WEDNESDAY 15 NOVEMBER 2000

AIR VICE-MARSHAL B BURRIDGE, AIR VICE-MARSHAL H G MACKAY, COMMODORE M KERR, MAJOR GENERAL A DENARO and MAJOR GENERAL J C B SUTHERELL

  440. The Adjutant General told us that changes had been made in the Sandhurst course as a result of the findings of the Retention Study. The greater emphasis would certainly be on personnel management skills. Can you tell us some more about that?
  (Major General Denaro) It was actually a wider issue than just Sandhurst cadets and personnel management, it was an overall criticism of younger officers, that they were very good as operational leaders, they could take their platoon up that wooded slope in Kosovo, but maybe they were less good at organising the careers of their corporals and sergeants when they were back in barracks. Slightly what the Admiral was talking about by the hard, tough leadership on one side and the more managerial side of things, which is so important in peace time. We have brought elements into the course at Sandhurst certainly to teach them more about personnel management as well as just the tough hard leadership. It is something that is developmental. It is developed much more when they get into their next course, their special to-arm course. Just for example, there is no point in teaching some of the lads and girls at Sandhurst how to design the career for a tank corporal because very few of them are going to be tank crewmen. We will pick up the detail of that personnel management later on. In terms of writing reports, soldier/officer interviews, these kinds of issues, we are addressing those more now than we did.

  441. There are some very good authors now coming out of the SAS and the Royal Marines. They are making fortunes when they leave. I must congratulate you all on turning out whistleblowers and authors by the dozen.
  (Air Vice-Marshal Burridge) I should just add for Mr Cohen's benefit that the next stage of Army training comes in my organisation, the Army Junior Division and the Adjutant General's reaction to the report on retention is such that the personnel management element of that course, which is a 14-week course, was expanded from three days up to an entire week. The training is taken further and reinforced.

  442. Is it just a matter of the training or does it reflect on the selection of candidates for these officer posts in the first place? Does that have to change slightly so that the ones you select can do both the operational thing and have those personnel sensitivities?
  (Major General Denaro) Yes, it does to a degree. As long as they have the potential to lead, then I believe they are absolutely ripe for us to instruct them in the various ways we believe we need to instruct them. We have changed the emphasis very slightly so that there is a bit more managerial stuff at Sandhurst than there used to be. The other point the Adjutant General was making here was the fact that we were not retaining quite a lot of people we selected at an early age right the way through Sandhurst. That was because in the period between the time they had passed selection at the RCB and the time they came to Sandhurst, which is sometimes as long as six years, they were not being nurtured enough. Now we nurture them like mad and it is showing because the numbers coming into Sandhurst have increased enormously.

  443. I am very much looking forward to the visit to Air Vice-Marshal Mackay in a fortnight's time. Two questions on Cranwell. Has the quality of people coming forward to train as RAF officers changed in either direction? We have heard the reason why you have decided to go from being in a position a generation ago where you had the highest proportion of graduates and why you have taken a higher proportion of non-graduates and the overall question of quality. What are the biggest challenges you feel you face in creating good RAF officers who will stay in the service?
  (Air Vice-Marshal Mackay) In terms of the quality of people we are getting, I do not think the innate quality has changed at all. That can be shown by the outward standard we are producing at the end of the 24-week course which we do at the moment which is acknowledged by the end users, the next stages of training, to be if not better at least as good as it has ever been. The challenge for us has been that they are a much more disparate lot than they used to be with different ideas, different career goals and that is the challenge to us. The short answer is that I think they are just as good as they have ever been. The challenge for us is to make sure that in that 24-weeks, we produce the goods. Harking back to earlier questions and DTR has been having a look at us, that has tied in with some of our own ideas on changing the course in that our course used to be 18 weeks. It is by nature shorter than the other two services because we are doing very basic initial officer training, that then continues into the professional training, which for the Royal Air Force tends to be longer than the other forces. The challenge for us is what do we need to put into that initial training, which used to be 18 weeks. That was seen as being too short; it was too pressurised. About eight years ago it changed to be 24 weeks. In the time since 1992 when that changed, there has been almost the equivalent of another two-plus weeks of extra topics which have found their way into the syllabus with the nature of changing society, changing armed forces. Now we acknowledge that we are very pressurised in the course.

