Examination of Witnesses (Questions 122-139)
GENERAL SIR
JACK DEVERELL,
LIEUTENANT GENERAL
SIR ROB
FRY, MR
DANIEL KEOHANE
AND COLONEL
CHRISTOPHER LANGTON
20 NOVEMBER 2007
Q122 Chairman: Welcome to this evidence
session. This is our third evidence session in our inquiry into
the future of NATO and European defence. Our intention is to look
pretty broadly at the role and purposes of NATO, to look at the
challenges that we face in NATO, how all this relates to European
defence and security policy, and today it is mostly military capabilities,
operations and readiness. There is going to be, we currently intend,
one further evidence session in December with the Secretary of
State. We hope to publish our report in the New Year, and anyway
ahead of the NATO summit in Bucharest in April. We have an excellent
panel in front of us today. I wonder if you could possibly, gentlemen,
introduce yourselves?
Colonel Langton: I am Christopher
Langton, I am the Senior Fellow for Conflict and Defence Diplomacy
at IISS and I was formerly Head of Defence Analysis at the Institute.
Mr Keohane: My name is Daniel
Keohane, I am a Research Fellow with the European Union Institute
for Security Studies which is based in Paris, and there I look
after the European Security and Defence Policy Research Programme.
Lieutenant General Sir Rob Fry:
My name is Robert Fry and I am Vice President of the EDS Corporation,
previously the Director of Operations in the Ministry of Defence.
General Sir Jack Deverell: Jack
Deverell. My last military job was Commander in Chief, Allied
Forces North, with a particular responsibility to the integration
of new NATO nations, and we redeployed the first ISAF headquarters
and force to Afghanistan and I spend the rest of my time now talking
about it as much I can!
Q123 Chairman: Can we begin by talking
about the expeditionary capability of NATO? What are the principal
capabilities that NATO requires to carry out its expeditionary
role? General Deverell.
General Sir Jack Deverell: The
first thing is you have got to be able to deliver, in the area
of operations, the required level of combat force, and that is
a balance between force protection and force projection, and that
will depend upon the nature of the threat and the nature of what
you want to achieve. So, it is having the right number of soldiers
at the right readiness, with the right balance of equipment, all
those sorts of things, and a coherent concept so that between
nations there is an understanding of what you are trying to achieve
and how you can do it and all those other things which come into
interoperability, compatibility and the rest. However, that implies
that you have the capacity to get them there and to sustain them
there, and that is both a political, a moral, a physical and a
conceptual capacity. In one sense it is strategic lift, on the
other side it is the capacity to command and control it, have
a network enabled capability, and, in particular, to sustain it
logistically and to be able to rotate it, and we have this classic
military conundrum. The old-fashioned phrase was: one on, one
in the wash and one in your pack. In fact, the rule of three is
now the rule of five, because you have to be able to sustain that
force by committing it, allowing it then to reconstitute itself,
conducting further training (general training as well as all the
other things you have to do) before committing it then again to
mission rehearsal training before it goes back into theatre. So,
there is now deemed to be a rule of five really. If more than
20% of your force is committed, then you are probably suffering
from serious overstretch. Those are some of the issues which an
expeditionary force needs to be successful.
Q124 Chairman: This is your past
role I am asking you to answer for. Does the British MoD accept
that rule of five?
General Sir Jack Deverell: Yes.
That is where it has largely come from. I am not sure it is written
down anywhere like that, but I guess if you talk to most people
in the MoD, they would nod and say, yes, a rule of five is about
right, in that a rule of three, one third having just left and
one third ready to go, is unsustainable apart from a very, very
short period of time—I mean months rather than years.
Q125 Chairman: General Fry.
