Defence of the Realm

Never tell the whole story

2012-02-09T09:31:00.007Z

The British administration is to purchase for the RAF another Boeing C-17 strategic transport aircraft (pictured above), bringing the total to eight – two less than the Indian Air Force fleet.

This £200 million purchase is reported in The Independent, having been announced by no lesser a personage than David Cameron himself at PMQs. Such grand issues of state, such as the purchase of one transport aircraft, can no longer, it seems, be left to the defence secretary.

The announcement came after a challenge over today's Defence Select Committee report which warned that Britain could struggle to mount an operation on the scale of the Libya mission in the future, such has been the scale of recent defence cuts.

Unchallenged, however, Cameron is allowed to propagandise freely, telling the Commons that, "Because the Ministry of Defence's finances are better run and better managed, and because we have found savings, we will be able to purchase an additional C-17 for the RAF". "This aircraft is becoming an absolutely brilliant workhorse for the RAF in terms of bringing men and material into a war zone like Afghanistan, but also evacuating civilians in times of need", he says.

What is not said, of course, is that the real reason for the purchase is to a desperate attempt to fill the huge gap left by the failure of the £2.7 billion Airbus A-400M programme, which was supposed to have delivered 25 of their shiny new military transports to the RAF by 2006, with an in-service date of 2007.

When the programme hit multiple snags – some of which have yet to be resolved – the delivery date was moved to 2011, and the RAF's ageing fleet of C-130Ks was given a refit at the cost of £15.3 million, in order to fill the gap.

However, still further problems with the A-400M mean that we will be lucky to see deliveries of the A-400M (now down to 22) by 2014, with an expected (if optimistic) in-service date by 2015. Meanwhile, wing fatigue have required four of the remaining 14-strong C-130K fleet to be retired last year, with the rest due to be scrapped this year.

Furthermore, some of the newer 24-strong C-130J fleet have been hammered so badly, from service in Afghanistan, that they are showing signs of premature ageing and will require wing replacement work, starting this year and taking an unspecified number of machines out of service.

All of this means that, as the National Audit Office reported last year, the RAF would be "unlikely to be able to sustain the current tactical capability". In less measured language, the RAF is now dangerously short of airlift capacity.

So bad is the situation that, this January, an announcement was sneaked out that the MoD was to buy two second-hand BAe 146s to supplement its air transport activities in Afghanistan – the possibility of which we reported in 2009, when 47 were available for purchase.

The addition of one C-17 still hardly scratches the surface, and is hardly a proper occasion for a triumphal announcement by a prime minister – affordable only because of the "savings" arising from the run-down of the transport fleet and the delay in buying the A-400Ms.

At the heart of this, though, is the political decision by the previous (John Major's) administration to take part in the European programme, and Blair's decision in May 2000 formally to order the machines. But never let it be said that we get the whole story from the MSM or the MoD. By their silence, a procurement disaster of the past becomes today's triumph.

COMMENT THREAD

Lessons unlearned

2012-02-08T12:57:00.002Z

One of the things I particularly enjoyed about Overlord, Max Hasting's book about the 1944 Normandy landings, is the way he interweaves the narrative with short dissertations about the equipment used in the campaign, including analyses of the many shortcomings.

There, I though, was a man who understood (to a degree) the relationship between the fighting performance of armies, and the equipment with which the were provided – issues especially relevant in Normandy where the Allies had failed to produce a tank which could match German armour or deal with the much-feared 88mm flak/anti-tank gun.

But if the man had then (in 1984) the glimmerings of understanding, any lessons he learned during the writing of his book, he seems to have unlearned as old-age, pomposity and grandeur have overtaken intellect.

This is evident from his latest piece in The Daily Mail, where he deplores the encroachment in the Army of what he calls the "elf'n'safety and a busybody culture" which, he asserts, is making babies of us all.

Hastings's cri de coeur rests in turn on Gen Peter Wall, the current CGS, who last week "hit out" at the "zero-risk culture" which, he said, had "fuelled unrealistic demands that no British blood should be shed on battlefields".

Human rights lawyers, Wall asserted, were among those who had created an "expectation" that troops should not come to harm in war zones. The spotlight shone on the Armed Forces in Iraq and Afghanistan had exposed "a variety of awkward ethical, legal, human rights and equipment issues".

But, he added: "There will be an expectation in some circles in society that the sort of zero-risk culture that is understandably sought in many other walks of life ought to be achievable on the battlefield".

Nevertheless, he said, the public must be prepared for lives to be lost in future conflicts. Despite the equipment lessons learned in Afghanistan, the "operating risks" would be greater on a future mission where the UK was forced to put "boots on the ground" in an unknown theatre of war.

Picking up on that theme, Hastings tells us that Wall's dismay "is widely shared in the armed forces, and among senior veterans". Name dropping in the way that he so grandly does, he then tells us he heard Gen Michael Rose, who commanded the SAS in the Falklands, "deplore the new ethic created by coroners, human rights cases and media pressure, which he believes to be gravely damaging the Army as a fighting service".

Now, there are few people who will disagree with the general premise, that war is dangerous and soldiering entails risk. Further, it comes as no surprise that, when soldiers make a career out of going to strange, foreign places in order to kill people, there is always a chance that they are going to come back with bits missing, or in a body bag.

However, on the basis of what he is told by Army worthies, Hastings decides that we, the public, are expecting too much. Although the Army has had to fight its recent campaigns amid a deplorable shortage of helicopters, he says, we should ignore much of the claptrap about alleged equipment failures: our soldiers in Afghanistan are the best-equipped Army Britain has ever put into the field.

If their kit is not perfect, he informs us, it is because nothing ever is. If commanders sometimes make mistakes which cost lives, and earn magisterial rebukes from ignorant coroners, this is because young men do make mistakes, and in war the price is paid in blood.

And that is the word from Hastings. If we are to take him at face value, concerns about the Snatch Land Rover, the pathetically inadequate Vector, and the stupidity of the Jackal, are misplaced. Pointing out their deficiencies is "claptrap", and commanders (many of whom – and especially those making decisions on equipment - are not that young) are entitled to make mistakes.

The tragedy of this mindset – and that it clearly is – is that it neglects two important issues.

Firstly, it fails to allow for that fact that people are reasonably tolerant of military casualties, although that tolerance reduces in what might be termed an "unpopular" war. What primarily they are concerned with is what are perceived to be unnecessary casualties, caused by avoidable errors, or inadequacies in equipment.

Secondly, it neglects the very essence of counter-insurgency warfare, where the objective is not the capture of territory but the "hearts and minds" of the indigenous population in the area of operations. In thus type of battle, though, the enemy is also fighting for the same objective, but that includes the "hearts and minds" of the home population, from which their opposing troops are drawn.

Thus do insurgents, as a matter of course, target soldiers specifically to cause casualties, the purpose not to achieve any direct military objective but to influence public opinion and reduce support for the war. As with Viet Nam, they know full well that wars are won on the home front, when "permission" to fight is withdrawn and the war becomes politically unsustainable.

In such circumstances, it is incumbent on military commanders to make "force protection" a major theatre priority. If soldiers' lives are the currency of war, where every death is a victory for the enemy, keeping deaths to an unavoidable minimum is a necessary military objective.

Above that though, no commander can afford the luxury or taking casualties that are perceived to be preventable – and that really is the issue. No one, surely, can argue that the deployment of inadequate vehicles to Iraq and then Afghanistan was anything other than a mistake, and that lives were lost unnecessarily.

There is, however, a third and perhaps even more important element. In the context of both Iraq and Afghanistan, enemy tactics involved the extensive use of IEDs. The effect of this on the counter-insurgency forces is to reduce tactical mobility, and to force local commanders to limit the scale of operations to keep casualties to within "acceptable" bounds.

In this context, force protection is not an optional extra, an add-on luxury to be supplied once other operational needs have been satisfied. It is a sine qua non of modern, discretionary operations.

Behind all this, though, one sees a deeper, more sinister issue. With a number of human rights cases pending, and an appeal due in the Supreme Court over the Snatch Land Rover, it seems that the Army and its apologists are indulging in high-level back covering, to conceal or mitigate egregious failures in the supply of equipment.

There, I have no truck with this "lessons learned" culture, which seems to be the military (and official) response to the supposed "elf'n'safety and busybody culture". Any number of mistakes are permissible, it seems, as long as the lessons are duly learned, and the mistakes are not repeated … until the next time, when lessons have to be learned all over again.

By any measure, sending Snatch Land Rovers into Iraq was a bad decision. Keeping them there, and taking so long to provide mine/ambush protected vehicles, was criminal folly. Deploying both the Snatch and its replacement, the Vector, to Afghanistan, was the height of stupidity.

Demanding that troops are better equipped to deal with predictable threats, before they go into theatre is not "claptrap". Nor is demanding emerging threats to be quickly recognised, with countermeasures rapidly supplied, unreasonable. It is common and military sense.

Hastings does us and the military no favours by taking his current line. He should know from his previous writings how important it is to supply the correct equipment to our armed forces. He is going backwards, a case here of lessons unlearned.

In the foreword to Overlord, he cited Basil Liddel Hart, who had suggested that the Allies had been strangely reluctant to reflect upon their own superiority in Normandy and draw some appropriate conclusions about their own performance. "There has been too much glorification of the campaign and too little objective investigation".

When it came to the lamentable performance of British armour, Hastings observed that "the British Authorities were at pains to stifle any public debate about the shortcomings of their tanks, although these were well known throughout the British Army".

In the House of Commons, the government was constantly challenged by Labour MP Richard Stokes, only to have his entirely justified complaints dismissed with the assurance that "public discussion of this issue was not in the public interest". Field Marshall Montgomery himself quashed a succession of complaints and open expressions of concern, writing at the time of such reports being "likely to cause a lowering of morale and lack of confidence among the troops".

Hastings then reports that, "The government lied systematically, until the very end of the war, about the Allies' tragic failure to produce tanks capable of matching those of the Germans".

It seems to me that Hastings needs to re-read his own book.

COMMENT THREAD

The terrible truth

2012-02-07T13:14:00.000Z

As an antidote to Sandy Gall, in the current edition of The Week, we have Crispin Black on "The terrible truth about our wasted sacrifice in Afghanistan". His piece makes for sombre reading. Here are some excerpts:

Not only did we lose in the province for which we were responsible, Helmand. We lost because our generals have no idea how to deploy our troops to best effect.

One of the reasons the top brass were so keen to get involved in Afghanistan was to restore the army's reputation after its defeat in Iraq at the hands of Shia militiamen in Basra. They reckoned they could handle things in Afghanistan.

Senior British commanders in Afghanistan in 2006, backed by their bosses in London … deliberately and recklessly disregarded an eternal military axiom: never split your forces …

And then the shooting war which we had just about mastered changed. The dastardly Taliban switched tactics and started to blow up our soldiers on patrol with roadside bombs or Improvised Explosive Devices, in the jargon.

An army which had spent a generation facing just such threats in Northern Ireland was taken by surprise without the bomb disposal equipment or protective vehicles to cope. Soldiers on resupply runs in Belfast in the 1980s travelled in vehicles with heavier armour than their counterparts on the frontline in Afghanistan 20 years later.

Then he concludes:

There is one overarching truth about the contemporary British Army that they and the rest of us are reluctant to face up to. Yes, soldiers in today's army are more experienced than their predecessors. They are better trained and equipped and more decorated. We have all been inspired by their example and their fortitude in adversity.

But in the end they have failed in their only purpose - they don't win their wars.

And that is why get the likes of Dannatt and Richards creating a veritable blizzard of diversionary pieces – anything to throw the MSM off the scent, and salvage their reputations.

COMMENT: "WORSE THAN I THOUGHT" THREAD

Worse than I thought

2012-02-07T13:04:00.000Z

At the end of January, I wrote a review of a review of Sandy Gall's book on Afghanistan, War against the Taliban, a book which purports to tell you "Why it all went wrong in Afghanistan".

I complained at the time that we seemed to be in "he says – she says" territory, where the current idea of writing history is to gather a collection of interviews of leading players and stitch them together to make a narrative.

Having now obtained the book, and read part of it, it strikes me that the volume is even worse than I at first thought. Chapter 15, which purports to tell us of the background to the role of Brown and Blair in the early stages of the war, is a case in point – and only one.

Consulting the references, after having read the chapter, one finds that the narrative is not so much "he says, she says", as "he says". Almost the entire chapter is based on Gen. Dannatt's book, Leading from the front, with 19 separate references. The bulk of the rest is his testimony to the Chilcot inquiry and a few press articles, followed by just over two pages largely based on an interview with Gen Jackson.

Thus, a highly contentious and important part of our history relies primarily, in Sandy Gall's hands, on the testimony of one witness, with a few comments from another. There is not attempt whatsoever to triangulate, to seek the views of other witnesses, or to refer to documentation.

Further, it is not as if either of his witnesses could be considered impartial, or even reliable. And even if they were, the reliance on so few sources can hardly be regarded as a sound approach to writing history. However, what Dannatt and Jackson do have, as does Sandy Gall, is prestige. That, it seems, allows you to get away with writing crap – and get glowing reviews in the Failygraph for it.

I have a feeling I shall return to this theme.

COMMENT THREAD

Afghanistan: what to make of it all?

2012-02-04T12:37:00.001Z

A series of leaks on the progress of the war, and then a report on what appear to be plans for an expedited US withdrawal, have had the media abuzz with stories and analysis, but with no real consensus – a question of heat but very little light.

The first trigger was a Nato report leaked to the BBC, which suggested the Taliban in Afghanistan are being directly helped by the Pakistani security service (ISI), only to be followed by a predictable denial, with the Pakistani foreign minister, Hina Rabbani Khar, dismissing the report as, "old wine in an even older bottle".

As to the US plans, the trigger here was a suggestion by US defence secretary Leon Panetta suggesting that US combat missions in Afghanistan would end in 2013. That, though, was quickly clarified when Panetta said that the US would keep fighting alongside Afghan troops, but would cede the lead role in combat operations.

Thus, US troops would remain "combat-ready" as the United States wound down its longest war, but the troops would largely shift to a train-and-assist role as Afghan forces took responsibility for security before an end-2014 deadline for full Afghan control.

By the time Panetta came up with this reassurance, however, the damage had already been done, with widespread reports, culled from the original leaked report, that the Taliban, "backed by Pakistan", expected to retake Afghanistan when coalition forces leave.

However, despite the flurry of media activity, one is tempted to say "what's new?". I don't think anyone who knows the region and its politics is under any illusions that the Pakistanis work, and have been working with Pashtun and other tribal factions, with Arab support and money, specifically but not exclusively the Haqqani network.

Nor is there anything particularly new about the US military planning gradually to hand over security responsibilities to the Afghan forces, then easing themselves out of the picture. And nor is there any secret that the Taliban expect to have a free run at taking over the country, once the infidels have departed. What else is there to say?

