Readiness and recuperation of the Armed Forces: looking towards the Strategic Defence Review - Defence Committee Contents

Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1-141)

VICE ADMIRAL PAUL BOISSIER CB, LIEUTENANT GENERAL SIR GRAEME LAMB KBE CMG DSO, AIR MARSHAL IAIN MCNICOLL CB CBE, RAF, BRIGADIER KEVIN ABRAHAM AND BRIGADIER JAMES EVERARD CBE

3 FEBRUARY 2009

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.

  Chairman: Good morning. This is the first evidence session which we are having into recuperation. This morning we will be spending most of the time on readiness; next we will be having an evidence session on which we will be spending most of the time on recuperation. This evidence session is being conducted in private, as the Committee has decided, and I would like to begin, please, by asking if, firstly, the Clerk could tell the Committee that everybody who is here from the Committee side is appropriate.

  Committee Clerk: Yes, they are.

  Chairman: Who should do this from the witnesses' side? Sharon?

  Ms Wroe: Everyone here is appropriate.

  Chairman: You know everyone from the Committee and you also know who is here from the Ministry of Defence?

  Ms Wroe: Yes.

  Q1  Chairman: Thank you. The next thing is could I ask everybody, please, to do just as I am about to do, which is to take their batteries out of their mobile telephone, because mobile telephones can be switched on remotely. (Short pause while mobile telephones were removed from the room or put out of action) The Committee is reminded you cannot, please, take notes except for those which are absolutely essential and which, after this meeting, will remain in the classified folders in the safe. I will ask the witnesses, please, to follow the following procedure when we ask you questions: could you start, please, with the unclassified part of your answer. I know this is complicated, but do your best to start with the unclassified part of your answer and tell us when you are going into the classified parts of your answers so that we are aware of the issues of particular sensitivity. Do your best on that with all of the questions. Finally, in this introduction, I would like someone to explain at the outset why it is all so frightfully secret. I would like to begin, please, by asking you to introduce yourselves.

  Vice Admiral Boissier: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I am Vice Admiral Paul Boissier, the Deputy Commander-in-Chief Navy Command based in Portsmouth. I have been in the Navy since, almost, Noah's Ark was launched and a lot of my time was spent on submarines. Since then I have worked in the Ministry of Defence on the programming side. I have commanded a ship as well as a submarine and commanded a naval base—run all three naval bases—and now I find myself as, in effect, a chief operating officer of the Royal Navy.

  Brigadier Abraham: I am Brigadier Kevin Abraham. I am the Head of Joint Capability in the Ministry of Defence, a post I have held since July of last year. That is a post, really, to do with the integration and readiness of joint capabilities, both now and in the future. Before taking up this post I was at PJHQ as the Assistant Chief of Staff responsible for joint force training and joint warfare development.

  Air Marshal McNicoll: Good morning, Chairman. I am Air Marshal Iain McNicoll. I am Deputy Commander-in-Chief (Operations) in the Royal Air Force Headquarters, Air Command at High Wycombe. I am responsible, as my colleague in the Navy is, for the raising, training and sustaining of forces so that they may be used on operations and prepared for contingent operations. My background is as a fast jet pilot; I have commanded a squadron station and indeed a group. In fact, the group I commanded was a large aircraft transport and intelligence group and, indeed, RAF Regiments. I am more experienced broadly across the service.

  Lieutenant General Sir Graeme Lamb: Chairman, ladies and gentleman, I am Graeme Lamb. I am a Lieutenant General; I am Commander of the Field Army—the deployable Army that we send to operations. I am based at Wilton with General Richards, who was here the other day, and I have been in the service for a little over 37 years. I am a frontline soldier, I have done five tours with Special Forces and I retire in the middle of this year.

  Q2  Chairman: Shame.

  Brigadier Everard: Brigadier James Everard. I am the Director of Commitment at Headquarters Land Forces and, therefore, responsible for the day-to-day apportionment of the Army to operations.

  Q3  Chairman: Who would like to tell us why this is so secret?

  Brigadier Abraham: At the moment, as you appreciate already, Mr Chairman, and I hope we can inform you greater today, our design standard for contingent operations and our readiness to meet that is less than it should be in the normal course of the world, and you will hear the reasons for that is the demands of the current operations. Nevertheless, the fact and the extent to which we have gaps in our readiness to react to the unforeseen is something which we would not want potential adversaries, whether conventional or asymmetric adversaries, to understand in more detail. In particular, when we talk about the recuperation target for readiness, that is something which we will consistently ask to keep in the classified domain because quite a lot of reverse engineering could be done against us in the sense of our preparedness to react to anything unexpected in the future.

  Q4  Chairman: If we had been holding this inquiry five years ago, would it have been so secret?

  Brigadier Abraham: Our readiness, as we have seen, matched against the PSA target, has reduced. The fact that we are below readiness makes us more vulnerable and therefore we need to protect the information accordingly. So five years ago, probably not as much as we would advocate now. We are talking, really, I think, of recuperation targets now which have been confidential rather than strictly secret in the technical sense of "secret".

  Q5  Chairman: The answer that you have just given amounts, essentially, to: "Things are so bad that we can't let the opposition (by which I mean the enemy) know". Is that fair?

  Brigadier Abraham: There would be disadvantage to us potentially in letting potential adversaries know.

  Q6  Chairman: That sounds like a "Yes".

  Brigadier Abraham: I think so. It is a slightly different emphasis from the way you summarised it.

  Q7  Chairman: Do you think it is something to put in the other side of the balance that it is a good thing to let our friends know how bad things are?

  Brigadier Abraham: By "friends" you mean allies, or within the UK?

  Q8  Chairman: Laughingly, I suppose, I mean the Treasury. What I mean is those who might actually be able to do something about it.

  Brigadier Abraham: The specific example of the Treasury; there is detailed work under way to try and work out how we recuperate and how it is funded, and so on. So while not all of the Treasury will necessarily be aware of all that we are talking about, there are parts of the Treasury who are decisively engaged in this process.

  Lieutenant General Sir Graeme Lamb: Chairman, if I could interject. I sense it is an opportunity for the Committee to ask of us who are working at the front end what problems we face in the current operations as we look forward to contingency and the future. Where we are not naturally cautious about some of our answers, we can be a little more open and a little more comfortable and, therefore, relaxed in how we respond. Therefore, I think, the importance of the opportunity is for the Committee to understand and, therefore, represent those views across the Treasury and the Government and have an understanding as near as we can from an honest broker's—and from the Army's—view for those of us that are having to manage the current pressures and try and ensure that we do not lose sight of the future requirements.

  Q9  Mr Holloway: I was quite shocked yesterday when I saw on a table the latest issue of The Economist saying: "Over-stretched, overwhelmed, over there", with pictures of our troops in Afghanistan. General Lamb, I have not even read the article, I have just seen the front page. What does that make you feel?

  Lieutenant General Sir Graeme Lamb: I was out yesterday seeing some of my troops in training on Salisbury Plain as they prepared for Afghanistan—19th Brigade. I asked them specifically about some of the articles that are coming through in the press and the feeling about "over-stretched, over there, unloved, humiliated"; taking on the scene from Basra, and I had no sense from them that it was affecting their morale. For us at the top end I sense it is important that we discuss these issues with America because they are the prime drivers in the Coalition. Occasionally one feels somewhat disappointed that a rather simplistic view is taken over the nature of the fight we are in. Are there some truths in those articles? Of course there are. Are there pressures upon our current commitments? Naturally, and that is what this Committee is looking to inquire about. Do we feel sorry for ourselves? No.

  Q10  Mr Jenkin: At your invitation, General, can I invite you to continue answering above your pay grade because it is for our education, and we are in private. We read that we are just not anywhere near our PSA targets in the Ministry of Defence. What is the strategic implication of that? At a tactical level, what are the strategic implications for the United Kingdom of not being able to meet those targets? Is it more than strategic, for example, in our conversations with the Americans?

  Lieutenant General Sir Graeme Lamb: I sense that a comment which I have made for all the time I have been in this job and a little before was my sense of that which we are experiencing in the current fight in Iraq and Afghanistan. From what we have drawn from the Balkans, from Northern Ireland and from elsewhere where we have been committed, the Army (and I can only speak for the Army and at the front end), I say, has never been in better shape. There is also a sense of never having been more fragile, in my lifetime. So there are risks to the contingent and the readiness of Armed Forces and the nature of how those forces, as the nation would wish, are to be used in the future, and there are issues on manpower, on equipment, on training and on sustainability out there.

  Q11  Mr Borrow: Just following on from that, I am not sure whether it is above the pay grade of anyone here, but there is obviously a balance that has to be struck beyond being able to meet the targets for readiness in the Armed Forces and being able to participate in current operations. UK plc needs to make an assessment as to whether or not the risk involved in terms of readiness is reasonable in order to devote sufficient men and equipment to conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Are you confident that those who have made those decisions have done so in the full knowledge of the risks that are existing as far as readiness is concerned?

  Vice Admiral Boissier: From the Navy's perspective I can understand exactly where this question is coming from. The way I would characterise it at the moment is we have an absolutely correct focus on current operations. As General Lamb said, we have got troops who are completely content with their part in it and feel really quite good about what they are achieving. When we—certainly from the maritime perspective—ask about how easy would it be to conduct successfully a contingent operation, for which we hold forces in readiness, I am aware that there is a sort of balance between one and the other, and in order to achieve success in current operations we have had, to some extent, to take a certain amount of risk against our contingent capability

  Chairman: That was all rather high level stuff. Let us move down from there.

  Q12  Mike Hancock: I am just interested in how often you five are together and who pulls you together, and how does the debate go about what we can do and what we cannot do, and the pressures that you are under to deliver. As you rightly said, General, with your experience—you have been a long time in the Army—you have never seen it in this situation and that must be true of you in the Navy as well, with fewer ships and more commitments, not fewer. When and how are you brought together, and who by?

  Vice Admiral Boissier: Quite often by the Chief of Joint Operations and we do sit down and have this sort of discussion probably three or four times a year, I guess.

  Q13  Mike Hancock: Who is putting the pressure on you to deliver more, continuously? Where is your pressure coming from? Is it field commanders?

  Vice Admiral Boissier: From my perspective, my pressure comes from, I suppose, ultimately, from the Ministry of Defence to achieve the targets that they set me. I am not quite sure that is a satisfactory answer to your question.

  Q14  Mike Hancock: No, it is not. There is pressure everywhere and then somebody says: "Well, we have to do something else". Endurance, for example—a good example. Endurance is out of commission. Who is putting pressure on you to say: "What are we going to do about getting Endurance back into service and, in the meantime, who is going to cover for it?" That sort of decision. Do you say: "There is no capacity to do it"?

  Vice Admiral Boissier: Quite the opposite. I think there are very few things we are incapable of doing. Sometimes it takes longer than one would wish. I would see it as almost exactly falling into my remit to look and work out what the contingency actions are in the case of, let us say, Endurance—which is not out of commission but suffering a serious defect. My job is to think this through and produce an alternative solution.

  Q15  Mike Hancock: So you are working on that now?

  Vice Admiral Boissier: Yes, we are.

  Q16  Mr Jenkin: Just to come back to this lack of capacity affecting our relationship with the United States. I am sorry, I do not think I got a good enough answer before. How do we manage the expectations of our closest allies, particularly the United States, which, clearly, has a predisposition to expect that we put more on the table than we actually can. Is that affecting our influence in Washington?

