Playing games in the bubble

We do not hear so very much about "joined-up thinking" in government these days – presumably because it has been given up as a lost cause. For the gentlemen (and ladies) in the House, however, their task is to mount a general oversight of the affairs of government, which presumably gives them the opportunity to take a wider perspective of issues.

That, unfortunately is not the case. Our wise and dedicated MPs, it seems, fall into exactly the same trap as our masters, thinking along tramlines, totally unable to deal with the bigger picture.

Yet another classic example of this inability is today’s much-hyped report from the Commons Public Accounts Committee on the great Chinook disaster – a project started in 1995 which has left us with an expenditure of £422 million for eight aircraft, which originally cost £259 million and have yet to fly operationally.

For sure, it is the job of this committee to examine high expenditure projects and draw conclusions from them – and this the committee has done again. It has already visited this project several times. But what it is not entitled to do – and does not assist by so doing – is to draw lurid conclusions which are not supported by the evidence or for which there are other inferences to be drawn.

However, you can immediately see that the line taken by Edward Leigh, the chairman of the committee, is calculated not to bring any light to the subject but simply to create an opportunity for grandstanding. This we see in the publicity, which has The Times reporting "'Troops put at risk' by MoD blunder in deal for Chinooks" and The Daily Telegraph telling us that MoD "Chinook delays 'endanger' troops".

Here, there is a link between the shortage of helicopters on operations and the fact that troops are often as a result required to use less safe modes of transport, exposing them to risk. And there is a case to be made that the absence of helicopter lift was a direct factor in a number of deaths in Afghanistan.

Not least, there was the death of Jack Sadler, killed by an explosion as he was riding in a Wimik while escorting a slow-moving convoy of guns which could have been quickly and efficiently delivered by helicopter.

But the point here is that these deaths occurred ten years or more after the original Chinook order, and many years after 2001 when it was evident that the project was going belly-up. The fault, therefore, lies in the failure then to make alternative provisions for airlift to make up for the shortfall of capacity represented by the non-availability of these machines.

On this, we have charted endlessly the availability of alternatives and pointed out that there were many different options that could have been taken. That the MoD consistently refused to take up any of these lies at the heart of the airlift shortage.

But what is sinister about this, and Mr Leigh's pathetic attempts at self-aggrandisement, is that this issue was explored in the oral questioning by the committee. Led by Ian Davidson, we see this exchange:

Q138 Mr Davidson: Was there nobody else, Australia, New Zealand, anybody else at all from whom we could have borrowed stuff?

Sir Bill Jeffrey: The truth is that in the two significant campaigns that we, the Americans, the Australians and others are engaged in, helicopter support resources of this kind are at a premium. In fact, there is in my view a strong need to persuade NATO allies in particular to be ready to deploy their own helicopter capability on their own account. At the point in time you are referring to, we did explore with Americans in particular and we found it just was not possible.

Q139 Mr Davidson: In the same way that it would appear the French want to borrow our aircraft carriers, if you read the front page of The Sun—and it must be true because it is in The Sun—there was nobody from whom we could tap helicopters at the time then?

Sir Bill Jeffrey: No.

Sir Bill Jeffrey is currently Permanent Secretary for the MoD, its most senior civil servant, made a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath (KCB) in the 2007 New Year Honours List. It cannot be said of Sir Bill that he actually lied. Most probably, there was nobody from whom we could have borrowed helicopters. But there were most certainly many opportunities to lease helicopters. Jeffrey was being somewhat economical with the actualité.

However, had Davidson been better briefed – or had he or any other members of the committee got off their idle arses and done some homework – they could have picked Jeffrey up on this, and got to the bottom of the issue.

This is not what our gilded MPs are all about these days. As long as Mr Edward Leigh can get his name in the papers with a lurid headline, the committee has served its purpose. As for ensuring that our troops are properly equipped, so that they do not have to die, well that is hardly of any importance at all.

But, if we want to play Mr Leigh's games, it is useful to note that, buried in the oral evidence – but not highlighted by the media – were some interesting snippets of information. The original request from the RAF for Special Forces helicopters was formally made in 1994, for the CH-47E (more correctly, the MH-47E). This was turned down by the then defence procurement minister, on cost-cutting grounds. From that stemmed the decision to adapt the eight HC Mk2s, a decision which led directly to this procurement debacle.

And the minister who made the decision? Ah! The Conservative colleague of Mr Leigh, Mr James Arbuthnot, currently chairman of the Defence select committee. It is he who so recently labelled the FRES project a "fiasco". Well, it seems it takes one to know one.

COMMENT THREAD

What is it?

I happened upon this ... it was taken in Calcutta in 1946. I thought I knew most British armoured vehicles, but I have no idea what this one is. Could it have been locally made?

Love the pub sign in the backgound.

COMMENT THREAD

What happened to the rest?

In July 2006, we got from defence minister Adam Ingram some information on Snatch Land Rovers. They were produced in 1992 and a total of 991 were procured.

February just gone, the MoD was asked how many were still in service. The response was that 645 were still on the inventory but only 580 were "fit for purpose".

Now, through several Parliamentary questions, we have established that no Snatches were ever sold off by the MoD. And they started with 991. They have 645 left, which makes 346 missing – more than a third of the starting number.

Whatever happened to them we wonder.

COMMENT THREAD

A glimmer of sense

In the absence of any coherent (or any) debate in the media on the important issue of how to tackle the insurgency in Afghanistan, a low-key snippet of news from the BBC is unlikely to have much impact – its significance barely appreciated outside a very small circle of analysts and officials.

That actually is a measure of the poverty of the debate in this country, for what we are being told is the UK is to commit an extra £50 million in development money to Afghanistan. But, more importantly, we find that the money is to pay for a new road in southern Helmand province and refurbishment of a power plant, as well as farming and job creation projects.

This comes from international development secretary Douglas Alexander, who has told the BBC that "tackling poverty was the best way to tackle the insurgency in the country." As such, this is not only the most sensible thing that Alexander has said, but it represents a paradigm shift in strategy in this benighted country, the result of much earnest behind-the-scenes discussion and debate.

Such is the inability of the media to understand what is and is not important, however –and its inability to sort the dross from information of value – that we only get the minimum of detail. Thus we are only told that the aid money has been earmarked for projects including construction of a major road linking the towns of Lashkar Gah and Gereshk (pictured above).

We also find that it will also go towards a hydro-electric plant to boost power supplies to Gereshk and agriculture and rural enterprise projects to create rural jobs.

Much will be written from time to time in the future, about the British military effort in Afghanistan, as if that was the totality of our contribution to fighting the insurgency, but this initiative – if it is implemented effectively – will have a greater long-term contribution to peace than a battalion of troops in their "boy racer" Jackals. Yet, you can bet, if another battalion had been despatched to Afghanistan, it would be all over the news, accompanied no doubt by much acreage of self-important pontification.

Interestingly, we see in The Guardian a piece headed, "Pomegranates not poppies", underlining the vital role of agricultural development in addressing the opium-growing problem in Afghanistan.

One smiles wryly and recalls that we were writing on precisely this point last June when we concluded that, if the trade was developed, it could have a very significant impact on the war.

Noting how there had been some welcome increases in high-value agricultural production, we wrote:

… in the final analysis, it is more of the same that is eventually going to beat the insurgency in Afghanistan. A supermarket buyer, waving a substantial contract, is probably worth more than a thousand troops – and certainly more than 10,000 aid officials.

The roads issue, on the other hand, is one we explored in depth last Sunday. But what the heck. We are only a lowly blog, way down the pecking order and not worthy of any attention from the high and mighty, so what do we know? Nevertheless, the fact is, that of all the dross you will read in the next few days, this little snippet of news from the BBC is of far-reaching importance.

