13
Examination of witness
General Sir Christopher Deverell.
Q152 The Chair: Good morning. I welcome to this session of the International Relations and Defence Select Committee in the House of Lords General Sir Christopher Deverell, commander of Joint Forces Command from 2016 to 2019. We are just reaching the end of our evidence-taking before we have evidence from officials and Ministers, so this is a really substantial day for us. Thank you for joining us to take part in giving us information that helps us with our inquiry, “Defence concepts and capabilities: from aspiration to reality”.
At this stage, I always advise witnesses and members to remember that this session is on the record, transcribed and broadcast. As ever, as you will have heard earlier this morning, I advise members that if they have a relevant interest to declare, they should do so before asking a question.
As ever, I will start by asking a rather wide-ranging and general question. I will then turn to my colleagues for a more focused question. I anticipate that, after they asked that, they will wish to follow it up with a supplementary.
For the first question, previous witnesses, including those you have heard this morning, have told us that the Integrated Review and the Defence Command Paper have effectively made a bet, prioritising modern technology over the size of the Armed Forces. Of course, the Government have recently announced that there will be an update of the review, and we are awaiting details of how that will take place. According to the press, it is expected to consider abandoning plans to cut British Army troop numbers. It is still unclear when we will know the results of that update of the Integrated Review and the Defence Command Paper regarding personnel, platforms and the extent of those across the services. If you were advising the Government, what changes, if any, would you advocate should be made? We are told that there is going to be some new focus: what should that be? Is there anything you think should be abandoned within that original paper?
General Sir Christopher Deverell: Thank you. It is a pleasure to be here. We should start by acknowledging that the Integrated Review was a good piece of work. I reviewed the summary of that document by the House of Commons Library and of the Defence Command Paper in the last few days in preparation for coming here. The summary of the Integrated Review listed 20 points and I did not disagree with any of them. I thought that the Defence Command Paper might have said a few different things from what it said, but fundamentally that too was a good reflection and extrapolation from the Integrated Review. So I do not think they start from a bad place, but clearly things have moved on more quickly than we might have imagined. The Integrated Review was very clear that Russia was a big threat, and my God, that has turned out to be right, perhaps more so than we had even imagined.
The issue with it last time, and it will be an issue again, is not so much about ends and ways, it is about means. Was the extra £24 billion that came with the last Integrated Review or Defence Command Paper sufficient to match the ambitions that Defence had set out? I was sceptical on that point, and I am certain that it is not enough now in the circumstances that we face. Does that mean that we need, for example, 3% of GDP? I do not know. What I know is that, when you list and look at the things that Defence needs to spend money on, which we might come on to, it is going to amount to significant additional resource if we are going to maintain the level of ambition that we have long since set as our target.
The Chair: That question comes at a particularly volatile moment with regard to spending commitments. We are trying to ask you to look into the future when it is even cloudier than usual. Thank you for starting us on our road map today.
Q153 Lord Stirrup: Good morning, General. It is very nice to see you. The Prime Minister has said many times that she intends to increase defence spending to 3% of GDP by the end of the decade. Let us ignore the intervening years for the moment, which will still be a huge problem. Let us assume that something like that happens and that it does not all get burned up by inflation, the dollar exchange rate and all the rest of it. You have said that it is going to require considerably more money—more than the £24 billion uplift. What will be the priorities for that expenditure? Everyone will be lining up with the shopping lists; what would yours be?
General Sir Christopher Deverell: You make a couple of interesting points just by way of preamble. First, the budget is declining in its effects as a result of inflation and the exchange rate, so it would need money just to stand still, in that sense.
There are several categories of things that you could say are strong calls for additional money. The first is a bunch of things that we have been taking risks on because we believed that the reality was that conflict with a near-peer enemy was pretty unlikely. Into that category I would put ground-based air defence, EW, long-range precision fires, counter-UAS, munitions stockpiles, space and industrial capacity. Although we identified the risk of near-peer conflict, the reality is that what we did in practical terms did not match that recognition. We now surely know that the risk of near-peer conflict is definitely on the table, and we need to make good those deficiencies. That would be the first thing.
