24 MARCH 2004

GENERAL SIR MICHAEL WALKER, ADMIRAL SIR ALAN WEST, GENERAL SIR MIKE JACKSON AND AIR CHIEF MARSHAL SIR JOCK STIRRUP

  Q40 Mike Gapes: How is the White Paper going to change this? Are there any specific consequences of the approach in the White Paper that will be different for you in the future?

  General Sir Michael Walker: I do not think so. What it will do is introduce some very high-tech equipment. If you go to the logistical end of things like watch keeper of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, they will need different skills and different levels of training, but I do not see that the White Paper or anything that we intend to do is going to materially change the sort of things that we have to do at the moment. We have a very responsive training organisation. If you go and look for example at one of the major bits if training that is going on at the moment, which is the Apache attack helicopter, and you were to go down to the airfield in Middle Wallop you would find a whole new building, a whole new PFI, and a whole new range of skills being taught to these guys in a way three years ago when they came on this thing they would not even have known they were going to have to learn. This is a serious change from analogue dials in the motor car to flat television screens, which is not about flying things but about fighting and they have extraordinary skills to develop in that time. It is a matter the training, and providing you have the right training regime and providing you have the right training facilities, it is not difficult. That it seems to me is going to be the change, a change in the nature of the training.

  Admiral Sir Alan West: It does move forward. For example, communicators are becoming much more data managers now and that is part of the network enabled capability side of things, and we are looking to restructure with a single platform engineer rather than having a weapons engineer and a marine engineer because of advances in technology and because of looking at the key things that enable you to move. How much support do I need for that? Do I need a Royal Fleet Auxiliary or if I have a platform and certain types of propulsion can I get away with none? So these things are all the time being looked across the Services and changes are coming along.

  Q41 Mr Jones: Can I follow up on a point you make. Obviously the picture you paint is very rosy. Why is it the case then that there are shortages in certain areas? Is that because of what Sir Alan West said about people leaving or in terms of planning and not being able to plan for the recruiting and training of people in specific areas?

  General Sir Michael Walker: Some of them, I am afraid, Mr Blunt, as we have already discovered, is responsible for! There was a study done, if I remember, where indeed there were some poor decisions made at the time which have cost us dear, and certainly there has been an element of that particularly in the medical arrangements. In terms of other shortages my colleagues might want to answer.

  Admiral Sir Alan West: For example, we stopped recruiting at about that stage and that was a most dreadful mistake. There was a black hole in our systems so at leading hand level we have got a real problem.

  Q42 Mr Jones: What year was that?

  Admiral Sir Alan West: End of 1992, 1993, 1994.

  Q43 Chairman: When Crispin was advising the Minister!

  Admiral Sir Alan West: We started recruiting again in 1995 and that has caused us immense problems in leading hand terms. There is no doubt in our submarine service for a whole number of reasons, partly because we put so much focus on nuclear safety and there were some issues where they were not operating so much, and that makes chaps fed up and they start going and although we have got a reducing nuclear power industry in this country they still are very pleased to get my nuclear power watch keepers and they were snapped up, and there are retention issues there. So it is a mix of reasons across the board that causes problems. Throwing money at it has helped with our submariners, there is no doubt about it, and the money we have given to them is way less than if I had had to recruit and train new people.

  General Sir Mike Jackson: Part of it too can be explained by the changing circumstances in which we operate. I mentioned human intelligence a moment ago. The demand for that in the sort of nature of operations we are doing is growing all the time, but these are not ordinary people who are comfortable working in that difficult environment. I just give you that as an example but that is circumstance-driven rather than recruiting or planning-driven.

  General Sir Michael Walker: Linguists is another area.

  Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup: It is also the case since we recruit and train if a demand goes up suddenly it is going to take us some while to return to balance in that area. If it is an area in which it is difficult to recruit and you have to put more effort into it then the lag could be even greater so these things, with one or two exceptions, tend not to be long term but they are significant while they are around.

