Q11 Chair: Basically on what? What I am suspicious of is that you do it because you don't have the contract.
Vice-Admiral Lambert: There is always a degree of pragmatism within it.
Q12 Chair: How much is the pragmatism and how much is the capability?
Vice-Admiral Lambert: It is a combination of both. If one does not have enough money for the programmes one has for the next few years, there is no point in cancelling a programme where the liabilities will be greater than the savings.
Q13 Chair: Let me put it to you that I think on this programme, because your contracts are not there, you have cut it. It is a massive cut from £14 billion to £5 billion odd. That is a heck of a cut. You are a third of what you originally intended it to be. In today's prices £14 billion would probably be £25 billion, knowing the MOD. So that is a massive, massive cut. The driving force was that you were not contractually committed.
Vice-Admiral Lambert: I would not disagree with you, Chair, but there is an awful lot that went into the programme in the past that was wishes. People thought that if they put a requirement in the programme, it would be delivered, whereas the totality of the equipment programme was not affordable. We needed to get down to an affordable programme before we started.
Q14 Chair:You could say that across the piece. I remember-this was on the previous Government's watch-when Sarah Bryant was killed in 2010 2. The press coverage in The Guardian at the time reported that, "soldier after soldier came forward to express the concerns they had felt when they heard they would be using lightly armoured Snatch Land Rovers for their mission in Helmand province." What we ended up with, according to some sources, was 35 deaths caused by roadside bombs in Afghanistan, because we did not have the right armoured vehicles.
Vice-Admiral Lambert: I would dispute that. I think that the procurement of the right vehicles for Afghanistan, through the urgent operational requirements process, delivered the capabilities that we required in that theatre.
Q15 Chair: So all these press reports are wrong, are they? I remember this period rather well, because that was evidence that came out at the time. It was just when the previous Prime Minister was giving evidence to the Chilcot inquiry. He was faced with the accusation that he had not put enough money into the system. The two are connected. At that time in 2010, people died because they did not have the right vehicles, because we cut, because we were not contractually committed.
Vice-Admiral Lambert: In 2010,1 can assure you that the urgent operational requirements process had delivered the right vehicles to the right theatres. At that time, we would have had Mastiffs for PPVs. We would have had the whole gambut of protected vehicles, which we had spent a couple of billion pounds on, through the requirements from the Treasury. I would dispute what you said for 2010.
Q16 Chair: Too often we are forced to use evidence that is given to us by other people. The minutes of a meeting held in 2011 of 16 Air Assault Brigade commanders, which was quoted in your Report, state, "Mastiff and Ridgback never got above 65 per cent availability. Risk was taken when vehicles were not fully functional." A brigade source said that, "Ridgbacks and Mastiffs are supposedly mine-proof, so 65 per cent of capability is a disgrace. Afghanistan is dangerous enough without being let down by equipment."
Lieutenant-General Coward: Perhaps I can chip in as a soldier. I think that it is fair enough to say that 65% is not enough availability. The requirement is 80% of the available fleet. It is only very recently-about a month ago-that we have consistently achieved 80%) availability with the vehicles that you speak of: the Mastiff and the Ridgback. It is fair to say that 65% was not good enough. When you urgently deploy these vehicles into theatres, it takes time to build up the spares and the resilience, so that you can learn and maintain them on the road as well as you would expect. I would add that part of the reason why only 65% were available was down to the fact that many of them had been struck by IEDs in 2009 and 2010. We were struggling to repair those quickly enough and get them back on the road. No, it was not good enough, but it has got much, much better. I suspect that if you spoke to Ed Davis, the returning commander of 3 Commando Brigade, he would tell you that he was more than satisfied with the availability that is now being delivered.
Q17 Chair: I am glad to hear that, but I have to say-this is not a criticism of you-that what has clearly happened, in this terrible saga that we are looking at today, is that you had huge cuts to a key programme, which meant that you were left vulnerable without the appropriate vehicles that would have not been impacted by IEDs, or that might have been more resistant to IEDs, or that could have gone over territory in a way that your vehicles did not, so that they did not hit IEDs. There were all sorts of capabilities that you required in theatre that simply weren't there, because in the MOD's traditional way they were cut-an easy-cut programme, where there is no contractual commitment-thinking not about the defence need but about the financial imperative. Do you want to comment on that? You looked as if you were agreeing with me, Lieutenant-General.
