Examination of Witnesses (Questions 240
- 259)
WEDNESDAY 26 JANUARY 2005
DR OWEN
GREENE, CHIEF
CONSTABLE PAUL
KERNAGHAN, MR
STEPHEN PATTISON
AND MR
STEPHEN RIMMER
Q240 Chairman: Regarding the role
of policing in peace support operations and crisis missions generally,
what are the respective roles of the FCO, the MoD, the Home Office,
maybe DfID, and the Post-Conflict Reconstruction Unit? Who will
do what in the future? You have touched upon that. If it is too
complicated for us, perhaps you could drop us a note on this,
because it does seem important for our records to know who has
been doing what. Perhaps you could give us a glimpse, and then
send us something in more detail.[1]
Mr Pattison: Of course, happily.
Just to give you a glimpse, in a sense this is still work in progress.
What has happened hitherto, however, is that the Foreign Office
has taken on responsibility for the operational deployment of
our police overseas. This has included things like working with
police forces on the selection of recruits, on their contracts,
the reimbursement of police forces for their salaries. It has
included the duty of care responsibility that we have to police
recruits serving overseas. It has included trying to develop training
courses. The whole range of things have been done essentially
within the Foreign Office, but drawing in expertise from outside.
We are not immediately planning to change those arrangements.
We are planning to make them more joined up with the rest of Whitehall;
but we are not immediately planning to change them. We are trying
to improve them and the way they work. There is a question about
the newly established Post-Conflict Reconstruction Unit. It is
not yet immediately clear whether responsibility for managing
the UK's contribution to overseas policing will eventually transfer
to them or will remain within the Foreign Office. We will need
to see how this develops. It may be that it is better that it
stays within the Foreign Office, because we will want to contribute
police to a number of countries where we do not necessarily have
a big British presence in terms of troops or others, but where
we are acting in support of OSCE or UN objectives. It may be that
falls, or will continue to fall more naturally to the Foreign
Office than it will to the PCRU. This is something we will need
to discuss with them, however, as they develop their own role.
I will send you a note on that.
Q241 Chairman: Yes, that would be
helpful.
Chief Constable Kernaghan: From
the perspective of the police service, once the Foreign and Commonwealth
Office identify a diplomatic need and they secure the support
of the Home Office, the Scottish Executive and Northern Ireland
Office, they then come and I try to facilitate that from a police
service point of view. I am involved and I appreciate the opportunity
to be involved in early discussions with FCO colleagues. However,
we as a service lack a preplanning capability. I do not have members
of staff attached to PJHQ, for example, to see whether there is
a police role, and that is a major failing. However, at this point
in time, once there is a political will expressed, I seek to facilitate
the response of the domestic service.
Q242 Chairman: We hear a lot about
joined-up government and you have given one example where it could
be a little more joined up, because now it is almost to be a seamless
move from defence, right across policing, and even private security,
and the structures have to reflect that.
Chief Constable Kernaghan: Indeed.
Dr Greene: The budget question
has been answered in the immediate term, but I think that the
expectation should be that we will need standing capabilities
on at least two or three areas, maybe based in the Foreign Office
or whatever. The three will be in those areas to do with police
units, and so on, that are ready to deploy and have the preplanning
and so on that the Chief Constable has just mentioned. However,
mission planning, as experience and lessons learned have shown,
is quite a demanding business, where you have to integrate recent
lessons learned from previous operations. Within the existing
framework, therefore, that cannot be done easily and in an ad
hoc way on the basis of teams being quickly brought together about
this or that planning mission. So I think that sort of structure
will need to be put in place. The reason I emphasise it here is
because I think that some of the needs are so clear from experience
that it would be a pity if the strategic task force took six months
without a framework already beginning to expect to be able to
allocate those resources. It is obvious that the Post-Conflict
Reconstruction Unit might be a location for at least some of these
standing capabilities, but that needs to be central to that work.
Q243 Chairman: We would not want
it bogged down in another set of bureaucracies; because what Iraq
clearly showed was that if you do not come in pretty quickly with
the security structures, you have lost the game. So you cannot
afford to allow bureaucracy to prevail. We are obviously more
oriented to what goes on in the Ministry of Defence, with all
of its perfections and imperfections, but the military are quite
good at devising military doctrine and there has, fairly recently,
been military doctrine on peacekeeping operations. Has there been
anything done in the Defence Academy, or in any of the police
establishments, or in the government departments, or academia,
on at least the outlines of a doctrine? Not just how it might
apply to us in the UK, but how it might have an application right
across the board—because there are other very good police
forces around, who hopefully have gone through the same process
that we are.
