The “Best Little Army in the World” (Scott Nelson/Getty Images)
The Armed Forces, and the Army in particular, are surely the only arms of the British state that still retain a popular reputation for institutional competence. Consider the recent book The Habit of Excellence, a sort of retread for civilian CEOs of the motivational anthologies handed out at Sandhurst. Or the Government’s drafting in of the former Vice-Chief of Defence Staff (though a Royal Marine rather than a soldier) to institute wide-ranging reforms to the NHS — a clear nod to the military’s residual reputation for no-nonsense, hard-nosed efficiency.
It is difficult to square this perception with the Army’s shambolic and wasteful recent record in procurement. And yet a sense lingers, whether true or not, that the armed forces remain a refuge area for a type of stoic effectiveness lost to the rest of the country, an ability to get the job done, without complaint, against intimidating odds.
This may say as much about Britain as a whole as it does of the armed forces itself. Consider the wave of affectionate sentimentality about the Army, perhaps a working-class analogue of middle-class sentimentality about the NHS, which swept the country in the late 2000s. The popular mood at the time, manifest in the Help for Heroes campaign (est. 2007) and the Sun’s Military Awards (est. 2008), was immediately inflamed by the sense that troops in the field were being put in harm’s way by the Government’s budget cuts, and by dissatisfaction with heckling and burning of poppies by jihadist sympathisers as troops paraded home from Afghanistan. Then the Army was a potent symbol of a pure, betrayed institution around which the British people could explore its wider anxieties, a metaphor for growing unease with the direction of the British state itself.
Yet even the Army’s most devoted supporter would be forced to admit that the past two decades have not enhanced its reputation. Both the Labour government’s two wars of choice were painful strategic and tactical failures, entered into with little popular enthusiasm and abandoned with little fanfare. In both wars, units and individual soldiers fought bravely on a tactical level, in pursuit of misguided and ultimately fruitless strategic aims.
It is within this context that two recent books aim to dissect the Army’s failings in Iraq and Afghanistan to make sense of this lacklustre performance. In The Changing of the Guard, Simon Akam, a former gap-year officer, chronicles the Army like a disappointed lover, twisting the knife into the institution’s sorest wounds. In Blood, Metal and Dust, Brigadier Ben Barry, a former director of the British Army Staff, chooses a higher target. Yes, the successes of the small interventions of the Nineties had led military chiefs to rest on their laurels, so that “operational success had become the mother of complacency.” But for Barry, whose book draws from his still-classified official postmortem of the post-9/11 wars, the ultimate cause of failure can be placed at the hands of the Labour politicians managing the war.
Both retell the bare, painful facts of the Army’s two most recent defeats. In Iraq, the initial capture and occupation of Basra, entered into with soft hats and the self-congratulatory confidence of an Army that believed it led the world in peacekeeping and counterinsurgency, ended in a humiliating negotiated withdrawal of British forces to the edge of the city, where, pinned down by constant bombardment by the Shia militias who now ran the city, they lost all capacity to exert their influence.
The Americans, distinctly unimpressed at the failure of the British officers, were forced to help Iraqi forces retake the city in 2008’s Charge of the Knights operation, a humiliation for Britain. “This damaged the reputation of British forces with the US and the Iraqis and inflicted major dents in British military self-confidence,” Barry notes. Akam is less stoic, describing it as ”an acute and lasting humiliation to the British Army”, which “will linger and follow the troops halfway around the world to Afghanistan”.
Indeed, to exorcise this ghost Britain’s political and military leaders recklessly volunteered for a campaign in a Helmand landscape of walled farms and thick vegetation which the Soviets had struggled to pacify, even while the Army struggled with Iraq. In Afghanistan, they believed, the Army would regain its reputation, leaving the difficulties of Iraq behind.
They were wrong. Thinly spread out in isolated rural compounds, or “platoon houses”, British troops were besieged by waves of Taliban fighters, and only avoided being overrun through devastating use of air power, which in turn alienated the civilians whose homes it destroyed. Along with a desperate need to avoid casualties, the reliance on short-ranged patrols, magnets for Taliban ambushes and bogged down by IEDs, meant that the Army could never retain tactical dominance in the countryside, let alone gain the strategic initiative.
As in Basra, force protection became the dominant goal and so initiative passed to the local enemy. Attempts to upend the balance of power, through bold but misconceived operations like Operation Panther’s Claw or through grandiose hearts-and-minds schemes like the transporting of a gigantic turbine through Taliban territory to the dam where it would remain unused for years, all failed. In Afghanistan, as in Iraq, the rich tribute of blood and treasure Britain poured into the dust was entirely in vain.