If we are ever to get out of Afghanistan with our reputation intact, leaving behind a country that is moving towards peace and prosperity, then what has just been announced is the way to do it. For this glimmer of sense, we should be grateful.

COMMENT THREAD

Dogma and ignorance

The British military faces transfer to the "second division" unless there is a "major spending increase". That is the message conveyed by a report produced by the UK National Defence Association UKNDA). Its author, Tony Edwards, a former head of defence export services at the Ministry of Defence, thus argues that Britain must increase its defence spending by £15 billion a year, representing a 40 percent increase in the defence budget.

That much we are told by The Daily Telegraph which gives the report front page treatment. To obtain the full details, however, one would have thought that the obvious place to go would be the UKNDA site and download the report itself.

Oddly, unless there are secret signs that are not visible to mere mortals, this does not prove possible. A link to the Telegraph story is available, and a somewhat less than informative press release can be read. There is no obvious sign of the report. But, not to be deterred, a Google search yields dividends, and a link can be found – on the Society of British Aerospace Contractors' website.

Not to put too fine a point on it, it does seem rather rum that the only way one can access a so-called "independent" report, calling for a very substantial increase in the defence budget, is to go to the website of an organisation which represents companies which would be the major beneficiaries of that increased expenditure.

Having looked at the report – a rather modest production of 24 pages including several large and rather odd photographs – perhaps the kindest thing one can say is that it is a blessing that Tony Edwards no longer works for the MoD. One could also surmise that one of the reasons why the MoD is currently in such a mess is because the likes of Tony Edwards used to work for them.

That is not to say that Mr Edwards does not make some good points. With such an open goal as MoD equipment procurement, even in a meagre production of 24 pages it would be almost impossible not to score the occasional hit. But what is lacking is any sense of intellectual coherence. Essentially, all that Edwards manages to do is assemble a list of major projects, current and future, put a notional price on each and then add up the price tags. A supermarket check-out girl could have done nearly as well.

What Mr Edwards does not do is explore to any extent what he would have the Armed Forces do, what they are capable of doing (not the same things) and what then they would need to achieve those things.

Bizarrely, there is barely any recognition that we are a nation at war, with the Armed Forces actually fighting a real enemy in real battles. Instead, Edwards's substantive point on Afghanistan is to complain that:

… our defence capability which supports our foreign policy is being degraded by the extended period of overstretch of our armed forces – the operations in Iraq and Afghanistan have lasted longer even than the whole of World War II.

So, if we have got this straight, the operations in Iraq and Afghanistan have "degraded" our defence capability, which "supports our foreign policy". And those operations were not – and are not – in support of our foreign policy? Yet, in a monumental example of schizophrenia, this same Mr Edwards also complains that, "recent reports from the US show serious dissatisfaction with the British contribution to both the Iraq and Afghanistan operations. "

So, putting this together, supporting our operations "degrade our defence capability" yet because we are not – evidently – supporting our operations enough, the Americans are showing "serious dissatisfaction". Which is it to be?

The litmus test on all this, however, is Mr Edward’s attitude to the FRES project. This, he sees as "fast becoming a national disgrace." Then, on the one hand, he points to "many outsiders including the Wiltshire and Oxfordshire Coroners" who have "spoken critically of the vehicles in which we send our troops to war."

On the other hand, he complains that, "Somehow we have managed to turn a fairly straightforward requirement for new vehicles into a "complex system" – Future Rapid Effects System (FRES) – which has only served to cause delay and incur unwarranted cost." FRES, he claims,

… responds to a wish to replace all fighting and support vehicles with a high-tech modular family of vehicles connected with a computer-controlled digital wireless network. On the way the MoD even managed to award £100 million to a company more usually associated with road and railway contracts. So, after many years of expenditure the concept of FRES has been put aside and instead we are going on an ad-hoc buying spree in response to desperate short-term requirements. This approach has created a new challenge – how will this collection of vehicles procured under Urgent Operational Requirements (UORs) be integrated later into the core defence procurement budget?

Those who have followed this saga through this blog will immediately see that Edwards is complaining that we did not buy into the FFLAV concept or one of its successor projects. But, with the MoD mercifully not having done so, he further complains that it has gone on an "ad-hoc buying spree in response to desperate short-term requirements." Thus, we have the MoD responding to genuine operational needs, with a specific class of vehicles - entirely different from the class originally proposed, which was and is unfit for counter-insurgency operations – and this is dismissed as an "ad-hoc buying spree".

Interestingly, this was exactly the same line taken by Bill Kincaid, another MoD escapee, about whom we reported earlier. This, clearly, is the perceived wisdom amongst the MoD rearguard, obviously from the same line of thinking that in 1935 insisted that Royal Tank Corps officers were issued with horses.

The worst of it all is that The Daily Telegraph, having bought uncritically into the UKNDA line with a news story, today publishes a supportive leader, telling us that, "The choice is clear on defence funding." Its view is that, "Britain must either continue with interventionist foreign and defence policies and fund them properly, or retrench to a purely reactive position."

Thus does it fail completely to recognise that it is, in supporting the UKNDA line, arguing for a diversion of funds from exactly "the interventionist foreign and defence policies" that it purports to support. It wants instead to inject massive capital funds into projects that have absolutely no relevance to those policies, leaving operations starved of equipment and capabilities.

Therein lies one of our major problems. On defence, as with so many other things, we need an informed, constructive debate. Instead, we get a miasma of ill-informed comment, based on tired dogma expressed as received wisdom, without any pretence at exploring or understanding the underlying issues.

And this is from a newspaper that once employed Lidell-Hart as a defence correspondent.

COMMENT THREAD

An absence of strategy?

For some time now – as we have remarked previously - it has been very difficult to "read" the battle in Afghanistan. That was not the case with Iraq. There, with some of the main action going in heavily populated areas, there was media reporting – and a constant flow of reports from Arab press agencies. It was, therefore, possible to piece together what was going on – albeit with very little help from the British media.

In Afghanistan, it is different. Much of the action is taking place outside the urban centres, the Afghani media is considerably less developed and the Western media relies almost entirely on "embeds", the output of whom is rigorously controlled.

Following the ebb and flow of a counter-insurgency operation is, in any case difficult. Unlike conventional warfare, with its defined lines and set-piece battles, there are no front lines. The confrontation tends to be disjointed, small unit actions, separated in time and space, with the fighting carried out by disparate national contingents, between which these is less than perfect communication, and different intensities of reporting. All of this naturally makes the "bigger picture" more than a little obscure.

The very idea of "reading the battle" however, implies that there is something to read – an element of coherence and a "guiding mind" that is directing movement towards a defined gaol, however chaotic and uncertain that movement. What is slowly dawning though is the realisation that the main obstacle to understanding what is going on is that there is lacking any defined goal and therefore any coherence. It is impossible to read the battle because there is no guiding mind. There is no coherence, only chaos.

A hint of that came in early February when David Milband complaining of "a strategic stalemate in parts of the country through their use of improvised explosive devices", also noting that the Taleban was "spreading insecurity".

Further hints came with the MoD's reporting of its recent "Red Dagger" operation, heavy on the hype but lacking any framework that would indicate that there is any sense of strategic direction, an impression reinforced by its pathetic attempts to over-sell the "success" of its drugs bust in northern Helmand. Combine that with its general lack of reporting and you discern exactly that which is becoming evident – that there is a lack of strategic direction.

Yet another clue to this disarray comes in today's Sunday Times. It tells us of how US forces in Afghanistan are taking a more assertive role in Helmand province, dictating the nature and scale of tactical operations in an area nominally the responsibility of the British.

A 2,000-man US taskforce based in Helmand has, we are told, pushed west into Farah province to choke the Taliban's supply lines, part of an American plan to contain what they perceive as British "failures" in southern Afghanistan. We are also informed that, privately the Americans are fiercely critical that the overstretched British are merely "treading water" until more US forces arrive this summer.

