Scottish Affairs Committee - Minutes of EvidenceHC 139-I

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Oral Evidence

Taken before the Scottish Affairs Committee

on Wednesday 20 June 2012

Members present:

Mr Ian Davidson (Chair)

Fiona Bruce

Mike Freer

Iain McKenzie

Jim McGovern

David Mowat

Pamela Nash

Mr Alan Reid

Lindsay Roy

________________

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Crawford, former Lieutenant Colonel in the Royal Tank Regiment, and Richard Marsh, Economist, 4-consulting, gave evidence.

Q446 Chair: Gentlemen, I welcome you to this meeting of the Scottish Affairs Committee. As you are aware, we are conducting an investigation into various aspects of the Referendum on Separation for Scotland. We are conducting inquiries into process but also into issues of substance. One of the main issues we are looking at is the question of how a separate Scotland would be defended. Therefore, the work that you have done is obviously of great interest to us.

I want to start off by asking you to introduce yourselves. Tell us your background and why you think you are competent to speak about this, and also whether or not you are speaking as individuals or on behalf of an organisation, gang or group. I would then intend to ask you to outline the bones of what you have put forward so that we get the context of it, and then we will go through it in bits. Let us start with you, Stuart.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: My name is Stuart Crawford. I am a former Army officer. I spent 20 years in the Army as a career officer in the Royal Tank Regiment. I left in 1999 and became temporarily involved in politics-I think that is probably the correct way of putting it. Since then I have worked in Edinburgh as a political, media and defence and security consultant.

My interest in the subject matter of today arose while I was still serving in the Army. I have a residual interest in defence matters and I am increasingly interested in the politics of Scotland. It struck me during the late ’90s that nobody had really seriously considered how an independent Scotland, if that thing should ever come to be, might go about organising its defence forces. It is very much a self-initiated study done in back bedrooms late into the night, after real work is done and children are in bed.

Richard Marsh: I am Richard Marsh. I work for a small research company called 4-consulting based in Kirkcaldy. I specialise in economic statistics. I have done work for the Scottish Government, for example helping to improve their measure of Scottish GDP. I have worked with Stuart previously on energy work and a few other small projects. When Stuart told me the idea of developing his previous paper, I was more than happy to help out with trying to put some costs against his future scenarios for the defence of Scotland.

Q447 Chair: Can I clarify whether you are what could be described as a defence economist or a general economist? Do you have any speciality in this area, in the way that Stuart obviously has in military affairs?

Richard Marsh: No. I have no military background and I have no speciality in defence economics.

Q448 Chair: I will ask you first, Stuart, and then Richard, to outline how you have responded to this, but would you like to give us a broad sweep of what it is you have put forward as a possible defence scenario for a separate Scotland?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: My first paper was published anonymously in 1998 by Professor Hew Strachan at Glasgow university-I know that Hew has been here recently-and was very much a first take at what I was setting out to do, which was looking at how an independent Scotland might go about defending itself. It is very much of its era post-cold war. I was still slightly mesmerised by my previous Staff College training and very much in the era of mechanised warfare, the focus being in north-west Europe.

The paper is still valid for its time but, with changes in the political context worldwide and in Europe, I felt that, with the referendum coming up in 2014, subject to consultation of course, now was the time to have a look at it again because a lot of my ideas will have changed. A lot of the circumstances in the background against which I wrote the original paper will have changed. Fundamentally, the major omission from my first paper-and there were a number of flaws in it-was that it was not costed. In fact it says so in the conclusions; that was for someone else to do.

I thought I had better rewrite it in the modern context. That is what I have set out to do. In the process of so doing, the conclusions will have changed fairly dramatically. In the rewriting of this, the modern paper-the further thoughts as opposed to the original thoughts-is still very much a work in progress. I am about two thirds to three quarters of the way through it.

My perception was that perhaps less expert commentators in the wider context tended to look at the whole idea of Scottish defence as being, "We will have our share of the UK defence inventory", "We will have the same as Denmark", or, "We don’t care what we’ve got as long as it keeps all the defence jobs." While those are all useful ways of checking on various thoughts, I thought they were not the primary case for doing it. You cannot really predicate a defence policy on job creation. It is not about job creation primarily, although there are important second and third order implications. That was how I approached it.

I wanted to try and answer three questions: what would an independent Scotland want its armed forces to do; what armed forces would be required to do those things; and could we afford the model that that threw up? The third one has been very much in Richard’s remit.

That led me to come up with a fairly conventional and modest model for Scottish defence forces, if we want to call them that. It is not a perfect model. It is by no means the best model. It is a model, and I think at the moment it is the only model. Much of it has been created in a political vacuum. There is no extant foreign policy for an independent Scotland that I know of, although I have asked for it. I have had to make an educated guess at aspects of it. What I have come up with is a model that would be a suggestion of what an independent Scotland would need to do the basic tasks of defence forces, but not necessarily what an independent Scotland might want to do with its defence forces, because that is very much a political and not a military decision, as far as I can see.

Richard Marsh: You have probably guessed here that Stuart has done a lot of the heavy lifting on this project. To summarise what he has said, a lot of the estimates that have been worked up so far have talked about what Scotland might get when it becomes independent, based on what is on Scottish soil or what Scotland might negotiate for a certain share of the defence industry. Stuart does most of the valuable work here in saying, "Here is what Scotland would need to defend itself." I have simply worked through that model and said, "According to Ministry of Defence statistics, how much might it cost to sustain that number of service personnel with this amount of equipment?"

Q449 Chair: If I heard you correctly, you mentioned that you had sought clarification about the foreign policy that a separate Scotland might have but that no guidance had been given. It seems to me that, unless you have some sort of information about the foreign policy, it is almost impossible to devise a defence policy and hence all the rest of the work that you have done.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: The external aspects of it become more difficult. There are certain assumptions that we can reasonably make on foreign policy. I am assured that foreign policies are being worked on but I have not seen anything. I will come back to your main point, but when I wrote my original paper in 1998, there was an extant defence policy for an independent Scotland that was produced by the Scottish National party, so I could do a certain comparison. There is no such current document that I can get access to at the moment-I have asked-but I understand that such things are being worked on. Therefore, in many ways, rather than me comparing my work with theirs, it might be the other way round, and as and when that work comes, they will be able to compare it with mine.

Q450 Lindsay Roy: You would accept that the first priority of any nation state is to protect its citizens. Does it not appear strange that there is this vacuum at the present time? If I read you correctly, not only is there not a foreign policy but there is not a defence policy framework.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: That is correct. There is a consensus that the purpose of armed forces is threefold, and I hope I can remember all three of them. The first is to maintain the integrity of the elected Government, which is the least popular one, because it brings visions of strikebreaking and all that sort of stuff. The second is to defend the territory of the state against external aggression. Most people would agree that that sort of conventional attack on the UK as a whole, let alone Scotland, is less than likely in the current political context. The third is to protect and defend a nation’s interests abroad. I think that most people would agree that those fairly broad guidelines apply generally, but there is no specific foreign policy for an independent Scotland that I am aware of.

Q451 Lindsay Roy: Have you considered criteria that would be used if the strategic military assets were to be divided up on separation? Do you have a notion of what the criteria would be?

Chair: Before we move on to that, I want to stay with the wider scenario. What is your assessment of both the internal and external threats that might be faced-that you are gearing up your possible defence forces to face?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: I spoke recently at a conference in Edinburgh on this. I have said that, very much in accordance with the preamble to the Strategic Defence and Security Review, there is no real, credible, conventional military threat to the UK as a whole. In terms of external threats, we are looking more at things like terrorism, of which Scotland was free until comparatively recently, economic sanctions and threats, and also cyber warfare, on which I am not an expert. The spectrum of direct threat to the state has moved away from conventional attacks to these much more asymmetric types of attack, but we can defend against them to a certain extent.

There is also a requirement for military assistance to the civilian authorities, which has been well exercised over the past 100 years. One thinks of the military assistance that was called in when the Lockerbie bomb went off and the wreckage came down. Much of the recovery work was carried out by the military. In any other sort of crisis of health or transport, the armed forces provide a structured body of men and women with a command structure and the appropriate equipment to deal with a whole host of civilian crises and emergencies.

Q452 Chair: In terms of external threat, other people have talked to us about the question of the melting of the ice cap, the way in which there would be tensions in the Arctic, and what used to be the Soviet Union-Russian-intrusion into airspace and so on and so forth. Have you built all that into your assumptions?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Yes, in sweepingly general terms. The armed forces model that I have come up with involves modest armed forces-very much at the modest end of the scale-but it does have sufficient resource and flexibility to allow some participation in all those sorts of things, so the whole spectrum of military threats. The question is the extent to which that can be done.

Q453 Iain McKenzie: On that last point, when you said "modest" armed forces, can you put a size or figure on it so that we can picture what "modest" armed forces are?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: In sweepingly general terms, I have come up with a model of a Scottish navy that has between 20 to 25 ships and vessels, an air force with about 60 aircraft of all types, and an army that would consist of two brigades plus supporting troops.

Q454 Chair: I want to come back to the general area about the extent to which separate Scottish forces might be involved in what are sometimes described as foreign adventures, and at other times are described as joint alliances-the wording depends on your perspective. Is there an element built in there that would allow a capacity for a separate Scotland?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: There is, but it is not a huge thing. For example, in the navy, I think I have suggested-I can check my notes-that it would consist of two frigates or something like that. That would allow a Scottish Government to contribute to joint military exercises or operations. In the air force I have gone for two squadrons of Hawk aircraft, which are advance trainers and have an operational capability. The elements of the army would be deployable, but they would not necessarily be deployable independently. In the model I have drawn up, the Scottish forces would probably have to be part of a coalition or larger force.

Q455 Chair: That would be a coalition of the willing. They would be entirely self-contained. It would be fair to say that the general thrust you have adopted is that Scottish forces would be capable of protecting home waters, home airspace and territorial defence, with some-it depends whether or not you call it slack-flexibility to be able to exercise a role internationally, if necessary.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Yes. It is also quite important to build in the element of operational availability. For example, if we use the model of 18 Hawk aircraft, they may have an operational availability of 80%. It does not mean that you have 18 aircraft up in the air all the time. You might have 18 or 16 or 15 aircraft up there for a period of three hours, depending on their fuel supply. If you want four aircraft up continuously, that is probably the best you could do.

Q456 Chair: This is clearly a restricted model in a sense, is it not?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Very much so, yes.

Q457 Chair: It could almost be described as a Home Guard option.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: You could describe it as that.

Q458 Chair: I deliberately do not use the term "Dad’s Army" because that would be seen as pejorative. The focus here is on the Home Guard option, but keeping Scotland safe.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Yes. The important thing about the way I have gone about it is that it is open to others to decide whether this is sufficient. This is where, of course, Richard’s part of the exercise comes in.

Q459 Chair: Absolutely. I am not criticising. I just want to be clear about what you are saying.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: It is a modest model.

Chair: Richard, if at any time you think there are issues you want to raise in this context that we have not spotted, please intervene.

Q460 Lindsay Roy: In relation to the criteria that might be used to distribute the strategic assets and what would come to Scotland, what kind of process do you envisage?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: I think the answer is that what exists in Scotland at the moment, equipment-wise and personnel-wise, would not be sufficient for the needs of the independent state as I would see it. Therefore, I anticipate that there would be a prolonged period of negotiation to make sure that the assets of the UK were divided up in an appropriate manner where that was relevant. In other words, I do not think an independent Scotland-we can go on to talk about this, no doubt-would necessarily want to have any part of the UK nuclear deterrent. It could be argued that its share of that is about 0.4 of a boat. Therefore, it might be open for the value of that share, however that is calculated, to be traded with the rest of the United Kingdom in return for something else that is absolutely required.