  444. You have actually answered my second question on course length in the course of your first answer so I shall ask a supplementary instead. Please do not be offended when I say this, but as an outsider looking on all the three services, there is sometimes an impression, perhaps inevitable in an Air Force where there is a split between air crew and the rest, that there is a greater degree of fragmentation and it does seem very odd that whereas the other services have a full year setting a common ethos, you do it in only half the time. Do you not think it would be good for the ethos of the Air Force as a whole and pulling it together as a service, particularly when there has been very substantial civilianisation of some of those follow-on courses, to have a longer course?
  (Air Vice-Marshal Mackay) The challenge is what to put into that. Our people join to be engineers, to be pilots, to be navigators and at Sandhurst you can produce somebody after a year who has done his officer training, but that is geared towards the sort of platoon commander side. My son went through Sandhurst himself a couple of years ago and it was very interesting to see it through his eyes. The Navy have their element where they spend quite a bit of time at sea, which is their professional training. If we persisted in our officer training for a year, I think we would very quickly either be dabbling into those areas of professional training which will follow on subsequently, and not really put across the right ideas, and we would run the risk of boring our students. You heard earlier that we have to grab their attention and keep their attention. We feel that somewhere round 24 weeks to 30 weeks, is the optimum at which we can give them a course which is pressurised, gives them something new, leads them on in leadership but does not get into the repetitive element where they would start to lose interest and be fed up and not be able to wait to get onto the next one. The other bit is that officer training does not stop when they pass out of Cranwell, it continues throughout their professional training over the next few years.

  445. But on a separate basis.
  (Air Vice-Marshal Mackay) It is on a separate basis. They do do their own separate professional training, but very quickly. The administrators will do another six months or so and they will then join in with the squadrons where they will meet up with their pilot colleagues who went through somewhat earlier.

  446. I cannot resist asking why Commodore Kerr is one rank lower than all his counterparts?
  (Commodore Kerr) I wish I knew the answer. It is very unfair. The truth of the matter, to give you a serious answer, is that Sandhurst is an altogether larger organisation, Cranwell has I do not know how many functions, three or four functions. It is a working airfield, for example. Dartmouth is very simply an initial officer training college.
  (Air Vice-Marshal Mackay) As well as being Commandant of Cranwell, I am also AOC of the air cadets, I run university air squadrons, I am Lord High-Everything-Else.

  447. How much emphasis does Britannia give to personnel management training? Is this likely to change to address any perceived weaknesses in this area?
  (Commodore Kerr) Yes. You refer presumably to the softer skills which have come up elsewhere in the questioning.

  448. Yes.
  (Commodore Kerr) We were aware, like the other two services, that until recently we had concentrated very hard on the operational type of leadership and we still do. There was this gap in our ability to teach listening skills, for example, and things like time management. Like everyone else my syllabus is jam-packed and that is another subject you might want to come back to. However we have now managed to find time in our programme to fit in the softer management skills. The counselling day now is kicked off by me personally: it is the listening softer man management, woman management, process, the management of your own time, certain keyboard skills have been brought into it. We encourage, nay insist, that in their third term they take part in looking after the junior people. We are one of the very few naval academies in my experience, and like General Denaro I have travelled widely and visited many other such academies, that does not have some form of institutionalised harassment of the junior people. I am sure that does not happen in Britain but I am talking about other countries. Our policy is that the third-termers, that is the people in their last term at Dartmouth, shall play a very large part in the management and guidance and advice to the first-termers. It is quite the opposite tradition that you find elsewhere abroad. I think that we have made quite large steps in the right direction. I do not know yet whether we have it right because we have only had it in place in some cases for less than a few months, but certainly no more than about 18 months or two years. We shall get feedback from the fleet in due course about whether we have trained our people properly in these areas.