Some recent campaigns, principally Ukraine but not exclusively, have shown that if you do not have certain technologies, you are in trouble. The proliferation of drones on the battlefield in Ukraine is enormous, as is their impact. I very much doubt that we have enough of that technology. That then raises the very big question of how you counter it. I have real concerns about our ability to deal with a threat that is relatively cheap and easy to deliver: drone swarms coming against our forces. We need the wherewithal to defeat that. That is probably some combination of networking of guns and sensors with some AI to produce coverage over the battlefield. Those are things that we have observed are needed as a result of recent campaigns.
There are probably things that we were investing in but maybe not enough. Cyber, both offensive and defensive; delivering the digital backbone that the MoD keeps talking about; open-source information; countering the threat to undersea cables and pipelines; the High North; the Army’s warfighting capability—there is a whole range of things that could fall into that category, where there is investment already but probably not enough, and it will not deliver the capability that we need. It is a big shopping list.
Lord Stirrup: It is, and I suspect that 3% of GDP would not go anywhere near covering it. I shall try to focus it down into priorities. I will not say exactly how long the Type 45 destroyers’ surface-to-air missiles will last in a shooting war, but it is not very long. The RAF’s air-to-air missiles will last for a bit longer but not much. We know that the Army is not able to arm and equip, and probably support, a fighting division. You mentioned all these things in the first item on your list.
When we talk about increased investment—I ask you as a former Army commander—things such as increased size are frequently mentioned: more soldiers in the Army, more squadrons and more ships. From what I have just said and from what you have said today, would it be true to posit that the top priority for any increased investment in defence would be to ensure that the current force structure that we have, and the one that we are planning, is able to fight effectively and enduringly, rather than trying to increase the structure?
General Sir Christopher Deverell: I certainly would not start with numbers of personnel when deciding how to spend the additional budget. Instead, I would try to derive the numbers of personnel from the tasks that we need to perform. Is that the same as saying we should resource the existing structure before growing it? Not quite, because there may be things that are not in the existing structure that we need to develop. You could of course choose to pluck something out of the existing structure in order to provide the people for this new capability, but equally you could choose to deal with that new requirement by growth of numbers. Fundamentally, I would not start by saying that numbers need to increase. I would derive the Army number from the kinds of capability that we need to have.
Lord Stirrup: But from your first answer I presume you agree that it is critical to ensure that what we have is able to fight effectively and enduringly.
General Sir Christopher Deverell: Yes, and there are all kinds of levels to that. You mentioned stockpiles and industrial capability. We have had a just-in-time approach, which is not the same as a resilient approach. The conflict in Ukraine has shown that, even if the usage of munitions had happened at the level that we were thinking then we would have been in trouble, but at the level of munitions used that has actually happened we would be in deep trouble. That can be solved only by spending money on additional stockpiles and on the capability to generate additional munitions and other things when we need them.
Lord Stirrup: It is perhaps worth remembering that at the Battle of El Alamein the Eighth Army fired over a million shells.
Q154 Lord Alton of Liverpool: I was thinking, as Lord Stirrup said that to the General, my father, and think yours as well, was at El Alamein fighting those battles.
I would like to take you to artificial intelligence. The late Stephen Hawking, along with 8,000 signatories of an open letter, said that artificial intelligence posed a threat from authoritarian and rogue states and from terrorists. Last month, the MoD published its defence artificial intelligence strategy, setting out how it will “adopt and exploit AI at pace and scale, transforming Defence into an ‘AI ready’ organisation and delivering cutting-edge capability”. What is your assessment of that strategy, and how realistic is its implementation?
General Sir Christopher Deverell: The first thing I would say is that we have a lot of strategies—a digital strategy for defence, a data strategy for defence and a defence AI strategy—and lots of organisations: the Defence Artificial Intelligence Centre and the Defence AI and Autonomy Unit, to mention two. But of course strategy and action are not the same thing.
