The Making Of The British Army (76 page)

Beattie had been the RSM of the Royal Irish (the battalion commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel Tim Collins) during the invasion of Iraq, and had been commissioned subsequently. He was awarded the MC for his courage and leadership in Afghanistan, but soon after his next tour of duty was over he left the army: he had had enough.

Troop numbers were now increased once more, and the Taleban offensive was blunted. From this point the IED became as deadly as the assault rifle and RPG (and the cool courage of the bomb disposal officers of the Royal Engineers and the Royal Logistic Corps – formed in 1993 from the RCT, RAOC et al – was daily tested, as it had been in Northern Ireland); but the civil reconstruction programme – the whole object of Reid’s deployment – had seriously stalled.

There have been criticisms of the way Brigadier Ed Butler spread his forces in ‘penny packets’ around Helmand – and indeed Dannatt advised a redeployment in face of the mounting casualties – but Butler himself appeared to feel he had been given no choice in the absence of strategic clarity. In his post-operational report he wrote of ‘the lack of early, formal political direction and a strictly enforced manning cap [upper limit of troop numbers], established upon apparently best case rather than most likely or worst case planning assumptions and taking little account of the enemy vote’. He complained that getting the right equipment and in the right numbers

Butler resigned eighteen months after returning from Afghanistan, as did the commanding officer of 3 Para, Lieutenant-Colonel Stuart Tootal, who was dismayed at the inadequate treatment of his wounded soldiers on evacuation to Britain – not least the lack of a proper military nursing environment at Selly Oak hospital.
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Every foreign army has to withdraw from Kabul in the end – it is the lesson of history – and it does so with a heavy ‘butcher’s bill’, for that is, in Kipling’s words, the ‘arithmetic on the frontier’. The new US administration of President Obama is now following the same strategy here as in Iraq, placing the main effort on training the Afghan forces to deal with the insurgency themselves, with a troop surge meanwhile to get the situation in Helmand in particular under control. Even if building the Afghan forces goes to plan, however, there will be a deal more fighting for the British army. For this reason, in his final six months at its head, Dannatt had determined on a review of the army’s ability to go the whole fourteen rounds.
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But why had the army seemed so keen to quit the ring in Iraq, and why had it seemed to reel under the blows in Afghanistan?

In a real sense the army was –
is –
still adjusting to the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Cold War was the only time a force of significant size (a BAOR of four divisions) had been kept in being to meet a specific threat. The cuts to the army’s strength made in the Major government’s determined pursuit of a ‘peace dividend’ were the origins of the permanent state of operational ‘overstretch’ in which the army has found itself in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Since the disbanding of BAOR there has also been, in the opinion of some former army chiefs, too little competition at the rank of major-general – except, that is, in the Ministry of Defence, where success can be too dependent on political acumen. For while policy is ultimately determined by ministers – quite evidently and properly – without unequivocal military advice it inevitably risks being flawed. Some senior officers had in fact argued at the time of ‘Options for Change’, as the programme of
Tory cuts was euphemistically entitled, that the priorities were wrong, that there was too great a concern to preserve hardware across the three services at the expense of manpower. In a recent exchange with the author, the commander-in-chief of UK land forces at the time, General Sir John Waters, recounted how he had urged that the ‘order of battle’ – the regiments themselves – be preserved in preference to any of the equipment programmes then on the stocks, and how he still holds that such a priority would have served the nation better in the past decade and a half.
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And yet the regiments were cut, with many ancient names disappearing in amalgamations and in truth plain takeovers.
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Old names have no sacred right to continue, of course; but reputation is not built overnight, and the losses in both numbers and quality proved a high price to pay for cherished equipment programmes. History shows that it is easier to re-equip an army than to raise and train one.

But it did not stop with ‘Options for Change’. When John Major’s government fell in 1997, the new Labour administration’s defence secretary George Robertson began a strategic defence review (SDR). Given that all reviews are undertaken in the expectation, one way or another, of cutting costs, most senior officers were pleased enough with the outcome, which involved a shift of resources towards ‘expeditionary warfare’ and away from what remained of BAOR (an armoured division of three brigades) and all the paraphernalia of Cold War in the other two services. SDR was, however, progressively underfunded to such an extent that the army – like the forces as a whole, indeed – was not able to do what SDR had envisaged, and it was soon trying to cope with demands well beyond those articulated in the review’s original planning assumptions, even as restated in 2004 thus: ‘As a norm, and without causing overstretch, the Armed Forces must be capable of conducting three simultaneous and enduring operations of small to medium-scale. Given time to prepare, the UK should be capable of undertaking a demanding large-scale intervention operation while still maintaining a commitment to a small-scale peace support operation.’
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It did not prove possible, however, to prosecute the Iraq counter-insurgency with the utmost vigour while maintaining a brigade in Helmand.

