latter, but it is more like, "We know you have this. Can you provide it? We require this particular capability to conduct this operation, to create this military effect. We know that the United Kingdom has that capability and we would like to use it".

Q2271 Mike Gapes: How much was this influenced by your assessment, and it gets back to the point about intelligence in a way, of the morale, the leadership, the organisation and the equipment available to the enemy? How much were the planning assumptions and the fact that you were going in in a certain way on a different basis from what might have been envisaged originally based upon intelligence assessments about how poor the Iraqi forces actually were?

Mr Hoon: I think it is fair to say that the planning was conducted on a worst-case scenario on the assumption that Iraqi forces might fight more vigorously than actually it turned out that they did, and I think that is a proper assumption to make. Certainly assumptions were built into the planning to allow us to overcome whatever resistance happened to be in our way and I think it is now almost a matter of history, but I was well aware of the way in which, for example, Iraq's armed forces were organised. Students of the Soviet Union would have found the military organisation of Saddam Hussein's armed forces wholly familiar. There was a purely military element, but there was equally a very strong, I suppose, political element that each of the units had loyalists of Saddam Hussein in position to ensure that the leadership in particular was concentrating on what he wanted them to do and that resistance was actually the real resistance in a military sense, and when we got to the edge of Basra, it was not particularly a military reaction, but it was very much the reaction of various groups that were utterly loyal to Saddam Hussein that had to be overcome.

Q2272 Mike Gapes: In the light of the quicker-than-expected success and the fact that your worst-case assumptions were not borne out in practice, did you intend to revise the planning assumptions based upon the experience of Operation Telic?

Mr Hoon: I think we are moving from the general to the specific in the sense that I hope that we do not have to conduct offensive operations against Saddam Hussein's Iraq again and, therefore, this was a particular and specific plan to deal with that country under that regime at a given time.

Q2273 Mike Gapes: It does not have general applicability, that we do not learn the lessons?

Mr Hoon: Exactly, and I was going to go on to deal with it in a more general sense. I think there is little doubt that in building in lessons learned from this approach we will be thinking far more about the creation of effect. How do you deal with a regime of this kind that has intimidation as its central reason for its existence? I think that the military effects, not least in Baghdad, for example, where precise bombing meant that we were able to attack buildings solely associated with the regime and we all saw the television pictures the next morning, and I was aware of the targets that had been struck and I was then able to see on television cars travelling up and down the roads in Baghdad as if very little had happened, the people of Baghdad were able to see for themselves that it was the regime that was our target, that there was not indiscriminate civilian bombing and that had an enormous impact, both, I think, on the civilian population, but also on the regime.

Q2274 Mr Roy: Secretary of State, I would like to stay away from the political point-scoring which the Iraqi debate seems to be becoming on a daily basis, which quite frankly I think sickens members of the British public, and I would like to focus on the people that really matter and that is the men and women who actually were at the front line in Iraq and I do not think that at any point in this debate we should forget that that is really what we should keep our focus on. I would like to talk to you in particular with regard to reservists. You said in your opening statement, "We have also recognised that our procedures for mobilising reservists need to allow for far greater notice than was possible in January of last year and I am pleased that we have managed to do it a bit better in subsequent mobilisations, meeting our aspiration to provide 21 rather than 14 days' notice". Secretary of State, why was it not possible in January last year?

Mr Hoon: I think the experience of mobilising that number of reservists in a short space of time was not one that the Department had had over a number of years and, therefore, I accept that there were lessons to be learned in that process and we do have to do better, as I have indicated. Our information about reservists, their location and sometimes their skills and capabilities, was not as good as it should have been, and I think that all affected the mobilisation. That is not to say overall that this was not a success and it is in great part, as you have rightly said, to the enthusiasm and attitude of those people who wanted to be mobilised that it was carried through so successfully, but I accept that it could be done better.

Q2275 Mr Roy: Secretary of State, last year in Basra I spoke to a reservist from Liverpool whose working life was as a lorry driver working for a small haulier business and he was very concerned that, because of the short time that was given to him, it was a problem for him, it was a problem for his employer, and it was certainly a problem for his future employment prospects when he got back home. Have the views of those reservists been sought and have the views of the employers been sought? Do your findings stop at the kind of top-brass level or have you generally asked the people concerned?

Mr Hoon: Certainly a great deal of effort has been made both to discuss with the reservists themselves their reaction, but as well I have spent quite a bit of time myself on this and talked to employers. I have attended a number of regional meetings where employers of reservists have been present and I have had the opportunity of asking in a sense what went right, but also trying to understand from their point of view what might have gone wrong. Again I think that the enthusiasm of the employers has been remarkable. I know that there have been in some cases particular difficulties, but actually, given the numbers deployed and the size and scale of this operation, I have not actually detected any widespread opposition from employers to the fact that their employees have been mobilised. Indeed overwhelmingly the response I have had, talking to employers, is that they have been very proud to have played a part.

Q2276 Mr Roy: I think what the employers feared was certainly not so much the mobilisation as after the mobilisation, after the men and women have returned to their work, that they would then be mobilised again for short periods which was certainly going to cause problems and that was certainly put across to me.