  Q44 Mr Jones: Can I follow up on a point. Clearly you said that recruitment creates problems but do you also think, for example, in the 1980s-1990s when companies were stopping, for example, providing apprenticeships that has led to a shortage in the civilian world that you are filling some of those gaps as well?

  General Sir Michael Walker: I do not know whether that is true.

  Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup: My experience has been that industry was less draconian than we were in reducing apprenticeships and we actually had to roll back from some decisions we made many years ago, not strictly speaking reintroducing apprenticeships but reintroducing training and improving quality, so I have not seen that as an issue.

  Chairman: We will have to draw stumps temporarily and we will be back in 20 minutes.

  The Committee suspended from 4.16 to 4.38 for a division in the House.

  Chairman: We will recommence. Please do not tell the Secretary of State you had coffee otherwise he will demand it also and our budget cannot run to it! Dai Havard has been very patient.

  Q45 Mr Havard: I have two questions one after the other but the first is in the area of reserves. Obviously, as we have seen recently, they are an integral part of the military capability and the White Paper talks about a "requirement for a closer integration between the regular and reserve elements of the various services and commitments to improve the relationship between the Services, the reservists themselves, their families and their employers." I want to explore some of those aspects. The first is have you given thought or do you see any scope for the expansion of the role of reservists coming through discussions about what will be in the White Paper?

  General Sir Michael Walker: When you say expansion and growth, in terms of expanding the number of reserves and giving them yet additional roles over and above those that they have already, certainly that has not been part of our consideration as far. What we have done is recognise there are parts of the structural process by which we mobilise our reserves—our relationships with employers and with the National Employers' Advisory Board—are all areas that need some tweaking with the experience we have had over Telic. So we are certainly going to address those. I think the other thing is that of course as we rebalance our forces we have got to come to a conclusion as to how best we can integrate those reserves into the various capabilities that we are developing.

  Q46 Mr Havard: Are we up to our realistic maxima?

  General Sir Michael Walker: We are up to what has been the figure of our reserves across the piece, by and large, plus or minus a few here and there. Our strength is broadly at the establishment of our reserves, yes. You have got to remember however that part of that establishment also includes those who are coming in because we train our reserves in a very different way to the way in which we train our regulars. They train having joined their reserve units, so they do not become people who are fit for role until they have completed certain mandatory training. That is not absolutely true in all cases, there are slight differences between Services, but for the vast majority that is true, so there is always only going to be a percentage of reserve forces deployable on, for example, overseas operations because they have to be fit for role before they can be allocated to overseas deployment and given specialist training to be part of that.

  General Sir Mike Jackson: The Territorial Army is not quite up to its established strength but it is not far off. In terms of the use of reserves, as you know, the last year has seen a breaking of the mould basically in the use of compulsory mobilisation on the scale that we have. That said, we should remember that certainly for the last eight or nine years in the Balkans there has always been about 10% of the force there have been reservist voluntarily mobilised. Compulsory mobilisation is quite a different kettle of fish and we have now mobilised some 8,000 or 9,000 I think, something of that order. It has worked on the whole pretty well. There were some obvious teething problems at the beginning, very short notice, some problems with pay although it was not too bad. The number of appeals was encouragingly small and of course now the urgency has gone forward planning of future mobilisation is much easier. I think we need to be careful. It would be, I think, a mistake to assume that we could use the reserves at the tempo at which we have been using them over the last year. The Reserve Forces Act itself of course says once in every three years, and certainly that is the law, but I personally think that may be a bit too often anyway. We need to maintain not only the goodwill of the reservists themselves, that goes almost without saying, but the goodwill of their employers as well and I think relations between the Armed Services and the employers are good and getting better, but equally we cannot take employers' goodwill for granted. They too must understand that there a real role, and this is not just the bailing out of the regular army.