Furthermore, US special forces are probing Taliban strength in Washir, Nahr Sukh and Garmsir, three districts in central and southern Helmand, again areas nominally the responsibility of the British.

This trend of greater US intervention has been evident for some time – if entirely unreported by the British media. In the operation to recover Musa Qala in December year last, it was the US which dictated the timing of the operation, which determined the shape of the operation and which provided significant ground forces, plus most of the helicopters and air support.

Then, in the operation to take control of Garmsir, it was the USMC which took the lead and provided by far the bulk of the forces, succeeding where previous British efforts had failed.

Now, it seems, US forces are not even doffing their caps to British sensibilities, refusing to take orders from Britain’s Taskforce Helmand. Instead, they report directly to a regional headquarters in Kandahar. A standing joke amongst the Americans, it appears, is the acronym for the Nato-led International Security Assistance Force, which includes most British forces. This is taken to stand for I Saw Americans Fighting.

An unspoken presence here, like the spectre at the feast, is Iraq. The lacklustre performance of the British in that theatre has had a profound effect on the Americans. Gone is any deference or even any confidence in the abilities of the British high command – although there remains the greatest respect for the fighting qualities of the troops. And the American attitude is somewhat reinforced by the delusional conduct of British senior officers who are seeking to convince themselves and everyone else that their activities in Iraq were a success. Amused contempt is giving way to irritation.

US General David McKiernan, ISAF commander, is less than impressed by British efforts in Afghanistan. Like Miliband, he sees the current situation in Helmand as a "stalemate". British officials, on the other hand, admit they do not have enough troops to control the ground. "We clear an area and the Taleban run away," said one official. "But the soldiers can't stay, so the Taleban creep back. It's pointless."

Such an analysis is – as so often – superficial, and again relates back to Iraq where the oft' repeated lament was for more "boots on the ground". But, as US General John Craddock observed last year, the priority is the provision of transport (particularly helicopters and mine-protected vehicles), intelligence and medical capabilities. "Too often," he said, "the forces there now are relatively fixed, because we don't have adequate tactical mobility to move them around to be able to do the jobs we need them to do."

We have a situation in Helmand where British troops – short of both helicopters and protected vehicles – lack the tactical mobility that would enable them to function more effectively. The Royal Marines, in the north, have been able to rely on USMC assets but, further south, the Rifles battle group are sorely lacking in the necessary equipment. More British troops would simply exacerbate existing shortages and achieve very little.

However, while the US is taking a more dominant and assertive role, that does not mean that the Americans have an overall strategy worth its name. Although Obama has agreed to a "surge" later in the year, there are no indications that these troops will make the difference.

Nevertheless, there is going on behind the scenes an intense debate on the correct strategy to adopt and, unlike in the British media, that debate is spilling over into the public domain. Thus we saw recently in Newsweek a long and detail analysis which, to a very great extent, reflects the range of thinking in the Pentagon and State.

Written by Frederick Kagan, the author obviously has a good knowledge of his subject but, like so many, is trying to paint too broad a brush, treating Afghanistan as a single country or a single problem. At the heart of the difficulty though is that Afghanistan has only ever been a country in name. In reality, it is in fact a series of disparate regions, with their own separate identities, which transcend the borders.

The task facing the coalition therefore is not so much reconstruction as nation-building ab initio, an altogether different prospect to the task that faced them in Iraq. The basic flaw in the thinking, it seems to me, is that they are looking for a "top-down" solution, ignoring the fundamental principles of how nations are actually created.

Here, one really does have to look to the past and it does seem strange that principles that were known to the Romans and the ancient Chinese seem to elude us, for all our technological sophistication. What both empires had in common were that, when they sought to extend their grip over their territories, they concentrated on communications - especially roads.

Reading recently, "The shorter Science and civilisation in China," By Joseph Needham, one sees the interesting observation that, "No ancient country in the world did more in civil engineering, both as to scale and skill, than China." Needham goes on to write: "With a territory of nearly 1.5 million square miles, by AD 190 during the Han dynasty, they had built 22,000 miles of first grade roads."

That, we are told, was in addition to an immense system of navigable rivers and canals. Road building was at its peak during the Warring States period. The most successful states, such as the State of Qin, were those which excelled in road-building activity.


One really does get tired of stating the obvious but the essence of a nation is communications. Governance stems from communications not the other way round. When you have mountain valley communities which are difficult to access even by Humvee, where even sizeable towns a mere 100 miles from the capital can take three or four days to reach and where it is possible to lose touch completely with communities of several thousand strong - not even knowing whether they still exist - just because there is heavy snowfall, this is not a nation.

The thing about the basics is that they are precisely that – basics. They are not optional extras and, unless you get them right, everything else that follows is doomed to failure. It might one day be modish to the point of fashionable to build houses without foundations - instead of sticking to boring old "traditions" – but the forces of gravity will soon prevail. Similarly, modish ideas about strategy will not stand the test of time without foundations.

At least, though, in the US there is some sort of a debate going on. Here, of course, our parliamentarians are far too busy emoting to waste their time on such matters and the media has long since abandoned any pretence of conducting anything that approximates informed debate.

Whether led by Americans or the increasingly discredited British, however, there is no sense that any strategy which does emerge will be any more successful than the current non-strategy. The fear is that all we are going to achieve is to kill a lot of good men, spend an awful lot of money and get nowhere.

That would seem to leave but one option. In the fullness of time, the Americans will have one thing to learn from the British – how to lead an ignominious defeat and pretend it is a success. Even there, though, the British have been somewhat less than convincing so it looks as if the Americans are going to have to work out their own strategy for that as well.

COMMENT THREAD

Getting the point

Two offerings in the Sundays on the continuing discussion of Mr Cameron's loss make an interesting contrast. One is from Matthew d'Ancona in The Sunday Telegraph and the other is from Peter Hitchens in The Mail on Sunday.

I will not trouble you with the former, other than to note that its vacuous drivel serves only as a counterpoint to the robust and sensible piece from Hitchens, who absolutely and completely gets the point. He writes that was "struck by the coincidence" between the death of Ivan Cameron and the four soldiers killed in Afghanistan. He then writes:

Three were of soldiers killed in Afghanistan by yet another roadside bomb, from which they were not properly protected by the inadequate, cheapskate vehicle in which they were travelling. They were Corporal Tom Gaden, Lance Corporal Paul Upton and Rifleman Jamie Gunn. The fourth was that of a Royal Marine, Michael Laski, who died in a Birmingham hospital from wounds sustained in Afghanistan on Monday.

That means deaths in this vainglorious, ill-considered episode have reached 149, a shameful number killed because they were inadequately equipped. No, these were not small children, but they were much-loved sons, fathers, husbands, and brothers. Their deaths have all left sad gaps in previously happy lives.

The fate of every one of these was directly in the hands of the MPs who adjourned on Wednesday. Yet I cannot remember when they last attempted a proper debate on what our soldiers are doing in Afghanistan, or when anyone on either front bench said anything truthful on the subject. None can explain why we have soldiers there at all. They come up instead with silly slogans, free of thought.

And even if our MPs are too busy claiming second-home expenses to think about this, or merely haven't the courage to raise it, and even if they are genuinely convinced that this doomed operation is necessary for the safety of the Western world, why have they done so little to make the MoD protect the men they have allowed to be sent into danger? The American Pentagon has a special unit to combat roadside bombs, with a budget of about £2.8billion a year. On top of that, it is spending £1.45billion on new armoured vehicles. Even the tiny Irish Army has taken more decisive steps than ours to obtain mine-resistant vehicles.

That encapsulates so well our thinking. In the torrent on "mawkish sentimentality" – as one commentator put it – over the death of one child, precisely how much attention has been given to the deaths of these four soldiers? Why, asks Hitchens, have they [the MPs] "done so little to make the MoD protect the men they have allowed to be sent into danger?"