Lieutenant-General Coward: I do agree, because we had to deliver urgent operational requirements. But even the Americans, who have dollars to spare so to speak, went out and bought new vehicles because even their Stryker vehicle, which was perhaps one of the vehicles that we were looking to procure for our core programme, was overmatched by the threat. A properly resourced core programme will allow you to deploy into harm's way in a reasonable level of risk, but there will still be risk, and we found in both Iraq and Afghanistan that even a well-equipped AFV fleet is challenged by heavy IEDs and externally forged fragments.
Q18 Chair: Okay, but on that-then I'm going to go to Nick and then Ian-let me just quote to you from Peter Flach, who you probably know well from RUSI. I am interested in benchmarking our performance against other countries and what he says, talking about armoured vehicles, is this: "The failure of the UK to derive affordable requirements is recognised in the AFV"-that's armoured fighting vehicles, I assume- "industry. The industry likes customers who know what they want and can afford it, such as"-this is the really scary bit-"US, Canada, Australia, Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium. They have other customers who either do not know what they want or haven't got the money for it, and these are more of a problem. Too often the UK falls into a third category of being unable to decide what it wants and not having the funds."
I have to say that that is an outrageous condemnation of our whole procurement process in this one absolutely key area, benchmarked against everyone else. What is your view of that, Lieutenant-General?
Lieutenant-General Coward: Peter is entitled to his opinion. I would not put us third; I would perhaps put us in the second rank. We have been indecisive. We have had well-recorded difficulties with the FRES programme, as this Report reflects, and that is a fair criticism. But we have learned lessons from that period of indecisiveness and over-aspiration, and I believe that our programme is beginning to head in the right direction.
Chair: I'm just going to ask Paul Lambert and then Ursula Brennan to comment on that, and then I'll come to you Nick.
Vice-Admiral Lambert: If one looks back a few years, as we moved out of the cold war the UK was of a mindset that we wanted deployability for our armed forces. That was a key criterion, which drove us down the route of looking at lightweight armour and equipment that you could deploy very quickly on aircraft, and I think that we learnt a hard lesson in places such as Afghanistan and Iraq that protection is more important than deployability. That is one of the reasons why we went down the urgent operational requirements route, and many of the vehicles now are a lot heavier than we had envisaged five or 10 years ago.
Q19 Chair: Are we worse than America, Canada, Australia, Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium at making these decisions, which is what he asserts?
Vice-Admiral Lambert: I agree with the General that we have changed our mind over the past few years, but part of changing our mind is because we have learned some hard lessons on deployed operations, and we have conducted a lot of deployed operations over the years.
Chair: I will take that as a yes.
Ursula Brennan: I think we do acknowledge that we had over-complex requirements and an over-complex procurement route for some of our attempts to purchase armoured fighting vehicles in the past. The only thing I would say is that in relation to theatres- Iraq and Afghanistan-it is genuinely the view in the Ministry of Defence that even if we had made up our minds and stuck with the procurements that we were intending to do, and even if they had come in speedily, we would still have needed to procure urgent operational requirements for Afghanistan.
It would be a pity if the Committee were left with the impression that people had died in Afghanistan because of our shilly-shallying about the procurement of armoured fighting vehicles, because the thing that mattered for Afghanistan was our recognising speedily what the requirements were and delivering them. Our core programme gave us some base vehicles, but the thing that we needed to do to respond to those threats was to be really speedy in getting the UORs into theatre. That is what we put all our energy into doing.
Q20 Chair: I have to say that it is your own commanders on the ground who say that. It is the people with whom Lieutenant-General Gary Coward works. It is not this Committee. It cannot make sense to dump a billion quid of a planned programme and then spend £2.8 billion of actual Treasury money, which is probably the reason that you did it, on second-rate alternatives. That cannot make sense in any world to dump a billion there and spend £2.8 billion over there.
Vice-Admiral Lambert: I would not say that the protective vehicles that we have for Afghanistan are second rate at all.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________
2 Cpl Sarah Bryant was killed alongside LCpl Reeve, LCpl Larkin and Pte Stout on 17 June 2008.