Where does the blame lie? Barry lambasts Labour politicians such as Clare Short, whose intransigent refusal to provide the British troops who found themselves suddenly governing Basra, a city of 1.5 million people, with even basic DFID support due to her opposition to the war, did much to incite local anger in the first vital weeks and months of occupation. He takes aim at Gordon Brown, who as Chancellor forced through defence cuts that reduced the Army’s helicopter fleet, and then lied about it as Prime Minister when soldiers died in Helmand as a direct result.
But he reserves his greatest ire for the architect of Britain’s entry into these needless wars: Tony Blair. Yet as Barry makes clear, military chiefs also failed to impress upon politicians the need to reassess their strategy in light of their failing mission. The plain-speaking and sober appreciation of hard facts for which the Army is renowned were here tragically absent.
For Akam, much of the blame can be laid at the Army itself. He draws an ethnographic portrait of an institution struggling to make sense of a changing world, whose cherished regimental ethos, the wellspring of individual pride and striving for excellence, also reduces it to “an awkwardly organised collection of warring tribes, inadequately co-ordinated and often fighting each other”. Fearful of future cuts, Generals volunteer the Army for the underestimated Helmand mission even as Iraq is failing: “It’s use them or lose them,” Akam quotes General Sir Richard Dannett on the ill-fated decision. Generals tell politicians what they want to hear, instead of the difficult truths that would blight promotion: “the British Army’s determination to ‘crack on’ got the army into a terrible mess.”
For Akam, the absence of accountability for such failure is corrosive to the Army’s capability. Junior ranks are hauled before the courts for individual war crimes — rightly, he feels — while generals are rewarded for strategic failure with titles and sinecures. Unlike in Israel, where the failure of the 2006 Lebanon War led to a purge of failed senior officers, “no British general was fired or resigned over Iraq and Afghanistan”. The result, for Akam, is institutional rot: “that hypocrisy had trickled down into the institution below them and was souring it.”
Moreover, Akam asserts, defence think tanks such as RUSI “can seem more like comfy clubs funded partly by arms manufacturers — friendly forces, in the forces’ jargon — than rigorous external overseers”, inhibiting them from guiding the Army through painful reform.
The American presence looms large over both books like a Victorian father, whose approval is yearned for, yet who emanates instead only cold disappointment. The tragic irony, as both Akam and Barry note, was that both the Basra and Helmand campaigns were entered into entirely to win Blair cachet in American eyes, yet the result of the Army’s disappointing performance was only American disdain. As Akam notes of his soldier informants on the eve of the Iraq invasion, “many appreciate that the real reason they are here is to maintain British military standing in American eyes”.
Yet even during the invasion itself, before the humiliating retreat, the winnowing capacity of the British state had already lowered the Army’s reputation in American eyes. Basra, just over the border from Kuwait, was chosen as Britain’s target, in Akam’s telling, because the Army’s recent adoption of just-in-time logistics had left it with insufficient spare parts to travel any further. Lack of armoured vehicles, of body armour, helicopters, even ammunition left the Army scrounging what it could from unimpressed Americans and almost entirely equipping itself through emergency Treasury funds.
Citing long-ago Malaya and more-recent Northern Ireland (as if that were an unqualified military success) in its favour, the Army deflected its sense of insecurity at its vastly reduced capacity compared to the US with an arrogant and ultimately mistaken belief that population-centric counterinsurgency was its unequalled métier. American officers quoted by Barry rolled their eyes at “‘more British tripe’” as events proved otherwise.
But even the Americans, whose resources were limitless in comparison, ultimately lost both wars. As Barry observes: “The US government’s decision to invade Iraq must stand as the worst military decision of the 21st century. It was a military strategic folly on a level equal to that of Napoleon’s 1812 attack on Russia and Hitler’s 1941 attack on the Soviet Union.” The failure, then, was ultimately a political one, of British politicians blindly following their American patrons into unwinnable wars: the Army’s essential sin was only one of trying to do the best of a bad job, a not ignoble character flaw.
It is difficult to avoid the painful conclusion that the British Army functions for the Americans as the Gurkhas do for the British Army: a highly motivated, loyal auxiliary force, incapable of prosecuting a campaign on its own, whose colourful traditions still carry the romance of an earlier, more glorious era.
Today, however, even this limited role is now in doubt: with the Government’s new focus on naval capacity and the much-vaunted Pacific Tilt forming the basis of Britain’s defence vision, the incoming Chief of Defence Staff, Admiral Sir Tony Radikin, is allegedly poised to oversee a dramatic cut in the Army’s already-dangerously pared-down numbers, cutting infantry ranks by more than one third of its current numbers.