Lieutenant General Sir Rob Fry:
I think I would say that NATO's expeditionary capability is no
different from anybody else's expeditionary capability. I think
most of the things Jack has enumerated already: you need forces
at the appropriate degree of readiness, you need a capacity to
project them, you need a capacity to sustain and command them
whilst they are there. There are two differences, however, between
an alliance expeditionary capability and a national expeditionary
capability. These are really the fundamental issues. The first
one is that bringing disparate force elements together requires
some sort of unity of concept, of training and of doctrine, and
you need to make sure that those things are right, because if
you are actually going to put people in harm's way, then you need
to make sure that you share as many of the central assumptions
that combat will bring as you possibly can. The second thing is
that expeditionary operations, by and large, are synonymous with
discretionary operations. They are not necessarily involved in
wars of national survival; therefore there is always a choice
to be involved in these things or not and, therefore, they must
be written and underpinned, sustained essentially, by a political
will, and everybody who is a force contributor gets a vote in
that equation, and keeping that collective political will solid
and not allowing those who wobble to undermine the whole is actually
quite a difficult thing. As Jack has already said, there are physical
elements to this, and those can be easily defined because we would
recognise them as a participle of military science. There are
things, however, that underwrite them which are conceptual or
moral which are a bit more difficult to define and much more difficult
to hold together.
Q126 Chairman: Would either of you
like to add anything? By the way, we have got lots of questions,
so you do not need to feel that everybody that needs to add something
to every question, but do feel free if you would like to on that
one.
Colonel Langton: If I might add,
obviously these comments are absolutely correct, particularly,
I think, the one where we look at a nation's preparedness as opposed
to an alliance's preparedness. My comment here is that NATO is
actually a political alliance in the first place and not a military
alliance. It is a political alliance trying to deliver a military
capability, and that is very complex and it speaks to a lot of
these issues, and we have 26 countries, with 26 defence budgets,
26 constitutions, which limit the preparedness to take part in
expeditionary warfare, or expeditionary operations, should I say,
and we have only got to look at the world today. If you look at
Europe as a whole, including NATO European Member States, there
are 39 countries with troops deployed in the world and 19 of those
have deployed less than 3%. If you compare that with the United
Kingdom, it is a fairly stark comparison and it is an indication
of preparedness which limits the ability to engage in expeditionary
warfare.
Q127 Chairman: It is preparedness
or political?
Colonel Langton: Political preparedness,
if you like. The militaries of, say, Germany and France are incredibly
capable.
Q128 Chairman: So the military are
prepared in these countries but the political constraints are
not?
Colonel Langton: Yes. If you take
the example, and I am sure colleagues would want to comment on
this, of the German forces in Afghanistan, which have been all
over the press this week, you can see exactly what I am talking
about, and if you visit those forces, as I have done this year,
there is frustration. They cannot do what they know they are able
to do because of restrictions placed upon them from their national
capital. It is not the only country.
Q129 Chairman: Mr Keohane?
Mr Keohane: I have nothing to
add.
Q130 Mr Jenkin: Would it not be more
realistic to regard NATO less idealistically as a single set of
capabilities that will be deployed collectively but more as a
pool which trains together, co-ordinates procurement but actually
from which we draw a coalition of the willing that can operate
together when Member States want to. It is not really the military
alliance that it was under the Cold War that would go to war as
an alliance in defence of mainland Europe.
General Sir Jack Deverell: The
problem with that is that its structures still are, and you have
this debate between common funding and where the costs lie.
Chairman: We will come on to that later.
Q131 Mr Jenkins: It is a very interesting
opening statement you made, because most people ran away from
it, but I believe you are right: the one big gap that NATO has
got is the political will across nations. Admittedly some of the
Governments in Europe would put their soldiers in harm's way because
they have not co-ordinated and practised with other armed forces
before they get pulled into a conflict situation. How would you
recommend we raise the pressure on these other politicians across
Europe to recognise that there is no free ride any more, that
we are linked in common and we all need to make the same commitments?
Lieutenant General Sir Rob Fry:
I am sure you are far better placed to comment on that than any
of us are. I do not feel the sense of outrage that you do. I can
see that politicians in each of these countries have elections
to win, electorates to satisfy and it is not an easy equation
to pick your way through the commitment of your force to live
operations whilst retaining a political will. I think some of
the political decisions in places like the Netherlands and Denmark
are actually quite politically courageous given the political
backdrop against which they are made. I think maybe the greatest
method of getting greater cohesion of thought across NATO members
is to convince them of a shared danger and a shared requirement
to respond. I made the comment earlier on that we are not in a
condition of facing a war of national survival, but maybe we are,
and I think that one could present it as such but if there was
ever a malevolent combination of terrorism and weapons of mass
effect, then you are really in a very bad place, to which the
only response is to be direct, effective and unified. It seems
to me that there is a task here of political advocacy drawing
on the military situation, as we see it and could define it, to
persuade people that they share a common threat, to which a common
response is the only thing to do.
