Examination of Witnesses (Questions 180-199)
GENERAL SIR
JACK DEVERELL,
LIEUTENANT GENERAL
SIR ROB
FRY, MR
DANIEL KEOHANE
AND COLONEL
CHRISTOPHER LANGTON
20 NOVEMBER 2007
Q180 Mr Jenkins: Is there a set-down
criteria for bringing these groups together or is it once again
a partnership of the willing as they come together, and can they
pull out if they think no, we do not want to go there, it is too
hot and dusty?
Lieutenant General Fry: My understanding
is what you have just said.
Q181 Mr Jenkins: They can pull out
at any time. What is the point of going through a training exercise—you
have all this training, my colleagues across here are guarding
my right flank, we are going to go into conflict and they are
going to decide they do not want to be there and the whole thing
falls apart. I cannot quite get my head around that; why have
they got the right to pull out when they have made a commitment
to the Battlegroup?
General Deverell: I think your
point was pre-figured in the earlier discussion.
Colonel Langton: It is a very
important question, but my sense is that the Battlegroups which
mostly are sub-regional groupings of nations that might even speak
the same language—there is the Nordic Battlegroup, the Balkan
Battlegroup and so on—were an easier way (shall I put it
like that) to bring together a smaller group of nations who are
used to operating and talking together—and I will concentrate
on the Nordics for the moment because it comes to the second part
of your question—and did so in fact previously, partly to
train more easily and locally and less expensively, partly therefore
to transform and therefore to contribute to the overall Alliance,
if it was necessary, but the interesting thing here—and
currently Sweden has just pulled out of the possible deployment
of the Nordic Battlegroup to Darfur which was a proposal, and
of course there are reasons for that which are purely national.
One of them is that Sweden is already committed, as a neutral
country, to be under the command of NATO inside Afghanistan with
a provincial reconstruction team, and the Swedes have felt that
was just enough as far as operating out of area should go, even
though they are of course in the EU. Those are the criteria and,
yes, people do feel that they can opt out and they have done.
Q182 Mr Jenkins: General Fry, in
the last question I referred to NATO and I want to see if the
European mindset is exactly the same, and apparently it is as
far as being willing and you can walk away having been trained,
so there is no difference there. Who pays for this Battlegroup?
Is it the same thing, the costs lie where they fall for different
countries and is there any perception that maybe we should have
common funding so that costs are met by a tax adjustment?
Lieutenant General Fry: For deployment
possibly, for force generation, no, I would say, force generation
is entirely a national business. We would do it under any circumstances.
The only issue which arises is that if you do conduct a deployment,
where does the responsibility lie then and I think that there
is a powerful case for common funding under those circumstances.
Q183 Mr Jenkins: Do you think that
Battlegroups should be the main force as far as European force
generation is concerned in the future?
Lieutenant General Fry: Let me
give a slightly longer answer. Jack Deverell has already made
the point that in a sense the real core capabilities that NATO
and European forces have are complementary at their best. There
is a capacity within NATO for large scale military operations
and force projection, and I would say that is no more than nascent
in European structures at the present time. However, in all sorts
of cross-disciplinary affairs—police, legal and judicial
functions—European capabilities seem to me to be very, very
strong. If you want to be in a process, therefore, of trying to
transform a nation like Afghanistan, for example, it seems to
me that there are complementary functions to be performed here.
Therefore, necessarily, if you accept that judgment, perhaps Europe
is best in establishing its military horizons at a rather lower
level than NATO, in which case Battlegroups, notwithstanding the
reservations that I expressed earlier on, are an appropriate level
at which to pitch that, but recognising that their capacity for
sustained and difficult war-fighting is likely to be limited.
Q184 Mr Jenkins: So you think that
Battlegroups compare—I cannot say unfavourably—with
NATO's Response Force because what you are saying is that Battlegroups
have a different perspective to NATO's Response Force.
Lieutenant General Fry: That is
true, but also the NATO Response Force should have within it the
entire structure to project, sustain and support it. A Battlegroup,
to go back to my original point, is essentially a minor tactical
instrument. Until you get to formation level, brigade and beyond,
you do not have the internal capacity for let us say artillery
support or sustainment in the field. A loose assembly of battlegroups
does not naturally aggregate itself up unless it has those supporting
capabilities, and that is probably one of the weaknesses of the
overall concept.