  Air Marshal Iain McNicoll: Perhaps I could kick off from the Royal Air Force's perspective. Our dealings in operational matters are more directly with the operational commanders.

  Q17  Mr Jenkin: Do we have people in CENTCOM?

  Air Marshal Iain McNicoll: We do, and I was going to say that the CENTCOM United States Combined Forces Air Component Commander, who is in charge of all of air operations over Iraq, and over Afghanistan, and I speak on a relatively frequent basis, as do our staffs. We have our own air commander in theatre who is directing the staff on a daily basis. The question you are asking is more about the degree of influence at our level of effort and our difficulties in sustaining that level of effort, and I think our US colleagues at the operational level are very understanding of how much we are doing, appreciate how much we are doing and certainly understand it when we say that we are either not able to do as much, perhaps, as they would like or we are able to do different things in different ways. I do not have a difficulty with that. I also have interactions with my—

  Q18  Mr Jenkin: So you have got enough?

  Air Marshal Iain McNicoll: That is not exactly what I was saying. I was saying our interactions with my opposite number in the Pentagon are arranged differently; I have two points of contact there, and similarly we have regular staff talks every nine or 10 months where we try and cover these issues about how much we are doing. I do not think it is the job of a frontline commander to answer the political question you are asking as to whether the political influence we have in Washington is enough for what we contribute to the fight.

  Q19  Chairman: General Lamb, would you have a different answer to the Air Marshal?

  Lieutenant General Sir Graeme Lamb: Yes. If I email General Petraeus, who is very busy, I will get a reply within hours. When I went to Washington I saw General Casey, who was very busy, General McCrystal, and saw a range of people from the US Marine Corps and Baghdad. I was asked to go across to Seattle last week to talk to the corps who were just about to deploy on a one-year tour, taking over from the airborne corps, in order to set the tone that this was about transition—that we Brits actually think quite wisely about this. So I would say, from my perspective, our relationship with America is good. They seek our assistance, they welcome our advice; they recognise that we are not as well equipped as they are but they do respect the manner in which we contribute to the Coalition, both in Iraq and Afghanistan.

  Chairman: Three more people are catching my eye and we have not actually begun the questioning yet. We ought to move on.

  Q20  Richard Younger-Ross: This Committee and other Committees in the House when visiting Afghanistan will ask the commanders in the field and others back here on whether you have enough resources, whether you have enough manpower to deliver the task set you. I remember, particularly, when we were in Afghanistan we were told: "Yes, we don't need any more forces." Is there a danger that when we are asking these questions that there is, at the back of the officer's mind, a fear that if they say: "No, we don't have enough resources", and more resources were given, that would have an impact upon your ability to recuperate?

  Lieutenant General Sir Graeme Lamb: Our ability to recuperate?

  Richard Younger-Ross: Yes.

  Q21  Chairman: Brigadier Abraham, you were looking puzzled by that.

  Brigadier Abraham: Yes, I am slightly puzzled by that. As I understood it, you are asking people on operations, and so on: "Do you have enough manpower? Do you have enough equipment?" relating to that specific operation. People have to tell it as they see it. Of course, they have to be circumspect and not speak above their pay grade or comment on things which are out of their lane—that is part of the military culture in all three of the Services. In the more general sense, where your question comes down in terms of recuperation, so many people within the frontline command, their service careers are dominated by what they are doing on the two major enduring operations at the moment. The extent to which individuals think, ask and comment about recuperation and readiness will vary, really, depending on their experience and level.

  Q22  Richard Younger-Ross: It is just that when we visit and we are told: "Yes, we have enough personnel", we then discover later that there is a request for more personnel and we need to commit more resources. I just wonder what it was at the back of the mind of the answers we were given in the field which was not necessarily the whole truth. The answer we certainly know is that there are problems. In 2003 we were told that there were problems with preparedness at that time. I wonder whether there is sometimes something at the back of people's minds which means that they are not necessarily as forthright with us as they should be.

  Lieutenant General Sir Graeme Lamb: I think anyone in the field is pretty robust and most of them are pretty straight shooters—actually, they really are very straight shooters. So if you ask a question they will invariably answer you in a truthful and honest manner. Asked: "Could you do more with more?" Of course. "Would you like more?" I think that would be a natural thing, again. Have they sufficient for the task that we are placing them on? In most areas the answer would be: "Yes, just." They would then say there are equipments and capabilities they would like more of. However, to recuperation, I sense that it goes into the theme of the morning's discussion. It is recuperating to what? I sense that begs a question which the Committee may not want to take on but I sense it is the substance of, maybe, at least, half the reason why you are here.

  Q23  Chairman: I have to say, General Lamb, I would agree that, by and large, the answers we get when we are in Afghanistan and Iraq are not: "No, we don't need more"; they are always: "Of course, we could always do with more. Everybody could always do with more, but given what we have we think we are doing pretty well and the morale is high." It seems to me to be a policy amongst the Armed Forces to have high morale, which is a good policy. You will understand why that gives the Committee a sense of always being told the good news, because that is the way the system operates.

  Lieutenant General Sir Graeme Lamb: Yes, and you are asking the question of people in a current fight, and that is where the bulk of our energy, effort, time and commitment is towards. I have no forces at risk; I am not recuperating.

  Q24  Mike Hancock: You are the people who have to say no; that more is asked for. There has not been sufficient time to recuperate. I am interested to know how often the Americans have asked us to do more and we have had to say: "No, but we can do something else instead", as you said, Air Marshal. We might not be able to do what they asked for but we will do something instead.

  Air Marshal Iain McNicoll: A very good example of that would be the use of our aircraft over Iraq where we have been able to offer to the US, and they have gratefully accepted it, the offer of the RAPTOR reconnaissance pod, which is offering them something that they do not have and which is very welcome. So there is an example of not offering something that they may have wanted—more close support aircraft—in fact, they could generate that themselves. ***

  Chairman: I am going to move on because there will be other opportunities to ask these questions.

  Q25  Mr Holloway: When we were in Kandahar, were we not told that the Americans were typically complaining that we actually did not have the correct pod? This was three years ago. Is it that we were well behind and now we have caught up?

  Air Marshal Iain McNicoll: I do not know the specifics of what you are talking about, but in relation to Iraq we certainly offered something which then suited the Americans well.

  Q26  Chairman: I cannot remember that specific matter. Anyway, a week or so ago we had a briefing on readiness generally. In that briefing we were given forecasts of readiness showing Force elements which reported no critical or serious weaknesses. In December 2005 the number of units showing no critical or serious weaknesses was 81. In June of last year it had got down to 39. In September of last year it had got down to 42, with a rolling average steadily lower. Is this due to current operations? If so, to what extent? Who would like to begin? Brigadier Abraham?

  Brigadier Abraham: Yes, I will kick off. The predominant factor that has reduced our readiness has been the effect of operating beyond the defence planning assumptions, the broad order guidance and corresponding resources, and that has had an inevitable and, actually, an unsurprising effect because we have been, for sometime, operating well above defence planning assumptions. So the biggest driver is the effect of running operations on the current scale.

  Q27  Chairman: So it is just over a third of our units actually do not have a serious or critical weakness. In other words, nearly two-thirds have a serious or critical weakness. That strikes me as verging on the terrifying.

  Brigadier Abraham: And that is a serious or critical weakness against contingent readiness. That is not the strict measure of how ready those that are to play a part in HERRICK or TELIC are to be. That is against contingent readiness. Nevertheless, you are right, it is declining and it is something we need to continue to pay serious attention to, but all in the context of achieving success on current operations.

  Q28  Chairman: What makes up a serious or critical weakness? Can you give an example, or several?

  Brigadier Abraham: Usually, it is a shortfall in one or more of the four constituent parts, in the jargon, of capability, manpower, equipment—

  Q29  Chairman: Remind us what those constituents are.

  Brigadier Abraham: Manpower, equipment, training and sustainability. It could be one or a combination of those. Under-manning. It could be to do with the readiness states of the vehicles themselves, and the platforms, in terms of the provision of spares. Sustainability. Its ability to do what is required over a predicted period of time; you do not have enough spares to keep it going over that time, etc. Training is an important one because so much of the training for Iraq and Afghanistan has had, necessarily, to become theatre specific; the ability to do what the Army, in particular, call the adaptive foundation general training for the unexpected rather than theatre-specific. Our ability to do adaptive foundation training has reduced necessarily because of the need to resource the training machine for delivering in support of TELIC and HERRICK. So, in short, it is usually a combination, or one of four, of those constituent parts which will produce something that is assessed as a weakness in the manner you have described.

  Air Marshal Iain McNicoll: Might I add something to that, Chairman? It is readiness to do what? We are, clearly, very ready to do the current operations in all sorts of ways. It is not surprising, I would put it, that if you are using a large proportion of your forces at above the defence planning assumption rate of effort you do not have other forces available at readiness to do other things. I think the figure of 42%, although correct, does not accurately reflect how the Armed Forces are being used on current operations.

  Mike Hancock: Is that the same with equipment? You can have forces available but you might not have the equipment available. In the report we were given and in answers by the MoD it is the maritime Lynx, for example, helicopters—

  Q30  Chairman: We will come on to that in just a second.

  Vice Admiral Boissier: The Royal Navy is quite equipment-orientated. It is fundamental in the way that we do our business. My take on this would be that in about 2004-06, as I think you may be aware, there was a reduction in funding for maritime support which took quite a lot of managing at the time. That was just part of the balancing of the defence programme, and a decision was taken that we could do that. What that reduction in funding did is two-fold: one is it forced us to use our spare parts that we had on the shelf, and we are still working our way back from that. The second one is that it reduced our investment in more reliable equipment. We now get to the stage where we have just about stabilised a sort of decline in readiness by, really, quite good management, and I have every expectation that we will slowly begin to claw back our readiness. We now get to a stage where our ships—all our units but particularly our ships—are actually being very heavily used. They are quite old ships; they are quite fragile; the equipment is actually quite unreliable because it is ageing. If you have an old car which has quite a lot of unreliable equipment and you run it really hard you do expect defects to happen. In answer to your question on what sort of defects are we talking about as critical, at the moment we have got four MCMVs sitting in the Gulf where the engines are nothing like as reliable as any of us would want them to be.

  Q31  Chairman: Mine —?

  Vice Admiral Boissier: Minehunters. We are doing as much as we can to sort that out but, actually, it is a fundamental issue that some of our capability is quite old.

  Q32  Mr Crausby: I have some more questions on maritime Forces to Vice Admiral Boissier. First of all, destroyers and frigates. How significant is their readiness affected by deficiencies in sub-systems, equipment and manpower?

  Vice Admiral Boissier: Against manpower? Yes. For us, actually, there are a number of components. I think some of my colleagues have already touched on this. A ship will only, let us take destroyers and frigates, be able to go to sea if it has got equipment available and sustainable and if the people are in the right shape and the training is adequate. What we have done over the last couple of years is focus very, very clearly on making sure that the frontline units are as close to being as well prepared in all of those aspects as we can possibly make them. I think that is a responsible way to do things. That is our focus on the operations we are asking the fleet to do—conceivably at the risk of some of the low readiness forces that we hold in readiness for contingent operations. If you are asking me how important is equipment and personnel for the ships, submarines and units that are doing the frontline operations, actually, I think we contain that quite well, but we contain it quite well conceivably at the expense of doing the recuperation to medium scale operations, as well as current operations.

  Q33  Mr Crausby: Can you tell us something about Afloat Sustainability and how the readiness of the Afloat Sustainability has been impacted by current operations?

