Examination of Witnesses (Questions 200-219)
GENERAL SIR
KEVIN O'DONOGHUE
KCB CBE, DAVID GOULD
CB AND LIEUTENANT
GENERAL DICK
APPLEGATE OBE
29 JANUARY 2008
Q200 Mr Jenkin: Therefore, none of
the £2.4 billion has yet been brought into the core programme?
Lieutenant General Applegate:
Elements of it have been and some of the decisions this year are
about what else we should bring into the core programme.
Q201 Mr Jenkin: Can you quantify
how much of that £2.4 billion has been brought in?
Lieutenant General Applegate:
At the moment I could not.
Q202 Mr Jenkin: Would you give us
those figures?
Mr Gould: The £2.4 billion
is what we have spent on UORs and sustaining them in the theatre
of operations. If we bring them back into the core programme it
comes out of the ESP and it will be separate from and additional
to the £2.4 billion.
Q203 Mr Jenkin: After 2003 and the
invasion of Iraq there was a sense that the UOR programmes in
2003 had an impact on 2004 and 2005. Can you quantify that? If
we asked you to provide figures on that would you be able to do
that?
Lieutenant General Applegate:
Can you describe what you mean by "impact"?
Q204 Mr Jenkin: There were items
of equipment which were then brought into the core programme.
The money had to be found out of the core programme to fund those,
and presumably that money had to come out of other programmes.
Lieutenant General Applegate:
We will have to get back to you with regard to the detailed figures.[5]
Q205 Mr Jenkin: But in terms of the
£2.4 billion there must be quite a lot that will come out
of future programmes?
Lieutenant General Applegate:
In terms of planning for 2008, one of the decisions that Andrew
Figgures as DCDSEC has to make is which of those capabilities
he wishes to bring back in because a new standard has now been
set. How can that money be found within the programme to do so?
Q206 Mr Jenkin: But would it be true
to say that a good deal of the reluctance to approve UORs is because
a lot of the big ticket items would have an impact on the forward
programme and therefore it is very difficult to justify that expense?
General Sir Kevin O'Donoghue:
There has been no reluctance to approve UORs.
Q207 Mr Jenkin: Even the saga of
the helicopters was protracted.
General Sir Kevin O'Donoghue:
That was a requirement issue. There has been no reluctance to
approve UOR funding.
Q208 Mr Jenkin: That is a very important
assurance and we take it very seriously, particularly as you are
wearing uniforms. Perhaps you would prepare a note on those figures
which would be extremely useful. CDP said that there were "some
very powerful lessons" to learn from the UOR experience,
procuring off the shelf as close as possible, making sure the
frontline user was involved in the decision and undertaking procurement
in an incremental way. I am not quite sure what that means. Do
you think we have learned these lessons, and are there further
ones to learn?
Lieutenant General Applegate:
Certainly from my perspective, yes. To go back to some of the
things we have said today in regard to FRES, the close involvement
in routine programmes of the user in a way that we did not adopt
in the past is directly the sort of relationship one sees in UORs.
We see a process whereby we draw those sorts of behaviours into
our main programmes. There is a sense of urgency and purpose because
of support of operations throughout the whole organisation, which
I think is refreshing and acts as a focus for people and clearly
a catalyst for changed behaviours. I certainly see close team
activity involving the user and industry coming out of UORs which
applies more widely. I think that "incremental growth"
goes back to the business of what we have now called the threshold
level which is good enough for the initial operating capability
with confidence of how it grows over time, putting in new technology
as the threat emerges or as it becomes more mature or affordable.
We see that taking place, and FRES is another good example of
that. As to the comment about buying as close to off the shelf
as possible, I go back to the comments I made about FRES. The
issue is that it is not a complete off-the-shelf item; it is something
that we can develop. What we have not done is the development
ab initio of a brand new armoured vehicle; rather, we have
taken a pragmatic stance in order to identify a solution that
we can develop to meet our needs. All of those things are beginning
to lap over, quite rightly, into our main programmes.
Q209 Mr Jenkin: Why do we still hear
so many stories—perhaps they are simply got up by the media—from
people who say that they want this and that but they have been
told they cannot have it?
Lieutenant General Applegate:
Do you mean on operations?
Q210 Mr Jenkin: Yes. You must have
had that experience yourself.
Lieutenant General Applegate:
Yes. I was a particularly impatient commanding officer who did
not get anything and who sat on top of a mountain outside Sarajevo
where nothing came through. To an extent that scarred me. There
is a certain impatience within the organisation to deliver what
is needed on the front line. I think that if you asked the question
18 months ago in relation to Afghanistan when initially Three
Para went through and there was deployment into the platoon houses,
to an extent we were surprised and the nature of the campaign
took a direction that we had not predicted. What one then tries
to do is play catch-up. The first thing we need to do is develop
a pattern for the campaign. What is really needed to get the requirement
articulated by those in theatre to say what they need? Clearly,
that comes from the individual soldier, but the views of each
individual soldier have to be analysed in theatre and turned into
a requirement. It goes through the Permanent Joint Headquarters
and is then confirmed and UOR money is given. Once we have done
that we have to go into the market place and try to find these
things. I was interested in Lord Drayson's comment about motor
racing in dealing not only with an agile industrial sector but
one which clearly had sufficient capacity. The lead time for some
of these equipments is significant.
