UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 465-iii

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

Defence committee

Tuesday 20 April 2004

GENERAL SIR MICHAEL WALKER GCB CMG CBE ADC Gen,
ADMIRAL SIR ALAN WEST KCB DSC,
GENERAL SIR MIKE JACKSON KCB CBE DSO ADC Gen and
AIR CHIEF MARSHAL SIR JOCK STIRRUP KCB AFC ADC

Evidence heard in Public Questions 195 - 282

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

Oral Evidence

Taken before the Defence Committee

on Tuesday 20 April 2004

Members present

Bruce George, Chairman

Mr Crispin Blunt

Mr David Crausby

Mr Dai Havard

Mr Peter Viggers

________________

Witnesses: General Sir Michael Walker GCB CMG CBE ADC Gen, Chief of the Defence Staff, Admiral Sir Alan West KCB DSC, First Sea Lord, General Sir Mike Jackson KCB CBE DSO ADC Gen, Chief of the General Staff, and Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup KCB AFC ADC, Chief of the Air Staff, examined.

Q195 Chairman: Gentlemen, thank you for coming for part two. I am sorry we could not complete the agenda last time. This is obviously a continuation of our earlier session and we will be covering inter alia the combined and joint operations. The first question, gentlemen, is on what I suppose I could call the "emerging shape of the JRRF". You will know but many people who have strayed in may not that the White Paper states that the Joint Rapid Reaction force will "continue to provide the pool of high readiness forces for rapid commitment to operations at up to medium scale." I should have said that there is no obligation on all of you to answer the questions.

General Sir Michael Walker: I am very conscious that last time it was a protracted period. The difficulty is that in asking across the piece in defence there is no one person here who can cover absolutely everything. So we will try to be brief, but if the answer needs a bit of context -----

Q196 Chairman: I am not saying you should provide three-line answers - as a Welshman I have never managed to be that concise! - but please do not speak unless you feel you have to. In an earlier answer we were told that the conclusions on the way the Joint Rapid Reaction Force concept will change are not expected for about two to three months. During your last appearance you said, Sir Michael, that the work of the JRRF concept was still on-going with definite conclusions expected in two months or so. Without repeating the same arguments or earlier discussions, what do you think are the key elements which you will be reassessing in the light of your respective service contributions? This is perhaps a question for all four of you, with Sir Michael first.

General Sir Michael Walker: I do not think there are going to be any dramatic changes in the concept. The concept has proven itself over a number of years now and has been used on many occasions. I think we are talking about looking at the degrees of readiness of the various component parts of the force elements that make up the concept, making sure that the force packages - because that is what it is about: packaging forces to take them to deal with the situation wherever it may be - are robust enough to take account of the experience we have had over the last five/six years.

Admiral Sir Alan West: We have started packaging our training in the navy on the basis of training as being part of the JRRF, and training up groups of ships that will be likely to deploy together as part of that JRRF. The readiness of all the various component parts is not completely finalised and is still being worked on and decided on.

General Sir Mike Jackson: I think there is little I can usefully add, Chairman. There are, as you know, currently in the land component of the JRRF a number of elements at various degrees of readiness, with training requirements which fall out from those degrees of readiness. It has certainly been a concept which has been well exercised over the last few years. As far as the army is concerned, this is more a check that we have everything properly aligned as much as we can, rather than any radical new look at the concept. That is not how I see it.

Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup: Chairman, I would just add that we are looking very much more at packages in terms of effects these days, rather than in terms of pure numbers. That is the only thing I would add into that overall mix.

Q197 Chairman: Do you expect anything to come out of the Istanbul NATO summit that might have an effect on this concept? Obviously NATO is moving quickly to try to deploy land forces. We were in Istanbul recently and heard a great deal about what was happening. We concluded how important our armed forces are, because we are capable of moving quickly over pretty long distances. Obviously you do not know what is going to come out of the summit but do you anticipate from what you have heard that there might be decisions emanating from that summit that may have an effect not simply on the JRRF but on the concept of rapid mobility over long distance?

General Sir Michael Walker: I think the answer is yes. I am sure one of the major topics of the NATO summit in Istanbul is going to be operational issues. The NATO Response Force will clearly be a matter of discussion. I suspect that the roster which is being developed will be discussed in terms of how it should train together, for example. Each nation has made a contribution on the current roster as to when they are prepared to provide each of the component parts. It is also of course linked to the European "Battle Group" idea, which of course is to provide some fairly high-readiness battle groups available for Europe to make contributions to peace-support type operations. I cannot speculate on what the declaration from the summit will be but I do see that we will be placing earmarks on our forces to meet the force elements of those various NATO and European force capabilities require.

Q198 Chairman: Mobility will not stop at the Joint Rapid Reaction Force.

General Sir Michael Walker: No.

Q199 Chairman: It is a concept which goes right across the whole of our military. Do you expect to increase the size and scope of the spearhead elements or will you instead be increasing the readiness of other forces committed to the JRRF concept?

General Sir Michael Walker: I do not think we have concluded on that yet. The spearhead lead element, the spearhead unit, is always a very useful unit and I do not see us changing that. Clearly the incremental approach to readiness is key. To try to keep all your forces at the very highest degree of readiness is both unnecessarily expensive and very demanding of people's time. It seems to me that it is going to be the packaging of the packages, rather than the increase in vast quantities of the readiness of those packages, and, to a degree, some adjustments to the readiness elsewhere to make sure that the enabling capabilities can keep pace with the combat capabilities.

Q200 Chairman: General, obviously spearhead affects you far more than others.

General Sir Mike Jackson: Indeed, Chairman. The spearhead battalion is one of a number of elements within the JRRF. It is one of those at very, very high readiness and it has been used on several occasions over the last two or three years; but it is one, if you like, golf club in the whole piece.

Q201 Chairman: Were there any lessons learned from the last deployment to the Balkans? Because they moved pretty swiftly.

General Sir Mike Jackson: No, I think it went pretty well.

General Sir Michael Walker: Not on spearhead per se but on NATO readiness times, in fact NATO readiness times required us to have that reserve in theatre within five days with its lead elements and within seven days with the rest of the unit. In fact, we had a request to have it there "by sunset, please" - a rather Somerset Maugham request - but anyway we got it there by sunset because for national reasons we have it at a higher degree of readiness. So I think the lesson is there, and certainly for the next NATO Chiefs of Defence it is one of the subjects we will be discussing as to the NATO readiness states. As you will appreciate, with NATO having force packages, with Europe now beginning to develop force packages, there needs to be coherence between the various states of readiness across the piece. Interestingly, the other nations who sent their troops there, having said they could not do it in under 14 days actually achieved it in about three. That, I think, is the lesson: we need to see what NATO states of readiness really need to be.

Q202 Chairman: Who else is there in NATO who can move forces fairly rapidly?

General Sir Michael Walker: Clearly it depends on how far. The Germans, the Italians and the French all moved their reinforcing battalions to Kosovo at the same time as we did but arrived shortly after.

Q203 Chairman: Will the concept of JRRF be used to support the global small-scale counter-terrorist operations that the White Paper introduces into the Defence Planning Assumptions? Let's ask the question in this form: Can it be incorporated?

General Sir Michael Walker: Yes.

Q204 Chairman: Will this be a change of concept?

General Sir Michael Walker: No, because ----

Q205 Chairman: Or will it need additional forces assigned to it?

General Sir Michael Walker: The concept is a very flexible one, which is why we adopted it. It essentially provides what pictorially I would depict as a spearhead, with those forces who are for their time being on the roster at the point of the spear, being at higher degrees of readiness. Now, of course you can have whatever forces you like in there, from special forces through to standard infantry to armour or whatever, but the concept is a sensible concept; there is nothing magic about it. It is a process actually that we have adopted for many years; it is merely that we have now described it in this term, the concept of the Joint Rapid Reaction Force. I think "Rapid Response" might be better because it is a response rather than reaction - we do not like always being reactive to respond - nonetheless, I think the reality is that we are unlikely to see counter-terrorism or any other reason for deploying British forces requiring a different approach.

Q206 Mr Viggers: Following, first, the issue of readiness, there was a headline-grabbing story which I saw yesterday, attributed to the Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld in the United States, of "10, 30, 30": of troops available in ten days, to deal with the enemy in 30 days and to have them regrouped in 30 days. Is that a helpful concept in terms of British strategic planning?

General Sir Michael Walker: We tend not to describe them in the same numerical formula but, in essence, this is the sort of thing the JRRF does anyway. We deploy within a certain time for a declared period of sustainability with the potential to sustain it for longer if necessary. That is the basis of the planning for JRRF.

Q207 Mr Viggers: Turning to air power and specifically the single-role fast jets, the Defence White Paper states that there is to be a reduced role for single-role fast jets and a desire to project air power from both the land and the sea, and that the MoD is "now considering how and when it should reduce the numbers of combat aircraft in order to reflect these developments". The Secretary of State has told us that no decision has been reached on a reduction plan for the acquisition of single-role fast jets. What is the assessment of the training implications and the costs of moving from single-role to multi-role capabilities?

Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup: If I may answer the second part first, the costs are already included in the programme, because this is not something that has just cropped up, it is something we have been moving towards for a considerable time. Our Forward Equipment Programme has taken account of that and our experiences in recent operations have merely underlined the correctness of that particular move. There is no doubt that in Iraq last year, for example, the first aircraft out of theatre were the Tornado F3 and the F15C, quite simply because they could only operate in the air defence role and we could not afford the footprint on the ground or the logistic support for aircraft that were no longer necessary in that role. The need for multi-role, the efficiency that it brings, not just in terms of tactical flexibility but in terms of logistic support in footprint on the ground, is clear. In terms of training, there is no doubt that it brings an additional bill. If you want to train people in war skills, then that takes time. The approach we will take, though, is, as we have done in the past, a phased approach. Again, this is not something that is necessarily entirely new because if we look even within a particular broad role in the past, such as offensive support, we have had squadrons which have specialised in alarm, squadrons which have specialised in anti-shipping attacks, but they have all been able to carry out roles in other areas as well. This multiplicity of training is something that is not new to us and we will have to adopt, throughout the training year, a phased approach.

Q208 Mr Viggers: If you reduce numbers, of course, you increase the proportional impact of attrition. Have you been reviewing the need for increased force protection?

Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup: We take account of the need for force protection all the time. In calculating the numbers we are likely to need in an operation, we take account of not just the different roles but all the other aspects of the operation, including the threat. All of that is built into our calculations. Force protection is a crucial element in our overall force package and has been for some time, so I do not think there is anything new in that.

Q209 Mr Crausby: It appears from previous witnesses before this Committee that one of the lessons from Iraq was that air-land integration was not as well practiced as it might have been. Could you tell us what specific steps have been taken to improve air-land coordination in the future?