Q461 Lindsay Roy: In terms of strategy, there would be negotiations and a trade-off to get what was fit for purpose.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: I think that is correct, yes.

Q462 Lindsay Roy: When you say "prolonged", can you give us an idea of what you mean?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: I really do not know, but I would think that it would be a period of years rather than months.

Q463 Lindsay Roy: Several years.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Several years. Two or three years probably-something like that. That would be the negotiation, but whether the assets would be transferred in the same time frame would be another matter altogether. In some cases there would have to be some work carried out to receive them.

Q464 Lindsay Roy: In my understanding, they would be quite complex negotiations, and thereafter there would be the distribution of assets in relation to those negotiations.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Yes, absolutely.

Q465 Chair: Am I right in thinking, though, that, if on day one, after a vote on separation, the negotiations started, nobody who had voted would know what they were going to end up with? In a sense they would almost be voting for a pig in a poke. They would know what the negotiating position of the SNP was, and they might know the negotiating position of the UK, but they would not know what was going to come out at the end of that.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: That is probably correct at the moment. I would very much hope that by the time of the independence referendum-whenever it takes place, although it looks as if it will be in the autumn of 2014-we will have a much better idea of what the vote was for.

Q466 Mike Freer: I represent a London seat. From my point of view I just do not see how these negotiations are going to take place. Looking at it from slightly outside, the Scottish Government have no foreign policy, no defence policy and no economic impact study on the negotiations. They don’t want the debt. They don’t want the cost of the bail-out. They still want the tax revenues, but they are then going to pick and choose the bits of the defence forces that they want and expect the RUK Government simply to roll over and hand this across. Do you not think that that scenario is a bit far-fetched, and that the Scottish Government need to start putting some flesh on the bones?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: I understand where you are coming from, and I think the necessary information is not yet available.

Q467 Mike Freer: That is a polite way of putting it, is it not?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: There will be a great deal of negotiation, I suspect. The elephant in the room, of course, is the Trident boats on the Clyde and how, when and to where those boats are removed from an independent Scotland that has pledged it will be nuclear weapons-free. That is supported by all parties north of the border, with the possible exception of the Conservative party. It is not a case of independence on Friday night and the boats sail out for ever on Saturday morning. Professor Malcolm Chalmers, who has been here, and certainly Professor William Walker from St Andrew’s university, would say that there would be an overlap when the rest of the UK, if it came to that, would maintain its nuclear fleet on the Clyde, possibly until it was obsolete. That is a political negotiation and not really a military one.

Richard Marsh: I would back Stuart up on that point. In the previous conference that we spoke at, we came to the conclusion that there would not actually be a day one, which has been referred to already; it would be a slightly longer period where you would have to provide more detail as to how the negotiations will take place.

Chair: It is not day one of year zero, as it were. People in Scotland have to have some sort of idea of what they are voting for. At the moment they do not. This is part of the difficulty about this sort of discussion, which we have to try and flesh out. As we go on, we will try and clarify how long the process of haggling might be.

Q468 Jim McGovern: I want to clarify something that Stuart just said. Did I pick you up correctly when you said that every party is in favour of a nuclear-free Scotland?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: I think that is correct, with the possible exception of the Conservative party.

Q469 Jim McGovern: I think you are wrong.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: The SNP is. The Scottish Labour party definitely is. The Green party is.

Q470 Jim McGovern: But there is a UK Labour party.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Yes, I know. I think the Labour party’s position is at variance in Scotland and Westminster, but that is not really for me to comment on.

Chair: This is a fascinating dispute-

Q471 Jim McGovern: You said you were going to try and avoid political subjects, but you just drifted into one there, I think.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: That is my perception of it. If I am wrong, then I stand corrected.

Jim McGovern: You are corrected.

Q472 Mr Reid: Does the model you have produced assume that Scotland is inside or outside NATO?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Neither really. I have frequently commented that the position of the party of independence-the SNP-on NATO is misguided. It is fair to say that there are many people within the Scottish National party who know it is misguided. My personal view is that the position is naive on two counts. It is naive militarily, because why would any small new independent country want to negotiate its way out of the most powerful military alliance in history, if you agree with that assessment? Although I do not want to drift into politics, I think it is also naive politically, because it hands the opposition political parties a big stick to hit the SNP over the head with.

Q473 Mr Reid: What do you think Scotland would lose by not being part of NATO?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: It would lose the overarching purpose of NATO, which is basically that an attack on one member is taken as an attack on all members. It loses that facility. It would also lose the facility of transatlantic involvement in the defence of Europe, and various other smaller things like equipment negotiations and so on and so forth.

Q474 Mr Reid: Would Scotland lose anything by being in NATO, or are the benefits all one way?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: The objection to an independent Scotland being in NATO is the perception that it is a nuclear-led alliance that has not ruled out the use of first nuclear strike. My personal view on that is that the use of nuclear weapons in future warfare is so highly unlikely, and the likely NATO use of first-strike nuclear weapons is so infinitesimally small, that to predicate a NATO policy on that very, very small possibility is perhaps misguided.

Q475 Mr Reid: Do you think the Scottish Government’s insistence on the removal of nuclear weapons from Scotland and not being a member of NATO would have an impact on negotiations with the rest of the UK over the division of assets?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Obviously it would in terms of the Trident boats, because there would not be any fuel for that. I really do not know how it would affect it. It would damage the credibility of the negotiating team because the reasons for leaving NATO are not, in my opinion, necessarily intellectually coherent.

Q476 Mr Reid: Have you given any thought as to how long it would take for the Vanguard boats and the Trident missiles to be removed from Scottish soil?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: I am not the expert, but Professor William Walker’s line at the Edinburgh conference was that if Scotland insists on nuclear weapons leaving the Clyde, the UK is basically being forced down the line of unilateral nuclear disarmament. You can agree with that or not, but his line was that the most feasible compromise was that the Trident fleet as currently constituted should remain on the Clyde until either the fleet or the missiles become obsolete.

Q477 Mr Reid: Does your model take into account the costs of the UK Government removing facilities from Faslane and Coulport that they would need if they wanted to relocate Trident somewhere else?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: I am going to pass that one on to Richard.

Richard Marsh: The short answer to that is no. We came to a figure of something approaching £2 billion a year in terms of operating expenditure and capital investment required to keep the forces that Stuart described up and running. That does not include any one-off costs that would occur around the time of independence and negotiation that you have just described.

Q478 Mr Reid: If we are looking at the division of assets, assuming that the Scottish Government continue with their present policy and tell the UK that the Trident missiles and the Vanguard submarines have to go, there would be a lot of fixed assets at Faslane and Coulport that the UK Government would not be able to move. Presumably they then become the property of the Scottish Government. When the UK assets are being divided up, have you placed a value on those assets that the Scottish Government would automatically get, even if they did not have any use for them?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: I certainly have not. I do not think my study is that detailed.

Richard Marsh: We did talk about this briefly. The problem is that when you talk about the value of the assets, you would really need to be informed by something approaching market prices. That is going to be very difficult to get.

Q479 Mr Reid: Presumably the value that the UK Government would put on them would be the same as any insurance company. It would be the rebuild costs and the costs of reconstructing them somewhere else. That was certainly what the Defence Ministers told us last week.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: The Faslane base, for example, has a residual value as a naval base. My model for the Scottish navy has suggested that Faslane would continue as a conventional naval base and there would have to be another naval base at Rosyth. Although Faslane is the only current naval base in Scotland, it is part and parcel of the three major naval bases of the UK. For an independent country to have only one naval base is a bit like putting all your eggs in one basket. I have suggested that Rosyth should be reinstated as a naval base, and I understand from my naval contacts that that is feasible.

Q480 Mr Reid: Would an independent Scotland have any use for Coulport?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: I have never been in Coulport, so I do not know the true extent of the facilities there, but I understand they are both extensive and impressive. One can only speculate what it might be used for, but not for nuclear weapons storage, I think.

Q481 Mr Reid: Do you think it would be reasonable for the UK Government to insist in negotiations, if the Scottish Government inherited all these facilities at Faslane and Coulport, that they were allocated as an asset that the Scottish Government have, and that therefore the UK Government would be entitled to allocate that cost against Scotland when dividing up the share of assets?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: It is a factor that would have to be considered. Presumably Scotland will have already paid a part of the cost of those assets through its tax take. Perhaps it would go into the general negotiation pot.

Q482 Chair: When the Czech and Slovak Republics split, my understanding is that those facilities that were in particular geographical areas were priced and allocated to that particular authority. Under what Alan is suggesting, presumably the replacement cost of Coulport and the entire base would be the equivalent allocation to Scotland. That would be part of the haggling that starts from day zero, unless some of that gets resolved beforehand.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: I would imagine it will be a factor that would have to be taken into account.

Q483 Chair: You have not done any work on anything other than running costs, as it were, of the force structure that is being proposed-the transitional costs, the one-off costs or anything like that. This is not intended to be a trick question.

Richard Marsh: It is something we were discussing earlier, particularly because there are some types of ships that Stuart has outlined that might not be readily available. I think we were talking about a Type 45.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: A Type 45 is probably too expensive but a Type 26.

Richard Marsh: They are incredibly expensive. What we have included here is both current and capital. Over the very long run you would expect the cost to be reasonably close to what we have outlined. We have included an element of putting aside a certain proportion of the budget that we have allocated here as capital expenditure. Where you would run your ship for 20 or 30 years, you would be expected to put aside some money so that you could afford to replace it in 20 or 30 years. In that sense there is something included for that.

Q484 Lindsay Roy: Leaving aside the nuclear deterrent, do you agree with Mandy Rhodes, the editor of the Holyrood magazine, who said that Scotland is NATO’s aircraft carrier from which it can intercept any potential threat to the UK and its assets?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: I think she is correct. The geo-political context in which Scotland finds itself historically is exactly that. It has been part of the UK aircraft carrier over two succeeding world wars in the last century.

Q485 Lindsay Roy: You will be aware of the number of call-outs from the Rapid Deployment Force from Leuchars, for example.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: I am sorry-I missed that.

Lindsay Roy: The Rapid Deployment Force from Leuchars has been called out on a number of occasions recently.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Yes, indeed, to intercept.

Q486 Chair: Would Hawk jets be capable of undertaking that role?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Yes. The reason why I thought the Hawk jet would be an appropriate aircraft for an independent Scottish force was its dual role. It is part of the RAF inventory. While it would never be as sophisticated an interceptor or fighter aircraft as the Typhoon, it is considerably cheaper. I do not have the figures for that. It can certainly intercept and it can certainly carry a weapon load. What it cannot do is what Typhoon can do: target and engage, although I don’t know how many individual targets all at the same time, a bit like the Type 45 destroyer can do. The Typhoon is at a level of sophistication that an independent Scotland might not need.

Q487 Lindsay Roy: What is the difference in airspeed between the Hawk and the Typhoon?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: I do not have the figures, but I think the Typhoon is probably twice as fast in general terms.

Q488 Lindsay Roy: So the Hawk has a much slower response.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Yes.

Q489 Chair: We have the Typhoon, which is very quick, and the Hawk, which is reasonably quick. Would the Hawk be capable of intercepting Russian planes coming into Scottish airspace?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Yes, it would. It depends, of course, on where the Hawks are based. My model has suggested that Leuchars, if it was to close down, should be reinstated, and then there would be Lossiemouth as well. I have also suggested the use of civilian airports, which many European countries do.

