Helicopter capability - Defence Committee Contents


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 120-139)

REAR ADMIRAL SIMON CHARLIER, REAR ADMIRAL TONY JOHNSTONE-BURT OBE AND BRIGADIER KEVIN ABRAHAM

2 JUNE 2009

  Q120  Mr Havard: So, it is not good but it is no different?

  Rear Admiral Charlier: Obviously, they are naval people and I take as much interest in this as my colleague. We work very closely together to look at peaks and troughs of retention and PVR rates. It is a much more complex position than you might at first think. If you work people hard in an operational theatre and continue to return them to that same theatre eventually two things happen: first, they become tired of that single involvement and all the pressures that go with it in the cycle, which my colleague has just mentioned; second, in the Sea King Mk4 force there are naval personnel with a particular sub-specialisation which is the littoral manoeuvre and amphibious warfare side, in this case flying. If you continually rotate them into a land-based operation so they are doing a single task, although the task varies within that operation, you combine the effects of both operational stress and the performance of a role which they are designed to do, but they have also joined the Navy and we have to get that in balance. We work very closely together to try to balance the operational demands that must come first—there is no doubt about that whatsoever—with the performance of the amphibious and littoral manoeuvre task of flying at sea and embarking. We have to watch it very carefully to get it in balance because that gives the varied military career in which most of the people who have joined want to participate.

  Q121  Mr Havard: Do you need to put more resource and therefore more people into that particular area? Therefore, do you need more people in the sense of the headline figure as well? It may be embarrassing to say that you need more people but if that is the reality is that what you need to do?

  Rear Admiral Charlier: No. As I said earlier, unless we were to predict a 10 or 20-year cycle of continuing to support amphibious and littoral manoeuvre operations and singularly land-based operations, I do not think that to overman the Navy would be a good use of taxpayers' money. The Navy is not designed around that process and that would require a whole change of policy to deliver it. It is up to us, the Commanders, to balance our people's role in employment as best we can to advance the operational theatre within the budget we are given.

  Chairman: I thought that was precisely the scenario predicted for the next 10 or 20 years.

  Mr Havard: Quite!

  Q122  Linda Gilroy: Are there any significant areas of capability for which you are unable to train because of the pressures of deployment and the Harmony issues that we have just been discussing? Are there things that you cannot train for in the UK that are needed in Afghanistan?

  Rear Admiral Johnstone-Burt: Yes, there are. We have been in operations now for a decade in Joint Helicopter Command and for six years we have been in operations at full tilt. As a consequence, we talk about ourselves being on what we call a campaign footing. My focus has been exclusively on delivering success in Afghanistan and Iraq. Admiral Charlier has mentioned one area in which we have not invested as much as we should or would have liked: littoral manoeuvre and amphibious warfare. There are two aspects of that that are of most interest to me. One aspect is the embarked operational capability of my crews and forces which is the ability to land and take off from moving decks in rough seas by day or by night. That is what I consider to be a core capability because if necessary we need to do that come what may. We are just keeping the flame alive in that sense, but we need to work at it. The second area is larger-scale amphibious operations where we are moving companies of land forces, usually Royal Marines, from sea to shore by air or surface by the use of landing craft. That is a highly complex key capability. I commanded HMS Ocean for two years and was very much involved in doing that throughout that time. It is an extraordinarily complex choreography of moving parts that we need to practise all the time to keep the skills alive. To do that we have used HMS Ocean this year on something called Exercise Taurus in the Mediterranean and managed to keep alive that skill on a small scale but only that. HMS Ocean is still at sea in the Far East with a detachment of Lynx on board doing the same thing. Those are the areas where we are in danger of losing focus and we must concentrate on them. We shall do that next year and in 2011 in terms of our small-scale, focused intervention capability. This is an area in which Admiral Charlier and I work very closely with Brigadier Abraham to make sure we do not lose that capability but it is a vulnerability, if you like.

  Q123  Linda Gilroy: How long is keeping the flame alive enough because your aircraft personnel have a life, a career, if you like and over time presumably that becomes more of an issue?

  Rear Admiral Johnstone-Burt: It is certainly an issue for retention and it is something on which we need to work.