And that is the point. Parliament has a special duty to protect the men and women put in harm's way in our name. MPs have the power individually and collectively to bring the government to account and force it to take action. We saw that in June 2006 when, finally, the House got its act together and made an issue of the Snatch Land Rover. That forced Browne to undertake a review, from which emerged an order for protected vehicles.

Now, we can allow Parliament and the MPs their "gesture" over Ivan Cameron. But, as Hitchens writes, "However hard they strained their minds and sinews, our MPs could not have prevented the death of young Ivan, or altered his fate by an inch." On the other hand, had they exerted themselves, they could have prevented many of the deaths that have occurred in Afghanistan and, before that, in Iraq. But, as we have seen so often, the House has not exerted itself on their behalf.

Without a countervailing concern – and action - for the lives for which the MPs are truly responsible, the gesture on Ivan Cameron was self-indulgence. It belies a selective concern which does nothing more than highlight the abrogation of their duties and responsibilities.

Nevertheless, Hitchens, having got the point, has a suggestion:

If they can adjourn for poor Ivan Cameron, then they should be compelled also to sit in all-night session till dawn, to commemorate and debate in detail each military death in Afghanistan from now on. The way things are going, that should also solve their second-home problems. They won't need them, as they'll spend most nights in the chamber.

They will not do that of course, but they should. In preparation, they should be given the bundles of witness statements and technical documentation that are produced after every death, and be forced to read them.

Then they should, each and every one of them, be forced to stand up in the House and explain to the nation why they (with but a very few honourable exceptions) have personally allowed soldiers to go to their deaths ill-equipped and unprepared. And in the gallery should be the parents of those soldiers who have died so unnecessarily. Our MPs can look them in the eyes when they make their statements.

They owe us no less.

COMMENT THREAD

Taking us for mugs

In his column today, Booker today picks up on the MAN truck story, but also extends it to take in the broader issues of the undeclared Europe first policy that has blighted defence procurement over the last decade.

Some time ago, I calculated that the British government had overspent to the tune of £8.8 billion on European projects, when the same (or sufficient) capacity could have been acquired more cheaply through indigenous production or by buying from other sources.

That is not to say that we should not buy European equipment. For instance, if a case could really have been made for a medium-weight, wheeled armoured vehicle (although I do not think it has) then we could have – and perhaps should have - bought the French VBCI. These, in any case, had a substantial British component, and they could have been in service by 2011.

The point that emerges, therefore, is that the decisions on which military equipment to buy should be made on the basis of national interest and then, within that, on the basis of what best meets the military requirement. All things being equal, the equipment should be purchased from British manufacturers. But, if better can be obtained elsewhere (or faster where there is an urgent operational need) then we should go anywhere in the world.

What Booker points out in his column though, as indeed did we earlier, is that one of the largest Army contracts in recent time, for a new fleet of 8,000 Army trucks, was not decided on any of these criteria but in support of Mr Blair's policy of supporting European military integration. Even Gerald Howarth, at the time noted that the MoD was "Buying them for political rather than commercial reasons". That is wrong, wrong, wrong. Army equipment should not be used as a political tool.

With a deep recession now in progress, the way this contract was awarded is particularly poignant, given the travails of one of the earlier bidders, LDV. The firm is now facing closure when it could have been sharing in a programme originally costed at £1.6 billion and which will end up at around £2 billion by the time all the add-ons have been taken into account.

The appalling thing about this whole episode and many others like it, though, is how little political and media interest there has been in the whole saga. We get no end of accusations directed at the government about "underspending", but rarely is there any interest in looking at where the money goes and whether it could be spent better. The whole of the undeclared "Europe first" programme has been one of those "black holes" which no one mentions.

Of course, with so many billions being sluiced about to bail out the banks and sundry financial institutions, it is very easy to lose sight of the fact that this is real money, representing real jobs and real products, the end result being military capabilities that determine whether people live or die.

The biggest problem of all, though, is that when it comes to protecting our own national interest, seem to let our "partners" walk all over us. The background to the MAN trucks story is that it took over the British company ERF, one of the last truck-makers in the UK, hollowed it out from the inside and then made it a front company for retailing German and Austrian-built trucks in the UK.

The one thing you can bet though, is the French Army – supposedly a pillar of the European Union – will not be seen in anything other than French-built trucks (pictured). In the same way, while we see French and German ambulances on our streets, you will be very hard put to find anything but a French-built ambulance anywhere in France.

It is exactly this mentality which is currently exercising the "colleagues" this week as they attend an emergency European Council today in Brussels. They are addressing the rush to "economic protectionism" and, in particular, Sarkozy's robust support for French car manufacturers and his determination to support French jobs before anything else.

In the frame are Sarkozy's plans to lend PSA Peugeot Citroen and Renault €3 billion each and other measures in exchange for a promise not to shut French plants or move to cheaper sites "in the Czech Republic or elsewhere".

The French see no inconsistency between being member of the EU and supporting their own industries, yet we seem to look upon our membership as an excuse to ditch anything British, run down our industries and buy from any Jacques, Fritz or Toni that happens to want to make a quick buck at our expense. I suppose that we should be consoled in this case that British truckers at least got the contract to transport the trucks from Austria to the UK (below).


However, when it comes to truck builders, as Booker observes, when LDV last week pleaded for Government aid, the trade minister Ian Pearson loftily responded "the British taxpayer cannot be expected to pay for the company's losses". What he didn't admit, of course, is that if it hadn't been for his own Government those losses would never have arisen. And for the British taxpayer to pay up to £2 billion to keep Austrian workers employed is, it seems, perfectly acceptable.

Our government is taking us for mugs. It really is about time it woke up and smelt the coffee. British national interest comes first – and that does mean British jobs for British workers and British trucks for the British Army. Look after your own first not least because, unless you do, you won't be in a position to help anyone else.

COMMENT THREAD

Play time

One senses a "spoiler" here, a high-tech extravaganza by the MoD, timed just after the Defence Committee report on equipment. It's certainly getting more publicity than the report, which tells you something about the media.

So, we have an Army driving around in 35-year-old light tanks – older than most of their crews – and 17-year-old Snatch Land Rovers – while unable to find a suitable protected patrol vehicle. This is the same Army that has taken 20 years and spent over £300 million on not buying a medium-weight armoured vehicle.

But, rather than address real-world issues, the MoD is prattling on about "the front line in the wars of the future." This, we are told, "will be machines":

A massive, unmanned air force will scour the skies over a city, while robots will patrol the streets, quickly discriminating between an enemy carrying a gun and a civilian carrying a child. Only then will human beings arrive, protected by fast armoured vehicles that are half the weight of today's tanks but just as strong and ground troops who will have robot mules carrying their equipment for them…

And so it drivels on. Amazingly, we are told, the MoD hopes to have working versions of these ideas in the next 5 to 10 years.

It would be nice to think that the MoD could summons up enough energy and brainpower to find a replacement for the Snatch Land Rover in the next 5 to 10 years. Obviously, though, that is far too difficult. It is much easier to indulge in these cosy little fantasies.

COMMENT THREAD

Idiot abroad

Ultimately, in a parliamentary democracy, the buck stops … in parliament. However powerful a government might think itself to be, it lives and dies by permission of parliament, which can bring it down with one vote of confidence.

Short of that nuclear option, the day-to-day work of scrutinising government is – or should be – carried out by the select committees. They are the bodies that really get down to detail, call the witnesses and examine the documents, producing at great expense detailed reports which, themselves often provide the basis of debates on the floor of the House. That is how the system works … or should do. Except it doesn't – not, at least when it comes to the Defence Committee.