Q132 Chairman: I think we may be
getting a bit ahead of ourselves here. Is there a serious gap
in NATO's capability and, if so, is it true that it is this political
will or is there also another gap relating to the size of military
forces in Europe and their equipment? What would you say were
the key gaps, if there are any, in NATO and how can they be addressed?
Who would like to begin with that?
General Sir Jack Deverell: I will
start off and other people can come in and fill in the gaps, so
to speak. There are some previously identified gaps in capability—strategic
airlift.
Q133 Chairman: We will come on to
that in just a second and concentrate on strategic airlift specifically.
General Sir Jack Deverell: All
I am trying to do is identify where these gaps are. I think it
is not exactly a gap in the accepted sense, although you could
call it a gap. There is a great absence of a unifying purpose
at a military level. If you go round many of the countries and
ask: "What is the Army for?"—and the Navy, where
they have got an airforce, if you will excuse the shorthand—you
will get some very different answers, and it is very difficult,
very demanding to get political coherence underpinned by military
coherence if there is not a similarity of view of what your armed
forces are for. There is a penalty we pay with some countries
still focusing on conscript armies, because in many countries
the law states that no conscript shall be posted abroad unless
he or she volunteers, and this changes the nature of units and,
therefore, the cohesion of units and, therefore, governments will
be more sensitive about endangering people who are, in a sense,
not volunteers to be in the force although they may be volunteers
to deploy. We can talk about physical weaknesses, capabilities.
Let me just finish by pointing out the whole concept of precision
engagement: the whole idea that you only hit the target that you
are aiming at, you are only hitting the target that is a threat
to you. Too many of our weapons, I would suggest (and you have
only got to look at some of the amazing pictures on You Tube),
are still weapons which have an area effect which are at times
not suitable for the precision engagement that we seek in somewhere
like Afghanistan to reduce the collateral damage. Too often in
the past we have had to resort too quickly from a precision weapon,
a small arms round, to a thousand pound bomb, which might be a
precision guided munition in that you can guide it through the
top right hand window of a house, but then it blows that house
up and another three round it and, it may be, those other three
houses contain people who are innocent of any involvement in what
is going on. So those are some of the areas where there is a genuine
lack of capability, and in many cases, of the force goals that
were put out at Prague, something like 72% of them will have been
met but 27% will not have been met by 2008, and one of those that
will not be met is the strategic airlift.
Q134 Mr Hamilton: Chairman, can I
indicate that I understand Brian's point but I disagree with it
in the sense that NATO, surely, is a cornerstone of the world.
Really what the problem is, taking your point, Mr Fry, is that
at the end of the day there are a number of countries who are
willing to participate in say Iraq but there are also a number
of countries who are willing to participate in Afghanistan. Surely
what we should be doing is adapting the NATO alliance to every
single conflict we are involved in—that would make it much
simpler. We criticise other countries, but in actual fact other
countries have a right to do what they are doing. Some people
agree with that, some people do not. Most agree with Afghanistan.
The point I am making is that it has to be a coalition. There
is no point in criticising other countries for what they are doing
or what they are not doing.
Lieutenant General Sir Rob Fry:
I think this goes back to Mr Jenkins' point, which is that an
alliance is there and an alliance literally and semantically,
we assume, does things together. That is palpably not the truth.
One actually exists as there are a number of willing partners
within this who, for various reasons based on history, provenance
and domestic politics, decide to get involved in this and tend
to lead the way.
Q135 Chairman: General Deverell,
your comment about people not knowing what their armies are necessarily
for implies that the allied command's transformation is a process
which has not gained traction in the nations of NATO and that
it is not working in transforming NATO into a new, modern alliance
that is relevant to the people it is meant to protect. Colonel
Langton, would you like to comment on that?