  Vice Admiral Boissier: Sustainability is, from my perspective, about getting our units to operate for six months of protracted warfare in a difficult environment. The current operations in many ways are actually preparing our people quite well. We have a number of people in the Gulf—and we have a number of people working in Afghanistan—and a number of ships and units in the Gulf where people are actually getting quite a lot of joint experience, which is profoundly beneficial. Also, our ships that we are operating in the Gulf, the MCMVs and frigates, are learning a lot about how to cope with sandstorms—how to keep their machinery running through sandstorms. Fundamentally, however, by using unreliable units hard we are getting through our spares quite rapidly. Unless we can invest in modern units and modern ways of supporting existing equipment, then we will continue to suffer defects which will ultimately impact more on sustainability than readiness. Is that clear?

  Mr Havard: I wanted to go back to Brigadier Abraham.

  Chairman: Shall we stick with the Navy for the time being. I will come back to you after.

  Mr Havard: It is a general question in the sense of understanding what his definitions are. I have just heard a definition about sustainability which I have not heard before, which is six months in a warfare environment. I wanted to ask about a definition because I am trying to understand exactly how serious—what the gravity of those figures you were talking about are, Chairman. If the definition is that there is a serious capability weakness, that is judged against something. You said to us earlier on that there were several elements involved in that and you failed one of the elements. Are these definitions set out somewhere clearly, because I have never heard them before, and I am just trying to understand therefore what the significance of a number is. It might not be terribly significant, actually; it might be terribly dramatic but it might mean very little. So I would like to know a bit more about these definitions. Can we have the definitions explained a bit more clearly?

  Q34  Chairman: It was, in a sense, explained to us in the private briefing we had—the METS methodology. Brigadier Abraham?

  Brigadier Abraham: In terms of sustainability?

  Q35  Mr Havard: You said, for example, a serious capability weakness as judged against readiness assumptions—or whatever.

  Brigadier Abraham: Defence Planning Assumptions.

  Q36  Mr Havard: And you said equipment, training, people and something else.

  Brigadier Abraham: Manpower, equipment, training and sustainability. Sustainability, in large part, boils down to logistic readiness, both from the outset and to sustain over a period of time. These are not formal definitions—I am paraphrasing. Can you quantify? Yes. The MoD with the frontline commands and other organisations has a set of logistic planning assumptions which is used both to form the basis of a plan of what needs to be bought and is also formulated on the basis of military judgment of what is likely to be needed in generic scenarios in which Forces at readiness might be used.

  Q37  Mr Havard: I am trying to get in my own head what is the real question. How do you judge what? These seem to be the measures you are using: sustainability is a key measure in deciding what it is you need to do.

  Brigadier Abraham: It is, yes.

  Q38  Mr Havard: And why it is that you need to do it.

  Brigadier Abraham: It is.

  Mr Havard: Thank you.

  Q39  Linda Gilroy: I want to go back to something that the Vice Admiral said in his last comment, in which you were saying if we do not adapt to more modern ways of doing things. I think I know what that means but I would be like to be sure that I have got the right concept.

  Vice Admiral Boissier: At the level that I was speaking there I was talking about making sure that we procure equipment which is actually more reliable and more sustainable than that which we have at the moment. We have progressively done this; there is nothing new about it except as, perhaps. the pressure comes on and we defer those programmes. For instance, the Type 45 is going to be a more maintainable destroyer than the Type 42, which is its predecessor. It will be more reliable. Any delay to the Type 45 will exacerbate the level of unreliability. I think there is a wider issue here, which is that we do need to look as well at how warfare is changing and adapt to that as well. That is perhaps something we will discuss later on.

  Q40  Linda Gilroy: So does cancellation of further Type 45s make us more dependent on older frigates?

  Vice Admiral Boissier: As long as we have a basic number of air defence destroyers; as long as we have enough to protect the task group that we will be sending into theatre, then we are okay. From a hard warfare position.

  Q41  Linda Gilroy: What does that mean?

  Vice Admiral Boissier: We are due to get six. The decision that has been made is that six is adequate to protect our forces.

  Linda Gilroy: Is that a correct decision from where you are stood?

  Q42  Chairman: I do not think, however high his pay grade, he will be able to say no!

  Vice Admiral Boissier: The more of those wonderful ships we can have the happier everyone will be.

  Q43  Linda Gilroy: That is one of these "More would always be nice"—

  Vice Admiral Boissier: They are extraordinarily capable ships.

  Q44  Mr Crausby: Are there any other Force elements that you are particularly concerned about in terms of current readiness?

  Vice Admiral Boissier: In terms of current readiness I think we are making sure that the Navy works. Where are we fragile? In terms of personnel we are fragile. We have a number of pinch-points which concern me. I think, at the latest count, we have 19 pinch-points. It concerns particular specialisations at a particular rank. My example here is the strategic weapons system, senior ratings in our Trident submarines. These are people who have to go through any number of hoops to get that far, and if suddenly two of them say: "Hang on, I want to go and be a driving instructor", it is an awfully long generation time to get more people through. So I think it is entirely appropriate that we put a great deal of management action to making sure that the people in these pinch-points do actually remain in the Service. None of these are critical at the moment but some of them are quite close to being critical. In terms of our Force elements—

  Q45  Chairman: Before you go off that, presumably the fewer ships—even if they are not powerful—that you have the more that particular problem is exacerbated?

  Vice Admiral Boissier: Yes, to a certain extent. That is right. The other thing, as well, is that we need people with quite well swept-up skills; we need some very, very skilful maintainers to look after some of these specialities, and they do not grow on trees. For instance, the research into the civil nuclear industry in this country, one of the things we are looking at quite closely: are we able to maintain our own nuclear engineers and specialists? That would take you to another Force element that I am quite concerned about, which is our nuclear submarines, which are again hugely complicated bits of equipment and getting quite old as well. We have got Astute class that will come in which will be a whole step-change in terms of capability. We are making sure that the submarines work to a very high operational tempo by a great deal of human effort. One of the things that does concern me here is if you were to ask me directly: "Do we have a problem with naval harmony?" No, we do not, actually. We manage to keep within the harmony guidelines albeit by quite a lot of personal churn, by moving people from A to B at short notice to make sure that they can get there, but, by and large, we are getting through that. If that goes on for too long they will probably vote with their feet, but we are not at that point at the moment. With the nuclear submarines, in particular, you have these submarines that come into harbour with quite a lot of work to do, and some of that you simply cannot do at sea, by nature of the platform. For a lot of that work we get external people in but quite a lot, as well, sits with the submarine's own organic maintainers to maintain. So you get these chaps who are probably doing 18-hour days in harbour. They come in from sea, do 18-hour days in harbour and then they go back to sea again. That puts an awful lot of pressure on people as well. You need to keep an eye on that . I am not saying that is critical but it is an area of concern.

  Q46  Mr Crausby: If Astute has been delayed, has the issue of readiness been adversely affected by delays in equipment or programmes? You have given one example but what about other examples?

  Vice Admiral Boissier: Any delay we have to future platforms is bound to have an effect. It has had an effect, without a shadow of a doubt. It has had an effect on readiness and has had an effect on the amount of effort we have to put in to make sure that the ships are sustained at sea and maintained at sea. Any further delay that we face on the Type 45 programme, we would cover that by running on the existing platforms. So there will be a cost to running them on: there will be a human cost to running them on and there will be a readiness cost. I think the real example of this is Future Surface Combatant which is the replacement part of our frigate force, which is I think due in service by 2016, or something like that. That is taking over from the Type 23 frigates which are the sort of mainstay workhorses of the fleet. The Type 23s were designed for a 16-year life but are going to be running for about 30 years. We can do that but there is a cost in financial terms and, also, in terms of the sheer effort in making sure they are ready to fight.

  Q47  Mr Jenkin: I am just trying to quantify it. SDR proposed 32 frigates and destroyers and we are down to 25. How serious is that for you, on a scale of 1 to 10?

  Vice Admiral Boissier: It is manageable, actually.

  Q48  Mr Jenkin: That sounds like a 5.

  Vice Admiral Boissier: I do not wish to sound too political in answering this but it is manageable except when we find ourselves with more tasks, and the piracy task is a real example.

  Q49  Mr Jenkin: So it is about doing fewer tasks, really?

  Vice Admiral Boissier: At the end of the day, we are running the Navy, the Armed Forces, pretty hard at the moment. I think it has an effect right across the board. In this case it has an effect because it means that some really worthy things that we ought to be doing—counter-piracy, which affects the livelihood and the economics of this country, at least when they get serious—become more difficult to do without gapping other things which are high priority tasks as well. This is a zero-sum game. You can do stuff but you can do more stuff if it actually draws from elsewhere.

  Q50  Mr Jenkin: The 30+ years that some of the Type 23s recently have been extended to, I have a hunch that means that FSC is going to be seriously delayed although an announcement has not been made. How serious would that be on a scale of 1 to 10?

  Vice Admiral Boissier: Again, it is do-able but in doing it we increase the risk. We increase the risk of success. If this country wants a Navy which can give it a good assurance of being able to fight successfully, which is, I guess, what the purpose of the Navy is, then that does require fairly timely replacement of our equipment. The spirit of the people is terrific. They will take anything to sea and make it work and make it work in a world-class way. I think there has to be a sort of fairly regular replacement of equipment.

  Mike Hancock: The Type 45 is a great ship—just to see it is marvellous—but it can only be in one place at one time, and it does not go any faster, so getting it from one side of the world to the other—it is not going to help having this great ship that is in the wrong place at the wrong time. The point, as you have rightly made, is about the number of commitments the Navy is expected to deliver on. Do you feel that you are in a position now to advise that that needs to be reconsidered? My second question relates to the answers we got from the MoD, which said that the maritime Lynx helicopters are—

  Q51  Chairman: Shall we stick with your first question first?

  Vice Admiral Boissier: Do I feel we should reconsider the number of commitments? Not in the abstracted way that you are suggesting. When a new commitment comes up, and piracy is a good example of this, my job is to go to the Foreign Office, go to the Ministry of Defence and consult and say: "Look if you want us to do this, is this higher than task A, B or C?" and actually bring it out so it is not done in a smoke-filled room within the corridors of Navy command but it is done in a sort of plenary session where we can actually look at the grand strategic effects of reaching that decision, and "Would we rather do this than that?" That is a fairly easy session to set up and we do it about quarterly within Naval Command anyway.

  Chairman: Before we come on to the Lynx question, which I would like to come on to—

  Mike Hancock: I want to ask one more about troops.

  Chairman: Linda, could you ask your question now and then I will come back to Mike.

  Q52  Linda Gilroy: I have one question arising from what the Vice Admiral was saying about the 19 pinch-points and the discussion around that. It seems to me that there are at least three sources of pressure on that, and one of the things that I think the Committee wants to understand is how much arises from the very high tempo of operations, but you also mentioned the civil nuclear programme as being a source of one of the pinch-points, and, also, the way in which the high tempo of operations is impacting but also the delays in the procurement programme, which have not necessarily got anything to do with the high tempo of operations. Is there any way you can give the Committee a flavour of how much the readiness relates to those separate issues? Do you analyse them? Is that part of the discussion that you have?

  Vice Admiral Boissier: The three issues were the pinch-points—

  Q53  Linda Gilroy: Things like the civil nuclear, which are external, and then the delays in procurement and then the high tempo of operations. They are different things.

