Sir Humphrey on the mapping uproar:
Several UK newspapers reported this week the findings of the UK Parliaments Intelligence & Security Committee report that during OP ELLAMY, the UK had relied on Germany to provide mapping for the RAF to conduct its missions. This was apparently a disgraceful sign of a nation in decline and that we should all be jolly ashamed of ourselves.
The reality (as ever!) is a little different and one worth thinking about. Maps are something that we all take for granted in our daily lives, and they are an utterly indispensable part of modern military operations (even in the hands of a newly appointed young officer). We perhaps take for granted the information on them, without considering how it is obtained. In the UK the Ordnance Survey has over many hundreds of years done a phenomenal job of providing accurate information almost down to the last manhole cover about what lies where. At sea the Hydrographic Service has similarly spent many hundreds of years charting the oceans and waters of the planet — it is not an exaggeration to say that in some of the more remote parts of the globe, the only charts in use date back to the surveys done by Captain Cook or other explorers. As a national asset the Hydrographic Office in particular is absolutely priceless — very few nations run credible hydrographic programmes beyond the UK, US, Russia and China. The Royal Navy, with its extremely effective and very hard worked survey fleet has been able to become a global leader in providing accurate chart information to the world — indeed many countries are enormously reliant on the UK for providing charts for their warships.
But, to put a map or chart together is an enormously complicated piece of work which takes a lot of time and effort. No country on earth currently has the resources to provide a truly global and accurate mapping capability of all the nations and areas that it may need military mapping for. Its not just a case of putting down some generic top level mapping and hoping that’s enough — modern military operations require a lot of detail, and to be able to work effectively, mapping is needed at a very high level of detail. When it comes to targeting, knowing whether a particular target is located at grid reference 123456, or 12345678 can make a huge difference — precision weapons nowadays mean that the chances of hitting the intended spot are much higher than ever before. This means you can destroy a critical node or facility without necessarily doing much in the way of wider damage, which makes rebuilding efforts easier, and also reduces the risk of civilian casualties.
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The irony is that amidst the anguish over using German maps, the article skims over the wider point that Defence Intelligence appears to be losing several hundred posts. It is not commonly realised that the DI is responsible for the provision of geographic information to the military, currently via the Defence Geographic Centre in Feltham (for more information see LINK HERE). This sort of service is crucial to help the MOD maintain an edge on operations — it isn’t just about having a good set of weapons, but the ability to know where you are, where you are going and how you can have the best possible military effect that matters. Ironically the papers that got the most irate about the news the UK was relying on the Germans were also the same papers that call the most loudly for ever more civil servants to be fired. The problem is that the people working at the DGC are exactly the sort of civil servants who are not pen pushers, who make a massive, near immeasurable difference to UK security, and who face considerable uncertainty in the future. We perhaps forget at our peril that just because someone doesn’t wear uniform, it doesn’t mean that they don’t play a major role in helping the defence of the UK.
