Examination of Witnesses (Questions 140-159)
GENERAL SIR
JACK DEVERELL,
LIEUTENANT GENERAL
SIR ROB
FRY, MR
DANIEL KEOHANE
AND COLONEL
CHRISTOPHER LANGTON
20 NOVEMBER 2007
Q140 Mr Jones: What we have been
talking about is the difficulty about different nations agreeing
this, but to what extent do you think internal politics within
nations between, say, the Army, Airforce and Navy, has an effect,
not just in this country but also in America, where they are throwing
a lot of money into it but the internal disagreements between
different areas of the Armed Forces also affects being able to
get this transformation?
Lieutenant General Sir Rob Fry:
I would not say it is that great. The campaigns we are involved
in at the present time are fundamentally land-focused. There is
an air adjunct to this, there are several air adjuncts. There
is an air adjunct in sustainment and in internal transportation
and in the sharp end of tactical support, so there is a constant
air theme running through it. Maritime force is almost entirely
absent at the present time. That does not, however, seem to have
provoked in this country some of the nasty inter Nicene tribal
fights that have taken place in other times. I think that the
chiefs of staff are bound together by the commonsense that we
have got to get through this and, therefore, no matter who is
bearing the burden, we must all morally accept that this is a
shared responsibility.
Q141 Willie Rennie: There seems to
be a view developing, and it has been there for some time, that
members of NATO should commit to whatever NATO does no matter
what it does. Surely it is the case that they will pick and choose
what those deployments are, depending on what their populations
believe are the right deployments to make, and is this black and
white issue that if NATO does it everybody should be on board
if they are members of NATO not unrealistic?
Lieutenant General Sir Rob Fry:
I do not think any of us has claimed that. I think an alliance
formed around the concept of collective self-defence against an
overwhelming external threat is entirely different to an alliance,
held together by all sorts of other motives, which can no longer
necessarily see something homogeneous in front of it.
General Sir Jack Deverell: There
is not a unifying threat any more, but, as I said five or six
minutes ago, the trouble is the structures and almost the philosophy,
the culture of the place, is that it is still being worked; the
processes, the procedures and the hierarchies are still there
to deal with a unifying threat where there has to be consensus,
there has to be unanimity. In fact, at the moment what you are
implying—and I think most of the people here would agree
instinctively that how it is done is different, is a more difficult
issue—is that it is a pool from which you take coalitions
of the willing for different things at different times perhaps.
How you go from where you are now to where you might want to be
is a much more difficult problem.
Chairman: Strategic airlift. John Smith.
Q142 John Smith: Thank you, Chairman.
Leaving political wills to one side, you have already referred
to the capability gap in strategic airlift. What is your assessment
of that gap and what constraints do you think it currently puts
on the ability to conduct military operations and sustain them?
What is the nature of that capability gap?
Lieutenant General Sir Rob Fry:
I think that the air transport inventory in most advanced nations,
but not in all, is probably just about adequate, and certainly
very little more than that, when taken in purely national terms.
When you have a combination of both national requirement and alliance
requirements, I suspect to some extent you are in double jeopardy
as far as your resources are concerned. I think the reasons behind
this are pretty simple. These are extremely expensive things to
buy and maintain, and I think that most nations buy them against
national requirements rather than building in a premium which
then allows them to support alliance operations at the same time.
I will give you one example, which is operations in Afghanistan
at the present time, to show you the impact on these things. At
a battlefield level the impact should not be huge so long as you
are able to guarantee the security of your lines of communication.
You can get to Afghanistan by one of two means. One is to put
aeroplanes flying directly into Kabul or maybe Kandahar which
then offload their logistic stocks directly almost into the base
areas of the troops who are fighting in the country. The alternative
is to conduct surface transport to somewhere like Karachi, offload
it and then have an extended line of communication which goes
through one of the passes into Afghanistan, and it is a mystery
to me why those lines of communication have not been disrupted
before now, because they are immensely vulnerable and entirely
obvious in the way in which they are being conducted at the present
time. If you had more airlift you could avoid that risk altogether
and simply fly the stuff directly into theatre. Air transport
will never give you the volume that sea transport will give you,
but air sustainment of a place like Afghanistan, given its geographical
characteristics, has some obvious advantages.