General Sir Michael Walker: You are right. I think we recognise that. I would say this was not just a feature of our own national operations. It was widely seen that since the Cold War the working together of the two, the land and air environment, had become a much less common part of our training than it was during the Cold War days. At the moment we are analysing what the training needs are going to be for us to be able to get that piece right. Clearly the air-land coordination gets much more complex if you are operating with other people's air forces as well, so at the moment we are addressing how we can get our own house in order. It is never always going to be the case that our own aeroplanes will necessarily be those overhead our own troops at any particular time and so we are looking closely at how the Americans do it. They have a number of devices they use, not least the American marines, who have a thing called the ANGLICO, the Air Naval Ground Liaison Interface something or other, which is a very good system for doing it. We are trying to make sure that those who are going to be taking part in these sorts of operation are going to have the right training but I do not think we have not put the package together finally yet.

General Sir Mike Jackson: I would just echo CDS. It was clear that not only was the offensive deep-strike use of air power very central to the outcome, but also close air support, once to be thought a rather old-fashioned way of using aircraft and air power, proved not to be the case. The two front line commands, land command and strike power, have actually put a project together, as CDS says, to bring up what is required and then how best to do it to improve our ability in that area.

Q210 Mr Crausby: Will the RAF participate in BATUS at a significant level in the future?

General Sir Michael Walker: I am not sure BATUS is necessarily going to be the answer. The answer is they could but at BATUS we tend to train up to brigade level. Very often it is at the divisional level and the corps level where the coordination of the air effort in support of land forces is managed. There is no reason why they cannot but we really need to wait to find out the outcome of the study to make sure that we put the two environments together with the best possible effect at the end of it. But there is no reason why they should not and they have.

General Sir Mike Jackson: It does happen from time to time.

Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup: This is not something that we do not know how to do because there were many examples in Iraq itself, in particular parts of the theatre, where it worked extremely well, but that was because those involved were practised, understood the procedures, understood one another and had done it before they actually got up to theatre. We need to look at extending that particular expertise throughout the force structures on both sides.

Q211 Mr Crausby: Will army Apache forces train with the RAF?

General Sir Michael Walker: They will train with all three components, yes. When you ask "Will they train with the RAF?" what do you envisage is the requirement to train with the Royal Air Force? Remember that the Apache is essentially a weapon system that operates within the land commander's battle envelope, if I can use that expression. I am sorry to use such a strange term but we are talking about the area around it. The training piece is by and large a question of de-confliction and the allocation of targets, so of course that would come into the whole wider management of the battle structure, including the air-land management. Training with the Royal Air Force is a matter of training in the procedures and working together rather than specifically going up and joining the Royal Air Force and flying off around the skies together, if you see what I mean. So it has to be a joint, combined training in that context.

Q212 Mr Crausby: Will the number of forward air controllers be increased?

General Sir Mike Jackson: Again, I think we await the outcome of what they are saying. Inevitably there is an expense which goes with an increased number of forward air controllers and there is a balance to be struck as to how that is best arranged most economically. We are not quite there yet. For what it is worth, if this would put your mind at rest at all, there is clear understanding that the day of the forward air controller is most certainly not over - of which there was some talk a few years back.

Q213 Mr Blunt: I need a little bit of reassurance. I would like it individually. The White Paper appears to be based on an assumption that it is the statement by the Secretary of State for Defence that in the most demanding operations it is inconceivable that the United States will not be involved. The Defence White Paper will help shape our armed forces for a decade and more to come. Do each of you think that it is reasonable to base the shape of our armed forces on the assumption that it is inconceivable that the United States will not be involved in future large-scale operations alongside the United Kingdom?

General Sir Michael Walker: If you want some reassurance, yes, I do believe that is the case. They are the only nation that has the range of capabilities required to prosecute high intensity warfare in the most demanding set of circumstances. If we are going to go into these, we recognise that we are unlikely to do it unilaterally and therefore the only nation alongside whom we are likely to find ourselves in those circumstances is the United States. In that context, I think that is a very reasonable assumption.

Q214 Mr Blunt: In paragraph 2.5 of the White Paper it says, "The most demanding expeditionary operations involving intervention against the state adversaries can only plausibly be conducted if US forces are engaged ..." Are we saying that the United Kingdom on its own will never again be able to fight a state adversary (as we had to do over the Falklands, for example) on our own? Therefore the White Paper is based on an assumption that the United States will always be at our side.

General Sir Michael Walker: I think the assumption is that we would not see ourselves engaging in inter-state conflict on our own. I think that is a very fair assumption.

Q215 Mr Blunt: May I ask you each whether you think that is an assumption on which we should properly rely for the future of British defence.

General Sir Mike Jackson: "Never" is a very conclusive word, is it not? As CDS have said, one needs to make very careful judgments over the probabilities and it is difficult to construct the scenario, it would seem to me, where the United Kingdom would engage on inter-state conflict single-handed. We had the example in 1982, and I trust there will be no repeat performance of that, but, perhaps outside of that particular set of circumstances, it is very hard to see any circumstances in which this country's national interest would be so threatened that it would have to set out alone. It would be part of a wider piece. The assumption, it seems to me, is that it would be part of a wider piece in which the United States inevitably will be involved because it is that wider piece.

General Sir Michael Walker: If I may just add: remember the Falklands was demanding, but I would not have described it as "the most demanding". This did not use all the weapons of war and capabilities that we would use in the most demanding type of operation. There was very little armour used; there was very limited artillery. It was essentially a lighter war-fighting operation. We need to remember that war fighting can happen at any level and with any forces but the most demanding we are talking about here is the exploitation of every single capability that is necessary to prosecute the most demanding form of war. In those circumstances, I do believe it is a fair assumption.

Q216 Mr Blunt: The kernel of my concern is that we appear to be stripping out the air defence capability both of the navy and of the army in the various savings measures that are currently being taken. Of course both of those capabilities were critical in 1982. The operation in 1982, although it was light in the terms you have presented it, we would not now be able to carry out in the course of the next decade when those capabilities are not present for the United Kingdom. That means that the shop therefore appears to be being bet on this assumption, where Lord King, former Defence Secretary, said to the House of Lords that in his experience "the inconceivable usually happens". Maybe by definition we cannot conceive of the circumstances in which it might happen but experience tells us, in my judgment, that Lord King's words would appear more often than not to be correct.

General Sir Michael Walker: I cannot let you get away with the statement that we appear to be getting rid of all the air defence within the army and the navy. I do not know where you have got that from, but that is absolute nonsense.

Q217 Chairman: Tory Central Office maybe!

General Sir Michael Walker: Alan, do you want to comment about your own views?

Admiral Sir Alan West: I would make a couple of points. Within the definitions that you have given about this large scale and the whole spread of capabilities being used, I would agree that it is extremely unlikely that we would ever be involved in an operation without the United States, that inter-state type operation. "Inconceivable" is a word I probably would not ever use, because I think it is true to say that you never know what is going to happen in the future. We have found that again and again and again. But the basis of assuming that we will not be involved at the very highest levels of military capability in an inter-state operation without the US I think is a very sensible basis on which to go forward. I think where you are coming from is a similar thing to the Falklands again.

Q218 Mr Blunt: Not just the Falklands. We are a member of the Commonwealth.

Admiral Sir Alan West: But if maybe I could talk on an operation of that type.

Q219 Mr Blunt: If a Commonwealth country is invaded, that brings with it obligations to the United Kingdom that the United States does not share.

Admiral Sir Alan West: But if I could talk on the specifics, where you talk about air defence being stripped out and capabilities: looking to the future - and I will use the Falklands as a scenario, because one needs a scenario - we will have the capability of doing exactly what we did before. We will keep it with our CVSs, through until the CVF comes; and when the CVF comes, we will be even more capable of conducting that type of operation. The loss of the FA2s - and there has been considerable debate about that - is a loss of air defence capability in the short term, but we of course have layered air defence and we are able still to provide air defence for the carrier group. Focusing more on deep strike is the way we need to go for the future - we are certain of that, looking at the operations that have happened - and would give us an ability to conduct an operation like the Falklands with more capability than we have had in the past. So I am not concerned on that specific but I would not use the word "inconceivable" because I also agree that the one thing of which you can be absolutely certain in defence terms is that it is the thing which you have not predicted that will happen - which is why we need all of the capabilities we have in defence, in those multi-role capabilities, to be able to react to that.

Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup: I would echo that. I would just say that, since we are unable to predict the future and if, as you say, the unexpected usually happens, then the important thing is to be able to react to an uncertain future. The way to do that is not to focus on specific issues but to accept the need for adaptability in our military structure, in our capability and in our tactics. I think that is the issue on which we should be focusing rather than on specific sets of capability that we think might or might not be required in the future.

Q220 Mr Blunt: Thank you. Might I focus, therefore, on the specific set of capabilities on land, with that introduction. General Jackson, these are questions really aimed at you, about this balance between heavy and light and the new medium-scale forces. In the SDR we unsquared the brigades, which was accepted as a penalty by the then Chief of the General Staff but there was then a return to it, so there was a formation training cycle which was then going to be, in a sense, to make up for that. Now that, because of the operational tempo that has occurred since the SDR, has not really been able to work and we now appear to be paying the price of going from three armoured brigades in a division down to two. What is the military price that you judge is therefore being paid by that sacrifice of heavy capability, going from three to two armoured brigades?

General Sir Mike Jackson: "Sacrifice" is a bit of an emotive word, is it not? This is a balanced judgment which was being made.

Q221 Mr Blunt: It is the cost part of the cost-benefit analysis, I accept, yes.

General Sir Mike Jackson: When you look back to the end of the Cold War and see what the army has been required to do over that decade-and-some, it is quite striking the relative frequency with which the heavy end, the heavy armoured end, is used as compared to the light end. It is the latter which has been called on very much more frequently, partly because of the urgency of the circumstances and therefore rapidity of deployment and partly because it is those sort of forces which have actually been required to have the effect on the ground. So there was an imbalance here of use and it meant to some extent that we were having one part of the army being over-used, and, if you like, another part being relatively underused - and these are relative terms. It also has something to do, I think, with the frequency - putting my point perhaps another way - of large-scale operations as against small and medium. The large scale seems to be about once a decade, when you count up the Falklands, Gulf I and Gulf II. When thinking about a future army structure - because we cannot stand still; that is not an option - we can at least think about how in ten or 15 years time we will be structured in the best possible way to continue to achieve the operational success which we do now. The rebalancing exercise requires the reduction of the heavy armoured forces, as you say, from three brigades to two: the conversion, therefore - and it is not quite as simple as that, but in arithmetical terms that is how it is - of that third armoured brigade into a second, in the army, light brigade, and not forgetting 3 Commando Brigade, of course, a third light brigade. So you see that balancing there. Of course, in between, we at the moment have three mechanised brigades, parts of which are heavy - because, as you know, each mechanised brigade has a main battle tank regiment and an armoured infantry battalion, so that part of it is heavy. Not only do we have a conundrum over frequency of use, there is a conundrum over rapidity of deployment. The conundrum is of course that the armoured brigade is a most powerful force when it is in theatre but it is more difficult and lengthy to get it there. Conversely, the light force is rapidly moved but its comparative combat power of course is relatively low. We are looking to take a trick here in the middle, balancing off heavy/light, with a new style medium brigade which will give - and nothing will be perfect in this sense because you have a weight-distance equation - a better solution to this question of deployability. That leads us on to FRES, but that was probably not the purpose of your question. I hope that lays out where we are.