Well, the Canadian National Post has a stab at offering something different, noting that the problem is that ordinary Afghan villagers subscribe to local codes of politics and morality that are profoundly alien and offensive to Western ways.

It tells us that gender equality, religious pluralism, due process - all of these notions are meaningless gibberish to a society made up largely of illiterate goat herders and farmers, who view women and children as property, and non-Muslims as hated infidels. In this world, the real business of public life begins and ends at the local mosque or village council.

Thus we are informed that, if outsiders in Kabul and Washington have money and guns to give, they will take them. They might even permit a school or highway to be built in their district, and appear in a photo-op. But that's where it ends.

Closer to home, we have a superbly robust commentary from Simon Jenkins but, other than to project the view that the UK – alongside the US – might be positioning for a war against Iran, having learnt nothing from the failure of Afghanistan, he really does not have that much new to say.

Matt Cavanagh also has a go, in The Spectator, but he ends up reiterating sentiments expressed in earlier articles, and in particular his piece last November. His conclusion this time is that we now have an opportunity "to move towards a more honest and realistic debate about the Afghan campaign and its prospects of success, in public as well as private".

Considering that we have yet to have an honest and realistic debate about the Iraq war, it is perhaps a little rash to expect anything different of Afghanistan, especially as the view of the UK administration on the conduct of the war seems to be locked in aspic.

This we saw recently from Lord Astor of Hever, defence spokesman in the Lords, who told the upper house that military means alone would not bring about a more secure country, then saying:

We have always supported an Afghan-led political process to help bring peace and stability to Afghanistan, and we continue to encourage all parties to take forward reconciliation. We will continue to engage with our US colleagues on these important matters.

We are not going to get a clearer definition of the UK stance, and while there is nothing new here either, it is useful to note the acknowledgement that a political process is required "to help bring peace and stability to Afghanistan", and that the military alone cannot close the deal.

In assessing current progress, as Cavanagh would have us do, it is useful to refer to the one of the great authorities on the nature of war, Carl von Clausewitz, and one of the most famous miss-quotations of all time: "War is merely the continuation of policy by other means".

This is, in fact, an abbreviated heading in Book One of his famous treatise on the nature of war, whereas the text states something different, and different in an important respect. War, he writes, is not merely an act of policy but a true political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse, carried on with other means.

This, Clausewitz expands upon in the rarely quoted Book Eight where, under the heading, "War is an instrument of policy", he tells us:

It is, of course, well-known that the only source of war is politics – the intercourse of governments and peoples; but it is apt to be assumed that war suspends that intercourse and replaces it by a wholly different condition, ruled by no law but its own.

Clausewitz then goes on to repeat his earlier aphorism, subtly improved, declaring: "We maintain, on the contrary, that war is simply a continuation of political intercourse, with the addition of other means". He then adds:

We deliberately use this phrase "with the addition of other means" because we also want to make it clear that war in itself does not suspend political intercourse or change it into something entirely different. In essentials that intercourse continues, irrespective of the means it employs.

Changing the "by" into "with" completely changes the meaning of Clausewitz's aphorism, making war an overall part of the political process, and not something separate from it.

That, it seems, to me, the Taliban understand – and so do the Pakistanis and other regional players. It is something the colonial British understood, but not their successors or the Americans. While both play lip-service to a political solution, they do tend to treat the military activity as something different and distinct from the political process.

And thereby we find Lord Astor reiterating the reasons why the coalition efforts must fail. On the one hand, the separation of military and political efforts defies sense, failing as it does to recognise the Clausewitz teaching. But, worse still, the flaw is in seeking an "Afghan-led political process", which is still further separated from the military effort.

In the scheme of things, Afghan politics are not played out within the actual borders that none of the players actually recognise, but on a far wider tableau, which takes in the ambitions and aspirations of all the neighbouring states, the former state of Baluchistan (now absorbed into Pakistan and Iran), and of course, the great regional elephant in the room, India.

And that also is nothing particularly new – not on this blog. Unfortunately, the coalition got it wrong from the very start, and it is too late to fix it now.

COMMENT THREAD

A stampede of elephants

2012-02-03T17:15:00.001Z

You would have thought that, given the huge number of column inches devoted to the diverse and expensive defence procurement failures, the MSM might be interested in this government's proposals for remedying the system, delivered on Wednesday in the form of a White Paper.

The official announcement on the MoD Website makes the ostensible agenda interesting enough, telling us that the "Government" has set out its plans to prioritise investment in Science and Technology, "in order to ensure the UK's Armed Forces continue to have state-of-the-art technology, equipment and support, in a White Paper published today".

Apart from the Financial Times, however (and a small, down-page item in the business section of The Times), the MSM apparently no longer feels the need to comment on such matters – possibly because there is no opportunity any longer to make party political mischief and get a "biff-bam" slanging match going.

As to the Financial Times, it picks on one issue, which is also the focus of much of the specialist press, headlining: "MoD will no longer favour UK companies". The Ministry of Defence, it tells us:

… will no longer give UK companies priority over their foreign competitors when buying equipment and weapons for the armed forces. The only exceptions will be cases where buying British is essential to maintaining national security, Peter Luff, the defence procurement minister, said in an interview. He made clear the MoD would not consider wider employment or industrial economic factors when it assessed whether a piece of equipment offered value for money.

Nevertheless, if the dailies largely ignore that issue, The Spectator gives a spot to Matt Cavanagh, who calls the White Paper the waste of another opportunity. We need clear and unapologetic government backing for a sector which, as the White Paper notes, employs 300,000 people and is a major player in a global market valued at £260 billion, says Cavanagh, adding:

In that respect, the timing of the White Paper could hardly have been worse. Yesterday brought the bad news that India has awarded preferred bidder status for its $10 billion-plus fighter contract to France's Rafale, in preference to the Eurofighter Typhoon in which Britain's BAE has a major stake. The White Paper makes the usual noises about ministers "doing their utmost" to support exports, but privately many in the industry are disappointed by the lack of help — especially given ministerial rhetoric in 2010 around reshaping our foreign policy around trade.

This long-awaited White Paper was a second chance for the government to demonstrate its seriousness about tackling the real problems in defence procurement. Instead we got feeble commitments of support and simplistic rhetoric about "buying off the shelf" in a hypothetical "open market" which, in relation to large defence equipment programmes, simply doesn't exist. Another opportunity wasted — for Defence, and for one of our better prospects for export-led growth.

But what Matt – and everybody else for that matter – is ignoring is not so much the elephant in the room, as a virtual stampede of elephants. These come in the guise of EU Directive 2009/81/EC "on the coordination of procedures for the award of certain works contracts, supply contracts and service contracts by contracting authorities or entities in the fields of defence and security, and amending Directives 2004/17/EC and 2004/18/EC".

To get a taste of what this is requiring, all we have to do is look at the recitals – two, three and four will suffice:

(2) The gradual establishment of a European defence equipment market is essential for strengthening the European Defence Technological and Industrial Base and developing the military capabilities required to implement the European Security and Defence Policy.

(3) Member States agree on the need to foster, develop and sustain a European Defence Technological and Industrial Base that is capability driven, competent and competitive. In order to achieve this objective, Member States may use different tools, in conformity with Community law, aiming at a truly European defence equipment market and a level playing field at both European and global levels.

They should also contribute to the in-depth development of the diversity of the European defence-related supplier base, in particular by supporting the involvement of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and non-traditional suppliers in the European Defence Technological and Industrial Base, fostering industrial cooperation and promoting efficient and responsive lower tier suppliers. In this context, they should take into account the Commission’s Interpretative Communication of 7 December 2006 on the application of Article 296 of the Treaty in the field of defence procurement and the Commission Communication of 5 December 2007 on a Strategy for a stronger and more competitive European defence industry.

(4) One prerequisite for the creation of a European defence equipment market is the establishment of an appropriate legislative framework. In the field of procurement, this involves the coordination of procedures for the award of contracts to meet the security requirements of Member States and the obligations arising from the Treaty.

Helpfully, albeit in an obscure footnote, the White Paper tells us that this Directive was brought into UK law as the Defence and Security Public Contracts Regulations on 21 August 2011. And thus, let's play "spot the difference". In that self-same White Paper, we learn that:

We are focused on ensuring best value-for-money and delivering the best equipment for the Armed Forces and the security services. That is why this paper sets out how we will use competition as our default position and why we will look at the domestic and global defence and security market for products that are proven, that are reliable, and that meet our current needs. This principle is, though, qualified by the need to take action to protect our technological advantage where essential for national security.

We believe that the best way for the UK defence and security industries to remain strong, with some of the most high-tech and advanced manufacturing facilities in the world, is to be competitive. That is why this Government will continue to support responsible defence and security exports; why we are helping to create the right conditions for companies in these sectors to invest in the UK, and why we will take significant steps to ensure small and medium sized companies can continue to deliver the innovation and flexibility we need. There was strong support for these actions in the consultation responses.

And so we get:

Wherever possible, we will seek to fulfil the UK's defence and security requirements through open competition in the domestic and global market, buying off-the-shelf where appropriate… we will also take action to protect the UK's operational advantages and freedom of action, but only where this is essential for our national security.

This is remarked upon by a trade journal, which remarks that the presumption is to buy on the basis of competition and best value, which may often mean "off the shelf", even if it's from manufacturers in France, the US, Argentina, Israel. Now, the journal observes:

… many procurement people would welcome this focus on value for money rather than preserving British jobs or capability, but it will be interesting to see whether this holds up the first time a UK manufacturer loses out and screams blue murder about jobs, national interest and so on. Look at the fuss about the Bombardier/Siemens train procurement, and that didn't have the emotive aspects that defence always carries.

But of course, it will hold up. British ministers are implementing EU law, and they are always going to obey their masters. And in this White Paper, they are providing an ex post facto explanation of how the procurement system is to be adapted in order to ensure absolute obedience.

This in governmental terms, is not a "wasted opportunity" as Cavanagh would aver. It is simply a statement of compliance, the sub-text, "we shall obey".

COMMENT THREAD

Kermits get the cream

2012-02-01T13:05:00.000Z

France's Rafale has emerged as preferred bidder in a $11 billion contest to supply India with 126 fighters, says Reuters. They have undercut the rival Eurofighter and boosted French hopes of a long-awaited first export contract for its premier combat jet.

Clearly, the ~~bribes~~ aid we've given them hasn't worked out. But why on earth are we giving £1.4 billion in aid to a country that can afford to equip its air force to the tune of $11 billion, and isn't even buying British?

It gets even murkier when one realises that India itself is giving $5 billion in aid to African countries, aimed at expanding trade relations. The Indians are sensible enough to use their aid to get economic leverage … we just dole out money we haven't got, and get nothing in return – except Rajendra Pachauri.

And how droll it is that after Sarkozy sneered at Britain, claiming that "the UK has no industry left", we see a British prime minister claim today that "Britain actually has a higher percentage of industry than France does".

But, says The Boy, "we think that we need to rebalance even further; we want to see a growth in manufacturing, technology and aerospace … ". Sadly, it rather looks as if Sazkozy is doing the rebalancing.

And it was such a pity about The Boy's trade drive. It didn't seem to work too well, did it? The "partner of choice" seems to have moved over to the other side of the Channel - at least as far as the IAF is concerned.

(I don't know why, incidentally, that the video shows Mirage jets as well, but there you go ... it's Euronews.)

COMMENT THREAD

He says, she says

2012-01-28T17:17:00.002Z

In a new book reviewed by the Great Sage Con Coughlin, we have Sandy Gall, the former ITN presenter, give an account of the views of the current CDS, Gen Sir David Richards, on the campaign in Afghanistan.

With the appearance of being disarmingly frank, Richards seemingly takes to task John Reid, defence secretary at the time, for his view that "we would be perfectly happy to leave in three years' time without firing one shot because our mission is to protect the reconstruction", despite "intelligence assessments conducted in southern Afghanistan concluded that they would receive a hostile reception".

We appreciate that we are looking at a review of the book and not the book itself, and Con Coughlin is far from reliable on this matter, but it looks as if there is an attempt here to pin the blame on the political establishment – which is fair enough – and exonerate the military, which is not.

The brass, as we know, was just as gung ho for Afghanistan as the politicos, especially Gen Dannatt, who saw it as potentially a more fluid conventional war, which his troops were capable of fighting and which – unlike Iraq – they were capable of winning (as long as he was able to buy the FRES utility vehicle).

However, Richards would be unwise to give the military a completely clean bill of health, so we get (via Coughlin and Sandy Gall), a sort of admission of failure, with the assertion that "Sir David says that the British military establishment was ill-prepared for the deployment of forces, despite its leading role in the overthrow of the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein three years previously".

It is this phrasing that made me fall off my stool, and then to attack the keyboard despite not (yet) having read the book itself (which was published on 19 January). Even if Richards then concedes that the military establishment was "ill-prepared" and with a "rather amateurish approach to high-level military operations verging on the complacent", that does not even begin to describe the level and degree of failure.

First of all, it is not really appropriate to make comparisons between the operation to overthrow Saddam Hussein (i.e., the invasion of Iraq) and the operation in Afghanistan. A better (although not entirely adequate) comparison would have been with the subsequent occupation of southern Iraq, both campaigns being counter-insurgency operations.

Given that that British occupation of Iraq had been an egregious failure – and one which the Army still has difficulty recognising – one has to take it almost as a done deal that the Army would fail in Afghanistan.

I will stop there, returning to the subject when I have read the book, other than to observe that, once again, we again seem to be in "he says – she says" territory, where the current idea of writing history is to gather a collection of interviews of leading players and stitch them together to make a narrative.

However, while entertaining on occasions, and giving some insight into the minds of those involved, oral history is one of the least reliable resources available to the historian, and especially when it comes from senior military officers and politicians, who will be seeking to cover their backs and put a spin on their involvement.

This is where Jack Fairweather's book went wrong. Everything the leading players say must be taken with a pinch of salt. To have any value, it must be cross-checked with the evidence – and the documentation, where available – and be consistent with the actual events.

Nevertheless, in an age where "human interest" dictates the approach to news gathering, and "feelings" count more than facts, evidence-based history is deeply unfashionable. These days, your book must be well-populated with people sharing the innermost thoughts or you are not a "proper" historian.

It is also much easier to produce "stream of consciousness" narratives – especially when this is the stock-in-trade of the average journalist (which is why also the material gets good reviews from follow journalists, all pissing in the same pot).

However, maybe when I get the book, I will be pleasantly surprised, and have to eat my words. But before this, we shall have to wait upon the pleasure of the great lord Amazon to deliver.

COMMENT THREAD

A bitter taste

2012-01-20T17:20:00.000Z

The past reaches out to bring back unwelcome memories, this time the fate of Acting Corporal Marcin Wojtak, who died on 1 October 2009 when his Pinzgauer Vector drove over a 40lb IED close to Camp Bastion, in Afghanistan.

An earlier report tells us that the Vector had been part of a three-vehicle convoy which had just left a wadi and moved onto higher ground, when it was blown up by the device, comprising "20-25 kilograms of home-made explosives buried about 40cm under the ground".