General Sir Jack Deverell: I absolutely
concur with that. There are some quite interesting figures that
I picked up. When NATO did the support for the Pakistan earthquake,
the humanitarian operation, it was forced to use C-130s and it
used something like 123 missions of C-130s, at a cost of 10 million
euros, to lift 1,000 tonnes of equipment. With C-17s that would
have been 40 missions at four million euros. So, there is a financial
element that comes into this. Of course, you then have to say,
well, the C-17 is more expensive than the C-130 and maintenance
costs and all the rest of it—it is a much more complex issue—but
there are financial issues here which, of course, when you are
dealing with things like common funding or costs for where they
lie, actually have an important effect upon the political willingness
to commit their forces to that sort of operation.
Q143 John Smith: Do you think that
the decision in June to acquire three or four C-17s will be enough
to meet certainly the pressure on the strategic airlift?
Lieutenant General Sir Rob Fry:
I do not know what the rationale behind the procurement was, but
I suspect it was to make sure that we do not find ourselves in
the embarrassing position that I have just outlined to you and,
therefore, that you could actually run a discrete airline of communication
if all else failed.
Q144 John Smith: What about the delays
in the A400M programme of up to about 15 months at least at the
moment? Do you anticipate any problems arising from that: either
a gap in terms of the transfer from existing aircraft to news
ones?
Lieutenant General Sir Rob Fry:
You can always go out into the market. Taking aircraft from trade
is something that we have done whenever we have needed to, and
it tends to fill either real capability gaps or temporary gaps
of the type that you describe. I think that a solution is available,
but it comes at a certain cost.
Q145 John Smith: What about the through-life
maintenance and support of this new generation of lift aircraft,
the A400M? Do you have any views on whether these aircraft, which
are going to be bought right across Europe, are going to be sustained
and maintained through life nationally, on a European-wide basis,
or any other views?
Lieutenant General Sir Rob Fry:
I guess this is beyond the competence of all of the panellists.
I would say a couple of things. First of all, there should be
some economies of scale here, both in terms of the price you pay
for them and the standardisation of maintenance support. That
simply ought to be a truism. I also think that some of the production
techniques now should make it far easier to maintain complex machines,
simply because you take a board out and you put a board in rather
than having to go through the entire process of diagnostic maintenance.
Q146 John Smith: But you have not
yet developed a view on whether this new generation of A400Ms
should be maintained through life at RAF Sealand?
Lieutenant General Sir Rob Fry:
I do not think I have the strength of confidence to offer that
view.
Q147 John Smith: What about other
air assets: tankers. Is there a capability limitation elsewhere?
Lieutenant General Sir Rob Fry:
You are normally okay, because one of the things we do tend to
do is share tanking assets. It is one of the things that alliances
tend to do well. We certainly tank an awful lot of American aircraft,
and tankers tend to be something of a collective asset.
Q148 Mr Jones: General, you mentioned
the situation of taking assets from a civilian fleet. What role
in terms of strategic lift within Europe should the civilian sector
play? Do we need the capacity all the time or should we aim to
have a baseline and then, when we have surges, bring it in from
the civilian sector?
Lieutenant General Sir Rob Fry:
I think that so long as we feel we face a threat of large-scale
conflict, then being able to link into the sinews of the real
economy rather than simply military capability is something you
should never ever loose. I think that the British amphibious capability
historically, over the last 30 years, has been sustained for a
large part of that time by shipping taken up from trade—latterly
we have got better amphibious platforms—and the same is
true, I think, for most other nations. All of us would be dependent
to a greater or lesser extent on what we can access from the civilian
market. This is a matter of legislation. You need to have legislation
there by which, under certain circumstances, you can go into a
process sequestering this stuff. Otherwise there is a well understood
market mechanism that makes this available.