Q222 Mr Blunt: It is the purpose of my question. The solution for the medium size or medium weight brigades is FRES.

General Sir Mike Jackson: In due course, yes.

Q223 Mr Blunt: When are we going to get FRES?

General Sir Mike Jackson: The initial in-service date for the simple variant is 2009/2010, of that sort of order, but there is still a study going on as to what the acquisition process should be. That is the target date.

Q224 Mr Blunt: Are we going to reach it? For me, with some knowledge of this, trying to understand what FRES is going to look like is like trying to nail a blancmange to the wall. It does not seem easy even to understand the process that is happening inside the MOD, for the various stories that seem to be coming out about how the procurement is being conducted. When would you expect a brigade to be equipped with FRES?

General Sir Mike Jackson: I have given you the target date for the simple variety.

Q225 Mr Blunt: You said the initial in-service date is expected to be 2009/10.

General Sir Mike Jackson: Yes.

Q226 Mr Blunt: Initial in-service date could mean the first ----

General Sir Mike Jackson: I think you are getting frankly into too much precision over a new family of fighting vehicles at this point. I cannot give you the answer to that simply. There is not yet enough information for me to be able to answer that question sensibly. It is one thing to have a target, but it is another thing to have knowledge of what is actually achievable. The study into what is the appropriate acquisition process for this family of vehicles has not got to the point where I can give you that sort of answer.

Q227 Mr Blunt: That is why I was a bit concerned when the permanent secretary, in the language he used, said, "We have said 2009/10, therefore I, as permanent secretary, must say 2009/10". The concern here is that we are reshaping the army to have a medium weight brigade and, if I were a betting man, looking at how far the procurement process has advanced for FRES and all the difficulties of producing the technology for a vehicle like that to be able to deliver what the you want of it, I would have thought 2009/10 was pretty difficult.

General Sir Mike Jackson: I would accept that it is a challenging target to set.

General Sir Michael Walker: May I help? FRES is a concept, as you know; it is not a vehicle. It came about as a result of our understanding of the American transformation model in which they wanted to produce a vehicle of dimensions and agility that could be deployed in exactly the way Mike has described. The then chief of the American army said to the science and technology community: "This is the technology we need. Go and deliver it to me by a certain date." Essentially that technology allowed you to deliver the same combat power from a medium-weight vehicle that a tank would give us or that an armoured infantry vehicle would give us. That was the thinking. You are left with two possibilities. Either you go out and you buy what is currently on the streets and available now, which, in a sense, is a platform of some sort and you fill it with everything you can, or, alternatively, you develop, using the technology, so that when you produce this thing it is as state of the art as it can be, it has a reasonable life and it has the capabilities that are necessary to give it enough protection, enough fire power and enough mobility and enough strategic mobility to meet the requirements. The process at the moment is looking at the debate between those two. If technology cannot deliver, then maybe the decision will have to go in favour of a platform that is available on to which things can be placed. If the technology can deliver, then we should exploit it to give us the best capability that we can for our troops when they go abroad. That is the nature of the examination that is going on now.

Q228 Mr Blunt: Given that is obviously a challenging task and given the uncertainty therefore about the date at which one might deliver FRES to a medium weight brigade, are we not leaving our forces under-protected by reducing the number of main battle tanks which have just proven themselves in Gulf II? We now for the first time appear to have a tank which is a world beater and our prompt reaction is then to cut its rather slim numbers rather substantially. Are we not leaving our forces under-protected by making that decision now?

General Sir Mike Jackson: Yes, but you have to bear in mind what slice of the armoured capability is going to be put in to even a large scale conflict. We do not plan to field three armoured brigades simultaneously and have not done. This is a careful balancing act set against what might be required of the army in the most demanding circumstances.

Q229 Mr Blunt: Could you give us a percentage of the amount of the amount of heavy armoured brigades we are going to lose?

General Sir Mike Jackson: Not at this stage.

Q230 Mr Blunt: Do you expect the size of the army to change as a result of the White Paper?

General Sir Mike Jackson: It is being examined. It probably will, but it will be, I suspect, a relatively marginal change in percentage terms. But our ability to react to changing circumstances does allow us on occasion to take an advantage there and there is of course the whole question of the feature of military support to the civil power in Northern Ireland which plays into this arena as well. There are unknown factors there. We shall see.

Q231 Mr Blunt: How resilient, if that is the right word, is the future army force structure going to be? In other words, we have constantly had to backfill units being deployed in operations over the last ten years. Once all the changes have come into place, are we still going to be in the game every time somebody goes on operations they are going to see 20, 30, 40 per cent of their people are somewhere else?

General Sir Mike Jackson: I am grateful for that question, because, you are right, unit establishments have never been as robust as we would have liked. Therefore, the backfilling, robbing Peter to pay Paul, or whatever phrase gets used on deployment, has been part of life. The Army Board is determined to put this right, to give unit establishments back that lift, where appropriate, that will avoid having to go round that backfilling route. We are devising ways in which we can readjust manpower to achieve that, but I can assure you it is a very clear objective, what is known in the jargon as Future Army, Step 2. We are on the case.

Q232 Mr Blunt: Is there anything you can give the Committee in slow time on Future Army Step 2? I am sure that would be of much interest.

General Sir Michael Walker: I am sorry to butt in here, but I think we are at the stage where no decisions have been made yet, so it would probably, I do not know, be outside parliamentary privilege. Ministers have to make a decision, I think, first, before we ----

Q233 Chairman: I would like to reply to that, General. We are interested in things before decisions are made. It is not our role just to react once a decision is made. If the MoD has any intelligence, sometimes it is down to them to deal with. Other times, I think it is profoundly unwise simply to dump something on us and say, "Here is our decision" when it would be really quite helpful at some stage if they could give us some of the argument beforehand; not saying, "We have not made a decision, therefore you have to wait until that decision is made".

General Sir Michael Walker: I accept that, Mr Chairman, but I do not think it is our duty to speculate on the direction in which we might go. Certainly these studies go on. You well know how the Ministry of Defence operates - or Crispin does, certainly - and the way in which all these things are looked at, but, as yet, none of these proposals has even been considered by ministers, and I think that to put them before you before they have had a chance to see them would be wrong - Don't you?

Q234 Chairman: No! We can give a very intelligent response.

General Sir Michael Walker: I am sorry, I will withdraw that question!

Q235 Mr Blunt: May I finish by saying you will remember Front-line First.

General Sir Michael Walker: I will. It is seared upon my heart.

Q236 Mr Blunt: That was an exercise which had to be carried out in the face of the Treasury - there is no disguising that - but the way the exercise was carried out was to go out to the whole Department and seek suggestions as to how to improve things. It was a very open exercise in the way it was conducted, with a statement to the House announcing how it was going to be conducted and a statement to the House when it was concluded. It was extremely open. Politically, as far as ministers were concerned, in terms of the Department's presentation it worked very well. I would just commend the transparency. It does make the tough decisions we have to take easier to sell.

General Sir Michael Walker: I accept your point, but, equally, this is routine work in progress, and one of the difficulties, as you well know, is that much mischief is made to the serious detriment of our workforce if things get out about some of the ideas and proposals that are being put forward. For a tank regiment sitting in Iraq, to see somebody's suggestion that they should no longer exist is not helpful to their morale. Quite clearly, we want to keep that within the bounds of the work we are doing. It is the army who are conducting this study and who will make recommendations to the Secretary of State in due course.

Q237 Chairman: A similar rational argument is predicated on the fact that nobody is going to leak inside the system, so you get the worst of both worlds: you have a secretive system where a committee like ours, which has an obligation to try to find out what is happening, then reads in The Guardian or The Times what somebody for their own vested interests and reasons seeks to transmit to a broader audience and then you have an allegedly closed debate which becomes a debate generated by the amount of information that is leaked, which is usually very partial. On the subject of tanks - and you have given your warning there, General -- and be careful, with The Guardian on your right, your boss on the left and who knows who behind - it seems to me that we have waited 100 years for a good tank and now we have them. They are superb, superb tanks. I would have thought that even if they are to be used for what I might call Basra type, post initial conflict situations, they are very useful to intimidate if it is necessary to intimidate. I seem to recall a parliamentary answer quite recently that no plans have been made as to what to do with the tanks. Whenever it is said "no plans have been made" it gets me rather anxious. If we are to cut down the use of tanks held ready for operational use, at least I would hope that those left are not sold off to whoever we can sell them to or give them to, but can be held in reserve, in case the policy makers have got it wrong yet again, when there is a requirement for the tanks. The end of the tank, broached for generations, I do not think is going to be reached for some considerable time. If it is feasible for you to write to us or tell us a little more than "no plans have been made as to what to do with any in-service tanks." We would really like to know the philosophy behind the cutting of the number of tanks, which is low anyway. If it is for financial reasons, should you tell us that, and if it is not for financial reasons what the other reasons are and whether we going to keep them, use them. Maybe TA personnel over a period of time could learn how to use them. In the event of a crisis, where we might actually lose tanks, it is not much of a consolation then to say, "Oh, well, we made a good decision in 2004 to get rid of one-third of them, maybe now we can borrow the rest to undertake a military activity". I am sorry for the barrage but I really feel the case has not been made and will not be able to be made for reducing significantly or at all the number of tanks.

General Sir Mike Jackson: First of all, I think it is worth being very clear that Challenger II has proved itself now to be a remarkably effective fighting system. But I go back to what I said a little while ago, and that is that we actually hold more tanks in the inventory than we would, I think under any circumstances, actually put into the field. Again, never say never - there is always the unexpected, as we have already discussed - but we hold more tanks than plans - certainly logistic plans as well - would support. As to disposal of any Challengers which were deemed to be surplus, I have no real knowledge on that, I am afraid. But I hear all you say.

Q238 Chairman: You talk about using logistic plans as a rationale for perhaps dismissing the number of tanks we have, then we find out from our own study of Iraq that logistic plans are less than 100 per cent perfect. As you said earlier, you can never tell what kind of war we are going to fight. We are now down to 150 tanks and we could lose half of them in a major conflict, should that type of conflict emerge. Then where does one go? If we have paid for them and we are not going to give them away - yes, there will be costs of putting them ----

General Sir Mike Jackson: I am certain in my own mind that the main battle tank, and of course its companion fighting vehicle, the armoured infantry fighting vehicle, the Warrior, those two very capable systems, are going to be with us for decades to come. I have no doubt about that. It is interesting that the United States army has just made it clear that Abrams, their main battle tank, will be in service beyond 2030- 2032 was I think the year given. This is not the end of the main battle tank and its replacement by some gee-whiz bit of equipment not yet invented at all. That is not what we are talking about.