  449. How does this feedback work?
  (Commodore Kerr) We have a feedback mechanism when people go off to the fleet after their one year at Dartmouth. Then there is a formalised feedback through the taskbook system. Each person takes a taskbook of things they have to do and one of the things they have to do is get their training officer and their commanding officer to fill in how well they have done. There is a less formalised thing which I am hoping to sort out in the near future which is when people have got further down the line in their career, I should like to know very much how useful their training at Dartmouth was from them. But of course they are a long way down the line then because like everywhere else, Dartmouth is only the beginning point—perhaps not always the beginning point for graduates—of initial officer training and there are at least two more years to be gone through before they start playing a useful part in the fleet.

  450. Unlike the Royal College of Defence Studies where examinations appear to be alien to the instruction methods, I trust you still have a rather stringent system of examinations to make sure that the students have been applying themselves.
  (Commodore Kerr) Yes, we do indeed. There are two parts to our training year. There is the naval training part which is what you would expect to find in the initial officer training college, which is the marching, getting up early, running and jumping, seamanship, navigation, those sorts of things. We have one third of the time, the last term, which is spent doing academics, which is providing a degree of underpinning, mainly technical but not entirely, and putting in professional knowledge. It also covers defence and strategic studies and to some extent naval history. Not as much as I should like.

  451. I was about to ask you. There was a big scandal about removing naval history.
  (Commodore Kerr) Like so many scandals there was far less to it than you would think from the newspapers. The examination process is fairly rigorous on the way through the naval general training but it is done by modules. We have one or two week long modules during which they are taught seamanship or navigation or staff skills, whatever it may be. They are examined at the end of each of those modules. Then at the end of the term they are given another examination in these things. Then again, with the academic side, it is not so modular but they are given half-term examinations and full-term examinations. If they fail they are back-termed. If they fail again . . . Well it has not happened, but I imagine we would have to look at asking them to look elsewhere for a career.

  452. How about failures of examinations in the other colleges? What happens?
  (Air Vice-Marshal Mackay) We have a very low failure rate overall; our overall pass rate is about 97.5% , which is pretty good striking. Most of our overall failures are for leadership and leadership is marked continuously; it is a continuous assessment at every phase and the student has a debrief, there is a communal debrief, the lessons are drawn out, he is given a mark, he is given the mark sheet and comments. At every stage he or she has a very good idea of how they are doing. There is a pass or fail at some of our field leadership camps and if they fail that then once again they are back-coursed with remedial training which is geared specifically to that individual and that works very well. In general our first-time pass rate, straight through, is about 75%; the overall pass rate is 97.5%. By-back-coursing, we are only talking eight weeks so it is not the end of the world.
  (Major General Denaro) Very similar. This back-coursing business is a very useful tool. Having spent a lot of money getting the guy in we do not want to kick him out just because he has failed this or that exam. Clearly there are some areas where if they fail they must be removed, but back-terming is almost always a success and the cadets themselves, by the time they get to the stage of being back-termed, know they need it and are grateful for it.

  Chairman: Some of our finest generals failed at Sandhurst. It never stopped them from going up the hierarchy.

  453. May I make clear that this point about history is not just the Chairman's obsession, there is quite an alarming disappearance and knowledge of history among our middle ranking officers? I think the Chairman is right to keep bashing his drum.
  (Commodore Kerr) Actually it seems to be pretty widespread amongst everybody. If you asked people when the Second World War was, you would be appalled at the answers you get from any age, anywhere, anytime. It is quite interesting.