Chief Constable Kernaghan: Sadly,
I do not believe that is the situation. We respond, we deploy
people on an individual mission; they do an extremely good job—and
I am very grateful for Mr Rimmer's comments—on that mission.
But there is no repository—and we are talking about perhaps
only two or three people—to develop a doctrine. There is
an outstandingly good publication by the Joint Doctrine and Concepts
Centre on peace support operations. There are no police officers
studying that. We do not look at it; we simply deploy people on
a mission. That is something we have got to do. In some missions
we will be a major player; in some missions we will be a marginal
player; other missions we will not participate in at all. However,
we do need one or two police officers who understand the jargon,
the language used by military planners—and that is what
we need to go to.
Q244 Chairman: It sounds like a good
PhD, if somebody can do it in three months, Dr Greene.
Dr Greene: Yes, we will set them
on to it! I agree with the point just made, but it is worthwhile
elaborating. The EU police unit has been spending a significant
amount of time over the last year on developing doctrine for EU
police operations, and that is welcome. However, it is noteworthy
that at present it tends to focus on how to integrate police immediately,
in the very first phases of deployment, which is one of the traditional
challenges—that the police arrive too late for their roles,
and so on. So that is important. However, in the rush to make
it clear that they have a doctrine which allows them to insert
gendarmerie-like forces early in a deployment, a whole range of
critical areas of doctrine are presently being neglected and are
not at all being customised according to the relative capabilities
of the UK. These tend to be dominated by those sorts of deployments
to which France, Italy and Spain can best contribute, because
of their standing gendarmerie forces. Similarly, there is a rather
gestural attempt at doctrine in the UN at the moment, but it essentially
boils down to being a very limited exercise. I think that this
is somewhere where the UK is in an extremely good position to
contribute very strongly, not only across the board but particularly
in relationship to how police services, those experienced with
community policing, and those elements of policing that go beyond
the paramilitary policing operations, can contribute rapidly and
link with other elements of the criminal justice system. So there
is a big gap.
Q245 Mike Gapes: Can I ask some questions,
partly following on from what was said but also based on the visit
we had to the Az Zubyah Police Academy in Iraq in December? Mr
Pattison, you said that 250 police officers were serving globally.
Is that the total, or is that just those who are funded from within
this conflict prevention fund? Are there any other police officers
serving who are funded by other means?
Chief Constable Kernaghan: Perhaps
I might deal with the police service. As I understand it, as of
December 2004 there were 235 serving police officers seconded
to the FCO for what we would call peace support operations. There
were a further 35 retired officers on direct contracts with the
FCO. There are small numbers of police officers elsewhere in the
world. That is an accurate observation. I can think of Jamaica,
for example, where the Metropolitan Police have two or three officers
providing very sensible, bilateral, operational co-operation with
their Jamaican colleagues; but, in terms of the vast majority
of police officers, it would be 235 at this point in time.
Q246 Mike Gapes: Those who are coming
from the Met will be funded by London council tax payers?
Chief Constable Kernaghan: That
is obviously a matter for the Metropolitan Police Authority and
the Commissioner. I know they work with their Jamaican colleagues
on matters which actually affect the people of London, and it
is done on a very professional basis.
Q247 Mike Gapes: I am just trying
to be clear. One of the issues, and it follows on from what Mr
Jones was asking earlier, is about the relationship between police
authorities and costs. You said that all costs were reimbursed.
I am trying to be clear whether it is all costs or all costs within
one pot, whereas in another pot there may be costs to me, as a
London council tax payer, which I would welcome if it stopped
the number of Yardies and drugs coming into London; nevertheless,
we need to be clear about this.
Mr Rimmer: There are a number
of dimensions to international police activity, obviously. One
which is very relevant at the moment is the excellent police service
response to the Asian tsunami disaster. In that specific context—the
Met, as you will know, have taken a leading role in the police
response to that—there are currently 115 police officers
and staff deployed in Thailand and Sri Lanka. That is for a different
set of circumstances, and the context will determine how we sort
out the funding for that. It is absolutely clear, however, that
assessing the funding implications of something like that, first
and foremost, is a central government responsibility. The costs
do not simply get thrown at the relevant police authority and
police force.
