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CORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 479-ii House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE DEFENCE COMMITTEE
THE contribution of ISTAR to operations
Tuesday 14 July 2009 AIR VICE-MARSHAL CARL DIXON OBE, AIR COMMODORE N J GORDON MBE and BRIGADIER KEVIN ABRAHAM Evidence heard in Private Questions 67 - 80
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the Defence Committee on Tuesday 14 July 2009 Members present Mr James Arbuthnot, in the Chair Mr David Hamilton Mr Dai Havard Mr Brian Jenkins Richard Younger-Ross ________________ Witnesses: AIR VICE-MARSHAL CARL DIXON OBE, Director Information Superiority, Ministry of Defence, AIR COMMODORE N J GORDON MBE, Air Officer ISTAR Air Command, Ministry of Defence, and BRIGADIER KEVIN ABRAHAM, Head of Joint Capability, Ministry of Defence, gave evidence.
Resolved, That the Committee should sit in private. The witnesses gave oral evidence. Asterisks denote that part of the oral evidence which, for security reasons, has not been reported at the request of the Ministry of Defence and with the agreement of the Committee.
Q67 Chairman: We begin on these issues in private session with the question about what difference ASTOR would make to coalition operations in Afghanistan and you said you could give us some vignettes about that sort of thing. We would be grateful if you did. Air Commodore Gordon: What does ASTOR bring to the party to start with? It brings to the party not only the Synthetic Aperture Radar that we can see the ground with but also the ability to detect moving targets, so it is very helpful in **. Where it has proved hugely beneficial as well is coming back to this cross-cueing piece, tying in the**. Air Vice-Marshal Dixon: If I may, Chairman, can I elaborate a little bit on cross-cueing with a little bit of the red data as opposed to the black data we have been talking about so far. ** I wanted to tell the Committee a little bit about what we are doing about **. I can just imagine the weekend folks have had in their constituencies. ** One of the great benefits of some of the toys we have got in theatre now is that we are able to look, as the Air Commodore said, **, which is very important. If we take an example like ASTOR, ASTOR has got a ** range on its radar so it really is a strategic capability. It thunders up and down at ** and its radar can see **. If you think about a sortie ** - and I should add by the way that it is not the only asset of its kind in theatre, the Americans have a number of JSTAR aircraft - which is a bigger aircraft again - in theatre. ** That is one example where that wide area surveillance being cued and tightened down, cross-cued into a detailed look is hugely useful in the **. Another one we are pursuing which is looking at using **. Q68 Chairman: Before you get off that first one does ** rely on somebody sitting at a terminal spotting it, or is it a programme-driven alarm that goes off? Air Vice-Marshal Dixon: There is software support to analysing the take. The ASTOR imagery comes down to a dedicated ground station and in effect you can video the product so it is a question then of how many heads you put around the problem. There are software tools, therefore, that are used in the analysis of that kind of product which we can leverage, but I actually do not know technically whether there is a software tripwire which tells you, hang on, **. Brigadier Abraham: Can I give you an example? It is not an ASTOR example but it is where ISTAR can automatically trigger, **, but it is one example where there is an automatic response to an event picked up by an ISTAR sensor. Air Vice-Marshal Dixon: If I may I want to press on a little with **. There is one example where ISTAR R&D is being pulled through, in truth very rapidly, to give real effect to **. Cross-cueing we have talked about already in open forum. This wide area surveillance, quickly cross-cueing down to a tighter, more detailed surveillance is absolutely key **, but there is no panacea, it is all about increasing the quality of warnings and alerts rather than an absolute surety. For example, **, never a panacea. That is really the message I wanted to give you but with a little bit of operational flavour that does not sound like rubbish in an open forum. ** Do you want to say anything more? Brigadier Abraham: As the Air-Marshal said, dealing with **. We have largely by UOR provided some considerably well-protected vehicles - ** - for Afghanistan. **, all these big things. The other thing is to increase the investment in training the force, which we have done a great deal of, so that your people are better prepared, not just on an individual but on a collective training basis. This is big business for us in the MoD at the moment, as the Air Vice-Marshal says. ISTAR is not the sole path to deliver that but it is a very, very important enabling capability in support of that. Q69 Mr Hamilton: Effectively what we are taking about is that it allows more choice in the sense that you are given more information and therefore the choices have then got to be made based on all of that information. The bit I was thinking about is as you gather all this information in, the human element then takes it up. The number of people you require as you gather more and more information must increase, and that requires another judgment which is the point you are touching on, and that is how the collaboration then begins to take place. Is it the case that as you gather more and more information you have to increase your staffing levels to try and deal with that? Air Vice-Marshal Dixon: Inevitably as this ISTAR layering, value thing grows in awareness there is going to be a shift in our manpower thinking along the lines you say. There is a lot more to do technically yet and one of the problems is data retrieval and storage. If you just think about the electronic burden of holding on to full motion video - we have all got our CD collections if you have not moved on and started to stream online --- Q70 Chairman: Or iPods now. Air Vice-Marshal Dixon: I cannot keep up with it now. I have two terabytes --- Q71 Mr Hamilton: I cannot keep up with the emails let alone anything else. Air Vice-Marshal Dixon: All of that is based at home. You know, the old-fashioned 180 meg PC is manifestly unfit for purpose for any modern digital home, but there are various ways that you can cut the data storage and retrieval piece. It is a very good example: you can either keep collecting CDs, and that will not be possible for very much longer, or you can go and buy yourself a huge hard disk and strip all your CDs and still live with the stuff in your dining room, or you can get with it and stream the music offline - hopefully and obviously if you can afford the bill from Virgin. But there is a lesson in that for us and quite a lot of this data can be stored in the cloud and one of the benefits of our DII investment and the ** means that this data can be passed around a very, very large number of people