Mr Hoon: One of the things that I think we do have to do in the future, and this came through perhaps in particular more from employers, I think they want a sense in which they know the nature of the contribution that they are making. I was very struck by how keen employers were to know where their employee was, what he or she was doing and I think we need to do more on that kind of basis to keep employers informed because that actually encourages then the sense in which they themselves, the employers, are also making a contribution.

Q2277 Mr Roy: The SDR proposed much more deployable and usable reserves and Operation Telic was a major test of that concept. Did the reserves pass that test?

Mr Hoon: With flying colours, absolutely overwhelmingly, and I think that is the big change. As I said earlier, I think it is a change which in a sense the Department have had to deal with. Although the words were there on the page, I accept that it is always a test in reality as to whether you can do that. It was done. There were areas where it could have been done better, but I do not think anyone can doubt, and regular forces, I think, would bear this out for me, that the reserves made a very significant, absolutely vital, contribution to the success of the operation.

Q2278 Mr Roy: And the higher management of those reservists - have lessons been learnt and are you now looking at ways of improving that management system?

Mr Hoon: Overwhelmingly I think the real lesson has been about communication. I have mentioned already the need to keep employers informed as to what their employees have been doing. I also think there is a family dimension to this because very often, unlike regular forces who are part of a unit and have all of the right support elements in place to inform family members, and I attended, for example, on one occasion essentially a meeting organised for the families of a particular regiment, all that is done as a matter of routine for the regular forces, and often reservists were coming as single people, and I am not talking about their marital status, but simply the way in which they were deployed, and I do not think we did enough, in my judgment, to ensure that there was communication with their families who obviously and understandably were concerned about their welfare. I think that is something that, consistent with the concept in the SDR, we have to do because we have to make sure that someone coming to join the armed forces in this kind of operation, who does not have the back-up of a regiment or all the kinds of structures that are in place, should have regular communication, and modern communications should make that perfectly possible. It is something that we have put in hand.

Mr Roy: I am glad to hear you say that, Secretary of State, because every reservist has a family which really needs, I think, to be treated a lot better in the future.

Q2279 Mr Crausby: You have already told us, Secretary of State, that there were challenges posed by switching our planning from the north to the south. You said that in your opening statement. What can you tell us about the problems that we faced as a result of that shift from the northern option to the southern option?

Mr Hoon: I do not think it had any necessarily detrimental effects in the sense that fortunately our forces were not - I am not particularly sure they were particularly under way and I am trying to remember whether anyone was actually diverted and I do not think that they were. Essentially they were on their way to the theatre. I do not think anyone went astray or off route by the decision to go to the south, which is a decision that I took very early as soon as I realised, having been to Turkey and having discussed it in Turkey, that the option of going through Turkey was not likely to be available to us. I probably took an earlier decision than other people did because having spoken to a number of members of the Government in Turkey, despite the fact that they did not actually rule it out at the time, I simply felt, as was proved correct, that they were not going to agree. We then had to take a decision which had an impact, consistent with Mike Gapes' question, on the plan that then evolved because inevitably we needed different kinds of forces to participate in an attack from the south, but we were able to make those adjustments in time.

Q2280 Mr Crausby: The Committee has been told that we proposed the northern option as opposed to the Americans proposing it, and the initial proposal involved 5,000 fewer troops in the northern option than was consequently the case in the southern one, so how far did that subsequent shift to the south lead to the various equipment problems that we subsequently heard about as a result of the fact that we deployed a three-brigade division rather than a two-brigade division supported by the Americans?

Mr Hoon: Again I just want to deal with the idea that somehow we had a bit of a plan and it was different from the Americans' and we persuaded them. There was a plan and the plan originally did involve a northern option. It involved a pincer attack on Iraq and the idea was to give Saddam Hussein more choices than he could deal with and the northern option seemed to me sensible military planning. It obviously involved a political dimension and, being an election in Turkey, there was a change of government and it was necessary to gain their approval for a long road crossing of southern Turkey. I judged, I think, on January 8, but I am not precise as to the date, that that political approval was not going to be forthcoming. No one had actually gone further, as far as the deployment was concerned, on the way to Turkey than was the case and indeed there have been some suggestions that actually being able to continue down through the canals to the south was probably easier than it would have been to cross southern Turkey by road. That road, which I have studied at great length at various times in this, is not the easiest road. It would not have been easy to transport the men and the equipment required and, therefore, in some senses the decision to go from the south logistically was arguably easier, although I am not a logistician, but I think that the general feeling was that getting our men and equipment into theatre from the south probably saved us some time.

Q2281 Mr Crausby: We also understand that Jaguar reconnaissance aircraft could not be redeployed from Turkish airfields. Did that make any difference to our operations in the south?

Mr Hoon: It did not, but there were obviously practical concerns because, as the Committee is well aware, we were still continuing to conduct operations over the no-fly zones, and the Jaguar aircraft made a significant contribution to that, and we had to look at ways in which we obviously did not contravene the political decisions taken in Turkey and making sure that we had those aircraft available was important to us.

Q2282 Mr Jones: Secretary of State, can I ask about personal equipment. There has been a lot of media attention certainly around body armour and other issues. Were you aware in May 2003 as to what extent troops in theatre did not have the full complement of personal equipment, certainly desert combats, boots and obviously enhanced body armour?

