6.3 |
Military equipment (pre-conflict)
“ –
undertake a more extended 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.”
17.
The DPAs are
addressed in more detail in Section 6.1.
18.
The ‘Defence
Strategic Plan’ was a confidential MOD document which
included
greater
detail than was published in the SDR report.6
The Plan
identified some specific
readiness
criteria in relation to regional conflict outside
NATO:
“… we need
to maintain the ability to respond within short warning times to an
Iraqi
threat, and
to build up forces thereafter. This again requires us to hold
capabilities
needed to
mount a medium scale deployment at high readiness (30 days) … For
a
large scale
deployment we need to plan on a framework division being ready
within
90
days.”
To inform
the DPAs, the scales of military effort, over and above those
required for
day-to-day
commitments, were defined in the SDR as:
•
small
scale: “a
deployment of battalion size or equivalent”;
•
medium
scale: “deployments
of brigade size or equivalent”, such as the UK’s
contribution
to Bosnia in the mid-1990s;
•
large
scale: “deployments
of division size or equivalent”, such as the UK’s
contribution
to the 1991 Gulf Conflict; and
•
very large
scale and full scale: forces
needed “to meet significant aggression
against an
Ally”, the difference between the two reflected the time available
for
preparation
– “warning time” – and the size of the threat.7
Other
factors to be considered included:
•
endurance
– the likely
duration of any operation and the potential need to
sustain a
deployment for an indefinite period; and
•
concurrency
– the number
of operations of a given scale of effort and duration
that could
be sustained by the force structure.
More detail
on the planning assumptions for the scales of military operation is
provided
in Section
6.1.
6
Ministry of
Defence, 1998, ‘Defence Strategic Plan 1998’.
7
Ministry of
Defence, Strategic
Defence Review: Supporting Essays, July
1998.
5