  Q47 Mr Havard: Could I just press that point a bit. Of course the reference to tempo has come up several times and you made the point about employers and the point about compulsion being different this time round. Do you see that as being the norm now effectively in order to establish a good relationship? I use the word "good" but a proper, well-understood relationship between employers and the people in the reserves because we have had evidence, for example, when we looked at the situation in Iraq to some reservists it seemed to come as a surprise that they had an obligation when they were called. Do you see some need for clarity in those arrangements or some changes in those arrangements beyond the number of times they can be called within the three-year period?

  General Sir Mike Jackson: I think the mechanism works pretty well. I cannot answer for the reservist who was surprised to find that he had received a brown paper envelope because that is what it is all about. I think the mechanism is fine; it is the way in which we use it where care is required and understanding of the positions of both sides.

  Admiral Sir Alan West: The numbers I am talking about are far, far less than the army and airforce and of course in 2002 we restructured our reserves to fit in with niche capabilities we needed assistance in and post Telic we are restructuring slightly again. They are nonetheless extremely valuable in those very specialist areas. For example, I was in Baghdad a week ago this weekend and there were a number of places that had got naval interrogators who are reservists and naval linguists who are reservists and media people who are reservists, so they are being utilised fully. Because we did not have the same problem in overall numbers it meant we were able to use intelligent mobilisation more easily. 50% of my reservists work in very, very small firms and the impact of calling those people up is very dramatic so we were able to use intelligent mobilisation to make it easier by maybe not taking it from a firm of painters and decorators of two people and taking one away and to go for the slightly larger firms. I think that worked quite well. I only needed to call up just under 400 RNRs and about 130 Royal Marine reservists so the numbers I was dealing with were far less than the army although they were all extremely important down in Umm Qasr when the port was being got up and running. It was very interesting the Commander RN, with whom I was most impressed and to whom I said, "You have done a fantastic job" said, "It is not really a problem, I normally run Southampton"! This is the joy of reservists. They bring these skills along. At the moment we have got a number who help with the Civil Contingencies Reaction Forces. HMS President provided an exercise recently for that. In terms of recruiting numbers we have shortfalls in a couple of areas in the country and in a couple of specialist areas. We probably have not got enough interpreters and linguists as I would really like to have for example.

  Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup: In terms of numbers I fall between the army and the navy. We mobilised about 60% of trained Royal Auxiliary Air Force for Telic. It worked extremely well and they are a fully integrated part of our total force. They were extremely effective on Telic and, frankly, we could not have done it without them. In terms of overall numbers Telic showed that we got it about right and I see no substantial change from that emerging from the White Paper. I think both in terms of what the White Paper sets out and our experience on Telic we will need to adjust the balance a little. We too rely upon auxiliaries to provide a lot of crucial specialist capabilities and in one or two areas we are having to hit them very hard. There will be a need for a small expansion in one or two of those particular areas.

  Q48 Mr Havard: This question of whether they are going to—and this is perhaps particularly the case in relation to the army—form units or whether they are going to backfill for particular activities leads into the question about specialistations as well. The experience that you relate, Admiral, was about someone who had got day-job experience who is then utilised as a matter of accident because they happened to have the right guy in the right place to do the job. We have heard lots of other examples of that in other recent activities. It has also been said to us that that is okay as a one-off but people do not join to do that, they join to do something else, so the question about recruitment/retention but also about the utilisation actually a difficult balance to strike. I am wondering whether or not we are looking then to say we are going to have reservists of particular specialist types and therefore it is a different type of recruitment of reservists?

  General Sir Mike Jackson: There are a lot of strands to that question. For example, does a guy who works for BT want to join the Royal Signals and do in uniform what he does in civil life? Some do but many do not and they want a complete change. As to the question of groupings, I think that is very interesting. Yes, we need some individual specialists. There is a very good example rather akin to the Chief of Naval Staff's of somebody I found in Basra who in the early days was virtually running what banking system there was. He happened to be somebody from the City who had been mobilised. He took it in good part but he did say, "It is not what I joined the TA to do." Your question about formed units I think is a very important one. Reservists I think, where there is time and they can be put together properly and given some pre-deployment training, would much rather go as a formed group, whether that be a platoon or a company under their own officers and non-commissioned officers rather than just go as individuals and get thrown into a regular equivalent. That works very well but time is important there. If you are going to do that you almost certainly need to give them some pre-deployment training as an entity, not just individual training but as an entity, so there is a balance to be struck.