Colonel Langton: The ACT, I think,
has had problems since its inception, particularly with its relationship
with Europe and particularly with its relationship with the EDA,
which you are coming on to later. My understanding, though, is
it is now beginning to have an effect as a transforming body but
what it is doing is transforming or increasing interoperability
in many areas, but it comes back to this question which has just
been raised. We can be as interoperable as we like but it is to
do with: will the country be prepared to deploy? There is, I think,
Chairman, in your question another implied question, which is:
are NATO and ACT communicating properly to the nations and the
populations of the nations that are its Member States? I think
that is another question.
Q136 Chairman: Your answer would
be?
Colonel Langton: My answer would
be that they are making strides. They now have this public diplomacy
division, I think it is called, which goes around Europe passing
messages, but I think the question is: are those messages being
aimed at the right place? My answer to that would be probably
not. For example, there was a seminar here in the House of Commons
on Afghanistan under their aegis only two weeks ago and, when
I looked around the room, there was not actually a member of the
British political establishment in the room, even though it was
in the House of Commons. The people who were in the room largely
came from the student population of London and the academic community,
which is a good thing, but if you are trying to pass a message
into the population, then I suppose, arguably, being a democrat,
I think it is probably best to pass it through the members of
Parliament.
Q137 Chairman: You quaint, old-fashioned
thing.
Colonel Langton: I know; I am
sorry about that.
Q138 Chairman: Shall we move on?
General Fry.
Lieutenant General Sir Rob Fry:
May I make a couple of points on the transformation? First of
all, I do not think that the transformation of a military alliance
is necessarily the subject which attracts most attention in my
local pub. In terms of penetration of popular debate, I do not
think so. It is quite an arcane and distant business. The second
thing is, even within single military entities the process of
transformation is a profoundly difficult thing to pull off. We
have witnessed what the Americans are going through at the present
time and, in a sense, the whole of the Rumsfeld doctrine to the
conflicts that we have been engaged in over the last few years
have been to use those conflicts almost as a battle-field experiment
to the transformation process. So it is not an easy thing and,
given the resources that the Americans have devoted to this in
comparison to that which is available to NATO, with 26 people
trying to do it in different ways unified only by a loose framework,
I think you are talking about a really significant challenge.
Chairman: Mr Keohane, you are being admirably
restrained. You will have your time, I promise you. We will move
briefly on to strategic airlift now, because it is something that
you and we have identified.
Q139 Mr Jenkin: Before we leave,
are we missing the wood for the trees here? Let me explain what
I mean. There is a huge capability gap because governments will
not spend enough money. True or false?
Lieutenant General Sir Rob Fry:
I do not think that is entirely true. I think that when Jack describes
some of the gaps that exist in capability, going from the back
to the front, an industrial capacity to surge the appropriate
level of logistics support at the right time does not exist in
every nation, or at least the mechanisms to capture it and push
it forward. The means to project by sea and by air do not necessarily
exist in the scale required. The numbers of high level, high readiness
formations probably do not exist and neither does deployed command
and control; so there are a whole series of gaps right the way
through this whole process. If, however, it was possible to mobilise
all of the things which ostensibly are committed to NATO simultaneously,
those gaps would be far less than they appear now; and I think
that there are real physical gaps but they can be addressed by
expenditure or better co-ordination of the process of allocating
force goals and getting people to stump up to them. We come back
to the underlying issue here, which is a lack of will to commit
those forces. They are not necessarily absent, it is the will
to deploy them which is absent.
General Sir Jack Deverell: And
a lack of understanding as to what effect you are trying to achieve.
In some ways NATO has not been good, and I have a criticism of
NATO when I was there with the accession and integration of the
new nations, because they took, in my view, and people disagreed
with me about this—this is a personal judgment—a rather
lofty view that each nation was a sovereign nation, which of course
it is, and that they should come to their own decisions about
the nature of their military capabilities. A great number of the
nations, particularly the small ones, actually were thrashing
around unable to make those decisions because they did not have
the experience of the decision-making process to come to terms
with some of the very, very difficult problems of either drawing
down or increasing—drawing down in some areas and increasing
in others—and NATO rather stood back, I fear, and they lacked
a guiding hand. So, we now have a situation where some of those
decisions which should have been taken five or six years ago are
still not taken. The whole thing about conscripts and the practicalities
and efficacy of a conscript army is still an issue which is being
addressed when, in fact, really there should have been a much
clearer guide from NATO, I think, about that; but you will find
different opinions about that, needless to say.
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