  Rear Admiral Charlier: What we have to do—this is where we try to work as closely together as possible—is keep alive what we call a seedcorn capability which we can grow by using often the experience of the more senior people particularly in day and night deck landing skills, but it is also related to the ship/air interface—it is exactly the same on the fixed-wing side as it is on the rotary-wing side—where the ship itself needs to understand aviation and the dangers thereof and how to operate a number of aircraft together on board as well as the air crew themselves. Although we tend to focus on air crew skills which are vitally important it is the whole package. We try to maintain the seedcorn skill and allow the squadrons to nominate those personnel who will be involved, concentrating particularly on keeping the junior members up to speed as they are the most inexperienced and building that through as has been mentioned, but there is one big exercise this year. Next year we have Auriga which is primarily a carrier strike exercise. We will have another big littoral manoeuvre section to it where we will get back as many people as possible for a reasonable amount of time to balance their operational training needs to make sure that that seedcorn is kept alive. What we are trying to do nowadays is be more clever in helping the JHC with its environmental training that it needs to do so people are forewarned before they go out to the operation to tie in with what we need to do in the sense of littoral manoeuvres. If you are clever you can programme those together so both gain a benefit from the same event.

  Q124  Linda Gilroy: Are you able over a five-year period, say, to ensure that all personnel are able to keep those skills alive and fresh?

  Rear Admiral Charlier: Yes, I believe we are but there is no doubt that we have to work at it.

  Brigadier Abraham: In February, I and others gave evidence on recuperation timelines. As we have drawn down in Iraq, we are increasingly looking where we can to reinvest energy, time and resources into training based on contingent operational requirements rather than the specifics of Afghanistan. The sort of things you have heard given as examples here will be incorporated in our progressive training plan to try to reconstitute and do expeditionary operations from a cold start.

  Q125  Linda Gilroy: On the way ahead for defence helicopter training, at the moment that is done through the Defence Helicopter Flying School and that is contracted up to the end of 2012. I believe that a study is going on as to how coherent helicopter training can take place in future. Can you tell us a bit about that and also link that with the role of simulators? Our understanding is that simulation for helicopter forces is not as comprehensive as it could be at the moment because of limitations on the capacity and capability of simulators.

  Rear Admiral Johnstone-Burt: At Shawbury, where we base our defence helicopter flying school, we train all three Services' helicopter crews over a period of months before they go into their respective frontlines. It has been the subject of several reviews. The DHFS comes under the RAF; I do not own the Defence Helicopter Flying School in that sense. However, as you have already intimated, I receive the product from it, so it is very important that the output standard is the same as my input standard. That is working extremely well. You will know that the flying training system is being contracted over the next few years and that is why we are focusing very carefully on it to see how we can find any other ways to use the skills. The baseline core capability of our helicopter crews has gone up with the intensity and requirement of operations as you imagine. I want to make sure that that is absolutely dovetailed. You referred to training in the UK which is also quite pertinent to the DHFS. What I am trying to do at the moment is recreate the environmental conditions that we are experiencing in Afghanistan and Iraq. To do that I have to send my teams abroad to do training. We are talking about dust landings, extreme temperatures, mountainous terrain and density altitude. Afghanistan has both very cold winters with snow and sweltering heat, as it is now, and there are also extraordinarily low light conditions. We use the term `red illum' which means that the ambient light levels go below 10 millilux; in other words, night vision goggles cannot pick up enough ambient light to discriminate and define shapes as well as they might. All of those conditions can be experienced only abroad and that is one example where we need to help transition our young air crew by introducing them to night vision goggles during their period of training in the different areas where they may train. For example, in Norway the recirculation of snow causes a `whiteout' and that requires the same techniques for landing because you lose your visual references as you do with a `brownout' caused by the recirculation of sand. Again, I think those techniques can be introduced earlier. There are other areas where I hope DHFS can standardise baseline training more comprehensively. That work is going on now. As to simulators, you are right. Our urgent operational requirement mechanism is fantastic and industry has done very well to deliver us capability so quickly. One area that you touched on in your previous session was the theatre entry standard conundrum and the balance we had to draw between having the benefit of an urgent operational requirement in theatre and having enough to train on at home without delaying the deployment of that capability before everybody is trained. It is a balance. I can assure you that everybody has theatre entry standard training before they go, and I can talk a little more about it if you wish. To that end, we must ensure that people have that experience as early as possible and we standardise as much as we can across the fleets and have a common standard both in aircraft and training.

  Q126  Chairman: In the interest of not covering too much ground again we intended to ask questions about theatre entry standard in our second session. That is not to say you cannot add something that is very useful, but we have a number of other questions we would like to ask you.

  Rear Admiral Johnstone-Burt: As to the simulators, that lags behind the UOR process; that is the last bit. It is coming on line but it takes about 18 months for it to catch up. It is happening but the sooner we can do it the better.