One should not resort to ad hominem attacks when making a case, but the character of a select committee is most often determined by its chairman. With a strong, intelligent head, a committee can be a powerful force. Unfortunately, the opposite applies, so the effectiveness of a committee is very much a matter of personalities. Perhaps that should not be the case, but it is.

And in the chairmanship of the defence committee, we are singularly ill-served by having in the Rt Hon James Arbuthnot a irredeemable idiot – a man who, given an open goal and a ball five feet from it, would punt it in the wrong direction and look for applause.

Therefore, in reviewing "his" 206-page report on "Defence Equipment 2009" – and it is very much a personal production – there is no need to go into any very great detail. The man does not know what he is talking about, has not bothered to find out and has thus spouted reams of drivel that is of little importance and, in the longer term, will have no impact at all.

That is actually the tragedy. There is very much wrong with defence procurement – which is at the heart of this report – and a great deal needs to be said. There is much which needs to be made good. This is what the Rt Hon James Arbuthnot should be addressing. Instead, he has kicked the ball in the wrong direction, and is now appealing to the crowd for applause.

Such that has come his way – and it is very limited, with only two newspapers having really bothered to dissect his work – has focused mainly on his comments on FRES. This is unsurprising given Mr Arbuthnot's choice of phrasing. With an eye to the headlines, he labels it a "fiasco", complaining that "some seven months after announcing General Dynamics UK as the provisional preferred bidder for the FRES Utility Vehicle, the MoD has announced that priority is now to be given to the FRES Scout Vehicle."

Expanding on that, Mr Arbuthnot then tells us:

Whilst we recognise that the MoD's equipment requirements need to reflect changing threats, that is no excuse for the MoD's behaviour in the FRES programme; they have wasted their and industry's time and money. The FRES Utility Vehicle programme was, from the outset, poorly conceived and managed.

We do not need to rehearse in detail the history of the FRES programme, as we have done it recently in three linked pieces here, here and here. All we need to say is that it was – and is – an intensely political project, aimed at equipping the British Army for its role in the European Rapid Reaction Force (ERRF), stemming from the 2003 Defence White Paper.

It always was a fantasy project, wrong in conception, ill-defined from the very start and impossible to achieve. As a result, the MoD has been saddled with something which, from the outset it, it never had a chance of delivering. And, finally, through a long series of steps, it has bowed to the inevitable and cancelled the project.

The direct loss, so we are told, is £130 million, to which we must add at least another £200 million (but probably a great deal more) in cancellation costs for previous projects which stretch back to 1987, when the idea of a wheeled utility vehicle was first seriously mooted.

By that reckoning, well over £300 million has been spent on not acquiring something that the Army does not need, and should not even have attempted to buy. Inasmuch as the MoD has now, once again, recognised this, it something, although it has cost us dear.

That it is now focusing on buying a much-needed replacement for the 35-year-old CVR(T)s is also something. The likelihood is that we will have to buy something off-the-shelf, which is what we should have done years ago, at considerably less cost than we will have to face now.

The trouble is that, without confronting the political background to FRES, and without looking at the project in the round, it is impossible to make sense of it. Thus, Mr Arbuthnot does not make sense of it. He looks as a small segment of the recent history, on the basis of limited and highly selective evidence, and then pontificates.

This is the very worst of the select committee system in practice. Dominated by a man who is incapable of understanding what is going on, and seems determine to avoid looking at the real needs of the Armed Forces, he condemns the MoD for wasting their and industry's time and money.

What he has actually done is waste our time and money, in failing even to begin to address the real issues, a task for which he is handsomely paid yet does not deliver. Perhaps one should think about cancelling Mr Arbuthnot.

COMMENT THREAD

A profound abuse

Details coming in of the deaths of three soldiers from 1Bn The Rifles point to the continued misuse of resources and equipment in the Army, leading once more to unnecessary deaths.

According to The Daily Telegraph, the three were killed while riding in an open-topped Wimik Land Rover, when they were hit by an IED just east of the town of Gereshk in Helmand province.

What is particularly relevant here is that the vehicle was being used as part of the escort for a supply convoy, making it highly vulnerable to attack, while negating any of the claimed advantages for this type of vehicle.

The essence of a Land Rover Wimik is that it is a lightweight, highly manoeuvrable gun-platform. The emphasis is on mobility, therefore, rather than armoured protection, the theory being that the vehicle is not tied to roads or any specific routes. The crew can choose unpredictable routes, and avoid potential ambush points, by which means the mobility afforded is judged to offer as much or greater protection than conferred by armour.

Even that theory is arguable. On the one hand, the Taleban have become adept at ambushing vehicles when they are travelling to and from operations, when they are tied to fixed routes and lose the advantages of off-road mobility. Then, crucially, it makes a false distinction between mobility and protection, as if they were mutually incompatible, which they are not.

Where a vehicle is involved in escort duty, however, even the theoretical advantages disappear. Supply convoys in that region are often laboriously slow, with typical average speeds of 5mph. Their routes are predictable and their slow progress gives the Taleban plenty of opportunities to get ahead and prepare ambushes.

While it is possible – and standard practice – to carry out explosives searches at "pinch points", these are carried out by the British Army with dismounted troops using hand-held mine detectors (pictured left) and dog teams. They are laborious and slow, with checks often having to be cut short or omitted to avoid delaying the convoys – where hold-ups in vulnerable positions carry their own risks of ambush.

Under such circumstances, Wimiks and the like should never be used as escorts. Even within the frame of reference dictated by the Army, they are patrol vehicles and light gun platforms. They were never designed for convoy duties and are not safe for that purpose.

Nor should any convoy be required to travel through hostile territory without route clearance and proving. Dismounted techniques, being too slow – and dangerous for the clearance teams, who are themselves prone to ambush - purpose-built vehicles are essential.

Such use was, of course, pioneered by the British and, as we have often observed on this blog, copied by US forces and the Canadians, where such route clearance is routinely carried out in Afghanistan. Now, belatedly - having sold off its own vehicles ans sat on its hands for six years - the MoD is at last buying replacement vehicles, the so-called "Talisman" package. Unfortunately, this is not due to start coming on-stream until next year.

Belatedly, also, the MoD has just issued a "contract notice" inviting expressions of interest from manufacturers prepared to supply "up to 400 Light Protected Patrol Vehicles (LPPV)".

The LPPV, we are told, will be a wheeled vehicle with an estimated gross vehicle weight of around 6 to 7 tons, capable of carrying up to 6 crew (2+4), integrated with a range of communication and electronic equipment providing protected mobility. This, we are also told, will replace in-service light legacy platforms based on the Land Rover based SNATCH vehicle. Additionally, the platform may be used as the basis for the replacement to Land Rover WMIK.

Interestingly – tragically – the tiny Irish Army has already resolved this issue, having at the end of last month ordered 27 mine-resistant patrol vehicles (LPPVs by any other name).

These are the BAE Sytems/OMC RG-32Ms (pictured right), the smaller version of the RG-31. This is a vehicle the MoD tested in 2002/3 and rejected in favour of the less-protected Iveco Panther, which is still not in service.

However, the Irish, slow though they might be, do have an advantage. They do not have to contend with the MoD. This is the MoD's second attempt at buying an LPPV, the first being the ill-fated Pinzgauer Vector (pictured below left). And it is worth noting that, in June 2006, when the Army ordered its first batch of 80 Vectors, at a cost of £35 million, the intention – or so it was claimed – had been "to counter the threat posed by suicide bombers."

We were then told that it had been adapted for use in "high-risk" environments and would thus "protect troops from automatic fire, landmines and fragmentation bombs."

At the time, it was reported that senior officers believed the greatest threat to British troops would come from suicide bombers and insurgents "armed with the same improvised explosive devices that have been used against lightly-armoured vehicles in Iraq." Nothing has changed.