  454. Is the training for ratings completely separate from the training for the officers? Has consideration been given to combining the training and are there any advantages in doing so?
  (Commodore Kerr) In the Navy a very important element of our training is sending people to sea in ships where they live as sailors, with sailors and work as sailors for six weeks. The point of that really is to show them the nature of the person they are going to be leading. That is part of the point, but the other thing is to get them to sea as fast as possible, reverting back to my earlier point about catching and keeping their interest. It is important that you show them quickly the sea environment which they have signed up for. Occasionally people do come back and say they do not like it and leave. It gives them this essential awareness of sailors. I always say to them when they go and then again when they come back that I hope they are going to or have paid very close attention to what sailors say to them because it will be the last time probably in their naval careers, until they become very senior officers, when again sailors speak more freely, oddly, that sailors will actually say what is on their minds without any kind of restraint. They do not wear badges of rank, they go around as sailors, they are wearing sailors' clothes and they spend six weeks. Sometimes they are lucky and they go to Honolulu and sometimes they are less lucky and they get their operational sea training at Plymouth. Whatever it is the ship is doing, they do. If the sailors are cleaning out the lavatories, then they clean out the lavatories. If the sailors are manning the upper deck or firing the guns, then they man the upper deck or fire the guns. It is a very good system.

  455. Do the other services seek to have the same kind of experience with their officer training?
  (Major General Denaro) It is one we envy but we just cannot bring it about in the year that we have. Other than a quite significant proportion who come in through the ranks, the majority of cadets at Sandhurst do not even see a soldier until they arrive in their battalions. That is always one of their criticisms of the course. Interestingly a retort is that they are not ready to see or certainly command or direct soldiers until they have had their year. That is another way of looking at it.
  (Air Vice-Marshal Mackay) In the Royal Air Force we have a week during the 24 weeks which they spend on a Royal Air Force station, plus of course a large number of our graduate entrants have been in university air squadrons, similar to the officer training corps, where they have seen the Royal Air Force in action.

  456. This relates mainly to Sandhurst, Cranwell and Britannia. Do you have sufficient time in the initial officer training to sort out the problems? If people are going well on the course and then they hit a problem, is there sufficient time to turn that round so that they can continue on the course? What sort of wastage rates do you have in the officer training?
  (Major General Denaro) In wastage terms we lose about 10%, which is much less than those going on initial recruit training and that is achieved because we have selected them very carefully to come. Everybody who arrives at Sandhurst has been selected to arrive there. Of that 10%, the majority ask for release—we call it PVR. They ask for release because they suddenly find that actually it is either much tougher or much different to that which they expected. An element is for physical reasons and then of course there are some, having selected them to come, whom we decide actually have not got what it takes so we throw them out.

  457. Have you carried out analysis of the reasons for people dropping out? You say there are physical reasons. Have you done any detailed analysis?
  (Major General Denaro) Yes, we do a detailed analysis of every person who drops out and why and we trace back. They are graded when they come through selection at Westbury and there is an element of a risk pass coming through into Sandhurst. All that is very carefully analysed and there are no specific trends which overly concern us.