Mr Hoon: I think I indicated to the Committee that there were shortfalls and I was also very conscious at the time, being asked questions about boots, that there had been some press speculation in particular about people not being equipped with boots at all, not least of the right size and particularly referring to reservists. I have indicated this morning that obviously two weeks after the end of offensive combat operations our state of knowledge was not what it was as the investigations into the operation continued and we developed, as I am sure the Committee have, a much fuller picture as those investigations developed.

Q2283 Mr Jones: I think that is a brilliant Yes, Minister answer, but can I just remind you of what you said to us on 14 May 2000 when, in reply to Jim Knight, who is obviously no longer with us, you said, "All the requisite number of boots, clothing and equipment were there", and then you go on to say, "I am still waiting to see any sign of an apology from individual journalists and editors".

Mr Hoon: That is precisely the answer that I was thinking about when I answered your previous question because I, and I know the Committee did as well, visited Chilwell on a number of occasions, not least because it is only a couple of miles from where I live, and one of the complaints in the press was that Chilwell did not have the right size of boots and clothing for reservists mobilising and I think that was what was in my mind when I answered that question in the way that I did.

Q2284 Mr Jones: Therefore, the press comments and stories were actually correct and of the individual soldiers that we have seen as part of this inquiry both in theatre and also subsequently, the concerns about, for example, people going into areas without the correct body armour and boots, those stories are not just hearsay, but they are actually true, are they not?

Mr Hoon: Again I am not aware of any suggestion, I have not seen one which actually was true that anyone went into Iraq without boots. I accept, and I think I said at the outset, that there was concern rightly, and I understand that it affected morale, of not having appropriate desert combat equipment, but I think you will find that the entire American marine expeditionary force got all the way to Baghdad in its green combat kit. I do not judge, nor did military commanders, that it was necessarily affecting operational effectiveness that all of the desert kit reached the people when it needed to. That is not to say that that is the same as the question of body armour which I think ought to be dealt with separately.

Q2285 Mr Jones: Do you not also think that if you are sending people into combat that one of the important things is to have morale as high as possible? Clearly if you have got people not going in with the requisite equipment, for example and more importantly, I think, body armour, then that is quite concerning if you have been asked to put your life on the line for Queen and country?

Mr Hoon: I do not disagree that those are important issues but I think there is a distinction to be drawn between the effect on morale of not having desert clothing as against clearly the risk to life, of not having sufficient body armour, and that is why I sought to draw a distinction. The military judgment was that the absence of desert combats for every single member of the Armed Forces was not necessarily affecting their ability to fight, and I gave you the illustration of the American Marine Expeditionary Force who fought superbly all the way to Baghdad. The issue of proper protection and the availability of ceramic plates and so on is a separate matter about which, as I have indicated previously, I am extremely concerned.

Q2286 Mr Jones: Can I say one final thing about the effectiveness. If you have got a pair of boots that are melting as you are walking, does that not affect your ability to fight?

Mr Hoon: Perhaps that was one of the stories that I was thinking of when I responded on 14 May. I have not seen any substantiated evidence of boots melting, apart from one person, I think he was a corporal, who had the wrong boots with him. He had taken those particular boots and they were not appropriate for the job that he was doing. That was the only time I have been able to substantiate this story about boots melting. I keep asking that question, I have asked it on a number of occasions. I think the example is of someone from the RAF who had a pair of light boots that were simply not the right boots in the circumstances and he should never have taken them.

Q2287 Mr Jones: What about instances of troops having foot problems because their feet were sweating in the wrong type of boots? Are you aware of that?

Mr Hoon: Again, that is a consequence, I accept, of not having desert equipment and that is why desert combat boots are issued. I am not aware that was a significant problem. There may have been some soldiers who suffered from that but there is a judgment made about the temperature and the conditions and that judgment is obviously made by commanding officers. This is the importance of these equipment issues. The question is whether this affected their ability to conduct the operations and I have not seen any suggestion that it did.

Q2288 Mr Hancock: We were told in evidence by an army officer who was responsible for chemical suits, and I take you up on your point about things that were of critical importance as against things for comfort, and you talked about ceramic plates -----

Mr Hoon: I was not dismissing it at all. I did not suggest that for a moment.

Q2289 Mr Hancock: I did not say you dismissed it, I said you separated the two issues, and I agree with you that they should be, the ceramic plates and the chemical suits are the separation points, I think. We were told that there was a command decision made that the suits should not be checked to see if they were effective because if they were defective in any way there were no replacements and it would be bad for morale if those suits were then taken away from people. Were you made aware of that command decision being made?

Mr Hoon: No, I was not, and I am still not aware of it.

Q2290 Mr Cran: Secretary of State, my colleague, Kevan Jones, has highlighted the question of personal equipment, which as we walk around the MoD estate, as you would imagine, excites enormous interest and is of very considerable importance. However, can I move us on to equipment generally? You said in your own statement, "I think it is clear that the performance of our equipment was good", and of course you are on very strong ground when you say that because the NAO's report said: "Service equipment operated effectively in the austere environment in Iraq" and was equally effusive in the rest of its document. By and large it operated effectively, however Air Marshal Burridge identified communications as a significant problem. That was reflected in your own document, Lessons for the Future and, therefore, what I think the Committee is interested in in relation to communications is (a) your concern and (b) what the heck are we going to do about it, particularly because of the gap that is opening up between ourselves and the United States? Given the likelihood is that future operations, if there are to be any, will be with the United States, that is a fairly critical question.

