Examination of Witnesses (Questions 80
- 99)
WEDNESDAY 9 NOVEMBER 2005
MINISTRY OF
DEFENCE
Q80 Mr Bacon: Your phrase "single
command structure" leads me neatly into what the Chairman
tells me is my last question and that is about tri-service. Plainly
with the success of Northwood and various other operations, there
is a closer integration than ever before. What truth is there
in the notion that serious consideration is being given to an
effective merger of the Services? When I lived in Canada, there
was one Service, the Canadian Armed Forces.
Sir Kevin Tebbit: None whatsoever.
Q81 Mr Bacon: That is not going to
happen. Why could it not happen, keeping a brand badge separate
but to all intents and purposes underneath being managed as one?
Sir Kevin Tebbit: Let me just
say that from a policy point of view, one of our greatest successes
has been the creation of a Permanent Joint Headquarters in 1995.
Q82 Mr Bacon: At Northwood.
Sir Kevin Tebbit: Yes, under a
Commander of Joint Operations who is a separate budget holder
in his own right and is the man who essentially puts together
the force packages necessary to carry out the various operations
that we are involved in. That works extremely well and I think
it gives us the best of both worlds. From my point of view, from
the Permanent Secretary's point of view—military men can
comment—it preserves the ethos of the individual Services
according to their own characters, background and roles, while
at the same time giving us the effects we need on the battlefield
or in the peace support area or whatever. Not only would there
be problems about doing that, it would be completely pointless
because you would actually go backwards; it would reduce the effectiveness
of our Armed Forces rather than improve them.
The Committee suspended from 4.40 pm to
5.20 pm for divisions in the House
Q83 Mr Davidson: I wonder if I might
go back to Operation TELIC and the shortages of body armour and
boots and air filters in particular. I have read the stuff here
about this system which seems to be fine and everything works
dandy, but why did we, presumably with the same system, have such
a breakdown in supply in TELIC?
Sir Kevin Tebbit: We have improved
the system since TELIC, but let me go back to TELIC. TELIC was
an operation which took place with a speed of notice that was
much shorter than our planned readiness times to meet it. Perhaps
I might just explain; I tried to before but I think it is important.
I was with Geoff Hoon in Ankara in January 2003 trying to negotiate
with the Turkish Government the arrangements for what we then
expected it still to be, our force package that would go to Iraq.
It was going to go through south-east Turkey and would have held
the northern part of the country. It would have involved a very
different force from the one that we eventually sent; its composition
would have been completely different from the one we eventually
had to send. It was a smaller force than the one we had to send,
it would have been equipped particularly for mountainous conditions,
whereas the force we sent had to be equipped for desert conditions.
It had a completely different logistics supply chain requirement
from the one we found we needed in Kuwait. The host nation arrangements
were completely different; different countries. There was a total
change from plans which might have been made up to January to
what actually happened for an operation which took place by the
end of March. We usually plan on a much, much longer timescale
to be able to do such an operation than the amount of warning
time we actually had with this operation. Therefore, it was not
to be expected that we could achieve perfection and there were
shortfalls. What was impressive I think was that we were still
able to manage the risks and difficulties and achieve the result.
If I might just give you a specific, it was not that we did not
have a system for tracking and identifying the logistics that
we were putting into the theatre. We did have a system, but it
was a slow system and it was overwhelmed by the speed with which
items had to arrive into this one place in Kuwait where everything
had to come for this huge force which we were putting together
and it simply broke under that strain. What we now have is a much
better system, which I could ask Air Vice-Marshal Leeson to explain
in more detail if you wish, which does indeed give us much more
resilience than was the case there, but the basic answer to your
question is that we were operating outside our planning guidelines.
Q84 Mr Davidson: May I just get this
clear? At that stage you had a state of readiness which depended
upon the task being the task for which you had already planned
and you were unable to adjust if there was an alteration in both
the time parameters and the style of operation. This does not
seem to me to be the sort of flexibility and planning that would
be necessary. You seem to be saying to us that you can implement
any plan we want, provided it is a plan you already have.
