Afghanistan: Urgent Operational Requirements
This question was posed to “Slow Bob” Ainsworth in the House of Commons, the answer raises a few more questions
David Laws (Yeovil, Liberal Democrat)
To ask the Secretary of State for Defence how many urgent operational requests made in relation to Afghanistan in the last 12 months had not been met by 13 July 2009; and if he will make a statement.
Bob Ainsworth (Secretary of State, Ministry of Defence; Coventry North East, Labour)
The Urgent Operational Requirement (UOR) process exists to address unforeseen capability gaps for imminent or current operations. Over 70 UORs for Afghanistan were approved in the period 13 July 2008 to 13 July 2009. We would generally expect these programmes to begin delivering capability to Theatre between six to 18 months after approval. We would not, therefore, expect the majority of requirements associated with these programmes to be fully met within the period stated in the question.
Basically as far as I can see “Slow Bob” has not answered the question or has indirectly by giving such a non-answer. To me it sounds like no Urgent Operational Requirements have been completed in this period.
Interestingly (or not) according to JSP 886 THE DEFENCE LOGISTICS SUPPORT CHAIN MANUAL VOLUME 3 SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT PART 10 THE MANAGEMENT OF EQUIPMENT PROCURED UNDER URGENT OPERATIONAL REQUIREMENT ARRANGEMENTS the time that a UOR should take is defined as
UOR capability must be able to be introduced into service in time to make a contribution to an operation. For planned operations this will usually mean before the commencement of operations. For enduring operations UOR capability will normally be delivered within 6-8 months of an Urgent Statement of User Requirement (USUR) being raised, however, for complex integration challenges and large fleet fits, this may increase to up to 18 months. Given the time constraints that this imposes, in the majority of cases the capability will be ‘Commercial Off The Shelf’ (COTS), ‘Military Off The Shelf’ (MOTS), or will make use of OTS components
So if this is correct then many of the UOR’s raised should have been completed, but with the MOD who knows. The government has made great store on the amount of money it is putting into UOR’s so it would be good to know how quickly or not they are progressing through the supply chain.
The other question that this point raises is the number of UOR’ that have been raised. This all points to the fact that the MOD has not been equipping our forces correctly and that this may be due to the fact that the current Strategic Defence Review is well past it’s sell by date. As the Defence Committee said of the UOR process
While we are satisfied with UOR process, we remain concerned that the extent of UORs represents at least a partial failure by the MoD to equip adequately its forces for expeditionary operations which were anticipated by the Strategic Defence Review a decade ago.
So somewhere along the line the wrong types / amounts of equipment have been bought. This all points to a need for a more frequent reviews and a better ability to keep up with changing circumstances.