Q239 Mr Havard: On this question of the size of the land army, I was going to try to wind it into something I was going to ask you later about basing and joint training and so on, but the army has a particular place here because the degree of change it is having to make is probably greater than the other two services in certain aspects. As I understand it, something like 40 per cent of the army is currently not trained-for-role. It is the usage of the army and the question of the readiness cycle - and I will come back to this later perhaps when I am talking about how people train together. With the readiness cycle at the moment, there is something like one-third of the army involved in that process. It is a question about the deployability and the trained-for-role at the given time you require them, so it is less to do with the size of the overall number and more to do with their ability to respond and be trained at the appropriate time. They seem to me to be questions equally as large as questions about equipment. They are not necessarily addressed in the public print at the moment but presumably they are being addressed in terms of your considerations.

General Sir Mike Jackson: Training, of course, is an essential part of having military capability: if you are not trained, you do not have it. It is as simple as that. Anything multiplied by zero is zero. In the way the field army sets about this, as you know, the six ground manoeuvre brigades, three currently armoured and three currently mechanised, are trained through what we call the "formation readiness cycle" to which you have just alluded, designed to ensure that at any one time we have one brigade from each of those trios which is at high readiness and ready to be deployed. That system has worked well. It is complicated by the operational tempo which we have at the moment. There is a non-operational aspect to this as well which is the arrival of digitisation and the Bowman system: each brigade is being Bowmanised as a coherent formation, and it is a program which takes some six/seven months for each brigade -----

Q240 Mr Havard: That structure which you are explaining which has worked well in the past, if the overall number of the army is not to increase, or in fact is to decrease, are we actually talking about a change of shape? Obviously in terms of light brigades and heavy brigades, there is a change of shape, and I think there may be a change in shape in terms of how you improve the usability of the people you are actually left with. A large percentage of them seem to be tied up with the wrong things at the right time. How do you change the process? Are you changing the process internally as well as questions about materiel and equipment?

General Sir Mike Jackson: Not, I think, in a way that I can recognise from your question of a changing process internally. I have given you the structure of the formation readiness cycle now, and, you are right, there is a lot of the field army which is not in those six ground manoeuvre brigades, but the air assault brigade has its own arrangements, and of course a lot of the rest of the field army is predicated, amongst other things, in support to Northern Ireland. You mentioned 40 per cent not being trained for their role. I do not recognise that figure. I do not know what lies behind your allegation there, but ....

Mr Havard: I will explain them to you later.

Q241 Mr Crausby: The Defence White Paper tells us in paragraph 4.1 that "some of our older maritime vessels contribute less well to the pattern of operations that we envisage, and reductions in their numbers will be necessary." Could you tell us which type of vessels you have identified as contributing less well as set out in the Defence White Paper? I do not expect you to tell us which vessels you intend to scrap, but could you give us some sort of insight into the thinking that provoked that statement?

Admiral Sir Alan West: Yes. Part of the way we are looking at future warfare involves, as you know, network-enabled capability, effect-based operations, and we have had to look and rebalance across maritime - indeed, across all of joint warfare - the best ways of providing these capabilities. We have been looking to the way that we fight in the future and it has become clear to us that that will take investment in other areas. Clearly, within a limited amount of money that means you have to take investment out, to put it into the areas where you really want it to be. In the maritime context, the batch-1 42s, for example, with the sea dart system, are ships that contribute less than the batch-3 42s and less than the later 23s, in terms of those sorts of capabilities that we are talking about. The money and resources freed up from getting rid of that type of platform will be reinvested to other capabilities; for example, in the maritime and joint sense, the CVF, the JCA, the Tactoms going into Astute type submarines and that sort of thing. That is what the White Paper is alluding to.

Q242 Mr Crausby: On a more positive note, can you tell us which vessels have proved more capable?

Admiral Sir Alan West: As I say, the later 42s clearly have more capability to them. The 23s, particularly the later 23s, are able to be operated with far less people. They have a range of capabilities that we have found extremely valuable for the sorts of operations we have been conducting in the Arabian Gulf and in the North Indian Ocean and in other parts of the world as well. We have put investment into amphibious shipping. As you are aware, we have the two new LPDs; one of them was operating on R2 during the training up in North Norway recently; Bulwark will be coming to us later this year. We have the LSDAs being built and the second one was launched on Good Friday. It is in those sorts of ships that we are putting investment, really to increase our expeditionary capability. We have been lucky in the navy because almost by definition we are capable of expeditionary warfare, because of the way we walk around with our homes on our back and everything with us on one platform. But increasing that expeditionary capability, because those were the types of operations that were envisaged in the SDR as becoming more and more relevant to the world we are in, is the shift of emphasis in where we are moving our money around.

Q243 Chairman: I would allude to a debate the Defence Committee had, admittedly in the middle of the Cold War, about the size and shape of the service fleet, when we had Sir Richard Mottram saying "about 50" when we had 43 frigates and destroyers and, however eloquent he was, he was not able to explain why that was "about 50" as opposed to "about 40". Then each decade we have lopped off ten more ships, with the same arguments exactly that you are giving now - quite correctly giving, theoretically - but in consequence we will be getting down to the mid-20s in terms of frigates and destroyers and ten years from now we might be down even lower. It is almost as though the navy is getting out of ships. If the Treasury, or whoever above your level, Admiral, is going to argue this case and will not be arguing strictly in terms of the cost or personnel, I really hope they will publish some sort of serious document to try to convince people that we do not need some of these older ships. Because I find it a little absurd, in a way, that if we only went to war with equipment that was ten years old, we would never have got into a war from Crecy onwards. Frankly, we always go into a conflict with some capability that is older than others. There is an argument - whatever the naval equivalent of the footprint is - that if we have fewer and fewer frigates and destroyers, one then wonders what sort of presence we are going to have outside the English Channel. Please, if this is the argument that is forced on you, at least present it in such a way that appears to be modestly convincing, that we are cutting ships because there is some strategic rationale for doing so. I have been on the Committee for over 20 years and this just comes round the houses all the time: the same arguments, different people. I am as unconvinced now as I was then. In the case of the older type 42s, is there not a case for re-arming them, of putting something on them that is relevant to defend our carrier force or to perform functions that may be necessary rather than pensioning them off? I do not expect all the answers to that, but I hope you will produce a serious document giving am attempt at justification.

Admiral Sir Alan West: Chairman, may I come back a little bit on that?

Q244 Chairman: Please do.

Admiral Sir Alan West: There is a whole raft of issues encapsulated in that. Clearly one has to cut one's cloth within the limit of the budget that is available and therefore one has to make assessments of priorities. In an ideal world, as you will expect from a First Sea Lord, he will want to have as many ships as is possible and indeed probably far more than he actually needs, that is one end of the spectrum. At the other end of the spectrum we have to cut our cloth within the amount of money that is available. I think we have got to try and move away a bit from numbers, but there is always some strength and issue in numbers, as you rightly say. We are trying more and more to move away from that and say what is the effect of the capability we want to achieve. So, for example, the capability of the Merlin ASW helicopter, of which we have now got 42 in service, is huge in anti-submarine warfare terms and makes up in a sense for quite a lot of what in the old days would have been Corvettes and units like that. It is not all as gloomy as it might seem from first vision. When one looks at the whole gamut of maritime capability and all of the parts that fit together, it is not as gloomy as it looks. In terms of do we want to upgrade something like the batch-1 42s, part of the problem is because of the saga of what was NFR90 and then the Common New Generation Frigate, etcetera and then our decision to go for Type 45s, a British destroyer with the PAAM system, there has been a delay in these things being replaced. The way to go in terms of anti-air warfare defence is the Type 45, of which we have now got six on order and we should really be getting those in now, but we all know the reason that did not happen and that would have been the best way to do it. To upgrade an older ship is really not a very cost effective and sensible way to go for UK plc for the money we have to invest in it. In terms of overall numbers, yes, there are concerns if you go down below certain levels. My ship was sunk in the Falklands, there were four ships sunk there and four of the frigates and destroyers were quite badly damaged. If you get down to too low numbers and you have to get involved in something where that happens it becomes very significant. These issues all have to be taken into account, but I think just to focus on numbers of destroyers and frigates does miss some of these other great capabilities we have got in terms of our expeditionary capability, amphibious warfare, the Carrier decision where the CVFs have huge extra capability, TacToms and Astute class submarines, all of those other issues. Some of the points you made are valid, Mr Chairman.

Chairman: As you said last time, you cannot be in two places at the same time and when you are getting down now to about 20 then your words will come back to haunt you. The thing that disturbs me about the whole process - and I am aware of the need for efficiency - is the process is driven by how much money the Treasury is prepared to allocate to you and frankly, if the Prime Minister wishes to deploy those forces readily around the world then doing it within the constraints of what might be a diminishing budget appears to me to be a little bit of a fantasy. You either decide you are going to have adequate forces, adequately funded, adequately led, adequately deployed and adequately resourced or you do not and in my view we are moving into that area. If there are going to be any further cuts in the defence budget, you might wish to see and we might wish to see them being curtailed because the Treasury once again, as in the 1920s with the Ten-Year Rule, has their perception of warfare ten years from now which often is based on an illusion and on economic decision making rather than defence policy making.

Q245 Mr Viggers: Will you share your current thinking about the new aircraft carrier? We can all see the problems. The Joint Strike Fighter is some seven years behind the milestones, three years behind the service entry date and, perhaps more importantly, it is two tonnes overweight. Whilst we have been told that size is not everything, nevertheless will there be a short take-off vertical landing Joint Strike Fighter to which the Americans are not committed or are you thinking along the lines of conventional take off and landing? Can you share your thinking on this, please?

Admiral Sir Alan West: At present the position is that we are going for the STOVL variant of the JSF as the aircraft that will be carried in the CVFs. I have seen various reports about weight issues and things but this often happens early on in a programme. I do not recognise the dates that you are giving us yet, I do not think any of those have been finalised, but the position as regards the MoD is at present our plan is as it was, to go for the STOVL variant of JSFs and that is the way we are proceeding at the moment.

Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup: You said to which the Americans are not committed when you were talking about the STOVL variant. The US Marines are hugely committed to it and the United States Air Force has just announced plans to buy STOVL JSFs for its own forces for the very critical role which we discussed earlier of providing support to forces on the ground. The Americans are committed to STOVL JSFs in a major way, more so now than they were even six months ago. There are weight problems for all variants. The weight problem is more critical for a STOVL aeroplane than it is for a conventional one, but weight is a very serious issue which is being tracked very closely by all the partner nations and on which industry is working very hard. As things stand at the moment I am pretty confident that the industry will be able to overcome those great problems but it is clearly going to be a challenge.