Chairman: Operations. Adam Holloway.
Q185 Mr Holloway: What do the Generals
think we can do to improve force generation and deal with this
question of national caveats that seems to be causing something
of a hindrance?
General Deverell: National caveats
come and go. Sometimes, I am afraid, they are constitutional issues;
sometimes it is a matter of constitutional or Parliamentary diktat
that a nation can or cannot do something. I was confronted in
Bosnia with a French lawyer—and I am not against the French
from this point of view—who was hidden behind a pile of
books which he was about to metaphorically throw at me to demonstrate
that the French could not do what I had asked them to do. That
is fine, that is what the law says. The more pernicious caveat
is where a government takes a decision for political reasons which
restricts the flexibility of the force, which can lead to increased
threat, it can lead to increased costs because you need more soldiers
to do what less soldiers could do if you could move your soldiers
from place to place et cetera, et cetera. Of course, the one caveat
that is often not mentioned but very often is present and actually
quite damaging—and this is something NATO could do—is
the self-imposed one where the commander reads his political directive
and adds 10% or 15% of de-risking to it and says "I cannot
do that; this is the way I read this political directive and this
is the implication." Those caveats are going to be like death
and taxation, they are an inevitable part of our military life.
What can we do to ameliorate them? I am afraid we go right back
to this whole thing of political will and we go back to this understanding
of what your military is for, what constitutes the proper ability
to generate combat power in support of your military objectives,
and if nations have different views of that then you will get
caveats.
Q186 Mr Holloway: Immediately there
is a whole practical question emerging with the Dutch in Oruzgan
and the Canadians in Kandahar with the possibility that neither
of them will sign up again. Does this sort of thing not seriously
jeopardise operations and specifically what is happening in Afghanistan?
Lieutenant General Fry: Absolutely
it jeopardises it, but military mechanisms to make force generation
any better are completely exhausted. John Reid worked himself
to a shadow doing this and we went round every possible buoy;
it is interesting on one sense that the reformed Alliance places
some limitations upon you. For example, there are Mongolians and
Koreans deployed in Iraq in a coalition of the willing; you are
not confined necessarily by what is in the Alliance, you can go
outside; in NATO there is no such recourse. Looking to find some
smart button to press within the NATO process; no such recourse
is available to you and this really is now a matter of convincing
other nations of their political responsibilities to the health
of the Alliance as a whole.
Q187 Mr Holloway: If I can move that
on slightly would you extend that to lack of unity of purpose,
lack of unity of command, specific to Afghanistan, and how seriously
would you say this was jeopardising the possibility of succeeding
there?
Lieutenant General Fry: I would
say it is jeopardising things but it is a solution that has been
derived because of the essential limitations within the situation.
We did not go there thinking let us have the Americans doing something
over there, the caveated nations only operating in the north and
here is a wonderful opportunity, we will take the south. It was
finding people's limitations and appetites and trying then to
shape a scheme of manoeuvre according to that.
Q188 Mr Holloway: Finally, if I may,
do you guys have any observations of how things would work differently
if what you just hinted at in Iraq, where you have essentially
got a coalition whereas in Afghanistan you have an alliance—how
has Iraq in a sense been more successful than Afghanistan in that
particular respect?
Lieutenant General Fry: Because
people who join a coalition of the willing do so with less constraint
than when they pay their dues to an alliance. A nation committing
to deployment in Iraq has made a rational choice, which is not
about its alliance responsibilities, it is there for whatever
political reasons it has. It is therefore less likely to place
constraint upon its operating forces.
General Deverell: It is worth
saying that if you look back at Afghanistan in 2003 you see a
very different construct and a very much more positive construct.
There is greater unity of purpose and unity of command because
NATO has steadily expanded its influence. If you look back at
2003 before NATO took over, ISAF was limited to Kabul and Operation
Enduring Freedom which, dare I say, was more about the security
of the United States and Western Europe than it was about the
reconstruction of Afghanistan—that is my personal view.