Q248 Mike Gapes: I want now to go
on to the lessons from Op Telic and Iraq. One of the points that
came through very clearly in our visit to Iraq was that the decision
to deploy police officers there was taken late in the day. As
I understand it, it was not until April, which is a month after
the conflict started in the March, that the Home Secretary wrote
to the Foreign Secretary, promising UK policing assistance to
the coalition. In retrospect, would you agree that we should have
been planning this far more in advance, rather than responding
to a situation after the collapse of the institutional structure
within the Ba'athist regime?
Chief Constable Kernaghan: I would
agree entirely, Mr Gapes. The first contact to ACPO and to myself
was 72 hours after the famous statue toppled in Baghdad. There
was no engagement with the British police service prior to the
invasion—I appreciate primarily a diplomatic and military
issue—but there was no liaison with the professional police
expertise prior to that. I think that was wrong. We would hope
in future never to be in that situation again. It may be you consult
the police and we say, "We don't have a role to play",
but at least there should be that opportunity to seek professional
advice. In my opinion, that was a failure of pre-planning.
Q249 Mike Gapes: Our Committee has
already made criticisms of some of these aspects, but on other
areas. On the question of the actual work that the police are
doing in Iraq, they work very closely with the military. In fact,
they have required protection by the military in order to establish
the police academy that we visited. Was there prior consideration
of that issue before the request came through for assistance?
Chief Constable Kernaghan: Pre
the toppling of the Saddam Hussein regime, there was no liaison
that I am aware of with British police in any shape or form. I
deployed to Iraq in May 2003, I think 3 May, to see what contribution,
if any, British policing could make, and, if we could make any
contribution, to specify what that contribution would be. My assessment
at that time—which was a fairly benevolent environment in
May 2003—was that we would not have British police officers
walking the streets of Iraq. I believed we could make some limited
policy contribution in Baghdad (within a secure environments),
and we could also provide training within, again, secure complexes.
The Az Zubyah regional police training academy is a manifestation
of that second recommendation. So there was no planning prior
to that. We sent some people to Baghdad; then we activated the
Az Zubyah Academy. It has to be within a security environment
provided by the military because, with respect to my members,
British policing is primarily unarmed. You are talking, in the
environment that is contemporary Iraq, of placing heavy machine
guns to guard compounds, et cetera. That will always be a military
role. I do not envisage that being performed by UK police officers.
We provide different expertise. They therefore have to be closely
integrated, so that, whatever we are doing, the military and the
police work very closely together.
Q250 Mike Gapes: Our involvement
in Iraq is as part of the coalition, and the main player in that
coalition is the United States. The Ministry of Defence's own
Future Capabilities document refers to the expectation
that we will in future be involved in complex, large-scale operations
as part of what will be US-led coalitions. Given that is the case,
what lessons have been identified for police missions or contributions
to police missions in the future, within US-led operations or
alongside US military?
Chief Constable Kernaghan: The
scenario you suggest is particularly interesting. The United States
does not have a national police force, and they are very similar
to ourselves in fact. They have a multiplicity of police departments,
ranging from one man or woman up to the New York Police Department.
In the early days in Iraq there was perhaps a very idealistic
view that what should be created in Iraq was 50% New York Police
Department, 50% Blankshire Constabulary—that mythical force
which police planners always refer to as "Blankshire".
This is a personal but also a professionally influenced judgment,
but the one thing Iraq does not need is five parts NYPD, five
parts Blankshire. We need to support the Iraqis to deliver a police
capability which meets their needs. We should not be so arrogant
as to come and say, "What works in Hampshire, what works
in California, will work for you". We need to go in there,
deploy expertise, but come up with a solution that will secure
the support of Mr and Mrs Average Iraqi. I would equally say,
in relation to a wider coalition with other colleagues, "We
have to see what capabilities you bring to the party". On
some occasions we may say that the Germans take the lead on policing,
or the French, or the UK. We should not come thinking that we
have to contribute or take the leadership role. In essence, I
think that this is about pre-planning for any involvement in another
country. What is the situation operationally? What expertise do
they require? And—to use a military phrase familiar to this
Committee—troops to task. We have to deploy the right troops
to carry out the task.