General Sir Jack Deverell: The
only comment I would make is that there is an element here of
risk of the civilian element of it being unwilling or, indeed,
perhaps finding, for all sorts of insurance rationales, that the
potential risk to their crews was such that they would be unwilling
to actually deploy those crews into theatre in the way we would
want. It is something that cannot just be swept under the carpet,
I guess.
Chairman: NATO response force. David
Crausby.
Q149 Mr Crausby: Thank you, Chairman.
The NATO Response Force was declared fully operational last November
at the Riga Summit. It is highly ready, it can start to deploy
within five days, it can muster 25,000 troops, but, in the light
of all that we have said about political consensus and 26 nations,
could you say something about its sustainability and viability?
General Sir Jack Deverell: I suppose
that question points at me because my headquarters set up the
first NATO response force. It was seen to be both an aid to, and
a test of, NATO transformation. It is an aid to NATO transformation
because its does actually drive nations to ensure that their force
structure is at levels of real readiness which can be measured
rather than stated readiness, where we take it on trust because
there is a level of training that is conducted to prepare NATO
response forces for their stand-on period, so to speak. The main
problems with the NATO Response Force are, entirely as we have
discussed before, one of compatibility and interoperability, both
conceptual and physical, and that is one of the values of having
that force, because, first of all, it exposes these issues and,
secondly, gives you a mechanism by which you can actually deal
with them, and there is evaluation (some awful NATO acronym) which
actually, in simple terms, means there is a lessons-learned capability
to feed back into the future. My own view of the NATO Response
Force is that it is limited again (and I am afraid to go back
to it) by the political will. There are questions over common
funding and how much common funding provides the enablers for
the NATO Response Force and how much do nations pay, because it
is not surprising that nations find themselves less willing to
commit their forces to the NATO Response Force if they find they
get a big bill for it and, secondly, if they find that they cannot
use those forces for other things, whatever those other things
might be; so there is a certain amount of giving up of sovereignty.
There is the whole question of transfer of authority and the confidence
that NATO headquarters has that when "country A" commits
a special forces company to it, of which you have no idea what
the NATO Response Force is going to be used for, when the operation
is actually identified will that country say, "I am very
sorry, we are not prepared to play. We are not prepared to commit
our forces"? It goes back to the points we have been talking
about. The other area, I guess, in terms of the NATO Response
Force is the sustainability of it, not least because the United
States and the United Kingdom find it very difficult at the moment,
I understand, to find certain forces to go on it because we have
20% plus of our force structure which is committed to operations
already. This throws the burden onto the other European nations,
the other NATO nations, to fill that role and there is a sense
(and it was a sense three years ago) that we are not playing our
part in the development of the NRF; it is the non Afghanistan
and Iraq players who are carrying the burden. The other problem
with the NATO Response Force is that the raison d'etre
for it was to give NATO a form of response force which could be
used, in part or in whole, not just to deal with new operations,
but actually to reinforce existing operations. So, if you wished
to conduct a surge operation, you could use the existing, trained
coherent NATO Response Force for a limited period of time, put
it into theatre and bring it out again. This was deemed a perfectly
reasonable thing to do. Some nations have found that, for all
sorts of reasons, very difficult and there has been enormous reluctance.
Q150 Mr Crausby: The Germans would
have to take that back to their own Parliament, would they not?
General Sir Jack Deverell: And,
of course, there are constitutional reasons why this is so, yes,
and the French have found it difficult because they see the NATO
Response Force for a totally different purpose in any case.
Q151 Mr Crausby: It is only really
effective for disaster relief, is it?
General Sir Jack Deverell: No.
To be honest, I think if there was a situation which occurred
which required that commitment, you have a force which exists
which has a combat capability, a power projection capability,
the bits are in place. It might not be all the bits you want,
because nations might not have filled, for that NRF six months,
all the capabilities you want, but it does have a real capability.
I have no doubt about that. Whether it is the quite the capability
that we first thought, whether it is as flexible as we first thought
and whether it is as politically robust in that it cannot be unhinged
dramatically by a nation at the last minute saying, "You
cannot have that capability", remains to be seen. That is
where I have my doubts. We are back, I am afraid, to this main
theme we keep going back to, political will.