  Vice Admiral Boissier: They are. Thank you for asking that question because I think it is a really important issue, and I think that question puts this debate, from my perspective, into the right context, which is that we are looking at something which is far more complex than tabloid headlines here. You cannot just say: "There's not enough money so the Navy is not doing readiness". It is quite complex and it depends on an awful lot of things: it depends on getting the procurement right, not just the unit procurement but, actually, equipment procurement—making sure that we buy the right MCMV mine-hunting equipment, for example; it depends on making sure that our people are properly looked after and properly trained. Part of that is the high tempo of operations where you sometimes do not always get the chance to do the training; part of it is the external realities, where we are drawing, particularly in recruiting terms and to some extent in retention, and competing with a sort of national mindset which does not necessarily understand the sort of demands we are making on people. All of these knit together into a very complex sort of tapestry of making sure we can do readiness today. One of my predominant concerns is making sure that we still have a Navy which works in 15, 20 or 25 years' time. I think this is very complex. I genuinely think it has more strands to this, and I think your question sensibly brings that out.

  Q54  Linda Gilroy: On the much narrower question which you did touch on earlier, about how long it would take to recover from the reduction in the funding of maritime logistic support in the 2004-06 period, you gave us a fairly positive idea of what was happening there. Are there particular challenges within that which the Committee should be aware of?

  Vice Admiral Boissier: I gave you a positive spin because I have to be an optimist. I would not, for one moment, underestimate the difficulties.

  Q55  Linda Gilroy: What is the most challenging element of that?

  Vice Admiral Boissier: Without doubt it is keeping ageing ships going in a way that allows us to fight and sustain high tempo operations in a reliable fashion.

  Q56  Linda Gilroy: Getting the spares for that?

  Vice Admiral Boissier: It is to do with spares and it is to do with replacing close-to-obsolescent unreliable equipment.

  Q57  Linda Gilroy: And parts which are very expensive and have special production facilities that are required?

  Vice Admiral Boissier: Correct. There are some very good examples on the positive side. On a number of our gas turbine engines—and this will be something for next week when you get the Chiefs of Material in—we have moved on to availability-based contracts where we allow the people who are really expert at this, the contractors, to build, source and provide us with good engines at a fixed cost, but engines which we know will work. Our offshore patrol vessels, equally, which are built, supported and owned by Vosper Thornycroft, are on availability contract, so they build them in such a way as to actually ensure that we get a good product. There are some very good examples of good practice here.

  Q58  Linda Gilroy: So apart from getting the capability represented by Endurance replaced in some way, what is the thing that is at the top of your agenda in terms of being very challenging to keep the naval capability as everybody would want it to be?

  Vice Admiral Boissier: The thing that immediately springs to my mind, in terms of current operations, is keeping the equipment going and keeping the people going. In terms of contingent operations, probably one of the biggest issues is making sure that we can get hold of the assets at some stage to make sure that we train them properly. A lot of our fast jet assets, our rotary wing assets, the Royal Marines and their supporting equipment are bought up in Afghanistan, and to a lesser extent off Iraq.

  Q59  Linda Gilroy: Training to work off ships.

  Vice Admiral Boissier: We work really, really hard to get as much of that training as we possibly can and it is awfully difficult.

  Q60  Linda Gilroy: And that is a big weak point. I have heard that before that the training for aircraft to fly off vessels is very fragile.

  Vice Admiral Boissier: We work very closely with the Royal Air Force on that and we work very closely with the Army and the Royal Marines, but these are important parts of an integrated maritime capability, and they do take a lot of effort.

  Q61  Mr Hancock: Could I ask then about the helicopters. In the paper we got it said that all of the maritime Lynx had exceeded their flying hours. What does that mean in real terms, that they were flying past what their maintenance requirements were and that they were in fact going way beyond what was reasonable to expect these aircraft to do? That is my first question.

  Vice Admiral Boissier: They have been flying more than previously because the operational tempo has moved us there. There is a potential for fragility but we are not at the stage where fragility cuts in. It coincided with a measure, which was essentially the right measure, to reduce the flying hours of Lynx because we had never exceeded them, so the funded flying hours were reduced (to a reasonable level I have to say ) at a time when the operational tempo brought the flying hours up. I do watch Lynx hours quite closely because there is a fundamental fragility until we get the future Lynx to replace it, but that is not one to be concerned about at the moment.

  Q62  Chairman: Before you move off that can we ask the same question, please, about Chinook, Merlin and Sea Lynx. Chinook and Merlin might not apply to you much but Sea Lynx?

  Vice Admiral Boissier: Chinook I cannot answer.

  Q63  Chairman: Sea Lynx?

  Vice Admiral Boissier: Merlin? The Lynx question I was answering.

  Q64  Chairman: Yes, sorry, you were.

  Vice Admiral Boissier: It will be no secret that there has been a struggle to make sure that we get enough Merlin together to fly to the level that we would wish. At the moment we have got a forward fleet of 24 Merlin which allows us to fulfil a significant amount of our functions. The real problem, as I understand it, is that there is an industrial problem of sourcing spare parts to keep the fleet going. However, in fairness, the experience I have had with AgustaWestland is they are trying extraordinarily hard to do that. It is just that titanium and stuff is not all that easy to come by. So we are more or less there with Merlin and we are getting good capability out of it.

  Q65  Chairman: When I said Sea Lynx I meant Sea King.

  Vice Admiral Boissier: Sea King keeps flying. It is a cracking good helicopter. It is almost as old as I am and we are making sure that it keeps going. Merlin is really where we have some concerns at the moment.

  Q66  Mr Hancock: Going back to the pinchpoints, do you conceive of a time when, because your staff are getting offered outside jobs at much higher rates of pay, the Navy will re-hire these people as civilian employees but going to sea on your ships to fill the gaps? As you rightly said, the time taken to bring somebody up to the experience level which allows them to have command of pretty sophisticated equipment is quite long. Is not one of the initiatives that you are going to have to look at some stage that of rehiring retired naval personnel to fill the posts?

  Vice Admiral Boissier: I hope not; they will be paid far more than I am!

  Q67  Mr Hancock: Yes, I know, that is what I was thinking.

  Vice Admiral Boissier: It is conceivable. We are not looking at that at the moment. It is conceivable that we might have to do that. We get an awful lot of advice home through remote imaging and through, in effect, the internet. We can email people back home and say, "What is the answer to this? And, by the way, here's a photograph. How would you sort it out?" You can get quite a lot of secondhand skills elsewhere. We have been doing this for quite a long time really, but we do find that to resolve some of the more complex problems we need to fly specialists out to a convenient port near where the ship is working to help sort them out.

  Q68  Mr Hancock: Is not one of the frustrations that because of these pinchpoints some of those personnel are doing much longer sea time than they would have reasonably expected to do and the rotation for them is a lot less than some of the others and that is one of the things that makes them look to the outside world? How is the Navy going to come to terms with that? A final one on manpower: is there any ship operational at the moment which is more than 5% under its operational capability in manpower?

  Vice Admiral Boissier: Let me deal with the first one first. Are extended periods at sea driving people outside? We monitor the voluntary outflow rates, as we call them, very carefully, and some are higher than others, and of course 50% of the issue which creates a pinchpoint is the voluntary outflow, and our ability to manage it, by either bringing people through or retaining people. At the moment we are not seeing voluntary outflow driven through operational pressures causing an unsustainable problem. But, that said, it is something that we are very, very alive to, because it could be seriously damaging.

  Q69  Mr Hancock: How common is it now for a sailor to serve on three different ships in the course of a year simply because they were filling in for the gaps on that ship? Quite often?

  Vice Admiral Boissier: You sound as if you have inside knowledge here.

  Q70  Mr Hancock: I meet them all the time.

  Vice Admiral Boissier: Indeed. What I will say—and forgive me, I cannot answer the question in an absolute way—we are moving people around an awful lot more than we ever did. I am a profound believer, having spent most of my life at sea, that there is a sort of bonding between the human body and the bit of steel on which you serve which creates the regimental ethos that provides the fighting spirit. We all know that moving people around too much is unhelpful, but in many respects we have to do that in order to meet the commitments. At the moment people are not voting with their feet.

  Mr Hancock: Thank you.

  Q71  Mr Hamilton: I am quite puzzled and concerned at some of the answers you have given. Am I right in thinking that when we look at the United States the Armed Forces work in a silo system, where the Army does one thing and the Navy does its own stuff and the Air Force does its own, but in the United Kingdom each Service depends on the others and the integration between them is far greater? Therefore the problem I have got is if we move along to a position where in a few years' time the aircraft carrier is going to be brought forward, then it has got to be supported by ships which are not capable of supporting of it. I will give an example. I do these things in a very simplistic way. I am an ex-coal miner. We brought in a state-of-the-art coal-cutting machine to produce half a million tonnes of coal per year. It was able to do to that, but it never attained that level because the conveyors which took the coal out was absolutely useless, and the maintenance that was required for those conveyors just drove it down. What you are saying to me, if I understand it right, is that you will have support ships which are not going to be able to support the aircraft carrier when they come in. At what point are we going to have that breaking issue? I am looking at things in a very simple way, but it seems to me that we are not going to have the support ships and, if that happens, it is going to have an effect against the Air Force and the Army because of that integration. Is that not the case?

  Vice Admiral Boissier: That is a very good question. Our plans at the moment are to make sure that we have an integrated capability of support ships and the anti-air warfare and anti-submarine protection that the carrier will require. That is what we are planning to do.

  Q72  Mr Hamilton: I am suggesting you are not going to be able to do that. When this new aircraft carrier comes on which is state-of-the-art, brilliant, super-duper, they are going to have rubbish to support it.

  Vice Admiral Boissier: Keep an eye on it but the plans at the moment will have us bringing these in at the same timescale for exactly that reason, because if you cannot deploy them in a coherent way you end up with less than the capability.

  Q73  Mr Hamilton: The order was for eight Type-45s; it is now down to six; it might go down again. You obviously argued at the beginning that this was going to be required for the aircraft carrier. I make the point, Chairman, it does seem to me that if one goes down, it affects the other two. That also is true of the Air Force and so on.

  Vice Admiral Boissier: Your point is very well made but at the moment I could not tell you that we are producing incoherent capability. Forgive me for sounding a bit bureaucratic in this. At the moment the plans are that we will have the capacity to generate a viable carrier task group and that we will have the capacity to generate a viable littoral manoeuvre group for land effect. Nowadays it would be quite absurd to think that any of the Forces can stand operationally on their own. We depend hugely upon each other. We in the Royal Navy have a huge vested interest in successful outcomes in the Air Force and in the Army.

  Chairman: We will come back to carrier strike capability in due course but moving now to the land element, Adam Holloway?

  Q74  Mr Holloway: The MoD seem to have had to change the way that units are prepared for other roles because of the need to make sure that people are ready for operations. Will this need to carry on for much longer? If we want to avoid that happening, how can that be mitigated?

