Jeff Little’s proudest moment was the day he pitched up at Buckingham Palace to receive a sparkling OBE medal from Her Majesty The Queen in recognition of his distinguished military service.
“It really was wonderful to meet Her Majesty,” explained Little as we sat down to ‘talk shop’ in his office at Sentinel House in Maidenhead, home to the National Security Inspectorate (NSI) – the organisation for whom he now stands tall as its CEO in residence.
Indeed, the Brigadier’s Royalist leanings are manifest in the small figurines set out before us on the periphery of the interview table. One of Her Majesty, one of the Duke of Kent and models of Charles and Camilla thrown in for good measure (all of them capable of ‘walking’ unaided across said table by dint of wind-up mechanisms… but more of the ‘engineering talk’ anon).
Having exchanged pleasantries (including details of my – thankfully – smooth train journey from Paddington, and a potted history of Security Management Today to boot), we began our discussion in earnest (but not before Little had very politely asked the NSI’s new sales and marketing manager Chris Pinder to see if he could do something about the air conditioning system’s all-too-apparent lack of warmth).
First, some detail about the man himself. Born in the Peak District of Derbyshire – Glossop, near the A57, to be precise – back in 1955, Little is the proud son of Alfred (an engineer) and Jenny (a devoted housewife) but was, by his own admission, “an accident”.
When Little first saw light of Glossop day his sister Anne was already sweet 16 and brother Rod two years older still. “Respectively, they’d been the head girl and head boy at their schools, too,” stated Little. No pressure there, then.
Prospective career in engineering
“The one toy my father insisted I have,” continued Little with the perfect diction you would expect from a former military man, “was a Meccano set. I used to build bridges and all manner of things with it. Fair to say that Dad was very keen for me to become an engineer.”
It’s perhaps easy to understand why. Alfred Little looked after railway bridges and tunnels, but not just any old tunnels. For example, Little Senior worked on the Woodhead Tunnel (which stretched for 3.5 miles and was, back in the day, the longest railway tunnel in the UK).
Little Junior dutifully attended Glossop Grammar School (which morphed into a comprehensive during his time there) and tried to pick up the legacy left behind by Anne (who, by this time, had gone to work in a bank) and Rod (who’d joined the Royal Air Force and was “busy flying Vulcan bombers all over the world”).
“I was never any good at Latin or French, whereas my brother and sister had been. I was more scientific and interested in physics, chemistry and biology.”
Indeed, those three topics ended up being Little’s chosen subjects at A Level along with General Studies: perhaps not surprising for a boy who always took a healthy interest in world affairs and avidly devoured the news agenda.
Little decided that university wasn’t for him (although he would eventually go on to study for and duly complete an MBA with the Open University, more of which anon).
“My brother was having a great time in the RAF, and I wanted to do something equally positive with my life. I knew that I didn’t want to go through another three years of study, so instead I decided to join the Army.”
Little’s parents initially wanted him to follow in Rod’s footsteps and grab hold of a career in the air, but he rebelled. “If truth be told, my parents were a bit shocked about my choice of the Army,” he said. “Northern Ireland was very heavily in focus at that stage, you see.”
From Manchester to Sandhurst
It was 1974, and Little jauntily rocked up at the Army’s Manchester recruiting office to sign on the dotted line. He sailed through the regular Commissions Board and began a year’s stint at the world famous Sandhurst Royal Military Academy that September.
A mere day after checking out of leafy Berkshire, Little was brought back down to terra firma with a bump and sent straight to Northern Ireland for an assignment at St Angelo Camp (a small airfield located in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh).
“I had a squadron of armoured personnel carriers called Saracens under my charge,” explained Little. “A set of lumbering beasts designed to operate on the North West plains of Europe, but which ended up looking after an internal security situation in Belfast.”
Little was only 20 years young, and yet here he was in the thick of the Northern Ireland troubles: a troop commander in charge of 80 soldiers and around 70 armoured vehicles.
“You learned very quickly, Brian,” he told me. “That was the norm in those days. You did get thrust into positions of responsibility at a very early age, which is why the Army’s selection process takes on such a great importance.”
Little would go on to complete four tours of Northern Ireland, but for the most part of his early Army career he was based primarily in North West Germany: in his words “looking East at the Russian threat and the whole Cold War scenario.”
At that time, the British Army had just three armoured divisions based in Germany, and a cohort of 55,000 soldiers. “We were just north of Hanover at a place called Minden, and then at Munsterlager.”
Both towns were close to the border. “There was a real threat there,” recalled Little. “All your kit had to be ready, and if the warning siren went off you had to be out and about smartly with all your weapons and equipment deployed into a hide area in case the Soviets moved with a surprise attack.”