Now, over two years later, an inquest found yesterday, predictably, that Wojtak was "unlawfully killed", leading to a number of reports in the MSM.

Not untypical of the reports is the story in the Daily Mail which has Wojtak's mother accusing the Ministry of Defence of a "catastrophic failure". Vectors, says the paper (now – although not at the time) were notoriously vulnerable to roadside bombs because of a lack of armour on the underside, and the Government announced a "phased withdrawal" from front line service in May 2009.
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But the inquest heard they were still being used five months later when the 24-year-old - who had complained in an email home to his father that he felt "exposed and at risk" patrolling in one - was killed.

In a tragic twist, the inquest was told he would have survived if he had been in the heavily-armoured replacement vehicle he was due to pick up the following morning. The replacement was the Mastiff, which, "when it initially went into theatre, soldiers didn't want to get in it because the feeling was that it was just a truck." But, "after a couple of months the lads knew they were safe as houses", and it became the vehicle of choice.

However, its popularity was not just due to the armour. As Ann Winterton had to remind the Telegraph yesterday, it was "because of its V-shaped hull which is designed to deflect rather than absorb blasts", something which the Vector lacked.

But what made the Vector uniquely dangerous was that the driver position was also over the front wheel, in the centre of the "cone of destruction" ensuring that, if the vehicle drove over a device, any explosion would be unsurvivable. In one of the heaviest mined regions of the world, a more unsuitable vehicle could hardly have been chosen, so obvious were its defects.

Yet Wojtak's mother is probably being a little unfair in blaming the Ministry of Defence, per se, for its deployment. Intended as a replacement for the vulnerable Snatch Land Rover, its particular champion was a famous general by the name of Richard Dannatt, who insisted on its purchase for Afghanistan, as his price for accepting the unwanted Mastiff into theatre in Iraq.

The full, ugly story is in my book. Nowhere else will you see the whole story told of the wasted lives and the waste of £100 million from an overstretched defence budget to buy a vehicle that was so dangerous that it had to be replaced, temporarily, by the Snatch Land Rover, up-armoured and re-named the Vixen.

There can be few other instances where a replacement vehicle was deemed so unsatisfactory that it was eventually replaced by the vehicle it was intended to replace, but that is the legacy of Richard Dannatt. And even to this day, it leaves a bitter taste.

COMMENT THREAD

Mother nature on our side

2012-01-06T17:02:00.000Z

Following the story we did on the Super Tucano three days ago, I am reminded of just how long ago it was that when we were pursuing the issue in parliament. Notably, it got a mention on 20 April 2009 when Ann Winterton raised it in a procurement debate. She said:

I have consistently argued that we should use aircraft such as the Super Tucano two-seater light attack aircraft … It could assist in the creation of an Afghan air force. If such a force is not founded and developed, the international military force will be required to continue to give air cover virtually for ever. It is interesting to note that the United States has recently leased two such aircraft and they will be used in Afghanistan. It will also be interesting to see whether those aircraft will be procured directly when they have proved to be successful.

The ultimate logic, which we explored on the Defence of the Realm blog, was that we should have been concentrating on building up the Afghan national capability, rather than have the RAF playing with their (extremely expensive) toys.

That, effectively, is what the Americans are at last attempting to do, which suggests that our arguments had some merit. But, even if we are completely right, that is not enough. And this is a lesson that carries right through government. Custodians of public money generally tend to pursue their own interests, rather that what is right.

As yet, we have not worked out any way of changing that. Whether it is getting the RAF to buy Tucano bombers, trying to stop the government supporting useless wind turbines, or convincing it to pull us out of the EU, might rather than right prevails.

This can be rather depressing. It would be nice to think that it is possible to expend energy to effect, and that ultimately our efforts can succeed. Without being pessimistic, the record is not good enough, and we have to change that. But at least it is not all bad news. Mother nature is helping out. And with her on our side, we cannot lose.

COMMENT THREAD

Agendas come first

2012-01-05T17:05:00.000Z

A small piece of news to start the New Year has had a very small band of defence analysts and journalists intrigued. This is the winner of the light air support (LAS) competition to supply ground attack aircraft to the Afghan Air Force.

The winner was the hot favourite, the Super Tucano, of which 20 examples have been purchased for sums variously described as $355 and $950 million. The competitive Hawker Beechcraft AT-6B Texan II having been ruled out last November.

Hawker have since challenged the contract award and it is temporarily on hold, pending a Federal court ruling but, all things being equal, the Afghan Air Force will soon have this valuable addition to their striking power. Initially, however, the aircraft will be operated by the US Air Force, used to train Afghani pilots.

The implications of this purchase are profound, not only for the Afghan Air Force, but in broader terms. We have long advocated that the RAF would benefit from the capability of this flexible and effective weapons system.

In practical terms, there is very little to chose between the ground attack version of the Harrier, and this aircraft. In cash terms, however, the Tucano is about one fifth of the hourly cost, while it is a mere one ninth the cost of an Apache attack helicopter.

What is interesting, if predicable, though, is that, although this news is covered in the specialist press, it has found no space in the British MSM. Right throughout the whole debate on the merits and possible use of the Tucano, the British press has been silent – apart from Christopher Booker, of course.

For once, though, there was an opportunity to square the circle – providing a killer capability at an affordable cost. But then, neither the media, the political establishment nor the British military actually want to solve problems. Their agendas come first.

COMMENT THREAD

A retreat into dogma

2011-12-24T17:22:00.000Z

Ministers, we are told are considering proposals under which the private sector could play a large role in the procurement of weapons and equipment for the armed forces. Says The Guardian, the civil servant in charge of defence procurement, Bernard Gray, has submitted a report setting out options for bringing in private expertise, and a decision is expected in the New Year.

The problems, however, are not going to be solved this way. Contrary to popular belief, the procurement system is actually quite efficient. If the services want a particular type of widget, and tells the system to go out and buy a requisite number, it will usually do it, on time and within budget.

Where we have the major issues with "big ticket" equipment purchases, though, the excess costs arise for a number of reasons. One is the failure of the services to define properly what they want, and then to keep changing the specification through the procurement process.

Another is the use the defence budget to support British (and increasingly European) defence industries, with purchases dictated by political rather than operational need. And then there is the "pork barrel" dynamic, where equipment is purchase from specific areas, again for political advantage.

Of all the issues, though, the definition problem is perhaps the most acute – and the most expensive. That, basically stems from the fact that we have lost sight of what we really want our Armed Forces to do. Military equipment is (or should be) the ultimate in functionality, and if we are unclear as to the functions needed, it is almost impossible to specify the right equipment.

Thus, it seems as if we have a Tory-led government, with no real idea of what to do, retreating into dogma, and privatising some functions which should properly remain in the public sector. After all, if you don't know what kit you really want, getting Tesco to buy it isn't going to make things any better.

That aside though, whatever the merits or otherwise of such decisions, now – during the Christmas break - is not the time to announce them. These are major changes, with profound implications. They should be subject to full discussion, and should not be rushed.

COMMENT THREAD

A War of Choice

2011-12-21T13:11:00.001Z

Hailed by its publishers as the first book on Britain's occupation of Iraq during 2003-2009, this of course is by no means the first. That accolade goes to Ministry of Defeat, published in 2009 - see below right ... note the similarities in the subtitles. But, as author of that book, I must be very careful in criticising what might be seen as a rival product - although it isn't. This is a very different book.

What one must realise with Fairweather's book is that it was written with the broad approval of the MoD, which gave him access to many of the characters he interviews. And therein lies its strength. It gives what appears to be a very accurate account of how a segment of the establishment - diplomatic and military - saw the occupation, and their role in it.

Unfortunately, that is also its great weakness. This account is hardly dispassionate and it is certainly not accurate. It represents a highly partisan attempt of that segment of the establishment to cover their backs and mitigate their own failures.

The narrative itself is confusing, as it darts about all over the place - to areas outside the British zone of control, and even to Afghanistan, and the attempts at characterisation verge on comedic. We have "ruggedly handsome" Brits, and the like ... and even a "wily" Arab.

And clearly, technical details are not Fairweather's strong point. He is a people person, and his knowledge of kit and the technology of war is slight ... indicated by a large number of unforced errors, and unfortunate phrasing. Since when did a Predator "hover" over battlefields, and when did a "Spectre" gunship have a 105mm cannon "slung beneath it".

Such errors, however, pale into insignificance compared with his uncritical acceptance of the myth that EFPs (which he manages to describe without naming - unhelpful when you are looking for them in the extremely poor index) were made in Iran, despite the very substantial evidence that al Amarah was a major bomb factory, with scores of incomplete EFPs being found there when the city was recovered.

Therein lies the essential weakness of the book. Fairweather is not a historian or a professional researcher. He is a journalist from the "he says, she says" school, and as long as he has talking heads to back up his assertions, that is sufficient. The idea of triangulation, or using documentary evidence, does not seem to occur to this writer, making his narrative a compilation of uncorroborated sources, the veracity of which we have no means of knowing.

Add to that some huge omissions - how can you not even mention Operation "Promise of Peace" in an account of the occupation, when this set the seal on the British occupation?

How can you not discuss the role of the MRAP in restoring tactical mobility to the battlefield, to which the British were too late in coming, relying to the last on the Snatch? And how can you not discuss the vital, game changing role of the UAV, and the scandal of the British Phoenix, a result of procurement failures stretching back decades?

All that said, however, Fairweather adds detail that isn't generally known, and if you already know enough about the campaign to be able to sort the wheat from the chaff, then the accurate detail he offers is illustrative and useful. But if you want a book to tell you what went on in British sector of Iraq during 2003-2009, this isn't it.

COMMENT THREAD

Courage is not enough

2011-12-13T13:16:00.001Z

We last looked at the ill-fated Kajaki Dam project in June last, when we concluded that it was a complete waste of time, money, effort – and lives. And, to reaffirm that, the latest report in The Guardian tells us that, owing to "cuts" in the US government's Afghanistan development programme, it is unlikely that the project will ever be finished.

No one will dispute that the military operation in September 2008 operation was not an epic adventure, "sneaking" the heavy machinery needed to upgrade the generating capacity across 100 miles of hostile territory in northern Helmand. At the time, it was acclaimed by the British army as one the most daring operations of its kind since the Second World War.

Yet, if the final outcome is that nothing changes, all the derring-do, the skill in planning and execution, have been wasted as well. We would have saved out time and money, and the world would have gone on just as before.

It is not therefore – as some will aver – cynical to question the wisdom of military operations. However good they may be at field tactics (and that is variable), the military is notoriously bad at taking in the bigger picture, and assessing the overall value of its own input. The famed "can do" attitude of the military, therefore, is as capable of getting it into trouble, as it is of extracting politicians from their own messes.

And here, in Kajaki, the project was always doomed. Not is it a question of money – this is just the figleaf. The Americans are perfectly justified in not throwing good money after bad.

Not least of the problems, and one that is effectively insoluble, is the remote location of the generating facility. This, as Booker remarked in 2009, meant that we were unable to secure the transmission lines, thus allowing the Taliban to control the distribution of the electricity, charging to maintain the supply and thus topping up their coffers at the expense of British and (latterly) US taxpayers.

At the time we produced that article, we took a lot of flak for our pessimism, also being accused of denigrating the bravery and skill of our military. But, as it transpires, the military and its supporters were being unrealistically optimistic. Unfortunately, as is now all too evident, courage is not enough.

The worst of it all is that, for want of the capacity not being supplied from Kajaki, electricity is being supplied by the Americans from hugely expensive diesel generator sets. Even if these are left when the Americans depart, it is unlikely that the Afghan government will be able to afford to run them. Electricity supply, therefore, will very quickly deteriorate.

And here we see something of a double-whammy. The absurd sums of money, spent on the pitifully small increase in capacity from Kajaki, could have been far better spent on alternative schemes.

Given that Afghanistan has huge reserves of high quality coal, and a plentiful supply of cheap labour, the most logical provision would have been low-tech, coal-fired generator sets, near the points of consumption, such as Kandahar, thereby minimising transmission distances and increasing security of supply.

But with British and US aid dominated by climate change luvvies, the idea of subsidising coal-fired stations in Afghanistan has been vetoed (a real veto), even though we are apparently happy to pay for similar facilities in India, Pakistan and South Africa.

The courage of our military, therefore, has been completely negated by poor policy-making and, latterly, by climate-change warriors, who demand danger money and full-time armed guards just to venture into the Afghan hinterland, where they can wreak their peculiar form of damage.

Looking at this debacle in the round, one can only despair. Sometimes, we think, the military has its weapons pointed the wrong way. The real enemy – the one that does by far the greatest damage – lies not in the hills of Kajaki but in the offices of Whitehall, where the more deadly battle is being fought out.

COMMENT THREAD

A waste of space

2011-12-11T17:24:00.000Z

We should be grateful, I suppose, that we have a parliamentary committee of public accounts (PAC), chaired by the redoubtable (irony) Margaret Hodge MP. This is a committee set up to monitor government spending, in an attempt to ensure we get value for money. The role of the committee is, ex post facto, to examine specific projects and criticise government departments where it feels money has been wasted or not wisely spent.

But, in a sort of quis custodiet ipsos custodes question, who monitors the PAC and decides whether we get value for money from the committee?

That question is highly relevant in view of its performance last week in delivering its fifty-ninth Report of Session 2010–12, on "The cost–effective delivery of an armoured vehicle capability", in which it accused the MoD of spending £1.1 billion on programmes to acquire armoured vehicles, without delivering a single vehicle in more than a decade.

Its view was the MoD had proved to be both "indecisive and over-ambitious" in its attempts to manage the programme, complaining that will now be gaps in capability until at least 2025, making it more difficult to undertake essential tasks such as battlefield reconnaissance.

The conclusions of the report were widely publicised, not least by the Press Association, the inference being that the MoD should have delivered the armoured vehicles specified in its programme. Without exception, the media have condemned the "flawed procurement process".

What we cannot find in any of the reports in the popular media is any reference to what this report is really about. Nowhere do you find any mention of that which is identified in the PAC report, that this is about the Future Rapid Effects System (FRES), and yet another complaint about its non-delivery.

Evaluation and reporting of this long-running saga has been a black hole as far as the popular media is concerned. There is not a single newspaper or broadcaster which has yet had anything intelligent or useful to contribute on the issue, and right up to press it does not fail to disappoint.

It is, therefore, left to the likes of the PAC to do the heavy lifting, but here also lies nothing but disappointment. To examine what amounted to the most expensive single armoured vehicle procurement programme ever mounted by the MoD – worth £16 billion in acquisition costs alone – the committee managed to produce only a slender 40-page report, including the covers, including the written evidence and the transcript of oral evidence – which took one half-day.

The list of witnesses also tells a story – it was confined to Ursula Brennan, Permanent Under-Secretary, Ministry of Defence, Lieutenant-General Gary Coward, Chief of Materiel (Land), and Vice-Admiral Paul Lambert, Deputy Chief of Defence Staff (Capability). The committee relied for the totality of its oral evidence on three MoD officials, and for its written evidence on one MoD report.

