Jock Stirrup interview

On Sunday 21 October Andrew Marr interviewed Sir Jock Stirrup, Chief of the Defence Staff.

Please note 'The Andrew Marr Show' must be credited if any part of this transcript is used.

ANDREW MARR:

The last decade's been hard for the armed forces, fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. At times they were said to be overstretched, hampered by shortages of equipment, and there were tensions between military leaders and political masters. The Defence Secretary, Liam Fox, now says the defence budget was handled in a "scandalous" and "incompetent" way during the Labour years with no-one taking responsibility. Is he right? Sir Jock Stirrup's been Chief of the Defence Staff - that's head of all the land, air and sea forces - for the past four years, and he joins us this morning for his last interview in office. Welcome, Sir Jock.

SIR JOCK STIRRUP:

Thank you.

ANDREW MARR:

Well let's start with the Liam Fox charge sheet, as it were; that particularly when it comes to things like these two hugely expensive carriers, something badly went wrong with procurement during the Labour years. Would you agree with that?

SIR JOCK STIRRUP:

Well I think there were some pretty unfortunate cases in procurement during the Labour years, but I think that the root of the problem was cost growth for a whole variety of reasons in the programme, which needed to be attended to and which the Defence Board had plans to manage. But those plans were vetoed by ministers of the day because they were, I suppose, politically too difficult. And …

ANDREW MARR:

Can you give us an example?

SIR JOCK STIRRUP:

Well when the cost of the programme clearly outstrips the amount of money that you're likely to have available under any given scenario, then you have to reduce the total programme, which means you're going to have to cut some things. And proposals were put forward to cut various things - painful militarily and politically - but it had to be done, but those proposals were vetoed.

ANDREW MARR:

Because it's been suggested that one of those would have been at least one of the carriers not going ahead, but there were political reasons with the dockyards and the politics of all of that intervened.

SIR JOCK STIRRUP:

Well I think the story over the carriers has become somewhat confused. There is clearly the issue of affordability in the round, but there is also now the difficulty that we have which is that we have a terms of business agreement with the dockyards. Now the reason that this was reached was actually entirely sensible. We had too large a shipbuilding industry in this country for what we were able to sustain, and we had to come down to one dockyard. To enable us to come down to one dockyard, the industry had to invest in the necessary rationalisation. They were only going to do that if they had a commitment to a certain level of work for a certain number of years. And part of that work of course was the construction of these two carriers.

ANDREW MARR:

And we're now left with carriers which for ten years won't have planes to fly off them.

SIR JOCK STIRRUP:

Well of course you know the way this is reported is we'll have two new aircraft carriers for £5 billion and no planes to fly off them for ten years. Actually the new carriers and the new planes will be coming along at broadly the same time. What we will not have are fixed wing aircraft to fly from the current carriers. We will for the next nine or ten years maintain one flat top in service at a time, which will operate helicopters in the amphibious assault role.

ANDREW MARR:

But you were an old RAF man. Isn't it a terrible shame and a mistake to have no Harriers left, nothing to fly off the flat top?

SIR JOCK STIRRUP:

It's certainly a terrible shame, there's no doubt about that, and it's not something that any of us wanted to do. But the problem was in the Defence Review we were faced with saving considerable sums of money, and it was quite clear that as part of that we were going to have to reduce the number of fast jet aircraft we had. And in order to save the right kind of sums of money, you had to get rid of an entire type because that's the only way you save all the cost of the logistic support chain. So either the Harrier or the Tornado had to go. Unfortunately the Harrier force is simply too small to sustain our commitment in Afghanistan and leave us with a small residual contingent capability which we need.

ANDREW MARR:

The figure that Liam Fox used was £38 billion of unfunded liabilities going forward - which, if true, is an astonishing state of affairs, isn't it?

SIR JOCK STIRRUP:

Well it is. If you added up the total aspirations as well as all of those things that were on contract, set against a flat real budgetary line, that was the excess over ten years. And, as I said to you, I mean this was not a surprise. This was something the Defence Board saw coming years ago and for which it prepared and for which it put in place proposals to bring the programme into balance.

ANDREW MARR:

So what kinds of things were ministers refusing to countenance that the Defence Board thought were tough, regrettable, but necessary?

SIR JOCK STIRRUP:

Reductions in number of fast jet aircraft, reductions in numbers of ships, reductions in equipment within the army. All the kinds of things that we have had to do in this Defence Review.

ANDREW MARR:

So this is absolutely the reverse, I think, of what people would have expected - the Defence Board, the senior military people pressing for more and more equipment and more and more kit and the politicians holding them back. It was the other way around.

SIR JOCK STIRRUP:

That's exactly right.

ANDREW MARR:

That's fascinating. And this Defence View, as a result, was conducted at pretty much breakneck speed. Was it done too fast?

SIR JOCK STIRRUP:

No. Of course it would have been nice to have been able to adopt a more leisurely pace, but the one thing we knew was that the Comprehensive Spending Review was going to complete this October. If we had taken say a year over the Defence Review, we'd be halfway through it now and the Treasury would already have decided our resource allocation on a fairly arbitrary basis, and we would have had to conduct the second half of the review within that financial straitjacket. Now nothing is more finance driven than that. By doing the Defence Review at the same pace as the Spending Review, we were at least able to use some of the strategic arguments in an attempt to influence the resource allocation process. With some success, I have to say.

ANDREW MARR:

With some success and pretty publicly. I mean there was the famous leaking of the Defence Secretary's letter and people pointed the finger not at you personally but at the Ministry of Defence for that.

