The generals must share the blame

It says something for the media – and the general commentariat - that, years after we have been ploughing the solitary furrow, pointing out that the military should bear some of the blame for the current parlous state of our Armed Forces, and their lacklustre performance in first Iraq and now Afghanistan, only now does The Spectator pop up with an article headed: "The generals must share the blame".

The piece is written by Paul Robinson is a professor in the Graduate School of International Affairs at the University of Ottawa. Giving the Spectator the comfort blanket it needs, Robinson has also been a military intelligence officer in both the British army, as a regular officer, and the Canadian forces, as a reservist. Thus, he has the right credentials to say the words and get a hearing.

Says Robinson, while it is fashionable for the military top brass to attack politicians when things go wrong, many of the army's problems are of their own making. This, of course, we have said many times, with a particularly trenchant piece in April 2009, when we described the military, as currently constituted, as "a deeply dysfunctional organisation, not least evidenced by its state of denial over its performance in Iraq."

But while this blog has been a voice in the wilderness, alternately attacked and ignored, the professor is allowed to note that, while in recent years, failure to "support the troops" has become the ultimate political sin, reminding us that the Conservatives' soon-to-be defence adviser, Gen Dannatt, blasted Brown a few weeks ago, letting it slip that his brave plea for 2,000 extra troops had been ignored by our callous PM.

But, he asks, has Gordon Brown really "betrayed" the troops in the field? A good degree of cynicism is in order, he asserts, then coming up with an interesting thesis of his own.

In reality, Robinson says, both as chancellor and as prime minister, Mr Brown has given Britain’s armed forces a lease of life which they had no reason to expect, while the country's military leaders, including and especially Dannatt, must share the blame for the difficulties their troops have faced in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

Of course, while it is fashionable for the general to attack politicians, it is deeply unfashionable even to think of blaming soldiers for anything. But a McGonagall-like desire to help the ordinary serviceman or woman on the front line, says Robinson, should not serve as cover for the senior officers who lead them.

Nor, he says, should it prevent us from criticising the institutional culture in which they serve. One element of this culture is that professional soldiers tend to look at themselves as part of a select order, upholding the highest moral and professional standards, while seeing politicians as self-serving hypocrites. He adds:

As a result, when things go wrong, the natural tendency of many in uniform, especially the generals, is to blame the politicians rather than to look in the mirror. The combination of this self-satisfied culture and the moral elevation of the soldier in the popular imagination has led to a modern version of the infamous dolchstosslegende, the stab-in-the-back theory which encouraged Germans to believe that they had not really been defeated in the First World War.

Robinson recalls that the "sharks" at the Daily Mail led the way. "A shameful betrayal of our servicemen"; "Treachery, politicians, and the shameful betrayal of this man of honour [Richard Dannatt]", its headlines have screamed. Sensing blood, the rest of the press have joined the frenzy, not least The Sun in its current and ongoing campaign.

Thus, it is held, the army's humiliation in Iraq and its failure to bring peace to Helmand, are not its fault. Rather, the Labour party, and in particular Gordon Brown, "coldheartedly sent the troops off to die without the proper equipment and without the reinforcements which might have enabled them to achieve victory." If only they'd had the tools to do the job, our fine 'boys and girls' would have dispatched the Taleban long ago."

For the past two years, elements of the British press and the British army (with General Dannatt to the fore) have worked all out to propagate a similar myth. This is, of course, says Robinson, perfect nonsense. He adds:

One of the more galling sounds of the past two years, he says, has been that of Americans smugly observing that the British have been slow to learn the lessons of modern counter-insurgency. The criticism has been especially hard to bear because it is true. Many of the British army's problems have been of its own making.

As one officer participant has eloquently put it, the decision in 2006 "to scatter small groups of soldiers across the north of Helmand, in isolation, in an intelligence vacuum and with complete disregard for the most basic tenets of counter-insurgency was, quite simply, a gross military blunder." And even if it is true that this decision was the result of "political pressure" from London (which it was not), it was the responsibility of the generals to resist such pressure and to insist that the troops be used sensibly.

In the Second World War, Robinson notes, General Alan Brooke would argue all night with Churchill when he thought the prime minister was making absurd military judgments. In the same way, while politicians make the decisions on whether to deploy troops overseas, senior officers have a duty not only to ensure that troops are used in sensible ways, but to tell the politicians what those would and would not be. Alas, Britain's military leaders have failed to restrain the Labour government from its strategic follies.

According to Robinson, the reason why this situation came to pass stem from the late 1980s, when the British armed forces were orientated almost entirely towards the Soviet threat. The collapse of communism left them without a raison d'être but, rather than destroying Britain’s military, the Labour party saved it. The 1997 strategic defence review provided a new mission — expeditionary warfare to be a "force for good" around the world – which the top brass embraced with zeal. Their existence depends on it.

From there, however, the man then seems to go astray. He argues that these factors together mean that the armed forces are institutionally averse to recognising a fundamental truth - that the problems they have faced in Iraq and Afghanistan derive not from a lack of resources but from the very nature of the missions themselves.

Recognising, he says, this "would mean admitting that expeditionary warfare is not a good idea, and admitting that would cast the whole defence budget into doubt." Blaming Mr Brown provides a convenient way out of this impasse.

More specifically, the strategic defence review – and subsequent white papers – reconfigured the military for the rapid reaction concept, dedicated to early intervention with decisive force, enabling speedy task completion and short-duration deployments. Thus, the military was never equipped for the low-intensity, long wars which it has had to fight.

Nonetheless, Robinson's overall premise is not wrong when he asserts that, in 1997, the Labour government gave the country a new strategic direction, which has not worked out well. He thus concludes that if the Conservatives take power next year, they will inherit and complete the latest defence review. In the process, future defence ministers, including possibly General Dannatt, need to do more than merely juggle resources.