Mr Hoon: I broadly agree with what you are saying. The Department, as the Committee well knows, has had a long history of difficulty with securing appropriate communications. I am delighted that we are now beginning to get that right and there is little doubt that the Bowman personal role radio, for example, was an outstanding success, so much so that I understand the Americans were not only borrowing our radios but also purchased some for themselves, which I think is an interesting aspect of the debate that has been about whether it is always the Brits borrowing from the United States. We have to go on ensuring that the communications equipment is rolled out, that the Bowman programme is continuing successfully, and it has done very well to date, not least for precisely the reason that you have identified, to ensure that we can continue to work alongside American forces. I would not suggest, and I am sure you were not, that the entire American Army, for example, is digitised. Indeed, what is interesting about the way in which the Americans have deployed their technology is that different parts of the American Armed Forces cannot always communicate one with another. What I think we have to do is to ensure that in the development of technology we can inter-operate with those parts of the US Armed Forces that we are used to dealing with on a regular basis. I have referred already to the close co-operation in the air. That is an area where vitally communications need to be absolutely right in order to ensure that inter-operation. I think it was one of the outstanding successes of the operation. I think there is some more progress to make on the ground in particular as we try and develop new and leading edge technology.

Q2291 Mr Cran: That is the general answer, if I could go to the specifics.

Mr Hoon: Please.

Q2292 Mr Cran: If you take, simply because Air Marshal Burridge did, the Skynet 4, he said there were considerable limitations with it. He then went on to say: "...we are at the moment in the process of launching the Skynet 5 system satellites, which will be up and running over the next four to five years..." Great, but the problem is what is going to happen between now and the next four or five years? I think we may be allowed to hypothecate that we may be involved in another exercise like the one we have just had.

Mr Hoon: I personally hope not.

Q2293 Mr Cran: So do I, but on the premise that we might.

Mr Hoon: I think the answer to that is to say that the equipment available to the UK Armed Forces today is better than it has ever been. There has been a steady process of improvement and I want that process to continue. Therefore, whilst I would like every piece of equipment that we have on the blocks available to use tomorrow, I recognise that particularly in some of this leading edge equipment, and you have described one example of it, it is going to take time, not only to ensure that that equipment is successful and can be used and deployed but obviously that forces are trained to deal with it. I am absolutely confident the equipment available today is better than the equipment available last year and better than the equipment available ten years ago. It is an iterative process. One of the points I sometimes make when I have these sorts of discussions in the Department is that if we got to a certain level of equipment and then stopped supplying new equipment we would have massive problems five or ten years down the track. This is an experience we all have with computer technology. In some ways the delay in supplying communications equipment, and I will not ascribe the responsibility to that but Mr Blunt knows what I am talking about, caused by previous difficulties has now given us an outstanding system that ironically had we purchased the equipment as planned by previous governments we would now already be thinking about a replacement. We all know that if you buy a computer today, in six months' time there is usually a better model available and probably at a cheaper price. Because of the failures of previous governments we are now in a process of having state of the art equipment that will serve us extremely well.

Q2294 Mr Cran: As in the last time you came before this Committee, I do not know about other Members of the Committee, you kept answering questions I did not ask and this is another such example. I asked a much simpler question, which is between Skynet 4 and Skynet 5 - we are not going to get to Skynet for four or five years - what do we do if we have a similar operation? Do we just make and mend?

Mr Hoon: I am sorry my answer was too sophisticated. The answer is that we continue to use the equipment that we have knowing that we are going to improve it as we go along. I am sorry I did not put it as simply as that.

Mr Blunt: All the equipment that is working so well was ordered by a previous Conservative Government.

Q2295 Mr Cran: Just one more question. The general question arising out of Operation Telic is what additional major equipments, or capabilities, or enhancements to existing equipments do you foresee as necessary and will the funds be forthcoming to achieve that? An unsophisticated answer will be perfectly acceptable to me.

Mr Hoon: We set out some of our thinking in the White Paper before Christmas and I think you are right to concentrate in the area of technology, in particular communications. If I can put it in a simple way, I think that there is a similar lesson to be learned by the Armed Forces in the use of computer technology as has been learned by most businesses on the civil side. I think it is that level of change that we need to anticipate and prepare for. I accept that is an expensive business and I have to ensure that we have the funds available but, as previous Secretaries of State have found, that is always a challenge.

Q2296 Chairman: Additional funds or shifting from one budget to another?

Mr Hoon: I think both. We have been fortunate in receiving significant additional funds in each of the four years that I have been Secretary of State. I recognise that in planning for the future it is necessary to ensure that existing equipment - I used the word "flexibility" in the White Paper - is sufficiently flexible to cope with the kinds of technology challenges that I have described. There will be some equipment that is less flexible and less useable and it would not make sense to maintain that equipment in the light of the kinds of changes we want to introduce with the new technology. As others will know, as I indicated earlier this is not a process that stands still.

Q2297 Mr Viggers: But there are severe budgetary constraints, are there not? The National Audit Office identified an over-run of £3.1 billion on 18 separate projects. Will the extra money which will be needed to fund that over-run need to come from other areas? Will it affect your ability to put in hand the lessons of Operation Telic?