Nevertheless, as early as June 2008, less than a year after the vehicles had been deployed, there were hints of a problem. This came in a published list of "expected out-of-service dates" for a range of vehicles. The Vector was given a date of 2015.

In an Army that routinely keeps vehicles for 30 years or more, a mere seven-year service life was unprecedented. Then, by the end of the year, the Army had conceded that the vehicle was not up to the job, having proved inadequate, and unable to cope with the threat from roadside bombs - the very purpose for which it had been bought.

In December 2008, however, we had General Sir Kevin O'Donoghue, without so much as a blush, airily telling the Commons defence select committee, "You produce a solution for the requirement of the time; the requirement changes as the threat changes, as the security architecture changes and you need to produce something else." It hadn't changed - they got it wrong.

Now, more than three years after the Pinzgauer contract was first mooted, we see a "contract notice" inviting expressions of interest for a vehicle which will probably end up being something like the RG-32M or another vehicle that has been available for many years.

So, while the Army gets it wrong again and again - pouring money down the drain in the process - men have to die, again and again. And the MPs, who are supposed to monitor such things, have asked what?

COMMENT THREAD

The ring of truth

December last, we started seeing a disturbing increase in the number of casualty reports – at a time when, traditionally, the campaign season should have been winding down.

Only later, in typical MoD style – well after the event – did we learn that there had been a major operation in progress, codenamed Sond Chara – Red Dagger.

Needless to say, according to Commander Task Force Helmand, Brigadier Gordon Messenger Royal Marines:

This was a very successful operation that demonstrated the ability of the Task Force to surprise, overmatch, manoeuvre and influence over a huge area. Whilst our efforts have made a significant contribution to the overall Nad E'Ali security plan, it has not been without sacrifice, and we will forever remember the contribution of those who died.

Such is the low stock of the MoD publicity machine – and the public pronouncements of the Army - that one would fully expect the operation to be described as a "success", even if it had been a catastrophic failure. And here there would be good reason to have one's suspicions, not least because the operation was in an area or northern Helmand, called Nad Ali, which was supposed to have been pacified.

Thus is was of more than some interest that we saw yesterday an article in the Western Morning News by correspondent Lyn Barton, embedded with British forces in Afghanistan.

In a piece headed, "We're a laughing stock," she retails how "disillusioned" Royal Marine Commandos serving on the front line have claimed high profile military gains are being squandered through lack of manpower. They are questioning the point of the conflict and have slated "antiquated equipment" they claim makes Britain a laughing stock.

The Commandos are commenting about Operation Red Dagger, which was designed to push the Taliban lines back in their stronghold of Nad Ali, one which we have already noted has been claimed a "success", but – we are told - the area is in danger of being gradually conceded. Having been pushed out, the enemy is already starting to move back in.

One Marine from 42 Commando declares: "We are just marking time and losing blokes," adding that, "All we can do is hold ground. We can clear an area of Taliban, put in Afghan police checkpoints but when we go the Taliban come back and it slowly goes back to what it was before." The fighting now is "as bad as before Operation Red Dagger."

Another Marine agrees, saying that, "Red Dagger achieved its aim, it was successful," but "It's just that we cannot dominate the ground as we should do because we do not have enough guys."

Although these comments are echoed by many in 42 Commando, Lt Col Doug Chalmers says they fail to take account of the bigger picture. The operation was used to create a triangle of control in a region insurgents were keen to maintain. He said the operation had pushed back enemy lines, but the area is crucial to the Taliban and they wanted it back. There was no question, he claims, of it being ceded.

Chalmers thus argues that Red Dagger was, "an overmatch and the enemy faded away. They have come back and they are testing us. There is no doubt about it."

One hesitates to point out that experienced guerrillas usually do precisely that … straight out of the "Little Red Book": when the enemy advances, we retreat. This goes on to say: "The enemy camps, we harass. The enemy tires, we attack. The enemy retreats, we pursue…" Perhaps Chalmers ought to read it some time. It looks as if the Taleban have.

Nevertheless, we are confidently informed that the operation blocked a north-south transit route for the enemy and dealt a blow to their finances by cutting off from large swathes of valuable poppy crops. "That is why they are putting more men into the fight," says Chalmers.

We already looked at the claim about the effect on the Taleban's finances and find it distinctly less than credible. Thaqt rather puts the rest of Chalmers's claims in the same context. "I wouldn't risk lives if I didn't think we are achieving anything," he says.

Putting that into context, we also get the Commandos criticising the continuing use of the lightly armoured Snatch Land Rovers. "Equipment is broken down. One day it took four hours to get out on patrol because of repairs," said one man. "The Snatch Land Rovers are from the 60s and 70s. You show it to the Yanks and they are laughing at us."

However, Major Reggie Turner, Officer in Charge of J Company 42 Royal Marine Commandos, says they were an extremely useful tool used during routine patrols. "Around a built-up area we use it for basic mobility. It is all we have got so it is what we use," he says.

Turner adds that their versatility and manoeuvrability provides crucial "situational awareness" which would be lost in bigger vehicles. "Sometimes your best protection is situational awareness," he claims. Shades of Mandy Rice-Davies here.

Interestingly, Thomas Harding picks up the story, also noting that, with limited numbers of British journalists allowed onto the front line in Afghanistan the reports contrast with recent Ministry of Defence press releases announcing successes against the Taliban.

Indeed they do, and one is surprised that Lyn Barton's report ever saw the light of day. The MoD have many ways of visiting their displeasure on embedded journalists and are, by this means, tightly controlling the output from Afghanistan, relying on the simple premise that, without Army facilities, journalists can get no stories at all.

Many have to make the agonising decision of whether to go along with the military, in order to get some information out of theatre, in the knowledge that, if they are too candid, their access is completely cut off.

The big problem is that, for all we know, the military may be doing a superb job in Afghanistan and everything may be going swimmingly. But given the control freakery exercised by the MoD, and its well proven tendency to gloss over the nasty bit, it would be a fool that took the Ministry at its word.

Even with the best will in the world, they are wont to make a common mistake – that of using activity as a measure of success, and of imposing their own interpretations on outcomes, which do not necessarily accord with those of the enemy who, in guerrilla warfare, tend to have the initiative.

Earlier, we suggested that neither this government nor the MoD can be trusted to tell the truth. And nor, we added, can the media be relied upon to ferret it out. That many not be the case with Lyn Barton, whose report has the ring of truth. If it comes closer to what, in any case, will be a confused picture, then we have problems.

In this, there is only one certainty. If we do, we will hear it last from the MoD, who will still be tellling of its "successes" long after the Taleban have taken over Kabul.

COMMENT THREAD

The wages of neglect

One gets exceedingly weary of the hole-in-the-corner way the MoD is "playing" the war in Afghanistan. Its strategy is to keep us largely uninformed as to what is really going on, while devoting its resources to a steady trickle of propaganda which serves to obscure rather than reveal the truth.

It played exactly the same game in Iraq, feeding us with glowing "puffs" about the "derring do" of "Our Boys", and happy little "touchy-feely" pieces about how our caring-sharing troops were engaging with those nice Iraqis and how things were getting better all the time – when the whole campaign was going down the pan.

We saw the propaganda technique in full swing last week when, out of the blue, we get a graphic account of an operation in the Upper Sangin Valley "which has struck severely at the narcotics industry in Helmand".

"Waves of helicopter-borne troops caught the Taliban by surprise," we were told, "in a meticulously planned assault which helps finance the Taliban's insurgency." And then we got the political pay-off from defence secretary John Hutton, who happily twitters:

Our dedicated and professional forces have once again taken the fight to the enemy. Their bravery, coupled with the size and sophistication of our firepower, has cleared the enemy from large areas of Helmand bringing security and governance to more of the province. The seizure of £50 million worth of narcotics will starve the Taliban of crucial funding preventing the proliferation of drugs and terror on the UK's streets.