Q246 Mr Viggers: What is the plan for the size of the airwing that will be carried in the new ships?

Admiral Sir Alan West: The plan is it will be 36 JCAs and then there will be four MASCs (?), which is the future ASW capability, that is the basic airwing that we are basing it around.

Q247 Mr Viggers: Have you studied a marine version of the Typhoon?

Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup: The answer to that is yes. That was looked at in the early days and was discounted.

Q248 Mr Viggers: So you have decided not to proceed down that path?

Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup: Indeed, we have decided to proceed down the STOVL JSF route.

Q249 Mr Viggers: We have been told not to be size fixated, but can you tell us the latest plan for size and weight of the aircraft carrier?

Admiral Sir Alan West: We are in phase three of the work. At the moment all of the designs are for a ship of about 60,000 tonnes and about 275 metres long, but I would have to come back to you on this. I think that is the size that it is looking like at the moment. There has been a lot more detailed work done in terms of design and things than has been the case in the past at this stage of work prior to what one has known as Main Gate, a lot of work on that, but that is about the size. The way things are built now means it will have a very large flight deck with that 60,000 tonne weight, it will be about two-thirds the size of the flight deck of a Nimbus. These will be quite big ships. When they are berthed in Portsmouth Gosport will not be able to see Portsmouth, which some people in Gosport will be quite pleased about, so they are quite large.

Chairman: I have foregone the pleasure of asking questions on the French for fear of saying something appallingly politically incorrect, so I will keep my mouth shut and pass on to David Crausby who is far more discreet than I am.

Q250 Mr Crausby: I asked the Secretary of State about involvement with the French on the Future Carrier Programme and he said "We are certainly prepared to co-operate with France or any other country which might have a similar requirement to our own". He went on to say, "There must be some benefits in at least talking to France about the fact that they require a conventional large carrier." How significant is the French Navy in your plans for the future carriers?

Admiral Sir Alan West: I think there are possible benefits in terms of the industry-to-industry co-operation. Let us say, for example, we decide on a podded main engine for this carrier - and I am not sure that has been finally decided or not - and that we are going to have two on each of ours, that means we would be buying four of them, but if the French go for a very similar design and they want two engines, you are getting six and hopefully you will be able to get a reduction and similarly in other areas like that. That is where we would see there being value in co-operation. What we do not want to do is get to a situation where the French say we are not quite happy with your design, let us redesign it. All of the things that went wrong with the Common New Generation Frigate and the NFR90 we do not want to let happen again because the timelines for introducing this carrier for us are quite tight and we know that will inevitably cause delay. My view is that if you get involved in redesigning between countries like that you end up with it costing more as well. It is really on an industry-to-industry basis where there will be the need for co-operation and where I think there is potential for some reductions in costs overall and I hope there are some because that would be very good news. The more stuff we have in common then the support costs over time would be less as well.

Q251 Mr Crausby: Can I be assured that it will not cause any delay?

Admiral Sir Alan West: Where we are coming from is that we are going to make an ISD of 2012 and that is why we are being very adamant that there is this industry-to-industry co-operation and there is not going to be something grander than that. There is a tendency with other nations to say I would quite like to have a stabilisation system that is different, they have got them in Charles de Gaulle, that would mean a complete redesign of the carrier and that is not the route we wish to embark on.

Q252 Chairman: And the French can give you enormous advice on extending the length of an aircraft carrier.

Admiral Sir Alan West: I am not going to comment on that, Mr Chairman.

Q253 Mr Crausby: Apart from the procurement of the new aircraft carriers and the Type 45 destroyer, what other steps are you intending to take to 'deliver effect from the sea'?

Admiral Sir Alan West: The new Astute class submarines will carry the TacToms, block four of TLAM which has got a hugely enhanced capability, it is more accurate, you have different types of warheads, it has got a longer range, it can loiter, you can pre-programme it and re-programme it in the air which gives a wonderful ability to do deep strikes and use for coercive action. That would be one that would leap out to me as something else that gives us this ability. The other arm is really the new amphibious force and the new amphibious shipping we have got. For example, although the LPD was later than I would have liked, Albion is proving to be a superb ship. The actual command and control capability within that ship and the ISR capability within it is really showing itself to be fantastic. When we were doing the exercise up in north Norway we began to develop that more and more and I think there is a lot of potential for huge enhanced capability in our amphibious effort because of the new ship.

Q254 Mr Crausby: Are you satisfied that this emphasis on the delivery of effect will not be achieved at the expense of adequate force protection?

Admiral Sir Alan West: Specifically in the maritime sense we take force protection extremely seriously. In anti-air warfare terms the reason we have gone for PAAMS, which will be the best AAW system in the world, is it will be capable of shooting down any known missile. The ASW threat is less than it used to be in the past. However, there is no doubt that one well-handled submarine could have a major impact on any operation and we have still got an ASW capability and can counter that. In terms of asymmetric threats, we have put quite a lot of money into our systems to enable us to counter things like fast attack craft, they have not all arrived yet but they are in the process of appearing with the fleet and we are training our people to enable them to use those and to be able to conduct those operations against the asymmetric threat. I believe we are looking carefully at all of the aspects of our defence to enable us to conduct these operations. Also, there is no doubt about it, when ships are out of sight of land it is very difficult for people who are not sophisticated enemies to know where they are at all. To find one, pinpoint it and deliver a weapon is in fact extremely difficult. In asymmetric terms, as long as you are out of sight it is quite tricky for these people to do anything.

Q255 Mr Blunt: Can I ask some questions about coalition operations, initially about working with the United States and, secondly, about the problems then of working with our European allies since our main assumption is now going to be on the need to work with the Americans. Using Iraq as an example, we say in the White Paper, "When the UK chooses to be engaged we will wish to be able to influence political and military decision-making throughout the crisis, including during the post-conflict period." How are we getting on in Iraq in influencing the United States in how they are conducting operations in Iraq?

General Sir Mike Jackson: You will know and I suspect that the CDS ---

Q256 Mr Blunt: I focused it on you because it is primarily on the ground.

General Sir Michael Walker: You have misunderstood because you do not influence on the ground, you influence right back into the national capital. You give your piece and we will put it in context.

General Sir Mike Jackson: This question of influence on a senior or larger coalition partner from a small one, as the CDS has already said, has a number of dimensions to it and a number of levels to it and clearly at a strategic level this is national leader to national leader and it is not for me to answer on that part here. What it means on the ground is ensuring that you have a structure which allows that coalition to work together as best it can. There are a number of thoughts here which I think are important. Coalition, multi-nationality, yes, brings great political advantage but it also brings military friction and that is reality. The great trick is to ensure that your political advantage is greater than the military friction which a coalition brings with it. There are a number of ways in which you can minimise any potential friction, that is by having a system, which we most certainly do in Iraq, of deputies under the US commander, whatever we are talking about the British deputy is there. The fact that the British approach to post-conflict operations doctrinally is somewhat different to the American approach is a fact of life, that is simply a fact. Therefore it is important that the liaison and deputy system you have got makes sure that that difference is minimalised in terms of what happens. So there are a number of strands to this in theatre. Just a week or ten days ago General John McColl (some of you may remember him from taking the original ISAF Force to Kabul two Wednesdays ago) went out on promotion as a three star to act as the deputy to the American commander under the new force structure being put into place now in Iraq for the transfer of sovereignty. The final thought here is if you try multi-nationality at too low a level you are getting into a position where the friction may outweigh the political advantage and, therefore, to keep units/brigades discrete is a sensible approach and you will see that is more or less what it is on the ground today.

General Sir Michael Walker: Can I ask you to interpret the word friction in its military sense? We talk about military friction as being the friction of war, ie those things that combine together to make things not run always as smoothly as they might in combat and in all fighting operations. Friction here does not mean that we are permanently arguing with those people around us, if I could put that context right.

General Sir Mike Jackson: I use the word in the technical sense, yes.

General Sir Michael Walker: The reality is you need to have influence at the operational level, at the tactical level and at the strategic level and the mechanisms for doing those are new mechanisms to us. Whereas in the context of a NATO run Article 5 operation the political machinery, the military C2 structure and the link between the two has been pretty well established over a number of years, in coalition terms you have to manufacture that from the outset. At the height of Telic I think we had something of the order of 600 people, civil and military, salting the various levels of influence throughout the chain of command that went from Donald Rumsfeld right down to the military. Indeed the Foreign Office were working at their piece which included the State Department and so on. It is a multi-faceted approach to provide that influence. At each level only part of it is achievable. So if you want to influence at the tactical level, that is fine, but you do not influence the strategic level from your people at a tactical level. So there is a requirement to salt any coalition chain of command with your people. We are not the only nation to do this. There are a lot of other nations who have had people in Tampa Florida working with Tommy Franks, having access to the Pentagon etcetera. It is a fairly major piece and the ability to produce that has got to be a fundamental part of any planning for these operations both prior to conflict, during conflict and post conflict.

Q257 Mr Blunt: In making this decision that we have to have the ability to co-operate with the United States in terms of equipment and capability, how long do you think it will take for the UK to bridge the gap in demand and information capabilities that were demonstrated in Iraq? Are we going to be able to display effective 'catch-up' with the United States to achieve that level of ability to co-operate or are we constantly going to find that as we improve our system they have gone a technical leap ahead? Perhaps all three services will have a different perspective on the co-operation there. I would guess that there is a different story for the Royal Navy or even the Royal Air Force as there is for the Army.

General Sir Michael Walker: I think that is true. The answer is that we will never replicate the Americans' capability in command and control, information management, C2 and technology in that sense. Our aim really is to make sure that we have a plug and play system so we can plug in at the appropriate level.

Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup: We are not actually trying to catch up because if one chased then I think you are right, one would never overhaul them. What we are trying to do is to point ahead and get to the same capability at the same time. In terms of developing new capabilities, particularly a network-enabled capability, we are working very closely with all of those elements in the US defence structure, including the military, to ensure that our objectives and our plans are aligned. That does not mean to say that we will be buying the same things, but it does mean to say that we will be working out protocols, processes and procedures to ensure that as these things come into service on both sides we will be inter-operable. I think the key point here is that this is a moving target and you have got to pull a bit of a lead.

