25 October 2002
The wrong kind of sand and 'unexpectedly hot' conditions in a desert were among excuses that embarrassed military officials this week provided for a bungled exercise to test British troops' preparedness for war in the Middle East.
Senior armed forces personnel told the Commons' Public Accounts Committee on October 21 that the catalogue of equipment failures that occurred during an £85m training exercise in Oman last year did not mean that the UK was unable to conduct warfare in extreme conditions.
But MPs remained dubious. In the light of a National Audit Office report on the September 2001 exercise in Oman, which involved 23,000 armed forces personnel, they questioned whether Britain could safely send troops into a potential conflict in Iraq.
PAC acting chair Alan Williams told Sir Kevin Tebbit, permanent secretary at the Ministry of Defence, and armed forces' chief of joint operations Lt Gen John Reith, that despite the NAO's 'generous' conclusion that Operation Saif Sareea had been a success, the abundance of failures meant the exercise had been a 'debacle'.
Among the many failures in Oman, the army's Challenger II tanks seized up because filters, supposedly designed to withstand 14 hours of desert conditions, clogged up and failed after four.
Tebbit refused to discuss whether the army had encountered 'the wrong type of sand,' the mocking excuse satirically offered by committee members, but Reith said there were considerable 'differences between different types of sand'.
Tebbit also claimed that the 'unexpectedly hot' conditions in the desert had led to additional problems. A bemused Richard Bacon, Tory MP, asked: 'They had three years to plan an exercise in the desert – and belatedly discovered it was too hot?'
Other failures included long-range guns that failed to work, soldiers' boots that melted in the heat, helicopters that worked at 55% capacity and failed communication systems.
Tebbit said that while there were 'many lessons to be learned', he disagreed with parts of the NAO report.
The list of failures, he claimed, had been exacerbated by the MoD's conscious decision not to fully equip vehicles in order to cut costs. 'In retrospect, they probably made the wrong call.'
PFoct2002