And then, as if things were not bad enough, in late 2004 the situation was made even worse by a further ‘peace dividend’ drawn by the Treasury – a cut of 2,000 men following the Northern Ireland agreement. The Army Board decided that these cuts could best be borne by the infantry, but only if there was an end to the ‘arms plot’ as it was known – the rotation of regiments as formed bodies between stations and roles every four or five years.
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Instead multi-battalion regiments were to be formed, with constituent battalions permanently based at specific stations, and with individual soldiers posted between battalions as the need arose. This in theory meant that there would be the same number of battalions available for operations because there would be none
hors de combat
during the months of transition from station to station and role to role. Few soldiers believed, however, that this was anything other than ‘smoke and mirror’ work, and it risked a very great deal of what had taken years – centuries in some cases – to build for the sake of a little gain in ‘organizational flexibility’. In fact, in the way that all attempts at rationalizing the infantry’s structure produce yet another obstinately untidy model, there are now more types of regiment, from those of a single battalion to those of five, than ever before.

So was it the army that faltered? Or was it the MoD, sliding into two wars without the right numbers, equipment or operational plans, encouraged by wishful thinking in No. 10 and the FCO – and, in the words of one former CDS, by the Treasury’s ‘unhelpfulness’?
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There is no guarantee that the British or any other army will always win its battles, or even its wars, or that its soldiers will always do their duty. Alanbrooke had after all confided to his diary in 1941: ‘Cannot work out why troops are not fighting better’ (and many of these regulars). And indeed the ‘chattering classes’ were soon firing ranging shots in the press once it was announced that combat troops would leave Iraq in July 2009;
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but until the Iraq (Chilcot) inquiry reports, there will be no knowing whether any of these rounds have fallen near
the mark. The evidence of the body bags suggests that shirking on the ground had not been widespread, however; and the evidence of medal citations such as Private Beharry’s suggests there was no want of old-fashioned courage when the occasion demanded. Perhaps, old joke though it is, George Bernard Shaw was right when he wrote, ‘The British soldier can stand up to anything except the British War Office.’
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Although these words were written in 1828 in the
Edinburgh Review
on the publication of Volume I of General Sir William Napier’s
History of the War on the Peninsula
, they have a decidedly contemporary ring. For as I have tried to show, the British army has been built brick by
brick, to no architect’s plan and in a number of styles, and the soldier today is conscious of his operational heritage as well as being formed by it. Except in passing, however, to explain a point better, I have not tried to demonstrate that the British army is different from other armies: I have taken it as self-evident that an army which is today smaller than that of Turkey, or of Greece, France, Germany or Italy, and not much bigger than that of Spain, and yet is still a major player on the world’s military stage, must in some important ways be unique.

Britain was the last of the great powers to introduce conscription and the first to abandon it. For all but twenty-four years of the British army’s continuous existence since 1660 it has relied on volunteers. Unlike that of any other major power during those three and a half centuries, however, the British army has never existed because of a clearly identified threat to the ‘homeland’: France, for example, with her long borders, was always vulnerable to attack from rival Austria or the Netherlands, as were they in turn from France; Prussia positively floated on the map of Europe during the period, her borders resting wherever the Prussian army could make a defensive position; and Russia, though always able to trade vast tracts of territory for time, relied ultimately on her army to settle matters in the marches of Eastern Europe, the Baltic and the Levant. For a century and a quarter after independence the US army, too, fought its frontier wars with native tribes and with Mexico. Britain, on the other hand, always felt secure enough behind its ‘wooden walls’: the enemy could never come by sea, as successive sea lords confidently asserted, and when the Germans once tried to come by air the retort was emphatic.

Because of this, the British army has always had to argue its rationale – and thus for its rations. And more often than not it has been half-starved, for trade and empire were activities of choice, while to politicians of all colours continental military entanglements were something to be avoided altogether. Indeed, as a national insurance policy the army has always been more ‘third party’ than ‘fully comprehensive’. And even when from the middle of the nineteenth century its numbers grew larger for reasons of empire, these numbers were dispersed around the world, rarely combining in more than divisional strength, whereas other nations organized their forces on an altogether larger scale – into army corps and even discrete armies. The British army did not as a rule think big in this way, although it did think globally – or, at least, its soldiers were at ease globally. When for example the 25th Middlesex – a
Kitchener battalion – was sent to Siberia via Vladivostok on its own in 1918 as part of the anti-Bolshevik intervention, the soldiers did not bat an eyelid. Afterwards the Middlesex’s commanding officer merely reported that ‘One and all behaved like Englishmen – the highest eulogy that can be passed upon the conduct of men.’ For 150 years British army officers, often very junior ones, have had to relate what they were doing on the ground to the grand strategic object that London desired. Nowadays, young NCOs are doing the same.