Admiral Sir Alan West: On the maritime side, I think what is very interesting is if you go back a few years ago, the Americans were stepping again and again further and further away from us and we were in the strange position, going back about ten or 15 years ago, in that the UK Navy were just about keeping up with the Americans but with great difficulties in certain areas and we were beginning to move away from our other NATO allies. The Americans now realise that for the operations they are involved in they have to involve other coalition parties and therefore they are adjusting their linkages to enable that to happen, to allow this plugging in and connectivity. We are much better now in the Royal Navy at being able to link into the Americans than we were. So if you take a look at the Americans now trying to make the coalition side work more, I think things are better than they were and I do not think there is that same danger. To give an example, during Telic there were a number of systems we connected into that we had not really been connected into before, one of which is SIPRNET and the Americans are allowing us to be fully connected into that this summer in our big exercise with the Americans off the American East Coast and so we will be exercising exactly these aspects. Our task group that goes over there will actually be linked onto SIPRNET. It is not as bad as it was, I think we are getting better and they are not moving ahead at the same light speed that they were and leaving us gasping.

General Sir Mike Jackson: Perhaps it is less obvious where armies are concerned in the sense that the degree of technology and the amount of it is less important than it is in the other two. The phrase I use for this is that we must be able to fight with the Americans. That does not equal we must fight as the Americans. Do you see my distinction?

Q258 Mr Blunt: Yes. Can I ask about operating with all our other coalition partners because there is obviously a tendency with the UK being the size of power it is that we see an exercise where I imagine we have rather more foreign partners in our area of responsibility in Iraq as a percentage of our forces than the United States do in their area, so it is a much larger scale problem for us than incorporating these other smaller powers into other forces often directly under UK command. Can you illustrate for each of your services the problems involved when working with those sometimes smaller countries and sometimes larger countries, places like Germany, both the political restrictions that operate in working alongside them and where you think the Allied Command for Transformation is actually going and the challenges our forces have to face in order to enable these smaller countries to ensure that the political advantages they bring then do outweigh the military friction? I hope you will illustrate that by way of example in the case of each service.

General Sir Michael Walker: Allied Command for Transformation is going to be in its own words 'the forcing agent for change' and I think it will do that. I think it will begin to make it absolutely clear, particularly in the NATO context which other alliances tend to keep as their benchmark for their own progress, that the whole transformation process is about developing capabilities to work together in difficult, tense environments and I think people have understood that. There are a number of other things that are happening which will test that notion fairly soon; the NATO response force is one. It has been set up and enthusiastically espoused by all the nations within NATO. Now they are going to be asked to do things. We will see whether that enthusiasm is translated into impact. Similarly, the proposals to develop European battle groups has been enthusiastically espoused sometimes by people who are both members of NATO and Europe, others who are just European and in all of that context those sort of nations are looking very hard at the way that the Allied Command for Transformation, which has fed very heavily off American views on transformation as well, is proposing to do business. For example, if you go to Scandinavia, if you go to Finland, you will find that they are quite advanced in their whole means and the process by which they are addressing network-enabled capability. Of course it does mean different things to everyone, but the forcing agent of change from Allied Command for Transformation will lead to a process where this can be proven or not proven and we will see that being exposed over the course of the next two or three years.

Admiral Sir Alan West: Within the maritime environment our ability to link in work and talk to what I call the old NATO nations is extremely good and there are linked protocols and NCCIs and all of these sorts of abilities to connect with them and to pass on data works very well. The new NATO members have got some catching up to do, and working with non-NATO nations is tricky because of crypto-incompatibilities. It is more difficult with a non-NATO Navy in the maritime sense to have that full connectivity, but we cannot have full connectivity, they cannot get into those NATO systems and clearly would not get into the American systems. Generally we have got very good connectivity. In terms of difficulties of operating, I suppose the one that stands out the most would be RoE. So, for example, in Operation Active Endeavour different nations have different RoE and that can sometimes cause difficulties for the commander when he is trying to organise his group in terms of taking action against suspected terrorist ships or illegal immigrants or whatever it might be. That would be something that would stand out as a specific difficulty.

General Sir Mike Jackson: In my experience the degree to which you get cohesion in a multi-national force is to some extent at least a function of the degree of commitment of the national contingents to the task in hand. Some may be more enthusiastic than others. Obviously if you are in a NATO Article 5 situation you have superglue and they are going to do it because they are all under the same situations. Non-Article 5 situations, however, are rather different beasts and the degree of commitment can vary from one nation to another. They also will see the task and see the political circumstances in which they have decided to deploy military force through different perspectives perhaps and national considerations may be different. This brings us on to RoE that the First Sea Lord has mentioned and more than that, of course, the whole question of a national red card, what people are allowed to do and what people are not allowed to do and there is no easy answer to this. It goes back to my point earlier about the level to which it is sensible to have a multinational force. If you are going to fight a war-fighting operation you need to be very careful as to how far down these routes you allow a multinational force because you are going to get that Clausewitz-ian friction post conflict, less intense, the sense of multi-nationalising further down below brigade and you are under a different set of circumstances and a different outcome of the Clausewitz-ian friction versus political advantage.

Q259 Mr Blunt: I was going to ask you to comment on what we saw in Bosnia in particular of the extraordinary choreography required by the coordinating command in many operations as to who was to do the ring, who was to do the house searches because of the various limitations on each nation. You say there is no easy answer. I was going to ask whether you see our Allied Command for Transformation and the drive to make forces work more effectively together overriding any of these problems?

General Sir Mike Jackson: For NATO members this problem is much less because we are all used to each other.

Q260 Mr Blunt: These are all NATO members.

General Sir Mike Jackson: And, of course, Allied Command for Transformation will no doubt assist the process with NATO members. More difficult sometimes is non-NATO members who do not have a history, who do not have the commonality of procedure and exercises and all of that and whose national governments should, because they are not outside of the alliance, be taking a more independent position than a NATO member may.

General Sir Michael Walker: We had this big exercise across in the States, Colorado Springs, which was addressing this whole question of speed of decision making within the political arena of the NATO captains. The good old Dr Klaus Reinhardt quotes 49 different states of constraint that sat on the very many contingents he had. Some of them are only minor but they do introduce exactly the sorts of thing you have there and there is a big drive in NATO to try and get those down. I actually think that at the end of the day it will not happen. If, for example, you face the German government with some of these questions, they are very clear about changing them to the extent of giving the flexibility to their commanders that we would have because they have a very rigid process of going through the Bundestag to get to those sorts of things. I think those will continue. There is recognition that these constraints must be moved. Even Germany has moved quite significantly in terms of being able to deploy its own troops in Afghanistan and that will continue. I suspect you as a Committee would not wish your own government to release all constraints of the use of your armed forces around the world so that the red card system will always be in operation for any contingent.

Q261 Mr Blunt: Members of this Committee, not me, went to Afghanistan and there have been reports then and since that the Germans provided about five times as many soldiers as we did at that stage of the operation and they appeared to be concerned primarily with force protection. They had some people killed in a bus bomb and in some other activity which meant they had reined in their activity completely to protect their own force and their willingness to go out and conduct searches and to act effectively in support of the Afghan government was, frankly, such that they might as well not have been there. That causes big problems for the smaller British and Canadian forces who are acting much more rigorously and it puts a greater burden on them. This is an issue that does need to be faced up to because if there are a lot of troops on the ground who are not doing anything then that continues to put a burden on the players.

General Sir Michael Walker: I take your point exactly, but I would want to point out that any military commander working under a political leadership will always have to respond to the result he gets from that. If there has been a crisis nationally and they say, "Right boys, get the troops off the street," even we would have to do that in those same circumstances. The system has recognised this as a problem and people are really trying to address it in a way in which they never have before. I suspect we will always have some sort of constraint apart from the political level.

General Sir Mike Jackson: It is more politics than it is military matters and domestic law has something to play in this too. Different nations have different laws about the use of force to defend property for example.

Q262 Mr Blunt: Can I just ask Sir Jock about the possibility of putting an air package together in these circumstances. Could you give us a brief view of how difficult a challenge that becomes with the coalition operation?

Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup: I think the difficulties are less for us. We have been putting together multinational air packages for quite some time. Within the context of NATO standards still remain the bedrock of being able to do that. As far as RoE differences are concerned, it is again perhaps easier to accommodate these. We have seen in all operations that enabling capabilities are crucial to success. Things like air transport are always in short supply, surveillance, support helicopters. So there are lots of areas here where nations can contribute without having to address some of those difficult RoE questions. The main challenges tend to be the passage of information, the technology to allow that to happen and in some cases defensive aids. We have a very good mechanism for dealing with that certainly within Europe which is called the European Air Group, which is based at High Wycombe, and they work through real world inter-operability issues between European air forces and introduce effective solutions to a number of those. We do have mechanisms to address them, but I think the constraints, and particularly the RoE ones, are rather less for us than they are certainly for land forces.

Q263 Chairman: Thank you. When Crispin asked questions on divisions between allies, NATO and non-NATO and he got as far as Sarajevo airport he was straining terribly close to Pristina airport and I would have ruled him out of order completely until after the session had terminated, but maybe one day you can elaborate more fully on how decisions made at a tactical level can have strategic implications.

General Sir Mike Jackson: Yes, a small amount of Clausewitz-ian friction.

Chairman: I was going to ask if that was a Clausewitz-ian example!

Q264 Mr Havard: I would like to ask a few questions about jointery. Sir Michael, you have said in a speech that "training and deployments will increasingly be with joint units and we shall have to harmonise conditions of employment while retaining individual service identity and ethos ..." That is an issue that is well discussed within each of the services and between them and comes to us. Given that is the case, how are you going to achieve your intention of individual service 'identity and ethos' in an era of increasingly joint training and deployment?

General Sir Michael Walker: You have got us on a subject where we could be waxing eloquent for about four hours. I think it is clear to all of us that one of the best characteristics of the British armed forces is the fact that their services are filled by people who want to be soldiers, who want to be sailors, who want to be airmen or women and to us it seems inconceivable that we should try and tinker with the ethos that creates that because that is where the fighting spirit comes from. Having said that, to use that as a sole reason for not doing things in a joint manner would be - and we fully recognise this - quite wrong. Where you get into combat operations, where you get into logistics operations, where you get into support operations, the creation of joint structures to do that makes sense. Equally, you want to be careful that you do not, in creating those joint structures, also create some part of the structure which begins to erode the single service ethos and so that is really what I meant by that, the special nature of the British armed forces is the colour of the uniform. You are not going to get a young lad from Birmingham saying I want to join the defence force or I want to join the Army, he is going to say I would like to join such-and-such a regiment and become a member of the Royal Navy, or I want to go and fly for the Royal Air Force and that is the strength of our system. We ask a lot of our people and a lot of that is given because they feel they want to be part of what is a very special organisation and by and large better than everybody else's organisation, whichever one they are in.

Q265 Mr Havard: The question really is about how all this works in practice. It would appear that the recent operations have been very successful in terms of the joined-up activities of the three services and rightly so. What do you see as the improvements that could be made for that to work better, because doubtless there will have been these Clausewitz-ian or other frictions in all of that? What improvements could be made to make it better?

