The Report
of the Iraq Inquiry
Afghanistan)
would breach the Harmony Guidelines and the Defence
Planning
Assumptions,
and was “too big a risk”.2
11.
Sir Kevin
Tebbit, MOD Permanent Under Secretary from 2001 to 2005, told
the
Inquiry:
“I was
apprehensive [about the deployment of UK forces to Helmand] and I
made my
concerns
known to my planning staff and to the Chiefs of Staff. I think
their view was
that they
could do it and it was manageable ... since it was [the Chiefs of
Staff] who
would
actually have to ensure they could do this, I did not press my
objections fully.”3
12.
The impact of
the decision on the availability of key equipment capabilities for
Iraq is
addressed
in Section 14.1.
13.
The force
began to deploy to Helmand in May 2006.
14.
At the end of
August, General Sir Richard Dannatt, Chief of the General
Staff,
advised
Mr Des Browne, the newly appointed Defence Secretary, that “as
an Army, we
are running
hot”.4
With
operational deployments well above the levels set out in
the
1998
Strategic
Defence Review and the
MOD’s own Harmony Guidelines, the Army’s
demands on
soldiers were greater than its ability to look after
them.
15.
Gen Dannatt
told the Inquiry that the military covenant had “fallen out of
balance ...
as a
consequence of decisions taken to stay in Iraq until we had
successfully completed
our
operations there, but also take on Afghanistan as
well”.5
16.
The MOD’s
assessment that the Helmand deployment was achievable
without
causing a
substantial number of personnel to breach the Harmony Guidelines
reflected
overly
optimistic assumptions about the intensity and duration of
operations in Iraq
and
Afghanistan.
17.
The twin
deployments challenged the planning assumption agreed in the
1998
Strategic
Defence Review that the UK
should be able to undertake two medium scale
deployments
simultaneously but would not expect both to involve war-fighting or
to be
maintained
simultaneously for longer than six months.
18.
It would only
have been possible to manage the established Iraq commitment
and
the new
Helmand commitment, without significantly increasing the pressure
on Service
Personnel,
if the former was wound down on schedule and the latter was
contained. In
the event,
it proved difficult to withdraw from Iraq as quickly as hoped while
Helmand
developed
into a more substantial combat operation than originally envisaged,
pushing
up force
levels.
2
Public
hearing, 21 July 2010, page 80.
3
Public
hearing, 3 February 2010, pages 15 and 16.
4
Letter
Dannatt to Browne, 31 August 2006, [untitled].
5
Public
hearing, 28 July 2010, page 98.
156