14.1 |
Military equipment (post-conflict)
1294.
The difficulty
with Watchkeeper was that “it became very
political”.675
Sir Peter
referred to
Lord Bach’s evidence before the House of Commons Defence
Committee,
in which
Sir Peter said that Lord Bach gave an In Service Date “under
political pressure”
and before
the requirement was properly understood.
1295.
Sir Peter
said that “you have to be thick‑skinned enough to stand up to
that
pressure
politely, but in a way which informs Ministers that … a short term
gain here
is going
to lead to a lot of grief later”.
1296.
At the time
that the MOD was debating whether to bring in the Hermes 450
UAV
as a “gap
filler”, Sir Peter said: “there were some quite hard decisions
which needed
to be made
in London by the military customer to decide what they want to
spend the
money on,
because they could not have both simultaneously”.676
1297.
Sir Peter
concluded:
“The
compelling lesson from all of this is if you want something quickly
to work,
you go for
something which is available apart from anything you might need to
do
to
integrate it to work inside your own organisation, because there
will be some
aspects of
the way we operate UK military forces which will be different, say,
from
1298.
The Inquiry
asked Lt Gen Figgures whether, if the Reaper UAV that was
sent to
Afghanistan
had instead been sent to Iraq, it would have made a difference to
the UK’s
ability to
defend itself against the indirect fire threat at Basra Air
Station.678
He
replied
that it
“could potentially have made a difference. Indeed the Hermes in
2007 and Desert
Hawk I
think had some success.”
1299.
Lt Gen Fulton
acknowledged to the Inquiry that the UK should have procured
its
own UAV
sooner than the Hermes 450 in 2007.679
1300.
The
Watchkeeper UAV was never deployed to Iraq. The MOD told the
Inquiry that
it came
into sevice in August 2014 and was deployed in
Afghanistan.680
1301.
Asked when
Watchkeeper had been scheduled to come into service,
Lt Gen Fulton
replied that he thought a date of 2009 to 2010 was “what people
had
in mind”,
but referred to Lord Bach’s evidence to the House of Commons
Defence
Committee
in June 2003 that it would be 2005 to 2006.681
He
added:
“I think
what that showed was not so much that they got it wrong, but a
reflection
of the
keenness to get it in, and the wish to put pressure on not only us
to work
675
Public
hearing, 26 July 2010, pages 65‑67.
676
Public
hearing, 26 July 2010, pages 67‑68.
677
Public
hearing, 26 July 2010, pages 68‑69.
678
Public
hearing, 27 July 2010, pages 109‑110.
679
Public
hearing, 27 July 2010, pages 100‑107.
680
Letter
Duke‑Evans to Hammond, 4 February 2016, [untitled].
681
Public
hearing, 27 July 2010, page 100.
219