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123Clearly, if you are going to operate at extreme ranges, with or withoutthe fixed-wing aircraft carriers that we talked about this afternoon, youare going to be critically dependent upon air-to-air refuelling. The wholeenterprise was a real test of the flexibility of air power.Looking back from my contemporary vantage point in Whitehall,what were the particular highlights that struck me? Number one wasundoubtedly the performance of the fleet of Victor tankers. They wereabsolutely superb in the service that they provided. Then there was theadaptability of the receivers, the Vulcan (and we have only reallytouched on Vulcan operations), the Hercules, the Nimrod, the Harrier, allconverted, very, very quickly %u2013 and not only the aircraft because, in mostcases, we also had to convert the crews. I think that that was a quiteremarkable achievement. Then again, there was the support provided byour groundcrew, air force wide. They did the most superb job, devising(apart from the hard work and long hours that they put in) imaginativesolutions to technical problems and designing modifications to theaircraft to expand their operational capabilities.And then there was the support that we got from industry, anotheraspect that we have already discussed, not least with regard to the way inwhich the procurement process was speeded up. In essence, of course, itwas all about money. Once the financial constraints had been removedall of the committees became redundant and could be swept aside.Thereafter, if we needed anything, we got it and that enabled us actuallyto acquire a lot of capabilities that had long since been planned, most ofwhich were very unlikely ever to have been realised. I recall, forexample, that the provision air-to-air refuelling for the Nimrod had beenin the programme for some time, but it was going to cost, I think, %u00a330M,which was quite a lot of money in the 1980s, and take three years toimplement. We just didn%u2019t have the money, but, once the gloves wereoff, we actually did it in about three weeks. At the end of the war, Iasked the Permanent Under-Secretary to let me know how much thatmodification had actually cost. I never got an answer, but I doubt that itwas %u00a330M; you just couldn%u2019t have spent that much in such a short time inthose days.I could go on; I should, for instance, note the adaptability of ourplanners. We were talking about contingency planning towards the endof our afternoon discussion. The fact is that there simply was no plan forthe Falklands but, paradoxically, I believe that that may actually have