Q490 Lindsay Roy: Has reopening Leuchars, or retaining Leuchars and Lossiemouth, been built in as a cost factor?

Richard Marsh: Yes, there is a small amount of money in there for that.

Q491 Lindsay Roy: What kind of money are we talking about?

Richard Marsh: I am happy to go through the figures and send you that data.

Lindsay Roy: That would be most helpful; thank you.

Q492 Chair: I want to come back to this question of nuclear weapons and the pressure that that will have on the discussions. Are you saying that the present SNP’s position is that nuclear weapons should be removed from Scotland as quickly as they can be? CND has said that could be within two years or so.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: That was its latest report yesterday, yes.

Q493 Chair: That would be not only unilateral nuclear disarmament for Scotland, but enforced unilateral nuclear disarmament for the rest of the UK. Is that your understanding of the position? That would be distinct from saying, "We want these out of Scotland, but we will give you enough time to replicate what you have in Faslane and Coulport somewhere else in England." As I understand it, the estimates we had were 15 to 20 years. There is obviously a difference between saying nuclear weapons out of Scotland with a deadline of two years, because that is what can be physically managed, and a deadline of 20 years, because that is what it would take to replicate it. Have you built either of those into your assumptions?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: No. I have assumed in very general terms that there would be no place for nuclear weaponry in an independent Scotland. I do not know what the SNP position is because I am not a member of the party. I think that the Scottish CND study was not so much to do with the removal of nuclear weapons from Scotland as the decommissioning of the UK’s independent nuclear deterrent.

Q494 Chair: There were two steps. One was the decommissioning because it was not active in Scotland. The other was physically removing them, and then there was a longer period for dismantling them, but that could be done in the Firth of Scotland, as I understand it.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Profession William Walker at St Andrew’s university has spoken and written extensively about this. His line, as I said before, is that there would need to be some sort of negotiated settlement whereby Trident remained on the Clyde until it was obsolete. That seems to be a common-sense approach.

Q495 Chair: I want to pursue this a little bit with you. If you are saying that negotiations will have to take place about who gets what assets, they are likely to be somewhat poisoned by a Scottish Government saying, "We are going to enforce unilateral nuclear disarmament upon the rest of the UK, but we want to be pals with you. We want you to have a decent dialogue with us and we want to be pleasant and agreeable, not only in defence things, but as we want you to save our banks and all the rest of it." There has to come a point, does there not, where somebody like yourself, making an assessment about a future foreign and defence policy, takes into account the nature of the relationship that there will be with the rest of the UK dependent upon what decisions are taken on nuclear weapons? Have you factored that in? If the pool is poisoned by an inappropriate decision on nuclear weapons, presumably your costings and estimates of co-operation just disappear.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: I would agree that nuclear weapons are probably an unhelpful negotiating position. One has to ask whether the global community would allow that position to be carried through to its natural conclusion, because we are talking about effective unilateral disarmament. A compromise has to be sought but, in the case of my model, I have assumed that nuclear weapons would not be part of the inventory of an independent Scotland.

Q496 Chair: I do understand that, to be fair. It is coming back to the building block of foreign and defence policy depending upon a decent relationship. When you say you want to have this settled amicably, that would swing towards the 20-year option or the four-year option. I do not see that splitting the difference is possible. It is a bit like the Tories not having any aircraft carriers for a period; it depends upon whether or not they are willing to have no nuclear weapons for a period. If you say, "You can keep them for eight years, but in fact we recognise it is going to take 20 years to build a replacement, so you have got them for eight, and you then don’t have them for 12, and then you either reinstall them at the end or not," I would have thought that it is not likely to build peace and harmony. Can you see anything other than the full 20 years as being conducive to an agreeable settlement?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: If we accept that there is nowhere else for the UK’s nuclear deterrent to go-some people have speculated that it could be found a home in the eastern seaboard of the USA, or on the French coast at the French submarine base, but if we accept that those are long shots that are unlikely to happen, so there is nowhere else for it to go-my personal opinion is that the long exit scenario is the most likely and the one upon which people are most likely to be able to agree.

Q497 Chair: That is very helpful. Similarly, in your model, you refer to clean-up costs for any bases that are left. Traditionally the United States, when it pulls out, does not pay clean-up costs just on the basis that it would cost them so much. Have you factored in any of that at all to any of your model?

Richard Marsh: The short answer is no, because it is very difficult to try and find out how much it costs.

Q498 Chair: I understand that. Do you have any information at all about that? We can seek some of these things from the MOD, but getting information from the MOD is not always the easiest of processes.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Even when you are inside it.

Chair: We have been told to expect a 20-year timetable for getting material from them. That clarifies that element of it.

Q499 Iain McKenzie: In relation to where the nuclear deterrent is based, is there anywhere in the UK where the weapons would not have an impact in Scotland should there be an exchange?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Of nuclear weapons. You mean "nuclear exchange", as in conflict.

Iain McKenzie: Yes.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: I am just thinking. The First Minister of Wales has recently said he would welcome them to Milford Haven in Wales, if Scotland does not want them.

Q500 Iain McKenzie: In effect it is a gesture to say "off our soil". There is still an effect on Scotland should there be an exchange. There is nowhere in the UK we can base these weapons that would not have an influence.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: If the nuclear exchange was designed only to negate the nuclear arsenals of the competing sides, it is feasible that Scotland might not be affected by a nuclear exchange, but if it is a general military exchange-and there are military targets in Scotland-clearly Scotland would be involved in that exchange. For example, if it was a first strike against the UK’s independent deterrent-four Trident boats at Milford Haven, which is the speculation in the papers today-then depending on the size of the warheads involved, Scotland could escape that. Likewise, if there was a nuclear first strike against Trident on the Clyde, much of the rest of the UK would escape that exchange.

Q501 Chair: What way does the wind blow from Milford Haven? Does it not depend, since Welsh lamb was affected by Chernobyl?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: It does. I think it comes from the west. If it was Milford Haven, London would definitely be affected; if it was in the Clyde, maybe not.

Q502 Chair: So the future of Scotland would depend on the direction of the wind.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: The future of humankind would depend on that.

Chair: That is very consoling; I feel much better now.

Q503 Iain McKenzie: Continuing on the theme of NATO and taking it from the other angle, if Scotland was not a member of NATO, is there any other military alliance that it could join? What would it get from that, and which countries would it be involved with?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Apart from a general warm and fuzzy feeling that you are not alone militarily in the world, the Partnership for Peace is a sort of NATO halfway house. You would be half in and half out there-doing the military hokey cokey. That has always been a favourite. I do not know very much about the Partnership for Peace.

There are other alliances in the Scandinavian countries. I cannot remember what they are called-it is the Northern Alliance or something like that. That would allow an independent state, whether it is Scotland or any other, not necessarily to have to have the full gamut or spectrum of military capability, but to be able to specialise to a certain extent. It would work on the basis that the gaps in the inventory would be provided by the allies, much as NATO operates under the American surveillance and advanced weapons technology umbrella.

Q504 Iain McKenzie: Do you think that Scottish forces would be able to participate in combined military manoeuvres?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Yes. I do not see why Scottish forces should be any less well trained than the current UK forces might be, although they might not be involved in the full spectrum of operations that the current UK forces are.

Q505 Iain McKenzie: Could they take part in engagements like, for instance, Afghanistan or Libya?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Very much so. The model I have drawn up, though, has no heavy artillery or tanks.

Q506 Iain McKenzie: Would that be offering specialist units, or would it simply be the soldiers on the ground?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: It would be a combination of both. My model has no real specialism, except that there are some areas that I have suggested the Scottish defence forces would not necessarily wish to be involved in. Heavy armour is one of them.

Q507 Chair: I want to clarify that Scotland would not have any particular niche for combined forces; it would be a question of boots on the ground and a bit of whatever it is we had.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Yes, absolutely, unless a specific decision was taken that the Scottish defence forces would specialise, for example, in the medical field-"We will produce the world’s best field hospitals."

Q508 Chair: Something like that would be an add-on, wouldn’t it, because it is not built into this sort of model?

Richard Marsh: No, not currently.

Q509 Chair: Presumably the difficulty with a niche speciality like this is that it depends on the Government agreeing to hand it over.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Yes.

Q510 Chair: In which war was it that the Belgians would not give us bullets? Was that Iraq? If you have any alliance like that, you have to be certain that your chums are going to come if you get into a fight.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: You have to be sure that you have allies, absolutely.

Q511 Chair: I want to clarify the defence of Scottish waters. Are you suggesting that Scotland would be able to do that on its own, and would therefore have almost a niche capability driven by its own needs there?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: I am suggesting that Scotland-Richard will talk about the cost-could afford to have a navy that would be capable of defending its maritime interests: the oil and gas fields; the fishing grounds; the trade routes and so on and so forth. It depends on the number of operations you want to be able to do at the same time. It would be impossible to send any sort of major naval presence to operate off Lebanon at the same time, but that is common to all armed forces around the world. Even the Americans, I think, can do only two regional operations at the same time.

Q512 Chair: It used to be three wars at a time.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: It used to be six.

Chair: That is before my time. We turn now to the question of the Scottish army.

Q513 Lindsay Roy: We are most appreciative to you for this model, because otherwise we would have much less focus for our meeting. In terms of your model, can you remind us of the strength of the Scottish army, and how that compares with the current strength of the Scottish regiments?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: That is quite a difficult question. The Scottish army I have come up with is based on a two-brigade structure and a headquarters. The problem is that any military unit size like a brigade, a battalion or a division is essentially a headquarters on which a number of units can be hung, depending on the operation.

The classic idea of an ordinary brigade is a brigade headquarters, three combat battalions-whether they are armoured or infantry-plus supporting troops, but it can be more than that. When I went through Staff College as a student, and indeed when I taught there, the maximum number of units that one could attach to a brigade headquarters was always thought to be five. When we talk about brigade strength and people say, "How big is a brigade?", the answer is not quite, "How long is a piece of string?", but it could be anything from 3,500 people to as many as 7,500, depending on the purpose and the tasks.

The model I have come up with assumes an average size of brigade. I have been fairly consistent over the years in saying that that would amount to an army of approximately 12,500.

Q514 Lindsay Roy: How does that compare with the current arrangements?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: The Royal Regiment of Scotland is currently five battalions. That is about 2,500. With the Scots Dragoon Guards that would be 3,000. With the 19 Field Regiment it would be 3,500-plus. It would be larger than units that you would necessarily say would be the Scottish part of the UK forces, I think.

Q515 Jim McGovern: I am sorry; I did not quite get that. What was the answer to the question?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: The answer is that I have not made that direct comparison. I could do but I have not done it.

Chair: It would be helpful if you did.

Lindsay Roy: It would be immensely helpful.

Q516 Chair: Again, this is coming back to the question of trying to clarify for people in Scotland what the situation is just now, what the impact of separation might be and what the choices and differences are.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: I shall certainly try and get that. Again, I may have to go to the MOD for some of that information.

Chair: Tell them you have a note from me.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Yes, I will.

Q517 Lindsay Roy: Can you tell us about the proportion of regulars and reservists?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: That is really just in my own head. I had in mind one infantry brigade, which would consist of regular troops that would be deployable overseas if need be, and one brigade of reserve or Territorial Army troops, which would primarily be a domestic force. Other people have commented-Professor Hew Strachan being one of them-that it would be better to mix the brigades to have a combination of regular and TA, and I think he is probably correct about that.