The “Best Little Army in the World” may be getting littler, but it is not for the better. As the defence analyst Francis Tusa warns, the result of its decades-long and self-inflicted procurement woes is that it is now more or less “combat incapable against high-end threats”. Two decades of fighting poorly-equipped insurgents has distracted the Army from its primary mission of defending the country against a competent and well-equipped adversary like Russia or China.
Perhaps this is less a disaster than it may at first seem. The danger is not so much the Army’s incapacity as our politicians’ inability to match their ambitions to its resources, or the moral courage of its generals to gently dissuade them. For all that we mock Germany its military weakness, it is not abundantly clear that Britain has gained much for the decade or so of warfare that the Germans managed to avoid. After Blair’s promiscuous use of the Army to assuage his lust for glory, perhaps a period of enforced abstinence might do the institution some good, if it is to re-equip itself for the graver, and unchosen challenges of the coming century.
The Army’s focus on the new Ranger battalions, tasked with training and directing local partner forces, in place of line infantry hints at a world of conflict where the business of fighting is increasingly left to expendable proxies. Yet a shrunken, more tightly-focussed Army also presents a challenge for a denuded British state, which has increasingly come to rely on soldiers to make up for its own lost capacity.
Its willingness to take on tasks outside its core role may fend off cutbacks, for a time, but is not necessarily in its own or the state’s best interests; it distracts from its urgent task of modernisation and reorganisation, and gives British governments cover to further winnow away state capacity, confident that soldiers will always be there to pick up the slack.
As the Chilcot Report on Iraq observed, “a ‘can do’ attitude is laudably ingrained in the UK armed forces, a determination to get on with the job, however difficult the circumstances — but this can prevent ground truth from reaching senior ears.” Perhaps the Army’s capacity to win the next war, like the British state’s to weather the next crisis, would be better served by generals finding the courage, when necessary, to tell politicians that some things simply can’t, or shouldn’t be done.
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SubscribeThis article clearly makes the case that our country has been diminished because we sent off armies to do tasks in difficult circumstances with inadequate equipment , and unrealistic instructions . In the meantime , we can use the soldiers to build hospitals, drive petrol tankers , help with floods and give inoculations and generally hide our inadequate planning for so many aspects of our lives here .
What astounds me is the plan to send our ships to the pacific to confront the Chinese. If a shooting war starts , the surface ships will be as vulnerable as the Repulse and the Prince of Wales and just as useless. Meanwhile, our home waters need guarding.
Perhaps the idea of force projection needs to be reviewed and thrown out.
Basra has been very hard for the British Army. ‘The siege of Kut Al Amara’, (WWI, up the river from the army based at Basra) a book very worth reading, ended in one of the large disasters of the British Army, and their Batan Death March.
Basra in the recent war was a huge failure of the Army, and one I thought was in part to the ROE (rules of engagement – rules of when, and at whom, you are allowed to shoot). And it goes back to an early line in this article:
“Junior ranks are hauled before the courts for individual war crimes — rightly, he feels —” (Akam)
I had heard once the British Army got heading into Basra the political leaders back in London (Blair) decided they could not tolerate causalities as that would cost votes, in the political mood of the time turned against the war – and did not want civilian causalities for the same reason, so the British had to fight safely to avoid their own causalities, and also avoid the native casualties, a defensive offensive with one arm tied behind ones back, The ROE were such it was the final nail turning it all into fiasco. (This is what I had heard).
But then add in the above quote, that the soldiers were likely afraid of their own courts as much as anything. They dare not fight aggressively. I kind of agree with General Powell, and Clausewitz, that if one has a war it must be fought as absolute war, or you get stalemate, and an even worse disaster, humanitarian and military, than by fully committing with everything, (and not afterwards blaming the soldiers for the horrors, it is war).
Great article; keep them coming! Just one micro-quibble: you refer to Afghanistan as “warfare that the Germans managed to avoid”. Germany had several thousand troops in Afghanistan and suffered more than 60 fatalities and more than 200 injuries.
And you should had added defence secretaries, John Reid and Geoff Hoon, to your list of New Labour nitwits. Reid famously sent the troops off to Afghanistan telling them that he hoped that their mission would be accomplished “without a shot being fired”. And in a pre-invasion Commons debate, when a backbencher in the Commons suggested that British troops might have to remain in Iraq for “weeks, or even months”, Hoon dismissed this as “scaremongering”.