Mr Hoon: One of the things I have learned in wrestling with the MoD's budget is that those kinds of assessments are, of course, snapshots of the position today. What I do not know, and there is an irony about this which I find frustrating, is whether there will be any further delay in those kinds of projects. I hope not. One of the challenges of Smart procurement has actually been that by delivering equipment more successfully and earlier, which is by and large the report's conclusions, we have to pay for that equipment sooner and that has put a kind of pressure on the budget which previous administrations did not have to face because previous administrations made judgments about the availability of funding for these projects on the assumption that significant parts of the equipment programme would slip and, therefore, in each financial year there was always going to be an amount of money that was not committed. Smart procurement has actually made it more difficult to make those assumptions because as industry does more successfully deliver equipment on time - the report makes this clear - the Ministry of Defence, not surprisingly, has to pay for that equipment and that does put pressure on the year-on-year situation. Although that is a disturbing snapshot, it may not be the position next year or the year after, as I hope these projects now are back on track and will be delivered on time.

Q2298 Mr Viggers: My question was whether the budgetary shortfall will affect your ability to deal with the lessons of Operation Telic. Can I take it a little further? Will you need to be making short-term programme cuts, like cutting helicopter flying hours, overseas training, live firing of weapons, vehicle movements to save fuel, etc?

Mr Hoon: There is always a programme of activity that in any given financial year has to be adjusted according to the financial reality, and particularly towards the end of the financial year there are those kinds of adjustments. They are done every year in the Ministry of Defence, they have been done every year since time immemorial, and that may have some of the implications that you describe.

Q2299 Mr Havard: We have got very little time. Can I just turn to this body armour question simply from the point of view that there is a balance of risk assessment that has to be done. Perhaps you can write to us if we do not have the time because we would like to know how the legal processes and other factors are balanced in making this balance of risk assessment? Quite clearly intelligence comes into that as well. As far as the body armour is concerned, what we now know from the incident is that the front line is everywhere, the front line is in no one place any more. This is a different thing we now know that we did not know before. Is it going to be the case that everyone in future who enters into a conflict situation will have all the proper kit, including the body armour, because it was clearly done on the basis of those in greatest need in this exercise but the world is changing?

Mr Hoon: I think that is a very fair point and please bear in mind that was the assumption we made when 38,000 sets of enhanced combat body armour were sent to theatre for operations in Iraq, we had made that judgment. You are right to emphasise the fact that front line in these kinds of operations, when the front line is moving very rapidly across large areas of territory, as the Americans found themselves, the front line is everywhere and we want to provide proper protection for all our people, whether they happen to be in the notional front line or they are in the supply lines, for example, or logistic trade.

Q2300 Mr Havard: Would you write to us about the balancing of the risks and the processes involved?

Mr Hoon: My point is that we took that decision, we were not balancing risk in that sense as far as the decision to provide enhanced combat body armour to all those engaged. The issue, as I have made clear, was the issue of tracking that equipment once it got in the theatre and I am determined that we should improve that asset tracking system.

Q2301 Mr Havard: They had better put it in their back pocket next time.

Mr Hoon: I would be interested in what the Committee considers, whether it has had this conversation with soldiers, because one solution that has been suggested is to make enhanced combat body armour part of the personal equipment of the soldiers concerned but it does mean, of course, that in addition to all the other kit that they are required to be responsible for, they then have to be responsible for the enhancement. I do not know how many Members of the Committee have worn enhanced combat body armour for even a short period of time. It is something that is a judgment that will have to be made about whether we require that because my experience of talking to officers and, indeed, to senior NCOs is that part of their task when enhanced combat body armour is issued is to make sure that the men under their charge are wearing it.

Q2302 Mr Havard: I agree that it is a complex issue and there are certain walls I can get over in it and there are some I cannot without it, it is that sort of thing. I appreciate that. Maybe we should change it to the individuals to make the decision rather than the Ministry of Defence. It is certainly an area that I would hope in the Lessons Learned exercise is having serious consideration.

Mr Hoon: It is something that we are looking at. As I say, I do not think it is quite that simple. It is probably relatively straightforward for civilians to say that this should be part of the personal kit of all soldiers but I am not sure that necessarily all members of the military would readily agree to that. I think it is something that we have got to look at and I would be very interested in what the Committee's experience has been in this area.

Chairman: You will be pleased to know that none of the general issue body armour fitted me. However, there was a corpulent MoD policeman of my girth whose suit I borrowed and I must say he needs to get into a bit of training if he is that size, although I must thank him for the loan of his body armour.

Q2303 Rachel Squire: Can I pick up again on NBC protection which you mentioned in your opening statement and which has been referred to in our questions so far, Secretary of State. You are very aware of the criticisms that the NAO made reporting a significant shortfall of 40 per cent in tactical nerve agent detection systems and a severe shortfall in residual vapour detector kits, commenting that, "While these shortfalls could be partially mitigated by the use of the Chemical Agent Monitor and training, it made detection and therefore response to an attack insufficient". It also then went on to talk about the NBC protection for Challenger 2 and other armoured vehicles and was somewhat critical of it. I know that you told the House on 13 January this year that: "we have acknowledged in our own reports that there were deficiencies in the way stocks of some NBC equipment were managed. The Department is working hard to ensure that that does not occur again. However, as the NAO recognises in its report, mitigating action was taken through a combination of purchasing spare parts and rigorous re-testing of equipment. The operational requirement was consequently fully met." Can I try and pin you down a bit. When you talk about the "operational requirement" being consequently fully met, can you explain to what level of protection the operational requirement was set to enable you to say that it was fully met in spite of the shortfall that you yourself have recognised and which certainly the NAO recognised?