Sir Kevin Tebbit: Not at all;
no. Forgive me, I was giving you the very specific answer; I ought
to give you the more general context. Our defence planning assumption
is to be able to conduct three operations simultaneously, a combination
of medium and small scale, or to be able to reconfigure with warning
time to a very large-scale operation. This was a large-scale operation;
no mistake about that. Those are not absolutely specific, because
you cannot be specific about the precise operation it might be.
If we tried to be specific, we should just have a massive defence
budget. So we do the best we can with assumptions, plans based
on exercises, based on operational analysis; we try to scale our
forces, our training requirements, our equipment, our support
requirements around assumptions, but they are all assumptions.
When the real world issue hits, we then have to shift, hoping
that we have managed risks and carried our assumptions as well
as we possibly can to the real world and we have to act. All I
am saying is that in this particular case, the time available
to make the shift was less than ideal. It meant that there were
particular stresses at various parts of the points in the force
structure.
Q85 Mr Davidson: I do find that slightly
difficult to accept on the basis that my recollection is that
virtually everybody knew what the options were some considerable
time beforehand and while a formal decision might not have been
made, the direction in which we were moving was quite clear. What
I want to clarify, and I understand that you were talking there
about what happened in the past, is the shortage of equipment
such as boots, for example. Boots do seem to me not to be the
cutting edge of high technology. I, in my office, was being phoned
all the time by the wives of Territorials saying that their husbands
were out there with the wrong sorts of boots and without desert
equipment and so on. What I want is a guarantee that the changes
in the system that you have now introduced mean that that will
not happen again. Can you give me that guarantee?
Sir Kevin Tebbit: I can give you
various guarantees, but I must just go back. I do not think I
made myself clear in my first explanation. It was a very different
environment, even to the extent of requiring rather different
boots and colour of clothing, going in through the south than
the north. The warning time for that size of force that we actually
had for that specific operation was very short; it was three months
not six months, certainly not a year. I do ask you to consider
that, because it is a real fact. To come on to your point positively,
since TELIC we have reviewed our scales of requirements. Every
year a logistics audit is done, including what we would need for
deployed forces, and we have increased the scales of holdings
that we have for uniforms and boots and that sort of thing. We
have done a lot of other things since then. That audit also reviews
our arrangements with industry and establishes whether we are
right in our assumptions about how quickly they can produce the
stuff we do not hold in our inventory. If we have it wrong, then
we have to change our assumptions or, more likely, redo the contracts
so as to make sure that we can. So we have done indeed a number
of things and I could go on in more detail. Back to a fundamental
point, in a lot of cases it was not that we did not get the equipment
there even in the reduced timescales, it was that it was piling
up so fast through one small choke point that our tracking and
identification system, what was in the ISO containers, went wrong.
We have also changed that whole way of tracking and being able
to see our material in transit and that also is a very big improvement.
It includes IT changes; there is a particular project going on
at the moment. We also kept that system called TAV minus, which
you may remember us discussing before, but also, for example,
the SkyNet programme, making sure we have more satellites that
we can use so our communications are more robust.
Q86 Mr Davidson: I do not want to
get drawn unduly into micromanaging the system for you; I just
want to know that this is not going to happen again.
Sir Kevin Tebbit: I am just trying
to give you assurances.
Lieutenant General Sir Rob Fry:
I cannot guarantee this is not going to happen again and for one
very good reason: there is a role in here for military judgment
and the management of operational risk. As happened in TELIC and
as can happen on any number of other occasions, a judgment is
made by the people who are commanding the forces in the field
on whether they wait for the logistic train entirely to catch
up with them, so that every man is equipped to the level which
we want, or whether there are other absolutely compelling factors
which say that we do something now and those can be military or
those can be political. We must always accept the fact that there
is a place for that, because that is much more likely to bring
about a decision on the battlefield than simply waiting for our
logistics stocks to be right.