Q251 Mike Gapes: The British—in
fact, RUC officers in the past—have done work in the Balkans
alongside Americans. A few years ago I met an American guy from
the NYPD, one of the senior people. Has there not been any kind
of transfer through of that collective memory or knowledge?
Chief Constable Kernaghan: I do
not believe there is any body commissioned to collect those memories
together. We do not have a Joint Doctrine and Concepts Centre.
We do pass things on. We have one or two people out in the Balkans
who are now on their second tour of duty. They obviously bring
knowledge, et cetera. However, that is the key element. We need
some office, some body, to collect that together in terms of mission
planning. I have to say—and Mr Pattison referred to it—the
FCO have restructured. I think that they have more people supporting
police missions, and that is very much to be welcomed. However,
we need to develop doctrine along the lines referred to by your
Chairman.
Q252 Mike Gapes: You need to do it
here, but are the American police doing it within the American
military structures and the American State Department's discussions
about future operations?
Chief Constable Kernaghan: I cannot
comment on the American Department of Defence, but bear in mind
that they contract out all policing overseas. The police officers
whom you have met from America are not from American police departments
or the American equivalent of ACPO. They are contract workers
to a commercial organisation. The Americans have gone for that
option. They simply award contracts to a commercial entity.
Q253 Chairman: In Kosovo they were
policemen. The Americans looked like something out of "In
the Heat of the Night"—ten Rod Steigers! Frankly, it
looked ridiculous. In other police support operations, peacekeeping
operations, I am sure that I have seen uniformed officers from
small Georgia police forces, as opposed to being contract security.
Chief Constable Kernaghan: I stand
to be corrected, Chairman, but my understanding is, whatever their
provenance or background, I think you will find that they are
employees of one or two major commercial undertakings. They are
not seconded from Georgia state troopers or NYPD. They are private
individuals, working on a contract to a company contracted to
either the Department of State or the Department of Defence.
Dr Greene: May I add something
to this? Just as background, a year ago, in co-operation with
ACPO, the FCO policing unit, and so on, Bradford co-ordinated
a big practitioners' lessons-learned exercise from the deployment
of police and post-conflict police missions. The questions you
are raising are generic ones that apply, and therefore the British
capabilities need to be very much developed in all of these areas.
Perhaps I may elaborate on two or three points. One is that this
needs assessment, dimension and mission planning, is a very challenging
one and requires very serious capabilities. It is not simply a
question of deciding how to deploy police in this or that area.
You are normally intervening in a context which is a tough one
in terms of peace-building, with many spoilers. It requires quite
a detailed understanding of what one is strategically trying to
do. This means not simply deploying police in an advisory capacity
but having a clear understanding of what capacity building and
intelligence gathering, for example, might be needed; what sort
of capacity building in terms of institution building within the
local police. So often our assistance, because we have not had
the standing capability, has been focusing on mentoring and training—which,
although very valuable, is often not central to the requirements.
It requires much closer scrutiny than that. Similarly to do with
continually upgrading assessments. This question of how to link
with the US is a generic one. Police forces tend to be relatively
parochial in their professionalism in comparison with the military.
Of course there are lots of shared understandings, but styles
of policing differ. One sees horror stories of different police
forces being deployed, with very different professional habits.
They take six months to understand where each of them is coming
from, and then the tour of duty is over. There are so many difficult
areas here. In a sense, this all speaks to reinforce the point
that one needs a standing capability that can get to grips with
this: not simply in terms of understanding a little more deeply
the complexity of mission planning here, and seeing how you fit
into a broad system. So often there are police forces deployed,
strengthening police forces, with very little sense of how one
is going to detain people who are arrested—because there
is not the penal resource or court procedure resource there. So
this is a challenging demand. I am not being perfectionist here.
The lessons learned from all practitioners are that, unless you
have some sense of how those link together, you are likely to
fail in your overall objectives in deploying the police, even
if the individual policemen and women deployed there perform exemplarily
in their specific role.
Q254 Mr Havard: But the lesson of
Iraq was that we knew a lot of these things. You had this information,
and the point that has been made by you, Chief Constable, is that
there was a failure in terms of early enough involvement of the
police. In the two police forces that I straddle, I have been
discussing with one of my Chief Constables, Barbara Wilding, and,
as I understand it, your organisation was asking to be involved.
Is that right? So there is information available. If people want
to get involved, want to contribute and have been excluded, then
the process now being described by the Foreign Office will avoid
it in the future. Will it? Do I have the confidence that it will?