Yes the Germans were there – as they quite famously made the decision to not operate at night because it was “too dangerous”. For all the US and UK’s failings, too many of the coalition lent little other than token support to the mission. A criticism of the political and command classes rather than the forces themselves.
The German Military leaders back at home wrote a number of directives to the troops on how to stop from getting fat.
Because the Germans were there really to be part of a show of unity – for most of the time there they stayed behind fences and blast walls protected by contractors and native forces – and in the camp played video games mostly, wile drinking beer and eating lots of snacks, and gaining weight.
Which was no reflection on them – the Politicians did not want casualties, but were there to give political support by just being on the ground – not as a fighting army.
The glories of our blood and state are shadows not substantial things. Afghanistan has long been the graveyard of Britain’s military reputation.
My great granduncle wrote a Journal following a punitive expedition to avenge the utter destruction of the British army in the retreat from Kabul through the Kyber Pass in the First Afghan War in which he lambasted the idiocy of the politicians in sending the Army in to Afghanistan in the first place and optimistically predicting that it would be the last time a British army would be engaged in Afghanistan.
Sadly his prediction was very wide of the mark. His nephew, my grandfather, was back in Afghanistan to suffer yet another humiliating destruction of a regiment at Maiwand at the hands of the Afghans in the second Afghan War. My grandfather only escaped with his life as the result of being a young second-lieutenant involved in the baggage train and thus able to effect a retreat through the Kyber Pass with his life, if not his pride, still intact – one of the few officers able to effect an escape.
The litany of brave defeat in portions of the globe we had no real strategic interest in continues as a theme throughout the ages. Theirs not to reason why theirs but to do and die.
This article is wrong and profoundly misplaced.
The British Army at battalion and regimental level, especially at the human and small unit level, remains as competent and well-trained as it has ever been. The story of Iraq and Afghanistan is a story of political failure, in which one man – Blair – was able to impose his deeply misguided war concept upon Britain, in the face of an anti-war march to London involving 1 million people. In 2002, French President Jaques Chirac had the courage to veto the attack on Iraq in the UN Security Council. Blair, for some reason related probably to his deep-seated ambition and desire for recognition, partnered with the hapless George W and the “Axis of Evil” crew to pursue the attack, in the face of the UN veto. George W was pushed all the way by his nasty and evil vice-president Cheney, aided by Wolfowitz and pro-Israeli elements who thought they perceived opportunities for aggrandisement in the Middle East, and supported, inevitably, by the big weapons suppliers like General Dynamics. Generals are soldiers, who do what they are told. The British Army is a weapon which the country’s leaders can point in any direction they choose. The terrible failures in Iraq and Afghanistan were not down to the soldiers, but to the politicians, especially Blair.
Army Procurement has been a disaster for ever, mainly because weapon planning requires a three-decade time horizon which the politicians and civil service won’t give it. In addition, BA and other weapons manufacturers are past masters at pulling the wool over the eyes of the MOD.
Yes, for me our armed forces should be for the defence of the British realm and its people not political posturing or making global corporations loads more money
If climate change apocalypse is real then surely part of our preparation for it is massive expansion of our defensive capabilities, including national service, to learn discipline, self reliance and skills. Our island of 67 million will otherwise be no match for the 100s of millions who will head to our shores and who won’t be as civilised in their conquests as we are.
I don’t particularly see a problem with the army moving from the kind which was designed to fight large scale conventional battles of the Cold War to a much smaller more tactically flexible one, capable of small scale, high impact interventions in potential future hot spots.
Internationally, if armed force is required to oppose the rise of Chinese hegemony, this battle will be fought on the sea and in the sky, where the majority of our funding should be concentrated. Similarly, if there should be conflict with the Russians, Britain would be far better off looking to maintain air superiority whist our allies did the fighting on the ground.
Domestically, attacks on infrastructure pose far more of a threat to our country than defeat in a land based conflict. With long ranged missile guidance systems improving, making attacks with conventional warheads on key targets possible and the threat of mass cyber attack, both a real danger. What defence can be mounted against these will not be done so by the army.
Perhaps then, having the “Best Little Army in the World” is not such a bad strategy to pursue?
Agree with the sentiment of your comment, but it’s sadly far from what’s happening.
The trouble is that this shift to being “more tactically flexible” with a greater focus on “cyber” and “asymmetric threats” is marketing guff.
It’s a cost saving exercise dressed up to sound clever. Unless there is a matching increase in funding to allow the units to upskill to an adequate level, they will just be the same undermanned, undertrained (in things that actually matter) units at a fraction of their previous capability.