I do not fundamentally dissent from any of the defence AI strategy but I am not convinced that it is going to happen. There are all kinds of reasons for that, but as a broad contention I would say that the MoD has been a slow adopter of AI, which is prevalent in all our civilian lives and in all our businesses but has hardly penetrated the MoD at all, just as I would say the MoD has been slow to seize the digital opportunity more generally. That is partly because our traditional suppliers are light on this capability. It is quite hard to acquire the necessary talent—data scientists and the like. If you are a prime contractor, your ability to pay salaries and generate excitement is not quite the same as some start-up that will offer new entrants equity in the venture.
More generally, the MoD and the defence industry in the wider sense of the word are mirror images of each other. We are risk averse, slow and hidebound by lots and lots of process. We live from feast to famine and retain fat to wait for the next feast, or to go hunting for it. The bottom line is that you are asking whether I am confident that the AI strategy will deliver benefit for defence. The jury is definitely out, and at the moment I would be sceptical.
Lord Alton of Liverpool: It seemed to me from reading the Defence Command Paper that we are placing a lot of emphasis on AI. I wonder if we are getting the balance right between AI and our capacity. You have talked about swarms of drones and conventional capacity. Can I ask you to go a little further? In the light of what is happening in Ukraine, which you have referred to, and in the light of what some of us heard last week in Bahrain and Qatar about the conventional threats posed by Iran, are we doing enough about, for instance, the depletion of weapons that you mentioned? Are we getting value for money? You have commanded tank regiments. Perhaps you can tell us a little about what you think of the Public Accounts Committee’s reflection on Ajax. Will it ever be ready and able to be utilised? On the issue that Lord Stirrup and others have raised of the depletion of our munitions, what must we do to rebuild our industrial base to ensure that we are in a position to protect ourselves?
General Sir Christopher Deverell: I would not subscribe to a thesis that said we have a choice between AI on the one hand and bombs, bullets, tanks, planes and ships on the other. The reality is that AI will be in everything. You gave the example of a drone swarm. That is a very cheap capability: you buy off-the-shelf drones and equip them with off-the-shelf munitions, but the thing that enables them to work is AI. So I agree with Strategic Command’s emphasis on it. We have to govern it correctly and so on, but it is an incredibly important development, and one particularly worth stressing because we have been such poor adopters of it. If we were sitting here on a reasonable base of adoption maybe it would be different, but we are not doing enough to acquire that kind of capability.
Lord Alton of Liverpool: So these are false polarities. It is not a question of either/or; it is about getting the balance right.
General Sir Christopher Deverell: Yes.
Q155 Lord Teverson: I will stay on new technologies, to a degree, following on from Lord Alton. You are currently a mentor of the Creative Destruction Lab, one of the accelerated programmes based at the University of Oxford. Taking into account your previous military experience, what are the main obstacles to the process of translating technological ideas into defence capabilities? That is a big subject but one that we are all very concerned about with the rapid changes that are taking place at the moment. How would you make this more efficient or effective?
General Sir Christopher Deverell: You rightly observe that I am a mentor in the Creative Destruction Lab at Oxford University. In fact, more broadly, there are lots of these labs around the world. It is a massive incubator or accelerator capability. I am also involved in advising start-ups. I am a venture partner in a San Francisco cybersecurity venture capital business, so I see a lot of this landscape today as a civilian.
Of course, in my military career I saw defence procurement from every angle. I have been a requirement setter, a fleet manager, a programmer programming the spend of the equipment budget and an acquisition person in DE&S as Chief of Matériel (Land). I have done that at senior levels—Brigadier and above—and I have been a user, clearly. I believe that I speak with a lot of experience. That does not necessarily translate into wisdom but let us hope that it does.
There is a narrow answer to your question and a broader one. To start with the narrow answer, we often talk about something called the valley of death, which I am sure you will be familiar with: lots of research and development not translating into capability in the hands of users. Why is that and what can we do about it? The risk is that government spends a lot more money on R&D—I welcome the additional spend on R&D announced in the Defence Command Paper—but if it just turns into nothing it is waste. We really have to attend to how we translate S&T, as the MoD calls it, or R&D as people more generally describe it, into capability.
