Examination of Witnesses (Questions 80-99)
DR IAIN
WATSON, DR
ANDREW TYLER,
MR JONATHAN
LYLE AND
LIEUTENANT GENERAL
ANDREW FIGGURES
27 JUNE 2006
Q80 Chairman: How is this project
going to deal with fast inshore attack craft?
Mr Lyle: We are putting new barrels
on, giving more precise, accurate fire, but more importantly,
as you can see in the pictures, we are putting additional sensors
on to the mount so we have a forward-looking infra-red imager.
We have what we call side lobe suppression in the radar, which
means—the engineers in the room will hopefully understand
it—that we are looking to direct the beam more clearly so
that it gives it a look-down capability to discriminate and pick
up targets against sea clutter. The sea produces a scattering
effect for normal radars. This gives it an ability to look down
more. It is looking up to aircraft threats or sea-skimming threats.
It gives it an ability to look down at things coming effectively
below the horizon. The system would look down on things on the
water. It gives it that additional capability as well as retaining
its capability to defend against sea-skimmers and against aircraft.
Q81 Chairman: At the end of March
the projected cost was £63 million, which was £3 million
under the approved cost. Does it remain the same? Is that the
current forecast?
Mr Lyle: That is the current forecast,
yes.
Q82 Chairman: At the end of March
the forecast in-service date was July 2008. Does that remain the
same?
Mr Lyle: Yes, that is the same.
Q83 Chairman: Does that in-service
date projected relate to both the small calibre gun and the upgrade
of Phalanx 1A?
Mr Lyle: The in-service date is
a combination of the two systems. The in-service date is actually
driven by the later of the two systems. So we plan to have an
initial operating capability with the automated small calibre
gun on the Type 23 in the summer of 2007; in July in fact. So
that will already be in service in 2008. The ISD is defined as
when we have both systems in service, so it is driven by the Phalanx
system.
Q84 Chairman: When the Type 45 destroyer
replaces the Type 42, is there still a need to fit the Type 42
with an upgrade to the Phalanx system?
Mr Lyle: The Type 42 currently
has Phalanx 1A systems. A certain number of Type 42s, five in
fact, will be upgraded to the Phalanx 1B system and will carry
that until they are paid out of the Royal Navy service. When that
happens, the Phalanx 1B mounts that we have will be refitted to
other ships in the Royal Navy's fleet and a decision will be taken
at that time as to which are the priority to receive it. A number
of RFAs are receiving modifications to enable them to receive
this system. We will take a decision at the time. We will recycle
the mounts, as we currently do, on to those ships that are best
judged to need the capability at the time. So the assets will
be reused.
Q85 Chairman: What system do other
navies use to deal with these threats?
Mr Lyle: The Phalanx system is
very much the market leader. I believe there are about 23 navies
who operate the Phalanx 1A and about seven, including ourselves,
who operate the 1B. The other contender which we do operate on
our ships is the Dutch goalkeeper system, which we operate on
some of our larger ships, but the market leader is very much the
Phalanx.
Q86 Chairman: Getting back to the
question that Kevan Jones was asking about buying things off the
shelf, is there an element here of re-inventing the wheel with
this project, or would it be possible to buy something that was
already developed?
Mr Lyle: We are buying this off
the shelf. We bought it off the shelf when we originally bought
it as a Phalanx system, and we have then followed effectively
the Americans. So the mod kit that we are now putting on, the
mod 1B, which is part of this fit, is already in service with
the United States. So it is off the shelf.
Chairman: Moving on to the Maritime Composite
Training System Phase 1, Linda Gilroy.
Q87 Linda Gilroy: First of all, could
you outline to us what the Maritime Composite System Phase 1 project
will deliver, who it is for and what the other phases of the project
will deliver?