Q518 Lindsay Roy: How does that compare with the current provision?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: In Scotland?

Lindsay Roy: Yes.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: I think there is only one actual brigade now in Scotland. It has never been an operationally deployable brigade. It has always been an administrative brigade: 51 Brigade and 52 Brigade.

Q519 Jim McGovern: When you talk about brigades and battalions, what we are trying to determine here is numbers and people.

Lindsay Roy: Would there be more reservists?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: There would be a greater emphasis on reservists.

Q520 Lindsay Roy: By roughly how much?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: I don’t know. I have not counted it. At the moment there is no Scottish army. All we have is the Scottish contribution to the UK Army. Historically, over the past 20 years, something in the order of 13% of personnel are Scottish. If we take the strength of the armed services as being 102,000, going down to 82,000, currently my model of 12,500 fits in quite neatly with that 10% to 13% of the UK armed forces being the Scottish contribution. There is no Scottish army because a large number of those individuals are spread across arms and services that do not have a distinctive Scottish identity.

Q521 Lindsay Roy: As you will be aware, there are very strong attachments, legacies and identities to the Scottish regiments. There are huge issues currently about them and the retention of the Golden Thread and so on.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: I have campaigned on their behalf many times.

Q522 Lindsay Roy: How would you define a Scottish regiment? Is it by name, historical recruitment area or current base? Have you given any thought to that?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: No. I am in favour of a return to the traditional Scottish regimental structure, which is geographically-based, rather than having five battalions of the Royal Regiment of Scotland, as it is now. I was very much in favour of the six, traditional, individual regiments that had territorial recruiting patterns. They are historical in nature and I think formed a large part of the identity and ethos of those individual regiments.

Q523 Lindsay Roy: Can you tell us how expensive it is to train a full-time soldier as opposed to a reservist-a regular as opposed to a reservist? What kind of differential is there?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: I don’t know the answer to that.

Q524 Lindsay Roy: Again, it would be helpful if we could have that information.

Richard Marsh: We had a figure in our model that was based on some MOD data. It was £49,000 direct costs for each service personnel. We do not have the data to hand on reservists versus full-time service personnel.

Q525 Lindsay Roy: Can you envisage Scotland ever introducing conscription, because there are issues at the moment about the number of people signing up? Indeed, I understand they have Fijians in some of the Scottish regiments, for example.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: The Royal Regiment of Scotland-and I am speaking in general terms-consists of five battalions or units, but it has sufficient manpower for only four. That may be driving certain aspects of the current review that the MOD is undertaking. Conscription is very unpopular within the armed services because it is a case of unwilling recruits in many cases. It is far better to have one volunteer than 10 pressed men.

Q526 Lindsay Roy: I understand that. The figures that I have here are that each of the regiments is undermanned.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: That is correct.

Q527 Lindsay Roy: Would that change on separation?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: I do not know. When it comes to an independent Scotland setting up its own armed forces, and particularly setting up its army, one would assume that to a certain extent those Scottish servicemen and women who are in the UK armed forces would have the option to transfer to the Scottish defence forces, but what proportion that would be I do not think anybody knows. It should be easy enough to find out; we need only ask them.

Q528 Lindsay Roy: That is something that should be done in terms of some research.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Absolutely. Defence Analytical Services Agency does that sort of stuff all the time, but maybe that question is one that it would shy away from.

Q529 Lindsay Roy: We have some anecdotal evidence that some of the soldiers in current brigades would wish to retain membership of the British Army in the UK.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Absolutely; I am sure they would. The figure we talk about among ourselves is that about 50% might transfer, but that is just speculation.

Q530 Lindsay Roy: Informed speculation.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: The pattern tends to be that when you are young and single, and full of vim and vigour, you want an adventure. When you are married and settled down with children and a spouse who is not keen to see you disappear for six months at a time, you are more likely to want-

Q531 Chair: I did say earlier that this would be a Home Guard and not a Dad’s Army.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: That is the danger.

Q532 Chair: In fact, you are pointing us towards the idea that it would be a Dad’s Army.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: There is always a danger that, when you have a domestically-based armed force without any expeditionary function, it tends to become populated by people who, through personal circumstances, wish to be more geographically settled.

Chair: Captain Mainwaring, if I may say.

Q533 Jim McGovern: I was just going to say, Chair, that Stuart mentioned earlier that he was being speculative. I think probably almost every answer you have given has been speculative.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Indeed.

Q534 Jim McGovern: I realise it is not an exact science, but every question that you have been asked you have ducked or have said, "I can’t quite answer that", "I don’t know", or, "I must speculate." To be honest, I am not quite sure why you are here.

Chair: Because he is all there is. To be fair, you are understandably unclear about a number of issues, and the Scottish Government are even more vague. You are the only person who has done much work on this.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: There are issues that I cannot be clear on because there is a vacuum.

Lindsay Roy: I think we should be clear that your contribution has been immensely helpful.

Jim McGovern: Not for me.

Q535 Chair: You have only heard the answers that both of our guests are unable to provide. This depends, as with so many things, on the Scottish Government getting off the fence and telling us the premises on which some of these things would be based.

I want to pick up one element of this. At the moment we have the British Army. It has been suggested that having a separate Scotland would not diminish our Britishness. It seems to me that a substantial element of Britishness is actually the British Army and the pride that people take in the British armed forces. I find it difficult to see how breaking them up would enhance Britishness. Is that a reasonable point to take?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: It is a very reasonable point. Clearly, if there was that sort of political break-up, the UK armed forces would lose a sizeable proportion of their current inventory and assets as a result. It would not enhance the rest of the UK’s military capability. It might also not enhance the reputation of the British armed forces. I don’t really know whether that would be the case.

Q536 Chair: One of the points I think Jim is unhappy about, and understandably so, is this question: under your scenario, how many of the existing regiments would remain? At the moment we have the 1st to 5th Battalions and the Royal Regiment of Scotland. I am not clear whether, under the force structure you are proposing for a separate Scotland, we would retain the Borderers, the Highland Fusiliers, the Black Watch, the Highlanders, the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders and the Scots Guards inside a separate Scottish army. I know that you and a number of other commentators have said that that is the wrong way to look at it, and that you should be looking at what you want to do and then structuring accordingly, but we are where we are and people will want to know. Does a separate Scotland mean the abolition of the Black Watch?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: No, not necessarily. I have drawn up a model that has six units, one of which is armoured. That leaves space for five infantry-based units, which fits in neatly with the current constitution of the Royal Regiment of Scotland. The answer is no, there is no need for the Black Watch to disappear. Some of those units in my model, which are currently regular battalions, might be territorial battalions.

Q537 Chair: Let me be clear about this. The five battalions would all retain their names under your scenario.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: That is the way I would do it.

Q538 Chair: But they would not necessarily be full time; some might be territorials.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: That is the case, yes.

Q539 Chair: And they might not retain their present numbers.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: My preference would be for them to revert to their historical regimental entities.

Q540 Chair: When I said "numbers", I meant numbers of personnel.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: The same numbers of personnel in general terms, yes.

Q541 Chair: I want to clarify in terms of the Scots Guards, would they also be coming to-

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Not in my model, no.

Q542 Chair: The Royal Scots Dragoon Guards.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Yes.

Q543 Chair: They would.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Yes.

Q544 Chair: But not with heavy tanks.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Not with heavy tanks.

Q545 Chair: Do they have heavy tanks just now?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: They have in Germany, yes, in Fallingbostel.

Q546 Chair: So they would be moved to light reconnaissance vehicles.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Absolutely, if they still exist, because obviously the current speculation is that they will be disbanded in situ.

Q547 Chair: We will cross that bridge later on. The other two are the two artillery regiments-the Highland Gunners and the Lowland Gunners. If I remember correctly, you would only retain the Highland Gunners.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Yes. The Lowland Gunners have been disbanded.

Q548 Chair: Have they? That must have happened since our briefing was drawn up.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Very recently.

Q549 Chair: I find it difficult to believe that our staff would have briefed us incorrectly, unless it took 20 years to come from the MOD, in which case it was out of date by the time it arrived here.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: I think they laid up their colours a fortnight ago.

Q550 Chair: Goodness me; well, there you are. It just shows how quickly things move.

I want to be clear about the question of choice. There are Fijians in the Scottish regiments, providing them with one of the best seven-a-side rugby teams available, obviously. There is a substantial complement of Fijians and other Commonwealth nationalities in these regiments. Would they transfer or would they have a choice? Have you thought that through?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: I cannot see why they would not transfer.

Q551 Chair: I want to go back to a question we have discussed with the others and your estimate that 50% of people in the Scottish regiments might want to remain. I got the impression from some of our previous speakers that almost anybody with any ambition would not want to stay in the Scottish armed forces because they were essentially going to be a Home Guard, as we discussed earlier. There is your point that people who want adventure-and indeed a career-would remain in the British Army. Just as more people, as I understand it, from the Republic of Ireland joined the British armed forces than are in the Irish armed forces, your 50% scenario-even if it is the end-of-the-war elderly-is still over-optimistic. How would you respond to that?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: You might be right; I just don’t know. I think there is work to be done in asking Scottish servicemen and women in the UK armed services whether they would transfer on independence. I do not think that work has been done.

Q552 Chair: We will want to pick that up.

I want to come back to the question of conscription. The nationalists have said on a number of occasions that they want to model themselves on, and to be much more like, the Scandinavians, who do have conscription. I want to press you a little on that. Would your model with more emphasis on reservists be more attractive with conscription? Presumably it would be less costly. If you have limited functions with the Home Guard aspect of it, is that much more cost-effectively done with a bit of conscription and a higher proportion of reservists, as you say?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Undoubtedly it would be less expensive, but whether conscription is a good thing per se is another matter altogether. From the armed forces’ point of view, conscription is not seen as a good thing. They would rather have volunteers.

Q553 Chair: Given that Scots throughout the armed forces would be given the opportunity to fight and potentially to die for Scotland, would it not appear reasonable that they should actually get a vote in the referendum?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: That is an argument that I have heard.

Q554 Chair: It is an argument I have just made.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Personally, yes, but I am aware from my military career that voting in UK elections was virtually impossible until comparatively recently. It would need a sea change in attitude within the military as a whole.

Q555 Chair: If we will the ends, we would have then to will the means. It just struck me that it seemed bizarre that Fijians in Scottish regiments based in Scotland would be able to vote on whether or not Scotland should become separate, but that Scots based in Germany who might be asked to die for Scotland would not have a vote. That is one of the issues that we will explore.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: That is fair enough. I would be in favour of military personnel serving abroad in Scottish regiments having a vote.

Q556 Chair: Not just in Scottish regiments, surely. Presumably every Scot would be given the chance to relocate to Scottish forces. There will be Scots in engineering.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Very much so, yes, and in the other armed services.

Q557 Chair: So they also presumably would-

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Yes.

Chair: Could we turn to the question of the navy?

Q558 Mr Reid: Could you outline for us what you think a Scottish navy would comprise of in terms of ships?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Yes. Again, in very general terms, I have drawn up a model. Obviously I am not a naval officer, but I have taken advice. It comes up with a navy of about 20 to 25 ships overall, comprising maybe two frigates, six to eight offshore patrol vessels, half a dozen mine countermeasure vessels and various other smaller minor vessels, which I have not gone into any detail on. Do you want me to compare that? That compares with the Danish navy, which has 70 vessels-I think they call it ships, boats and vessels-and the Irish naval service, which has eight ships plus one or two smaller craft, so it is somewhere in between.