I will give you five or six components of that valley of death problem and what we might do about it, then I would like to have a conversation about procurement more generally, following on from the evidence you heard from witnesses earlier. In no particular order, first, I do not think that invention is the same thing as innovation. That is profound. There is a tendency, especially among people who call themselves scientists—S&T as opposed to R&D—to think, “What I’m after is invention.” That is where the glory is and it is why people want to be scientists, quite often. Actually, repurposing or combining existing technology is usually far more effective as a means to innovation. The iPhone is a great example: it is the collection of all the capabilities inside that instrument—mostly paid for by US Department of Defense R&D funding, by the way—that leads to such a powerful product.
In that context, as a red herring, I was disturbed to see that the Advanced Research and Invention Agency is called that. It would have been much better titled “innovation”. So understanding that they are not the same thing and that there is a lot of mileage to be had in combining and repurposing existing technology is the first thing.
There is not enough focus on delivering capability into the hands of users. When I set up the jHub, which you have mentioned a couple of times today, we had a sole success metric, which was capability in the hands of users. Not proofs of concept or procurement bids, tenders or anything: it was, “Have we delivered something into the hands of users?” I do not think there is enough focus on that. Quite often you ask people in innovation or R&D what they are doing and they say, “I’m delivering a proof of concept.” That is not enough.
There is too much focus on requirement and not enough on opportunity. The first and rather easy thing to say is that no major invention of the 20th century, and no major weapons system development of the 20th century, came about from a military requirement. The nuclear bomb, radar, tanks: they did not arise because someone in the military sat down and wrote a requirement.
Again, in the jHub we had a process that we called the opportunity assessment. We looked out for opportunities, because you do not know what you do not know. The terrible tendency of a requirements writer, and I have been one, is to write down what you currently have plus 10% as what we want in the future, not least because our structures can be fixed and hard to change: it is much easier to replace a tank with a tank than with something else because our structures do not change that easily. We should pay a lot more attention to opportunity, which is how most of these things that affect our lives so dramatically in the digital space have arisen, not because someone said that there was a requirement for it.
There is a failure to design for speed. I often say that we should trade in time, not money. If time was the currency we used to judge things it would be a different world. We do not count the opportunity cost of delay and we do not design for speed. It would be better if we did.
There is a slavish adherence to competition at all costs. I understand the requirement to prove value for money and that there is a real risk that the only way to do that is to hold a competition. Something like absolute value for money is very hard to prove, but “I held a competition and X cost less than Y” demonstrates value for money, so that is what we do as a means of providing an audit trail of value for money. It does not actually necessarily deliver you that value for money. I am not saying that we need to rip up the book and have no competitions. I definitely think that you would have some problems if you went too dramatically in that direction, but I also think, especially in the innovation space, there is a case for basically making an open call for innovation, trialling the thing you like the look of the most and, if it works, buying it.
That is one of the problems that start-ups have in the defence community. The risk is that a start-up will come along with a great idea, you trial it and then you compete it. At that point the incumbents come in, steal your ideas and you are done. This competition thing is really important.
I mentioned already that the primes are not set up for innovation. They do not spend that much of their money on R&D themselves—less than 3%, I think. That constrains change, whereas some of these start-ups have good capital and are spending considerably more than that.
Finally, before I pause and we discuss more general issues, there is an issue with retaining capital to scale. Generally, with all these innovation hubs and other forms of R&D funding, it is relatively easy to do a demonstration of a proof of concept, but what do you do if it succeeds? Do you have the capital in your budget to then apply it to that success? If you have essentially consumed that capital in your programme already on existing equipment procurement, these demonstrations go nowhere. I would advocate holding a pot of free capital at Defence level, command level or both that is available to seize opportunities once you have consistently demonstrated success through demonstration.
Those are some answers on the narrow question of the valley of death, but I will happily talk about procurement more generally if you would like me to.
Lord Teverson: That was a very comprehensive answer. Can I just take you up on one point? You mentioned judging things by time rather than other factors. Do other nations manage to do that? It seems that, with the length of time these things take, they are obsolete before you start, to put it in a straightforward way. Is there a way of delivering things on a time basis?
General Sir Christopher Deverell: There are nations that are more disciplined about time than we are. I will get this wrong but it was either the Swedes or the Danes—I am sorry, I cannot remember which—who went through three cycles of new armoured vehicles in five years, flash to bang.