  Lieutenant General Sir Graeme Lamb: I have a starting position that the Army I look after, which is some 56,000 of Field Army, is committed to current operations. That is what they are committed to and that is the reality. The Defence Planning Assumptions is the theory where in times when you are not on operations you need to have some benchmark under which you then assess what, where, for how long, and with whom, as the basis of what your force should run to, and therefore the mandated tasks—we have military tasks for peace-keeping, peace enforcement, peace projection, military assistance to stabilisation and development, focused intervention, and deliberate intervention—are all things we structure our force according to. That is the theory. The reality is that the Army, on the current operations we are running, is about three times above the levels at which the assumptions place us. The assumption is that we should be able to do an enduring medium scale, an enduring small scale (a small scale is a battle group so it is about 600 or 700 people and a medium scale is about 5,000 as a broad order of figure) and in extremis we should be able to do a non-enduring which means six months, in and out, small-scale operation. Our current commitment sees us running well in excess of two medium scales, so the Army is preparing for the current fight. The reality of where we are is not about contingency; it is actually ensuring that not the risk but the liability of the full command that comes with us, in my case for soldiers, is met, that we do whatever is necessary to ensure that we have the right manpower, of the right quality, that they are properly trained, and that they are properly equipped and able to stay in the current fight. The Army is focused on this. The idea that current operations impact on readiness from an Army perspective is completely the wrong way round. We are committed to current operations. That is what the British Army is currently doing. ***

  Q75  Mr Holloway: Some are double-hatted.

  Lieutenant General Sir Graeme Lamb: And we double-hat in the FORM process. ***

  Q76  Mr Holloway: Both Governor Daud and an American friend of mine ask why is it that the British "tooth to tail" seems so long compared to other people and I have not known the answer. What is the answer to that?

  Lieutenant General Sir Graeme Lamb: The Army should be at 101,000, plus a few; we are at 98,000. Is that the tooth to tail that you are looking at?

  Q77  Mr Holloway: No, you can have thousands of people in Camp Bastion but actually you can only send a much, much smaller number out to do operations?

  Lieutenant General Sir Graeme Lamb: Again, I could have an interesting discussion with your American friend.

  Q78  Mr Holloway: I do not know the answer. I am asking a genuine question.

  Lieutenant General Sir Graeme Lamb: In the nature of these operations in which we find ourselves, for instance if you take force protection, the fact that we had to go out and take Cougar, which is the massive theatre that you will all have seen, which is an armoured truck, but it is very good at defending itself against anti-tank mines and the like; that is a necessary step that we have to take. You then have to have C-RAM, the system that is basically taking the Phalanx off the ships we have brought in, which defends against rockets coming into our base camps. We have a raft of supporting and enabling functions which are about protecting the force, not blindly so that it becomes a self-licking lollipop but which meets a requirement which we consider to be appropriate for the risks that we are asking of our soldiers, against the liability that sits with us with full command and the political implications of us failing to do that. The Americans have a fairly large tooth-to-tail ratio. The Afghans can afford to go a lot lighter and that is the nature of the Afghan situation.

  Q79  Mr Holloway: Returning to a point that is relevant to this question and to Bernard Jenkin's point earlier, neither of us is surprised that General Petraeus replies to your emails pretty rapidly because many would say that you are the main driver of some of the successful things that have happened in Iraq recently. To what extent do you think we are going to be able to help to drive policy in Afghanistan and to what extent, given our overstretch, do you think the Americans are confident in our ability to play a part?

  Lieutenant General Sir Graeme Lamb: My sense would be that if you elect not to be part of the decision-making process, so issues about our force elements at Task Force Helmand, RC-South, our commitment of key staff officers into Kabul and the ISAF headquarters, those are, from my point of view, as a front-line soldier, very important if you wish to engage and move the campaign forward in a way which is about delivering success in current operations, which is to do with strategy and the MoD and the front-line command stand-by. If you elect not to have those sort of representations, where you are very much not only part of the fight but part of how the fight should be conducted and engaged, in a way that is substantial, then you will probably lose the vote. So I think it is important from the progress that has been made in Helmand, the progress that has been made in Afghanistan in what is a very complicated and difficult fight, every bit a match of Iraq, that from an Army perspective we remain engaged in not only the doing but the thinking in the nature of how that campaign evolves and moves forward as America begins to turn its attention north from Iraq.

  Q80  Mr Holloway: Finally in your office I know that there is a lot of debate about the war or a war. Is it really sustainable to carry on as we are now? Do we not at some point have to make a decision about what we want our Armed Forces to do?

  Lieutenant General Sir Graeme Lamb: That is a debate we have all alluded to down on the front. We in the front-line look towards the nature of change, the nature of conflict, which has moved from the period in the Cold War from broad certainty, where we could measure the size of the Third Shock Army of Eighth Guards, we knew its capabilities, so one was looking at the technology of the equipments, into a period where uncertainty is the watchword, where you have the confusion and complexities of the whole government approach or, as the Americans would put it, comprehensive approach, tying together the Foreign Office, DFID and ourselves in the nature of these battles. We are finding that fire power in this particular nature of the fight is becoming less important than manpower. Our ability to be alongside the Afghan Army or the Afghan police is important. You lead; they do. It is the nature of what the British Army has done these last 300 years with Ghurkhas, with the Indian Army, Burma, our history is littered with the approach, but from the Army perspective my view is that it is an issue of manpower. As I look towards the current task—and reality, unsurprisingly, grips my daily life—I keep an eye to the future and the responsibilities of where we need to go. As I look towards the realities that we face they are fairly stark: I need more manpower. I think the Army needs more manpower for what we are doing. For instance, we commit a company of about 98 and that is structured against the old establishment and against the old organisations that existed in a certain period of time, the Cold War. We are manned at the moment because of undermanning at about 78. That is improving because we have put considerable effort into that. The figure that we are sending out by company to Afghanistan, as a broad order, is about 120. If I want to bring in career management and education, which is an essential part of sophisticated soldiering, and the nature of the contemporary environment in which we find ourselves, I would probably need to push that figure out to 132. If I look at the equipment that we have currently on operations, I have about 75% of the equipment I need in the current fight. It is great stuff and I do not want to under-estimate the effort that has been put in both by the Treasury and the Ministry and the support we have been given by the other Services because it would be to misunderstand that. I only have 40% of that equipment available to prepare the force for that fight. ***

  Q81  Mr Holloway: It is a great shame you are leaving then!

  Lieutenant General Sir Graeme Lamb: I have had a long and hard paper round!

  Q82  Chairman: You said you needed more men. Are you able to quantify that?

  Lieutenant General Sir Graeme Lamb: The figures that CGS has used in the past—and I know the Commander-in-Chief is going to move to that position shortly—has talked of figures of 112,000, but at the moment it would be wrong for me to say "And that is a figure the Army need." I sense there is a piece of work which is developing within defence, and certainly within the Navy and the Air Force on the nature of the future fight that we will find ourselves in and the capabilities that we would require to service that. It is a different place to that which I joined the Army in 1971 fit-for-purpose quite clearly on the plains of Germany. This is a very different place which requires some quite different capabilities. That work is the development of a dialogue which we can read from Secretary of State Robert Gates, the dialogue that has gone on with America, the work that General Petraeus came out with on the counter-insurgency doctrine and the adjustments within that, the nature of technology and how that is being brought to bear, and the issue about the whole government approach and comprehensive approach. So there is a piece of work which is hugely complicated because it is dealing with levels of uncertainty and of complexity, the likes of which we in the Armed Forces—and I can only speak for myself in the Army—we in the Army are experiencing in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that would test Job.

  Q83  Mr Jenkin: I think I am beginning to understand why this is such a sensitive briefing. Forgive me for perhaps dramatising it but basically you are saying we have very limited preparedness for anything unexpected?

  Lieutenant General Sir Graeme Lamb: Again, I think that would be to misrepresent it. We bring a unit back from operations and we have this FORM cycle, as people say. Actually it exists and it works and it is quite a necessary process, but we bring people back, we have a period of recuperation and then a period where we reinforce basic skills and training. So, for instance, a Warrior crew will go back on to the Warrior, and whether it is at BATUS or in Salisbury Plain or down at one of the firing camps, will go through a series of exercises which will bring them up to a competency which I am entirely comfortable with and would have been considered fit-for-purpose in the Cold War. They will then operate that at troop and at squadron level and into a battle group level, so a battalion's worth, small-scale. Do we have the time and the ability to train them as we would have done to a brigade level of competency and a divisional level? No, we do not. At the moment we have taken that risk to the future because the time is then available, because for many of our troops we are well inside our harmony guidelines, which are supposed to be six months in 24. I have people, for instance, weapons intelligence specialists who are running on a six-month tour, with a six-month recovery and a six-month tour. I have people in a technical role who have gone from a four-month tour to a six-month tour to a 12-month recovery. I have specialist nurses, ITU nurses etc., based upon a pool of 40 of whom we require 18 in theatre. You can work out the mass of how often they have to return back to theatre. We are running people through in a measure which is quite aggressive, but we have a residual skills-set from which we can build which allows us to meet those mandated training tasks or the tasks that are set within the DPAs. It provides a framework, I sense, which is helpful.

  Q84  Mr Jenkin: On the DPAs, if you were required to do a small-scale, focused intervention, power projection and peace enforcement for six months at short notice, you could not do it?

  Lieutenant General Sir Graeme Lamb: *** We could pool together a small, skilled, focused—

  Brigadier Everard: We could do it but we would have to take equipment off the training pool for current operations and move a battalion up in the order of battle to go back on operations earlier than anybody would have expected, and so it is a penalty to current operations.

  Brigadier Abraham: That is the important point to stress. In terms of our general preparedness for contingent operations, anything we do beyond the very, very benign will have an effect on the enduring operations across a wide range of things—provision of air transport with defensive aid suites to get them there, the provision of battlefield helicopters with appropriate force protection, and so on and so on. Our ability at the moment to do anything with regard to the unexpected is largely only at the expense of the current operations.

  Q85  Mr Jenkin: I appreciate that the answer is much more complicated than a plain no, but it is more on the negative side than the positive side at the moment?

  Brigadier Abraham: I think the figure of serious and critical weakness that the Chairman mentioned early on is the assessment of that.

  Q86  Chairman: General Lamb, just a quick question on this. In view of the shortage of ITU nurses to which you referred is this not a strange week to be thinking about restricting the number of overseas people who can join the Army Nursing Corps to 15%?

  Lieutenant General Sir Graeme Lamb: The 15% is a view that was taken by the Army Board. I am unsure where it now sits in policy but I believe it has been endorsed. From a personal point of view I sense that one has to be cautious that the British Army remains the British Army. There are needs which are in many ways extraordinarily well-supported by those from overseas who are in the current fight with us, from across the globe, which are important. At the same time it would, I think, seem peculiar for us to have an Army that was predominantly made up from people overseas who came here, fighting for this nation in its fights and battles as it sees fit. I sense the figure, which was 10% and it is now 15%, is a discussion that has been long-running. It is in no way to denigrate those that are in the fight with us, Gambians, Ghanaians, all these people who at the end of the day not only do I see regularly being awarded significant gallantry awards but being very much part of the fabric of the British Army. I sense that all we are trying to do, without being Luddite or old-fashioned or lost in some history, is to be conscious that the Britishness of the Army for the nation and for us is not unimportant. We have pegged the figure at 15 but I sense that it is always open for debate.

  Q87  Mr Havard: On this question about planning assumptions, changes to these assumptions are always taking place but whether they are formally re-described or not is another matter. It partly becomes a political discussion as to whether you formally do so or not. In terms of our report, am I right that we should contextualise it in the sense that your current recuperation efforts are clearly set against published declarations and are expedient in the sense of they are what you need to do to get back to a situation where your training is not below 50%, or whatever it is, and so on, so there is the immediate task of recuperation, but then that obviously feeds into a broader discussion about what the future recuperation might mean for moving forward, for procurement, etc, etc. We need to contextualise our report in terms of the immediate and short and longer term, obviously. In doing that, the way in which the measurements are changing to publicly describe the debate, the weightings, the METS method, all of this stuff, which is all very interesting and all leads us into a description of what is happening now, what can we say about what we need to do in terms of separating the arguments out and what we need to say about that broader debate as to what recuperation means for assumptions in the future?