We are not going to rehearse the issues in depth here. I've done it all before, two especially relevant pieces being this and this. Suffice it to say that the whole concept of FRES is flawed, and overly expensive, and largely abandoned by the United States, which pioneered the concept.

For the PAC to have come to a reasoned, objective conclusion, it would have had to have done a lot more work than it did, interviewed many more witnesses and trawled through hundreds if not thousands of documents. The slight, superficial report that it did deliver was a waste of time and space – and money.

But that, it seems, sums up parliament these days. If it was wound up tomorrow, the building given over entirely to tourism as a "museum of democracy", would we really notice any difference? Is there now actually anything parliament does, much less does well, that would make a difference to our lives?

COMMENT THREAD

Synchronised departures

2011-12-01T13:18:00.001Z

One could be cynical and suggest that the reason we are seeing so little published about Afghanistan is that the MSM is keeping its powder dry. With 390 military deaths stacked up so far, it needs ten more to bring the figure to the magic 400, when we may expect an orgy of gushing press about "our brave boys".

More recently, we did actually see a longish piece in the Failygraph from Thomas Harding, reflecting on what had been achieved by the Army in the five years since it had been deployed to Helmand province.

And if to some his report seemed overly optimistic, that unfortunately is what you get when you rely on the MoD for your access, and have to pay lip service to the Army "spin doctors" in order to ensure continued access. In truth, though, if you want to find out what is going on in Afghanistan, the last thing you should do is ask the military, or an embedded journalist.

For a more sanguine appreciation, you would be better off reading the latest piece from Matt Cavanagh, who takes a cool look at the region as US troops continue to withdraw.

And what we do or achieve in Afghanistan is very much "under license" from the United States for, without the airpower, the logistics and the heavy lifting in some of the more bitterly contested areas, the UK forces would be a small, besieged outpost, achieving very little at all.

In his piece, Cavanagh notes that the public's attitude seems to be one of "weary resignation" and also notes that, while fatalities amongst British and other international forces are down on last year, civilian casualties are up 15 percent on last year, itself 15 percent higher than the year before.

Although modest by Iraq standards, this contradicts the pledge given by Gen. McChrystal to reduce overall civilian casualties, and marks one of the many coalition failures in a failure-strewn campaign.

But on top of the steady toll from suicide bombs and, this year we have seen a series of high-profile "spectaculars", the attacks in Kabul, notably the siege at the Intercontinental Hotel in June, the storming of the British Council building in August, a 20-hour shoot-out near the US embassy in September, and a bomb killing seventeen international troops and contractors in October.

At the same time, writes Cavanagh, the campaign of targeted assassinations has continued, including among its victims General Daud, the pre-eminent regional police commander; Ahmed Wali Karzai, the president's half-brother and de facto boss of Kandahar; Burhanuddin Rabbani, former president and lately head of the peace council charged with reaching out to the Taliban; and a number of district governors and town mayors.

Interestingly, and worryingly, American and British officials stick doggedly to the line that the spectaculars and assassinations are irrelevant, or even encouraging.

And then we have that great [transport] expert, Philip Hammond, the new defence secretary, tell us that his "military advice" is that the insurgency is on "the back foot", and argues that these "so-called spectaculars … rather suggest desperation".

Such an assertion might have more credibility if we had not heard something similar when the Taliban switched from direct confrontation in the platoon house phase, to asymmetric warfare, majoring on the IED.

While it caught the military flat-footed – despite plenty of warning – the brass excused its own inadequacies with such comforts, while the politicians pushed them into taking on protected vehicles and adopting other counter-measures which took the sting out of the Taliban's initiative.

But what it did demonstrate was that the Taliban was capable of thinking flexibly, and responding to changing circumstances, with a speed that leaves our Sandhurst warriors struggling.

And so it is with the "spectaculars" and assassinations. We see here, almost an echo of the Viet Cong tactics in 1960s Saigon, but with a guiding mind that clearly recognises that the coalition forces are no longer strategically relevant. The battle is now on to dominate the population once the foreign troops have scuttled back home, their chests full of medals.

Cavanagh thus offers some useful correctives to the usual shallow thinking that passes for strategic wisdom, including the caution that we should not be attempting to backfill for the Americans when they leave.

Rather than pretend we have an independent role, we should be planning to align our drawdown more explicitly with the Americans, recognising that, as they depart, so should we – and in phase. If our tactics in theatre have not always been in harmony, we need at least to synchronise our departure plans.

In other worlds, with departure on the near horizon, our politicians and military should avoid the temptation to indulge in a little local "top dogging", and concentrate on getting our people out in one piece, with as much credibility as possible.

That, at least, is what I take from Cavanagh's piece. He is perhaps a little too polite and gentle to point out how easy the military gravitates to disaster mode, especially when egos and careers are at stake. But above all, we need to recognise that the adventure is over and the only strategic gain it to recover as many warm bodies from theatre as possible, and to hold the body bags.

As for the broader politics, we have given up any hope of our dismal set of domestic politicians having even the first idea of what is going on in the region, and are fully reconciled to Afghanistan becoming a policy train-wreck within a decade of our leaving. But that is another problem, for another time. We have enough at the moment to keep us busy.

COMMENT THREAD

The reign of the expert

2011-11-29T13:20:00.001Z

This is slightly old news but I have been saving it until I could do it justice. And for that, one needs a little background to be able to appreciate and savour the full enormity of the development.

As to the background, in our sister blog, we have written many times of the great white hope of the Army Brass, the £16 billion FRES programme which former CGS Sir Richard Dannatt regarded as essential to the future of his Army.

At the heart of this concept was the medium wheeled armoured personnel carrier, Dannatt's preferred type being the Piranha, the acquisition of which he regarded as so important that he was prepared to forego mine protected vehicles in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Those with any memory at all will recall the near reverence with which the media treated Sir Richard, the great expert of such stature that, when he retired, the Daily Telegraph could not wait to sign him up as their expert on all things military (although we hear very little of him nowadays).

Possibly the greatest (and certainly the most consistent) source of opposition to the concept was the DOTR blog, one piece provoking an unprecedented intervention by the then procurement minister, Lord Drayson, on our blog, and a strong rejoinder that remained unanswered – largely because it was unanswerable.

Needless to say, this dramatic development was ignored by the MSM, which is wedded to prestige, and would give space to Dannatt, but not our blog. Who were we, after all, to challenge the Great General?

Well, with the programme on hold and with no sign of it being activated in the near future, we now see what surely must amount to its death knell – brought to you by the US Army.

This comes in the form of news of the US equivalent of FRES, the so-called FCS concept, based on an American version of the Piranha known as the Stryker. The US Army, in this respect, is much further advanced than the British and had an experimental Stryker Brigade deployed in Iraq in 2003.

Now we come to the news of the moment. A Stryker Brigade is now to be deployed to Afghanistan, as the 3rd Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, but with one very notable omission. It is not deploying its Strykers, which are now in use by the Alaska-based 1st Brigade, 25th Infantry Division, in a somewhat safer environment.

Replacing the Strykers in Afghanistan are a mix of vehicles such as the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles and its all-terrain variety, the M-ATV.

What is especially poignant here is that these are the very vehicle types that the great military expert Dannatt was prepared to forego in order to acquire the Piranha and equip his own equivalent of the Stryker Brigade which, even in 2006 he was claiming to be the Army's key equipment priority.

Had the great expert had his way, the UK would now be saddled with a programme which even the US has abandoned, in favour of the vehicles that our experts rejected, but have now in place in Afghanistan.

All of this goes to show that, regardless of their elevated rank, and the "prestige" afforded to the brass, this does not necessarily mean that our so-called military experts know what they are talking about. And, in this case, the evidence goes to show that, fortunately, we were spared from the fruits of their expertise.

The reign of the expert, it would appear, is something we cannot always afford.

Empty vessel syndrome

2011-11-27T13:23:00.002Z

We have observed before how many journalists, on picking up a long-running story, seem to have no history – and neither time, inclination (or even capability) properly to research the background. Thus, on lifting a single nugget, without understanding or context, fabricate a report which adds little or nothing to the corps of knowledge, and most often distort or confuse the issues.

So it is in the Independent on Sunday, where journalists Brian Brady and Jonathan Owen happen upon a report on "secret tests" carried out in 2005 on Snatch Land Rovers.

Amongst other things, the tests confirmed that the Snatch was "overmatched" by the then current array of IEDs ranged against it, and also "revealed" that even when soldiers wore body armour the Snatches provided little protection from IEDs.

The Independent acknowledges that official documents released to the Iraq inquiry last year revealed that ministers had been warned that Snatches needed to be replaced in 2006. That indeed was the case, but the newspaper then seeks to shift the time frame to an earlier period.

Thus it tells us, in what amounts to the single, substantive new fact of the story, in a "vehicle protection presentation" held on 16 March 2005 – the second anniversary of the Iraq invasion – the defence technology company QinetiQ reported that "Snatch performs relatively poorly but in line with expectations when attacked by projectiles".

This, on the face of it, though, does not refer to IEDs – more likely to RPGs. But, whether or not QinetiQ then reported on the failings of the Snatch, the most serious shortcomings, in respect of dealing with the explosively formed projectile (EFP), could not have been known. That weapon was not deployed in a fatal attack until 1 May 2005, when Guardsmen Anthony Wakefield and Gary Alderson were killed.

By 6 June, however, an intact EFP array had been recovered and evaluated and it was from that point that it was clear that the Snatch was no match for the weapons being used against it. And when on 16 July in al Amarah, Lt Shearer and two others were killed in a Snatch following an EFP attack, there can have been no doubt.

Contrary to the impression given by the Independent story, therefore, there is nothing new about when knowledge of the new threat emerged, but the newspaper makes a big deal about the MoD withholding reports, claiming that "disclosure of such information could prejudice the safety of the armed forces".

That, of course, is one of the genuine reasons why the MoD might withhold such information. If your equipment suffers a fatal flaw, the last thing you are going to do it admit it to the enemy.

But, a year later, despite significant additional casualties, the vulnerability of the Snatch was becoming so evident that we were to pick it up on this blog, leading in August to a review of the vehicle by then defence secretary Des Browne, and its partial replacement by the Mastiff.

Here, journalists Brady and Owen get it completely wrong, reporting that an emergency review of the Snatch vehicles was not announced until 2008 – "after a tide of protests from the families of service personnel who had been killed or suffered horrific injuries in a series of IED attacks in Afghanistan".

The review was in 2006, and carried out after the issue was raised in this blog, and then in the Sunday Telegraph and Sunday Times, at our instigation, followed by a spirited campaign in parliament, led by Lord Astor of Hever. This, as set out in Ministry of Defeat (pp110-122) is one of those instances when everything came together,.

Brady and Owen, though, insist on rewriting history. The immediate replacement for the Snatch was the Mastiff, later augmented by the smaller Ridgeback, but this ignorant pair fail to realise this. Instead, they get confused by the later long-term contract for the Foxhound, designed from scratch as the long-term replacement, complaining that this has not yet been delivered to theatre.

The journalists thus miss the point. The crucial part of the story is not that the dangers were ignored, but why they were ignored, and long after they were known - and why the replacement was so long in coming. Here, it is not good enough simply to say that the MoD failed. There was a very specific and egregious failure, attributable not to officials but to senior officers in the Army. They not only ignored the shortcomings of the Snatch, but actively blocked replacement with better vehicles.

For those who understand the issues, the real reason was because Jackson and then Dannatt were committed to the FRES programme and feared that, if protected vehicles were bought, the money would come from the FRES budget. Thus, to protect the budget for their new toys, they were prepared to let soldiers die.

Such an assertion I have made many times, including it with great detail in my book, Ministry of Defeat. If it were not true, it would be libellous and wrongly damaging to the reputations of two of Britain's most senior generals. No one, however, has ever disputed the issues.

But now we can see in the evidence of Lord Drayson, then procurement minister, to the Iraq Inquiry, confirmation of the assertion. In his witness statement, he told the Inquiry:

The project to improve/replace SNATCH was always separate to FRES. The Generals stressed the urgent need to replace the ageing fleet of Army Fighting Vehicles as a whole when voicing their concerns over delays to FRES.

However SNATCH was a Protected Patrol Vehicle rather than an AFV, and was not an old vehicle. In terms of augmenting Protected Patrol Vehicles such as SNATCH the focus in early 2006 for the Army was on the VECTOR which in March 2006 I was told was General Dannatt’s highest priority as CinC LAND.

Progress on FRES and concerns about SNATCH Land Rovers should not have been connected in theory because the FRES project was designed to provide a different capability, i.e. AFVs not PPVs.

In reality however, I believe that the Army’s difficulty in deciding upon a replacement to SNATCH was in part caused by their concern over the likelihood of FRES budgets being cut to fund a SNATCH replacement vehicle.

Though this whole affair, therefore, we have seen the most egregious failure of the Army. But we now also see the continued failure of the media to understand and deal with the issues, missing the point again and again, always going for the cheap shots, without even beginning to understand what was involved.

Journalists have become empty vessels, to be filled on the day with plausible but inaccurate material, sufficient to fill space in a newspaper, but a travesty of the truth.

COMMENT THREAD

Another exercise in rhetoric

2011-10-07T13:26:00.000+01:00

Ten years into the war in Afghanistan, to call our strategy "fatally flawed" – as does Sherard Cowper-Coles in an incredibly lame piece in the Failygraph - is to pay it a huge compliment. It isn't even that good.

All Cowper-Coles, former British Ambassador to Afghanistan, can do is bleat about us "ignoring all the lessons of the Great Game", as we fail to engage Afghanistan’s neighbours and near neighbours systematically in the struggle to return Afghanistan to its proper place as the crossroads of south-west Asia.

That much is extruded verbal material. The "Great Game" was the interplay between two empires, the British and Imperial Russia. What we have today is altogether different – a proxy war between India and Pakistan, played out on the plains and hills of Afghanistan.

Since it is current British policy to suck up to the Indian government, not a word must be said about the malign role of the Indians in fomenting and perpetuating the strife in this benighted country. This means that the gigantic Indian elephant must perpetually be ignored.

Of course, dealing with India means addressing the Kashmir issue, which means getting India and Pakistan sitting at the same table. That is not going to happen. Even now, with talk of a regional conference to discuss Afghanistan's future, India's presence is not assured. Turkey is trying to broker a deal.

That, in fact, says it all. India was left out of the last regional conference and that it should be left to a minor-league player to be fronting the effort to get it to the table, instead of a high-level Indian presence being the centrepiece of US strategy, says that the policy out there is fundamentally unserious.

The other important player is, of course, China, and here diplomatic paths also lead back to Kashmir. But the really crucial players and India and Pakistan, and without them getting together, any further steps are, as one regional observer puts it, just another exercise in rhetoric.