  Q127  Chairman: What are the main limiting factors in relation to helicopter availability? Would it be manpower, spares or the hours that they can fly, fuel or money? In order of priority what are the main limiting factors?

  Rear Admiral Johnstone-Burt: I know that my deputy introduced the concept of the four-legged stool when you visited Middle Wallop.

  Q128  Chairman: Perhaps I may say how helpful his briefing was because we were extremely impressed.

  Rear Admiral Johnstone-Burt: Thank you. The four-legged stool analogy is simplistic but effective. The four legs are the people—the air crew, ground crew and engineers—the aircraft themselves, the support, which is all the equipment, and the training. For my 15 to 20-year robust sustainable capability on operations those four legs must be as strong and as long as each other; otherwise, the stool will fall over. There are strengths and fragilities in each stool depending on the aircraft type we are talking about, but one leg that is probably the least robust is the people. Without wanting to repeat myself, that is the one area on which I need to concentrate the most. All of the other legs are coming good very quickly. We must make sure that our training is realistic and there is enough of it and it is in time to give people confidence in themselves, their colleagues and the aircraft they are flying. As to the support and aircraft themselves, again we are reducing the numbers of fleets within fleets; there is a clear plan to standardise fleets to theatre entry standards, and you will hear more about that in a minute. I am most confident that we are coming good on the other three legs. My big concern is about the people leg and that is why addressing it is my top priority.

  Q129  Chairman: Can you answer a question about the hours of helicopters? As we understand it, the Treasury of all people, have put a limit on the number of hours that helicopters can fly in Afghanistan. Is that correct?

  Rear Admiral Johnstone-Burt: No, absolutely not. Brigadier Abraham may wish to add a little in a moment. If that were so clearly we would reduce the operational effect as a consequence. My whole drive is to see how while keeping the four legs in balance I can increase the capability in the hours we are flying in theatre. The hours are limited by those four legs of the stool, not in budgetary terms. Of course that is a factor according to what is achievable but that balance covers it, so the answer is no.

  Q130  Chairman: So, there is no decree by the Treasury which say that Chinooks or Apaches can fly only x number of hours this month?

  Rear Admiral Johnstone-Burt: No, definitely not.

  Brigadier Abraham: I have never heard that before; it is not the case.

  Q131  Mr Jenkin: I declare an interest on the Register of Members' Interests. I arranged a fund-raiser for Combat Stress earlier this year which was substantially sponsored by Finmeccanica. Earlier you mentioned hybrid warfare. You said in a recent speech that you would like to see "helicopters forces in the future swing from a symbol of fear to the enemy to one of hope to civilians and friendly forces." What are the practical difficulties for helicopters in that swing role? What does that mean?

  Rear Admiral Johnstone-Burt: Frank Hoffman, an American academic and former member of the US Marine Corps, coined that phrase in trying to describe the complexity of warfare we face at the moment in Afghanistan and Iraq, where you have an insurgent who has everything at his fingertips, whether he is using the latest laptop in the morning to stream video or whatever of IEDs to the local population or indulging in medieval warfare in the afternoon by cutting off people's heads or whatever. We have an extraordinary creature who is using everything he can including the latest in technology to his own advantage. Michael Evans has said we are now facing a war in which Microsoft co-exists with machetes and stealth technology is met by suicide bombers. That really wraps it up. The advantage enjoyed by the hybrid warrior is the fact that he can move at will; he can exploit the dense urban environment and terrain; he can use the local infrastructure and transport facilities to hide, plan, attack and escape at will and use it to his own advantage in dislocating our own forces. My point is that the battlefield helicopter is the perfect antidote to the hybrid warrior in the sense that the agility, flexibility, versatility and potential lethality of a battlefield helicopter counter the apparent advantages of the hybrid warrior. As the roles of helicopters now begin to blur, which was why I referred earlier to being smarter about our tasking to create greater effect in theatre, what is happening is that we are using Apache not only for close combat attack but for reconnaissance, intelligence and surveillance. We use the Chinook both for emergency medical relief and assault operations. You can swing from one to the other and ditto across all the forces. You can pursue the hybrid warrior from the urban environment into mountainous terrain, desert and a maritime domain; you can swing straight from one to the other without having to recheck and reset your forces either conceptually or practically.

  Q132  Mr Jenkin: This is about training and attitude, not about equipment or reconfiguring helicopters for different tasks?

  Rear Admiral Johnstone-Burt: Exactly; and it is about optimising our equipment where we can to fulfil those roles, which is what we have done.