  458. The Principal Personnel Officers have told us that other ranks' initial training had been softened to a degree to encourage people to stay. Has that happened in the officers' section or not?
  (Major General Denaro) No, it absolutely has not been softened because the main aim of everybody is to achieve the same high standards of the past, if not supersede those by the time a cadet is commissioned. What I would say though is that we have altered the approach and the style in some ways so that it is much more progressive. There is no softening, because despite all these huge Health and Safety at Work agendas we have to adhere to, on the day the guy is dropped into the swamp in Sierra Leone there is not somebody from the Health and Safety at Work cadre; there is nobody. So the guys have to be really tough both physically and mentally to pass out.
  (Commodore Kerr) May I endorse that? It is critical to our training and that is why we have this absolute standard. To go back to your first question about time, if they need more time you give it to them. Like Sandhurst, we back-term people. They have four weeks' remedial training in leadership. Right now as we speak our leadership module is going through and I shall have probably 15 and 20% of people who will fail that first time round and they get back-termed. They are put into a remedial training division which is absolutely outstanding. I was astonished when I discovered that it has an almost zero% failure rate; not quite, I had to let somebody go a couple of days ago. It is very, very successful and they are at a real low point when they are told they are not good enough and they have to go into what we call "Trowbridge". Some of them cry, all of them wring their hands in one way or another and some have to be persuaded to stay and see it through. When they have, when they have come out of that at the end of four weeks and they have gone round and started the first term again in what is actually the second term, we see a remarkable change in them. It means that our wastage rate is in fact really quite low. Ten years ago it was 30% and now it is 3.7% over the year. Yes, we analyse it. It is very easy to analyse because it is in the low fives and tens. It is generally because of lack of leadership qualities, lack of character; not invariably, sometimes it is fitness.
  (Air Vice-Marshal Mackay) Once again I would endorse what my colleagues say. We have a very low dropout rate overall. That is mostly in leadership. Echoing what General Denaro said about the Health and Safety element, some people ask us in the Royal Air Force why we do so much of our leadership training out on military training areas, Otterburn, Stanford, etcetera, when we are training pilots, administrators, etcetera. That misses the point entirely, that we are a tactical Air Force now. Somebody can be sitting in an admin office one day, be in East Timor the next patrolling with the Gurkhas, Kosovo, etcetera. There is this requirement to be experienced out in the field. It is only through physical endeavour, physical exertion that you can introduce these elements of stress that you need for proper leadership training. We have grasped with both hands the requirements of Health and Safety. Our initial officer training has just been awarded the ISO9002. It was one of these things where we could either take this as a burden or we could seek to get the good things out of it. We are just using it as a check that what we are doing is the right thing to do. It is just as easy to have the right sort of boots for somebody as the wrong sort of boot. We really have gone through it with a fine-tooth comb to make sure that the course is as rigorous as it has to be but we are not going over the edge in making it any worse than it need be.
  (Commodore Kerr) We do this thing of teaching leadership out on Dartmoor as well, but it is not because we anticipate that our young officers will find themselves on land exercising leadership, it is because almost exclusively that is the only environment where we can put them under the kind of physical stress of carrying heavy weights over long distances, being deprived of sleep, cold, wet and exhausted, and we can actually control that environment and do so very carefully and then invite them to make important decisions and take charge of groups of people and think about how they are going to get through the next couple of hours of their life in a structured way. That is the only way we can do it. I am really not interested in the field craft aspect of it at all. That is a distinction between me and the other two services.

  459. I received a letter after taking part in a debate on the floor of the House from someone who, because I managed to get the issue of equal opportunities into the debate on defence procurement—which was a bit of a tenuous hold, I have to tell you—wrote to me and told me it was disgraceful and disgusting and asked whether I really understood what women had done to the armed forces and how dreadful it all was now. My only hope is that that was not an officer in the armed forces. That is all I say to you; but I suspect that it could have been. What about that influence of officers on the thoughts and general response to women in the armed forces? What sort of training are they given to make sure it is very much part and parcel of training and education for our officers?
  (Commodore Kerr) Shall I kick off on that one as we have women fully integrated? It really is not a problem. Unfortunately you do get people like the person who wrote to you. I used to run the Royal Naval presentation team and about once every week or so I would get someone coming up to me and saying, "This women thing, you know, it'll never work". I had just finished commanding a ship called HMS Cumberland, which had 25 young women on board and it worked perfectly, there was absolutely nothing wrong with it. We had fewer difficulties on the whole than we would have had with an all-male ship. Nothing I could say could shift these people from their preconceived position. It is difficult to explain in forceful enough terms how much of an issue it is not. They come from co-ed schools. Even if they have been to boarding schools they come from co-ed schools. They come into a co-ed environment in Dartmouth. They are completely used to having men present or women present. Most of the young people I talk to on this issue, and I do not talk to many now because they look at me as though I have two heads, do not understand what the problem is. It simply does not give any difficulties.