collaboratively, and as I said earlier in the open session knowledge can always be improved. The more heads you can get around a problem the better usually the product is. A good example last year - you will recall the Kajaki Dam operation, much televised. There was **. It had to be a British operation but we sucked in a lot of American capability. If you could review **, so what does that tell us? You know, **, and if you had the Chief of Defence Intelligence here or the Chief of Joint Operations here, who has just recently been the Chief of Defence Intelligence, he would tell you that he would quite like to get in with his knife, fork and spoon amongst all of that take. Hitherto we have not really been able to do that because **. That is really what we are trying to do with our ** is actually get that cloud, that storage, access and information going properly. Q72 Mr Havard: ** some of it you can automate but then it is only going to give you indicators and the analysis has to be done by human beings somewhere or other at different levels. Air Vice-Marshal Dixon: It can be very much helped by technology for sure. Q73 Mr Havard: Absolutely. Air Vice-Marshal Dixon: ** all that sort of thing is very useful. Mr Havard: Yes, quite, but the significance of the information at some point is going to be interpreted by somebody bright - 20 per cent, 30 per cent, 40 per cent. Chairman: It boils down to judgment at the end of the day. Q74 Mr Havard: Absolutely, it is a judgment call at the end of the day but it is a more informed judgment call than previously. Air Vice-Marshal Dixon: I would be surprised if after a Defence Review we did not conclude - to come back to the earlier question about manpower numbers - that we did not need to up our numbers over this whole area. I would be surprised. Q75 Mr Havard: I would be surprised as well. The argument is not about whether you strap a gun on it - that is where the argument currently is with a lot of people and it is the wrong part of the argument. It is about your satellite capability, it is about your bandwidth, it is about your streaming of this stuff back to wherever you are going to put it, a data centre in Hertfordshire or wherever the hell you have it. It is about all those questions and that is the area it seems to me the investment needs to be put into rather than in a sense the front end capability of any particular platform, as to whether it can spit fire or not. Air Vice-Marshal Dixon: There is as much an opportunity for ISTAR and C4 in the Defence Review as there is a threat, and I think a lot of the platform folks are probably looking at their fingernails a bit nervously about the Defence Review, but actually several people in the community that I work with, in the C4ISTAR world, think this is a big opportunity because all the lessons learned point to the need to get this absolutely gripped. We have made the investments we have made and everything I said in open forum is right, we are going to take great benefit from DII, but this people layer that you both talked about is key. Q76 Mr Havard: Can I ask you what discussion you have had? I have lost the plot a bit, I have to confess, I do not know where Lord Drayson sits in the architecture any more, but there is science behind all of this at the start and there is all of that stuff with business and all the other departments of government that need to chime in to let you do all these things. Air Vice-Marshal Dixon: Yes. Q77 Mr Havard: Where is the cross-governmental discussion of that going or is this all vested as just secret squirrel stuff within the MoD, because it cannot work if it is. Air Vice-Marshal Dixon: It is not. I will start the answer because I know Kevin will have a view. I sit on a cross-government research and development committee with the ** and you can imagine the kind of agenda that is running there. The MoD is seen by those ** this huge leviathan, immensely rich organisation that seems to have a finger in every pie; I in all modesty look at them with, you know** - there is an interesting dialogue that goes on in there. But we have taken a view that we need to collaborate very much more closely around our R&D effort, largely on the principle that we are probably duplicating efforts, and I have made available out of my R&D colleagues in Defence a whole raft of information about what we are up to in our research and development programme to those other agencies. There is an example on R&D. On the communications side, you are probably aware in the Committee that there was an intention to deliver a pan-Whitehall TS (top secret) network called SCOPE. It was being run out of Cabinet Office and fell over technically. The phoenix that has arisen from that considerable pile of ash is called CliC[1] and CliC is going to be what was SCOPE. CliC is already working pretty well with **, and the MoD is third on the list alongside those two to come on board, and we are already paying our way into the CliC programme. We are not just networking DII as a sort of digital island for the MoD - a big digital island - we are also participating in connecting up government through those agencies, so there is a communications agenda running there. There is also a whole raft of work going on around **. Mr Havard: No, but it is the technicality of collaboration that is important as well, stuff like bandwidth. We have just had Digital Britain which is all about mobile phones and all the rest of it, which obviously is a very small part of that bigger area, is it not? You need to reserve some of that. Q78 Chairman: Is there anything else that you need to tell us in private? Air Vice-Marshal Dixon: Yes, there was one vignette I was going to offer which was to do with interoperability. One of the questions asked earlier was how interoperable are we because there is a sense in the line of questioning this morning that it is all a bit stovepiped. One of the things we are actually very good at interoperating with is **. Brigadier Abraham: It is not just **. That is quite powerful. Q79 Mr Havard: That six-bit stuff has come in through our Bowman system, has it? Brigadier Abraham: No, ** is a discrete UOR to **. Q80 Mr Havard: Can I ask you the other obvious question, where does it go in the future? Air Vice-Marshal Dixon: I appreciate the Chairman has obviously got an eye to the clock now but the issue on Bowman is that Bowman currently in its fielded condition is a voice system. It is just about to acquire the very, very thin pipe data component on which there are a number of applications running, but the applications are not full motion video capable, the pipe is not wide enough. The things you send around Bowman Data are things like maps and charts and orders groups. It is not far off a fax capability, so do not imagine that Bowman Data is going to solve the world's ills, it will not, it is a very tight pipe. Chairman: Thank you very much indeed, a very interesting session, extremely helpful and illuminating. Many thanks to all of you. [1] Note by witness: Collaboration in the Intelligence Community. |