SIR JOCK STIRRUP:

I think that's a debatable issue, but there is an investigation underway. What I will say is that it was extremely unfortunate that it was leaked. It didn't help us, it didn't help the wider cause, and these sorts of leaks are damaging.

ANDREW MARR:

It was clearly a very intense - if I can use that word - process. It's said that at one point things got so bad that you and the other forces' chiefs, in full fig had to go in and confront David Cameron and say we can't go this far; we need a lesser cut.

SIR JOCK STIRRUP:

Well I think "confront" is a bit of an emotional word to use. But of course it was a very heated debate. I mean these were difficult circumstances …

ANDREW MARR:

(over) You had to go and intervene late in the process?

SIR JOCK STIRRUP:

Well actually we … I don't know if we intervened. We participated in the process on several occasions. We didn't go just once.

ANDREW MARR:

Yuh.

SIR JOCK STIRRUP:

I mean I saw the Prime Minister on a number of occasions and I saw the Prime Minister with the chiefs on more than one occasion. But you know these are very difficult issues in very difficult financial circumstances. I mean the strange thing would have been if we hadn't had a vigorous debate about it. And that debate was not just in the Ministry of Defence, but of course around the National Security Council table.

ANDREW MARR:

And we are now left obviously with a much diminished defence budget and, going forward, diminished forces as well. Could we defend the Falklands as we did back then?

SIR JOCK STIRRUP:

Well we wouldn't do it as we did back then, but could we defend the Falkland Islands? Yes, we could. I mean let's remember that in the 1980s we didn't defend the Falkland Islands. We lost them and then had to retake them. We can defend the Falkland Islands. The Falkland Islands is something about which I have concerned myself greatly over the last few years. The Chiefs of Staff have discussed it on a number of occasions. We keep a very close eye on the Falkland Islands.

ANDREW MARR:

Do you feel, looking back, that the forces in Afghanistan were under resourced at least in the early stages of the conflict?

SIR JOCK STIRRUP:

Well the Afghanistan campaign was under resourced in the early stages of the conflict. There's no doubt about that. It's only been resourced adequately for the last eighteen to twenty-four months. And the reason for that …

ANDREW MARR:

Well I was going to say, was that a failure of intelligence?

SIR JOCK STIRRUP:

No, no. It was down to the fact that we and more particularly the Americans because let's remember that in Afghanistan the only military that's able to provide the bulk of the forces to the scale that are required in Afghanistan is the United States; and the United States and we were both involved in Iraq. We were trying to balance resources between two theatres. Frankly the United States was focused on only one, which was in Iraq. And, as I've said before, I found it impossible to have a sensible conversation with anyone in Washington about Afghanistan before the beginning of 2008.

ANDREW MARR:

We heard endless arguments about was there enough body armour, did we have enough helicopters and so on. Were candidly do you think ministers too slow to get on top of that issue in the earlier stages of the conflict?

SIR JOCK STIRRUP:

I think it was a struggle in the early stages of the conflict to get the recognition of the force levels that were required, but actually we generated numbers of troops and we generated equipment as fast, frankly, as our commitments in Iraq and industrial capacity would permit. I mean we started with the number of helicopters we had in our inventory. But in the last four and a half years since I've been doing this job, I mean we have nearly quadrupled the number of helicopter hours available to our troops; we've doubled the number of troops. We should also remember though that in Helmand where the bulk of our people are, we started in 2006 with about 3,500 people and we now have 29,000 troops in there with the Americans. I mean that's pretty dramatic. Over that period, we have spent £1.8 billion on 1800 new protrected mobility vehicles; we have increased the amount of surveillance that we have for our troops. So we've done it all. We've done it as rapidly as we could given the fact that we were also tied down in Iraq, and the fact that a lot of these were new vehicles that just had to be designed and produced by industry.

ANDREW MARR:

And so although it may have been breaking protocol to go public, was General Dannatt's analysis back then when all the furore came out about what he was saying correct actually?

SIR JOCK STIRRUP:

About?

ANDREW MARR:

About the under-resourcing of the army. Do you remember he went public about this?

SIR JOCK STIRRUP:

Yes, absolutely.

ANDREW MARR:

He was right?

SIR JOCK STIRRUP:

And it was something that we were all debating all the time in the Chiefs of Staff Committee and we were driving improved resourcing as rapidly as was possible. But there is only a certain pace at which industry, you know even when they're operating you know with shifts that are on overtime, there's only a certain rate at which industry can turn out these new equipments.

ANDREW MARR:

It sounds to me from what you're saying that as to the general charge that in the Labour years ministers didn't look after the armed services as well as they ought to have done, your verdict would be that's true?

SIR JOCK STIRRUP:

I think that the focus of attention was slow to shift to the armed forces. I don't think that anybody sat there and said well we're not going to look after the armed forces, but I think the realisation that this kind of campaign can only be weighed successfully if there is wholehearted commitment to it across the board was very slow to gain purchase within the wider community. And I don't think that it's just politicians. I think that it's across Whitehall as well. That did shift and there's no doubt about it; the effort of the last couple of years has been absolutely excellent across the board. But it took time.

ANDREW MARR:

In the early years they were let down by the politicians?

SIR JOCK STIRRUP:

In the early years, it would have been nicer if we could have had much sharper focus on the commitment in Afghanistan.

ANDREW MARR:

Sir Jock Stirrup, thank you very much indeed for joining us this morning.

SIR JOCK STIRRUP:

Thank you.

INTERVIEW ENDS

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