Page 13 - The Cormorant Issue 14

Front Line Command Capability Studies – A Civil Servant’s View
Mr Matthew Savill
The aim of the FLCC studies is to understand how the Forces ‘deliver military capability and generate forces for employment at the operational level’. Or, more bluntly, this is the module on the Course where students are expected to regurgitate all the propa- ganda they learned during the Single Service Introductions about why the land/sea/air is the key environment! It’s not quite clear what the Civil Service ‘environment’ would be. Paper, perhaps? Or the political environment – characterised by uncertainty, fric- tion and where normal laws don’t apply, populated by, well, best not to say in print...
The Combat Power visits are the subject of separate articles, so this piece is the equivalent of the Cormorant Hall lectures from FLCC; the ‘protein-rich’ intellectual meat that helps it all to make sense. Either that or the boring bit people want to skip over to get to the tanks and bombs (it’s difficult to have an exciting photograph of a Powerpoint lecture on doctrine – sorry DCDC!). FLCC came at an interesting time for ACSC14, as it was dis- cussing the different environments and the capabilities required for each at the same time as the SDSR process was happening out in the ‘real world’. That involved some depressingly pre- dictable (and painfully public) inter-service wrangling over the shape and purpose of the Armed Forces which several speakers noted probably did half the work of the Treasury for it. Thank- fully, isolated within the Shrivenham environment, there was little evidence of any such internecine warfare here, perhaps because of the camaraderie of the Course and a sense of all ‘being in it together’.
Either way, it made for some awkward lectures and robust ques- tioning, especially by the time the final study, Maritime, was upon us late in October. By this point the conclusions of the SDSR had been announced, so pity the speaker who had to explain why maritime strike was such an important capability but that we could afford to take a ten year capability ‘holiday’ in carrier strike. In any case, each study followed a similar pattern of explaining the complexities and characteristics of each environment, outlin- ing doctrine relating to it and then covering the capabilities that have been developed in each case to ‘deliver effect’ as the DS would no doubt wish it to be called. It was at this point that the phrase ‘contemporary operating environment’ made its appear- ance, to be added to the officially-approved ACSC list of buzz- words you should include as often as possible; for each study it became necessary to emphasise the importance of that environ- ment to the ‘CoE’.
If this sounds cynical, it’s really because although the studies are divided by environment, it is delivered by service. Air is really ‘RAF’ whilst Ground is really ‘Army’. So the poor Royal Marines barely appear in Land, but when we get to Maritime, the War- fare Officers of the Senior Service are rather more interested in sleek grey hulls than booties making their way ‘By Sea, By Land’. Royal would no doubt claim it has been ever thus, until they deploy to Afghanistan and suddenly they’re on the front of Navy News as the Navy starts making the link with the CoE again! The only other arm that seems to get such a raw deal consists of those brave souls who are associated with logistics. All speak- ers were agreed that logistics was Very Important. At the same time it seems to be Very Boring. Never mind loggies; some teeth-arm types may not love you, but I do! I would have noted the traditional abuse heaped upon practitioners of the mystic art
of intelligence, but they were pretty much erased from the order of battle in these phases, and didn’t appear in Joint Challenges and Capabilities either. Instead we had the tyranny of uncon- trolled use of ‘ISTAR’ – and in particular the emergence of the Chief of the Air Staff’s new buzzphrase ‘Combat ISTAR’; it won’t get added to the ACSC approved list until the RAF can actually explain consistently what it means!
This might imply that FLCC was undercooked. But it isn’t intended to be a phase about how we operate in the joint envi- ronment; that’s what JCC and Campaigning are for (just to prove to the DS that I was noting the linkages!). FLCC was an oppor- tunity for the Services to explain their different viewpoints and ethos and how and why they are structured the way they are. In that respect it was interesting to hear lectures like ‘To Be an Airman’ (well, unless you’re in the RAF and ‘aren’t’ an airman, in which case every stereotype of the ‘two-winged master race’ was confirmed!). And the doctrine lectures demonstrated sev- eral themes run throughout the environments and that the Future Character of Conflict work has relevance for all; as an example the Army’s Doctrine Publication for Operations has sections on Joint Operations and the other environments and many of its key tenets have wide applicability. Both demonstrate the wisdom of having, and reading, doctrine and why DCDC is an important part of our military capability. Finally, there was an understand- ing of the equipment itself, which was generally delivered without being fetish-ised (we’ll excuse the odd tanks and planes plus rock music video) and for some exposed for the first time the sig- nificant challenges that people and machines have to be trained and equipped to deal with in the other services. It also made the case for the need to maintain a certain warfighting edge and that the applicability of some ‘high end’ skills to contemporary prob- lems is more than just a trite reassertion of existing roles. This didn’t go without challenge, and certainly the phase also raised questions about relevance and the flexibility needed to train and maintain a force with maximum utility. The unanswered ques- tion at the end was whether SDSR has achieved this. In other words there was a lot of information to take in here, a few myths slain (and a couple perpetuated) and we all learned something; if nothing else that “70% of the world’s population lives within 100 miles of the sea, 80% of the world’s cities are within 200 miles of the sea and 90% of UK trade comes by the sea” (with thanks to pretty much every RN speaker for that one).
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