It is funny how military operations are always "meticulously planned", and no doubt this one was – like all the rest, although one suspects the MoD would not be publicising it otherwise. They leave those to their Boards of Inquiry and then keep schtum about the results.

Putting this operation in perspective, the local value of the Afghani heroin trade is in the order of £3 billion (as export income). By the time the drugs get on the streets at their destinations, they are worth ten times that – and sometimes more. Hutton's £50 million is in fact worth about £5 million as export value in the form of heroin. As crude opium in situ it is probably worth one tenth of that – about £500,000. That is not even chump change compared with the total value of production.

Even then, the figure is meaningless. The "industry" in Afghanistan is vastly over-producing. It is thus keeping back considerable stocks in reserve, to keep the price buoyant. It will simply replace this amount from stock and won't even miss it. That is one of the more sinister activities of the Taleban, they way they are manipulating the market. Thus, the loss of this small quantity of drugs will have no impact on the overall income and cause very little more than a minor, local inconvenience. It will certainly have no effect on the amount of heroin reaching the UK.

Without in any way downplaying what our troops achieved – they put their lives on the line for this operation - this is typical MoD spin. They talk up every "success" while never giving us the overall picture.

We saw them doing exactly the same in Iraq, talking up weapons cache seizures, which were minuscule compared to what was actually in circulation. On the other hand, they kept very quiet about major losses of equipment and wounded soldiers when, for instance, supply convoys got bounced - which was happening very frequently indeed.

The very great danger in hyping this up is that the MoD actually begins to believe its own propaganda, and starts to think it is achieving anything substantive. That again harps back to Iraq, when the Army mounted a huge programme of raids to capture weapons and bomb-making materials. When it paraded the seized material, one definitely got the sense that the MoD believed it was achieving something. But the raids made absolutely no difference to the rate of bombing and attacks.

Yet, when the US Army and Iraqis closed down the bomb-making factories in al Amarah and Maysan province, within a month, combat engineers doing mine clearance noted a sharp fall off in the number of bombs being laid. The MoD was deceiving itself that its activities were having any effect at all.

What we don't get is any sense of a balance sheet – what we are gaining in overall terms, and what it is costing us. For sure, we know that troops are killed – we know that because the MoD is obliged to tell us when a soldier dies, but it does not tell us of the injured.

What little information we get is statistically meaningless, because we can't relate to anything. The most detail we get is in "puffs" about heroic recoveries of British soldiers, who defy all the odds to overcome their injuries. This is in no way to denigrate these admirable people. It is to attack the MoD for the way it exploits their efforts as a tool of propaganda, giving a one-sided view without the bigger picture.

A little of that emerges in The Sunday Times today which publishes an article headed: "MoD hides rising injury toll of Taliban bombs". There, we are told that more than 100 British soldiers have suffered amputations and other debilitating injuries in the past year in Afghanistan, "according to previously suppressed Ministry of Defence (MoD) figures that reveal the true toll of the Taliban's roadside bombing campaign."

The number of troops losing limbs or eyes, suffering serious burns or permanent brain damage has increased dramatically since August 2007 when the Taliban intensified their efforts. During the past 18 months, 37 of the 71 British troops killed are known to have been the victims of roadside bombs or mines, but the number of troops disabled in the attacks has never been fully disclosed.

Figures now obtained by The Sunday Times show that 37 soldiers suffered "life-changing injuries" between April 2006, when they first deployed to southern Afghanistan, and the end of that year. There were 55 such injuries during the whole of 2007. Last year the figures more than doubled to 114 and there have been 12 cases this year.

Yet this is only one glimpse of the downside. We still don't get any details of how these troops were injured, under what circumstances, and whether – of crucial importance – they could be prevented.

One tantalising piece of information is that, while the MoD has bought better armoured vehicles in an attempt to counter the Taliban offensive, insurgents using such large amounts of explosives there is a limit on the protection afforded even by new Mastiff armoured vehicles. There have, we are told, been cases of soldiers in Mastiffs who were protected from a blast but who lost their legs below the knee as a result of the shock wave inside the vehicle.

We also learn that such is the scarcity of helicopters – which would provide a safer mode of transportation - that last week a British operation against the drug barons financing the Taliban had to use aircraft provided by the US marines. That, incidentally, is a detail curiously missing from the MoD "puff" on the operation.

Campaigners, says The Sunday Times claim the MoD is deliberately keeping the human cost of the war out of the public eye. All the MoD will admit is that 23 soldiers underwent amputations between December 2007 and November 2008, but said is was "unable to provide a breakdown of other serious injuries."

If that is what it is saying, that is a barefaced lie. The most comprehensive details of all injuries in theatre are kept, on a single computer database in Selly Oak, with complete details of all incidents. They are instantly accessible and can provide breakdowns of all the details needed.

Since the MoD is so sparse with its information, perforce, the only real way of measuring progress on the battlefield has been the death rate. This detail has traditionally been used by military historians and, of late, it has been the main metric (sometimes the only metric) on which the media rely. It there is a high number of deaths, the media get interested. If there is a period without casualties, the media goes to sleep.

The problem is that even this metric is now becoming heavily distorted. We saw recently a report in The Daily Telegraph on the extraordinary measures taken to airlift a dozen wounded servicemen out of Helmand province "in the largest and most complex medical evacuation since the conflict in Afghanistan began".

From that piece, we also learn that more than 20 troops a week are being evacuated by air from Camp Bastion and that the number of aeromedical evacuations has more than tripled since the first British forces entered Helmand in 2006 with 800 troops flown home in the past year.

Last year, we also saw a piece which reported that British battlefield casualties had been almost halved by radical new changes implemented by medics, bringing down the death rate on the front line in Afghanistan from almost a quarter dying from their wounds to one in eight.

The massive improvement in survival rates has been put down to "miracle bandages", a new tourniquet and the use of trauma consultants on board evacuation helicopters.

Significantly, the use of large Chinook and Merlin helicopters carrying an anaesthetist or emergency medical consultant plus four medics are the key factor. With most journeys in Helmand involving a two-hour round trip, the doctors can effectively set up a trauma station in the back of the helicopter keeping the patient alive until they reach the field hospital in Camp Bastion.

All this is being done for admirable reasons, and it is far too cynical even to suggest that the enormous effort made to prevent troops dying suits the MoD rather well. The fact is though, that with fewer troops being killed – when even quite recently they would have died – the war in Afghanistan is getting far less scrutiny than it might otherwise have done.

With 58 troops having died this year and last, and a ratio one death in eight applying when previously it would have been one in four, we might have seen 132 deaths but for the changes. Those extra 74 deaths would have brought the total from the current 126 to exactly 200.

These are, of course, rough calculations, but the point is made. With there having been 178 deaths in Iraq, a recorded death toll well in excess of that in Afghanistan would have drastically altered the media dynamics. There would have been far more reporting, much more comment, considerably more criticism and a great deal more political intervention.

What has escaped comment from those who have recently reported on the efforts made to keep injured troops alive is the apparently disproportionate effort being expended. From our extremely limited fleet of Merlins and Chinooks, no expense is spared when it comes to using them as flying trauma stations, but that leaves us even shorter of helicopters for operations, so we have to borrow from the Americans or send troops out in less safe forms of transportation.

Not for the first time do we observe that it would be gratifying if the MoD – as well as the media and politicians – devoted as much energy and resources to keeping troops alive and uninjured as they did to treating them and trying to keep them alive after they have been wounded.

That they could do more is indicated by a piece from Thomas Harding last week, in which he records an interview with Canada's defence minister who tells us that British forces in Afghanistan could "learn lessons" on how to properly equip troops on the front line.