Q559 Mr Reid: In terms of naval bases, you have suggested that Scotland needs two. Can you perhaps explain why?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: From a purely military perspective, having all your eggs in one basket in terms of military assets is probably unwise. In addition to the established UK naval base in Faslane, another at Rosyth would be perhaps appropriate.

Q560 Mr Reid: Have you worked out the cost of reinstating Rosyth?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: No, I have not.

Q561 Mr Reid: Why did you suggest that Scotland does not need any submarines?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Mainly because of the expense. Again, this comes from advice from naval colleagues. Had there been conventional diesel-powered submarines in the Royal Navy inventory, perhaps the cost of that would have been more acceptable, but the advice I got was that any thought of having an Astute class nuclear-powered submarine, for example, would be just too expensive for a small nation like Scotland.

Q562 Mr Reid: Even for a diesel-powered one.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: A diesel-powered one might be feasible, yes, but anything that is nuclear powered is not.

Q563 Chair: The British Navy does not have any diesel-powered submarines, does it?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: It has no diesel-powered submarines left, no.

Q564 Mr Reid: If an independent Scottish navy wanted to acquire diesel-powered submarines, would it be feasible for it to set up its own industry to build them at the shipyards, or would it have to buy them from elsewhere?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: I would suspect that they would be sourced from elsewhere.

Q565 Mr Reid: What role would you see the Scottish navy fulfilling?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Policing sea and trade routes is one, as is the defence and protection of oil and gas installations in the North sea and off Shetland, if Shetland is indeed part of an independent Scotland. What else have we got? There are mine clearance purposes and so on and so forth.

Q566 Mr Reid: Would you see the role of the Scottish navy as purely defensive within Scottish territorial waters, or do you see any major role for it?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: My model has an element built in that would allow for some sort of contribution to extra-territorial military operations, if the Government of the day chose to do that, but it would not be a substantial contribution.

Q567 Mr Reid: Have you done any calculations on the naval personnel and onshore personnel that would be required to support the Scottish navy in comparison with the number of jobs the Royal Navy has in Scotland?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: No, I have not. I have a figure of about 1,500 to 2,000 personnel for the Scottish navy, but I have not compared that with the current numbers of naval personnel in Scotland.

Q568 Mr Reid: What about staff in the dockyards?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Nor have I done any work on that.

Q569 Iain McKenzie: I want to go back to submarines. We took evidence earlier that suggested to us that submarines would be ideal for Scotland to protect its shores, especially in the oil industry. Reference was made to the South African navy, which puts its submarine fleet to good use in that respect instead of surface vessels. You suggested that, obviously, they would not be nuclear but diesel-powered, off-the-shelf submarines. They tend to source theirs from Germany, which produces these off-the-shelf diesel submarines. Again, would that be an option for Scotland? Would that indicate a low-spec, low-tech arm of the navy?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Yes. I do not think there is anything fundamental that would stop a Scottish navy having conventionally powered submarines of that nature, if the Government of the day wished to make the expenditure on them. All I am saying is that I have not included them in my model.

Q570 Chair: You indicated that you did not think it was helpful to have just one naval base in Faslane on the basis of having all your eggs in one basket. I would have thought a bigger argument against Faslane is that it is on the wrong side. If you had to have one base, you would want to have it at Rosyth anyway. Presumably most of your ships in those circumstances would be sailing out of Rosyth, would they not, whereas Faslane was essentially a residual base.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Again, I am not a naval officer, and I am definitely not a naval expert. Scotland looks both ways. It looks to Ireland, the Atlantic and the Americas, with the trading routes across there, and it also looks to the east. I think there is an equal requirement for the ability to deploy naval forces from both sides of the country.

Q571 Chair: Surely the sort of scenario that we were discussing earlier on about possible threats emphasised the North sea, the Arctic and so on. We have never touched on Scotland as an Atlantic power in a sense.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: No.

Q572 Chair: Therefore, we have not looked at that westward-facing aspect at all. Am I missing something here?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: No, because I have not mentioned it, and therefore the omission is mine, if there is an omission there. It just seems to me sensible to make the best use of an existing naval base on the Clyde.

Q573 Chair: I understand that. You have got it, and after separation you are going to inherit it, so you might as well use it because you are going to be billed for it in terms of the allocation of resources. I just wanted to be clear that, in a sense, Rosyth would be the No. 1 base and Faslane would possibly be residual.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: That could be the case in time, yes. A certain amount of work has to be carried out at both naval bases, as I understand it, but Rosyth needs to be reinstated as a naval base because it is not a naval base any more, and I do not think it has been a naval base since the 1990s.

Q574 Chair: Do we have any costings for what that might be potentially?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: I am looking at the costings man.

Richard Marsh: I do not have them on me right now. We did not put them in the formal report, but we did have a little think about it.

Q575 Chair: Is it possible that you could let us have that?

Richard Marsh: Yes.

Q576 Chair: If a Scottish Government were strapped for cash and wanted to spend money on something else, would operating the Scottish navy out of a single base at Faslane be feasible?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Of course it would be feasible.

Q577 Chair: It is undesirable for reasons you have indicated, but it is doable. It just seems to me that reinstating Rosyth is, as it were, a policy option that people might decide not to proceed with in the absence of any immediate threat, because they might have other things that they want to spend the money on.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Yes; agreed.

Q578 Mr Reid: I want to pick up a point that the Chair alluded to earlier. Most of the assets that Scotland would want to defend would be on the east coast-the fishing grounds and the oil rigs. If your only naval base is at Faslane on the west, obviously it is a long journey round the Mull of Kintyre and all the way round Scotland.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Absolutely.

Q579 Mr Reid: Would you therefore need ships permanently on patrol in the North sea to counteract the fact that it would take an awfully long time to get there from their home port?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Ideally, yes. This applies to the UK naval presence at the moment. When the Russian aircraft carrier recently appeared in the Moray Firth, the naval asset had to come from Portsmouth. I think your answer is absolutely right; yes, it would be helpful to have something closer to hand.

Q580 Mr Reid: Take the scenario that there is a terrorist incident on an oil rig.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: That would probably be a special forces job, I would think.

Q581 Mr Reid: Do you have any idea how long it would take to get a ship there from Faslane?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: It would take longer than it would from Rosyth-definitely.

Q582 Chair: That is why we brought you here-to give us these sorts of insights.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: I think that would be special forces. We have not talked about special forces and, again, I am not the expert.

Chair: We are proposing to come on to that in a moment.

Q583 Mr Reid: This is probably unfair because you are not a naval officer but an Army officer, but how would the navy operate? Would it mean that ships would be permanently anchored in the North sea and sailing up and down?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: They might be permanently based in Rosyth, for example, and have patrol patterns that saw them going into the North , doing a patrol and coming back as much as in conventional naval operations, but if they do not have a global purpose, their time at sea would probably be less.

Q584 Chair: If you are guarding against Arctic difficulties, would it not make sense to reinstate something at Scapa Flow or somewhere like that?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: The yet-to-be-published and still-being-worked-on paper does go into the number of naval bases like Loch Ewe, Scapa Flow and Moray Firth that have historically been used for a British naval presence. So the answer is yes, but I do not think there is anything left at Scapa Flow.

Q585 Chair: Is there not?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: I do not think so.

Q586 Chair: I want to come back to the question of the number of ships. The number of ships and the way in which they are divided up has all got to be dependent upon the break-up discussions and haggling. There is no new build envisaged.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: It is not built into the model with ships. There is no new build envisaged in that, but obviously there would have to be new build in the fullness of time, and Richard has built that into his costings.

Q587 Chair: There would have to be new purchase. In a sense I represent the Govan shipyards. They are not going to hang about waiting until a Scottish navy decides, 20 years down the line, to build some minesweepers. They will be shut long before then. We will come on to that in a moment, but I just wanted to be clear about that.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Yes.

Q588 Chair: Am I right in thinking that the first option, if you had more money to spend on capital items for a Scottish navy, would be submarines, or is that something that you want to seek other advice on?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: I think I would need to take advice on that because it would depend very much on what the foreign and defence policy priorities of the Government of the day would be. I have speculated enough.

Chair: We do not know that, and I do not want to get you rebuked by my colleague for not being able to tell us the unknowable.

Q589 Iain McKenzie: You specified the number of vessels. Is that the optimum number to defend Scotland, or would there be a number of ships below that that could accommodate the defence of Scotland?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: I have deliberately designed the model to be at the modest end of the spectrum. I think that going below that would not be wise.

Q590 Iain McKenzie: Going below that would seriously question the ability to defend.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: I think so, yes.

Q591 Mr Reid: I want to pick up on something. You said that a terrorist attack on an oil rig would be a special forces job.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Yes.

Q592 Mr Reid: Would Scotland have the resources and numbers to have special forces in the right numbers to be able to counteract that sort of attack?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: I think the answer is yes. Again, I am not the expert in this. It was eloquently covered at the Edinburgh conference by my good friend and colleague Clive Fairweather, who is ex-Special Air Services, and has considerable knowledge of special forces operations and also cyber warfare. He would be the man to speak to, but I can tell you that his script-because I have a copy of his script-said that, as a minimum, an independent Scotland would need a special forces squadron of in excess of 75 personnel, which would take up to three years to set up, and, to quote Clive Fairweather, might have to go "as far as the Foreign Legion" to obtain suitable recruits.

Q593 Mr Reid: How does that 75 compare with the number of special forces that the UK has at present?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: There are two special forces regiments-one regular and one TA. It would be about an eighth of the size.

Q594 Chair: Since we have touched on special forces, maybe we can deal with that now. I am intrigued by the idea that we will have to approach the Foreign Legion.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: I am quoting Clive Fairweather.

Q595 Chair: We have a combination of Dad’s Army and the Foreign Legion.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: I am quoting Clive.

Q596 David Mowat: On special forces, what do you think Scotland would end up doing under your model?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: I think it would end up setting up and training its own special forces squadrons of somewhere between 75 and 100 trained personnel, whose primary purpose would be protection of the oil rigs and protection against other terrorists.

Q597 David Mowat: Is that similar to how Norway protects its oil rigs?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: I do not know the answer to that question.

Q598 David Mowat: But that would give you an idea of how big it would need to be if you knew how big Norway’s was.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: I do not know the answer to that.

Q599 David Mowat: So your model has 100 special forces in it.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Yes. I should say that it is still a work in progress.

Q600 David Mowat: That would be an SAS or SBS type of thing.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: An SAS-SBS type of organisation.

Q601 David Mowat: The question that arises with a thing of that size is that you must lose a lot of economy of scale in the training that you would need.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Yes, but the training would not necessarily have to take place in Scotland and be exclusive to any other organisation. Quite a lot of joint training goes on in military circles. It would not be unusual or unheard of for much of the training of Scotland’s armed services, including special forces, to be done elsewhere, if the facilities in the country don’t exist.

Q602 David Mowat: Are you implying it could be like a company of Hereford, so there could just be a Scottish company?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Exactly; yes, it could.

Q603 Chair: Let me be clear on that. We are talking about Scottish special forces training elsewhere when Scotland has potentially just walked out of NATO and thrown UK nuclear weapons out of Scotland without giving the rest of the UK time to build an alternative. Do you think that is likely?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: It is not likely, but that is the way that one would have to train one’s special forces initially.

Q604 David Mowat: It is like an outsourcing model; it is effectively that, being a friendly country.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: It is an outsourcing model, but they would obviously be under the command and direction of the Government.