  Q133  Mr Jenkin: Reverting to a previous conversation with my colleague, is it not a fact that combat operations tend to take priority and if there is a shortage of helicopter capacity in theatre it is the humanitarian and nation building aspect, the second part of the Comprehensive Approach, that loses out?

  Rear Admiral Johnstone-Burt: That is absolutely right. We cannot do everything all the time, but my objective is to create a joint helicopter command that is capable of swinging from one to the other. What they actually do depends on exactly what you say: numbers, capacity and the priorities at the time.

  Q134  Mr Jenkin: In that context, helicopters are the supreme force multiplier?

  Rear Admiral Johnstone-Burt: Absolutely. What I love about them is that they can deliver tempo to the Ground Force Commander; in other words, they can ratchet it up or down, manoeuvre and put in fresh troops without breaking contact.

  Q135  Mr Jenkin: It is small wonder that every Brigade Commander in Helmand has lamented the lack of sufficient helicopters. He has adjusted his operations accordingly, but if he had had more helicopters he would have been able to achieve a different quantum.

  Brigadier Abraham: I am not sure I accept the premise that every Brigade Commander in Helmand has lamented the lack of helicopters.

  Q136  Mr Holloway: Privately, yes.

  Brigadier Abraham: I do not accept that premise.

  Rear Admiral Johnstone-Burt: A Ground Force Commander will always want more helicopters for all the reasons I have explained. We have what we have got and we are doing the maximum with what we have got, and I think we can do better still. That is my objective over the next two years or so of my appointment.

  Q137  Mr Jenkin: The last time we were in Helmand we were extremely well briefed. It became apparent that in terms of driving the conflict into a new phase that was beyond the capacity of what we do in Helmand.

  Rear Admiral Johnstone-Burt: At the moment in Helmand we are doing the best we can with what we have got. We have just had a massive influx of American aviation capability. Two hundred and ninety-five aircraft are arriving as we speak. We now have the Marine Air Group totalling 40 in Bastion and the CAB is arriving in Kandahar as we speak. I hope that that will balance or cope with the huge influx of American troops of 21,000 or 22,000. We are in a dynamic situation at the moment, but aviation is something that we hope will improve all the time.

  Brigadier Abraham: As to the provision of helicopters to Helmand, from November 2006 to date it has increased by about 84%; by the summer of next year it will be about 115% expressed in terms of hours. As you know, at the end of this year and beginning of next year the Merlin force, currently finishing in the Middle East, will redeploy there and the buy of the T800 engines for the Lynx will allow us to use those aircraft all year round. These are sustainable increases in terms of the hours, but we are building it on a steady profile in order that we do not break the most important thing which my colleague mentioned earlier, which is the people part of the four-legged stool.

  Q138  Mr Jenkin: I am grateful to you for putting that on the record, but it underlines that the complaints to which I referred earlier were probably justified.

  Brigadier Abraham: I do not accept your premise that everyone has said that. Let me tell you what one Brigade Commanders told me. It was said in private, so I will not identify the individual. Helicopters are like money in your bank account. If you are asked whether you would like some more, the answer is always yes. Do you have enough to do what you have to do? The answer is yes.

  Mr Holloway: You referred to the hybrid warrior. He is the one who is winning the battle for the people which I would have thought would be the only way to win this. What we face in Helmand is a peasant's revolt rather than an insurgency; that is really the characteristic of this. What percentage of your helicopter hours is used in winning back the people as opposed to the military effect?

  Chairman: You are asking the same question that you asked before, are you not?

  Mr Holloway: I am, but it is a very important question.

  Chairman: Putting it twice does not help.

  Q139  Mr Holloway: I cannot see how 20% of your helicopter hours are used on the battle for the people.

  Rear Admiral Johnstone-Burt: It depends on what you mean by "battle for the people". Clearly, you have a precise idea of what you mean by that question. My point is that it can be interpreted in different ways. I will try to answer in the way I understand your question. Referring to my 15 to 20%, if you say that the battle for the people is the recovery of people wounded by the Taliban—

  Mr Holloway: No; I mean winning or regaining the consent of the people.

  Chairman: I want to bring this exchange to a close.

  Mr Holloway: It is a fundamental question.

  Chairman: It may be a fundamental question, but next week we shall be conducting a Comprehensive Approach evidence session where I believe this question is more appropriate because it will not be confined to one particular type of platform.

  Mr Holloway: That is why it is illuminating to find out how a very important platform is being used in this respect and we will not have witnesses like these to answer the point next week.

  Chairman: But we have already had an answer to the question. I shall now move on to Linda Gilroy.


 
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