General Sir Michael Walker: If you look at what we have done over the last four or five years, the number of organisations we have set up as joint organisations range from some of our training establishments through to the joint headquarters, through to some of the organisations which provide joint combat effect. So, for example, our joint force helicopter headquarters provides a joint force capability. If you go to Basra you will find the joint force helicopters working in an integrated way, as part of the division, working in the building there. There are all three services there flying, supporting and tasking on a common line. That is the sort of approach that is producing a force multiplier in terms of combat effect for the amount of resources applied to it. We do that with aircraft, with helicopters and increasingly we are doing it with people, the paras, infantry, the Royal Air Force regiment all working together to cross the lines that used to be drawn as to the sort of tasks they might be prepared to carry out. For example, again if you go to Basra, the Royal Air Force regiment have done a much greater amount of force protection tasks, they have done a lot of patrolling. It is those sorts of things where it seems to me we need to act, making sure that we do not draw false boundaries and we try to make things joint where we can. We do it with a number of other things, but I do not think at the moment there is anything that we have identified other than the ground-based air defence where we need to move again in that direction. We still have to do quite a lot in that direction.

Q266 Mr Havard: How much further does it need to go in terms of command structures, co-location units, common facilities, common recruitment possibly? How much further can this 'purplisation' process go?

General Sir Michael Walker: There is a quite a lot of common recruiting undertaken in terms of wider publicity. You cannot go for common recruiting if you are looking to persuade people to become a fast jet pilot or to become a submariner, you have to target that pretty carefully. There are not a lot of people out there queuing up at the doors, you have to go and find them. The recruiting effort does need to be fairly well targeted. We have addressed most of the areas over the last five years where we see there being profit in making seriously joint efforts. There will be more and if people come up with suggestions where we could do things better on a joint basis without disturbing the wider ethos, I think we would go for that.

Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup: Joint units are very important and they are very helpful but they are not what jointery is about. We are all about jointery. Jointery is an attitude of mind, it is a method of working and operating and we are all in joint businesses whether we happen to belong to a specifically named joint unit or not. We must be careful to remember that joint units are the tool which will help us to increase the level of jointery, but they are not in themselves jointery.

General Sir Michael Walker: There was a suggestion about terms and conditions of service. As you know, we are doing a joint armed forces Act together. That has been a major labour for the boys and the lawyers trying to put it all together. Insofar as we can we are trying to make conditions of service common, but it is a very complex area for all sorts of reasons. If you go to sea for long periods of time your individual requirements are quite different to somebody who gets deployed into the desert or at an air base. Even there I do not think we are ever going to be able to achieve absolutely common terms and conditions of service. There is always going to have to be tolerable variation in order to cater for the different circumstances each of the services find themselves in.

Q267 Mr Havard: David asked earlier about air and land together and all of that sort of thing and the way in which the services have presumably done their own force readiness training processes and some sort of commonality of approach in relation to all of that. What thinking is being done there? Whilst they need to be trained to be sailors or airmen or infantry personnel, whatever it is, they also then need to be somebody who is able to work in the context of working together. What thoughts have been given about that process being more common as opposed to each service carrying out some training options and then coming together at certain times? Is that going to continue?

General Sir Michael Walker: I think one needs to understand the training requirements of each of the services and the chiefs may wish to add to this. Clearly you need to train everybody up to a certain basic level to put the uniform on.

Q268 Mr Havard: Are you bringing it into recruit training?

General Sir Michael Walker: You then need to train them in their specialisation. There are 144 specialisations in the Army alone ranging from petroleum operators to signallers, to gunners, to whatever. So you have got to get the chap to be master of his own skill and trade before you actually start injecting him into collective training. Collective training needs to take place in teams in all three services. The ship's crews need to be able to train to make sure they can operate the ship, they can face every situation. Only when you have done that, when you have a trained workforce in their own work skills, can you then bring together joint training. Joint training is undertaken by our joint headquarters where we have part of the machine there which designs that joint training. We all look for every opportunity we can to turn something as single service in collective training into a joint event and if it is possible we try to do that as well. You have got to remember that in the days of the first British corps, which was 48 hours, you needed to turn that corps out about four or five times a year to make sure it was up to the mark and so joint training needs to be very carefully done, you want to do it for a purpose and therefore you need to target it very carefully.

Admiral Sir Alan West: I will give you an example of how we pull in some joint training to what historically used to be our slightly more advanced unit level training. The joint maritime course, which primarily was designed to do tier two training for the maritime, we now have a very large number of Royal Air Force and Army involved in and foreigners as well. Beyond that, when we go into the more complex exercises such as the one that has just happened in north Norway and the one that is happening off the east coast of the States, which clearly are very joint and they have a PJHQ, we need to slot those into the programme to enable that sort of training to be done. I do not know if your question was referring to further back down the track in terms of some of the training where there is no doubt the DTI is looking at being able to have common training for things which make sense to have common. For example, some of the naval air engineers train with the Royal Air Force because it is the same skill effectively you are using. There might be a little bit of fine tuning needed on that but primarily it is the same skill. Their initial training was to make them a sailor, so they arrived for their training in being an air engineer already a sailor, but then the training they are getting is similar so let us do it in the same place. It would be madness to have it in two places. More and more we are trying to rationalise that and we are looking at those aspects quite clearly to see what can be done.

Q269 Mr Havard: What are the effects in relation to the morale of people? The really important thing is they come in, they join a particular service. One would assume this is largely beneficial but maybe not.

General Sir Michael Walker: We do not know because we have not done it. If you take the course for about major level people (33 to 36) in this case all brought together, they would tell you now, because we were worried about what it was going to do to the ethos, that they cannot imagine it happening in any other way and the output of that training has been proven consistently over the last five or six years. It has not in any way affected what we might call the ethos of the single service. Now that is quite a special group so there is more risk, I think, attached to taking a youngster straight out of basic training and putting him into a joint arena. Hopefully in his basic training he has become a soldier, a sailor or an airman.

Q270 Chairman: This is maybe something I should know - probably do but have forgotten - is there some process with some rigour in it then that is going to examine this question of some of the mysteries of the Ministry of Defence?

General Sir Michael Walker: There is no mystery. The process has designed, if you like, the training machine to ensure that there is sufficient military component to it which will allow that ethos to stay alive.

Admiral Sir Alan West: And each of the single service chiefs is responsible for the morale of their service. We make absolutely certain within our service that this is not having an impact on it. What I think is marvellous is when they have finished their staff training each recruit is absolutely convinced they made the right decision about which service they went into.

Q271 Chairman: When we had Mr Hoon and Sir Kevin with us a few weeks ago you were probably told in your briefing that there was a little spat over the regimental system. Some of us have gone through the process before. Can you give us some indication of what thinking there is going on as to recruitment to the army - perhaps specifically addressing this question to General Jackson - and are there discussions going on over whether the regimental system as we know it today will survive? I think it was John Chapel - I might be wrong - during the early stage of Options for Change who argued very strongly that this was the wrong base to recruit over, people should be recruiting into the army, in the same way as they recruit into the navy or the air force, not on the basis of loyalty to a ship or a single aircraft wing and it would be far more efficient if that was done. Having read Mr Hoon's comments I am still a little anxious about what might be going on within the Ministry of Defence, so I know it is a rather delicate subject, General, and you will tread carefully but we need to be given some information. My own regiment is about to celebrate its 300^th anniversary, not a very good time to write it off historically, I must say.

General Sir Mike Jackson: The regimental system, as that phrase was often used, of course has changed down the decades and the centuries quite considerably indeed. What are now famous names, 120 odd years ago there were no names at all, they were all known by numbers, every battalion.

Q272 Chairman: But you know where each number recruited.

General Sir Mike Jackson: Yes, although that varied a great deal as well. I think it was the 92^nd foot which was Midlands now Wales. The point I am making is that the regimental system has never been immutable in its current manifestation. What I think is immutable, and it is probably a peculiarly British thing because it is very strong, is that what makes men - and it is still men since we are talking about basically the infantry - hang together when the going gets very rough and very dangerous is not great broad appeals to patrons and Queen and country, it is to that small group and what makes a man keep going, perhaps more than anything else, is not to let his mates down. That small group identity and that sense of honour being at stake is represented by what we call the regimental system. In my view, the regimental system is bedrock to having the defining capability of the infantry which we have today. Now, all of that said, there is no guarantee, it seems to me, that the size of the infantry we have today is set forever, I simply do not see that. I have already touched in an earlier answer on the fact that if and when so-called normalisation is achieved in Northern Ireland there are relatively a large number of battalions which are predicated on that military support and civil power. No doubt at that point there will be a debate about how many battalions will be appropriate since you have 26 of them predicated on Northern Ireland, which is a large number, over half of what we have. If there was to be a change to the number of battalions in the order of battle then there will be some difficult questions about which battalions would cease to have existence. We have been through this hoop before, have we not, on several occasions in my memory and I am not sure that the result has always been entirely satisfactory. All I am prepared to say to you is that we have an open mind on this and we are looking very hard at whether the structure we have now is going to be the right structure for ten, 15 and 20 years' time. The structure at the moment means that we move people very often, for very good reasons, for experience, to even out the good and the bad roles, the good and the bad locations, etc., there may be other ways of doing this. You will forgive me if I say I am not looking at this or that future structure but just that it is essential we keep an open mind about this. We should not allow the effectiveness of the army, which is what we are talking about, to be jeopardised by other thinking, shall we say. I hope that lays it out for you as best as I can.

Q273 Chairman: I am sure you are passionately loyal to that regiment and its predecessor, General.

General Sir Michael Walker: All I would say is that Mike is absolutely right. What I think both of us, and I think most of our senior generals - and I talk as a general here rather than a CDS - believe is that regimental fighting spirit is what makes the British army what it is. Now the way by which you achieve that has many different courses of action which you could follow. It does not have to, as CGS says, be exactly as it is today for the future nor is it today what it was 15 years ago. You have to modernise the regimental structure that we have to make sure that it is relevant to what we are doing, that it meets what defence policy requires of us and it does provide the regimental fighting spirit. I see no difficulty or tensions between those things.

Q274 Chairman: Can you give us any indication as to when internal thinking might reach a point at which it can be presented before this Committee?

General Sir Mike Jackson: There are two aspects, Chairman, to your question, I think. One - and I am sorry to repeat myself - a normalisation in Northern Ireland would immediately, certainly in the Treasury's eyes if nobody else's, bring into question the justification for maintaining exactly the same number of battalions which we had whilst we were helping in Northern Ireland (as to not). That would be a clear visible trigger, I think, to then engage in some hard thinking. In one sense, one hopes, of course, that Northern Ireland does normalise. The results may be a little bit difficult to deal with but the greater good is there, without a doubt. Should that happy state of affairs not be achieved in the foreseeable future then it will be more difficult, I think, to be clear about what is a time or a trigger to do any form of rethinking because then you are looking at the future and you are saying "Is what we have now going to be right in ten, 15, 20 years' time?" and at some stage one will need to come to a judgment.