We really struggle with armoured vehicles. Part of that discipline is not trying to do everything at once. We struggle to make prioritisation decisions in our portfolio: instead of fire-hosing the talent and money at X and then moving on to Y once X is complete, we try to do X, Y and A, B, C, D and so on together. So every programme is elongated and, as soon as you elongate programmes, you expose them to risk. There is far less risk in a programme delivered in five years than in one delivered in 15, quite apart from the obsolescence problem you described.
So we could do more, and it would come about if we valued time more, but we seem to ignore it—except in our urgent operational requirements processes, which are an example of how Defence can do this really well. When I was the director of equipment capability for ground manoeuvre in the MoD during Iraq and Afghanistan, we spent over £1 billion on protected mobility equipment—vehicles, body armour, personal weapons and so on—and we saved lots of lives, and we did it incredibly quickly. So the possibility exists—it is not impossible—but we do not apply those behaviours enough.
Q156 Lord Anderson of Swansea: You were present at the previous series of exchanges on the relationship between the MoD and the private sector, and on whether the MoD has indeed had a culture change, however defined. It was pretty confident that there had been—the phrase “step change” was used. Do you see evidence of one in the relationship between the MoD and the private sector?
General Sir Christopher Deverell: There definitely has been some change.
Lord Anderson of Swansea: Is it positive?
General Sir Christopher Deverell: Yes. If you judge it by its words, there has been a lot of change. The issue is whether what is happening on the ground reflects that philosophy or change in approach, and I am not confident of that. The genes that are carried by the system reassert themselves, even if people at the top of the shop are talking about different behaviour. Some things are so deeply embedded that it is hard to change them. So the words are great, and I am sure that there is some difference, but I am not persuaded that it is fundamental.
Lord Anderson of Swansea: What more could be done to encourage such a culture change? You may have noticed that the Defence Select Committee report published in July concluded that the MoD’s record in “large and complex programmes” is “abysmal”. Do you agree?
General Sir Christopher Deverell: First, there is nothing like defence. We are trying to buy a range and volume of things that no one else has to deal with, from submarines to socks to syringes. No other institution does that, other than other defence departments. That might sound like special pleading, but it is a truth: this is very complex. I have been involved in this process for 30-plus years, and it still surprises me. I am not saying that we cannot simplify parts of it, and I will come back to that, but, as a general proposition, people often do not recognise just how difficult it is to do all of this.
Secondly, returning to my structures point, one of the complexities of delivering large equipment programmes is the personnel structures and processes that we have, albeit for good reasons. The regimental system—which, being an Army officer, I know most about—is something that people will fight and die for. It is absolutely not optimised for change; it is just about the worst way to organise yourself if you want to deal with change. These sorts of factors are not sufficiently acknowledged when people focus on failure in the equipment programme.
But some things need to get better. There is still insufficient recognition that complex project management is a highly technical art. We are getting better at this, but we are still not good enough, and we tend to rotate people. You heard the conversation about tenure earlier. Unless we change our reward systems, we will never address this. A proper, professional and large-scale project-management institution would not turn people over with the frequency that we do. Frankly, I would start at the top, with the Chiefs’ length of tenure—that would make it easier to have accountability. In the system now, if you have been in your role for three years and did not participate in a decision three and a half years ago, it is too easy to blame your predecessor. If we had longer tenures, accountability would be better.
Lord Anderson of Swansea: That could mean promotion while doing the same job.
General Sir Christopher Deverell: Yes, or more money, or both. I would not want to specify the answer, but we have to do something to change these, frankly, Elizabethan HR processes.
Appetite for risk is another big and fundamental issue. There is a powerful tendency to observe the risks of acting and not those of not acting, and there is a failure to recognise the portfolio approach to risk. I will give an anecdote to exemplify that. I remember briefing a Defence Secretary about the jHub innovation organisation, and I said that one of its central tenets was a portfolio approach to risk. I explained that by saying, “We have 20 projects. If 19 of them fail but one of them succeeds big, the portfolio as a whole was a success”. That kind of process is how venture capital works, although perhaps not at a ratio of 19:1. Because we were talking about the innovation space, I thought I was saying a commonplace—something non-controversial—but I was naive, because the Defence Secretary looked horrified, saying, “Do you mean to say that you accept the notion that 19 of these projects might fail—from the outset?” I said, “Yes”, and you can imagine where that conversation went. So there is something about attitude to risk.