There has been through the melding of the command structures and
a change in responsibilities a much greater sense of cohesion,
though there are still major problems in it. One does get progress,
therefore, and the danger is that we take a snapshot through time
and say "My God, this is unacceptable." Whether that
progress continues, NATO has this extraordinary capacity to muddle
through; the problem is previously it has muddled through against
a virtual enemy, somebody who is sat the other side of a border,
another bureaucracy; I am not sure we are now in a situation where
we can afford to muddle through when we are being called to account.
It is one thing to go onto the practice ground and play football
against a series of shady figures, it is another thing to actually
be in the stadium and play with half the management team saying
"I am not quite sure whether I want to put number 10 on quite
yet" or "He is only allowed to kick the ball with his
left foot"—if I can use a sporting analogy. There have
been very considerable advances from where we were in 2003; those
have got to continue.
Chairman: I just want to break in for
a moment to compliment our advisers on something because I personally
am finding this session extremely valuable, so the choice of our
witnesses has been well done. Thank you. Robert Key.
Q189 Robert Key: Most people are
anticipating some difficulty in the next few weeks in Kosovo.
Presumably the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in this country
and diplomats across Europe are anticipating what might happen.
Can we assume that NATO is also planning what might happen for
them in the worst case scenario and can we assume that there are
ESDP planners contemplating what might happen in a worst case
scenario? If they are both doing that, will they both be talking
to each other?
Lieutenant General Fry: Certainly
there will be NATO planners thinking about this because of the
contingent responsibility to respond to it. Whether ESDP planners
will be doing it with the same alacrity I am not really sure,
and I would have thought the chances of a unified military response
are very small. However, the chance of a NATO military response
being co-ordinated with elements of a European civil response
is quite high. The one thing that did seem to me to work in Kosovo
was a very good combination of European agencies, some international
agencies, NATO and OSCE actually mucking in together and, probably
better than anywhere else I have seen, bringing about some pretty
beneficial responses. The only response that NATO is thinking
about is a civil order one within the confines of Kosovo itself.
The wider implications of, let us call it Albanian irredentism,
seem to me to be far, far larger than that, and whether anybody
is contemplating that on a larger scale, I do not know.
Q190 Robert Key: We have now had
ESDP missions in Bosnia, Kosovo, Congo, Afghanistan; you would
have thought a lot of lessons would have been learnt here and
I am not very reassured by what you have had to say. Has anyone
else got a perspective on this?
Colonel Langton: The only thing
I could add to this, having spoken with Roy Reeve last week as
the Special Representative for the EU, is that he has spent a
considerable amount of time talking with NATO before he deploys,
which is actually this coming Saturday in advance of an 1800 strong
EU police mission, but he has talked about quite a lot of contingency
planning and activity with and alongside NATO. That is the only
thing I could add to that.
General Deverell: You will always
find soldiers and policemen and lots of other organisations who
will talk at the tactical level in order to de-conflict, to collaborate,
to co-operate. What is often lacking, and it was lacking in Afghanistan
prior to 2003, is drawing together those threads at a political/strategic/military
operational level. It was very interesting, if you look at Afghanistan,
that prior to NATO taking over the Kabul issue, the ISAF issue,
was run from whichever national capital was running it and the
United States effectively ran Operation Enduring Freedom, and
if you asked anybody in the US who was running Afghanistan they
said "We are". You would say, "Hang on, how are
you co-ordinating?" "Well, it is done in theatre."
That is not a strategic tying together, there is nobody allocating
priorities, and I guess there will be a lot of work going on about
Kosovo at the tactical level; whether this is being drawn together
at a higher level where strategic decisions are being made to
effect whatever we have to effect I would be more dubious, frankly.
Q191 Robert Key: In spite of all
the experience of these ESDP deployments and all NATO's experience
we are just going to muddle through, are we?
Lieutenant General Fry: I do not
think "muddle through" is a recognised military doctrine,
but it is a common practice.
Q192 Robert Key: It seems to be the
practice on this occasion—a practice not a doctrine.
Lieutenant General Fry: Sometimes
it works.
