Examination of Witnesses (Questions 200-214)
GENERAL SIR
JACK DEVERELL,
LIEUTENANT GENERAL
SIR ROB
FRY, MR
DANIEL KEOHANE
AND COLONEL
CHRISTOPHER LANGTON
20 NOVEMBER 2007
Q200 Chairman: Before we get into
that I want to pinpoint what strikes me as a possible disagreement
between you because when General Fry was saying that he thought
that there was a case for a separate headquarters, for the first
time during the course of the morning a pained look came over
your face, General Deverell, so it seems to me that General Fry
thinks there is a case and you think there is not a case. Is that
correct? General Fry.
Lieutenant General Fry: Let me
clarify the point. There is a three star officer, currently David
Leakey, who operates in Brussels and he is Commander EU Forces.
His predecessor was a Frenchman and we are doing it this time
round. He has a function in force generation and almost an inspectorate
function of looking at the force's readiness overall; he is unlikely,
except in extremely specific circumstances, to command a military
operation, that is much more likely to be done by DSACEUR. My
point was that if there was a requirement for that headquarters
to command an operation it ought to be able to do so. I think
that the circumstances would be highly localised, but it is not
an unreasonable investment against that contingency.
General Deverell: I entirely concur;
we do not really disagree. My pained expression was that I have
an innate suspicion of large bureaucracies because once you start
creating these structures you start creating structures that support
other structures and you find that you then have a very substantial
structure. You can criticise the NATO command structure for being
far too constipated and bureaucratic and just too big, and I would
say that, yes, you are quite right. It is another issue how you
get over it and there are certain training and environmental costs—I
mean environmental in terms of getting people out of national
thinking and into NATO thinking, there are certain costs you have
to pay for that—but I am just nervous about setting up an
alternative structure here. We concur.
Q201 Mr Holloway: Talking to the
military people here, you have spent your careers in the British
Army and the Royal Marines and now we are in an environment where
we speak about the EU. Does anything rankle in your minds about
the expression EU Commander or the British General who is reported
to have said in Bosnia, "I am not a British General, I am
a European General". Almost at the emotional level does this
rankle at all?
Lieutenant General Fry: For me
absolutely not. One of the aspects of the strategic genius of
this country is getting other people to fight our wars for us.
Since approximately 1800 until today we have been better at creating
alliances, we have been better at industrial production, better
at intelligence and we have been better at inviting the Americans
and the Russians to do the really difficult things on our behalf.
Therefore, if I look back at any period of British history, with
the one exception of 1 July 1916 to 11 November 1918, on most
of those occasions we have been part of an alliance and we frequently
have not been the major shifters within that alliance.
Q202 Mr Holloway: I did not mean
so much in the sense of an alliance, I meant I suppose in the
sense that the European Union or some members increasingly see
it as a country; how does that feel to you guys as military people
Lieutenant General Fry: I think
you might be asking me a question as a British nationalist ---
but I do not think you will get the answer you want.
Q203 Mr Holloway: You have to ask
the question.
General Deverell: Funnily enough
I think we are rather better at it than other nations. I must
give you an anecdote now because I cannot explain it any other
way, but every day my German deputy in NATO was telephoned by
or telephoned Berlin, and he would come to me and say "What
is the British view?" I said to him, quite seriously and
realistically, "I have not got a British view; if you want
a British view you must go to the senior British officer, not
me. I am a NATO officer, I will give you my view, I am not giving
you a British view." We are actually quite good at it and
I had no problem at all about being a NATO officer.
Q204 Mr Holloway: Does the Household
Division have a different view?
Colonel Langton: You could probably
answer that. I too have headed up a small UN mission and I would
totally concur that I had no doubts at all that I did not ring
up Whitehall if I had a difficulty, I rang up New York. I think
you could find the same with senior British officers in Afghanistan,
in Kabul and their headquarters. I am not sure if I fully understand
the question, but if it is do I mind or would I have minded commanding
a multinational force under another flag, providing my government
had sent me there the answer would be no.
Q205 Mr Jenkin: An interesting proviso,
providing "my" government had sent me there.
Colonel Langton: But that is true.
Q206 Mr Jenkin: Going back to force
generation, was not Berlin Plus meant to resolve all this question
and is Berlin Plus working or was the can of worms too quickly
reopened as soon as we thought we had closed the lid on the can
of worms?