Q152 Mr Crausby: The Heads of Government
Declaration said that it also served as a catalyst for transformation
and interoperability. How effective has it been on that and to
what extent has it delivered new capabilities for the alliance
in that way?
General Sir Jack Deverell: I really
cannot answer the question because I have been out of it too long,
I am afraid. I think it has been effective. I guess it has not
been as effective as we would have liked it to have been or have
hoped it would be, but I can say I know it has been effective
in many areas where there was a lack of interoperability, if not
to actually produce it, certainly to identify in more detail and
more clearly the requirement for it. I think it has been successful
to a degree though.
Q153 Mr Crausby: What about the United
States and their involvement? They have been reluctant to commit
themselves, have they not? What do you think the United States
think about it?
Lieutenant General Sir Rob Fry:
I think the United States think they have probably got enough
on their plates and I think that what they want is to be part
of an alliance which is properly burden-sharing. They feel that
they are bearing a very considerable amount of that burden at
the present time and they would like to see other people stump
up their contribution as well.
Q154 Mr Crausby: So you think that
they are leaving it to the Europeans to say, "Let them get
on with it", as opposed to the United States thinking that
it will not work. You believe it is just a question of putting
the Europeans under pressure to do something.
Lieutenant General Sir Rob Fry:
Yes, I do, but I think the first might lead to the second, because
unless you have got the force and the focus of American military
involvement in this thing, then perhaps it will not have the transformational
effect that it might otherwise have. I think the American position
here is pretty legitimate. They know what they are doing, either
unilaterally, in bilateral form or in coalitions that are willing,
and in alliance terms, and I think their position would be, "Our
contribution to military operations on a global basis is completely
defensible at the present time. We do not need any more."
Chairman: Moving on to the European Security
and Defence Policy. Robert Key.
Q155 Robert Key: Could I invite Daniel
Keohane to talk us through his analysis of the consequences of
the Lisbon Treaty for ESDP and NATO?
Mr Keohane: I think it is best
that I begin my remarks by explaining the contrast with the earlier
debate about NATO. I think the first thing we should all remember
about the EU Defence Policy is it is not really a defence policy
in the traditional sense. It is not about territorial defence;
it is not a military alliance. Of course there is political solidarity,
but that is another issue. It is as much about a security policy
and, when it comes to military operations or civil military operations,
we are talking about crisis management at a very small scale so
far. It is also worth bearing in mind, of course, that ESDP is
just over eight years old, so it is still a very new policy in
EU terms. Specifically with the Lisbon Treaty, the interesting
part of the Lisbon Treaty is the so-called permanent structured
co-operation which, in essence, is supposed to be about improving
our military capabilities. There is a similar debate, it is not
exactly the same, within the EU about our lack of capability on
things like strategic airlift and so on, and the idea behind structured
co-operation is to encourage those counties who want to co-operate
more closely on developing capabilities to allow them to do that,
because up until now it has not been allowed to have closer co-operation
between a smaller group of countries, as you have had in the euro,
say, or in Shengen in the area of defence policy. So it is essentially
to allow that. Of course, when this first came up in the Convention,
the body that drew up the original Constitutional Treaty, it was
presented as a kind of defence euro zone, but that has been watered
down to some degree because governments, particularly I think
in France but also maybe in the UK as well, do not want to present
this as an entirely exclusive process and do not want this to
be seen as devisive between the Member States. They recognise,
of course, that not all Member States have the capabilities that
France and the UK have. Also, because of the way certainly EU
officials think about ESDP—it goes back to what I said about
defence policy—they like to think of it in very holistic
terms. When you look at a security problem there are not just
military solutions. They are trying to bring together development
policy, they are trying to bring together diplomacy, they are
trying to bring together defence policy. So, the military tool,
if you like, is just one aspect, and they are trying very hard
to develop this broad holistic approach. The real crux in terms
of military resources will be what the criteria will be to join
this permanent structured co-operation. That is not entirely clear
yet. There is still some debate as to how it should be interpreted.