We already had a small army that did a lot with what it had, now it’s smaller yet.
As for increased air superiority – the RAF already struggles to mount any sustained operation even with US support. Modern aircraft and equipment are absurdly expensive and would require an enormous increase in funding. The carriers (joint RN and RAF aircraft) were a step in that direction, but are now looking vulnerable as everything else across all 3 services had to be scaled back to pay for them.
And yes a large part of the blame lies with the procurement over the years, like most government departments the MoD has wasted vast sums
“if armed force is required to oppose the rise of Chinese hegemony, this battle will be fought on the sea and in the sky,”
You do not know that – boots on the ground have always been what matters in the end, and we do not know it will be an absolute war we prepare for – And part of having a military is the training it leeches out into society.
Like the USA Army – the millions of troops who get to serve overseas makes a huge contribution to national understanding of the world. The numbers of young men given discipline, team spirit, skills, and later when out free university. That was what made America great, the G.I. Bill, post WWII when university and trade school became free to ex-military, and they took it up in the millions and this was the kicker pushing USA to the top.
A military is much more than the soldiers in trenches.
A consistent obstacle to effective and ground and sea capability has been the RAF, right back to 1918 really.
The RAF’s Goering-like determination that everything which flies should be theirs was a big part of why our aircraft carriers were ill-equipped in WW2 and why the later ones were decommissioned just before the Falklands War. The RAF assured all concerned that it could defend the Navy’s ships anywhere. Of course 8,000 miles from the UK it could not. It is still making the same objection to the AUKUS initiative because it involves naval forces without much role for the RAF.
We might actually be better off disbanding it.
As an Army Falklands veteran, you could never underestimate how much the army and navy hated the RAF (crabs). Their unsuccessful Blackbuck missions with Vulcans were just wasteful PR exercises. It was just to show that the RAF were in, what was really a navy and marine war with army support. To be fair they did a decent job of providing logistic support. Their Rapier Air defence ground crews were whinging boy scouts compared to the RA teams.
Even today, the Chinook fleet, nearly 100% used to support the army is RAF crewed and supported. Just so they can have a few aircraft.
The RAF is a political organisation still fighting the Battle of Britain. Period!
A saying at the time was FLY Navy, SAIL Army and WALK sideways!
Good article Aris
Interesting – did not know this. The US by and large seemed to learn a lot from Iraq and Afghanistan. Though far from perfect, their State Department and other organisations at least try and coordinate at all levels from operational to tactical. The UK’s organisations by contrast are a sh*t show, where the left hand doesn’t let the right hand know what it is doing. Whilst the US adapted and developed, we went backwards; each department fights for its slice of the pie from increasingly disinterested politicians who are fixated on domestic issues and opinion polls.
Fancy name for nothing other than stripped-down and neutered Infantry battalions. It’s a continuation of a trend following the last defence review’s “SPIBs” (SPecialist Infantry Battalions). Not deserving of the name ‘Ranger’ (after Roger’s Rangers years ago, and more recently the Tier 2 US Special Forces units who have a good reputation and effective track record).
Intelligent, insightful writing.
The major fault lies with politicians who have little or no understanding of wars or the armed forces that fight them. Certainly the generals did not do enough to educate them, but ultimately they and their men tried to obey orders issued by the vainglorious Blair and his acolytes. The procurement failures arguably lie more with the MOD than with the services. They are mirrored, after all, throughout central government.
It’s not clear whether there could have been any strategic success in Iraq or Afghanistan – probably not – but there was absolutely no chance with the pitifully inadequate numbers of troops we committed to both. And that leads to a very sad fact: the British Army has for many years been too small to fight any but the most insignificant of wars, which require sufficient mass to seize and hold ground.
Given that the British Army remains one of the most respected institutions in Britain according to opinion polls for the best part of 15 years, the headline about ‘humiliation’ is a tad misleading. The public continues to revere the Army and its serving soldiers, despite being largely out of civilian sight and mind – as they have been for the past 360-odd years.
Ben Barry is rightly respected, but I’d be less willing to bet the defamation ranch on a less militarily seasoned source. I am pretty sure Richard Dannatt has contested that he stated “use them or lose them”, as a third party once alleged.
PM Blair indicated a willingness to join an expanded NATO/ISAF mission in Afghanistan at a NATO summit in 2004. The assumption was that Operation Telic in Iraq would be – to quote George Bush – ‘mission accomplished’ by Summer 2006 when British troops got to Helmand, long before Charge of the Knights.
