16.1 |
The welfare of Service Personnel
of the
Service before your own, you will forgo some of the rights enjoyed
by those
outside the
Armed Forces. But in return you can at all times expect fair
treatment,
to be
valued and respected as an individual, and to be rewarded by
reasonable
terms and
conditions of service.”
7.
The Armed
Forces’ capacity to deploy and sustain expeditionary operations
was
determined
by decisions in the 1998 Strategic
Defence Review (SDR
98).3
8.
SDR 98 set out
the UK’s defence policy and translated that policy into
detailed
guidance
for defence planning by using a number of “planning assumptions”
which
defined the
required level of forces, or scale of effort, required for specific
Military Tasks
(see
Section 6.1).
9.
SDR 98 stated
that the UK should be able to:
“– respond
to a major international crisis which might require a military
effort and
combat
operations of a similar scale and duration to the Gulf War when we
deployed
an armoured
division, 26 major warships and over 80 combat
aircraft.
or
– undertake
a more extended overseas deployment on a lesser scale (as over
the
last few
years in Bosnia) while retaining the ability to mount a second
substantial
deployment
– which might involve a combat brigade and appropriate naval and
air
forces – if
this were made necessary by a second crisis. We would not,
however,
expect both
deployments to involve war fighting or to maintain them
simultaneously
for longer
than six months.”
10.
The principal
scales of effort defined in SDR 98 were:
•
Small
scale: “a deployment of battalion size or equivalent”.
•
Medium
scale: “deployments of brigade size or equivalent” for
war-fighting
or other
operations.
•
Large
scale: deployments of division size or equivalent. The most
recent
example was
the UK contribution to the 1991 Gulf Conflict, “although on
that
occasion
the British division deployed with only two of its three brigades”.
This
was “the
maximum size of force we would plan to be able to contribute to
peace
enforcement
operations, or to regional conflicts outside the NATO
area”.
•
Very large
scale and full scale: all the forces that would be made available
to
NATO to
meet a major threat such as significant aggression against an
ally.
•
Endurance:
the likely duration of individual Military Tasks. Each Service
needed
to be able
to sustain tasks for the required period, including where necessary
by
3
Ministry of
Defence, Strategic
Defence Review, July
1998.
3