The Making Of The British Army (90 page)

²³³
Though even 1968 is questionable, for an SAS soldier was killed in Ethiopia in ambiguous circumstances.

²³⁴
Author’s diary.

²³⁵
Minimum (necessary) force is defined by the army as ‘the measured and proportionate application of violence or coercion, sufficient only to achieve a specific objective and confined in effect to the legitimate target intended’. The contrasting principle in war is
overwhelming
force.

²³⁶
The Irish Nationalist leader Daniel O’Connell had used the term in the House of Commons in 1832: ‘The people of Ireland are ready to become a portion of the Empire, provided they be made so in reality and not in name alone; they are ready to become a kind of West Briton if made so in benefits and justice; but if not, we are Irishmen again.’

²³⁷
The IRA fractured in 1969–70. The ‘Official IRA’ (OIRA) soon declared a ceasefire; the Provisional IRA (PIRA – the ‘Provos’) continued their war with the RUC and army – and, indeed, with the OIRA.

²³⁸
The term derived from the maps issued by HQ Northern Ireland, with their colour overlays showing the preponderant sectarian make-up of an area: green for Catholic/Nationalist/Republican, orange for Protestant/Loyalist, and white for ‘non-sectarian’ – business areas, professional centres such as the universities, or middle-class residential districts (sectarian violence was almost exclusively a working-class phenomenon).

²³⁹
The regiment was an amalgamation (1959) of the King’s Own, whose fortunes in earlier centuries have been chronicled in previous chapters, and the Border Regiment. Its name disappeared from the Army List in 2006 when it was amalgamated with two other infantry regiments to form the Duke of Lancaster’s Regiment. The KORBR was a tight-knit battalion from the north-west of England, and served longer in Northern Ireland than any other regiment.

²⁴⁰
The IJLB trained boys whose NCO potential had one way or another been recognized while at school. They entered at 15 until in 1972 the school leaving age was raised to 16.

²⁴¹
Author’s diary.

²⁴²
This point was made forcefully to the author by a former brigade commander in the Province, subsequently in turn the army’s director of public relations, the professional head of the infantry, and the last Commander British Forces in Hong Kong – Major-General Bryan Dutton.

²⁴³
Rupert Smith,
The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World
(2005).

²⁴⁴
It was this that in 2007 prompted the CGS, Sir Richard Dannatt, to call for public expressions of support for homecoming soldiers: the war in Iraq (and to a lesser extent that in Afghanistan) was deeply unpopular with the public, and Dannatt was intent on decoupling revulsion for the government from support for the troops themselves, without which morale – already under pressure for a number of other reasons – would have sunk ever lower. See also ch. 32.

²⁴⁵
For a few officers and NCOs seconded to the sultan’s armed forces, and Royal Engineers as well as SAS, there was the opportunity for some brisk fighting in Dhofar, in the south of the Gulf state of Oman, where a remarkably little-known war was being fought against Communist insurgents. It was won, under British direction, by 1975.

²⁴⁶
The line put out by the Foreign Office at the time was that until 29 March, the eve of the invasion, there was no intention by the junta to invade, and so no intelligence could have discovered anything to report. It is, of course, ludicrous: even if the invasion had been improvised, as much of it appeared to be, it could not have been mounted in forty-eight hours from conception.

²⁴⁷
Arthur Herman,
To Rule the Waves: How the British Navy Shaped the Modern World
(2004).

²⁴⁸
From
5th Infantry Brigade in the Falkland’s
, by Nicholas van der Bijl and David Aldea (2002).

²⁴⁹
Using Gurkhas was still considered ‘tricky’, but the CGS, General Sir Edwin (‘Dwin’) Bramall, who had served alongside them during the Borneo ‘Confrontation’, insisted that if the army did not use Gurkhas this time then someone would always find a reason not to use them. When he told Margaret Thatcher that he intended sending a Gurkha battalion she replied ‘Only
one
?’

²⁵⁰
The Marines were generally far more combat-ready, and their brigade headquarters and operating procedures much more efficient – a fact not lost in the exhaustive after-action analysis. But all that said, it was a magnificent feat of defiant improvization, parts of which – the medical support, for example – were superb.

²⁵¹
Three others were killed in this desperate action, including the adjutant.

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Son of General Sir Anthony – ‘Para’ – Farrar-Hockley of Imjin fame (see ch. 27).

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Hew Pike,
From the Front Line.

²⁵⁴
Bringing down fire on your own position is the last desperate measure to hold off the attacker. All then depends on how well the trenches have been dug – and luck.

²⁵⁵
Van der Bijl and Aldea,
5th Infantry Brigade in the Falklands.

²⁵⁶
Conversations with author; and Max Arthur,
Above All, Courage.

²⁵⁷
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.
See also ch. 5.

²⁵⁸
The archbishop of Canterbury’s ambivalence over a national ‘thanksgiving service’ in St Paul’s Cathedral was particularly puzzling – to say the least – to many; and more so because as Lieutenant Robert Runcie he had won an MC with the Scots Guards in Germany in 1945.