Mr Hoon: If I can begin with the conclusion of the NAO report. It states: "Although overall protection against chemical agents was good, there were shortfalls". I simply prefer to start with the conclusion rather than the shortfalls. That may be just the way that I happen to see this. I am not in any way under-estimating the concern that we had to ensure that each person involved in the operation was properly protected against the risk of a chemical attack. It is my understanding that everyone who went over the line had a respirator and at least one correctly sized suit. One of the issues, and I know this has caused some controversy, is whether there were a sufficient number of suits available, whether each man had three suits available, which ideally should be the case. A judgment was made that it was sufficient for the conduct of this operation that initially at any rate as they crossed the line, the availability to each man of one suit, correctly sized suit, was sufficient to allow them to conduct this particular operation.

Q2304 Rachel Squire: I, and I am sure I was not alone in this, believed that Saddam Hussein was more than likely to use chemical and possibly biological material against the coalition forces. Are you clearly saying that in spite of the identified shortfalls, if British land forces had been subject to an NBC attack it would not have any operational consequences?

Mr Hoon: I am not quite sure that is the same thing. There are clearly operational consequences of coming under chemical or biological attack, I do not think anyone is in any doubt that that has a severe impact on the ability, for example, to conduct offensive operations. I am now talking about in a military sense. What I am saying is that as far as the protection available in the event of such an attack, each man had a respirator and one correctly sized suit. In addition, there were a number of other areas that were appropriate for the threat that we faced. That is why the NAO report came to the conclusion that it did. It actually said that the overall protection against chemical agents was good. It did not say that it was average or indifferent, it said that it was good. That was not my assessment, that was their conclusion having considered the evidence.

Q2305 Rachel Squire: Perhaps for me to be more specific, you are saying that if chemical weapons had been used against our troops, the equipment they had was sufficient not to put them at greater risk than was necessary?

Mr Hoon: That is right, yes.

Mr Hancock: I am going to ask you some questions about the post-war situation but, if I may, can I ask one about the pre-war situation. You told us on 14 May ----

Chairman: No, sorry.

Mr Hancock: This is a question relating to it.

Chairman: If it is post-conflict, please.

Mr Hancock: It is a very important question.

Chairman: If it is post-conflict, yes.

Mr Hancock: Do we have to only ask questions that the clerk has drawn up?

Chairman: Post-conflict.

Mr Hancock: Chairman, this is an important issue as far as I am concerned. Secretary of State, I would like you to tell us ----

Chairman: We have five minutes. Post-conflict, Mike.

Mr Hancock: So you do not want a difficult question?

Chairman: Mike, please, post-conflict, five minutes.

Mr Hancock: You have spent most of your time trying to avoid getting into the difficult questions.

Chairman: That is not true. Please, post-conflict. You have questions to ask.

Mr Hancock: If we are going to have a report on this war, Chairman, surely one of the questions is about the process that led up to it.

Chairman: You are wasting time.

Mr Hancock: Secretary of State, my question is quite a simple one. You told us on 14 May that you had identified 500 sites ----

Chairman: Michael, I am not accepting this. You are wasting time. Please ask the questions you have been asked to do.

Mr Hancock: Well, I cannot possibly be in a position to accept the report then.

Chairman: Try.

Mr Hancock: I think you are doing a good job trying to defend the impossible.

Mr Blunt: Point of Order, Chairman. I think people outside will find it incomprehensible that Members of this Committee are not able to ask the questions they wish.

Mr Hancock: Absolutely.

Chairman: I think they will find it incomprehensible that we have so many questions to ask and ----

Mr Blunt: May I finish?

Chairman: Please be quick.

Mr Blunt: My Point of Order, Chairman, is that Members must be allowed untrammelled freedom to ask the questions that they want to ask.

Chairman: We are here to ask the Secretary of State questions. We have four questions left. Please, post-conflict. We have five minutes to ask a lot of questions.

Mr Hancock: Are we not elected to this Parliament to ask questions that we think are in the public interest as opposed to ones that the clerk wants us to ask?

Chairman: We have a lot of questions to ask, Michael, and you have wasted five minutes.

Mr Hancock: Well, you should have let me ask the damn thing.

Chairman: Post-conflict questions, please.

Mr Hancock: If you stopped waffling on and trying to ----

Chairman: Conflict questions, please. Are you going to ask the post-conflict questions?

Mr Hancock: No, Chairman.

Chairman: I will ask them.

Mr Hancock: I would rather ask the question that I am sure the Secretary of State would be only too willing to answer and I am not going to be browbeaten into asking questions that the clerk wants to be asked rather than an elected Member of Parliament.

Chairman: Which we want to ask. Please, post-conflict.

Mr Hancock: You ask the bloody question because I am not.

Chairman: Mike Gapes, please.

Q2306 Mike Gapes: You have said already that the Iraqi regime's domination and collapse at the end when it went was unexpected in the way that it went but had we not known for years about the nature of Ba'athism and the repression? Given that the regime did collapse in the way it did, how do you explain your Department's position that it was only after the fall of the regime that the extent of the Ba'ath domination and nearly all aspects of the Iraqi state and society became clear?