Mr Pattison: It is of course true
that a number of lessons have been identified. In a paper that
has been commissioned by one of our experts, the author draws
a distinction between lessons identified and lessons learned.
It is not a bad point to bear in mind.
Q255 Mr Havard: It is exactly my
question.
Mr Pattison: Lessons have been
identified. We were very grateful to Dr Greene for the paper he
pulled together, at the end of the conference which the Foreign
Office sponsored, to identify more generic lessons. Indeed, from
the point of view of the Americans, they themselves are looking
at what lessons they can identify from policing in Iraq. On Iraq,
I think that we should all bear in mind that the situation immediately
following the fall of Saddam was immensely chaotic. We had to
start from scratch.
Q256 Mr Havard: I am talking about
a period before we even went into the adventure.
Mr Pattison: There is the question
of planning but, given the circumstances we found ourselves in
in May 2003, our plan then, to try fairly rapidly to train a large
number of new Iraqi police, was a plan which seemed reasonable
at the time. We put it into place, actively and with commitment,
and it began to produce police. The challenge that the Iraqi police
has faced as a result of the insurgency has obviously been an
extraordinary challenge, and thought needs to be given by the
Iraqi Government and others as to the best way of meeting the
challenge of the insurgency. However, we worked hard to try to
stand up a completely new police force in Iraq. We are identifying
the lessons. In some of the areas, particularly the ones mentioned
by Dr Greene, there has been a bit of progress over the last year
or so, particularly on the sorts of things Dr Greene identified:
the importance of a needs assessment; the importance of better
planning; the importance of a clear mandate for what the police
are going to do; the importance of doctrine—there is a gap
on doctrine. But in all of these areas we have been working with,
in particular, the UN to try to improve their performance. They
are not involved in Iraq, but their performance in other policing
situations, particularly in Africa and elsewhere. We are making
progress and we are registering the points. Some of the things
that Dr Greene mentioned—the need for intelligence and so
on—remain very sensitive internationally, of course. Relations
with the Americans—again, our view is that there has been
a great deal of contact between our police people in Iraq and
the Americans. We have quite a lot of senior-level contact. At
the same time we, in a sense, run the policing operation in that
part of Iraq for which we are responsible, and the Americans are
active elsewhere. At a strategic level, however, we think that
our relations have been satisfactory. All of this complex of issues
will be looked at again as the Post-Conflict Reconstruction Unit
begins to focus on how the UK can better prepare for meeting the
demand of post-conflict reconstruction, and it will include a
number of the things we have all talked about. So we are not complacent.
We have identified lessons. Some we are trying to nudge forward.
The task force will indeed take a lot of these things forward,
and I hope that, on the basis of the experience we have had in
Iraq and elsewhere, we will be able to do these things even more
effectively in the future.
Q257 Mr Viggers: It certainly seems
that policing was not so much an afterthought as an after-event.
The policemen who first arrived there felt that they were dropped
in a vacuum and Deputy Chief Constable Douglas Brand, who served
in Iraq, has written how, before he arrived in theatre, little
thought had been put into his role, how he should be supported
administratively, or his relationship with the Coalition Provisional
Authority. Indeed, I understand that an internal Foreign and Commonwealth
Office paper in December 2004 lists the "...low level of
mutual understanding between military and civilian police"
as a weakness of "the current state of play with UK international
policing". What is being done to ensure that policing and
post-conflict circumstances are being taken into account in military
planning?
Mr Pattison: I think that this
focuses on the whole question of development of doctrine. There
are two issues here. One is the experience of the British police.
There, the experience of the British police in working with the
British military is pretty good. It has developed well over the
years and translates pretty well to the sort of relations that
British police are able to have with the military overseas. What
we are really looking at, if I may say so, is the international
dimension of all of this. Let us focus particularly on the UN
and the EU. In both of those areas what is missing is a systematic
approach to these problems and, as we have already identified,
what is needed is a doctrine. We are trying to get, in particular,
the UN to focus on doing a better doctrine; but it will clearly
need to address the civilian-military interface. There is no doubt
about that. The UN recognise the need to develop a lot of their
work in policing doctrine, and we will try to work with them on
it. We have a British secondee to the UN Secretariat, who is trying
to work on precisely these kinds of areas. I think that it is
therefore something for the international community. We need to
put British experience at the disposal of the international community,
and try to encourage others to learn from our experience of generally
good relations, to see how that translates into future international
policing operations.