  General Sir Michael Walker: Could I add a couple of things. If we were to go back 12 or 15 years to the Gulf War we did not have many reservists called up. Very occasionally somebody might be invited to volunteer. What effectively the reservists wanted, by and large, was to have an exciting role. Those with a home defence role were not as excited as the others because they would not be going overseas. The opportunities for our reserves are so much greater at the moment and we have a responsibility therefore to do some things to make sure that the system becomes even more streamlined, more accommodating, more receptive and more welcoming for these guys, as I am sure we already do. We do already have this split between the generalists who do not want to be a signaller. For example, if you go into the Civil Affairs Battalion in the Aldershot area these are people who are specifically recruited because they have the skills. The medical people are the same. They come in with those specific skills. I think we are probably going to have to do some more of that. As we take the work forward after our recent experiences, because it is after only the last three or four years we have done some serious compulsory mobilisation of this nature backed by business and voluntary organisations, I think we are getting very clear where the shortcomings are—and there are some, I would not deny that—in the way we manage and handle them. I do not know if you have been up to the Reinforcement Training and Mobilisation Centre at Chilwell. It is very well worth going to see it because it is a step change from how we used to do it and I think most people who go through that find it a very smooth transition from their civilian job into uniform and beyond and then back out at the other end.

  Q49 Mr Havard: Is this Chilwell?

  General Sir Michael Walker: Yes.

  Q50 Mr Havard: When we visited there were no reservists around and we have got a suspicion about why that might have been, but do not worry I have met one or two others! One of the questions that came about there was the medical services and the way in which medical services are provided for reservists not by reservists, and perhaps there is something you would like to say about that?

  General Sir Michael Walker: Do you mean whilst they are in uniform?

  Q51 Mr Havard: So that they can be both retained and made use of when they come, to be used.

  General Sir Mike Jackson: You are talking about fitness on mobilisation?

  Q52 Mr Havard: Absolutely.

  General Sir Michael Walker: Not all of them. There are standards of fitness, physical and dental, that are required on reporting to Chilwell and if they do not meet those standards that is it, I am afraid. I do not think you would expect us to take people who were not physically up to whatever may be following.

  Q53 Mr Havard: Can I ask one last part on this which is to do with their use and maybe a different role and function. It has been suggested to us, and certainly we have seen from other armed forces, there are possible caveats on what people can be allowed to do and not do, and whether or not there are going to be reconstruction-type forces and whether or not there is a role for the civil contingency element here at home in terms of expeditionary activity where the reservists would be particularly used in relation to a reconstruction-type force as opposed to being integrated in the way they were in the recent conflict.

  General Sir Michael Walker: There is much merit in this but I think it comes back to the specialist bit and Michael's bank manager and Alan's dock manager and Corporal Jones who happened to be a school master who set up a school system. I think there is a role in the reconstruction area and I think that is one of the areas we need to look at, but I do not think it alters the basic principle of a reservist organisation. We would not want to go back to having two different types of organisation nor I believe would the reservists. To confine the reservists we have been talking about to operating only within certain very restricted areas I do not think we would get the same quality and numbers.

  General Sir Mike Jackson: I agree.

  Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup: Yes, absolutely.

  Q54 Mr Havard: General, you made this speech recently and you said that "the norm for service personnel will be individual mobility with frequent deployments and consequent separation from their families. Training and deployments will increasingly be with joint units we will shall have to harmonise conditions of employment while retaining individual Service identity and ethos." Against that sort of background I want to explore the range of regimes that are run as a consequence. Are you confident at the moment that the resourcing of training of all three Services is adequate?