Mr Hoon: I am not sure that I said it was unexpected. It certainly collapsed more rapidly than we, on a worst case scenario, thought. We might have expected the implants into the army, for example, who certainly had some effect on some of the leaders. One Iraqi general surrendered and then we understand as a result of threats to his family, who were kept in another part of the country, he then continued to fight. Large parts of the Iraqi army simply deserted but we were still left with some really quite uncompromising enemies. In Basra we all followed very carefully the excellent operation to take Basra but the people that we were fighting against were essentially the most committed of Saddam's people, and are probably still the people who are causing a security threat in and around Baghdad. Those were people who benefited from the regime, who were its strongest supporters and who carried out the intimidation against the Iraqi population that we are all well aware of.

Q2307 Mike Gapes: Did you plan for the looting and the destruction which came after the collapse? Did you expect it? What plans had you got to prevent it?

Mr Hoon: It was one of the contingencies that we knew could occur. I suspect that we did not have sufficient numbers of troops to be able to prevent the extent of the looting that did take place. That would have required us to be able to replace all of the police and security personnel that Saddam Hussein had available. I recall when I very first went into Iraq, two or three weeks after the conflict came to an end, talking to Iraqis who were actually complaining that we did not have soldiers on every corner. They were used to having a police officer on every corner. I do not know whether in Basra you saw the small places that existed almost on every street corner. I initially took them to be for traffic police but they were there as a visible, tangible sign that the regime was keeping an eye on you and the complaint of a lot of people was that we were not replacing that.

Q2308 Mike Gapes: Can I put it to you then that what you are really saying is that looting was inevitable and we had insufficient forces there to stop it.

Mr Hoon: In the very short-term. Eventually we were able to get a grip on that, but in the very short-term.

Q2309 Mike Gapes: Given that was the case, why did you decide to protect some buildings and not others? What choices did you make because there has been some criticism that oilfields were protected but museums were not and various other things of that kind? How did you make the decision to deploy to the areas you could protect knowing that you could not protect everywhere?

Mr Hoon: I think very pragmatic decisions were taken. One of the entire purposes, for example, of the planning of our operations in the south was to prevent Saddam Hussein destroying the oilfields. The whole point of a rapid attack in the south was to get to the oilfields and prevent them from being destroyed in the way that had happened previously. That was part of the strategic consideration that we made in looking at how best to take Iraq and defeat Saddam Hussein and at the same time prevent him from destroying a vital part of the livelihood of his country and it was a magnificent success.

Q2310 Mike Gapes: Were there instructions explicitly from the MoD to the military commanders to protect the oilfields?

Mr Hoon: We knew, and it would have had some strategic impact on our ability, that on a previous occasion Saddam Hussein had set fire to oilfields. That had a strategic impact because the clouds that were produced were extremely damaging. We judged that one impact of him doing that would be to weaken our ability to fight successfully. As part of longer term thinking about Iraq we also knew that the oilfields were vital to the future of Iraq and if he was able to destroy those oilfields then that would obviously necessarily make the process of reconstruction all the more difficult. There were both military considerations and, if you like, reconstruction considerations in that judgment borne out of experience. This was what he did in the Gulf War.

Q2311 Mike Gapes: Did you give instructions to commanders to protect other parts of the infrastructure, hospitals, electricity, communication hubs, or was it just left to their own judgment?

Mr Hoon: To the extent that it was possible certainly but, again, electricity infrastructure is an enormously difficult thing, even today, to protect. We have many people in place but out there in the desert, and you may have seen it for yourself when you travelled from Kuwait, it only takes one attack against a pylon to destroy the infrastructure. That is one of the difficulties that we continue to have. There have been continuing acts of - vandalism does not quite do it justice - sabotage against the utility system. That was a problem right from the beginning and I think we are getting on top of that and the electricity is steadily improving but it is still an issue.

Q2312 Mr Cran: Still on post-conflict. Throughout the conflict the Government fairly consistently said that it was not going to be able to give us figures about civilian casualties and all the rest of it. As I understand it, that was reversed by Baroness Symons in the House of Lords on 28 January when she said that the Prime Minister is concerned about it, is getting more figures, we will do our best to get accurate figures. The question is which department is doing this? If it is yours, what progress have we made and what is the timescale?

Mr Hoon: I certainly recall recently answering Parliamentary Questions and making it clear that trying to assess civilian casualties, not least in areas that we did not control, is a very, very difficult exercise.

Q2313 Mr Cran: I entirely understand that but nonetheless a commitment was given by Baroness Symons in the House of Lords, Minister of State at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. If the commitment was given, who is doing it?

Mr Hoon: I am sure she will be able to tell you.

Q2314 Mr Cran: You are saying that you cannot, which I find quite extraordinary.

Mr Hoon: Whether you find it extraordinary or not, I have made clear and, indeed, I think I have said this in a Parliamentary Answer, that trying to provide accurate assessments of civilian casualties at a time when we were engaged in conflict and not in control of the territory where perhaps some of those civilian casualties occurred is an extraordinarily difficult process.

Q2315 Mr Cran: I do not disagree with that but I find it extraordinary because of all the agencies that could help to make this promise come true. It might be the authority in Baghdad and Basra, and the armed forces of the United Kingdom and the United States. You are a member of Cabinet, tell me, if you cannot do it, who is doing it?

