Examination of Witnesses (Questions 100-112)
MINISTRY OF
DEFENCE
13 MARCH 2006
Q100 Mr Bacon: It says in figure
three that there were fatalities during the combat phase of Operation
TELIC. Were there other fatalities? Obviously there have sadly
been fatalities caused by insurgents, but have there been other
blue-on-blue fatalities in the non-combat forces?
Air Vice Marshal Dalton: No.
Q101 Mr Bacon: None as far as you
are aware. One of the things I am surprised about is the paucity
of information. Our Committee commented on that before and you
say you have made progress on it, but, given that you have been
living and breathing Combat Identification for two years, I should
have thought that you would have at your fingertips some feeling
for where things were with the Australians and with the Dutch
and the Canadians and Americans and so on and be able to rattle
off at your fingertips where things stood in terms of the number
of blue-on-blue fatalities which each had caused either to their
own troops or to allied troops in recent operations over many
years and would have been able to allude to examples in Afghanistan
or Sierra Leone or elsewhere in the Middle East. Yet neither of
you were able to do that. Is it possible you could write to the
Committee? What I should like to see personally is a matrix, a
table with the year down the left-hand side, say starting at 1990,
before the first Gulf War and go through to the present day. Then
go from left to right, each country, perhaps in alphabetical order,
or rank them by the number of fatalities, going from the United
States, Australia, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, the major
countries, with how many there were, by whom and on whom. Is that
too much to ask?
Air Vice Marshal Dalton: We shall
do our best.
Q102 Mr Bacon: I should have thought
it would be relatively simple to produce in a table.
Mr Jeffrey: We shall certainly
write to the Committee with as much information of that kind as
we can muster.
Q103 Chairman: Where are we with
the Sergeant Roberts case?
Mr Jeffrey: The Sergeant Roberts
case is with the prosecution authorities, the Crown Prosecution
Service and the police, and is therefore effectively sub judice
in the sense that it would be unwise for me or anyone else to
comment on it at this stage.
Q104 Chairman: Can you tell us about
the fratricide database and whether this has made any progress?
Air Vice Marshal Dalton: We now
have a single store in the corporate memory within the Joint Capabilities
area. It has all the data to do with fratricide on operations
and we have a store through our Defence Science and Technology
Laboratory Agency which pulls together both that and also for
training and exercise data.
Q105 Chairman: Are you making good
progress on the results of Exercise URGENT QUEST?
Air Vice Marshal Dalton: Yes,
we are. The results of that are currently being assessed by our
experts. I am due in America on Wednesday to hear what the American
assessment has been within the Pentagon so that we can then see
whether we have covered enough of the areas to make clear and
accurate decisions on where we are going to go.
Q106 Chairman: Summing up, would
it be unfair to put to you that since our last report—and
I stress that we took a particular interest in this—progress
has been uneven, that fewer than half of the projects identified
have actually made good progress? Does this show a lack of real
push within your department? Perhaps this issue is not taken entirely
seriously compared with other issues you have to deal with. Would
that be unfair?
Mr Jeffrey: I firmly resist the
suggestion that this is not taken seriously.
Q107 Chairman: Why have fewer than
half the projects made significant progress?
Mr Jeffrey: First of all, it is
fewer than half of the projects which happen to be listed in table
five of the report. A much wider range of projects is given in
the appendix. If you look at these, there is a wide variety of
explanations. Some of them have made good progress, as is noted.
We discussed earlier in the hearing why the Battlefield Target
Identification System has taken longer than was originally intended
and essentially it is because it has been internationalised.
Q108 Chairman: We knew all about
that five years ago, ten years ago, 15 years ago. It has just
been bogged down in NATO for years and years and years and you
have done nothing about it, have you?
Mr Jeffrey: That is not my sense.
It is certainly the case that pursuing these issues in international
fora is always more time consuming than it would be if we simply
pursued them ourselves. The other point I should make about the
equipment projects is that in some of those cases which are listed
in table five, what has happened is in fact what this Committee
urges us to do in another context, which is to look carefully
at the risk we face both technically and in other ways as early
as possible in projects and to re-scope them if necessary or indeed
in one case, ASTRID, to cancel it altogether. I agree that we
could be further ahead with some of this and I am not suggesting
for a moment that we are complacent about it, but in terms of
the list of projects which have slipped or otherwise, there is
an explanation in each case which I am sure the Committee is aware
of.
Q109 Chairman: The fact remains that
if there were another Iraq war tomorrow or a war in Iran, anywhere
else tomorrow, if an American plane sought to attack a British
tank by mistake there would be little the crew of the tank could
do apart from waving a Union Jack. That is right, is it not?
Air Vice Marshal Dalton: No.
Q110 Chairman: Tell us why not.
Air Vice Marshal Dalton: The example
there I should give is the fact that we have just recently enabled
our situational awareness picture to be transmitted seamlessly
across to the Americans through their coalition blue force tracker
system and from Bowman such that they will now know, if it had
to be done, technically we could field that sort of capability
relatively quickly. It may not be the most efficient way to do
it, but we could do it.
Q111 Chairman: From the tank to the
plane?
Air Vice Marshal Dalton: From
the tanks to the planes via the headquarters.
Q112 Chairman: In real time, quick
enough in the fog of war and all that?
Air Vice Marshal Dalton: Quick
enough is always a major thing. It would certainly be in a time
which is reasonable for people to be able to know whether enemy
or friendly forces are in that area.
Chairman: We shall leave it there gentlemen.
Thank you very much for what has been a very interesting hearing.
We look forward to the further progress you will be making. Thank
you.
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