CONFIDENTIAL
forces, whose training needs are best met by dedicated
courses.
8.
Service individual training accounts for nearly 7% of the Defence budget, 12% of Service manpower and 3% of civilian manpower; these proportions have remained broadly unchanged for several years. A new factor, however, is the introduction of budgets into this field, designed to identify resources with tasks. Whereas a training establishment may, in the past, have carried excess capacity without recognizing the need to eliminate it, the ERB process is already exposing the mismatch between overall expenditure and that attributable to tasked activity. However, deeper analysis of the distribution of F&C students between the different courses, and the demand
for, and cost recovery from, each course, will be needed. Unless an establishment is formally tasked to undertake an activity, expenditure of resources cannot be justified. It follows therefore that unless F&C training is recognized as a proper task for the armed forces in peacetime, and the training commands are tasked accordingly, individual training establishments will only be authorized to expend resources on planned UK training.
9. In considering F&C training, the COS agreed in principle that there was a clear political and military obligation on the MOD to support foreign and defence policy and sales objectives and to provide training capacity to that end. Subsequently in November 1988 they endorsed a note by PUS on the cost and subsidy of such training which concluded, inter alia, that FCT should be maintained at broadly the level of recent years and that the present policy on charges should be maintained on the understanding that work would go ahead on better options to be implemented under the New Management Strategy (NMS). It has been with these policy statements in mind that DMAO, as the Directorate tasked by the COS to assume Defence Staff responsibility for F&C training policy management, is seeking to make Ministers aware of the effects of the very real resource constraints which impede F&C Training progress. The newly-established Foreign and Commonwealth Training Committee, under the joint chairmanship
E-4 CONFIDENTIAL
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