²⁵⁹
The nadir had been the famous ‘winter of discontent’ of Prime Minister Jim Callaghan’s Labour government, when during widespread strikes by public service workers and others, servicemen had kept the country going. At the same time, pay was so poor that many of its junior ranks with families were receiving income support.

²⁶⁰
In 1965 the RASC had shed its non-transport functions to other corps and taken on the residual transport functions of the Royal Engineers to become the Royal Corps of Transport (RCT).

²⁶¹
‘Imperial’ was dropped from the title in 1964, there being very little left east of Suez.

²⁶²
The Russians had sent a light-armour column from Bosnia through Serbia to sit on the runway at Pristina, announcing that they had come to join KFOR – a brilliant and well-executed tactical movement of the greatest strategic impact which could only be admired (if secretly) by most other military observers.

²⁶³
This was not universally appreciated at the time – a dangerous disconnect between British and American strategic thinking which in part continues. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11 the author recalls listening in disbelief to an FCO official (today a very senior official) disputing that anything fundamental had changed.

²⁶⁴
Article 5 of the North Atlantic Charter states that ‘an armed attack against one or more of [the allies] in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and … [each] will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.’

²⁶⁵
So impressed with McColl was President Karzai, however, that he is reputed to have made enticing offers for him to pay back the Queen’s shilling and take his instead. Blair later made McColl his special envoy to Afghanistan, and when Karzai turned down Paddy Ashdown as the UN nominee as high representative in Kabul, he asked again for McColl (by then DSACEUR) instead. Here were shades of the North-West Frontier and the ‘Great Game’.

²⁶⁶
The ‘Bush Doctrine’ of pre-emptive war was laid out in the National Security Council text
National Security Strategy of the United States
(September 2002): ‘We must deter and defend against the threat before it is unleashed … even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy’s attack … The United States will, if necessary, act pre-emptively.’

²⁶⁷
Simon Jenkins, for example, former editor of
The Times
, in an opinion piece of breathtaking unawareness – headlined ‘Baghdad will be near impossible to conquer’ – wrote: ‘An astonishing event is about to happen. For the first time in modern history a city with the population of London is preparing to resist assault from a land army. The outcome of such a struggle is wholly imponderable.’

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The reference is to Yeats’s poem ‘He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven’: ‘Tread softly because you tread on my dreams’.

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The Military Medal having been discontinued, the MC is now open to all ranks.

²⁷⁰
The army’s so-called ‘harmony guidelines’ are that individual soldiers should not exceed 415 days of separated service in any period of 30 months, and regiments’ tour intervals should be no less than 24 months. Statistics which suggested that most of the army was operating within these guidelines often obscured the reality of disruption at unit level, however, with regiments ‘raided’ for manpower to bring another up to strength for deployment. And since some parts of the army were not available for deployment – the training and support organizations, for example, and certain garrisons – repeat tours for key types of unit were becoming more frequent.

²⁷¹
At the time of the final handover to the Iraqis, in April 2009, several soldiers were observed to be wearing tee-shirts saying ‘Not the end of an era, the end of an error’.

²⁷²
The command of operations is vested in the chief of the defence staff (currently Air Chief Marshal Sir Graham ‘Jock’ Stirrup), but operations are run by the Permanent Joint (tri-service) Headquarters (PJHQ) at Stanmore, the chief of which is a three-star soldier, sailor or airman. Neither the CGS nor CinC (Land) has any direct operational responsibility: their influence is purely ‘moral’, though in practice a consensus must be reached among the service chiefs. PJHQ was established in the wake of the First Gulf War to professionalize the command arrangements for operations which hitherto had been ad hoc, based on what was perceived as the most appropriate of the three separate service HQs to take charge.

²⁷³
Indeed, there has been a surge in contributions to service charities generally these past three years.

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The Apache had turned the Army Air Corps into a combat arm, effectively, rather than one of combat support.

²⁷⁵
See Introduction.

²⁷⁶
See ch. 17. And, indeed, the VC was won, posthumously, by Corporal Bryan Budd of the Parachute Regiment.

²⁷⁷
In a cost-cutting move, all the service hospitals had been closed. Servicemen were henceforward to be treated in a ‘military-managed’ wing of Selly Oak hospital, Birmingham. Predictably, this did not prove up to the sheer casualty load of Iraq and Afghanistan.

²⁷⁸
General Sir David Richards, who had become CinC Land (Forces) a year before, and was to take over as CGS, had on his own initiative placed his command on a ‘campaign footing’, and was increasingly frustrated by the evident unwillingness of parts of the MoD to do likewise.

²⁷⁹
Nor was this wishful memory: Waters had made his position very clear at the time – hence the interview.

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The Royal Armoured Corps was hardest hit, being effectively halved in strength.

²⁸¹
Defence White Paper 2004.

²⁸²
Some battalions equipped, for example, with the Warrior armoured-infantry fighting vehicle, and some helicopter-borne.

²⁸³
General the Lord Guthrie, CDS 1997–2001, has said publicly that he found Gordon Brown ‘unhelpful’ as chancellor of the exchequer.