Q211 Mr Jenkin: As an example, there
was reluctance to put foam in the wings of Hercules. That was
a logistical and not a cost problem.
Lieutenant General Applegate:
You know more about that than I do.
Mr Gould: You have to take an
aircraft out of service.
Q212 Mr Jenkin: You are still trying
to meet that requirement?
Mr Gould: We are still trying
to use them, so it is quite a challenge.
Lieutenant General Applegate:
The point I am trying to make is that there is a time lag first
in defining the requirement and then going to industry even for
things like heavy machine guns and general purpose machine guns
which one might think would be common. For a heavy machine gun
there is a six-month lag; for a general purpose machine gun there
is a 12-month lag in the market place because it is just not there.
As to the Mastiff, I remember well that in pushing that through
we required a lot of support from our US colleagues in order to
provide us with favourable conditions in order to bring it in
on an accelerated timescale.
Q213 Mr Jenkin: The problem is that
the equipment in theatre is designed to last a certain life and
that is very quickly trashed by the sheer use of it. How do we
fund that? Can that be UOR-ed? Is that not a cost of operation
and is it fully funded as such, or does that have to come out
of the core budget?
Lieutenant General Applegate:
Some of that funding does come out of contingency funding in order
to maintain it. I am less sanguine about the cost of recuperation,
as we call it; in other words, at a time when we do not need that
equipment on the operation, or the operation is closing down,
or we are trying to reconstitute a reserve, is there sufficient
money to prepare for a contingency task in five years' time? That
is an issue which the department is looking at in this round.
Q214 Mr Jenkin: Should not 16 Brigade
have more than six WIMIKs for its training?
Lieutenant General Applegate:
It should have a larger training fleet, but part of the problem
initially—this is not the case now—was that the Treasury
did not approve elements for training and attrition.[6]
Q215 Mr Jenkin: That does not come
out of your core budget?
Lieutenant General Applegate:
No. Now that we have a more stable campaign in Afghanistan—more
like TELIC—the department is working out what should be
the equipment table with which to conduct operations. We now have
a better idea of the pattern of operations and what is needed
for success. Because of some of the shortages for training we
may have to bring back some of that equipment to ensure we train
people properly before they go to theatre.
Q216 Mr Holloway: The Army has been
using a gigantic amount of ammunition in Afghanistan. Every six
months it doubles. For example, for the Apaches the requirement
has been 81,000 30mm rounds. Is this huge use causing a problem
in your supply chain?
General Sir Kevin O'Donoghue:
No. We are able to get the ammunition. A lot of it comes from
BAE Systems Royal Ordnance which this year will produce over 200
million rounds of small arms ammunition for us.
Chairman: We have a couple of questions
to ask finally of Mr Gould. Before we do that, we shall write
to you about a few questions because we have not really had time
to reach them today.
Q217 John Smith: I should like to
deal with the defence agencies. We turn to a somewhat more mundane
subject. Why are you retaining the DSDA as an agency within the
new department, and will it continue as an agency?
General Sir Kevin O'Donoghue:
The answer is that I do not know whether it will continue as an
agency. The reason it was the only agency to survive into DE&S
is that that was what was agreed and announced by ministers when
we launched FDSCI, the Future Defence Supply Chain Initiative
under the change programme.
Q218 John Smith: It was there before
and as part of the rationalisation you will continue to look at
it?
General Sir Kevin O'Donoghue:
Indeed.
Q219 John Smith: Why was there a
change of mind on the Defence Aviation Repair Agency which was
to be abolished on 1 April 2007 but will now be merged with ABRO
to create a super-agency with Trading Fund status? That is a complete
about-turn in government policy.
General Sir Kevin O'Donoghue:
I do not know whether we intended to abolish it.
Mr Gould: As I am sure you know,
the DARA is made up of three elements: the fixed wing engine part
which is at St Athan, that is, engines in large aircraft; the
helicopter bit in Fleetlands and in Almondbank, Perth; and the
avionic repair part of that at Sealand. The avionic parts, which
have a good deal of commonality with some of the work that is
done in the Army Base Repair Organisation, which is already a
Trading Fund, will be put together. They will become a single
Trading Fund agency. The large aircraft part at St Athan will
disappear with the large aircraft anyway, maybe even before I
disappear with FSTA being done. That will just die a natural death.
The rotary wing and component rotary wing repair organisation
is being considered for sale. Therefore, it is not an amalgamation
of the whole thing. What is being amalgamated is the component
avionic repair facility at Sealand with ABRO which does quite
a lot of similar work.
5 See Ev 40. Back
6
Note by Witness: The Treasury has not, until recently,been
asked to approve UOR funding and training and attrition increments,
and that agreement to such funding (which includes training and
attrition increments for WMIK) was given by HM Treasury as soon
as MoD sought it. Back
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