  General Sir Michael Walker: The answer is yes in the sense that we would not allow people to go and do what they had to do unless we were confident they had the right skills and the right level of training to go and do it. That does not mean of course that we are not having to make sure there are some areas where we do things differently. We have done our own audit of the initial training regime and we still have got quite a lot of investment to put into that to make sure that has got all of the recommendations that came out of the report of the operations capability for the initial trainees. There is then of course a huge very wide range of different sorts of training that take place in phase two. If I talk about phase one, phase two and phase three training does that mean much to you? Once they go and they get the skills which they will then deploy with the armed element of the Service, in some cases it can be as little as 12 weeks, in other cases it can be as long as two or three years. Then of course they come out into the Service. I think that piece is, by and large, alright. It needs a bit more emphasis in one or two places which we are attending to. Perhaps the bit that is above and beyond that is the demand that there now is for through-career training of all sorts across the piece. We are looking at officer training, staff colleges and career courses across the piece for all sorts of people for all sorts of services. To be honest, you could go on introducing yet more and more training and giving people yet more and higher skills at some significant cost and not really appreciate what the benefit in terms of pure military capability is at the end of the day. I think it is in that phase three area that we have to perhaps make much tougher judgments about what sort of training needs to be undertaken. There is a thing called a "training needs analysis" which decides for a particular skill what training is required, and we always conduct that before for example somebody goes and flies a new aeroplane or flies a helicopter in order to make sure that an individual is trained properly with the skills that are required but there is a lot of peripheral stuff as well.

  Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup: First of all, the quality of our training is fundamental to our military success, which was a key lesson, a not unsurprising one, from Telic. I think there is a wider point. Another lesson from Telic was that over recent years because it has not been required we have practised air/land co-operation in some respects less than we would have wanted to and therefore we were not quite as sharp in all areas of that on the operation as we should have been. We have attended to that but there is a broader point behind it and it is this; just because you have not used a particular skill on the last few operations does not mean to say it will not be the crucial one on the next operation. Given the unpredictability of environments and military operations we have to prepare our people across a   wide range of capabilities and skills, and maintaining that is very demanding but crucial if we are to succeed in the future.

  Q55 Mr Havard: This idea of joint training at all levels but particularly at the higher level, if you like, and the fact that when I went to Batus there wasn't a lot flying in the sky but obviously in the future you would need to have an integration between land and air, those sorts of activities we saw at Saif Sareea was a very useful exercise for you guys to have done before the recent operations. Those things cost a lot of money but are absolutely crucial. What thoughts are being put into your contribution in relation to the White Paper in improving that level of training as well as the training of the individual?

  General Sir Michael Walker: You are right, absolutely, and of course having gone through each individual Service becoming masters of their own trade, so to speak, both in their tactical and operational activities, you then need to bring those together in a joint environment. We did it in a number of ways. We tried to do it, first of all, by looking across the piece at single Service exercises and seeing how we could—so-called—jointify them. That is a rather interesting one, we sometimes get Canadian F18s and things to play but equally sometimes it is at a level below where you would expect joint activity to take place but equally, increasingly, we are able to do some of that. Then, of course, you would run the major joint exercises. As you say, they are hugely expensive. I would go so far as to say rather coincidentally had we not done Saif Sareea we would have been less well prepared than we were, in fact, foretelling when it came. Most people thought it was all to do with Afghanistan if you remember, and that was coincidental as well. The answer is you have got to do this so we factor in our joint training exercise period which is run by a group called the Joint Commanders Group. The vice chief of the defence staff chairs it and the three commanders in chief sit on it. They provide the overall direction, if you like, for the joint nature of the exercise which will take place over the coming five, six, seven, eight years. So it is attended to but it is expensive and when we do it we have to do it as precisely as we can and when we do it, it has to sit and take its place in all decisions that we make about the allocation of resources.

  Q56 Mr Havard: How are peace operations affecting at all this ability to train and maintain training for high tempo operational activities?