I am not saying that we should suddenly get very risk tolerant right across our portfolio, but I believe that, for bits of our portfolio, we could say, “We will tolerate more risk here”. That is exactly what happens in the urgent operational requirements space: we take more risk. There are new defence companies, especially in the software space, with which the MoD could work and which could deliver capability quickly if we were willing to take more risk. So that would be a big part of cultural change.
Q157 Baroness Rawlings: Thank you for your clarity and frankness. You mentioned the challenges of industrial capacity in the context of the war in Ukraine, notably in terms of UK and NATO capacity to enlarge our modest holdings of munitions. We have also seen the Russian and Ukrainian operations being limited at certain times by particular equipment constraints. As a former MoD director of equipment capability for ground manoeuvre, what is your assessment of the UK’s overall defence supply chain, from front-line resilience all the way through to industrial capacity for force development and resupply? How can it be improved while preserving effectiveness?
General Sir Christopher Deverell: The major issue here is the approach. For good and understandable reasons—because it is efficient—we adopted a just-in-time approach. We did not necessarily use those words, but that is what we did. We bought things broadly when we needed them, so we did not have the long-running drip-feed of munitions contracts that was described by your witnesses earlier. “We needed X million rounds of small arms munitions so we went and bought them. By the way, we’ve discovered 10 years later that we need more and we need to do it again, but we haven’t really thought about that”.
I do not think that that just-in-time approach can survive what is happening in Ukraine. We have to put more of a premium on resilience, and that is going to cost money. What is scary about that is that you cannot put that money into force structure or more equipment if you are buying stockpiles, but at some level we have to do better on that.
We need a better relationship with the industry in terms of quickly generating the capability to ramp up. That almost certainly involves spending some money with the industry, to pay it to have the capability to ramp up when we need it to. That does not necessarily mean that you need full production lines or empty factories that sit there waiting for something to happen, but if you are thoughtful about what it would take, there are some steps that you can take to pay for the ability to ramp up if and when that arises.
The defence and security industrial strategy was a step in the right direction. First, it recognised that our defence industry is a strategic capability in its own right, and that is an important recognition. It made noises about global competition by default not being the way ahead, so that is very welcome.
To take your example about understanding the supply chain, I was told earlier this year that there was a project to map the supply chains of defence equipment programmes. After a year I think they had mapped about three of the hundreds of programmes; they were doing it manually, by the way, which was not very sensible. The point is that you have to commit effort and resource to make these things happen—they do not just happen out of thin air. A fundamental change of approach that places more of a premium on resilience is the answer.
Baroness Rawlings: You have mentioned effort, resource, time and risk, but, if I understood correctly, you have basically said that a lot depends on cost. With your experience, how do we solve the cost question?
General Sir Christopher Deverell: I do not think you solve the cost issue; rather, you balance cost with other goods. Readiness is a good, and it needs paying for. You can be cute and clever about how you do things so that the cost of doing a particular thing is less than it might be, but fundamentally I do not think you get something for nothing. If you want resilience, you are going to have to pay for it.
Q158 Lord Campbell of Pittenweem: Like others, I guess I am fascinated by this notion of risk, but it must have some limitations. You heard the previous evidence about the size of the American budget. Would the principle not be that the bigger the budget, the more you can take risks? If you have a limited budget—such as, for example, 2% of GDP—then it is much more difficult to calculate risk in those circumstances. I think you are implying that if you are going to change the philosophy or the culture, that would have to be accompanied by additional resources, yet we know that there is some difference of emphasis around this table alone about the percentages that should go to defence. If things are tight financially when you make the calculations then you cannot afford to take the risks, whereas if you are the United States it is a completely different matter.
Just one little tailpiece. Would you have applied the different approach that you have set out so eloquently to the Ajax programme?