Q87 Mr Davidson: To be fair to you,
I entirely understand that there are these operational decisions
which have to be taken in the circumstances that prevail at the
time and striking a balance and so on. The issue is of course,
if the commander at the time has to decide to go without certain
equipment, that we need to clarify whether or not things could
and ought to have been done to make sure that that equipment was
actually there. That is the issue that perplexed us at the time
of TELIC.
Sir Kevin Tebbit: May I just give
you a little more on that? We kept explaining that commanders
declared they had full operational capability and therefore they
had what they needed to do the job. It did not stop your criticisms
and we accepted those. If you look at paragraph 2.38 of the Report,
you will see that already we have purchased £120 million
of extra consumable operational stocks, which we now hold in the
inventory and which we do not therefore have to get off the shelf,
and can therefore get to any particular event faster than would
otherwise be the case; well we hope so anyway. You will see there
that it includes NBC clothing and enhanced combat body armour,
the very sorts of personal equipment you are talking about.
Q88 Mr Davidson: So we can be satisfied
that the issues that we identified last time will not occur again.
Sir Kevin Tebbit: Nobody can be
absolutely certain in a business which is about managing risk
and taking risk, which is what security, combat, warfare are about.
What you can be certain about is that the Department has taken
very, very robust steps to manage these risks and to reduce them.
Q89 Mr Davidson: Can I be satisfied
that next time, if the equipment has been pre-ordered, it will
actually get from the back to the front and that you have the
systems to track and distribute materials? I understand the point
you are making there, this is now a slightly different issue about
being able to track and identify and follow through and so on.
Has that entirely been resolved now?
Sir Kevin Tebbit: Yes.
Air Vice-Marshal Leeson: We are
now much more confident on that. We have rolled out a system which
has a number of stages of improvement still to deliver, but right
now, for the Iraq theatre, we can actually track 93% of the equipment
delivered to theatre on a routine basis to final point of consumption.
It is a good performance and we can make it better.
Q90 Stephen Williams: May I return
to some questions about distribution of resources in between the
various services, particularly the Navy. As I understand it, in
2003, or approximately 18 months ago, £310 million was switched
out of Royal Navy maintenance effectively to support the Army
and the Air Force and it says that some vessels simply had maintenance
that was the minimum required just to meet Health and Safety considerations
and some environmental safety obligations as well. In paragraph
2.10 on page 21 of the NAO Report, it says that this decline in
maintenance funding effectively means that you are building an
assumption in the long term that the material state of the fleet
will degrade and that will obviously presumably affect readiness
levels. As we do not have a representative of the Admiralty here,
perhaps Sir Kevin would like to comment on that?
Sir Kevin Tebbit: You do not have
one of course because the Admiralty no longer exists; we are one
integrated Department. The first thing I ought to say is that
that was a judgment of relative priorities that was taken by the
Defence Management Board on which the Chief of Naval Staff sits
and it was a collective judgment taken by us in the way we have
to take all sorts of decisions of this kind. We have one limited
amount of resource, we have a budget growing at 1.4% real, which
is good for defence but is not that impressive considering how
costs are moving in the economy as a whole. We have to decide
where we have to prioritise resources to meet the most important
tasks, contingencies which arise. We made a collective decision,
to which the Navy subscribed fully, that the right thing, given
where our force structure was most stretched, was to focus resources
in this area on the Army for their recovery from Operation TELIC
and for the upcoming operations which were seen to be of the most
importance. Firstly, continuation of the task in Iraq and secondly,
preparation for doing more in Afghanistan whilst sustaining what
is going on at the moment still in the Balkans and with standing
commitments such as Northern Ireland. Similarly the Air Force
has tasks in those areas too. It was felt that at this particular
stage, things were easier for the Navy. That does not mean to
say that this was easy or welcome: it means that there is still
enough in the Navy allocation to meet their tasks. So far none
of the operational commitments of the Navy has been missed. It
means we have to keep this carefully under review, so that we
do not see the red line in the Report emerging, but we review
the position next year and ameliorate. We have already given some
amelioration to the Navy where things have looked as though they
could have come unstuck if it had continued that way. They were
not major amounts of money, but there have already been two injections
of additional resource to help where the shoe pinched. Yes, but
it was a prioritisation decision and it will only become seriously
damaging if it prolongs into the future in the way the red line
shows, but if the blue line is the one that is chosen, then it
will ameliorate after 2006 up to 2008.