Q605 David Mowat: You could extend that principle to nearly everything we are talking about today.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Yes, and I have done.

Q606 David Mowat: You could literally say to the UK residual, "We will pay you 2% of our GDP to defend us."

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: That is the other thing, and there has been debate about it, but the thing that was difficult with the model that the Scottish National party was suggesting-devo-max or indy-light-is that Scotland would have devolved responsibility for everything except foreign and defence policy, and would buy bits of that as it required it. But there would be conflicts of interest when it came to deployment of forces that included Scots forces, if the Scottish Government had a-

Q607 David Mowat: Also, if you have an outsourcing model like you have described and you are buying in things, you cannot do that if you are not in NATO. That would beggar belief, would it not?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: I think it would be unusual, yes.

Q608 David Mowat: Well, it just could not happen.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: It might not make much sense.

Q609 David Mowat: Do you think that model is something they might be thinking of, though?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: I don’t know what they are thinking of.

Q610 David Mowat: If they did that, it takes away the whole diseconomy of scale stuff, doesn’t it, that otherwise Scotland is going to have in spades with the sort of proposals that you are putting forward?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Yes, that would be the case, but I don’t know what the plans are.

Chair: Nobody knows, you see. That is the difficulty we have at the moment.

Q611 David Mowat: The part of defence spending that is actually increasing in the UK is the whole area around terrorism, cyber defence, GCHQ and all that stuff. How do you see Scotland handling that?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: With great difficulty, because to have an effective cyber warfare defence, one has to look at replicating what the UK has at the moment at GCHQ.

Q612 David Mowat: It would take a bit to build GCHQ in Scotland, wouldn’t it?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Absolutely. Again I would say, without dropping him in it, that Clive Fairweather is the man who could wax eloquent on these particular topics. I am sure that if time and space permitted-

Chair: He might very well be a future victim.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: I think he would be quite a willing victim.

Q613 David Mowat: I am thinking out loud but, presumably, whatever it is covertly that GCHQ does inside the UK, it currently does for Scotland as well.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Absolutely, yes.

Q614 David Mowat: The question would arise, therefore, of whether Scotland wishes it no longer to do that for it, or whether it would pay for whatever it is that it does and pay for the intelligence.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: I think an independent Scotland would be very keen to continue that facility.

Q615 Chair: But why should the rest of the UK wish to offer that facility to a separate Scotland that has just withdrawn from NATO and thrown out nuclear weapons?

David Mowat: I guess they would pay.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: I don’t know, but I suppose one could see a scenario where you say, "You keep our Trident up there and we will give you your intelligence."

Q616 David Mowat: Yes, or, "You will pay for it in some way."

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Yes.

Chair: Could we touch on the question of the air force?

Q617 Jim McGovern: The air force is a particular interest of mine. My father served in the RAF and my mother was a WAAF. My father-in-law was a rear gunner with Bomber Command during the second world war. Going back a wee bit about people wishing to join up, I think I need to say that the majority of people I know who wish to join the armed forces would want to join a British armed forces rather than a Scottish armed forces. How would you see a Scottish air force and how strong would that be? How many aeroplanes and helicopters would there be?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: That is a very good question. Given the tasks that I have suggested a Scottish air force might wish to carry out, such as defence of airspace, maritime reconnaissance, ground support and so on, I have come up with a model, as I have already mentioned, that has 18 advanced trainers-Hawks-which have a joint operational capability; three or four maritime reconnaissance aircraft, of which of course there are none in Scotland at the moment; six to eight Hercules transport aircraft, of which there are none in Scotland at the moment; six Chinook helicopters, of which there are none in Scotland at the moment; and six Sea King aircraft helicopters, of which there might be two in Scotland at the moment. The answer is that there are not the appropriate assets in Scotland at the moment to constitute an independent Scottish air force.

Q618 Jim McGovern: In terms of the Scottish air force, it would actually increase if Scotland was separated from the rest of the UK.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Would it increase overall? I have also suggested that we would have no requirement for the Typhoon in Scotland that is up in Lossiemouth at the moment.

Q619 Jim McGovern: Does what you have outlined include combat aircraft?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: That is combat aircraft, yes.

Q620 Jim McGovern: For clarification, there would be a greater air force in Scotland post-separation than there is now.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: It would be a larger air force in terms of aircraft numbers, but the types of aircraft would be radically different.

Q621 Jim McGovern: On the subject of fast jets-and maybe this is a question for Richard rather than you, Stuart-is your reason for not including them based solely on financial reasons?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: I will take the first part of the question.

Jim McGovern: Give Richard a chance.

Richard Marsh: It is probably a slightly unfair question. My understanding is that with the way the model has been put together-and I keep coming back to what Stuart said at the very beginning-this is what Scotland would need to defend itself. My understanding is that the Hawks are in there because that is what Scotland would need to defend itself. With regard to anything more, looking at fast jets-I think we mentioned Tornados and so on-it might not necessarily be what Scotland would absolutely need, though it might want it. Going through the figures, the fast jets are certainly more expensive to maintain than the Hawks, but that is not really why they were chosen.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: From an operating point of view, I do not see how a small country like Scotland with limited military aspirations-I have assumed that, in the absence of foreign policy-would require Typhoon jets unless it wanted to make a specific contribution to some wider alliance, in which case the Government of the day could choose to go down that path. I do not think an independent Scotland needs aircraft like the Typhoon, which is hugely sophisticated and much more expensive than the Hawk aircraft.

Q622 Jim McGovern: What would a Scottish air force do if Russian military aircraft continued their current practice of coming up to the edge of Scottish airspace?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Intercept, shadow and warn away.

Q623 Jim McGovern: Intercept?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Intercept slower.

Q624 Jim McGovern: Does that mean shoot them down?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: No. It would be as current RAF practice is at the moment. In days gone by, it was common practice for the Soviet Union and some of the Warsaw Pact allies to fly aircraft towards British airspace to see how quickly the Royal Air Force would react. It was part of that cat-and-mouse game. There was no malicious intent. Exactly the same sort of thing would happen with an independent Scottish air force should the same sort of scenario develop.

Q625 Chair: Surely all the Russians need to do is send something that is faster than a Hawk and the Scottish jets just cannot keep up.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: That could be the case, yes, but they tend to send over reconnaissance aircraft like the turboprop Bear and whatever its modern equivalent is. It would not necessarily be the case that they would send over their fastest supersonic aircraft.

Q626 Chair: No, but if they wanted to play cat and mouse, the best way is to send up something that is quicker and then move about. The Scottish air force would be in pandemonium.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: That would be correct.

Q627 Chair: They would have absolutely no idea whatsoever.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Yes.

Q628 Chair: Unless of course the regions wanted to co-operate, but that would depend upon whether Scotland was in NATO.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Yes.

Q629 Chair: Presumably the RAF would not intervene in any of that.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Unless, of course, the rest of the UK wants to feel secure about its airspace being penetrated from the north.

Q630 Chair: It would not be its airspace; it would be Scottish airspace.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Yes, but it would very quickly become UK airspace.

Q631 Chair: In which case it could intercept. Fast interceptors could be hovering at the last turn above Carlisle-I think the expression is "loitering". They could be loitering above Carlisle waiting for the Russians to dodge their way past the sleepy Hawks.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Yes, and come straight down the M74.

Q632 Chair: Absolutely. Now you are taking this too far. It would be entirely feasible for the RAF to maintain security over the rest of the UK’s airspace by having jets up to Carlisle and then just leaving the rest of Scotland exposed.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: It would be, but it would not keep the intruders off UK airspace, because you would basically be intercepting them on the border.

Q633 Chair: What is the border of Scottish airspace when you meet England? Surely it is directly above the plane above the border? In those circumstances, the RAF would be intercepting them at the border of UK airspace.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Unless it had permission to cross.

Q634 Jim McGovern: Chair, you have touched upon my next question. If Scotland was outside NATO, would it need to negotiate an agreement with England or other nations for air protection?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Undoubtedly, yes.

Q635 Jim McGovern: That was good. That was a definitive answer.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: I am trying not to be speculative.

Q636 Jim McGovern: If there is a Scottish air force, would it continue to rely on the RAF in the short and long term, and how long would this transition take?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Transition from the Royal Air Force being based in Scottish air bases to the Scottish air force being based in Scottish air bases-I do not know the answer to that. It would not be a short-term thing; it would probably be a period of years.

Q637 Jim McGovern: Does your model take into account the cost of finding maritime reconnaissance capability to replace the cancelled Nimrods that were to be based at RAF Leuchars?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: The report is quite clear that there is no maritime reconnaissance capability in Scotland. A maritime reconnaissance capability would have to be sourced from outside Scotland, purchasing off the shelf. You have not seen my paper because it is not finished yet, but I have suggested something like the P-3 Orion, which is a bit long in the tooth now. I think the Spanish have an equivalent aircraft. They would have to be purchased.

Q638 Jim McGovern: Do you envisage it being from England?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: England would be the obvious place to go initially.

Q639 Pamela Nash: First of all, apologies that I was not here at the beginning. I have the best excuse ever-I was hosting the Dalai Lama-but apologies that I couldn’t be here.

Chair: I hate namedroppers, as I said to the Queen last week.

Pamela Nash: I was going to say that the Chair is one of the worst for that.

I want to be clear. The language around the equipment that we have in Scotland at the moment in England and Wales is quite dangerous. As part of the UK, doesn’t Scotland have access to all equipment that we have in our armed forces within the UK?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: As part of the UK, yes, obviously. Scotland as part of the UK is defended by the UK’s defence inventory. Therefore, if there was a threat to Scotland as part of the UK, the UK defence forces would be the appropriate response to that.

Q640 Pamela Nash: Putting it simply for the person reading this in the newspapers tomorrow, in a Scotland that has left the UK, if we did not have Typhoon jets and we did not have the level of equipment we have at the moment, whether that is based in England or in Scotland, aren’t the people of Scotland going to be in more danger and more exposed to international threats?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Not necessarily, because the model that I have come up with covers all those threats, as far as I can see, but it is not to the level of sophistication and quantity of numbers that are currently in the UK.

Q641 Pamela Nash: I apologise if you covered this before I came in, but I take it that that is on current threats. How do you assess what the threats would be to a Scotland that has left the United Kingdom?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: It is almost impossible to say, so one can take only an educated best guess at what that might be. Arguably, you can say the same about the UK at the moment in terms of territorial defence of the UK land mass. The preamble to the 2010 Strategic Defence and Security Review acknowledges that.

Pamela Nash: I am certainly not supporting that either.

Richard Marsh: I would like to add to what Stuart has said. From the way he has put the model together, part of the reason why there is a more modest set of equipment in the army is because he was envisaging it being a regional power, so there are a lot of things that simply would not need to be done, and would not be factored into the defence of Scotland.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: I would see an independent Scotland as having a regional focus for its defence and foreign policy, rather than the global focus that the UK has at the moment, arguably.

Q642 Pamela Nash: Surely, though, that is for overseas operations. It is not about Scotland being attacked, which might seem unlikely in the current global climate, although history tells us that that is not always foreseeable.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: An independent Scotland would not have the military facilities to contribute to overseas expeditions that the UK has. That is quite clear.

Chair: A vote in the House is due in a moment, and David will be unable to come back afterwards because of another commitment. We will therefore let him come in with his point, and then the rest of us can come back after the vote.