I'm sure our troops out there would be highly delighted that they are, in the final analysis, fighting and dying for rhetoric. But if they hadn't already realised that they are wasting their time, and that their sacrifices are for nothing other than to save Cameron's face, then it's too late for them to find out now.

Soon enough though, the dreadful charade will come to an end – but not before more billions have been spent, and more lives lost. Until then, there is little more to be said. If there was ever any rationale for us going in, it has long departed. The sooner we get out the better.

COMMENT THREAD

The generals finally share the blame

2011-07-25T15:30:00.003+01:00

"Richard North, the author of Ministry of Defeat and independent blogger, has passionately written that the Committee report, more than the hacking scandal, has highlighted the flaws of both Parliament and the media.

James Arbuthnot and the members of the Defence Committee should have been aware of these issues long ago but they repeatedly failed to address them until now. North has also accused Arbuthnot of maintaining the myth of 'ministerial responsibility', the equivalent of Robinson's modern day 'stab-in-the-back'.

The media for all its interest in Afghanistan also failed to understand what was happening especially in terms of strategic questions and civil-military relations. Newspapers like the Sun and the Daily Mail chose to vilify Gordon Brown while making Generals like Sir Richard Dannatt the honourable soldier.

The Sun as well as the Mail have both been oddly quiet on reporting the Committee's findings, no surprise. The Sun's sister paper The Times, to its credit, did publish this article last year which mirrored this week's committee findings".

It's a good piece ... well, I would say that - but it still is. Read it and then buy the book. I need the money.

COMMENT THREAD

Failure writ large

2011-07-19T15:32:00.000+01:00

It's not just the British press, police and politicians that are in crisis, writes Michael White for The Guardian. "Spare a thought for Britain's armed forces, who are risking life and limb in support of state policy, while those of us at home hyperventilate over a squalid political row".

My immediate response to this is "speak for yourself, mate". We did a lot more than spare a thought over the weekend and we – unlike the scumset and associated turd-eaters - are by no means hyperventilating over a media storm.

This, though, is a Guardian journalist with a narrative to sell, a man who, from the depths of the most profound and disturbing ignorance, tells us that, while most weekend attention was focused on the Murdochs, the police and the politicians, the Commons defence select committee issued "a powerful condemnation" of the way the mission to Helmand was handled from day one.

Mr White is, of course, far too grand to read independent blogs but, if he had, he might have seen the alternative view expressed. From that he would have learned that, far from offering "a powerful condemnation", the select committee's analysis was weak and its conclusions tepid.

The clue to the direction of the narrative, though, is White's views on the select committee report. The interesting thing is, he says, "that its ire is not directed against the late Labour government or the then-defence secretary, John Reid".

Instead, he writes, "it is focussed on the top military brass who underestimated the threat from the ever-resourceful Taliban ("you have the watches, but we have the time") and told Reid there were enough helicopters to provide air support when there were not. Ministers were not told the risk level, which later proved fatal to so many young lives".

Now here comes the rub. White describes the committee chairman, Tory ex-defence minister James Arbuthnot, as "soft-spoken but solid". But what he does not say is that he was one of the "good ol' boys", part of the Tory defence claque, who actually maintained the myth – right through the critical period – of ministerial responsibility. It was all Brown's fault, remember?

I recall of the period, from 2006, when I watched every defence debate online, and then read the transcripts. I knew most of the personalities involved, and could read the mood music. Defence then was a political football, the mantras of "over-stretch" and "underfunding" being chanted with semi-religious fervour. The Generals were lauded and praised. Dannatt was treated as a demi-god.

Anyone who had half a brain and a little inside knowledge could work it out. I had a lot of inside knowledge ... through parliamentary and other contacts. Furthermore, I was writing consistently on this theme, culminating in October 2009 when I wrote a piece headed, "The generals must share the blame", celebrating the fact that, at last, the Spectator had published a half-decent piece.

This was by Paul Robinson, professor in the Graduate School of International Affairs at the University of Ottawa, whence I noted that, after years of ploughing the solitary furrow, pointing out that the military should bear some of the blame for the (then) current parlous state of our Armed Forces, and their lacklustre performance in first Iraq and now Afghanistan, only now did the magazine pop up saying the same thing.

In my own piece, I had referred to a particularly trenchant piece of my own in April 2009, where I wrote of "the real enemy in Whitehall" – the MoD.

All this was evident at the time – to the politicians and to the specialist correspondents like Michael White. Yet all of them chose to hold their fire, and focus instead on the Ministers, playing a dirty, devious and thoroughly dishonest game. And only now, are the likes of Arbuthnot – the Tory politician who no longer wishes to put Ministers in the frame - prepared to admit that the military was the author of its own downfall.

What I wrote on Sunday, therefore, is even more evident today. We have had and have now, two egregious failures. Firstly, Parliament – and the long-stop of the Defence Committee, failed to pick up what was going on. Secondly, the media likewise failed, and then failed to note that the Defence Committee was completely dysfunctional.

I despair in writing this. Even as I write, we have a three-ring media circus, centred around the proceedings of a select committee, chaired by an acknowledged crook, grandstanding for all it is worth. The same failed system represented by the Defence Committee, reported by a failing media.

From it, nothing of any substance will come and, in truth, no one seems to care. The soap opera is everything. The hard, grown-up job of analysing what is going wrong, and coming up with serious solutions, seems beyond the capabilities of anyone involved.

We are going nowhere with this, and nothing will be solved. In due course, the circus will pack up its tents and move on to another show, and we'll be none the wiser. Except that, before this show is even over, real life outside the tent will take a hand. While these fools play, the economy and the world order is falling apart.

Damn them all to hell, for their foolishness, their stupidity and their venality. We deserve better than this.

COMMENT THREAD

An unrecognised fracture

2011-07-17T15:31:00.001+01:00

Grudgingly, one has to acknowledge that there is a small residue of adult behaviour left in The Sunday Telegraph, it having devoted a tiny part of its output today to a subject far more important than the media "self" obsession. And it has the grace to admit that it is far more important.

The real scandal, it thus says, "is not hacking but Helmand", as it comments on its own report of the Defence Committee report on Operations in Afghanistan, due out tomorrow - "a precise and shocking exposé of how British troops on duty in Helmand, Afghanistan, from 2006 onwards were routinely failed by their senior officers and government ministers". As scandals go, the paper says, it is among the very worst.

It has now been published online (although not yet as a .pdf) and I would concur with the generality of the comments, both in the report and the ST's assessment of it – but with several important caveats, not least the extreme superficiality of the report and its findings.

Most importantly, though, we are talking five years downstream, looking at what were predictable and avoidable flaws in the operation, which were clearly apparent at the time, and about which we were continuously writing. The committee records, for instance, concerns about protected vehicles, but only addresses this issue in terms of the Snatch Land Rover. Thus, it has Brigadier Butler say:

... we also knew before we deployed that we had something in the order of a 45 percent on average shortfall of vehicles. We had already identified that Snatch was not an appropriate vehicle for the desert. We wanted WMIKs and Pinzgauers, logistical vehicles, DROPS, container vehicles, equipment support vehicles, the small Scimitar CVRTs.

Butler is highly regarded in some quarters, but his comments here show a profound and alarming ignorance, and especially in respect of the WIMIKS, which were death traps, and the Pinzguaers (type pictured below), which could not have been more unsuitable if they tried.

And this we were writing about with some force in June 2006 and in the following month when we accused that Army and MoD of corporate manslaughter.

But such is the bizarre superficiality of the Committee that, to guide it through the Labyrinth, it chose to interview General Mike Jackson, the man who did more than most to ensure that our troops were ill-equipped - the man who put the Snatches in Basra.

From a man who would, had there been any justice, been tried and shot for incompetence (pour encourager les autres), the Committee thus did take down these immortal words:

The tactics and equipment required in any campaign are to some extent dictated by the methods of the enemy. General Jackson (p42) explained that the Taliban had moved from direct fighting to the use of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) which had changed the need for equipment:

[...] If you recall, in the first two summers the Taliban took us on, basically using fire and manoeuvre—small arms, basically—and each and every time, they were defeated tactically. We can discuss whether any operational-level progress had been made, but they were defeated tactically.

It took them rather longer, looking back, than one might have expected, but they obviously thought very hard, particularly after the second summer, 2007, and said, "We're not going to get anywhere taking on the British soldiers at what they do best; ergo we will find another way".

That brings us to the IED. That changes priorities on our side. Armoured vehicles suddenly go right up in terms of priority, because that is the way you protect the force. As I've already touched on, the dispersion put a greater premium on helicopters. Tactics and equipment will vary according to the operational circumstances. One has to respond. Ideally, you need to be one foot ahead, but that's not always possible.

The response to this, of course, is that it was possible to be "one foot ahead". Once again, we have to recall that, in June 2006 – over five years ago – Ann Winterton asked the defence secretary:

As our forces appear to be winning the firefights in Afghanistan, does he expect those who oppose our troops there and in other theatres to revert to the use of improvised explosive devices? If so, what vehicles are our forces to be equipped with to counter the threat?

The answer then was a classic in studied complacency. Defence minister Adam Ingram responded:

We have been very effective in Afghanistan. We have a potent force in the Apache attack helicopters. We are up against intelligent and capable enemies, whether in Afghanistan or Iraq, and we know that they will continue to look for ways to attack land-based vehicles or air-based platforms. We have a lot of measures in place. The hon. Lady will understand that it is not appropriate to discuss all the detail, but where we identify a threat - be it a new or technological threat - we identify a quick way to deal with it. Sometimes that takes time as we come to understand the threat before developing the technical response. Our focus at all times is the protection of our personnel, whether it involves fixed-wing aircraft, helicopters, land-based systems or maritime systems.

It is thus not as if our fears and concerns were not known in parliament at the time, but as Ann Winterton constantly brought them up in the House, they were just as constantly ignored. Had they been noted and addressed earlier, many lives could have been saved. Why then, we ask, is it only now that we are seeing "a precise and shocking exposé" from the Defence Committee, and one which still seems incapable of getting to grips with some of the detail?

To answer that, we only need to look at the committee chairman, James Arbuthnot, and record that, time-after-time, under his tutelage, the committee has pulled its punches.

In the context where we expect the military to make mistakes (that is what the military does, and is best at doing), and governments to cover-up, the long-stop is parliament, represented in particular by the select committee system. And on this issue – as with many others – it has failed. But Arbuthnot is one of the "good ol' boys", part of the Tory defence claque, who certainly weren't going to let Lady Ann rain on their self-congratulatory parade, much less listen to "voices off" from the far North.

It is, however, a little unfair to put all the blame on Arbuthnot, as chairman. As we recorded last year, the system is broken - and there are multiple fractures. And now, as then, as the chatterati obsesses about entirely the wrong things, we have been almost a lone voice in saying this. Today, in Arbuthnot's report, we see the result – too little, too late, letting the guilty men off the hook, after good men have died unnecessarily.

And while one newspaper sees part of the point, it is not sufficiently adult to realise where the true problem really lies. As we pointed out last year, a crucial part of the scrutiny system - and especially where parliament drops the ball - is the media. Here, the Sunday Telegraph leader does at least acknowledge that: "Our own columnist, Christopher Booker, protested in 2006 at the outrage of British troops in Southern Iraq being sent to meet their deaths in lightly-armoured Snatch Land Rovers, in conditions which also applied in Afghanistan".

But, as it was at the time, while the newspaper allowed Booker to pursue the issue in his column – with the research carried out by myself – it offered us no support. Instead, its own defence correspondent, Sean Rayment, followed a conflicting line, pushing for more Warriors, a theme he was to return to, even as Booker was pushing for the mine protected vehicle solution.

Thus, in the absence of any real exposure from The Sunday Telegraph it was the Murdoch-owned Sunday Times that gave the campaign the necessary kick-start and got it moving. And when it came to the Pinzgauer, Sean Rayment was also out to lunch, having swallowed the Army spin and given the vehicle an outrageous puff. Thus compromised, he was never to offer a word of criticism against the vehicle.

There is the the other part of your problem. It is one thing having a broken system – but when the media does not recognises that, and then exacerbates it by failing to do its own job, there can be no attempt to fix what is wrong.

And when the media think that next week's select committee hearing is "historic", we know we have a long, long way to go. When parliamentarians start asking each other why they have failed so transparently to do their own jobs, then and only then would they be in a position to start looking at the media. So far, there is no sign whatsoever of this happening.

COMMENT THREAD

Churnalism almost wins out

2011-07-01T00:02:00.002+01:00

From the press coverage of the Snatch Land Rover litigation, on which a judgement in the High Court was handed down yesterday, you would think that the case against the MoD had been lost. It hasn't. The campaigners trying to bring the Ministry of Defence to book, for knowingly fielding dangerously vulnerable equipment in Iraq, have won a qualified victory.

The impression that the case was lost comes from the misleading headline on the BBC report (above), but this owes its origin to a similarly misleading report from the Press Association, which completely misrepresents the situation.

The essence of the flawed report, which has been replicated hundreds of times in local and national media, is that "a High Court judge has blocked attempts by families of four soldiers killed in Iraq to seek compensation from the Government".

The soldiers concerned were Pte Phillip Hewett, of Tamworth, Staffordshire, Pte Lee Ellis, of Wythenshawe, Greater Manchester, and Lance Cpl Kirk Redpath, 22, of Romford, Essex, all of whom were killed in Snatch Land Rovers, and Corporal Stephen Allbutt, 35, who was killed by "friendly fire" after his Challenger was hit by another.

Relatives, we are told, said the MoD failed to provide armoured vehicles or equipment which could have saved lives and should pay compensation. MoD lawyers, on the other hand, "said decisions about battlefield equipment are for politicians and military commanders and asked the High Court to stop compensation claims going forward". Then, says the report, "Mr Justice Owen ruled in favour of the MoD".

However, to project – by juxtaposition – that the judge accepted this particular MoD argument is simply false. As a spokeswoman for relatives' lawyers made clear, this was the MoD relying on the principle of "combat immunity", which removes any liability for exercising a "duty of care" in combat zones.

Here, the judge broke new ground. He refused to accept the principle, allowing Courtney, aged 10, daughter of Pte Lee Ellis, to proceed with a case of negligence. Similarly, the Challenger "friendly fire" case has been allowed through.

Where the Press Association had got itself confused is that there were two separate legs to the case. The first was the group of relatives, including Sue Smith, mother of Pte Hewett, who were not dependents, collectively seeking to make the MoD "... accountable for allowing their loved ones to go into combat in vehicles that were manifestly unsuitable for the job".

Because they were not dependents, they have no claim under common law and cannot seek damages for negligence under duty of care provisions. Before anyone can pursue a claim, the law requires them to prove they have suffered financial loss, which the relatives cannot or will not do.

Thus, this group of relatives have instead proceeded under Human Rights legislation (ECHR) and, since even that requires compensation to be claimed, the cases have been lodged in terms of the relatives seeking damages. However, as the entire group have constantly pointed out - articulated by Sue Smith - they are not interested in the money. This, in any case, is likely to be minimal, and soaked up by legal fees and repayment of legal aid. The relatives simply want the MoD brought to book.

