Q81 Chair: Optimised is not necessarily cutting edge.
Lieutenant-General Coward: I hesitate to say this, but since deploying those vehicles we have had casualties in them, but no one has been killed 6. In our core vehicle programmes in Iraq, and in other vehicles, we have had casualties and many deaths, as you rightly reflected. So I do think that the Cougar family of vehicles and the Husky and so on are cutting edge. The Americans are procuring the same vehicles and we are putting cutting-edge armour on them, over and above that which the Americans produce.
Q82 Mrs McGuire: If you move from that position of cutting edge, what would be the impact on the safety of our personnel in theatre? You have clearly indicated that by going for the cutting-edge solution, you have delivered a far safer environment for our personnel, inasmuch as the theatre can be safer. Does it cause you nightmares that you are moving to this more off-the-shelf approach and that, in two or three years' time, it may well be the case, although I hopenot, that you will be back in front of another Commons Committee-not necessarily this one- trying to justify why you did not go for the cutting edge?
Lieutenant-General Coward: May I qualify what I was talking about? I specified UOR. In terms of our core programme, the vehicles that we are being, rightly, in my view, criticised about were aiming for the cutting edge-they were going for a close to 100% solution. We have learned by these examples that that is not a sensible thing to do, so in our requirement- setting we are now compromising, within the financial envelope available, to deliver the best balance of capability against cost. Yes, in future there will be those people who, when they attend a coroner's court, might argue that if we had waited for a bit longer for another bit of technology, Rifleman X may have been saved, but if we wait that long we will not have any vehicle. So it is a balance between that requirement and what we can deliver in the time available.
Q83 Mrs McGuire: Do you think that Committees such as this conflate the two issues of the budgetary pressures and the procurement process, which has frankly left a lot to be desired? Should we actually be looking at the procurement process even within the new approach of having an 80%-or whatever-capability? Rather than concentrating on the budget, should we be looking at the procurement process?
Lieutenant-General Coward: You should look at both. There is a budgetary issue, which Mrs Brennan has addressed, and there is the requirement-setting and procurement process, which has been slow, lumbering and bureaucratic-it was aiming for the stars when, as it now is, it should have been much more pragmatic. With what we have done with the Warrior capability sustainment programme, with the Scout programme and especially now with the Foxhound, we are beginning to learn those lessons. You will have to judge us on that delivery.
Q84 Mrs McGuire: How do you benchmark whether you should go for the cutting edge, and there may well be circumstances in which you would want to go for the cutting edge, or for something that is closer to 80%-is it 80% or 75%?-of capacity?
Vice-Admiral Lambert: We look at upgradeability these days. One thing we are doing in our vehicle programmes is putting in the electronic architecture so that we can add things on afterwards. Getting that architecture absolutely right is therefore important and, after that, we can wait for what we will add on. It is really about looking at that upgradeability. Again, with vehicles and perhaps with other equipment, we are looking to make sure that we can upgrade them- that we have the space and the energy and propulsion plants that we can upgrade, rather than making sure that everything is there on day one.
Q85 Jackie Doyle-Price: I want to come back to figure 1. When you look at the figures, they show that, of the £1.1 billion spent, only £407 million has delivered any vehicles, so for £1.1 billion we have 160 vehicles. It's not great, is it?
Ursula Brennan: I think we have acknowledged that there were failings. They were not all for the same reasons. Sometimes we entered into something with the Americans and the Americans pulled out, and we were left high and dry. Sometimes we were over- elaborate in our procurement route. There were a variety of different reasons. We acknowledge that it was not good that there were projects that we cancelled and had nothing to show for it. There are others, however, where money continues to be spent and the vehicles are actually in production. Terrier is in production, I think, so it will deliver.
Q86 Jackie Doyle-Price: So ultimately only £323 million has been completely wasted-okay.
I want to get to the bottom of why some projects might have been more successful. You just mentioned that other partners have pulled out of things. Looking at the numbers involved in each of these projects, the two that you have delivered are those that were smaller in quantity than the perhaps more over- ambitious ones. Is that a factor in making a project more deliverable?
Ursula Brennan: I don't think the volume of order is what made it complex, although one of the things that we are doing at the moment across the whole of the equipment programme is to try, as far as possible, to have a contract that enables us to call off equipment as we need it rather than having to buy in bulk. One of them, the MRAV, was this business about, "Are we going for something light enough that you can fly it somewhere?" It got too heavy, so we thought, "That's not right". Then, as it turns out, the problems we face in Afghanistan meant that all of us, all nations, haven had to up-armour their vehicles. Ironically, it may be that if we had all stuck with MRAV-I don't know whether that would have been part of the answer.
Q87 Jackie Doyle-Price: Again, you look at this table and at the dates: the project commenced in 1992 and was cancelled in 2001. These projects, on average, all have a 10-year life cycle, which seems to me extremely long.
Ursula Brennan: Indeed.
Q88 Jackie Doyle-Price: I assume that when you started out in 1992, the end date was not anticipated to be that long. What causes the delay? Is it because you are constantly reacting to other budgetary pressures; is it constantly reacting to demand, or is it just incompetence?
Ursula Brennan: We've acknowledged that there were a series of things that were a problem, and we are seeking to address them. One was over-elaborate requirements. One was over-complex procurement routes. One was the fact that, because our budget did not balance, we were juggling programmes to make them fit within the budgetary envelope. So a variety of things were wrong and, gradually, we have been tackling each of those.
Q89 Ian Swales: Are we effectively funding research through these periods, potentially for commercial organisations?
Ursula Brennan: We've certainly learned from some of the failures and have taken some of the development into other vehicles, but generally we fund research separately rather than through these programmes.
Q90 Jackie Doyle-Price: Can I just quickly ask Lieutenant-General Coward a question? When you are reacting to the requirements in the theatre of war, how quickly can you make a decision to procure a particular vehicle and how quickly is it then deployed?
Lieutenant-General Coward: The best example, probably, was Mastiff 1, which was a combination of Iraq and perhaps ministerial involvement We delivered vehicles, with the US Marine Corps's help, in months. We can now deliver similar vehicles in somewhere between months and a year. The most recent example is Foxhound. Having looked at buying something off the shelf and not being able to deliver the levels of protection necessary, we have entered into a development of a vehicle, but it will deliver capability 18 months after signing the contract with the provider.
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6 No-One has died in a Cougar-based platform (Mastiff, ridgeback and Wolfhound) or in Husky as a result of enemy action.