This is an issue we have covered many times on this blog, noting how the Canadians are far more advanced in their force protection techniques, using equipment that we are only now thinking of buying, while still having considerable capability gaps.

With the death rate being contained by "artificial" means rather than by improved fighting equipment and tactics, the fear is that these words will fall on deaf ears. It has been difficult enough getting the MoD to focus on force protection and without constant pressure, there is great danger that we will see backsliding and a renewal of the complacency which has blighted the whole campaign.

As important, with the statistics being skewed – even if for the best of reasons – we are no longer getting any measure of what is going on, beyond the propaganda "puffs" from the MoD. Deprived of signals, we can only speculate, with suspicion that it is far worse than is painted and deteriorating rapidly.

Neither this government nor the MoD can be trusted to tell the truth, and nor can the media be relied upon to ferret it out. We can, under these circumstances, only fear the worst. We are now, in many senses, paying the wages of neglect.

COMMENT THREAD

Lost before it started – Part 7

In this final part, where we have explored the reasons for the British failure in Iraq, we turn the tables and speculate on whether they, despite the handicaps, could have succeeded. Reviewing what actually did happen after the British had retreated to their final base at Basra airport, we believe they could.

That is the ultimate tragedy. Instead of attracting the contempt of the Iraqis and the disdain of the Americans – who will never really trust us again – we could truly have walked out of Iraq with our heads held high, without having to pretend we had achieved success. It was that close – and that far.

Could it have been different?

At the start of the occupation in May 2003, the decision to cut back troops levels to 11,000 was disastrous, but not fatal. However, with that, Blair's decision to throw his lot in with the Europeans - compensating, many believe, for his failure to deliver the UK into the embrace of the single currency - seriously hampered the ability of the Army to deal with the insurgency.

And, having pledged the nation's armed forces to the Europeans and Iraq, he offered troops to reinforce the campaign in Afghanistan. That made a tight situation worse.

Even then, defeat was not inevitable. Looking at the campaign in the round, the single most egregious failure was the decision to abandon al Amarah, walking out on a half-trained and poorly equipped 10th Division. That was a major strategic error. Yet that decision itself was not initiated by the politicians but by the military.

Strangely, at the time, there had been very little discussion or debate. Equally, there was virtually no evaluation of the strategic consequences. Then, the "retreat" was an administrative decision. The "road map" had already been revealed by Gen Houghton in March, over three months earlier.

But "repositioning" in order to concentrate on Basra was wrong. Al Amarah was the Mahdi Army's major armoury and it would have made more strategic sense to have cut off the supply of arms at source before dealing with the problem of Basra. It was a "downstream" solution, akin to mopping up a floor after the bath had flooded, without first turning off the taps.

Dealing with the indirect fire

Of course, to have maintained forces at Abu Naji would have required dealing with the indirect fire – one of the main reasons why the base was vacated. Here, the main problems were the lack of suitable equipment, in particular UAVs, helicopters and MRAPs, plus C-RAM for base defence. All three could have been provided. Most were eventually provided, but too late. This was not a problem of money. It was about timing – and commitment.

Even in 2006, at a very late hour, had Gen Dannatt been able to break free of the Army’s obsession with FRES, he could have negotiated a major MRAP package. In exchange for scrapping FRES or putting it on the back-burner, substantially larger numbers of Mastiffs could have been bought, together with other, smaller MRAP vehicles. When this happened anyway in October 2008, it was too late for Iraq – and may be too late for Afghanistan.

As to helicopters, the Army was again partly the author of its own misfortune. Many times, cheaper options than the Future Lynx were offered, and rejected. Had the Army been intent on acquiring tactical helicopters rapidly, it could have had them. It was occasionally able to borrow US Blackhawks and the Americans also provided medivac helicopters, but this was not a reliable foundation on which to carry out planning.

The Army was actually offered a new fleet of Blackhawks off-the-shelf. It turned them down. As for UAVs, the MoD already had in place a replacement programme for the Phoenix, called Watchkeeper, modified Israeli Hermes 450s – with deliveries scheduled for 2010. The modifications, incidentally, were part of the FRES programme. They included fitting extra communications systems fit in with the proposed "network" that was at the heart of the system.

Because of the urgency of providing the Army with a UAV capability, in May 2007 the programme was brought forward with the purchase of the basic Hermes system off-the-shelf, direct from Israel. What was done then could have been done earlier, but for the determination to incorporate FRES modifications. Similarly, with C-RAM being ordered by the MoD in 2007, and temporary measures taken to ensure its early deployment, it is not untoward to argue that this equipment too could have been procured earlier.

With suitable equipment, holding the base at Abu Naji could have been tenable, buying time further to train and equip the Iraqi Army 10th Division. That perhaps could have allowed the Army, with existing resources, to back the Iraqis in recovering the city that much earlier, possibly as early as February/March 2008.

A fatal error

Instead of holding the line in al Amarah, the Army committed its main strength to Basra. And there it made a fatal mistake. In September 2006, it launched Operation Sinbad – a last-ditch operation to recover the city. It was well-planned and executed, but the timing was wrong.

Very much later, the Chief of the Defence Staff, Jock Stirrup, complained that the action had been "watered down" and lacked support from the Iraqi politicians, particularly Maliki. That was always going to be the case.

The British had misread the political situation in Iraq and had acted prematurely. Maliki was still in the grip of Muqtada's party and to have openly confronted the Mahdi at that time would have been political suicide. He had not by then secured his political base, weakening the political grip of Muqtada and could not take the same robust line that he took in 2008. The British would have been well advised to have husbanded their resources until a more propitious moment.

There were, though, the dangerous and debilitating attacks on the bases in Basra, but what held for al Amarah could equally have applied to them – with the probability that, without Abu Naji having been abandoned, the pressure on Basra would not have been as strong. Nor indeed would the insurgency in Sadr City been as troublesome, possibly liberating US resources for the fray.

A change in approach

One there had been a change in the balance of political power in Baghdad, things were possible which had previously been impossible. Then, had the British maintained their presence in al Amarah, a joint British/Iraqi move could have been made on the city, cleaning it out as happened with Operation Promise of Peace. This would have made dealing with Basra an easier proposition.

Arguably, with a British presence remaining in Basra, and the indirect fire being dealt with by technology instead of the wasteful use of manpower, the situation would not have deteriorated so far.

Instead of Basra becoming the battlefield in Charge of the Knights and al Amarah being taken without a shot fired, the situation might have been reversed. The battle would have been at al Amarah.

By June 2008, Muqtada was a busted flush and with British support, again using existing resources, the 10th/14th Iraqi Divisions could have walked into the Sadr strongholds in Basra without a shot being fired. The British, instead of skulking in their base in Basra airport, would have been central to the action, with a wholly different outcome to the one that has come to pass.

The tragedy is that this could have been done with existing manpower resources. Through the recovery of first Basra and then al Amarah, the US did not commit more than 2,500 troops – less than the British had available. What they had and the British did not, was the right equipment – and the right mental attitude.

A lack of commitment

To have won would have required the same degree of commitment injected by President Bush, Robert Gates and Gen David Petraeus. Yet, the Army - Dannatt in particular and Jackson before him - was not prepared to sanction what was required to fight a war that he and the rest of the Army no longer believed was winnable.

That was the real problem. Wars are won and lost in the minds of men. Even without the political drag, this war would have been lost because the Army had decided it was not worth winning. More to the point, it had decided that the price it would have to pay in order to win was unacceptable.

In Iraq, therefore, the Army was defeated by its own leaders. Indisputably, the major fault lay with the politicians, in particular, one man – Tony Blair. But the Army was not without fault. Its equipment was wrong, its tactics were wrong and, in the final analysis, it lost faith in its mission and gave up.

Whether Service chiefs could have made a difference lies in the realm of speculation. The indications are that they did not try. They accepted defeat and, in so doing, made it inevitable.

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