Now, it is the ECHR leg of the case that has been blocked - on the grounds that the deceased soldiers were outside the jurisdiction of the UK at the time of their deaths because they were not in the UK nor on a British Army base. Therefore, it is held, the ECHR does not apply.

That the ECHR case would be rejected was actually an expected development, especially after the Jason Smith case. When I spoke to Sue Smith after the judgement, she was not at all dismayed. There are other, different cases being heard which may settle this point – or these cases themselves may end up in Strasbourg.

But on the negligence issue, ground really has been broken. And, for once, the loss-making Guardian has got it right, a distinction shared by the Belfast Telegraph. Both note that, relying on the principle of "combat immunity", the ministry had argued that this was a complete legal defence for incidents that took place in war zones.

The judge, says the papers, disagreed. In The Guardian, he is cited as saying: "There can be no doubt that the [MoD] is under a general duty to provide adequate training, suitable equipment and a safe system of work for members of the armed forces". Thus Courtney's claim, plus claims by Cpl Allbutt's widow, Debi, and Dan Twiddy and Andy Julien – two soldiers injured in the Challenger - could continue.

Before all the misleading publicity, a ministry spokesman had declared that: "The courts have upheld our arguments on Article 2 of the ECHR. We will be seeking leave to appeal against the decision about liability claims for equipment provision".

Latterly, Sky News got the news mostly right – but still with a misleading headline. The Mirror became a late entrant, correcting its earlier story - as did the Mail, while The Sun continues to get it wrong. Interestingly, the Failygraph does not carry a report at all.

Nevertheless, the manoeuvring continues. Those who lost their lives in Snatch Land Rovers – as well as the Challenger set - are one step closer to getting their day in court. Unfortunately, due to the bulk of the media and its churnalism, most people will never realise what has happened.

COMMENT THREAD

Doing the honest thing

2011-06-29T08:37:00.002+01:00

A splendidly indignant Peter Hitchens is fulminating about "Dave" doing the talking (telling the military to shut up and do the fighting), while the war dead from Afghanistan are to be sneaked out of the back gate of RAF Brize Norton when it takes over from Lyneham (a few weeks from now) as the arrival point for the fallen.

They will then be routed down side roads to avoid nearby Carterton – a town almost exactly the same size as Wootton Bassett – and make their way to the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford along A-roads and bypasses. There'll be a small guard of honour near the hospital entrance (there already is) but somehow or other the cortege won't go down any High Streets, thus avoiding what has become a media circus.

All of this, however, has to be viewed in the context of the complete and utter failure of the Afghanistan campaign, typified by the experience of the Kajaki power project in Afghanistan, as narrated by the BBC's Mark Urban on yesterday's Newsnight, and repeated today in a BBC documentary.

He refers to a series of the heroic adventures, starting in 2007 and culminating in August 2008 with thousands of British troops taking part in an operation to escort a 200-ton turbine to the Kajaki Dam on the Helmand River, 100 miles north-west of Kandahar City.

The aim was to improve the hydro-electric scheme there, adding a turbine to the two already installed. This was part of a project that has so far cost more than £29 million, and was (and still is) regarded as an essential part of the hearts and minds campaign in the region.

But, three years after so much blood and treasure has been expended (albeit with the bulk of the cash being shelled out by the Americans), the third turbine lies unassembled – the parts littered about the weed-strewn site, exactly where they were left by the British military.

What makes this so desperately sad is that even the slightest knowledge of the history of the area would confirm that the project was never going to achieve its desired aim, even if it had been technically successful.

Not least of the problems was – as Booker recorded in September 2009 that the power lines and sub-stations which feed the electricity to several towns are controlled by the Taliban, who charge money to customers for allowing the juice to reach them.

So obvious, in fact, were the defects of the scheme that a year before, in September 2008, The Guardian, while acknowledging the "brilliant courage and ingenuity" of the British, dismissed it as a "glorious but dangerous folly".

The Kajaki, it said, has been a 90-metre-high, rock-filled demonstration of foreign good intentions for decades but has never delivered the promised benefits to Afghanistan - a political showpiece and always has been since it was built (but not fully completed) in the 1950s by the US to compete with Soviet projects elsewhere in the country.

Such was the delusional attachment to the scheme, however, that this brought a pained rebuttal from then defence secretary Des Browne. The project was not merely a symbol, he declared. "If it were only that, we would never have sent our people on such a risky mission".

Sense and analytical judgement, however, had been submerged in tales of derring-do, marking the self-declared "successful mission". Typical of the period, we got Lieutenant Colonel Rufus McNeil, Comanding Officer 13 Air Assault Regiment, Royal Logistic Corps, declaring of those that had run the hazardous convoy, "Every one of the soldiers did fantastically well."

Well, indeed they did, but it was still a complete waste of time, money, effort – and lives. By December 2009, The Guardian was back on the case with a report headed: "Taliban stalls key hydroelectric turbine project in Afghanistan". The strap read: "Convoy diverted British troops from front but generator may never be used".

The enormous hydroelectric turbine dragged at huge cost by British troops through Taliban heartlands last year, said the paper, may never be installed because NATO has been unable to secure a 30-mile stretch of road leading to an isolated dam in northern Helmand.

To install the turbine needed, amongst other things, 900 tons of cement for new foundations, but security had deteriorated to such an extent that British troops were having to be resupplied by air drop and helicopters. Even the BBC reported the problems.

Now, with additional US troops in the region – but for a short time only – USAid, which is managing the project, remains convinced that the project is worthwhile. US aid officials are now claiming that turbine could be installed in 24 to 30 months.

This is so much moonshine. No more now than in 2003 when then current project was first mooted, is this a feasible project. It remains, as always, a testament to the vain, unrealisable hopes of the coalition forces that they can bring peace and stability to Afghanistan.

Returning to Hitchens and his indignation, one recalls an episode during the London Blitz in 1940, when a cash-strapped council in the East End, finding rather fewer houses on its patch requiring collections, redeployed some of its dustcarts – cleaned out and painted a tasteful black – as hearses to collect the war dead.

Given the quite obvious disdain in which Dave holds the military, and the utter futility of the war in Afghanistan, where lives are being thrown away for absolutely no purpose – to say nothing of our hard-earned cash – he might consider following the example of the East End council.

Thus, for as long as Dave and his cronies continue to throw away lives for no purpose, he might as well do the honest thing and hire in a dustcart, instead of wasting money on expensive hearses that the public now will not be seeing. The symbolism would be entirely appropriate and serve merely to underline what our masters are doing with our money and soldiers' lives out in Afghanistan.

COMMENT THREAD

Losing the will to live

2011-06-28T12:59:00.002+01:00

Well, I watched the 13th Century Fox announcement in the Commons yesterday, and the whole of the subsequent debate. Then I read the 82-page report. But you can only take so much punishment before you lose the will to live, so I decided to sleep on it before writing it up.

Having further cogitated, I've come to the conclusion that I'm none the wiser for the travail. More seriously, it is well-evident that Lord Levene, his Defence Reform Steering Group, and thus 13th Century Fox, are not much wiser either.

Yes we agree that there are too many generals, and the number must be cut. But that's low-hanging fruit. We observed as much in November 2009 so it would hardly take a high-powered committee and 18 months to work that one out.

And yes, there appear to be some obvious and necessary reforms amongst the 53 separate recommendations. But even if it was acting purely by chance, you would expect that. And, of course, there is plenty of right-on guff, with the Group telling us that we need to create single, coherent Defence Infrastructure and Defence Business Services organisations, to ensure enabling services are delivered efficiently, effectively and professionally.

The trouble is that the moment you see words such as "coherent" and phrases such as: "to ensure enabling services are delivered efficiently, effectively and professionally", you know they're up to no good.

What one was looking for, though, was some sense that the Group really understood the problems they were looking at, and thus knew where to start the remediation. And here, centre stage is procurement, so that one looked especially for the views on this troubled issue.

What was needed was a clear statement that the failures here stem largely from the inability of ministers and senior military staff to define roles, to match equipment to the roles, then to devise acquisition plans and stick to them.

And here, the Group starts well enough, referring to the Bernard Gray review, where it was noted that successive attempts at reform have concentrated on acquisition delivery, rather than – as suggested – seeing procurement as a symptom rather than a cause of the problems in the Department’s decision making.

We go with that, but what are the problems? And here the whole damn thing falls apart. The Group is not into problem solving, but "lessons learned". Thus, they identify "conditions for success in transformations", producing a Janet & John list that comes straight out of the Common Purpose manual on how to bullshit the public.

Thus we get these headings: leadership: vision; engagement; communication; effective people; implementation; resourced; innovation (which "visibly encourages original and radical thinking, and leverages both independent expertise and internal knowledge"); honesty: "the programmes tone inspires confidence, enthusiasm and a 'sense of opportunity' while being realistic about cuts and challenges"; and benefits.

I will not trouble you further with this, for fear of making you physically sick, but that is a measure of the beast.

What one did not find, therefore, were any recommendations of lasting value. This is about shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic more efficiently, and getting more value from the band. The only merciful thing is that the report is only 82 pages long, as opposed to the 296 pages of the Gray report.

That, I suspect, will be the Group's only lasting achievement – reducing the amount of waste printed matter that goes in the bins.

COMMENT: MOD THREAD

A nosedive of morale

2011-06-18T13:03:00.001+01:00

Cameron's drive to reduce the size of the Armed Forces, even to the extent that he is forcing Service chiefs to call for redundancies, is undoubtedly marking the final stages in the decline of the UK as a political power. It would be a fool, however, who did not expect this to have a knock-on effect within the Services, so the news from Thomas Harding that morale is at "rock bottom" comes as absolutely no surprise.

He tells us that this, together with concerns that the Army is in a "permanent state of decline" has led to twice as many people applying for redundancy as expected. They include several future battalion leaders and two officers singled out as potential generals. Six brigadiers have volunteered for redundancy and 48 majors, with an average of 16 years experience each, have asked to go.

The important thing here though is that we are not just talking about the over-paid and over-privileged officer corps throwing a hissy fit. The Army is expected to lose a substantial number of senior NCOs, and has also been inundated with applications from corporals, sergeants and staff sergeants.

This we picked up independently, a little time ago, when we learned that the trigger for departure was a tour in Afghanistan. Once they had experience the shambles, hardship and danger of that theatre – with no obvious reason why they should – few are willing to repeat it. Now, so desperately short of junior NCOs are some units that soldiers only a few months out of training are being promoted.

Whatever the MoD and government propaganda might proclaim, we are fully aware that the official accounts are biased and incomplete, on top of which the Army is haunted by its institutional memory of failure in Iraq.

Cynicism has thus become a dominant sentiment and there is a massive sense of the futility of the Afghan operation, Furthermore, the failure of the Army to come to terms with its experience in that theatre has carried over into Afghanistan.

We are thus seeing an institution which has lost faith in itself, the result being dangerous haemorrhage, ending up with the ranks populated by children, as the older, more seasoned troops leave, commanded by a higher proportion of the inexperienced, the incompetent and disillusioned.

Military historians will undoubtedly be able to tell us things have been worse – and the inter-war period when disarmament was the vogue, must have been pretty dispiriting. Nevertheless, when the Army chiefs asks for 25 colonels to volunteer for redundancy and receives 52 applications, it must be agreed that the situation is dire.

One wonders, though, whether in the short to medium term the situation it recoverable, and whether indeed there is any serious political will to make any improvements. One cannot help but feel that the people masquerading as our leaders are content with the way things are developing, and will be most happy when our Army looks like the picture above.

COMMENT THREAD

End game

2011-06-04T01:11:00.000+01:00

We saw it coming in January 2006, but it goes back to November 1996 and the Bordeaux agreement on bilateral UK-French naval co-operation, in the dying days of the Major administration. Extended by Blair in 1998 in St Malo, we now have three prime ministers: Major ... Blair ... Cameron, all with the same agenda.

And now we move to the end game, the final surrender, as the Anglo-French force paves the way for a fully-fledged EU Navy.

Autonomous Mind also picks up the story. "All this has been planned and delivered, hidden in plain sight of the electorate and the media, yet even now many in the media are still unable or unwilling to connect the dots and explain to our population what our political class has done. They are sickening quislings to a man and a woman".

What more can one say?

COMMENT THREAD

The politics of denial

2011-05-22T09:05:00.001+01:00

The British formally ends its final military mission in Iraq today – a Navy training operation in the Gulf. Interesting how CNN marks the occasion with a Snatch Land Rover, while Hague says the mission has left Iraq "a better place".

In all probability, Iraq is indeed a better place. But Hague claims too much in taking the credit. The British expedition in southern Iraq was a failure, and only the combined efforts of the Iraqis and the US Forces salvaged something from the wreckage, but not before many people – and especially Iraqis – died unnecessarily.

Ironically, the Snatch Land Rover is the symbol of that failure, representing the inability of the military to adapt to circumstances, and handle a vicious but ultimately beatable insurgency. But to this day, neither the military nor the politicians have to grips with their failures. They are still in denial - a sure recipe for continued failure, of the nature we are currently experiencing in Afghanistan.

Interestingly, the Tories could have started with clean sheet, but they have also bought into the cover-up and are no more able to cope with acknowledging failure than their predecessors. As with so other issues, all we get is the closing of ranks. "Face" is more important to the establishment than success - and certainly more important than the lives of soldiers.

COMMENT THREAD

Shocked ... again!

2011-05-22T00:09:00.000+01:00

Coalition plans to pull out of Afghanistan are being hampered by theft and fraud totalling nearly $1bn, The Independent on Sunday is telling us. It adds that "hopes of a timely withdrawal of British troops from the region have been dealt a critical blow by revelations about massive bank frauds which have forced donors to suspend vital international aid".

In a country that is possibly even more corrupt than either India or Pakistan, and where it is known to all but the blind, deaf and the stupid (i.e., most of our politicians) that the élites of Afghanistan have been enriching themselves at the expense of international taxpayers, this really can come as no surprise.

And where the people of Afghanistan see daily the lack of progress (being unable to read the ISAF press releases), knowing full well that the bulk of the aid money is being ripped off, the Taliban are seen by many as the only hope for the beleaguered country. Any idea that we are going to walk away, bands playing, to leave a settled, stable, country, is pure fantasy.

When we leave, as leave we must and will shortly, the money spent will have been wasted, the dead soldiers and the broken bodies and minds of the survivors a testament to the egos and stupidities of successive politicians and military geniuses who thought they could waltz in and make a difference without doing the homework.

Collectively, they should hang their heads in shame. But they won't.

COMMENT THREAD

Idiots

2011-05-20T08:43:00.000+01:00

Incompetent defence chiefs cost British forces their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan by squandering nearly £1billion on armoured vehicles that have not been built.

