Letters

Oct 2009, Vol. 154, No. 5

SIR, Patrick Little’s excellent article accompanied by John Mackinlay’s review of Tom Ricks’s book Fiasco (RUSI Journal, June 2009) are very welcome contributions to the emerging debate about the present condition of the British Army. The fact that they appeared alongside Mungo Melvin’s astonishing article on the value of re-visiting a theoretical war, and the article by Theo Farrell and Stuart Gordon on the British Army in Afghanistan, is revealing.

Little and Mackinlay at last begin the process of forcing the army to look seriously at itself, and ask whether the army really can claim to understand the business of war. Melvin’s article, by its very existence, reminds us why this has been so long neglected – the malign consequence of victory in the Second World War, and the comfortable certainties provided by, but never tested during the Cold War. Farrell and Gordon, for their part, remind us that this complacency has been encouraged for years by complicit or naïve academics and journalists. This, combined with the profound ignorance of military and strategic matters by ministers and politicians of all parties despite nearly eight years of continuous war, has far-reaching consequences. These are felt in Afghanistan at every level: from the section commander struggling to implement an impossible plan, through the staff officer wrestling with issues he barely understands, to the London-based general giving bad advice to inexperienced ministers. The longer term consequences will be borne by the army, but they will be felt in London, Washington, and wherever the UK seeks to wield influence.

Self-aware and thoughtful army officers have known for years that the British Army is deeply flawed and that it is not a professional organisation in the true sense of the term. That is, it does not take war as seriously as, say, doctors or solicitors take medicine or law. Certainly, army officers take themselves and their careers seriously, but that is rather different. Unfortunately, for decades, those officers who were aware of the problems lacked the will or the forum to express their concerns and either resigned or resolved to put up and shut up. Alas, the

British Army does excel at myth making, and has for decades fooled enemies and allies alike as to its true capabilities. Sadly, as we can see now, the army, its friends and its political masters were just as impressed by these myths. Even in cases where failure has been outright and stark, solace has always been available in the old idea that the British Army may lose its first few battles, but always recovers, sacks a few generals, and gets itself together in time to win the war. Unfortunately, what is not well-known outside the army is how much currency this still has today. Army amateurism can be disguised by physical toughness, forceful personalities and technical competence in wielding weapons and manning equipment, but it is revealed in the vacuum where true professionalism should be evident.

These are serious accusations. They will, and should, trigger violent disagreement. To test their veracity one simply has to ask a few questions.

If, on 12 September 2001, or on 12 September 2008, an infantry captain had volunteered to take two years to learn Pashto, would he have been encouraged, given the time to do so – and would his career have benefited as a result?

How many army officers have published peer-reviewed articles in international journals, or been awarded PhDs, and gone on to high command?

Under what circumstances would the army break up its processes and structures in response to a changing situation?

Would an officer who advocated such policies be viewed as idiotic and sidelined, or creative and encouraged?

Who has the authority, moral and real, to make such changes?

If a general believed that a policy was likely to lead to operational failure, would he say so? To whom? When?

Would a commanding officer who encouraged his sub-unit commanders to experiment in training, but was seen to have ‘failed’ test exercises as a result, be promoted?

Under what circumstances would the army discard peacetime personnel roulement and posting policies?

If ‘war’ is not declared, when would the army consider itself to be ‘at war’?

There is growing evidence that these awkward questions are beginning to be asked by a new generation of officers, who have seen and endured first hand the consequences of British failure, and have the moral authority to demand answers. The trouble is, that by answering these questions truthfully, the army would reveal a great deal about the sort of behaviours and characteristics it disincentivises, as well as about the behaviours it could and should incentivise.

For this reason, the prospect of getting some straight answers – some wholesale ‘truth-speaking’ – looks extremely bleak.
- James Barker

SIR, It was illuminating yet depressing to see, side by side in your publication, an article by a young officer (Patrick Little) on the urgent need for the British Army to address failings that can be traced to past orthodoxies, and an article by an older officer (Mungo Melvin) on the value of revisiting battlefields where war might have been fought, had the Cold War heated up. I can think of no more stark an illustration of the magnitude of the challenges facing British Army reformers.
- Simon Keymer

SIR, Dr Syk’s thought-provoking article on the 1917 Mesopotamia Commission’s inquiry (RUSI Journal, August 2009) is a useful reminder that the forthcoming Iraq inquiry could with advantage learn from the old processes of (and mistakes made by) the Commission 1917.

Although Dr Syk touches briefly on ‘Wully’ Robertson’s views, that aspect might have been stressed more fully. As soon as military authority for the Mesopotamian theatre was taken from India and given to the War Office in 1916, Wully as Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS) began a long-overdue shakeup, including the despatch of the clearheaded Charles Monro to replace the old India-hand Duff as Command-in-Chief India. In 1926, Robertson published a two volume study, Soldiers and Statesmen, 1914-1918, and in fact many of his wartime appreciations as CIGS can be found here subsumed into narrative form. It was always John Terraine’s opinion that this work is one of the few great studies in English on the proper conduct of war; he used to cite in support General George C Marshall’s careful reading of Wully’s book in 1942, before meeting the British War Cabinet (almost none of whom had any knowledge of it, according to the DMO, Sir John Kennedy).

Wully’s account of the campaign and his verdict on the absence of any real policy, the confused lines of accountability, the inexcusable muddles, the vague questions addressed to the wrong people and the extraordinary replies (some in both directions bypassing the proper authorities), are all set out in his clear and unadorned Chapter 9 (Vol. II, pp. 19-82), and give weight to his judgement that the scale of culpability offered by the Commission Report (p. 111) needed to be reversed: ‘the chief cause of the trouble was a thoroughly bad system of High Command. This could be remedied only by the action of the Cabinet, and therefore the latter should be placed first and not last in the order of responsibility for the consequences that ensued.’

Those who were concerned from the very first at the Iraq projects of the Blair administration and subsequently by the troubling history of inquiries like Kelly will watch with interest to see what lessons from 1917 will be learnt.
- John Hussey

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