Q91 Stephen Williams: Does this degradation
in the fleet affect all vessels or is it just targeted at particular
vessels, surface vessels, submarines?
Sir Kevin Tebbit: No; the vessels
which are most critical for achieving the tasks are protected.
Those which are less critical have a reduced level of support.
For example, all the submarines are completely protected because
the deterrent is a number one priority still and nothing changes
there. With the destroyer and frigate fleet, then it depends on
what tasks they are engaged.
Q92 Stephen Williams: You referred
in the answer to my first question to additional units of resource
in 2005 and 2006.
Sir Kevin Tebbit: In 2006, not
2005.
Q93 Stephen Williams: It is anticipated
to come back to normal in 2006, is that right?
Sir Kevin Tebbit: Normal is a
word I could not use at this stage. It will be reviewed carefully
and the level that will be decided on will be chosen then. The
way in which the Navy is managing this is on the basis of outputs
and effects. In other words, they look at their tasks, ensure
that they can meet them and move the resources around in their
support accordingly. So it means that this particular vessel is
targeted for a second class life, it means active management of
a reduced level of support across the fleet.
Q94 Stephen Williams: Given that
you said there were extra resources in 2005, were they shifts
again within your overall department budget from the Air Force
and the Army, or were they additional resources.
Sir Kevin Tebbit: No, I would
not put it like that. Within a budget of £27 billion, we
do have some flexibilities, but this year, for example, the extra
cost of fuel for the Armed Forces as a whole is not less than
£100 million, so this obviously gives you the sort of shifts
that we have to cope with on a normal basis.
Q95 Stephen Williams: So are you
saying there were other factors which in fact outweighed this
switch in maintenance budgets in those two years?
Sir Kevin Tebbit: Sorry which
two years are we talking about?
Q96 Stephen Williams: I was asking
about 2004-05 and 2005-06.
Sir Kevin Tebbit: When I was talking
about the small adjustments. The smaller budget; no, that was
a different point. I do not necessarily take the advice of my
advisors, but I usually do. I would have thought the shift of
resources in favour of the Navy against the savings that were
taken earlier would have been about £50 million, that sort
of figure.
Q97 Stephen Williams: May I look
at the effect this shifting around of money and priorities has
on your suppliers? On page 22, paragraph 2.11 does rather suggest
that the impact of these switches on the defence industry effectively
is not properly considered. Is that a fair comment, do you think?
Sir Kevin Tebbit: I do not think
that is right. Clearly, we do have to veer and haul resources
according to circumstances and the outputs we achieve for defence,
which is our number one priority. However, it is increasingly
recognised that to do that we need a closer relationship with
industry and better partnering with industry where it is good
value for money. We are about to bring out a Defence Industrial
Strategy in December which will have, as one of its important
elements, this issue of giving industry a clearer long-term view
of where we will need them and where we will need less of them,
so they can plan their own loadings accordingly. The sorts of
shifts we are talking about here are relatively tactical; they
are not strategic. The really big issues are about the partnering
we are now doing for the whole of our repair and maintenance work,
whether it is land fleets, vehicles or the air fleets, for example.
This is one of the most important elements of the logistics transformation
programme, so I should say the relationship within industry is
getting closer rather than weaker. If you look at our change programme,
where we are creating efficiencies in logistics of £2 billion
up to 2011, a lot of that is being done by smarter partnering
with industry to reduce the costs of support and maintenance,
faster turnaround times in repair loops, so that planes are being
serviced for shorter periods than before and you have more availability
of the fleet as a whole; true of armoured vehicles as well.