  Lieutenant General Sir Graeme Lamb: Again, from my perspective from the Army point of view, we are not recuperating at the moment; we are repairing our equipment which is in the fight. We are replacing that in the fight.

  Q88  Mr Havard: Part of my problem is you see all these definitions and you report them to various people and now all of a sudden they are changing. Now we are repairing things, we are not recuperating. I know what you mean by that, I think, but when we describe this publicly we have got to be a bit careful about what the hell we are talking about here. When is repair part of recuperation? What the hell is recuperation? It is partly repair but it is broader than that.

  Lieutenant General Sir Graeme Lamb: You are recuperating back to a standard which at the moment is set both in the DPAs and against our historic structures and organisation. The concern we have would be that what we have learned from Iraq and from Afghanistan, from the nature of the contemporary fight, from the change in the enemies that we face, is that the equipments that we are currently comfortable with and use extensively daily in Iraq and Afghanistan are not part of our current structures and organisation, so it is readiness or recuperation to what standard? If we recuperated back to the standard of the Army that I joined then the bill for that would be on what we have previously used. It would then place us back in some place in time and history which would be inappropriate, in my professional view, for what we face for the future. What we need to do is look at the equipments that are battle ready, which are fully integrated, which enable myself and Iain's side of the house, in particular, to be able to prosecute the nature of both looking and then dealing with a fight. We have not yet benchmarked where that standard sits as to where it should sit. We have 240 major UORs in the programme. We have not yet benchmarked what we need into this future hybrid, whatever you want to call it, contemporary operating environment we find ourselves in. That, in my professional view, should be the standard we should be recuperating to. It is as yet undefined because it represents this future environment debate on where we are going.

  Q89  Chairman: What you are saying then is that the Defence Planning Assumptions are inappropriate?

  Brigadier Abraham: I do not think we are. The Defence Planning Assumptions are very broad order guidance and then there is a series of taxonomies which seeks to add more detail and more granularity the process. The big thing about the Defence Planning Assumptions, summarised by General Lamb, is their ability to undertake medium scale, small scale, enduring small scale and one-off etc., and then you populate the detail. The problem with recuperation is two-fold. It is not to do with the strategic choices of the Government as to what our Defence Planning Assumptions are. If I go back to Mr Havard's point, our working definition of what we mean by recuperation, which I hope might help, is making good the impact of current operations. I hope that helps. And in a sense, making good to what standard? Our contingent force standard was set out largely in the wake of the Strategic Defence Review and it has been up-dated, but I think all of us here would agree that what we have learned in the contemporary operating environment in Afghanistan and Iraq means that we need to think of new things and address certain things with new priorities, and that is emerging work to update our contingent force elements at readiness to the contemporary operating environment against the standard, as we understood it, some 10 or 12 years ago at about the time of the SDR. That is work that will continue to go on.

  Q90  Chairman: I understand your answer, Brigadier Abraham, but I still think that General Lamb would say that he thought the Defence Planning Assumptions were inappropriate.

  Brigadier Abraham: Okay.

  Q91  Chairman: And he has not contradicted me so far in saying that and he may well be right.

  Lieutenant General Sir Graeme Lamb: I think they are assumptions, Chairman—

  Q92  Chairman: Of course.

  Lieutenant General Sir Graeme Lamb: And therefore for me to challenge them would be entirely suicidal. They are assumptions and they are the theory under which we manage the business. This is well above my pay grade. For where I am, the question is "Are they helpful?"

  Q93  Chairman: "Not particularly" is presumably the answer?

  Lieutenant General Sir Graeme Lamb: The answer is they are not unhelpful. They give me a glide path, but in current operations, working at the level at which we are finding ourselves, and the tempo, the assumptions are often challenged.

  Q94  Mr Jenkin: Is there not something fundamentally more serious about the inability of proving Planning Defence Assumptions, in that presumably our national foreign and security strategy is premised on those Defence Planning Assumptions being deliverable, and if they are not deliverable is not our foreign defence policy actually out of kilter with what we can actually deliver?

  Lieutenant General Sir Graeme Lamb: Again, it is an issue of risk. Where the Army is right now I have to concentrate fairly wholeheartedly on the current fight. I take at risk a level of preparedness/readiness for our forces to be able to deliver on peace enforcement, peace keeping, and the like. Those are fully understood by the Ministry which has set timelines as to when we should set ourselves a stall of recovering to those levels. My view would be that I have no difficulty with that. What we need to do is make sure that when we recover to those levels, it is at a standard which reflects the lessons hard-earned, through blood and treasure, in Iraq and Afghanistan which would be appropriate for the future fight we find ourselves in.

  Q95  Mr Jenkin: When you do your RCDS seminars do you honestly believe that the Armed Forces are ever going to be given the space to recuperate within the time-frame that we know we have been given, which can be projected, because are we not always going to be required by the politicians to carry on doing more than has been planned for, which seems to be the experience for at least the last six or seven years, a period longer than the Second World War?

  Lieutenant General Sir Graeme Lamb: I sense that Iraq has been—

  Q96  Chairman: We will come on to that.

  Lieutenant General Sir Graeme Lamb: As we draw down it gives us an opportunity to get some balance back in the pressure that we are feeling on breaking harmony guidelines, to bring in some aspects of our training, have a chance to reassess that which we learned which we believe to be enduring and bring that into our basic foundation training and the like, to be able to change our training at Salisbury Plain, BATUS and elsewhere where we train, to bring those up so we can therefore address those issues. It will reduce the overall pressures and allow us, at the same time, to begin to reassess and, as we look towards all those tasks which are placed upon us, begin to build the foundations to be able to meet that particular requirement.

  Q97  Mr Havard: What I am trying to get to in my own head here is that in terms of our report we have got lots of detail that we will have to look at about the current matrix, and all of the various weightings and changes in terms of how this argument is currently presented, as to whether you are achieving or not achieving in terms of readiness and recuperation (and that is recuperation from current assumptions or whatever). You seem to be saying to us that we also need to look then in terms of understanding how we look at the future at this argument about standards. Where do we find that information in terms of being able to give us some understanding as to what that debate look like, what language is being used within it, and how we can grapple with it?

  Brigadier Abraham: Can I just clarify, where do you find the information?

  Mr Havard: There is a methodology, there are weightings, there is a description of what that is supposed to theoretically look like and, practically, how you operate within it. This argument about standards is slightly more difficult to get a grip of because it does cross over into the business of what it is you are trying to do. It does start to cross over into the assumptions, so there is a lot of discussion going on. I read it in the press. I see what they are saying in America or whatever. It is all pretty general description that starts to drift back into what, rather than how, as being able to describe to Parliament that there is now a debate about standards that is important in terms of performing the understanding of whether or not you are achieving or not.

  Chairman: Who are you going to choose to answer that question?

  Mr Havard: It is probably not a question that can be answered in so many words.

  Chairman: I think it would be quite difficult to answer the question, I must say.

  Q98  Mr Havard: At some point later, if you would give us some idea of how we should approach that issue because in our report we are going to have to address that question? Later if you could give us a steer on what we should be looking at.

  Vice Admiral Boissier: Can I clarify exactly what you are after. My understanding is what you are after is the delta between the standard assumptions and what we believe warfare is going to look like in the future and where that can be accessed.

  Chairman: I think that should be taken as a warning that it is a question that we will ask the Minister in due course.

  Mr Havard: You might not give me the chance.

  Chairman: I will of course give you the chance; I always do! Richard Younger-Ross?

  Q99  Richard Younger-Ross: Dai was talking about definitions, and it is what General Lamb was saying about wanting to recuperate but then saying having learned the lessons of what has happened in Afghanistan and Iraq. Would it be reasonably fair to say then that what we are not looking at is recuperation, because that is going back to where we were before, but actually looking to be somewhere different, and that does mean a change to the analysis we have, these criteria for small scale, medium scale and large scale.

  Brigadier Abraham: Let me give you an example which I hope might help. My own opinion is that one of the things that we have learned a lot about in the wake of Afghanistan and Iraq is the degree of force protection we need to provide to troops, so for example the fitting of defensive aid suites to large passenger-carrying aircraft is something that we do. I suspect in the future that is a standard to which we will want to adhere, but that does not actually change the Defence Planning Assumptions nor does it change the military tasks which are subordinate parts of those Defence Planning Assumptions—military tasks, the ability to do focused intervention and small scale. What we are saying is in the course of executing or being prepared to do that, we will need to have people prepared to different standards with different levels of equipment and so on in order to be able to do the job better, given what we have learned from Iraq and Afghanistan.

  Lieutenant General Sir Graeme Lamb: If I can give you an example. I have 793 Warriors and 97 of those are equipped to BGTI, which is a standard which we use in the theatre of operation because they have more sophisticated thermal imaging sights and they have a better system they are able to operate, I have a huge volume of vehicles which are available but are not at the standard which we use in the current fight. The lessons we have learned from that tell us do I need to reequip all 793 to that standard? My view is that we do not. However, I do need to identify how many we will need in the contingent and the future nature, structure and character of war which is shifting and changing; it always does. We would be held as donkeys if we did not.

  Chairman: Can we move on to the air environment.

  Q100  Mr Holloway: General, is not that the point? When I joined the Army we had warriors, the Cold War was just ending, and we were terribly excited about this new toy. Now we have got literally hundreds of these things, 10% of which we are using in Afghanistan. We are looking at other equipment programmes and it seems to me that we are still planning for the wrong war. Is it not really quite urgent that someone has a proper think about this?

  Lieutenant General Sir Graeme Lamb: You might sense that I would naturally leap off the table and come back to you on the basis that people like myself and David Richards—

  Q101  Mr Holloway: I know you are.

  Lieutenant General Sir Graeme Lamb: —We are actively engaged.

  Q102  Mr Holloway: I am prompting you!

  Lieutenant General Sir Graeme Lamb: As we are with the other Services. The nature of air/land integration follows. We are in fantastic shape now with our FSTs and how we manage air power and the like. The debate is taking place. Is it clear? The answer is not clear in America and it is not clear here. We do know that it has changed. It is changing and how we structure, organise and manage our manpower, our equipment and training and sustainability pieces which then fold into that, it is important that we define and look at not what will be the only way of warfare but something which in the contemporary operating environment we sense will be an enduring theme as we fight amongst and around the people, as we find that the fragile and failing states are more of a problem in many ways than the super states, the asymmetric threat and all the rest of it and the nature of those threats. People look at Georgia as an example of saying this was clarity. The answer is the forces that came across to Georgia had very little if no night-fighting capability. If you had had a squadron of Challenger 2 tanks it would have destroyed that force at 2 o'clock in the morning. What is really important is, if we look at the cyber attack and the economic attack, to look at the management of the propaganda and the other associated parts which is this character of what we find in the fight we are in.

  Q103  Chairman: Changing the subject, what is the effect of having so many Chinooks on deployed operations?