  General Sir Michael Walker: I will ask Mike to talk about it from the army point of view and the Admiral and Jock to talk about the others but I mean, of course, it does have an impact. I do not think it is just peace operations. I would say it is rather like a decathlete, if you are a decathlete you train for a good ten events that you want to go into. If you then concentrate on running the 400 metres for six months, your skills drop off in the other area and that is what we face when we send our troops and armed forces off to do a particular job. Very often we have this difficult situation when they talk about tour intervals so they are back here, so what are they doing? Well, what they are doing is they are honing up their skills on those of the nine events that they were unable to practise during the time they were on peace operations or whatever. It is not just peace work, it is whatever type of operation we do.

  General Sir Mike Jackson: You said you visited Batus, Mr Havard, well you saw for yourselves there the intensity of the training which takes place there. This is war fighting training, this is designed to train those units and formations for the most demanding and dangerous thing we can do. That is what gives us our edge for the future, that coupled with the experience which is both individual and institutional, if you like, so that is absolutely bedrock to us. Now, you can always adjust from that war fighting standard, you can come downwards for less demanding operations, the reverse arguably is not true. We were speaking earlier of the level of commitment which the armed forces have been through. Now one of the balancing actions which has to be done is that if commitments are high it makes making people available for that sort of training that you saw at Batus more difficult. That said, that is the seed corn of the future and if you stop doing the training, as CDS has said, over time you will run out of the skills. So it is absolutely essential that at all levels, from the individual right up to brigade and divisional level training that we get it in because that protects our ability for the future.

  Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup: There is another element. Because a great deal of our high end training has to be done overseas because of the air space ranges and so on and that requires transport to get people out and back. If the operational tempo is high, no matter what the scale of the operation then that air transport becomes an extremely scarce resource and it becomes very, very difficult to provide the wherewithal actually to get people out and back even if they are available to do the training.

  General Sir Michael Walker: Jock, you have a very good example in your Resinate Iraq No Fly Zone people?

  Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup: Yes, during the period of Resinate there is no doubt that we had people gaining a lot of extremely valuable training, not least alongside the United States forces. I think that showed as well when we came to Telic last year that, going back to CDS's decathlete, they were very good at that but when it came to air/land co-operation, which they had not had the chance to train for and to practise, then they were not as well polished in that as they should have been.

  Admiral Sir Alan West: If I could split it into the training of people, the platform they are in and then how we put the composite training together. Within the naval strategic plan we have a thing called Win 3, we look at what is needed, when it is needed and where it is needed as a basis to look at things. We have also now got greater integration with Smart acquisition. We have embedded training management teams in IPT so, for example, a Type 45 IPT has a training management team in there so we can look at things like generic trainers and all the training needs of the platform while this is being done early rather than later on thinking about that as an issue. The fully audited training needs analysis was mentioned already by CPS. We are looking much more at improving junior rates' training by coming up with targeted employment type format looking in detail at what exactly the job is to be rather than more generally we used to do in the past, this is a more efficient way of doing this. We are looking very much at trying to get water front training done. We are trying to see, also, if we can pull training from establishments out into ships at sea, to try and do it there by using federated trainers to see what we can do there, really that is migration to train, where you fight and who you fight with. That is for individual people. For ships and then working up towards task groups and then combined and joint type operations, we have the tier one training which is done in Plymouth. We have there, at FOST, a centre of excellence, really a European centre of excellence. The Germans, Dutch, all those navies come to us, the Portuguese and, Spanish, and that is a real centre of excellence for training up individual ships in all the skills they need in that ship. Then they go on to tier two training, things like the joint maritime course which, again, is seen within Europe as very excellent training. There we are getting task groups to work together and an element of joint training. Finally we move on to more complex exercises. So, for example, the marines who are in north Norway at the moment doing what effectively is tier two training with all the cold weather mountain training, the amphibious group, that same team will be working up with the Americans in the FTX in the summer which will be a much more complex, fully joint, fully combined type exercise so at the end of that they will be capable of deploying fully as a JRRF fully trained up and those are the sort of sequencing cycles we go through.