Q258 Mr Viggers: I was prompted to
follow this line of argument by the fact that last week I studied
the military doctrine on the treatment of prisoners of war. It
is a document that dates from 2001. It is 106 pages long and goes
into the most detailed statistics on exactly how you treat prisoners
of war, if you should take prisoners of war; and that this should
be incorporated in a military doctrine, and military commanders
should be thinking about this well in advance. Should they not
similarly be thinking—as we move into a rather more confused
world where military intervention might be, as it is in Iraq,
in a confused situation—that military doctrine should include
this thinking at a very early stage, and should not police officers
be included in that strategic planning?
Chief Constable Kernaghan: Yes,
I think that military doctrine should include a civil police dimension
but, in fairness to military colleagues, they need to know who
to liaise with, and who is going to contribute to it. At this
point in time there is no equivalent of the Joint Doctrine and
Concepts Centre in the police. I am hopeful—and you have
heard expressions of goodwill and support this morning from both
the Home Office and the FCO—that the strategic task force
will be addressing exactly the points you are highlighting. The
honest answer is that, to date, we have not done it; we need to
do it, and I am hopefully that Whitehall will create a structure
which will enable us to provide a more positive partnership with
our military colleagues.
Mr Pattison: As a footnote, the
JDCC will be part of the task force that we are setting up. So
that will indeed help to bring the two sides together.
Dr Greene: Could I add one other
point which springs from that? Again, it is to re-emphasise there
is the military-police dimension, which is strategic—and
let us at least start with that—but let us not forget the
other dimensions of rule-of-law missions: the linkages with judicial,
court procedures, and so on. This is not rocket science, but quite
often missions are designed with all sorts of assumptions as to
what is the backdrop, what is available. When those assumptions
are not met, a whole range of other mission objectives are undermined.
So the main point I am making here is that, while it is important
that in the first instance it is the military-police doctrine
that needs to be developed, it needs to bring in people who are
experienced with how you enable police forces to operate effectively
in maintaining rule of law. As I say, that includes some expertise
in how to link with the judiciary, and so on. Some problems in
Iraq come from the fact that there is a very different tradition
in the criminal justice system in Iraq—to the extent it
existed. Police who may well be very familiar with how to link
with the military—they were not, but they could have been—would
still have been puzzled, without some doctrine developed about
how to engage with those other sectors.
Q259 Mr Jones: The role of police
both in Iraq and other places has mainly been in terms of training
and trying to get the Iraqi police force up and running. The Chief
Constable also referred to the fact that he did not think that
it was the role of our police in terms of guarding duties, and
those things. What role do they have in terms of counter-insurgency?
Certainly in Northern Ireland—and we were there yesterday—one
of the issues there was that it was quite clear that the police
took on the role in terms of using their policing techniques,
rather than that the IRA would be defeated by military might.
Is there a role in terms of future deployment, in terms of our
police in Iraq possibly taking a more active role in counter-insurgency
and policing techniques, rather than just the training role that
they appear to have now?
Chief Constable Kernaghan: In
any overseas country the people who will provide the policing,
be it what we would call routine policing or counter-insurgency
policing, have to be the local officers. That is the key. You
have to interact with the local community. In respect of counter-insurgency
expertise, there is only one force in the United Kingdom that
can deploy that expertise, and that is PSNI. No other force has
any counter-insurgency experience whatsoever. It may have counter-terrorism
experience, but not counter-insurgency expertise. Then I think
you come down to the conflict between local priorities and international
priorities. Yes, I have no doubt I could gainfully employ X hundred
RUC Officers, now inherited by PSNI, overseas; but I rather suspect
that my colleague Hugh Orde has a few things for them to do in
Northern Ireland, and that ultimately is about resources and political
priorities. We have a degree of expertise that we can pass on.
I have to say that this is not new. The Royal Ulster Constabulary
sent a delegation to Greece at the end of the Second World War,
to assist the Greek police countering the Communist insurrection.
So this is not something we have never encountered before. We
do have expertise, but it is about obtaining individuals—and
I suspect the Committee will be going on to the human resources
dimension of it—identifying those people with the right
skills profile and then releasing them for overseas service, if
they volunteer. There is a very small pool of people with the
requisite skills.
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