Lieutenant General Fry: Berlin
Plus was intended to be a solution, not necessarily the solution
and a template to which people would have recourse on every occasion
and there are examples where it has been successful, so I do not
think we should dismiss it out of hand but it may not, on the
other hand, be a solution to every requirement we have.
Mr Keohane: The two operations,
Macedonia and Bosnia, where Berlin Plus has been used, they have
been fine, it has worked very smoothly, but that also may be the
point in a way, it has not really been tested. That is true generally
for ESDP operations and very small operations and a lot of ESDP
processes have not been tested yet so we cannot really assess
just how effective they are.
Chairman: Moving on to a key issue—and
this will be the final set of questions—funding. Willie
Rennie.
Mr Jenkin: I thought we were going to
do something about Bosnia and Kosovo.
Chairman: We have passed that, we have
to get on to Willie Rennie and the funding.
Q207 Willie Rennie: I concur with
all the points that were made earlier on about the political will
in different countries and I want to focus on the actual tools
that we could use to lever more funding from different countries.
First of all the targets, there is the 2% of GDP; should NATO
defence targets be binding, do you think that is a possibility,
and second of all do you think that we should establish separate
funds within the national defence budgets for designated Alliance
tasks and, third, do you think there should be more common funding
of operations?
Lieutenant General Fry: I will
have a crack first of all. The middle question you asked is should
we have dedicated funding for Alliance operations? No, I am absolutely
convinced we should not do that. What we have done in terms of
our force attribution is always say we have got one pot of forces
and that we will allocate them to whatever we need to do—national,
bilateral, coalition or alliance operations. To artificially separate
those things out is never going to be possible with Armed Forces
of the size and shape that we have because the only course of
action we have is to multi-hat people, we could not possibly have
discrete Forces for discrete relationships and therefore I do
not think it follows that we should have discrete funding.
Q208 Willie Rennie: The Turks have
done exactly that, they have a separate peacekeeping division
for overseas activities.
Lieutenant General Fry: They have,
and other nations go to a certain amount of role specialisation,
but the Turks are in a very particular position and we touched
on that earlier on—maybe that is a discussion by itself,
but if you are a member of NATO but not a member of the EU it
does present certain challenges for you in the way in which you
deploy your forces, and maybe it is a response to that rather
than a response to a situation which is analogous to our own.
Q209 Willie Rennie: And the other
two points about binding targets and also the common funding.
General Deverell: Whenever I said
anything about NATO ought to, NATO must, I was always told by
my German and other national colleagues that NATO was the sum
of national wills, so who is going to make it binding? It is rather
like turkeys voting for Christmas really, is it not? Those who
want the flexibility not to spend 2%—it does not mean to
say they will never spend 2%—are going to find it very difficult
to get themselves to vote for something that they do not want
to do, so I do not understand how it can be made binding unless
you have some form of majority voting which, of course, under
consensus one does not. The whole element of common funding of
course has come out of the days when you had a small NATO, you
had a permanent infrastructure—we looked more like a 17th
century army with garrisons and dumps just behind our lines from
which we operated than we look at the moment because you had these
two largely fixed positions in Western Europe and one could more
easily identify what was NATO common funded and what was not.
People fought in national corps and there was very little integration,
apart from in the air and on the sea where there was much greater
integration, and really it is the common funding on the land environment
which is, in my view, causing the major problems. I was made aware
that there were certain nations who were the bigger payers who
were very nervous that they were going to fund the sort of infrastructure
projects of the smaller players and allow the smaller players
to escape from their funding responsibilities. The things that
came up in Afghanistan were the need to have a mobile air traffic
control system which nobody had—with fixed air bases you
did not have that expeditionary capability; the only people who
really had it were the Germans, who happened to get there first
and then there was a hell of a row, it was very difficult to get
the Germans out of it, to find ways that the Germans could get
out of that commitment, which was a very demanding commitment.
Should that be common funding? It has become a far more complex
issue; I can simplify it, but when you then start trying to dot
the I's and cross the T's I am not sure the simplification works.
I would suggest that anything that is required to enable, for
example, the NATO Response Force should be funded commonly; the
costs of being part of it probably should not be, but there are
structures which enable the NATO Response Force which are, at
the moment, as far as I am concerned not commonly funded which
I think could be. There are identifiable tranches which you could
argue about and that is work that possibly needs to be done—I
do not know whether you would agree with that.