Q643 David Mowat: It seems to me that the key question in all this discussion is the number is in terms of percentage of GDP, because that drives everything. You have said 1.2%, whereas the UK right now is saying 2.7% declining to 2.2%, or something like that. You are assuming it is half.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Yes.

Q644 David Mowat: Why have you done that? That drives everything that we are talking about, really.

Richard Marsh: I think it is the other way round. What we have done is say, "What do you need to defend yourself and how much would that cost?" We get the number coming out that it is about 1.2% of GDP.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: If you want to do any more than that, that is an option.

Q645 David Mowat: Let me challenge you a little bit on that, because that depends on how you choose to defend yourself and what you envisage that "defending yourself" means. To some people "defending yourself" might mean, "We are going to be like Ireland. We are going to be neutral, and if something really bad happens we will just assume that the rest of the world will fix it." That is one defence policy.

Another defence policy is, "We are going to punch above our weight", and all that that means, which is arguably what the UK tries to do. In between that you try and get to the number. That is a judgment. A future Scottish Government could take any of those positions.

Richard Marsh: They could. We had a slightly longer list of countries and have presented a summary of them. You are absolutely right that there is a whole host of ways in which you could approach this and say, "I want the defence of my country to look as follows for the following reasons," and they can be very different for different countries. At the conference that Stuart referenced, we were thinking in the second half that what you need to defend Scotland is not the way you would go about it. You very much need to prioritise the very strong presence of the defence industries in Scotland and think about how you hold on to those, and then think about what you could extract from that to defend Scotland. You would get very different models of how you would defend Scotland if you went down each path. What I am suggesting is that how much that accounts for your country’s GDP is just a product of that.

Q646 David Mowat: But you have taken a number that is lower than, Norway’s for example, have you not?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Yes, but the number came out of my model, not the other way round. I drew up the model and then asked Richard to cost it. The major flaw in my previous paper was that there were no costings.

Q647 David Mowat: The Scottish Government could say, "Actually, in our view we do need submarines for all sorts of reasons," and therefore you would put those into your model and the numbers would be are different.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Yes, and those views have been made to me already by various people.

Q648 David Mowat: Similarly, they might take the view, "We need more special forces because we are going to be good at that. We don’t need 120; we need 300 because that is what we wish to do."

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Yes.

Q649 David Mowat: It is quite fluid in that respect.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Yes.

Chair: To be fair, you did outline earlier that this was the minimalist position and that you then could have a number of policy options that you add on. It becomes à la carte. You have to have a core, but then you have à la carte to add on. That seems a perfectly reasonable perspective.

Q650 David Mowat: Yes, it is. The other thing that strikes me about this is that even if Scotland were to spend exactly the same percentage as UK residual, as we now call it, there would be an overall loss of capability because of the fact that you are losing economies of scale-you have diseconomies of scale.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Yes, and losing a level of sophistication.

Q651 David Mowat: Even if we were to be joined at the hip-RUK and Scotland-and to do everything together, the very fact that you go down the route you have postulated, even if the spending was identical, would mean an overall loss of capability because of the diseconomies of scale.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: I think so, yes.

Q652 Chair: I want to turn back to a couple of questions about the air force. I can understand the point about 18 Hawk jets and having a certain number always in the air. I understand the point about trainers to train the people flying the Hawk jets. However, I did not quite understand the six to eight Hercules. They are presumably to move people about Scotland.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Yes. The Hercules is a tactical lift aircraft that can move troops or be part of a military expedition abroad and so on. It is just part of the lift capability by air for military purposes.

Q653 Chair: But do you need that in Scotland when you have a perfectly good rail service? If you are having things abroad that are done in conjunction with others, presumably somebody else supplies that, because you will be going abroad only as part of a coalition of the willing? I would have thought that the Hercules, under a home defence or Home Guard model, would spend most of the time just sitting idle.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Possibly, but it is a capability that armed forces would be very keen to have. It would be very keen to lift itself.

Q654 Chair: Where to though?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Wherever it was asked to go by the Government.

Q655 Chair: Do you mean round about Scotland?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Absolutely.

Q656 Chair: Like a bus.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: It has applications for special forces; all sorts of things.

Q657 Chair: Where are these special forces going by Hercules then?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Wherever they are required.

Q658 Chair: Would you need six or eight of them?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: That is the figure I have used. You could argue that there is a requirement for fewer.

Q659 Chair: I do not have a view. I do not have an understanding. I am just trying to pick your brains, as it were.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: I am thinking in terms of troop lift. Whether it is for overseas expeditions, contributions to overseas alliances or military operations in conjunction with others, it would be a useful asset to have.

Q660 Chair: It is a bit like the question of the six Chinooks. I am puzzled about why we would need that level of lift capacity for home defence-for a Home Guard force. I can see that if you want to have expeditionary forces, they would be valuable, but I would have thought that in those circumstances the bigger forces would have surplus capacity and that they would be working harder. There would be an under-usage of those, which would mean, to come to David’s point, that you could either save the money on that, or spend it on something else that might be a higher priority. That is my question.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: You still have to build in operational availability. Of the six to eight Hercules, maybe only six would be operating. There are training purposes and so on and so forth, but I take your point absolutely.

Q661 Chair: I want to clarify something about the Scandinavian countries with which we are often compared, or with which the SNP wants to link us. Who else is of a comparable size? There is Norway, Belgium, Sweden and Denmark. Do they have fast jet capacity?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Yes.

Q662 Chair: Do all of them?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Yes.

Q663 Chair: If you have decided that Scotland does not need that, then why does Belgium, for example, need fast jet capacity?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: I do not know the answer to that. I assume they will have been through the iterative process of saying, "What do we want our armed forces to do? What do we need to do these things?" We cannot just take the Danish model, as many commentators attempt to do, and say that because the Danish have four squadrons of F16 jets-or whatever it is-we should have that as well because we have the same population size. Their political stance on a whole host of issues is likely to be completely different. Their naval requirement, for example, given their huge coastline, all the fjords and so on, and their proximity to the Baltic, is likely to be completely different from the naval requirement of the UK.

Q664 David Mowat: I want to follow up on that. On the face of it, though, it is hard to explain why you would not need fast jets in Scotland, which has a lot more northern airspace compared with Belgium. It would seem an odd decision that Belgium has gone through an iterative process, as you describe it, but Scotland has come to a different answer.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: The Belgian fast jets may be part of their contribution to NATO; I don’t know.

Q665 Chair: There is the point that we touched on about Scottish and English airspace being the border. Presumably Belgium has that problem, so its fast jets are going to fly around in a circle without going over somebody else’s border. Any Russian that reaches them has already had to come over somebody else’s airspace.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Yes.

Sitting suspended for a Division in the House.

On resuming-

Q666 Chair: I want to continue with the question of the air force. There has been discussion about the sharing of bases. Have you assumed that there will be any sharing of bases? Do you see any arguments for or against that?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: I have not assumed that there will be sharing of bases, but I think it is a perfectly feasible option that the Royal Air Force shares bases with a Scottish air force.

Q667 Chair: How would the sharing of bases operate? We heard from one of the Defence Ministers last week that they were not willing to undertake any sharing that meant that anybody else would have a veto. If the rest of the UK wanted to send planes to do something from an airfield in Scotland and the Scottish Government could say no, they would not want that constraint.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: No; that would be impossible.

Q668 Chair: How would that be overcome? Would it be sovereign UK territory within Scotland?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: That is a possibility, as in Dhekelia or wherever it is in Cyprus where I served-I forget where I was. Yes, that would be an option. There seems to be a misplaced assumption that, if Scotland becomes an independent country, the Government of that country will be formed by the Scottish National party. That may well not be the case at all. If Scotland becomes an independent country, its Government could be formed from any of the political parties. Therefore, the whole tenor of force sharing, military sharing and training might change dramatically.

Q669 Chair: Surely that would be only in the short term. Any prudent UK Government would have to assume whatever the worst possible option was. The Communists or the Scottish Socialist party could take over, and then what would they decide?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: It is impossible.

Q670 Chair: It is the only sensible way to proceed, so if there was any sharing of bases, there would have to be a guarantee of complete autonomy.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: There would have to be a guarantee, and it would have to be written into whatever treaty arrangement was agreed between the two countries. In a hypothetical example, if the RAF chose to scramble 18 Typhoon jets from Lossiemouth, the Scottish Government would have no locus in being able to say, "No, you can’t send them through our airspace," or, "No, you can’t use them for that purpose." You are quite right that otherwise it would be useless.

Q671 Iain McKenzie: You have said here that Scotland might be required to buy two or three Lockheed P-3s for maritime patrol aircraft.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Yes.

Q672 Iain McKenzie: You go on to say "or unmanned aerial vehicles". What do you mean by "unmanned"? Are those the type of vehicles we see used in Afghanistan and so on?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Yes.

Q673 Iain McKenzie: Do they not have great limitations placed upon them?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: They have certain limitations, but as they become increasingly sophisticated, their utility is expanding exponentially. The US are now training more drone pilots than they are actual pilots who sit in the cockpits of manned aircraft.

Q674 Iain McKenzie: Do you consider the purchase of these to be a necessity, or an and/or?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: I do not see it as a necessity. I see it as being an option that would be available either straight away or, more likely, further down the line. They are ideally suited for marine reconnaissance because they have a huge range.

Q675 Iain McKenzie: You think further down the line they would be required.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: They could well be, yes. It is just an option. Initially you could say, "Will we have manned aircraft, which is the conventional safe option, or will we forget manned aircraft and go for UAVs with our maritime reconnaissance pod specialism on them?"

Q676 Iain McKenzie: But, overall, there will be a requirement for some form of reconnaissance aircraft.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Absolutely.

Q677 Iain McKenzie: What that then develops into will be determined further down that line.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: There are no maritime reconnaissance aircraft in Scotland at the moment.

Q678 Iain McKenzie: How far down the line would you envisage they would have to do that? I would imagine it is pretty strategic to have that in place.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: It would be strategic. If we are talking about wanting something in place immediately, there would be little option but to purchase off the shelf. There will be many defence manufacturers that would be only too keen to sell that sort of equipment to a newly emerging state.

Q679 Iain McKenzie: What kind of training facilities do you see a separate Scotland being able to provide, and what would you see them needing to source from other countries such as the UK?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: We obviously have the NATO bombing range at Cape Wrath. We have the missile testing facility at Benbecula. Apart from that and some fairly low-level training areas in Scotland, there is not a huge number of training areas in Scotland. Much of the training in Scotland consists of light forces training on private ground by arrangement with landowners. That includes not just UK forces, because the Dutch marines have come over and done training and so on.

Q680 Iain McKenzie: Would this training include officers or specialists?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: No, it will not-not initially anyway. We obviously have test facilities at Kirkcudbright for firing tank shells and so on and so forth. It was mooted recently that there might be an armoured vehicle training facility set up in the Scottish borders. I cannot remember the name of the town, but it came as a huge surprise to its inhabitants that there was to be a training area there. This was part of "Close all the military bases in Edinburgh and build a new super barracks at Kirknewton." That was all predicated on out-of-date information on property values in that the super-barracks was going to cost £440 million and the revenue from the sale was £90 million. It just did not make economic sense; nor did it appear that setting up an armoured fighting vehicle training area in the borders made much sense. We are talking about a fairly big environmental and ecological impact. I have been on many armoured vehicle training facilities in this country, Germany and Canada, and they have a huge impact. I do not think that was a practical suggestion.