General Sir Christopher Deverell: If I do not remember to answer that I will come back to it at the end; please remind me.
I do not think it follows that risk-taking appetite has to be proportional to the amount of money available. In my experience, there is a lot of waste in American defence spending. The sums of money available in the defence equipment programme are not inconsiderable. I believe there are ways in which we can take risks that do not necessarily require more money. In some cases you have to buy out risk with money, for sure, but I do not think that that is the case in every area. It is even possible that, if you had a higher tolerance of risk, you would spend less money in certain areas. I do not accept an automatic relationship between the volume of money and risk.
I was responsible for Ajax at one point in the past—quite a long time ago, I hasten to add. There are definitely things that we could have done differently or better, but there are also things that come back to some of the ills that I described. For example, if you elongate programmes over very long periods of time, you expose them to risk. If you are trying to do something very complex, which a major armoured vehicle is, you need to have the right sort of talent applied in the MoD and in industry. It is harder to generate that over a considerable period of time.
There are things about the contract that, looking back on it, turned out not to work in our favour that perhaps would have addressed the problem earlier. There are issues to do with standards. For example, on noise and vibration standards, it became clear that Ajax was causing some of its crewmen to get ill as a result of noise and vibration. My belief is that, when we then looked at what standards we applied, we did not really have a standard that was very clear. For all we knew, if we had applied the same standard that was available to other armoured vehicles we would have had the same problem.
So there are all kinds of components to it. As a general proposition, I would not advocate taking big risky procurement approaches to major capital programmes such as tanks, armoured vehicles, fighter jets, submarines or capital ships. I am talking about software, essentially. There is so much potential in software. You can marry it with existing hardware and the existing network, and you can achieve wonders. That is where I am talking about applying this level of risk.
Lord Campbell of Pittenweem: One last question: who takes the risk, the politician or the professional?
General Sir Christopher Deverell: Both, at some level. The politician will carry the can for these so-called abysmal failures of procurement. Politicians stand up in the House and take a kicking, so they definitely carry the risk, but operational people carry the risk too because the capability that you need is not available.
So they carry it, but who should make decisions? The risk of involving politicians in decisions about equipment procurement is that there are multiple purposes to which government spending can be put. One is the operational need, clearly, but self-evidently another is employment. There is a danger that you can distort the picture as a result of allowing factors other than the operational need to come into play.
I will give you a great example from a very long time ago, so I hope I will not offend anybody still living. I was a captain in operational requirements in the early 1990s or late 1980s and we were evaluating what should be the next generation of British tank. We evaluated the French Leclerc, the US M1A2, as it was then, the Leopard and Challenger. We concluded that the best tank to meet the requirement was the Leopard tank and Britain bought Challenger. It did not do so because of the operational need.
That is the risk of politicians being too deeply involved in procurement decisions but, equally, it is entirely reasonable that they want to hold people to account, because they will stand up in the House of Commons and be held to account.
Q159 Lord Alton of Liverpool: The Public Accounts Committee said that Ajax had been deeply flawed from the start. Is that your assessment too?
General Sir Christopher Deverell: With the benefit of hindsight, there are some things we should have done differently. I would need to reflect further on whether that is the same thing as saying that we could have seen those things and known about them at the time. It is also important to see it in context: the British Army had been trying to replace its armoured vehicle fleet for 25 years. That drives certain behaviours, for sure.
Lord Alton of Liverpool: You said that you were going to reflect on that further. It would be really helpful for the committee if you were able to write to us about that, if you are agreeable. Can it be turned around?
General Sir Christopher Deverell: I am very happy to do that. I really do not know whether it can be turned around. I am not sufficiently close to it to be able to answer that question.
The Chair: Thank you very much for the session. We asked you to guide us through one of the most complex areas of decision-making, that of procurement, against the background of this very volatile period, as I said at the beginning. We are peering forward when, even in a clear atmosphere, it is very difficult to work out what is best for procurement in the future. In particular, we heard very much about the cost of not taking risks as well. We have no misapprehensions about how difficult it is for people to take decisions along the way, both in the MoD and those who are investing in businesses outside. Thank you very much for the clarity of your answers today.