Dr Tyler: Again, can I assist
you by passing round a couple of pictures? The first one shows
what we have presently in our maritime training simulator and
the second one is a concept picture showing what we are aiming
towards. The best way to describe this is if you imagine—some
of you might have visited—a warship, that down in the guts
of the warship is basically the nerve centre, the place where
the ship is fought from, so it contains the radar systems, the
missile control systems and so on, and what we have done in the
past, and the existing system which is shown there, that is basically—I
have heard it described as a concrete ship. They basically build
the entire operations suite that you would find on board a ship
at a land-based training centre. One of the key things about that
is that each ship has a completely bespoke, unique set-up. So
you will have one for the Type 23, one for the Type 22, one for
the Type 42 and so on. They are completely inflexible. When the
guys and girls go in it to practise and train, you need everybody
present that you would have within the operations room, even if
you were just using one or two bits of equipment. It has to be
used as an integrated suite. What we are doing with the Maritime
Composite Training System is we are taking great advantage of
commercial off-the-shelf technologies in terms of the hardware,
and indeed, this is the direction we are going in on the warships
themselves, and you can see from that more conceptual picture
there that what we have there is effectively standard hardware
units inside of which will be maybe a slightly higher specification
but the sort of computer you would expect to have, and all of
the training, the systems, are provided as software to that. That
has hugely opened up our flexibility for use of the system. We
can now take one of those units and configure a classroom with,
let us say, a dozen radars in it. So if somebody is getting radar
training, we can have 12 of these set up, and you can have 12
people individually being taught how to use a radar. On the other
hand, we can set them up and arrange the room and the equipment
to simulate a Type 23 or a Type 42 and, even more significantly,
what we can do is that when we are doing co-operative training,
where we are trying to use more than one ship working together,
we can basically set up any permutation and combination we like.
At the moment all we can do is have one Type 23 and one Type 42
and one Type 22 working together. So we have enormously opened
up our envelope of flexibility for use of the system. We have
also, because of the flexibility it has given us, been able to
reduce the number of instructional and training staff that we
require to do this, the amount of real estate that we are using,
so we are getting some very positive efficiency benefits coming
out of this as well. The other thing that we have been able to
do with this—and this is a subtlety but I think it is very
important—is that in the past the training period that individuals
would go through contained a relatively small generic training
part and then a large specific training part. When I say specific,
I mean specific to a particular ship. If that individual was going
to move on to another ship, they would then need to go through
a protracted specific training period. What we have done now is
we have used this project as an opportunity to turn that on its
head now and to have a much more protracted general training period
followed by a much shorter specific training period. So you can
imagine now that our ability to use our sailors more flexibly
has been increased, because if they are going to move from one
ship to another, they can come back for a relatively short period.
I hope that answers the question.
Q88 Linda Gilroy: That is very clear.
Thank you very much. What about the other phases of the project?
Dr Tyler: Both phase 2 and, being
a little bit more visionary, phase 3, are—at the moment
phase 2 has a notional amount of money put aside for it but it
is not a confirmed project. At the moment all of this training
goes on onshore, but obviously, what we would like to do is to
optimise the amount of time that our sailors spend at sea, so
what phase 2 would do is it that the equipment is actually fitted
in the operations room on the ship but instead of being fed by
live sensors, by live radar and the missile system, it would be
fed by simulated and emulated data so they would sit alongside—this
is not while the ship is under way—and take a data feed
from the shore, and they would be able to sit in their own operations
room and fight simulated conditions. Phase 3, going beyond that,
is to do the same thing but at sea. That has quite a lot of quite
complex issues associated with it so at the moment that is more
of a vision for the future rather than something we have an extant
plan for.
Q89 Linda Gilroy: As at the end of
March 2006, some three and a half months into a four to three-month
demonstration and manufacture phase, the project was forecast
to be £2 million under the approved cost. Is the current
forecast the same?
Dr Tyler: That is the current
forecast, yes.
Q90 Linda Gilroy: The in-service
date for initial operating capability for the system is July 2009.
Is that right? March? July?
Dr Tyler: Our current forecast
for the ISD is shown in table 3(b) at July 2009, which is seven
months beyond our 50% date, as we call it, our most probable date
of January 2009. So our timescale has slipped on this programme.
Q91 Linda Gilroy: What sort of things
have caused that slippage?
Dr Tyler: Some of it we are going
to have to put our hand up for here, in the sense that there was
a more protracted negotiation. Immediately after we had gone through
the main gate process, got the main gate approval, we were a bit
optimistic about the time it was going to take to complete the
contract negotiation. We have had to add in a three-month additional
period into the acceptance process. The reasons for this are somewhat
complicated but related to the changing of the way we are doing
the training. I talked earlier about the generic training and
the specific training. One of the implications of that means that
instead of being able to accept the different ships' simulators
one after the other, we basically have to have them all ready
at the same point in order to be able to accept them, and that
has effectively added three months into our acceptance process
before we would actually be able to declare the initial operating
capability.