Q275 Chairman: But that judgment could be the same judgment as displayed by the MoD in the early 1990s when Archie Hamilton came before us endlessly and said "The cold war is over, now we can reap the peace dividend. We do not require the same number of infantrymen and therefore we can embark upon a process of reorganisation". It did not take too long before that whole philosophy was shown to be absolutely spurious.

General Sir Mike Jackson: Chairman, I must say that whilst we have the Northern Ireland responsibility and whilst we have the current operational commitment, the 40 infantry battalions we have are working pretty hard and they are not making their 24 month tour. It is quite a crude indicator but it is quite a powerful one as to how hard we are working. I am not volunteering for any guardroom here, please do not misunderstand me.

Q276 Chairman: Let us hope Northern Ireland does resolve itself but my four local regiments have been backwards and forwards to Ireland now since 1705, or just after 1705 in most cases. I do not anticipate Northern Ireland disappearing off the planning cycle but it is very contentious. You know, General, how immensely contentious - it is far more contentious than the European Union constitution - regimental reform is. One would be very reluctant to destroy that concept on the basis of some form of national expediency.

General Sir Mike Jackson: I hope that is not your conclusion, Chairman. I do not think anything I have said should lead you to conclude that we are binning the regimental system because, on the contrary, the regimental system is bedrock. It is just how we use it in the best way.

Chairman: You are absolutely right, regiments have to be flexible and governments and the Ministry of Defence have to realise too what you said in the first part, not being able to qualify before you outline the second part of your analysis and in the army loyalty is very important, in all services but particularly in the army. I will not ask the rest of the questions because General Walker and Crispin have to get away for lunch! So do I! I will stop and I think it is Dai to ask the last questions. Do not tamper with the Welsh regiments either. Whichever brain dead character sought to put together the Royal Welsh Fusiliers with the Cheshire Regiment, I hope has long since left the service of the Crown. We have had some pretty harebrained schemes.

Q277 Mr Havard: My question is really about where people are going to be based because with all the discussion about how the future is going to look and the question about where people are going to be based in order to be deployed it links it back a little bit to the jointery stuff and the stuff about regiments because there we know there is a huge identity with communities and placing resources as a relationship to that, particularly for the army. If I could ask, it seems to be, as I understand it, 70 per cent of the army is at home anyway at the moment but it is a question about where people are going to be. The argument is going to be that more of it is going to be possibly back on the mainland. There is this discussion about super-garrisons or super barracks and whether there will be three of these, for example. Have you got any comments you would like to make about that and how that would mean they would integrate with some passion with the communities? Are they going to be predicated largely on the areas in which there is currently some successful recruitment? How is this going to work? Are you moving away from the South East?

General Sir Mike Jackson: I know we are accused of being south-centric in terms of geography and it is probably disproportionate. How do we see this future? Again, we need to be thinking ten, 15, 20 years now, how will people be wanting to live their lives then, not only the soldiers themselves but their families and their children. Their wives - if I may use that as the majority as it will be of the spouses I think still - increasingly wanting their own careers, wanting their own opportunities to be able to work, stability of education, stability of health and dental care. In my view and in the army board's view the pressures to give more stability rather than less in that arena will grow. Also, we have a number of quite isolated stations, many of them inherited from the Royal Air Force when they ceased to be used as flying stations, which mitigate against exactly what I have been saying. So what we are looking towards are larger military communities, of which we have a number now, they are brigade garrisons: Aldershot, Salisbury Plain, particularly Bulford-Tidworth, Colchester, Catterick, they are obviously the big ones which are brigade based. To get an economy of scale there, and also by scale actually to be able to offer more, a nice outdoor swimming pool for 400 people is a pretty expensive proposition, for 4,000 it is much more do-able. It is in those ways that we are thinking to give people a better quality of life. Now, we have spoken of Northern Ireland and that could involve some additional moves from Northern Ireland to the mainland depending on the political progress; it will not be dramatic but it is possible. We are looking where we can, where we are adding to the present company on the mainland not to be on the southern centre of gravity, as it is, but to be looking elsewhere and perhaps the opening of RAF St Athan to an army presence - and, quite by coincidence, it was the first Welsh Guards as you know - and there may be growth potential there. We are looking, also, at the Midlands where an army presence is not terribly obvious. You also I think beg the question of the 23,000 in Germany behind your own question. The army board has taken a view here, I think it must. There is no political pressure, on the contrary, from Germany, that we decide on the removal of those 23,000 people and the training areas which go with them. The stark truth is here that if one took a decision on policy grounds to bring those 23,000 back to mainland Britain you would be looking at a huge capital investment or an army smaller by 25 per cent; the choice is quite stark. The capital investment on an empty barracks would be enormous. The army board's present position on this is that where there is an opportunity, which makes sense, we might bring a unit home but to assume on a rolling basis, 15 years, that presence in Germany will continue. It is not basing in an operational sense any more, it is still a popular place for soldiers to be. The costs, frankly there is not a great deal in it, there is a bit but not a great deal. Sorry, I have given you a rather long answer but I hope I have laid out how the army board is looking at it.

Q278 Mr Havard: It is very important in the sense as well that if you are looking at it in the context of expeditionary forces then some people are part way where they might want to go. If I can expand it a little bit. There is this question of are we going to see, for example, with the other services the idea of the notion the Americans have just rejected because is too expensive that you pre-position all sorts of things all over various parts of the world. You have got a place you can go and pick up the kit when you get there and move on. There is a half way house here. There are basing questions, are there not, about where you can put deployable forces as well as where people will want to live. What considerations have been given there as to whether they will always be occupied with allies?

General Sir Michael Walker: I think our approach is to ensure that we have access rather than bases. Clearly there are a number of bases that we do have: Cyprus, Gibraltar, Falkland Islands. They can be used, of course, as forward landing bases or for any other purposes while they are occupied but in principle our aim is to try and make sure we have the right sort of diplomatic relationships with countries which will allow us access to use bases in times of crisis. We do not envisage basing people forward, what we envisage is having at best small teams of people who might be there as part of the liaison arrangements prior to a base being activated on our behalf by somebody else but not sending people overseas in big numbers.

Q279 Mr Havard: As I understand it - as I understand it, I may be wrong - a reduction in the defence estate is planned in all its manifestations, this is not just where the operational people are, it is the support staff as well who perhaps go with it, particularly with the navy and the air force, what benefits do you see coming from this rearrangement of the whole of the defence estate, both the support mechanisms which go to you as operational people as well as your own activities?

General Sir Michael Walker: Economy of scale really, just to reduce numbers. We all recognise our estate is too big. We have too many buildings that require too much money to keep them going for too long. It makes logical sense, you heard about the army and the super-garrison idea that has all sorts of benefits to it, there are one or two minuses, and the same applies really across our operation now. The judgment which has to be made is how many bases can you reduce to? Where we need to be a bit more careful is we need to ensure that piece of our estate which represents on land, for both the air force and the army, training area capability, we need to keep that and keep access to those that we have overseas. I think the navy have led the way, to be honest, they have done a remarkable job in coming down to really quite a small fleet. I think the First Sea Lord will probably say we have had to pay a bit of a price in the present representational footprint but it has not been terminal.

Admiral Sir Alan West: For example, in the Portsmouth area, we have gone from 13 establishments to two over the last 15 to 20 years. We have focused very much with our people. We have tried to make our people buy houses and own their own houses because we feel that is the best thing for them. It is easier for us because actually our people go away and deploy for 660 days out of every three years.

Q280 Mr Havard: There is a huge gap between you and the army.

Admiral Sir Alan West: We try and focus them, we try to make them go into the base port areas, either Faslane, Devonport or Portsmouth, and those are our prime focuses, apart from the two air bases at Culdrose, and that ties in a little bit with Devonport, and Yeovilton. We try to say to them "Get yourself into one of those base port areas and our whole concept of manning, Top Mast, will enable you to spend more time in that base port area and be with your family when you are not deployed away at sea." Because when you are not in that base port area and your husband or your wife is deployed away at sea, it is much better if you own your own house and there are benefits there as well because they are using all of the systems we have in this country anyway in terms of the National Health Service, the education system, all those sorts of things as well.

Q281 Chairman: The last question - and we can be quite brief - it has been a rather turbulent period for the military, fighting wars, the perception in some newspapers of bullying and soldiers being killed or committing suicide and the possibilities of cuts in the defence budget. I know the Ministry of Defence does a pretty regular survey of attitudes. Do you have an opinion you would like to offer and would you like to back this up by sending us details on those surveys on how all this is affecting morale, whether it has an affect on recruitment, retention, general morale?

General Sir Michael Walker: I will let the single service chiefs answer, because they have this responsibility for morale. What I would say is that so much is now written, so much of it is speculation, even if some of it has a grain of truth, and so badly informed is it that I think our workforce has stopped believing anything it reads in the newspapers. We rather hope that is the case so that we say to them "Right, just wait until we tell you what the truth of this matter is". Now how effective that is as a broad strategy towards communications achievement, we will let you know. You have just been to Afghanistan, you have been to Basra and you have seen the state of people's morale there for yourself, I would not say it was much different from what you see in other parts of the world at other times.

Admiral Sir Alan West: We do have continuous attitude surveys, and we have the Second Sea Lords Personal Liaison Team who go out and assess this. Without a doubt, the morale of people in the front line is superb. I know you regularly go and visit and you have seen that but when one gets constant things appearing in the paper saying "The navy is now a quarter of the size of the French, and all the aircraft carriers are being paid out" these things do chip away. Even though there is an element of not maybe believing everything that is there, they do have an effect and we have to be aware of that. It is important we keep monitoring this. Similarly with the huge amount of change there has been I think amongst some of the middle ranking people, particularly those who are not in what one might call the absolute front line but more in the staff room, I think it does have an impact on these constant changes and it is something we have to monitor and keep a very close eye on.

Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup: Morale is good but the important thing is the next time you check it not the last.

General Sir Mike Jackson: I would echo that. Our own continuous surveys which I read with some care are not ringing any warning bells, in fact in some ways on the contrary. From my visits - and as has been said, Chairman, you and your Members would I suspect be very rapid to detect that things were not well when you went round speaking to servicemen - certainly I have little cause for worry on that score. These things, of course, are quite judgmental and it is quite hard to measure morale but you get it from your own experience. What is easy to measure, of course, is manning, and you touched on that. Our retention rates are good. They have not gone down, after this time last year or subsequent times. Our recruiting is particularly buoyant. We are quite successful, and it is very encouraging. The retention rate is a real yardstick here because if people feel let down or mucked about, they will go, they will vote with their feet and that is not what is happening.

Q282 Chairman: Thank you. We observe you command some priceless assets, the quality of men and women in the armed forces and we tinker with that at our peril. Thank you very much for your double header and we will leave you alone for a little while now before we summon you back.

General Sir Michael Walker: Thank you, Chairman.