Q681 Iain McKenzie: Have you factored it into the defence budget that you are proposing?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: I factored it into the programme. I have said, for example, that army officers would have to be trained at Sandhurst or elsewhere. There is nothing unusual about that. I was trained by the Americans at the American Staff College. Sandhurst always has a fair contingent of-

Q682 Iain McKenzie: Could Scotland train in-house as such? Could it do this?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: It could be done.

Q683 Iain McKenzie: How quickly could it be provided?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: If there was the political will to establish indigenous officer training for all three services, it could probably be done within a period of five years. The question is: is it worth it? Is it not easier-and probably cheaper-to export it? I do not know the answer to that.

Q684 Chair: Let me just take that question of officer training. What is the point, in a sense, of becoming independent if you then get all your army, navy and air force officers trained by the people you have just left?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: It is just pragmatic. Lots of the African countries do it. It is common practice.

Q685 Chair: One of the Defence Ministers told us last week that since Sandhurst, in particular, was under tremendous pressure, there could be no guarantee that Scottish army officers would be given such priority as would allow them to block-book places there. That would very much be dependent upon whether the rest of the UK was willing to give them places.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: That is correct.

Q686 Chair: Why should they train them in NATO doctrine if a separate Scotland had just left NATO?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: A good question; I do not know the answer to that. I suppose one would assume that there would remain a residual friendliness towards a former part of the UK.

Q687 Chair: Would there remain a residual friendliness towards a part of the UK that had just enforced unilateral nuclear disarmament upon the rest of the UK?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: That would militate against it being quite so friendly.

Q688 Chair: I think that is possibly true, yes.

I want to ask about the question of the bases and the ranges. Cape Wrath, for example, is used by a number of forces other than just the UK.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: I think it is a NATO range actually.

Chair: A NATO range, right.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: I think so.

Q689 Chair: Whether or not Scotland allowed NATO to use it once it left NATO would be a matter of price and so on. I want to turn to the question of Benbecula and the missile range. That is clearly something that could be replicated elsewhere because there was a big political fight to save it, wasn’t there?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: That is correct.

Q690 Chair: Why should the rest of the UK keep it there when presumably there will be arguments from Welsh MPs and others to say, "Relocate it here"? Would the assumption not be that that would be lost?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: There is a good chance it could be lost. I am not quite sure whether that has been set up exclusively by the MOD, or whether there is a commercial buy-in from the defence industry in the UK.

Q691 Chair: QinetiQ is the contractor. We are obviously going to have to clarify that in due course.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Of course it could be moved.

Chair: There is a question of whether or not divorce leaves a residual friendliness, as you said. A lot depends upon the terms.

Is there anything else on bases and training that anyone wants to pick up?

Q692 Lindsay Roy: You would not envisage a separate Scotland using Benbecula and Cape Wrath.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: No; it could use either of them.

Q693 Lindsay Roy: For what purpose?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: For the current purposes-for weapons testing.

Q694 Chair: What weapons would a separate Scotland test at Benbecula?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: It would test its anti-aircraft missile system, if it had one.

Q695 Chair: It will have bought it from the Americans anyway.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Yes, but it would need to carry out tests. It would need to carry out training firing as well.

Q696 Lindsay Roy: So there would be minimal use compared to now.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: I do not know what the current levels of use are, but I would imagine that the use would diminish.

Q697 Chair: Let me pursue that. Taking Benbecula, presumably there would be no development of missiles by a separate Scotland since it would not have the economic base, and it would be only for the occasional test firing, which presumably would not sustain the level of employment and investment that there is at the moment.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: I would think it is unlikely. I do not know what the test missile firing rates are. I do not know how many missiles an operator is allowed to fire to make sure he or she is competent in that particular trade. It is not very many because they are hugely expensive.

Q698 Chair: We have touched on the question of moneys. One of the points that David did not touch on is this: if your budget came under pressure, and notwithstanding the fact that you have done it as a minimalist one, are there sections of it that could be cut out if the Scottish Government decided that they could not afford it and wanted to spend on education and health programmes? Are there some obvious things that are almost in a sense self-contained? Would the size of the army be one of the first things to go? I mentioned the Hercules. Are there some obvious things that you would chop out that you have included almost as optional extras?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Yes. If you look at the navy, the reason that I suggested two frigates there was to allow a Scottish Government to have the facility of being able to send a warship as soft power or to contribute to something else. If it was decided that the spending priority was on health, education, housing or transport, that sort of thing could be cut out. There will be a minimum level below which I would suggest you would not want to go. Ireland is below the minimum level, really. It is not even armed in neutrality, is it?

Q699 Chair: That is helpful. We have already touched on the question of intelligence and special forces. I want to turn to the question of the defence industry in Scotland. Scotland has quite substantial numbers of jobs involved in defence industries. As I understand it from your outline, that pattern of armed forces is not going to be able to sustain the present level of defence industry in Scotland. Is that fair?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Yes, I think so. I have always said that, if you are being pure in your approach to defence, you do not predicate your defence policy on the number of civilian jobs it provides. Those are very important but secondary considerations. You design your defence policy to do its primary task, which is to defend.

Q700 Chair: I completely understand that, but we are now talking about the consequences of your structure.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: But I would say that the indigenous defence industry in Scotland is already very limited. There is no small arms manufacturer. There is no ammunition manufacturer now that Bishopton has gone. There is no aircraft manufacturing outside BAE Prestwick. I do not think it produces full aircraft. There is no armoured fighting vehicle production facility. There are obviously the shipyards, which are important, but whether the requirements of an independent Scottish navy would sustain the current level of shipbuilding in Scotland is, I think, doubtful. Where else was I going to go with that?

Q701 Lindsay Roy: There are guided missiles and Raytheon.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Of course, yes. There is the radar capability at Crewe Toll in Edinburgh, and then there is the very successful and sophisticated optics business, which was formerly known as Barr & Stroud in Anniesland, Glasgow, and is now called Thales.

Q702 Chair: Let me touch on some of those. First, with regard to BAE Systems Surface Ships in the Clyde, as I understand it from your proposals, there would be no new building of ships for some period. That is predicated on the Scottish navy getting what is divided up.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: In so far as that satisfies the needs of the policy, yes. There would need to be-not necessarily in the navy, but in other aspects of the armed forces-some sourcing from elsewhere, either by buying off the shelf or whatever.

Q703 Chair: Therefore, unless you have purchases by either the rest of the UK or third countries, the shipyards would shut.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: There will be a great danger of that, yes.

Q704 Chair: Looking at Babcock Marine, it is running Rosyth dockyard at the moment. If that becomes a naval base, that would obviously provide jobs for those who are perhaps diverted from ship repairs. We understand that the ship repair function might be lost to Babcock there. That might be okay, though we will have to go and speak to people about that. Vector Aerospace repairs military helicopters at Perth. The force that you have for helicopters, as I understand it, would not be sufficient to sustain that.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: I would doubt it.

Q705 Chair: Therefore that, again, would be dependent on orders from either the rest of the UK or third countries coming in.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Yes, I would imagine so.

Q706 Chair: We have already touched on QinetiQ in the Western Isles. As I understand it, the function of SELEX Galileo in Edinburgh is to provide radar and electronics for the Typhoon.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Yes.

Q707 Chair: Given that Scotland is not likely to be ordering any Typhoons, unless I am mistaken, it is highly unlikely that that would remain there. Does that seem reasonable?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Typhoon is not just a UK aircraft. It is a European aircraft, and a number of European countries have either ordered the aircraft or have it in their inventories. I am not sure whether SELEX Galileo produces the radar arrays for countries outside the UK or not.

Q708 Chair: My understanding is that, if it does, that will have been part of a divvy-up between the countries about who gets what. If the SELEX Galileo orders are part of the UK’s share, they are then hardly likely to leave them in a separate Scotland, because it is part of the job share and therefore they are likely to move them. Does that seem reasonable to you?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: There is an argument that that could be part of the negotiations. I do not know how the commercial arguments would fit in with that.

Q709 Chair: The same sort of issues would apply to all the other plants.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Yes.

Q710 Chair: I want to clarify whether you have taken into account, or you are aware of, what arrangements there are with Norway, Denmark and other Scandinavian countries to do procurement sharing.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Collective bargaining? I know what happens, but I do not have any of the detail. That is obviously another option that an independent Scotland might want to go with. All these things are always compromises.

Chair: We understand that, which is why we are so desperate to clarify what the negotiating position of the Scottish Government might be. Even though you said it might not necessarily be a Scottish National party Government eventually, presumably they will be conducting the negotiations if there is a vote for separation, because they will be in power on day one of year zero, or however it is termed, and therefore it will be on the basis of their foreign policy. I am conscious that you want to get away.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: It is just the practicality of getting home.

Chair: I completely understand that, which is why I would ask my colleagues whether there are any other points they want to raise.

Q711 Lindsay Roy: I have one point in particular. We said at the beginning that the negotiations would be a compromise. You have just reinforced that with the range of issues we have discussed. There will be no overnight transition.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: No, absolutely. I am very conscious that my model is simplistic. There are so many intangibles and unknowns that I have either had to make an educated guess at, or indeed speculate about something, because there are no answers, so a lot of this comes out of my head. I do not know of any other model that exists at the moment.

Q712 Chair: Are there any answers you have prepared to questions that we have not asked?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: No. I do not know what the time scale of your report on this inquiry is, Chair, but we are within about a week of continuous work on the work in progress for finishing it. There are some modifications to be made as a result of comments from colleagues like Professor Hew Strachan, Malcolm Fraser and so on. There is a thought that it might be published by RUSI, but obviously we would ensure that an early draft copy, without it being in the final production form, would come to the Committee, if that dovetails in with your inquiry.

Q713 Chair: We are hoping to decide by 17 July, which is the last day the House is sitting, on the form of the report that we are going to publish. There is then the publishing process, as it were, but we will be identifying lots of areas where there is no answer until the nationalists clarify what they mean. Hopefully, we will have moved the debate forward quite a bit.

I must say that I think we have found your contribution very helpful, even though some of us were perhaps more frustrated than others at the fact you did not have all the answers-at least yet. You are the only people who have done this sort of work-sorry, you are the only people who are prepared to admit to having done this sort of work. There must be others thinking on it, but they have not come forward to us with it so far.

If, when you are travelling north on the train, you think, "Oh drat, I wish I had said such and such," or, "I forgot to say such and such," by all means get in touch with us. We would prefer this to be an iterative process as much as possible. We will probably want to look at defence again before the referendum takes place, so if you are not too put off by your experience today-

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Not at all, no.

Chair: This has been for your own good.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Part of the questioning has allowed us to focus on things we have not thought about. Richard has already said to me, "That is two extra pages on your report." It has been very valuable for us as well.

Chair: As I say, this has been for your own good as well.

Q714 Lindsay Roy: I want to clarify that this continued development is your own initiative. Has it been commissioned by somebody?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: No, it is borne out of interest. I have written all this stuff out of interest. It is not commissioned by anybody.

Q715 Lindsay Roy: Is it self-funded?

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: It is self-funded only in my and Richard’s time, in that we are not paying ourselves to do it.

Q716 Chair: A mind needs a hobby.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: Yes, it is a hobby.

Jim McGovern: The potting shed.

Lindsay Roy: We are indebted to you for the work you have done so far. We look forward to the further deliberations from you.

Q717 Jim McGovern: I would just like to say this to Stuart in particular. If in my frustration-I think you were referring to me earlier, Chair-it sounded like I was being hostile, I apologise for that.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford: No; I did not think there was any hostility there at all.

Chair: On that happy note of an apology from Mr Grumpy, we will close the meeting.