This is the narrative being thrown up by The Daily Fail and others this morning, telling us the Ministry of Defence "wasted a shocking £718million on plans for thousands of properly-protected battlefield trucks which were then scrapped or delayed".

Look behind the headlines and you will see FRES – about which we have written a word or two. But the MoD/Army narrative is that the MoD purchased a fleet of mine-resistant vehicles - including Mastiffs and Ridgebacks - to stop troops being maimed and killed. These were bought as "urgent operational requirements' using Treasury cash. But because they were built specifically for Afghanistan, they are unsuitable for wider use".

In other words, we are being told that FRES would have been a better option – which is pure, distilled BS. The mine protected fleet was bought instead of FRES – in the face of stiff resistance from the Army. Had the Army been given its way, there would have been carnage.

But there is something more fundamental here. Apart from Korea, the Falklands and the first phases of the Iraqi war, every significant conflict in which the Army has been deployed has involved elements of irregular warfare, for which these mine protected vehicles were designed. But the Army hates this type of warfare, refuses to accept that this is the rule, rather than the exception, and hankers after the free-style, war of manoeuvre for which FRES is designed.

Classically, the Army is seeking to equip itself for the wars it would wish to fight, instead of the warfare it is most likely to meet - a triumph of hope over experience.

But FRES, as they say, is the narrative, and the MSM buys it hook line and sinker. The real story is here ... in my book, but we don't want anything like the truth sullying the minds of the public, so let's forget all about that. These people are idiots.

COMMENT THREAD

Costing us a bomb

2011-03-22T17:29:00.001Z

The Times (no link) is asking questions about the cost of Dave's little adventure in Libya, and so is the Daily Mirror. Even the hand wavers are asking questions. Nice to see them catching up with the derivative blogs.

I've revisited my own figures, and found I had over-egged my original calculations. The GR4s are cheaper than F3s, a about £33,000 an hour. I've assumed that VC10 and TriStar costs and AWACS are about the same as Nimrod, at about £33,000 an hour as well. An eight-hour sortie for three GR4s, therefore - with support - costs about £1.5 million.

From what I can see now, the Tornadoes carry only two, not four Storm Shadows. But here there is the greatest variation in costs. The Times is saying £500,000 – without giving a source. The Mirror has defence "expert" Francis Tusa saying that Britain pays around £1.5million for a pair. They are both wrong.

The hand wavers quote Prof Malcolm Charmers, from defence think-tank the Royal United Services Institute, who gives £500,000 as the cost of the Storm Shadow. That tells you all you need to know about Charmers and RUSI. He is wrong as well.

The total programme cost for the Storm Shadow was £981 million, and we bought 900 missiles. The sum includes development costs, INITIAL support costs and unit procurement costs. There are also the aircraft integration costs - the costs of adapting the aircraft to carry and launch the missile.

Thus, we have the typical MoD trick of separating out the costs under different headings. But the real cost is £981 million divided by units procured ... 900 as far as we know. That makes £1.1 million each in round figures, and puts the single mission cost - with six Storm Shadows at £6.6 million - at slightly over £8 million.

The Brookes cartoon in The Times shows a stylised GR4 with its external stores, each with a label. One Storm Shadow is labelled: "half a school", the other: "the other half". We also get "tuition fees", "disability benefit", "one hospital" and so on. Against that, what have we to show for our down payment of £8 million, plus all the rest of the money being poured down the drain?

Cameron has made a serious miscalculation here – and so have the grubbly little MPs who have rushed to support him. Either we are broke, and we must cut spending to the quick - including defence spending - or we are swimming in cash and have plenty to spare for something that isn't directly our problem. They really can't have it both ways.

If they now want to tell us that we must tighten our belts even further, just so that little Dave can enjoy his ego trip, they are likely to meet with a less than sympathetic response - and instructions which are biologically impossible to carry out.

But there is another element here. Throughout the Arab world, people are losing their fear. You never know, this might just catch on here, and our masters might regret taking us for granted. We didn't ask them to go to war, we haven't given them our permission - we didn't even vote for them as a government - and we are certainly not happy about having to pay for it.

Even our masters can only treat us with this level of contempt for so long, before we've finally had enough of them. This has brought us a whole lot closer.

COMMENT: "ONE OF OUR INTERESTS" THREAD

Opportunism?

2011-02-01T17:24:00.001Z

That diminishing band of us who celebrate having memories of slightly greater capacity than the proverbial goldfish in a bowl will recall what a big deal the Tories made out of the shortage of helicopters for our troops in Afghanistan – even though the need was vastly overstated.

Such was the political pressure, though, that the then Labour government allowed itself to be bounced into ordering a further 20 Chinook heavy-lift helicopters to augment operations – unwisely in my view.

How interesting it is, therefore, to learn from the left-leaning Daily Mirror that the self-same helicopters "promised to troops in Afghanistan" may be axed by the Tories. And if that is too partisan a source, then one should note that the Financial Times is also pointing out that there is a "question mark" over the order.

I said at the time that the Tories were playing politics and they were pushing the wrong debate, for the wrong reasons. So it turns out to be – a classic example of political opportunism.

In then becomes doubly interesting to see how quiet the media are being about this volte face, especially the gung-ho, Tory-supporting Sun, which thought nothing was too much for "Our Boys", as long as pointing this out embarrassed Labour.

When the account of the current Afghan campaign comes to be written, it might then be remarked how quick the media and the Tories were to make political capital out of the military problems in theatre, when it suited them, but how little they actually did care, and how quickly the Tories forgot their concerns once they were in what passes for power.

COMMENT THREAD

A Harrier replacement

2010-12-16T23:15:00.003Z

Much weeping and gnashing of teeth attends the premature retirement of the Harrier force. Those of us with longer memories, though, will recall that the original justification for the aircraft (in the ground attack role) was that its V/STOL capability allowed it to be deployed closer to the FEBA (Forward Edge of the Battle Area). The high sortie rate - attendant on the short transit time - thus compensated for the poor load-carrying capability and the limited range.

Latterly, the aircraft has been used to salve wounded pride in Afghanistan, where the vast preponderance of close air support has been provided by the Americans. Based at Kandahar, where facilities were fairly primitive, the Harrier was able to operate from the air base, in the space left by the Americans, when our heavier aircraft (such as the Tornado) could not, without considerable expenditure on infrastructure.

Nothing of this, however, makes up for the fact that the Harrier retains its limited load-carrying capability, and limited range. This, plus the fact that it is inordinately expensive to operate and highly manpower intensive, makes it a far from ideal aircraft.

On the other hand, the A-6 /Tucano B-2 option offers a better load/range/endurance combination than the Harrier. These aircraft are vastly cheaper to operate and, although not capable of vertical landing, they do have a significant short-field capability and can operate from unprepared strips. In many respects, therefore, this aircraft type could be a useful Harrier replacement.

March of the euroslime

2010-11-02T09:58:00.001Z

What is incredible is how blatant it all is, and how easily they lie through their teeth as they "insist" that this will not give the European Union a role in Britain's defence policy. Despite their denials, the great greasy-pole merchant Liam Fox - so ambitious he would sell his mother for a farthing if it bought preferment - has sold us out to the forces of European integration, cosying up to his euroslime master Cameron in the process.

A treaty creating a new joint Anglo-French rapid reaction force would serve both countries’ interests in a world "where resources are tight", he says, as his traitorous master is set to announce the creation of a new Combined Joint Expeditionary Force (CJEF) of around 6,500 troops from the two countries under a 50-year deal for closer military "co-operation".

It is expected to include units from the Parachute Regiment, the Royal Marines and Special Forces including the SAS, as well as their French counterparts. The CJEF, they say, is the centrepiece of a new Anglo-French military co-operation treaty being unveiled by Camerslime and TLOTK Sarkozy at a summit in London today.

Needless to say, this "new" Combined Joint Expeditionary Force is not new. It is simply a battle group, along the lines agreed in 2004 as the core part of the European Rapid Reaction Force. Under the guise of "economy", euroslime Cameron is selling out to the euroweenies, doing more for European integration in his first year of office than Blair did in thirteen.

Of course, the lame and the stupid are wittering on about this being "a bilateral, not a supranational endeavour," which is complete and total cant – a staggering insult to our intelligence.

But for all those dim little Tories, all this does is go to prove is that the only thing more stupid than a Tory politician is a supporter of the Tory party. As they trill away about this not being a repeat of Tony Blair's St Malo summit – which is exactly what it is – all you can hear is the sound of their brains gushing out of their backsides.

This is a continuation of the Maastricht Treaty agenda, as this briefing note makes clear. Agreed by the Tories under John Major, this set up the parameters for the development of a European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP). The process continued with the Franco-British meeting in Saint-Malo (France) in December 1998. That was when London and Paris agreed to jointly and actively work to make the European Union "able to carry out some security tasks on its own".

During the period 1999-2003, the EU set up relevant political-military structures to assess, decide, plan and execute military operations and now it is "moving ahead" to embark on a "second round". And that is what this is, the "second round" - building the ESDP, planning and organising new military "cooperation" and integration among EU member states. This is the Trojan Horse or, as the "colleagues" say, the catalyst.

With it, our military heritage is being sold down the river by the euroslime. These are black days. We have traitors in our midst, surrounded by fools who've woken up too late.

COMMENT THREAD

Sold out!

2010-10-29T11:45:00.001+01:00

In The Daily Telegraph we now read that French Rafales may be using the Royal Navy carriers. You did, of course, read it here first and then here. Amazingly, after the debacle of the "carriers with no planes", we are now told that, trying to bridge the “capability gap”, ministers have said the new carriers will be redesigned to have catapults to launch aircraft. That "will allow them to carry planes like the French Rafale". Oh, what a surprise.

The beans have been spilled by French defence minister Morin, who has told a "Euronaval conference" that: "I've asked our military command to consider the feasibility of stationing British aircraft on our aircraft carrier and vice versa." He added: "The idea is an exchange of capacity and an interdependence. It's a new approach."

Is it bollocks a new approach. That has been the plan all along ... do they think we are that stupid?

Anyhow, us poor little dimwits are told: "The British have decided to equip their aircraft carriers with catapults - we can have joint exercises, but also arrange to have a Rafale squadron make use of the British platform." The plan would give France "a permanent presence at sea" even when its single aircraft carrier, the Charles de Gaulle, is in dock for maintenance and cannot sail, Morin says.

And so we march on to the Euro-navy. Dave the slime presides over the work of his predecessors, Blair, Major and Heath. The Royal Navy is being sold out on the altar of European political integration. A more potent symbol of integration could hardly exist, and its all but in the bag.

RAFALE THREAD

Well, what a surprise

2010-10-20T13:36:00.000+01:00

The Daily Telegraph print edition runs a front-page story headed, "Armed Forces will have to seek French help to fight a war". The on-line version does not share the headline, but the key part of the content remains the same.

"At an Anglo-French summit next month," we are told, "Mr Cameron will discuss with President Nicolas Sarkozy a range of options for greater partnership, including the creation of 'high readiness joint formations' composed of British and French personnel." Mr Cameron, we further learn, "told MPs the summit would produce 'some very exciting steps forward'".

There is the real agenda. This a direct continuation of the post-Maastricht defence policy espoused by Major, and supported by Portillo in 1996, and continued by Bair in St. Malo and beyond. The 1996 agreement was even reported by The Independent at the time.

"Anglo-French military co-operation is thriving in a number of areas, despite the anti-European rhetoric of the Secretary of State for Defence, Michael Portillo," the paper said. "An Anglo- French nuclear committee is said to meet regularly and to have made considerable progress since President Chirac came to power last May, although both sides are secretive about the committee's agenda."

You can bet both sides are "secretive", and they still are. But this is not helped by the current newspapers failing to make the links between then and now. Reporters have no memory of previous events and the media has no institutional memory, and thus every event is reported in isolation, without reference to the previous, linked developments.

Thus, Cameron is able to talk about "a range of options", as he was in charge, and had thought about the possibilities himself, rather than having had the Foreign Officer deliver them to him as part of the ongoing plan. And that is how we are being sold out – small step, by small step, so slowly that the media doesn't notice and can't join up the dots.

The name of the game is "interdependence", with each member state of the EU being robbed of the capability for independent action, thus being forced to worth with and rely on other member states. Through such a mechanism is the process of political integration driven.

The real irony, though, is that if we were to dispense with the annual payments to the EU - £18 billion and rising, we would not have needed to curtail spending on the Navy in the first place. But, of course, these things must not be mentioned in polite company, where European integration is simply a figment of the imagination of those horrid, uncouth eurosceptics.

So, gradually, we move into the end game. The sell-out will soon be complete, happening under our very noses while the clever-dicks sleep on, leaving Mr Cameron and his euroweenies to succeed where Hitler and the Axis powers never could - the destruction of the Royal Navy as an independent force.

COMMENT THREAD

Heath in our time

2010-10-20T02:34:00.002+01:00

Well, not only is HMS Ark Royal to be scrapped but the Fleet Air Arm as well. In the meantime, the BBC has learned that "at least one" of the new carriers will be redesigned so that it can deploy normal fighter aircraft that do not need a Harrier-style vertical lift capability.

Dr Fox says that there would be "interoperability" so strike fighter aircraft from allies such as France could land on UK aircraft carriers, and vice versa.

So what have we here? No British aircraft, an Anglo-French agreement on joint carrier operation and now a carrier design change that allows for the operation of French aircraft on the British carrier. Where did you read this first?

And as more and more details leak out, you can see the game – the Armed Forces are being stripped of capability to the point that they can no longer operate independently, even within the context of an alliance. We will have to look to "allies" for operational components just so that we can field our forces.

Well, the US Armed Forces don't work that way, so we will have to look elsewhere. Where do we think Cammy and his euroweenie chums are looking? Why does the phrase "sold out" come to mind? But then, this has been on the cards for a long time, and we said this was going to happen in January 2006.

That it should happen now, under a (partially) Tory government is not a surprise. Historically, the Tories have always been keenest on European military "co-operation" and the die was cast when Portillo signed the co-operation deal in 1996. Euro-Navy here we come, with the European Carrier Group as the flagship operation.

We are now simply seeing the end came of a process that has been under development for decades, and which started with Heath and his merry men. Forget Thatcher (Blair and all the rest). Cameron is the true heir to Edward Heath. In the manner of Chamberlain and Munich, we now have "Heath in our time".

COMMENT THREAD

An evening with defence

2010-10-20T02:33:00.001+01:00

So it came to pass that the North went south to attend the great debate. There was a smaller than usual attendance for a Spectator debate, which is interesting in itself, given the high profile of the defence at the moment.

The motion, I think, was part of the problem ... that the armed forces should be scrapped and replaced with the Royal Marines. It was roundly defeated, and deservedly so, and I say that even though I was speaking for the motion.

I tried to turn the debate by arguing that the motion was a proxy for arguing for institutional change, and that the real need was to break away from thinking about our three services and introduce an Armed Forces ethos, task orientated rather that focused on what the services wanted.