Q92 Linda Gilroy: Can I just be clear?
The initial operating is July 2009 but that has slipped?
Dr Tyler: Originally it was January
2009 for our most probable and it has now slipped to July 2009.
Q93 Linda Gilroy: Full operating
was October 2010. That has slipped back.
Dr Tyler: Yes, by which time we
would have ... We are working on that at the moment. We are at
very early stages in the project here so we are just working through
the specific implications of whether that slip would then track
through the whole of the programme.
Q94 Linda Gilroy: What is the impact
of that slippage going to be in terms of people who are expecting
to be able to use it and are planning for it?
Dr Tyler: Two things. I would
like to make a point here, because I think it comes to one of
the more general things that we were talking about earlier. One
of the things I think this project can be held up, as a good example
of, is the application of a technique which we are now mandating
in all projects called Earned Value Management, which, put simply,
is basically gauging the stage you are in the project by the actual
real value that has been executed in the project to that point
in time. What that does is it forces you to be extremely rigorous
about understanding very, very early on in the project how your
programme is likely to develop. In times gone by, I am sure you
have heard in the past of projects where we found out that things
were slipping rather late in the event before we were able to
really explore options about what we were going to do about it.
What we have done is we have realised that there were some programme
issues in this project at a very, very early stage, so that is
allowing us to do two things: first of all, it is allowing us
to obviously look within the project itself as to how we can get
some of that time back, and I think there is a real prospect of
doing that with our contractor, who is being very co-operative.
The second thing it allows us to look at is what contingency plans
we might need to have in place in order ensure that the customer
is not going to be without their capability, and in fact, there
are a couple of strands to that. First of all, we were originally
due to be vacating the Southwick Park premises—it used to
be HMS Dryad—but now that is staying in MoD's hands so that
the enclave, as we call it, where the current simulators are based
is going to continue to be available to us if necessary. The second
thing is that we have some slippage in the Type 45 destroyer programme,
which is the other critical date to have the simulator ready for
the training for Type 45. So essentially, that has bought us a
little bit of time on the programme. We can call that serendipity
but that gives you some idea of the contingency plans that we
are able to build in order to make sure that, whatever happens,
we are not getting a situation where we do not have our sailors
trained and ready for action.
Q95 Linda Gilroy: I am curious as
to how the programme can slip but can become less expensive at
the same time. I would have thought it would be the other way
round.
Dr Tyler: It depends. This is
a lump sum, fixed price contract that we have with the contractor.
If the contractor determines that it is going to take him three
months longer, that is his risk that he is taking.
Q96 Linda Gilroy: So his reward basically
comes with meeting the deadline, and if he does not do that, he
is losing something.
Dr Tyler: Of course, and one of
the things he is going to have to do is to sustain his project
team for a longer period than he had budgeted for, and so there
will be a financial penalty to him for that.
Q97 Chairman: Have you built into
this training system, training for the future aircraft carriers?
Dr Tyler: Not at this stage. However,
one of the beauties of the maritime composite training simulator
is now all the new classes, instead of us having to build a concrete
CVF on some land site somewhere, what we will basically be able
to do is, as somebody put it to me the other day, bring the CD,
load it in and then reconfigure the floor space with those standing
units that you saw in the picture to replicate the floor space
at the CVF operations room, and the same for any other ship.
Chairman: Moving on to the thermal sighting
system, David Borrow.
Q98 Mr Borrow: I was at TADL in Belfast
yesterday so I have had a demonstration of this kit. I was a bit
perplexed to understand why this sort of kit was not fitted in
the first place with the SP HVM.
Dr Watson: It was an aspiration
when the original project was carried forward. At that time the
technology was not mature enough and the risk, both technical
and financial, was excessive for that original project, so it
was therefore postponed to a later date, and when we felt the
technology was ready, we chose to take it forward.
Q99 Mr Borrow: At the end of March
this year, the project is forecast to be £2 million underspent.
Is that still the case?
Dr Watson: That is correct.
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