They need to re-examine fundamental strategic assumptions. The stab-in-the-back myth stands in the way. It maintains the pretence that the basic direction was all right, and merely the implementation went wrong, so that all can be solved with the application of additional funds. While this story may serve some narrow bureaucratic interests, says Robinson, it does the people of Britain no service at all.

COMMENT THREAD

War is too important to be left to the generals

Famously said by the French politician and former prime minister Georges Clemenceau, this is becoming an issue in the prosecution of the war in Iraq – and war it is – as evidence begins to emerge that much of the current British strategy is increasingly being dictated by the military, with insufficient political input.

One of the many clues to this lies in an article in last week's Sunday Telegraph, which pointed out that the current Labour government front bench are "total strangers to front line".

The piece was by Geoffrey Wheatcroft, who pointed out that every prime minister from 1940 to 1963 had served as an infantry officer in the Great War. Even Winston Churchill, after he had resigned from the government in 1915, commanded a battalion in the trenches for several months. Attlee and Macmillan were badly wounded, one at Gallipoli, the other on the Western Front. Eden won an MC for rescuing his sergeant under fire.

By contrast, in the present cabinet, there is not a single member of the Government who has ever worn uniform, let alone heard the proverbial shot fired in anger. Tony Blair did not even serve in the cadet force at Fettes and, with the exception of "the preposterous Major Eric Joyce", there is no Labour MP with any military experience.

Wheatcroft, however, sees this in terms of "military virgins" who wage war now that they are too old to serve. "Never has there been such a gulf between the forces and politicians," he writes, "few of whom know any soldiers or sailors even socially. Never has there been such a breakdown of true responsibility."

What this conveys is an impression that the political novices are imposing on the military, dedicated professionals who are suffering the ministrations of the amateurs, and suffering as a result.

However, there are different ways of looking at this. In his book, "Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen and Leadership in Wartime", published in 2002, just before the second Gulf War, Eliot A. Cohen – described as the (American) nation's leading scholar of military-civilian relations – argued for more not less civilian interference. In the history of warfare, all the great civilian war statesmen interfered in things military.

This, Cohen says, was unavoidable:

The goals of the military - the definitions of victory - are ultimately political questions; as Churchill wrote in 1923, "The distinction between politics and strategy diminishes as the point of view is raised. At the summit true politics and strategy are one." Not even military professionals have real practice employing military tactics: They spend most of their careers not fighting. "It is quite true that conventional war can hardly be made by complete amateurs," Cohen concludes, "yet neither can it be handed over to the professionals."

Cohen then cites examples of great civilian statesmanship: Abraham Lincoln in the Civil War; Georges Clemenceau in World War I; Winston Churchill in World War II; and David Ben Gurion in Israel's war for independence, demonstrating the need for a hands-on approach to military affairs. He thus challenges the long-held view that military strategy should be a sphere wholly apart from civilian leadership, disagreeing that military strategy is a matter of technical expertise, which must inevitably be degraded by civilian, and does not accept that the political role is merely to set the goal and leave the military to decide how to get there.

Another clue emerges from a remarkable interview for Australian television of Dr Rosemary Hollis from Chatham House. She claims that the current British strategy is "one driven to a large extent by the advice of concerned military leaders in Iraq who have warned that British troops may be doing more harm than good in the country."

Other sources, of a diverse nature seem to confirm this, pointing out that, far from taking a hand-on approach to the day-to-day management of the war, the Tony Blair and his ministers, handicapped by their lack of military experience, are leaving too much to the generals. They are too willing to defer to their judgement, even when the outcome has profound political implications.

For sure, as even today another group of experts pointed out, the armed forces are undergoing a cash crisis, but this is largely long-term and related to the strategic objectives of the forces.

As far as the prosecution of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are concerned, the money is not actually drawn down from the defence budget, but found from contingency reserves, funded directly from the central budget.

One thing which has puzzled us is the continual refrain that that the armed forces are short of key items of equipment – ranging from armoured vehicles to more helicopters – all of any of which can be obtained through what are known as the "Urgent Operational Requirement" (UOR) process. Yet, we are constantly assured by ministers – who could so easily be contradicted on this, if they were not telling the truth – that all UORs, which have been approved by the chain of command, have been sanctioned by ministers.

Ministers themselves do not have the knowledge to generate orders for equipment, and neither does the system work that way. The armed forces have to trigger the process by asking for what the need. And, from this we must conclude, some of the reason why specific equipment is missing from the field is simply because it has not been requested.

That actually seems to have been the case with issue of armoured vehicles to supplement the "Snatch" Land Rovers, with the reasons why they were adequate coming, in the first instance, not from ministers but from the higher echelons of the military, who have been opposed to the idea of taking on new equipment.

We have explored what might be some of the reasons for this in an earlier post and sufficient emerges from that, and other posts (such as here and here), to confirm that the military has a far greater role in the running of its own affairs – and the current war strategy - than is popularly imagined.

Thus, while we see a growing legend, as expressed in one blog, that the, "Soldiers have done a sterling job under impossible political conditions…" the top brass, as well as the politicians, seem to have some of the responsibility for the current situations.

That is not in any way to exculpate the present government – ministers bear the ultimate responsibility for any failures (in theory at least). But, unfashionable though such a view might be, this post simply serves to offer a corrective suggestion. Simply, if we are going to be locked into that oft quoted paradigm of "lions led by donkeys", it is as well to remember that, when that phrasing emerged, many of the "donkeys" were in uniform. And that might apply with some force in this current situation.

COMMENT THREAD