Q98 Stephen Williams: Paragraphs
2.24 to 2.29 actually flesh that out in rather more detail and
paragraph 2.28 mentions Iraq and the supplies that were needed
there. It says "102 of the 194 urgent operational requirements".
Those are the only figures for which you were able to supply the
data. "Of the 102 acquisitions for which data was available,
77 were required to be ready for use before war fighting began"
in Iraq. "Of these, 53 were fully delivered, fitted and usable
in time while, in a further 19 cases, part quantities had been
delivered, fitted and were usable", which builds on what
I was saying earlier. What sort of work does the Department do
to assess the risk that an industry will not be able to supply
the equipment that all the Services need in order to meet the
Government's defence objectives?
Sir Kevin Tebbit: We are covering
the same ground as we have done earlier, but I am happy to continue
to do so because I am answering your questions rather than those
of another Member of the Committee. Firstly, on the information
question, we used to gather information on an exception basis.
In other words, with urgent requirements of this kind we tended
only to gather information which needed action, that is to say
it had not arrived; a negative reporting system. We have accepted
that we should cover all of the urgent operational requirements
under one system, so in future we shall have data always available
on whatever is happening. Secondly, if you actually drill into
these figures, even about TELIC, you will find that the position
was actually much more positive than this because this does not
take account of those requirements where you only needed part
of them actually to begin the operation. A lot of them would be
needed for sustainment over a longer period of time and could
arrive anyway throughout a longer period. In fact, 93% of those
items that were required for the start of war fighting were in
fact delivered. To your point: since then, as part of the 2005
logistics support and deployability audit, all of the Integrated
Project Teams—and that is how we manage logistics and equipment
programmes—have been tasked to express the level of confidence
they have in industry's capacity to meet the assumptions which
are there about delivery times and if there is a gap between the
assumption and what industry is now telling us, to consider amending
the contracts so that we can be sure that we get the stuff in
time.
Q99 Stephen Williams: May I switch
to the effectiveness, the stretching the Army has on other objectives.
This is on collective training which is referred to in paragraph
2.5, which says "The Army's current commitments to operations
also means that some peacetime activities, such as collective
training for roles not employed in current operations, has been
curtailed. This is further fleshed out in paragraph 2.15 which
actually says ". . . the impact of high activity levels is
pervasive and results in additional strains on processes, people
and equipment". What is the impact of this reduction in collective
training, and other matters I have just referred to, on the Army's
state of readiness?
Lieutenant General Sir Rob Fry:
It will be much more difficult for us to take on an unforeseen
contingent operation now. Bearing in mind the level of commitment
we already have, that is not something we are looking to do. The
Report very much uses the language of contingencies and I must
introduce the language of campaigns here, if only for a few moments.
A campaign is different from a contingency in so far as it runs
on for a period of time and you generate forces against the requirements
of that theatre, rather than against a generic requirement and
that is the situation currently in Iraq. Now clearly that is the
operation which is the clear and present danger and we must try
to resolve that, therefore we need to concentrate our force generation
issues there. This does have a knock-on effect more widely, particularly
in the land ORBAT, but what it does not do in any way is prejudice
the conduct of our campaigns in the Balkans, in Afghanistan or
in Iraq; indeed those are specifically preserved. What it does
make more difficult is retaining a body of forces which could
now discharge an entirely unforeseen contingency.
Sir Kevin Tebbit: And that is
why we are quoting readiness levels, the main purpose of this
Report , lower than the 100% which they otherwise would be. In
other words, the main reason is that because of the high tempo
of operations in excess of our planning assumptions two years
ago and the fact that since then we have remained at a very high
state, inevitably what you might regard as that bit of the perfect
readiness which should be there is actually up in those operations
in the real world and is not available for perfect contingency
minding for the rest of the structure. Indeed I should be surprised
if it were, because if it were, people would say either we did
not need so much money for defence or we should be having even
more ambition.
|