Mr Hoon: I am not saying that we can do it, what I am saying is that it is difficult. I am certainly prepared to assist in that effort if it can produce a realistic and useful result.

Q2316 Mr Cran: But as a member of Cabinet you do not know who is doing it?

Mr Hoon: I am saying that we will provide assistance.

Mr Cran: Quite extraordinary.

Chairman: James is an ex-Whip, he knows how to count bodies and knows where they are buried as well. Crispin?

Q2317 Mr Blunt: Secretary of State, when I was last asking you questions you raised the advice of the military that they could cross the start line into action with one NBC suit per individual and that the advice was that they would be able to fight the tanks and fight from the Warrior armoured personnel cars on that basis. Can I suggest to you, Secretary of State, that that is an example of the military being willing to undertake risks in order to achieve military objectives. Equally, I am quite certain that had you invited them to do so they would have crossed the start line with no NBC protection had that been the objective of the forces. They would have taken that risk and done their duty as they should have done. What I would say to you is that soldiers in the Royal Armoured Corps, of which I had the privilege to be one for 12 years, will tell you that to suggest you can fight from a tank in an NBC suit for a prolonged period of time, frankly if you have the opportunity of having proper NBC filters and over-pressure inside the tank, is simply unfeasible for any length of time.

Mr Hoon: Is that a question?

Q2318 Mr Blunt: Would you agree with it? Secretary of State, the general point here is that this Committee has travelled around before I joined it doing Lessons from Iraq and in the short time since I was reappointed in December and has found a completely different set of accounts from the people on the ground than from you and the very senior generals and chiefs of defence staff who have given evidence to that effect. That is a precise example, that in the Royal Armoured Corps people would find it extraordinary that you were inviting people to cross the start line in tanks that did not have satisfactory NBC filters whereas they should have been there.

Mr Hoon: I think there are two answers to that assertion which, again, you make without really having any proper evidence to back it up. The two answers are these: first of all, I did not invite anyone to do any such thing. This is a military judgment, as you should well know, a military judgment made at each level of the system passed up through the chain of command ultimately to the chiefs of staff and to the chief of the defence staff that our forces are ready to fight. That judgment was made and that military advice was given. If that military advice had not been given then those forces would not have crossed the starting line. The second point is your criticism is not a criticism of ministers, it is actually a criticism of the Armed Forces and I take grave exception to that. What you are really saying is that those senior officers who made that judgment that those forces were ready to fight were not sufficiently protecting the forces in their charge, and I personally think that is a disgrace.

Q2319 Mr Blunt: Again, Secretary of State, that is sophistry. As you know perfectly well, the Armed Forces are filled with an enormously widely admired can-do character and all soldiers, from the highest to the lowest, would do their absolute level best in order to fulfil what they saw as their duty. Commanders would very properly take risks in order to achieve the objectives of the Government and to suggest that it is their fault and not yours is not right.

Mr Hoon: If I could just comment. Let me spell it out to you. I am saying to you categorically that there was absolutely no political interference whatsoever in those decisions. Those were decisions taken by commanding officers having regard to the safety and security of their men and you cannot find a single example otherwise, other than these politically inspired assertions, which is all that they are.

Mr Blunt: I will give you an example.

Chairman: I would like a question, please.

Mr Hancock: Why not?

Q2320 Mr Blunt: You have asked me to give you an example, Secretary of Sate. I would invite you to comment on this report in The Scotsman. "Lieutenant Colonel James Cowan, the commanding officer of the Black Watch, one of the regiments in the thick of the fighting, told The Scotsman the shortage of equipment in the Gulf was due to the government's unwillingness to commit to war until all possible alternatives had been explored, while the regiment's quartermaster during the conflict criticised the shortage of nuclear, biological and chemical protection suits and equipment."

Mr Hoon: I have read that report.

Q2321 Mr Blunt: I am sure you have.

Mr Hoon: It went on to say, which you are not quoting, that they were not able to get two chemical sets for every person, so their shortfall was not having the two sets that they would ideally have liked but everyone had at least one set, which is precisely the point that I have been making to you. If you are going to read out articles from The Scotsman it would not be a bad idea to read all of it.

Mr Blunt: I fear I may trespass on the patience of the Chairman and the rest of the Committee.

Mr Hancock: The press officer gave you that one.

Q2322 Mr Blunt: The point, Secretary of State, and this is a question drafted by the clerk, is are you concerned that the chain of command which leads to you appears to have failed to reflect accurately the experiences of service personnel?

Mr Hoon: No, I am not. That is their job and they do it very well, which is why I take exception to your criticism of them.

Q2323 Mr Blunt: Then why does the commanding officer of the Black Watch feel it necessary to break into print in this way?

Mr Hoon: For the reasons I have set out consistently. Ideally we would have liked to have had as many as four suits available, that was the number that were despatched, but because of the difficulties I have described to you there were not four sets but there was sufficient protection for each man as judged by their commanding officers, and that is the important point. Chairman, I do apologise, I have to see at two o'clock the families of five soldiers who died in this conflict and it would not be appropriate for me to be late for that meeting.

Chairman: Thank you very much. At least you now realise how consensual we are in our Committee, we do not have the kinds of arguments that we have on the floor of the House. I very much hope that we will be able to produce a consensual report. Thank you very much.