Faulty intelligence played a malign role in Telic and Herrick, but as Paul Cornish and Andrew Dorman highlighted back in 2009, we had Blair’s Wars on Brown’s budgets.
The lack of accountability of senior officers is the key issue – none of them noticed during 20 years in Afghanistan that we were not going to achieve anything, and kept “pushing-on”. A fish rots from the head, and unless ‘we’ remove the head, the whole body of the Army will suffer.
Is this because many of the best officers in the Marines/Paras/Special Frces leave as Captains or Majors and enter the private security World?
The Army’s, or the MoD’s?
…who thought the Army were, to quote Mandelson, “chinless wonders”.
The current situation does appear to resemble that faced by Britain’s armed forces in about 1941-2.
The army had spent the years since WW1 assuming there would never be another war, and being used as an imperial gendarmerie. As a result, it had developed no ideas about modern corps-level all-arms warfare to pit against the Germans’. The disastrous decision to create the RAF resulted in a force that thought it could win wars on its own by bombing. As a result, the RAF failed to develop close ground support aircraft (or tactics) akin to the Germans’ Stuka and it ignored the Navy’s needs so that the RN’s front line fighters were biplanes in 1941.
The bill for all these mistakes was always going to come in eventually. The result was defeat in France, the western desert, and the Far East. Yes, there was Alamein, but it was timed to start at the same time as the invasion of Tunisia, so that if Rommel moved west to deal with that, it could be painted as Monty’s victory. Alamein also relied on US armour as the home-made stuff was so lamentably poor.
Meanwhile the RAF, having achieved a draw in 1940, went over to the offensive over France in 1941 and suffered the same fate as the Germans had the year before. The reason there were no Spitfires in Malaya was because they were too busy getting defeated over France. Bomber Command was then defeated in 1942-44 and really only got the upper hand after the US air forces had destroyed the German fuels industry and shot down most of the Luftwaffe in daylight.
Britain’s armed forces were just about ready for WW2 by 1946.
To be fair , some of our aircraft and tanks had been sent to the Soviet Union. Just possibly , they could have swayed the balance in Malaya
It’s difficult to know where to start demolishing this nonsense. The Aremy’s fault after WW1 was in failing to learn the lessons of armoured warfare which they had pioneered. They also entered into a p155ing contest with the Navy over aircraft. It was Army and Navy officers who created the RAF, recognising that died-in-the-wool Army brass simply couldn’t understand the pace and scope of air warfare. And the RN stuck with capital ships in the inter-war years; they neglected naval air power. The international consensus during the inter-war years was that ‘the bomber would always get through’, and have such a devastating effect on targeted nations’ morale that they would give in; that was proved wrong by the Luftwaffe, and later by the RAF, though the US air campaign against the Japanese mainland came close to forcing capitulation. But the RAF bomber campaign was the only offensive front Britain could open till the US entered the war. It didn’t win the war, but diverted enormous numbers of Germans and resources from the Eastern and other fronts. An independent air force such as the RAF was followed by many other nations.
FGS, what a lot of uninformed tosh.
The Army assumed after WW1 that there’d never be another war and consequently had no idea how to fight one when one came along. Germany had panzer divisions with integral mechanised infantry, supported by aircraft built, optimised and utilised for the role. The Eighth Army had “jock columns” and “boxes” and “brigade groups” and “infantry tanks” (8mph) and “cruiser tanks” (that broke down) and arguments between the ex-cavalry regiments, which wanted to do cavalry charges in tanks, and the RTR, which wanted all tank formations with no organic infantry, artillery or anti-tank. The only Army-dedicated aircraft in use by the RAF was the Lysander, which wasn’t an attack aircraft.
The Army did not enter a “pi55ing contest” with the Navy over aircraft. The RAF decided it would win wars by bombing, so it ordered Battles and Hampdens and Wellingtons, and that Hurricanes and Spitfires were required for defence. None of these types was remotely suitable for naval operation, which the RAF couldn’t have cared less about. Hence when the FAA was formed in 1924, its buying power was limited to tiny orders of no interest to manufacturers because the RAF had neglected all needs except its own.
This is why the US Navy and Marine Corps had the Wildcat by 1941, while we had the Gladiator and later the Fulmar (slower, less manoeuvrable and worse armed than the Wildcat). The RN’s first decent fighter was the F4U Corsair and they only got that because it bounced all over the place and was rejected by the USN. The RN solved its bouncing problems and by 1944 finally had a competitive fighter.