Transport and logistics in Hong Kong
What happened next ended up becoming a highpoint of Little’s military sojourn. He was selected to go to Hong Kong and work with the Gurkha regiment: once again in a transport and logistics role and, once again, with the same Saracen armoured personnel carriers.
This time around, there were 32 of those ‘lumbering beasts’ in situ, all of them designed to hold back the Chinese military if they ever decided to try and invade Hong Kong.
Little would broaden his horizons and cultural learning by visiting Nepal and Brunei. In fact, he was lucky enough to travel all over South East Asia during this period and, subsequently – and not at all surprisingly – his admiration for the Gurkhas knows no bounds.
“I still have a great respect for those soldiers with whom I worked. They were very disciplined, loyal and friendly. Gurkhas can soften what might otherwise be a confrontational situation.”
To this day, one of Little’s great hobbies is cooking Gurkha-style curries.
According to Little, everybody in the forces “has to do their pittance at some point”: his was returning to the UK and, more specifically, Aldershot. After Hong Kong, you can easily see why that would have been something of a shock to the system.
It was 1982 on The Little Timeline, and he was tasked with running the depot training regime. Two years later, it was off to the Royal Military College of Science at Shrivenham – as it was called in those days – and a captain’s role.
“Selection for the Staff College was a critical point in your Army career,” Little explained. “As I had a scientific background this meant 12 months or so learning about the technology side of life. You know, weapons and the like.” A “jolly difficult” 12 months at the Army Staff College, Camberley followed.
The ‘scientific bit’, if you will, heavily influenced the next step in Little’s progression, focused as it was towards the procurement side of life.
“My first posting after Staff College was to the Ministry of Defence in London. I was in charge of a procurement programme for something called DROPS [which stands for Demountable Rack Offloading and Pick-Up System].”
For those of you who, like myself, aren’t that aux fait with DROPS, what we’re talking about here is a big, skip-like carrier, but instead of carrying skips these military systems tote a huge pallet holding no less than 16 tonnes – yes, 16 tonnes – of ammunition.
At the time, they were designed to quickly outload the storage depots in Germany should the Soviets attack, and supply ammunition “in vast quantities” to the appointed gun lines where it would be used.
“To give you an idea of scale, Brian, there were over 3,000 vehicles involved. It was a huge project. DROPS has been the backbone of the British Army’s logistical capabilities for the last 30 years. Similar vehicles are in service now in Afghanistan, although they’re much more heavily armoured these days.”
Life during the first Gulf War
Little went on to command a squadron at the time when the first Gulf War conflict broke out. Having taken another sip of tea, Little recounted that he was actually on holiday with his wife Sally at the time Kuwait was invaded.
“I woke up to the 8.00 am news, and I recall saying to my wife: “We’ll be off there shortly”. Well, the phone rang about ten minutes’ later, Brian, and off we trooped.”
Little and his fellow soldiers went through Iraq in what he described as ‘Norman Schwarzkopf’s great left hook’.
“At that stage, we thought we were heading for Baghdad. The war had only been in motion for 100 hours. Gradually, though, we ground to a halt and found ourselves back in Kuwait.”
Little was in town, in fact, when the British Embassy in Kuwait was liberated. “We held a band concert that night for the Ambassador,” smiled Little as he recalled the moment with great clarity, “but he wasn’t too happy…”
The reason for that unhappiness was pretty simple. Little and Co had been forced to set explosives and blow the Embassy building’s beautiful oak front doors off their hinges just in case the Iraqis had booby-trapped the premises.
Returning from the Gulf’s ‘operational theatre’ – as military folk like to call battle grounds – Little was promoted and went back to defence procurement, this time in requirements for the MoD.
He then commanded his own regiment (based in Aldershot), but soon after war was to break out in Bosnia.
Recalling the siege of Sarajevo
Little was ‘in country’ – to use Army parlance once more – at the height of the siege of Sarajevo when the hostage crisis was in full flow. You’ll no doubt recall those horrifying images on the national news bulletins of UN staff being tied to bridges, etc.
At the time, Little was based in Lippa (which he described to me as being “the worst place in the whole world, bar none” on the basis that it ‘enjoys’ the greatest temperature range of anywhere in Europe, fluctuating between plus 40 degrees down to minus 40).
Little recalled the siege of Gorazde (and the time when the British fusiliers were liberated). “My guys took part in that liberation,” said Little with an obvious sense of satisfaction, “and we were there to help pick up the pieces after the Srebrenica massacre as well. We were involved in looking after refugees, and making sure that the needy were fed.”