Lieutenant General Fry: Yes.
Q210 Chairman: Would there be anything
to be said for the precise reverse of a costs lying where they
fall process so that those countries that were prepared to commit
troops would do so and those countries that were not would commit
money?
General Deverell: Funnily enough
I have that written down. I was coming up in the train and I suddenly
was struck by this, I thought, rather elegant idea. That starts
to repaint NATO as a very different organisation where actually
you can pay; you can pay to avoid having your soldiers in combat.
It is a form of military carbon trading and I do think it is a
very interesting concept, but I cannot go any deeper than nodding
and saying that is an interesting point of view.
Lieutenant General Fry: It did
seem to me that when the Prime Minister spoke in New York when
he co-sponsored a resolution with France about intervention in
Darfur, that is precisely what we were doing. We were making no
undertakings about the deployment of our own Forces but we were
willing to contemplate the material support of others to do so
and I think that is a course of action that we have taken nationally
on a number of occasions, and I do not see why that should not
become a wider principle.
Q211 Mr Havard: Sorry I was not here
earlier. As I understand it, this is a doctrine that is developing
in NATO called constructive abstentionism—the things they
do to the English language beggar belief, but I understand that
is a doctrine which is actually being developed quite actively.
Is this not really about, as you have just said, France does not
want to participate at certain times; are these not just squaring
political circles? Is not the whole debate about ESDP and NATO
about what is Europe going to do sans the USA, so when the right
question comes out of the wrong mouth, like it did with Rumsfeldt,
of saying "What are you Europeans going to do on your own
without the Americans?", is that not really what they are
talking about?
Lieutenant General Fry: The military
officers here are probably not very good at being abstemious,
but we will leave that to one side. The earlier part of this conversation
was all about political will, absolutely all about political will,
and if there is a theme which has recurred throughout the evidence
that we have given here it is the centrality of that to just about
everything that we have talked about; also the glue that NATO
provides which binds the United States to Europe is another fundamental
underpinning which we have not touched upon on this occasion,
but I think was given in previous testimony.
Q212 Mr Havard: Is this not the whole
point, this is about how much you are prepared to pay and is this
not really about are the Europeans prepared to pay?
Lieutenant General Fry: You can
pay in either blood or treasure and there is a considerable difference
between those two things.
Q213 Mr Hamilton: Taking the last
point on blood or treasure, that would be a conscience payment
that many countries would see fit to do. You made a comment earlier
on to an earlier question which I thought was really quite telling,
and that was the difference between Afghanistan and Iraq where
there is an obligation on the countries that are in Afghanistan
but there is a declaration open the countries that are in Iraq.
Surely that just makes that obligation even more diluted and it
would be the wrong way to go. It is conscience money.
General Deverell: We have come
back full circle to the essential issue and that is the issue
of political will. Wars of discretion, wars of choice, carry political
risk. People who join alliances of the willing—and there
will always be a major alliance nation, either politically or
militarily, there will be a major alliance figure, the big boy
on the block, probably going to be the United States, and governments
sign up to that political risk. When they sign alongside another
alliance member they sign up to that political risk and this makes
their life extremely difficult, and it can actually determine
the way they control their forces, their capabilities that they
commit to it and the rest. I guess that any of these options that
we have talked about all come with a cost, it is just a different
cost and people have to make that decision.
Chairman: A quick final question from
Bernard Jenkin.
Q214 Mr Jenkin: It is about Bosnia
and Kosovo and force generation. It is quite possible that Berlin
Plus is going to be tested because of the possibility of instability
in the Balkans. Do you have confidence that there is access to
and readiness of the EU/NATO operational reserve in order to bolster
military forces in the Balkans if needed?
Lieutenant General Fry: Yes, I
do, because Bosnia is the example that will prove the efficacy
of the European structures. It was entered into and the transfer
of command from NATO to the EU was permitted with the full knowledge
that this might happen at some stage. It is an example which Europe
cannot afford to permit to fail.
Chairman: We must finish there, which
is a shame in a way because it has been a fascinating session
this morning, really helpful. Thank you very much indeed to all
of our witnesses, most excellent stuff.
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