The Sea Hurricane was a rebuilt Mark 1 with 1939 performance deployed in 1941. The Seafire was a navalised 1941-era Mark V Spitfire deployed in 1943. Both were outclassed by both the Oscar and the Zero.
The Royal did not “stick with capital ships” – they completed two 16″ battleships in the early 20s and then, like everyone else, didn’t build any more until the late 30s because the Washington Naval Treaty limited construction to 5:5:3 (USA, UK, Japan). All three nations cancelled battleship plans and the USA and Japan each completed two as carriers instead. By the late 1930s the RN then faced the Italians with three 9 x 15″-gunned battleships, Germany with two 8 x 15″-gunned battleships and two 9 x 11″-gunned battleships intended to be upgraded to 6 x 15″, and the IJN with nine WW1 battleships, three 9 x 18″-gunned battleships building and six fleet and six light carriers embarking 600+ aircraft. Meanwhile HMS Victorious hunted Bismarck with exactly 15 aircraft embarked.
The RAF was an independent air force established at the expense of the air component of the army and navy. Countries that established an independent air force post-war did not make this mistake.
You are ignoring comments by G Orwell. From the early 1930s , the middle class Left attacked patriotism. Orwell stated that many of the more intelligent middle class were put off the Armed Forces, especially the Army. As flying was at the forefront of technology in the 1920s and 1930s it attracted the best engineers. Tanks and anything to do with the Army and to a lesser extent The Royal Navy attracted few engineers; hence little innovation.
WW1 traumatised a civilian population which had known peace since 1815. Hardly anyone could complate war up to 1939. Pacifism slowly changed to defeatism. People like Vera Brittain who had served as as a nurse in WW1 had her fiancee, the next man she planned to marry, her brother and her brother’s best friend killed in WW1. Trying to increase defence exoenditure until September 1939 was impossible.
Germany started to plan for WW2 in 1919 and by the 1920s was undertaking training in the Ukraine. Germany sent engineers to the Netherlands and Finland to develop military technology.
Orwell understood a truth which most ignore; the British are not a military nation and do not like soldiers close by. The Royal Navy has been our wooden walls.As Orwell pointed out , the British do not goose step. The British march is a formalised walk. As Admiral Ramsey said after Dunkirk ” All British victories start in defeat.” Britains have disliked military rule ever since that imposed by the Major Generals under Cromwell and long may it continue.
However, the British attitude to the military is disasterous on the when it comes to procuring military equipment with the exception of Radar, The Hurricane, The Spitfire, The Lancaster, the Mosquito and the Jet engine.
There is only one remedy, close down the MOD, The MOD is merely the cost cutting arm of the treasury. It’s procurement policy is determined by the treasury and is in no way concerned with the operational needs of the armed forces.
The armed forces budget should be agreed between The Prime Minister and the Senior members of the defence forces. This will ensure that the PM must take personal responsibility for the defence of the realm.
Civilisations either survive through superior military technology or overwhelming demographics. We are unlikely to survive with the latter.
Cheryl, in the seventh decade of this century the indigenous British become a minority in the UK. What do you think we are fighting to defend after that happens?
Interesting article, failure to cover the fact that both Iraq and Afghanistan had no political posers placed on trail unlike the PBI’s who were fighting for their lives primarily and to protect the public secondary – it was galling that the legal eagles hoovered around waiting to swoop and earn £’000’s in legal aid fees when allegations of murder and mistreatment were made. Until you have been at the sharp end of receiving incoming fire, regardless of training, it is both a shock and a wake up call – get down, scan, locate, eliminate, move, move, scan, locate, eliminate – the ROE, written by civil servants in a cosy office, where the most dangerous thing is a paper cut, are usually the last thing on your mind – survival is critical – your squad needs you, you need your squad. No war is fought fair, modern warfare is both distant and upfront and immediate, distant warfare is a video game – push the button, they are dead – upfront and immediate is just that – smell them, see them, and where necessary disabled them by any effective means.
We appear to spend as much as Russia. I realise that total amounts spent is probably an invidious comparison but is it the case then that Russia actually spends too little and is really a paper tiger or they just pay soldiers far less or they simply don’t have the tanks and aircraft they appear to have?
…can’t help feeling that the only way the Soldiers could have avoided this supposed “humiliation” was to refuse to deploy…because successive Governments had cut numbers, equipment and training budgets and war supplies year after year and ignored any arguments to the contrary…because the left/liberal establishment had pretty much branded anyone in uniform an inadequate, a psychopath and probably a war criminal for years…and because the press aided and abetted both processes, and added a big dollop of performative grief in respect of the inevitable casualties of war for good measure.