Later on, of course, there was a transition from the UN peace-keeping force into a much more aggressive NATO-led operation in the region and that, as Little pointed out, “solved the problems”.
After this posting, Little travelled to North Carolina for a three-month exercise with the United States Marine Corps. “That was fabulous. I had a fantastic time, and made some very good friends at the Cherry Point base.”
He was then promoted to full colonel and returned to his “first love” of vehicle acquisition, this time running a project team at Abbey Wood and buying “some of the sexiest vehicles you’ve ever seen” for the military.
This was the era when British troops were going back into Iraq for Part 2 of The Gulf War, and with that came “lots of urgent operational requirements”. The process sharpened Little’s mind, and certainly those at the top of the Army’s hierarchy.
“Solutions that would normally take ten or 15 years to develop and buy would be procured in four or five months, Brian. Let me tell you there was huge job satisfaction for the civil servants buying the vehicles. The next time they saw those vehicles would be on TV pictures broadcast from Iraq.”
Little’s management style is, at least in part, informed by a further six-month stint overseas, this time in Kosovo. Here, he served as the chief G1 in charge of personnel. “I was working at the three-star NATO headquarters”. Initially, Little was led by a French general, and then an Italian general.
An army marches on its stomach
Back in Britain once again, Little was promoted to Brigadier and became director of defence catering. In essence, he was responsible for feeding the Armed Forces.
“A very important job, and a very satisfying one,” is how Little described this phase. One couldn’t resist interjecting with that classic saying of how an army marches on its stomach.
Little laughed. “I used that quote almost every day!”
On a more serious note, Little’s phrase at the time was that food is part of a moral component of warfare. “If you have poor food then your troops will suffer and morale will be low. That would hark back to the days of the Crimean War where more soldiers died through lack of nutrition and subsequent illness than due to any kind of enemy action.”
The soldiers’ ration packs were, apparently, “a bit bland” so Little wanted – quite literally – to spice things up. Furthering the curry theme, he was proud to introduce these spicy delights into said packs.
“That particular feat saw me pictured on the front page of the New Delhi Times. ‘British Army goes to war on curry’ or something like that was the headline. In some small way, I became a national hero in India. I was invited to speak at the Indian Staff College on the back of that little episode, which really was tremendous.”
Isotonic drinks were introduced to ration packs for the first time. In parallel, some boffins at Birmingham University were tasked with studying ways of preserving bread for three years as Little wanted that basic foodstuff in the packs, too. “They never came up with a solution, though,” he sighed.
Directorship of the Royal Logistic Corps
By his own admission, probably the pinnacle of Little’s Army career was being selected to direct the Royal Logistic Corps (which, at the time, represented about 17.5% of the Army per se).
“It was the size of half the Royal Navy, and just over a third the extent of the Royal Air Force,” suggested Little. “We’re talking about 19,000 soldiers and lots of Territorial Army guys and girls for good measure.”
The Royal Logistic Corps covered – and still does – a multitude of disciplines, ranging from transport through to storage, catering, postal and courier solutions and on to bomb disposal.
A whole panoply, then, of the type of logistics that keeps an Army functioning in the field, and the perfect remit for a man who takes overt pride in having been a “military logistician”.
Come 2004 and after two years in that job, Little took the bold decicision to leave the Army because he felt whatever role they were to give him after that “would have been a bit of a downer”: an ‘after the Lord Mayor’s Show’ scenario.
Having developed a natural interest in emergency planning, Little decided to go to Coventry University and study for a diploma in that paired with disaster management.
He learned under the expert tutelage of “a charming chap” by the name of Les Moseley (former chief fire officer at West Midlands Fire Brigade until he unfortunately fell off a ladder and injured himself during attendance at a fire scene).
“Quite what Les was doing up a ladder as the fire chief I don’t know,” explained Little, “but I guess that epitomises the man’s leadership style.”
In turn, Little joined the Institute of Civil Defence and Disaster Studies which was later combined with the Institute of Emergency Management to form the Institute of Civil Protection and Emergency Management (ICPEM).
“The organisation’s aim is to unite the academics with the practitioners, thus turning the theory of emergency planning into something that a fireman, police officer or paramedic can understand on the ground.”
The Institute is still going strong to this day, as is Little’s interest in it (he’s scheduled to attend next month’s Annual General Meeting in Kettering).
In Part Two of SMT Online’s exclusive interview with Jeff Little, the NSI’s CEO focuses on the organisation’s immediate future, his own managerial style, regulation and the Security Alliance and Critical National Infrastructure protection
