Examination of Witnesses (Questions 67-80)
AIR VICE-MARSHAL
CARL DIXON
OBE, AIR COMMODORE
N J GORDON MBE AND
BRIGADIER KEVIN
ABRAHAM
14 JULY 2009
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. Back
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