The only way it might be avoided in future is if we operate (proportionately) at the same level as the US…which would mean at least doubling the numbers in unifom (regulars and reserves)…and aiming to spend approaching 4% of GDP, not struggling to reach a niggardly 2%. Which I personally would welcome…but I doubt if most here would..!
The author makes a number of good points, but conflates many issues. And citing Akam, whose minimal experience as a junior ‘intern’ in the military is outweighed by his ignorance of anything outside that internship and his bitterness at the experience, shows the author’s own lack of knowledge.
Procurement starts with a ‘capability’ to meet a stated defence commitment. Options are identified and evaluated, then scientists, MoD civil servants, the DTI, defence companies, politicians, and military experts, all get involved, with the Treasury holding the whip hand. It takes at least 10 years to deliver that capability, with the military having less and less say, politicians coming and going, the original requirement having been changed, and budgets reduced. And the net result? A piece of equipment which is over-engineered, over budget, late, and has little flexibility to do the job it’s now needed for, and which has been procured more for its ‘UK content’ and jobs than to serve its purpose.
As for ‘use it or lose it’, and the Iraq war, this refers to operational capability, not to units. Mounting a major operation in a distant theatre takes enormous logistical and planning effort and resources, over many months. As units arrive in theatre, acclimatise, train, deploy, etc, plans are refined, and support is put in place, capability slowly reaches a peak. It can be held at that peak only for so long, then, as units are rotated, kit begins to show signs of wear and tear, morale deteriorates, and the cost mounts up, capability degrades, and you have to ‘use it or lose it’. That was the problem; the US began its build up too soon, but once it was committed, it had to back down or fight.
And the UK’s forces were undermined by penny-pinching politicians and the Treasury, in numbers and equipment, and constrained by political decisions remote from understanding or practicality. As always.
For me, two points stand out amidst the notably interesting responses to Aris Roussinos’ article. First, that no senior officer fell on his sword, or was sacked, after the failures of the last two or three decades. Would some Unheard reader please enlighten us further on the reasons why?
Second, Jon Redman’s perceptive comments on naval aviation and its marginalisation by the RAF, culminating in the elimination of the Harrier force and maritime reconnaissance in the 2010 Defence Review. It would be good to restore to the navy the things that are the navy’s, though I would hesitate to entrust the army very much with anything that flew beyond helicopters. And to cap it all,now that carriers have been restored, their chosen aircraft is the inferior F35B and their design precludes their ever operating anything else.
I don’t think anyone in the Army or Armed Services felt they were behaving wrongly or dishonourably in Iraq or in Afghanistan. The Generals were following orders, which is what they are trained to do. The efforts to defeat the Taliban in Helmand were not very successful, but the Army felt that it did well nevertheless, in spite of being heavily outnumbered in terrain which strongly favoured numbers and ambushes. The person who should have felt deep shame was T Blair – but since when has Blair felt anything except the certainty of his own righteousness and cleverness ?
How much is this to do is the lack of career options?. Unless one has a private income, above the rank of Major, can an officer afford to oppose a politician?A highly experienced SF officer can afford to leave the Army and will be able to join the private security World but above this rank, most officers cannot afford to oppose politicians.
What is ignored is that after communism collapsed , people thought there would be no further conflicts. My Father who spent 5.5 years in combat in WW2 and then sailed the World for 42 years thought after the 1990, the World had become far more complicated . Under communism one was either for the West or against it. After 1990, thousands of years of conflict based upon race, religion, and language emerged. The conflict in Yermen between Fiver Shia and Wahabi Sunni goes back a 1000 years The conflict between Croat and Serb can be traced back to 300AD when then Roman Empire was split between West and East. !.
Major cut defence spending post 1990. He is a suburban bank clerk with a suburban bank clerks understanding of the World and those Prime Ministers who followed are no better. Fighting in built up areas and jungles needs vast numbers of soldiers who are highly skilled and have no rules of engagement which reduces their ability to kill the enemy. Major and those PMs who followed him have no experience of combat, come from families with no combat experience nor appear to have friends who have it. Roy Mason the Secretary of State of N Ireland was miner but obtained advice from those who understood what it took to defeat the PIRA. Martin Mc Guiness said the PIRA was three weeks away from being defeated under Mason. My guess was that though being a miner he contacted NCOs from elite units especially the Special Forces and listened to what they had to say.Apparently during one meeting Mason’s solid fist hit the table and he said ” The gloves are off!”.
Who would be scared of Major’s fist or any PMs who came afterwards ?