Q193 Chairman: Colonel Langton, what
would you like to add, if anything, to what has been said already
about Afghanistan and the lessons that we need to learn?
Colonel Langton: Just going back
to this question about Iraq and Afghanistan, of course one of
the obvious differences is you have a nation running operations
in Iraq as the sort of supreme military player, whereas in Afghanistan
that supremacy which General Deverell has just alluded to has
diminished to a state where now we have 37 countries operating
there, some in larger capacity than others. It is important, perhaps,
when we talk about NATO's operation in Afghanistan, to ask ourselves
is it not actually the International Security Assistance Force's
operation, which has a slightly separate mandate—or has
its own mandate but it is being led by NATO and was led by other
groups of countries in the past. My sense is that the military
effect which is achieved is quite obviously diluted by having
more and more nations and less and less American influence on
top of it.
Chairman: Moving on to NATO/EU relations,
Bernard Jenkin.
Q194 Mr Jenkin: Chairman, we have
covered one or two of these areas already. Do ESDP's attempts
to increase military capabilities interfere with or enhance NATO's
attempts to create military capabilities? We would like it to
work better, but.
General Deverell: I have said
everything I possibly can say about it.
Q195 Mr Jenkin: We have done the
non-military capabilities of ESDP but when we visited NATO headquarters
earlier this year we did hear that some EU people still want a
military headquarters and I wonder whether there is a case for
this or does it risk creating further unnecessary duplication?
Lieutenant General Fry: I think
there is a case for it. I visited some time ago and it seemed
to me that there were a couple of black phones in the corner and
a layer of dust about the place; if you are going to do it then
you need to do it in a serious manner and if you are going to
contemplate the deployment of military force then maybe it is
sensible for you to have something on the top of the whole thing.
As long as there are separable military ambitions that the Europeans
have, then it is entirely legitimate to try and command them in
an appropriate fashion.
Q196 Mr Jenkin: With all these double-hatted
forces, on call both to ESDP and NATO, when there is a crisis
what is the command chain for deciding who does what?
General Deverell: There is a command
chain and of course some time ago I had this debate about the
command chain. I have to say my view of the resilience and robustness
of that command chain was not particularly good, but that is a
matter of military judgment and it does not mean to say that they
are wrong. Where I have some difficulty is with the vision of
the strategic commander of EU operations being the same as DSACEUR,
and all this begins to unravel when things go wrong, when something
unexpected happens—events, dear boy, events, suddenly crop
up. There is this rather comic vision that DSACEUR or the strategic
commander goes into his own office and stands on one side of his
desk and issues a rocket, and then rushes around the other side
of his desk, changes his hat and receives his own rocket, and
what does he do about it? He has a very difficult problem if things
go wrong.
Q197 Mr Jenkin: I was thinking more
in terms of force generation. When there is a crisis, who is in
charge of force generation for an operation involving European
forces, is it DSACEUR or is it the ESDP?
General Deverell: The answer to
your question is I am not quite sure. There is an EU military
staff and I suppose the strategic commander ultimately is responsible
for the force being generated; having been generated he will not
be doing the actual work—or maybe he will. Rob might know
better than I. There is one glaringly obvious point which I almost
apologise for making, it is so obvious, but if there is a very
large European commitment to a European operation which is on-going,
those are soldiers which are not available to NATO operations
and it may be that a large and on-going European operation starts
to undermine the viability of NATO response forces and other NATO
operations, because there is only one set of forces.
Q198 Mr Jenkin: But that is true
of any national operation which might occur. We are involved in
Iraq and our forces in Iraq are not available for NATO operations.
General Deverell: Absolutely,
but we luckily, though it costs a lot, have an extremely flexible
and effective military force. A lot of nations—and it goes
back to one of the significant problems—do not have that
capacity to generate deployable forces with relevance and utility
from within the very often quite large forces they have.
Q199 Mr Jenkin: What do you feel
about France talking about an ESDP operation to Darfur when NATO
has not even fulfilled its commitments in Afghanistan? Is this
the kind of confliction—
General Deverell: I was looking
at my friends to start talking because I am boring myself now.
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