For example, I doubt we will have strict spending goals, as you
have in NATO—for example, the aim to spend 2% of GDP on
defence. I would like to see more stringent investment goals where
you should be spending say 20% of your defence budget on equipment,
but again, I am not sure that is going to happen because the idea
is to try and encourage as many people to be involved as possible.
I personally would prefer to see fairly stringent goals. I am
not against the idea, in practical terms, of having a two-tier
defence policy on capabilities, but maybe I should stop there.
Q156 Robert Key: Should NATO be alarmed
as a result of the Lisbon Treaty?
Mr Keohane: No, basically because
if the reforms in the Lisbon Treaty helped to improve military
capability, then that is good for NATO as well.
Q157 Robert Key: I wonder if our
military witnesses could comment on the effectiveness of the Headline
Goal 2010. How has that helped to improve the generation of military
capabilities?
Mr Keohane: Can I make a comment
on it first?
Q158 Robert Key: Of course.
Mr Keohane: It is important to
remember what the Headline Goal 2010---. If you look at the EU
documents which the military staff produce, and they are available
somewhere on the website, but it is not an easy website to use,
it is very hard to find concrete examples of new hardware, to
put it bluntly, but perhaps that is not the point in a way, because
if you look at any headline goal process in any EU policy area,
if you take, for example, the Lisbon Economic Reform Process,
everyone knows the EU is not going to become the most competitive
economy in the world by 2010 and, likewise, they know that the
EU Governments are not going to meet all the headline goal by
2010, but what is more important is that they have agreed to this
set of reforms, that you effectively have a common agreed set
of military reforms, and given the way politics is and national
politics is, of course it is going to take some longer than others,
but what I would argue is look at the investments. If you look
at the equipment that EU governments should have available by
2015, it is actually not bad. We should have A400Ms, we should
have new aircraft carriers, we should obviously have new fighter
jets, we should have new satellites, we should have new refuelling
planes. So on a strategic level, it should be a lot better, and
the headline goal is part of that.
General Sir Jack Deverell: I am
very glad that Daniel has brought in this whole business that
the military is not the solution to conflict resolution pure and
simple. We talk about the comprehensive approach; we just do not
implement the comprehensive approach very well. The thing that
worries me about NATO is that it is a political alliance but one
that manifests itself in military capability and, it is not good,
there is no part of its structure that readily enables itself
to deal with all those other bits of the comprehensive approach—the
political, the legal, the economic, the social the cultural and
all the rest of it. The people who do that extremely well are
Europe. America does it well unilaterally, but if you look at
Europe, the capacity of Europe to draw these things together,
it has the capacity, it is very, very effective, and it strikes
me that the synergy between the European capacity to provide the
capabilities to implement the civil side of the comprehensive
approach has been understated. It may not have been understated;
it has been under-implemented. I just get concerned when I hear
Europe continuing to go down the line of developing military capabilities,
because I fear it is a distraction. I go to various things at
the European Defence Agency and I hear all these major projects
being talked about—the carriers, the aircraft, strategic
lift—all of which are important, but the reality in Europe
is that we have armies which are not suitable for purpose because
they have not transformed intellectually in many cases, and I
do not hear much about that. To me it is about institution building,
it is about the creation of hierarchies, it is about a mirroring
of bureaucracy and does not get down to the essential issue that
there is a tremendous capacity for the European Union and all
that it represents to support the NATO kinetic capability, and
I do not think that is being worked hard enough or effectively
enough.
Chairman: Could I break in for a moment,
Bernard Jenkin.
Q159 Mr Jenkin: I agree with every
word that Jack Deverell has just said, but positively about ESDP
having the civil capabilities that we need to deploy in these
situations. Can I just turn back to Daniel for a moment about
permanent structural co-operation. The Lisbon Treaty specifies
qualified majority voting for the permanent structural co-operation,
does it not?
Mr Keohane: Yes.
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