  Q57 Mr Havard: Lastly I think we want to know whether or not there is the ability to have proper interval training processes for individuals and collectively when placed against this particular change of expeditionary forces, the tempo and so on, but also the changes in terms of equipment. For example, we have had comments made to us that Bowman in the army has a particular effect in terms of all this activity about how you organise these matters and there will be more examples in the future.

  General Sir Mike Jackson: You are quite right, Bowman in particular is the equivalent of having a brigade away on operations at any one time because—you were probably briefed on this, I do not know—each brigade is being re-equipped with Bowman in sequence. Of course whilst it is being re-equipped and is retraining it is not available for operational deployment. It is quite taxing for the planners down there to get the thing balanced off.

  General Sir Michael Walker: I think it is fair to say—and if I can use an army example because I am of that persuasion as you see—there is no doubt about it that the precision with which we now plan and resource training is of a different order of magnitude to what it was at the end of the cold war. Mike and I when we were brigade commanders we would tip into—I do not know if you were in Germany?

  General Sir Mike Jackson: Northern Ireland.

  General Sir Michael Walker: —we would tip out into the plains of Germany four or five times a year on a major exercise. I am not quite sure if this is precisely targeted and given objectives as today's training. Now, of course, a brigade commander will probably get one go at taking his brigade out in a joint environment at which he will either get a tick in the box saying he is now at the right degree of readiness to deploy on operations or not. So that has all become very much more precise. I do not see that the White Paper and the policy changes in it are necessarily going to change that. Clearly some of the bits of that training will have to be sharpened up or changed or some dropped but it does seem that is the case. Alan, you might like to say something. Alan's people are slightly different to us and to a degree to the air force—the army and the air force—in that they go out on board ship and they stay together and do their training for that six month period. In a peace support operation are you going to find your skills in other areas drop off to the same extent?

  Admiral Sir Alan West: We do and we have tried to get round that to the extent when we did our restructuring of the fleet headquarters we strengthened the size of the sea training organisation at Plymouth to allow fly away teams to go out to give these people a burst when they are deployed in area. We try and programme exercises with other navies when the ships are in area. For example, we have done one with the Pakistanis which primarily was to try and help the Pakistanis because we have just persuaded them to put a ship into OEF type operations. It does enable us to train in some of those other areas. CDS is absolutely right we have skill fade in the areas we are not doing every day. A fine job in the Northern Arabian Gulf is an ISR issue of knowing what is going on around you and boarding and searching; we are very, very good at that, we are not so good at anti air warfare. If a missile is suddenly fired, we do not practise it as much as maybe we should. That is what the team is going for, to bring that up to date and try to bring ourselves back up to the right level.

  Q58 Mr Cran: I wonder if I could move us on to what the Defence White Paper called the concept of graduated readiness. Now, do not let us debate it, the White Paper says it is of central importance, fine let us accept it. I am interested in two sentences in it. Relating to it, it says "We are currently assessing that changes need to be made to the forces assigned to the Joint Rapid Reaction Force to reflect the increased frequency of small and medium scale operations". The question is what changes?

  General Sir Michael Walker: As I say we are assessing them at the moment, Mr Cran, and I do not mean to be facetious. Have you been briefed about the Joint Rapid Reaction concept?

  Q59 Mr Cran: Yes.

  General Sir Michael Walker: You know that this is a spearhead with elements of different forces which are at different degrees. We have a lead airborne battle group, we have a lead mechanised, lead armoured, we have special forces, all these sort of things, and the same in terms of the packages that go from the air and the maritime in that context. There was, if you like, in the early days, and still is until we go through the reassessment, an assumption that if the lead mechanised battle group goes then the rest of the brigade to which it belongs will follow, automatically. Probably as we have developed our exercising and gone through Telic that "ain't quite how it might happen" so probably what we are looking at is looking for a different set of consequences or actions following the lead element that goes out and whether we have them, for example, in the right packages. The new equipment like FRES and so on comes in, one needs to be able to force package the whole thing in a different way. I think it is really looking at the way in which we are going to use our ability to deploy forces under a JRRF concept. It is not in essence going to remove the concept as a way in which we do our business.