  Lieutenant General Sir Graeme Lamb: We have a fleet of 50 (it is 49) of which 30 are forward ready and of which 10 are committed to the operation. *** The remainder are going through modifications and training and, of course, if we are moving them you have got to take the thing apart, take it out to theatre, and put it back again, and the like. So by having what we have forward, of which many we could turn round and say we are able to sustain and manage the fight as we have it now, if I were a commander in Task Force Helmand and had another five Chinooks I would have a chance to manoeuvre in another way. That would be the choice I would have. I do not have the choice because I do not have five extra helicopters, but we are able to sustain and manage the force without feeling we are being shallowed out. What it means back on the training fleet is that I have forces which are not as air aware, other than that which they pick up in the theatre of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, as we had in the Army in previous times.

  Q104  Chairman: Thank you, we will be doing an inquiry into Chinook helicopters in the next three months or so. Is this a question, Bernard, which can wait until that?

  Lieutenant General Sir Graeme Lamb: All I can say is that I use them obviously extensively (I have crashed in a few!) but the Commander of Joint Helicopter Command is the expert on the technical detail.

  Q105  Mr Jenkin: May I just test your reaction. Very simply, if you look at all the out-of-service dates for our existing helicopter fleet and what is due to come into service up to 2020, the number of helicopters in the British Armed Forces will be less than half what it is today in 2020 and we will only have 14 Chinooks. What is your reaction to that?

  Lieutenant General Sir Graeme Lamb: I would be surprised if we allowed it to get to that. We would have modification and extension programmes in.

  Mr Jenkin: I totally agree with you but I think you require more money than the Government has currently got.

  Chairman: We have gone into this with the Minister and I want to move on now to the air environment and David Borrow.

  Q106  Mr Borrow: Just to run briefly through a number of points, mainly to Air Marshal McNicoll, the first point is on Hercules which obviously does a lot of work on current operations. Can you outline the impact of this in terms of manpower, equipment, training and support on your ability to maintain target readiness.

  Air Marshal McNicoll: Chairman, would it be helpful if I gave a little bit of context before answering directly the question on the C-130. The first point I would make is that we are different from the land environment in that not all of the Air Force is as heavily committed as land forces are. However, some bits are particularly highly committed and the C-130 is one; others are less so. The second point I would make in relation to readiness is that in the air environment you need to train continually to keep any readiness at all. You cannot take a holiday from it and still maintain some extended readiness easily. As a result of these things there are three things that we are trying to do to cope with the current pressure. One of these is a manpower placement plan and that means that some of the forces which are heavily committed (and I can give you the exact percentages at a classified level if you want but the general point is easily made) are manned to over 100% in order to sustain current operations, and others of course have to be undermanned in order to free up the manpower to go and do it. The C-130 force is heavily committed in current operations and clearly has more manpower assigned to it. *** Turning to the C-130, did you want me to cover the so-called METS for the C-130 force, so each aspect in turn?

  Q107  Mr Borrow: Yes.

  Air Marshal McNicoll: This is where I think we get into the classification bit. If you include forces which are assigned to current operations, the RAF is currently able to meet the readiness standards in Defence Planning Assumptions in all but three cases. I could go into the detail of those three, but the C-130 is one of these. I will just refer to the exact detail. *** The C-130 force is manned to slightly over 100% of its mission establishment. You might get slightly differing views from within the C-130 force if you spoke to them because there have been changes in the establishment of the force, so whether the baseline has changed, and some would argue that we are under the baseline, I would agree with that. I think current operations are showing that we probably need it slightly higher than even we have got. ***

  Q108  Mr Jenkin: How many?

  Air Marshal McNicoll: *** The C-130J is well-fitted for current operations. ***

  Q109  Mr Jenkin: Can you jump out of a C-130J yet?

  Air Marshal McNicoll: Can you jump out of a C-130J?

  Q110  Mr Jenkin: Or is there a problem with the airflow interfering?

  Air Marshal McNicoll: You can jump out of one bit of it but not out of the other bit. Here is a man who specialises in jumping out of aircraft!

  Q111  Mr Jenkin: But we still cannot jump out of the side door?

  Air Marshal McNicoll: I believe that to be the case.

  Brigadier Abraham: ***.

  Q112  Mr Jenkin: ***

  Air Marshal McNicoll: ***

  Q113  Mr Holloway: It is not relevant to current operations.

  Air Marshal McNicoll: Exactly. If I just give you a list of some of the things that we are not able to do: ***

  Q114  Chairman: So what is this list?

  Lieutenant General Sir Graeme Lamb: ***

  Q115  Chairman: So these are in ***?

  Air Marshal McNicoll: ***

  Q116  Chairman: *** meaning exactly what?

  Air Marshal McNicoll: ***

  Q117  Chairman: Could you run through the list in terms of importance?

  Air Marshal McNicoll: *** So the readiness to do what? We are ready to do what we are doing at the moment. ***

  Q118  Chairman: And this includes air-to-air refuelling?

  Air Marshal McNicoll: Let me give you the exact figures on that. ***

  Mr Jenkin: That is recorded as a serious critical weakness.

  Q119  Mr Borrow: The theatres in which we are operating are particularly harsh and many of the aircraft there are flying more hours than they were planned to do or designed to do. I am interested in terms of the impact of that both on readiness and future recuperation, and it is particularly that aspect about the toughness of the environment and this issue of doing more hours than one would have normally planned to do, just how that impacts.

  Air Marshal McNicoll: Let me answer that in relation to the C-130 because it does particularly affect that. The C-130J is currently flying the vast majority of its hours on operations at a far higher rate than was planned when we procured the aircraft. They are producing therefore fatigue in their wings faster than we expected, and the outcome of that is that we will need to do something to refurbish the wings of our C-130Js much earlier than we would otherwise have to, probably around the middle of the next decade, and that will be an expensive business. There will have to be considerable negotiation, I suspect, with the Treasury to decide how much of that should fall to contingency funds and how much of that is the responsibility of the MoD, given that at some stage in the aircraft's life that would have been necessary anyway.

  Q120  Mr Borrow: If I can touch on a different aspect again of current operations. We are using Harriers on current operations. What impact does that have on the training side in terms of training pilots to fly off aircraft carriers because of the way we are using Harriers in current operations?

  Air Marshal McNicoll: The Harrier force consists of three front-line squadrons at the moment and they are maintaining effectively a squadron's worth of effort. It is actually slightly less than that on operations in Afghanistan, and the force is almost entirely committed to supporting current operations and has been for the past four and a half years. That is why, as you may know, we are planning to relieve the force this spring with Tornado because it is a situation that cannot be allowed to continue indefinitely. If I just give you the exact details on Joint Force Harrier. *** There is no particular issue with the fatigue life or long-term support of that, ***

  Vice Admiral Boissier: I would support what Air Marshal McNicoll has said. That is precisely where we are with regard to capability. We deploy Illustrious, our fleet aircraft carrier, as much as we can to fit in with the availability of the aircraft to maintain currency, but this is one of the areas where our contingent capability is taking second place, entirely justifiably, to the current capability.

  Air Marshal McNicoll: I have now got the facts helpfully supplied by my staff. ***

  Q121  Chairman: Is that ***

  Air Marshal McNicoll:***

  Q122  Chairman: ***

  Air Marshal McNicoll: ***

  Q123  Mr Jenkin: Does this explain why it is essential that we rotate Tornado into the Afghan theatre in place of Harrier?

  Air Marshal McNicoll: There are two factors at play. One is the question of breaches of harmony and the operational load being put on people within Joint Force Harrier. The other is beyond a certain amount of time you will end up not with the blind leading the blind, that would be too harsh a way of putting it, but you end up losing core capability experience at even the supervisory level of the force. So after a period of four and a half years in operations, and a limited amount of other effort being able to be applied to the other possible roles of the aircraft, you are beginning to find people getting into supervisory positions on squadrons who have not themselves experienced some of these contingent roles, so when you try and rebuild it, it gets doubly difficult.

  Q124  Mr Jenkin: So Tornado needs operational experience in order to maintain the skills base?

  Air Marshal McNicoll: I was talking about the Harrier.

  Q125  Mr Jenkin: I thought we were talking about operational experience?

  Air Marshal McNicoll: No, I was talking about the contingent task experience.

  Mr Jenkin: I see. Thank you very much for that.

  Q126  Mr Havard: Can I just be clear then the list that you have given for those particular assets, you will have similar things for each of the assets you have got, presumably, so you do not have the same sort of discussion about standards? You know what you are trying to recuperate to and those are the standards that you are trying to recuperate to; is that correct?

  Air Marshal McNicoll: No, I would echo exactly what Lieutenant General Lamb is saying which is there is no going back to the future. We have learned a tremendous amount from both the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns and the goal posts have moved. The way in which we now do air/land integration, the sort of equipment that we fit into our aircraft, and the training that we have got with forward air controllers is completely different, so there is no point in recovering to some point in the past. Similarly, as was outlined earlier, with defensive aids suites for our large aircraft we need to keep them; there is no question of that.

  Q127  Mr Borrow: Just to come back to the impact of the current operations on training flying hours here back in the UK, outside the aircraft you have spoken about what impact current operations have had on training available in the UK, but, in particular, have you any comments in terms of fast jets and what other factors in addition to current operations are impacting there?

  Air Marshal McNicoll: Training for the fast jet force is skewed at the moment, both because of the manpower placement plan I talked about earlier, but also because of the current operations and the rate at which flying hours have been used for current operations. For example, the Tornado force over Iraq has been doing a tremendous amount of flying which is consuming out of the total, so if the total flying bill for the force is 100%, there is quite a large percentage consumed out of that not available for training in the UK. That is not just because of the impact on aircraft and ground crew and current ops, it is also a question of depth maintenance capability because aircraft need major maintenance at defined intervals, and the quicker you use the flying hours the more frequently you need to do that maintenance and there is a finite for capacity that. *** This is entirely coherent with what you have been hearing from my two colleagues, because of course we are not able to do some of these higher contingencies until we have recuperated the entire force in the timescale on which you have been briefed by Air Vice Marshal Leeson.

  Q128  Mr Crausby: What impact will the drawdown from Iraq have on each of your Services and how will that be felt?

  Air Marshal McNicoll: It will have an impact. I think there will be very little air involvement beyond the deadline currently agreed, which is the end of July, so we will be able to, for example, get the Tornado aircraft and the VC10 supporting tanker aircraft out of theatre. In the land environment the support helicopters, for which we have full command responsibility, we will be able to take the Merlin support helicopters out of theatre. They may of course subsequently be deployed elsewhere. In terms of people, we will be able to reduce the load to a reasonable degree across a large number of people, but some of these are likely to be required in Afghanistan. So for example the Royal Air Force regiment which provides the force protection and guarding of Basra air station at the moment, when it is no longer required there, there is a high probability that Camp Bastion in Afghanistan will require an increase in force protection capability there to match that which is already given at Kandahar, because we can see Camp Bastion being developed further and it is already a very busy airfield becoming an even busier airfield in future. It is a mixed bag. There will be some relief in terms of what we are able to do but also some bits which will, of necessity, have to be transferred between theatres.

  Vice Admiral Boissier: From my perspective the great majority of our involvement currently is in Afghanistan with the Royal Marines, *** and some of our aircraft. With regard to the drawdown in Iraq there will be some relief in terms of the Commandor Helicopter Force but that may be deployed to Afghanistan, or not, as the case may be. I would see us providing substantially Britain's enduring commitment to the area through our maritime presence in the Gulf, which has two elements: first of all, our contribution to the Coalition in terms of Task Force 158 and Task Force 152, both of which are in the Gulf, our presence at one-star level in Bahrain, and of course our presence for as long as we are required in the Northern Gulf, where we are undertaking the training of the Iraqi maritime forces, so not a huge change from our perspective.

