Select Committee on Defence Minutes of Evidence


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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