Is There No Such Thing As A Stupid Question?

Why don’t all Royal Navy warships have F35 fighter jets embarked on them? After all, vertical take off technology has been around for decades, and in the eyes of many, aircraft carriers are perceived to be vulnerable. Wouldn’t it be better if the RN instead acted as a force multiplier to put as many F35s to sea as possible across as many ships as possible?

To seasoned defence observers this may sound like a very silly proposal, yet it was asked in all seriousness on Twitter this afternoon by someone genuinely curious about why this doesn’t happen. The natural response was perhaps to be cynical, or to think ‘oh come on’ and wonder why people suggest these ideas.

But, is this natural response actually a good sign that Defence is failing to cut through and explain in a way that the public instinctively understand about issues in a manner they remember? Perhaps its worth a bit of thinking about as to why people ask the question in the first place, and a bit about the instinctive responses we sometimes generate.

People are naturally curious about defence issues and what it does and why the armed forces do what they do. They don’t often have a massively detailed understanding of defence technology, doctrine or issues, and they don’t have the time to spend years learning an extremely complicated subject in great detail.

That said they do want to learn a bit, see a bit and try to understand something of the assets that the UK has and where they are deployed and what they do. You only have to look at the way nearly 20,000 tickets sold out in barely an hour the other week for visitors to go to HMS PRINCE OF WALES on the first ever public open day to a UK carrier. Similarly HMS NORTHUMBERLAND on a recent visit to the North East had nearly 1000 people in the line an hour before the ship opened all queueing up to see the ship and the people onboard.

Its not surprising then that people ask questions that seem to make logical sense to them, but which they can’t find an answer to. The MOD does a good job of trying to make defence understandable to the layperson – the ‘miles of sausages’ statistics are a good example of this – it makes something relatable in a manner and reference point that people naturally understand.

If you understand the frame of reference, you can understand a bit more about it and why it matters. One of Humphrey’s personal success stories was once writing a piece of work to explain the importance of shipping – the article referred to tonnes of shipping being escorted by the Royal Navy, but it was hard to get a sense of the scale. To try and personalise it a little, a quick google of ‘WW2 Atlantic Convoys’ followed by adding up the displacement of all the ships in a WW2 convoy followed.

By doing some very basic maths, it was possible to work out that there were several WW2 convoys worth of tonnage being escorted, albeit in bigger but fewer platforms. But the image of a WW2 convoy is something people inherently understand – they can picture it in a way that ships weight cannot.

This fascination continues too in asking perfectly reasonable questions – why aren’t Royal Navy aircraft carriers nuclear powered or ‘why in Afghanistan didn’t the Army use flail tanks to stop IEDs’?

This sort of question isn’t easily answered by MOD – while DDC and the Single Service channels do a good job of engaging with journalists to try and explain to them how things work and provide a crash course in defence capabilities, the public doesn’t really have a channel to ‘ask the obvious question and get a respectful answer’.

While Social Media fills some of this void, it is also inherently a hugely toxic place. For every positive twitter engagement there is a legion of horrible rants, vile language and horrible behaviours. Plenty of people ask what seems a reasonable question and get ignored, trolled or jumped on.

There is a wider piece too about how defence social media works – it is an intensely difficult environment to engage in, and easy to bite and be snarky. Working out how defence commentators can play a part in this is also important – not just in terms of patiently answering questions, but in making sure an atmosphere exists where people feel happy to ask them.

It is telling that when senior NCOs or Officers do twitter ‘Ask Me Anything’ sessions they often get some really good thought provoking questions from people who don’t know their sea dart from their sea wolf, but who do take a quiet interest and pride in all things Defence. These events are great because they help the public engage, but they also highlight the sort of issues people in the real world care about on defence matters

Very few people relatively speaking care deeply about the deeper technical parts of Defence. It is telling that one of the best social media accounts out there for humanising defence (Ships Cat) excels at telling a very human story of bathrooms, bunks and buns – in other words answering the questions people have about what the living conditions and food is like onboard a modern Royal Navy warship. Very few posts talk about widgets, gizmos or the Type 29424 modulator. They instead focus on telling a human story – and people lap it up as a result.

Most importantly, there needs to be a way that people can know how to ask a reasonable question to the MOD and get a sensible reply back.  While you can strike it lucky on occasions, is the missing gap some kind of website that people can send in questions to, and get answers back that don’t sound robotic, swamped in FOI legalese or which take forever to reply?

A good example of this is back in the 1990s, when a much younger Humphrey wrote a letter to the Royal Navy asking some sensible questions that he couldn’t find an answer to. The reply back included a very personal letter explaining the answers, and some great pictures of RN ships, plus the latest ‘Ships, Aircraft and Weapons’ poster that adorned his wall for some years to come. This was great public engagement.

Is the modern need for a website where you can either search by FAQ for questions like this, or provide an easy way to ask a simple question and provide an email address for an answer?  In other words, while the existing single service websites are great, is there a way for them to host answers to questions that are obvious if you know it, but less so if you don’t?

Image by Ministry of Defence; © Crown copyright

Right now there isn’t an easy way to find out answers to these sorts of questions beyond a lot of googling and possibly striking it lucky. Perhaps investment in a website that can help the questioner find what they are looking for first time without getting lost in a rabbit warren of random results due to poor use of metadata (frankly anyone who has ever managed to use the MOD internal or external search engine and found first time exactly what they need definitely needs investigation as being a possible Russian spy).

Is the way that Defence can communicate better to focus on the human stories and provide really good insight into answering questions that are not silly to their originators? This sort of task sounds like a good one for reservists in media roles-  handle some of the questions coming in about life in the Royal Navy or British Army and provide a response that makes the originator understand why things happen the way that they do.

But this sense of providing a way to ask a question safely shouldn’t just be confined to the real world. It is often quite astounding, and at times embarrassing, to see how poor the military knowledge of each others services are. For example, listening to Naval Officers suggesting that the RAF should be scrapped is always an experience, as is listening to Army Officers not understanding why the RN needs aircraft carriers.

The problem though is that in what is an intensely competitive culture, showing weakness or less than complete knowledge can be seen as a dangerous thing. Who would want to sit in a classroom as a non-naval officer and ask ‘but why don’t you put individual F35’s on ships’? To do so may invite ridicule and banter, but more importantly put people off asking questions they don’t know the answer to in future – and one day there could be one which has serious safety implications if the person doesn’t know, and doesn’t feel comfortable in speaking up.

There is a more serious side to this, how do you create a culture where questions can be asked safely and appropriately without people feeling embarrassed for asking it?  Part of this is technology – there are a variety of apps out there to allow people to ask questions anonymously, providing they get answered properly.

But also we have to ensure we are comfortable that the person answering the question knows the answer – there is nothing worse than bowling an ACSC style ‘look at me, I’ve got an affirmation my own importance and intellect that is loosely masquerading as a question’ approach which can prove problematic. If you don’t know the answer or want to stick to your lines to take, then at times this approach can be less than helpful.

Perhaps what is needed is some kind of anonymous mail site where people can ask genuine questions, without fear of ridicule or embarrassment and receive honest email answers back from people who don’t feel they’ve been caught out and have the time to respond openly and appropriately. For all the talk of developing a culture of reasonable challenge in Defence, perhaps what is also needed is a culture of reasonable question asking too?