  Q129  Mr Crausby: General Lamb?

  Lieutenant General Sir Graeme Lamb: We will pull back about 24 sub-units or blocks, 100-men type capabilities, and that will make an impact on our current harmony guidelines which have been broken. The Royal Artillery is breaking harmony guidelines by 55% and the Infantry are breaking harmony guidelines by 53%, so those figures get rolled into different roles which gives us therefore some flexibility to reduce the harmony guideline. The focus for the Army will remain unchanged in the current operations; it will not relieve us. We will have enough force to be able to recuperate or recover and it will give us time to get involved in the discourse and the dialogue about the character of the fight that we find ourselves in, and take stock of that. Some of the equipment we will bring into the shortfall that we currently hold in our preparation training. We only have 40% of equipment that we require from pre-deployment training six months before a unit goes to, in this case, Afghanistan. We will have a sustained, small-scale element of the force committed to Iraq for the foreseeable future. That will change and adjust depending on conditions, the Iraqis' wishes, the Coalition and the like, so we will improve our harmony guidelines. The focus will remain broadly unchanged. It will bring some space into our equipment programme and relieve some of the pressures that we are currently feeling, but the focus for the Army will remain still necessarily the current fight.

  Q130  Chairman: Could you possibly give us a list, please, because I have not before heard that 55% of the Royal Artillery were breaking harmony guidelines. I knew that the Army itself was somehow near the 30%.

  Lieutenant General Sir Graeme Lamb: Chairman, I think that represents a general figure; what we have is specific areas.

  Q131  Chairman: It would be helpful with the specific areas if those who are out of kilter with the rest if you could give us a list, please.

  Brigadier Everard: I was just going to say, General, you said 24 sub-units back from Iraq. It is a 24% reduction in sub-units. We will actually be bringing back about 10 sub-units. It was just a Freudian slip.

  Q132  Mr Havard: That is how many people?

  Brigadier Everard: Well, we are as yet waiting confirmation on our enduring strategic relationship with Iraq, which will eat up a bit of manpower, but I think that will be the bulk of the force, less about 500 people probably. That is combat units. You then have to include combat service so that will be the bulk of the force out, so the remaining 3,000 out of it.

  Q133  Chairman: Brigadier Abraham, what is your overview of all of this?

  Brigadier Abraham: There is clearly some potential in terms of the ability to reinvest from Iraq either to Afghanistan, if required, or, secondly, into the recuperation process of getting manpower suitably trained and equipped, etc. to meet the contingent tasks. One of the critical paths, though, is what you might call joint enablers, and again it is back to things like provision of tactical air transport, C-130s, rotary wing and so on and so on, which are required in great measure to train the force for Afghanistan. Your ability to switch that and generate training at the same time as generate this big force for Afghanistan is to some extent constrained, so overall there is some dividend, not absolutely quantified yet, as Brigadier James Everard says, but it is a long way from a one-for-one manpower. It is a more complex relation than that. To add to something that Air Marshal McNicoll said earlier, for example the reinvestment of the Merlin force, currently employed in Iraq, I think the Secretary of State has already announced, and it certainly is the plan, that that will be deployed in Afghanistan for a period after its withdrawal from Iraq. That will be a good dividend reinvested in Afghanistan.

  Q134  Chairman: Okay, moving on to a different issue, in October 2001 there was the joint field exercise Saif Sareea II. There has not been one since then. Training exercises have in many cases been cancelled because of TELIC or HERRICK over the course of the last five years. What are the most serious concerns that arise out of these cancellations or inability to mount another joint field exercise like Saif Sareea?

  Brigadier Abraham: I can talk a little bit, Chairman, about the future intent (it is not as firm as a plan) which is to try and run a similar live exercise in not before 2013. It has periodically slipped for the reasons that you cite—HERRICK and TELIC. 2012 for the obvious Olympic reason would not have been a good year. There is a target now to see whether we can deliver this at the scale and resource to do an exercise, because the value of the last Saif Sareea, and particularly its relationship so soon after the TELIC I operation, was very clear. We are trying as best we can to get another exercise like that, hopefully in 2013, although that is to be confirmed.

  Air Marshal McNicoll: I might add to that although it is a concern that we have not done this major live exercise for some time, we have also set aside a number of our exercises at a level below that, and, on the light blue side, we historically—and I mean by that four years or so ago—have been running eight major flying exercises or exercises involved in flying at the brigade-type level (if you compare it with the Army) per year. We are now running five, possibly four this year. Part of the recuperation would be to regenerate these extra three exercises.

  Q135  Chairman: That is not joint, is it?

  Air Marshal McNicoll: A lot of them are. For example the joint Neptune Warrior. Its name keeps changing. It used to be Joint Maritime and it is Joint Warrior now and it involves all three Services now. It involves air deployment in a major, major form.

  Q136  Mr Borrow: I would be interested to know your assessment of the value of such an exercise in the sense that such an exercise is something that would normally be held when we were not involved in operations in order to, if you like, give the three Services a joint major operation to replicate in some ways the stresses of being on operations. Given that we have been in operations in two theatres for the last five for six years, how valuable would such a major exercise be, if we are still in Afghanistan in the sort of numbers we are now?

  Brigadier Abraham: I think the extent to which we can do it will take second place to what we are required to do in Afghanistan. There is no doubt about that. How important is it? In broad terms, we now have enormous experience nationally, in defence and elsewhere in government, in running operations because we have been doing it for some time now. What we probably need to revitalise is our ability, our skill sets, our thinking about how you mount something ab initio, as it were, from a relatively cold start, which is what force elements at readiness and contingent readiness is all about. Whether it is exercising a broader range of skill-sets than are necessarily encountered on the current operations, or whether it is extending a new line of communication, and all the frictions and difficulties that go with it, those are just two of many examples of the many virtues of running major exercises like that. You are quite right that there have been cancellations and there has not been a live ex since 2001. There have been exercises set at that level which are run by the Permanent Joint Headquarters called exercise Joint Venture. They completed one just before Christmas which they ran in Cyprus which, aimed to address a lot of the conceptual planning and integration aspects of it, but clearly without the friction of deploying companies, squadrons, ships, etc. which come with a live ex. In short, they are very important indeed.

  Q137  Mr Jenkin: I recall the then CDS having to go to see the Prime Minister to prevent Saif Sareea II from being cancelled. I was also very struck when I spent a week on Saif Sareea how incredibly few, a tiny fraction of the personnel of Saif Sareea II had had anything to do with Gulf War I, which I suppose was a comparable operation. What would be the effect if Saif Sareea III, if that is what we called it, did not happen?

  Brigadier Abraham: It would just extend the period and increase the risk—I cannot put absolute values on—of the period over which we do not practise certain things.

  Vice Admiral Boissier: It seems to me that the issue here for any sort of exercise is to prepare your forces, either in microcosm or, like Saif Sareea, across the board, for an operation they are likely and conceivably expected to do in the near future. The sort of Saif Sareea exercise is preparation for a medium-scale contingent operation. It strikes me that when we get ready to do a medium-scale contingent operation, that is exactly the right time to do this exercise so we can validate the ideas and the concepts. We are not there at the moment, and indeed much of the skills and many of the units that we would require to conduct this as a live ex rather than a planning exercise are bought up in current operations. I think this is an absolutely vital precursor to when the time comes that we regenerate our contingent capability at that level.

  Q138  Mr Havard: Can I just be clear then in terms of recuperation you are recouping to a position whereby, as Graeme was just saying, in pre-deployment training, you have got more equipment, and that is great, you get back to a situation you would like to have been in in the first place, so you can actually do that properly, but where are you recouping back to? Are you trying to recoup back to a situation where you can do this live exercise or is it just somewhere underneath that so you can continue improved exercises short of that and pre-deployment and so on?

  Brigadier Abraham: ***

  Q139  Richard Younger-Ross: We discussed earlier particularly the naval situation with stockholdings. This is not just naval but for all of you: in terms of reductions in stockholdings and in terms of cannibalisation, how is that limiting your ability to recuperate and which capabilities are actually hardest hit by that?

  Vice Admiral Boissier: I will start from the naval side. Cannibalisation is a tough business. It is tough on the equipment. It is actually quite tough on the poor old maintainer who has looked after it and then hands it over to his buddy. It undoubtedly has an effect on our capacity to recuperate and our readiness because only one of those two ships has it as a permanent fixture on board. I think really, though, more broadly from the naval perspective on stockholdings, we are becoming cleverer at it, we are buying the stuff that we need and not buying so much of the stuff that is of less importance or less frequently used. There is a major strand of work, and this may be something that you can take up next week, just looking at this, which is a rather rambling way of saying that there is an effect of cannibalisation on readiness and it is one of those things that we have got to have in our sights and we are trying to manage as well as we possibly can.

  Q140  Richard Younger-Ross: Which capabilities would you say in naval terms are hardest hit?

  Vice Admiral Boissier: Gosh, I think I would need advice from technical colleagues, but some of the sensors on our equipments probably, some of the communication intelligence support equipment that we are taking into the Gulf, stuff like Centrix, which is just going from one ship to another the whole time. That sort of thing off the top of my head. Forgive me, that is not a full answer at all.

  Q141  Chairman: Air Marshal?

  Air Marshal McNicoll: There are two parts to the question. The first is on the weapons sides of things. We will need to recover our weapons stocks on a rolling basis, but some of these will end up being slightly less expensive. For example, we have being using the so-called enhanced Paveway II+ laser-guided bombs and also the GPS facility as well. The new one now being used is the Paveway IV, which has got both of these, and it is very slightly cheaper than its predecessor. We will need to recover these stocks in due course to be able to meet the contingent liabilities in the same timescale that has been described. On cannibalisation, or robbing as it is often called in the Air Force, it is a real pain. It effectively means double work. You have taken something out of one aeroplane and put it into another aeroplane and done the same again for the aeroplane that you have taken it from, so it is double work and, when you have aircraft deployed on operations and consume spares which must be supplied, the proportion, or the amount of robbing or cannibalisation you have to do goes up slightly. It is not at unmanageable levels but it does put added strain on the system because you are doing double work to achieve the same objective.

  Lieutenant General Sir Graeme Lamb: On the question of stocks there are obviously stocks we are using which are affected—60 mm mortar rounds, Javelin missiles and the like—so there are some stock issues to the fight we are in. On cannibalisation I think we have only cannibalised two Challenger 2s. This is not like Gulf War I, Granby, where we cannibalised a great number of our vehicles in order to provide the force in relation to two armoured brigades into that particular operation. As I said, I have a fleet of 793 Warriors and we only have in operation 97, so I do not need to cannibalise the others. What I do need to do is put on new kit to the 97 that I have, which is the UOR issue, and I have to manage my equipment back here in the UK for training and therefore throughput to operations, but cannibalisation for the Army is not an issue. The management of the equipment is something which is the issue, and the stock issue is one. Again I think General Applegate, who comes here next week, without question of doubt is the man to ask.

  Chairman: Thank you very much. It is now past one o'clock and we have never before gone past one o'clock; I am afraid you are too interesting! Thank you very much indeed. I am conscious of the effort, given the conditions over the last couple of days, that it has taken you to get here and we are extremely grateful. I would remind members of the Committee that this has been a private session so any notes that you have please keep in your classified folders. And to the witnesses for a very interesting and very helpful beginning to our evidence sessions, many thanks indeed.

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Prepared 10 February 2010