The trouble is with these things though, is that the spectator does see more of the game. You sit there, blinded by the lights, in your little bubble of nerves, trying to marshal your thoughts and hoping you do not fluff you lines.

One point, I made was that the officer corps in the WWII Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe trained together and that the officers only specialised after being commissioned. But it was also the case that Albert Kesselring, in command of Luftflotte 2 during the Battle of Britain then went on to command OB South and mastermind the fighting withdrawal of the German land forces in Italy.

I am not sure the idea went down all that well, but I also went on to point out that the strategic bombing campaign conducted by the allies was fought by RAF bomber command on the one hand and the US Army Air Force on the other. And, of the two, arguably the USAAF was more innovative and effective.

The point from all that, and some other more recent examples, is that performance does not depend on the nature of the institution. But another from the war made that point. In Germany, anti-aircraft defences were part of the Luftwaffe. In Britain, they were part of the Army, but under the overall control of Fighter Command. In Germany, Paratroops were again part of the Luftwaffe. In Britain, they were part of the Army.

There are loads of other examples which, I think, demonstrate that it really does not matter which service you are in, as long as the function is well defined, and the people in it are properly trained and equipped. The job isn’t done better because it is done by any specific service. In the Korean War, the British air component was provided exclusively by the Fleet Air Arm, and so on.

Anyhow, it was entertaining enough, and the dinner afterwards more so. But it was Chatham House rules, so I cannot repeat what any one person said. Nevertheless, the discussion confirms my many impressions of certain high personages. Surprising accord on Afghanistan. There has been something of a learning curve and the original paradigms have been thrown out of the window. We are simply looking for a credible – or any – exit plan.

One really interesting point though was that there was lots of bitching about the cost of the csrriers and complaints about them being bought. I made my speech about the European Carrier Group, St Malo and the ERRF ... it was like I'd made a bad smell in the room. They couldn't change the subject fast enough.

I am never sure, therefore, whether these events are worth the time and nervous energy they take, but it does help to climb out of the ivory tower occasionally, and see how the other half live. It is not a pretty sight really, but the beef was actually rather good.

COMMENT THREAD

Savagely vindicated ... again

2010-10-10T12:50:00.002+01:00

I first wrote about it on 28 July 2004, marking it down as "another blunder of Eurofighter proportions".

This is the £16 billion FRES programme, which I have consistently opposed, writing over 100 pieces about it. Yet I was almost a lone voice, stacked up against an indifferent and ignorant media, with only Booker for support in the media, and the tenacious Ann Winterton in Parliament.

On the other side of the divide, its greatest supporter has been General Sir Richard Dannatt, with the wholehearted approval of the Defence Committee and the Tory defence team.

But now we learn that FRES is dead in the water. "It's a dead duck. It is the definition of everything that is wrong with the MoD's procurement process," says a senior Ministry of Defence source. Actually, this isn't a procurement issue - it is a definition problem - the Army simple couldn't get its act together and make a coherent case for its future needs.

Fortunately, the project has not gone so far down the acquisition path that it is incapable of being cancelled. And, although I say it myself – because no one else will – that is in no small measure due to the opposition of this blog. Such was its reach and its sister blog DOTR, that we had the then procurement minister coming onto our forum to plead the case, after I had written this.

This I remarked at the time was when the blogosphere came of age, when a blog was setting the agenda and forcing ministers to respond. We in turn responded with this - a case which was never satisfactorily countered. Few people know the effect that piece had on the defence establishment, and why. I do.

You can read much of the background in Ministry of Defeat, still the only book that gets near telling the story. It has a recent review here.

Yet it is the Gen Dannatt who is lauded as the great expert, doyen of The Daily Telegraph - the man who "knows". This is the man who would have lumbered us with that useless pile of junk called FRES, and its lifetime costs in excess of £60 billion. By contrast, this blog won't even get a look in, shunned by the great and the good for telling the inconvenient truths.

Even then, the media doesn't get it. That idiot political editor Patrick Hennessy, who writes the piece about FRES being ditched, states: "The decision will mean that the Army will be forced to fight in Afghanistan and in future conflicts with its existing fleet of ageing vehicles, some of which first entered service in the 1960s."

In his little Westminster bubble, the world passes him by. Has he not heard of the Mastiff, Ridgeback, Wolfhound, Ocelot? How you can be that ignorant and still be a journalist is one of those modern miracles. No wonder they think Dannatt is an expert.

COMMENT THREAD

Snatch to be replaced

2010-09-22T14:01:00.001+01:00

The BBC is trilling its little head off about the announcement that the decision to award the contract for the LPPV has gone to Force Protection Europe and Ricado, with their Ocelot. That is probably the right choice and it means that the last of the Snatch Land Rovers can now be replaced. However, while one can say it is exactly what the Army needed – that was back in 2003. It is now probably too little, too late.

Nevertheless. it will be heaps better than the Jackal and maybe some soldiers who would otherwise have left their legs and possibly their brains spattered over the Afghan countryside might survive intact. However, in the case of some officers, it would be hard to tell the difference if the latter event occurred, and for some generals it would be an improvement.

Of course, it would have been nice if we had had mine protected vehicles back in 2003, when we really did need them, instead of the Snatch Land Rover ... er ... except that we did (pic below). But the Army didn't want them and flogged them off at knock-down prices. It then did its level best to ensure that no more were bought - with the full support of the BBC - until the hapless Des Browne forced the issue and soldiers started finding out how nice it was to have two legs after all.

Now, of course, the Army has seen the light, seven years after it could have acted – which is about the sort of speed the Army is capable of working (in fact, slightly faster than average). But the Taliban now have seven years practice in blowing up British Army vehicles and will soon get the measure of this one. What we really need is more Buffaloes and some Huskies, which even the French are buying, and some concerted effort in using intelligence-based systems coupled with 24/7 UAV surveillance on target routes.

The trouble is that the idea of using detection systems, as well as detection vehicles in concert (much less designing and buying a Pookie replacement with GPR and environmental mapping software) is probably so far above the competence level of the typical brown job that we'll have to wait for the invasion of the Euro Army (where in some countries they still have an education system) to up the brain-cell count before we get any movement in that direction.

Instead, we'll have to make do with the Media's currently favourite talking head, Col Tootal, to tell us what for. He know's everything 'cos he's been there and ritten a book. So that's alright. Job sorted.

COMMENT THREAD

Sodden and limp

2010-09-21T09:06:00.003+01:00

In the aftermath of the British withdrawal from Sangin, we have considerable media comment, and a huge contrast of styles. Up front is the ponderous – some might say pompous - Max Hasting, in The Daily Mail. He says: "Blame the generals and politicians for this mess. But our soldiers can hold their heads up high."

Then we have the gung-ho Sun which blares: "Sangin: Our Boy's blood, their efforts, their victory." And just to make sure we get the message, it has that great strategist Andy McNab, who is now the "Sun Security Adviser". Continuing the joke, he tells us:

I AM fed up with armchair generals who say the handover of Sangin to US Forces is a British retreat. That is 100 per cent crap. We have moved out because at long last the 20,000 US 'boots on the ground' finally arrived.

The Scotsman has Clive Fairweather telling us that the handover is a sensible redeployment of our troops ... not a retreat. He then retreats behind a "premium" paywall, so we never get to see what he really thinks. And we care less.

In The Daily Telegraph we get some sensible pieces from Thomas Harding, but it is more reportage than analysis. And that is what is missing – decent analysis.

You couldn't call Hasting's piece "decent" analysis. His is lightweight extruded verbal material. You unroll it, tear it off by the yard and paste it in to fill the space. I'm getting rather bored with his pontificating.

I was mightily cheered, however, by an extract from Michael Foot's biography of Aneurin Bevan, who commented on the wartime coverage of military affairs – the Second World War, that is. "Immediately on the outbreak of war," he wrote, "England was given over to the mental level of the Boys' Own Paper and the Magnet". He continues:

The Childrens Hour has been extended to cover the whole of British broadcasting, and the editors of the national dailies use treacle instead of ink. If one can speak of a general mind in Britain at all just now, it is sodden and limp with the ceaseless drip of adolescent propaganda.

At least we can take some comfort in having been there before. I devoted a considerable amount of effort into evaluating the situation at Sangin in Defence of the Realm and was particularly proud of this and this.

But with a nation given over to a second childhood, still "sodden and limp with the ceaseless drip of adolescent propaganda," such grown-up analysis is a complete waste of time and energy. How much easier it is to cheer "Our Boys" to the rafters, and celebrate yet another victory.

COMMENT THREAD

Fluffheads Mk II

2010-09-20T15:14:00.002+01:00

The Taliban have taken out a Jackal, killing two soldiers. Far from being critical, however, The Sun acts as a free propaganda sheet for the MoD, calling in aid Major Chris Hunter, ex Army bomb disposal "expert".

The Jackal is so much better than its predecessor, the Snatch Land Rover, says Major Hunter, immediately demonstrating that, while he may be a bomb disposal expert, he certainly ain't a vehicle expert. The predecessor to the Jackal was the WIMIK Land Rover. The Snatch was supposed to be replaced by the Vector – another brilliant choice from those Army geniuses.

But hey, this is The Sun after all, so we get Hunter giving us a Janet and John lecture, telling us that, with combat vehicles there is always a trade-off:

You have to balance firepower, mobility and protection and the result is a compromise. When you increase the vehicle's capability in one area, you have to surrender it in another. More armour means less speed and less manoeuvrability.

As you can see, 50 years and more of expertise on vehicle mine protection, the theory and practice, is ignored. But what do you expect of a British Army Major?

Anyhow, this is a good opportunity to remind ourselves that very little you read in the newspapers can be trusted. Feast your eyes on the above, as the Guardian Air Correspondent tells us that the "new" Heinkel 113 is inferior to the Spitfire and Hurricane.

And indeed it is, for one very simple reason – it does not exist. It is a spoof, a propaganda stunt pulled by the Germans. Soon enough though, we had RAF pilots swearing that they had shot down He 113s, with "kills" studiously recorded by intelligence officers and entered in the official record.

Now, in the great tradition of the wartime Guardian, we have David Willetts, Defence Correspondent of The Sun, fronting a piece telling us what a brilliant truck the Jackal is. You can always rely on The Sun - they will tell you how it really is.

COMMENT THREAD

Another great victory

2010-09-20T11:18:00.003+01:00

Most of the papers carry the "news " today, that British forces have scored yet another great victory in the global war on terrorism, handing over the now pacified town of Sangin to the grateful forces of his excellency president Karzai, who will now extend his kindly rule over the friendly and prosperous inhabitants of this bustling market town.

This victory follows in the great tradition of recent campaigning in Afghanistan, where British forces can now add Sangin to the growing list of towns and settlements pacified, which include Now Zad, Musa Qala and Kajaki, and where the US forces can only stand back and admire the sheer skill, dedication and fortitude of the UK military and its leaders.

The template for this success, however, was undoubtedly forged in recent times by the experience in Iraq, where the British military brought us the stunning success of the al Amarah campaign, followed by its storming success in Basra, which has earned the undying gratitude of the Iraqi people – those that survived the experience.

But for those who think such successes are recent, we need to look back 70 years where, this weekend we were able to celebrate another great victory where the RAF so successfully beat off the German air force that the citizens of London and elsewhere in the UK only had to endure another eight months of bombing and a few tens of thousands dead and injured – plus hundreds of thousands of homes and properties destroyed - as the Luftwaffe roamed almost without challenge in the barely-defended night-time skies.

And so the lessons of the past transfer to the future. Says Sir Stephen Dalton, the current Chief of Air Staff, "winning the Battle of Britain was vital to the overall outcome of the war ... Unless we had control of the skies over Britain we could not build up the forces ready to liberate Europe later on."

"That is entirely relevant today," he adds. "Without the freedom of the skies in Afghanistan there would need to be 10 times the number of soldiers and marines on the ground to achieve the same effect." And as with the Luftwaffe of the past, we only have to count the wrecks of the Taliban air force to know how true this is.

We are so lucky that we have such wise and foresighted leaders who will guide us on the path to yet more and better glorious victories in the mould of Sangin. And the Afghanis simply don't realise how lucky they are that we happened along at just the right time to save them and their beautiful country.

COMMENT THREAD

Didn't we do well!

2010-09-15T14:15:00.000+01:00

The Heritage Industry is in full spate today, celebrating "Battle of Britain day", and in particular the 70th anniversary of the battle.

As always – seen from the picture above – the politicians are getting in on the act (give them an "act" and they'll climb into it, with not a scintilla of shame), but in so doing they perpetrate a pernicious myth that hands credit for what actually amounts to a famous victory to a self-serving élite, and completely distorts an important part of our history.

At the core of all this, of course is the myth of the "Battle of Britain", with the "battle" capitalised. At the time, it did not exist, was not recognised as such and only came formally into being in April 1941 when the Air Ministry published a pamphlet with that title. Even then, the start point was 8 August and it was not until later that it was revised to the arbitrary date of 10 July.

The "self-serving élite" at the time was, of course, RAF Fighter Command – not "the few", who were just the expendable pilots, the cannon fodder, but the institution. At that time it was locked in mortal combat with the real enemy, Bomber Command. It was threatening to achieve what the Luftwaffe had failed to do, the abolition of Fighter Command.

It was the "invention" of the Battle of Britain which made this a political impossibility, and that involved branding a very limited part of the overall battle, and vesting the ownership with Fighter Command. Thus pilots who flew with Bomber or Coastal Commands during the period chosen do not qualify for membership of the "few" because the "brand" is exclusive to Fighter Command.

The more important issue, though, is that the real Battle of Britain lasted much longer than the very short period claimed by Fighter Command. Furthermore, it actually comprised three phases. The first started on the first day of the war – the "blockade" phase - which continued through until 1942 when we finally achieved a victory.

The second phase, running contiguously, is the classic "air superiority" phase, but it actually lasts from about 8 August until 6 September 1940, the next day being the day the Luftwaffe bombs the Port of London and the start of phase 3. In the general hagiographies of the battle, bombing London is seen as the great mistake by Hitler, and the one that saved the RAF and therefore Britain. Without German air superiority, the threatened invasion could not go ahead.

But actually, the mistake was going for the RAF in the first place. This perhaps reflected the hubris of the moment and the half-formed but totally unrealistic plan for an invasion of Britain, which was never a practical proposition. Thus, while the battle for air superiority raged, wiser heads prevailed, affirming that the invasion was a non-starter. A more certain way of taking Britain out of the war - it was thought - was to attack the people in the cities.

At this time, the prevailing theory of air warfare was that nations could be brought down by strategic bombing, the main effect being to erode public morale to such a great extent that that functioning of the cities would collapse and the governments would be forced to sue for peace.

Hitler and those around him reasoned that Britain – and the British Empire – was a corrupt, decadent, class-ridden society on the verge of collapse. It only needed a small push (in the form of the Blitz) to make that happen. In fact, he was wrong – but not far wrong. British society was torn by huge stresses and, under the weight of the bombing and the blockade, it very nearly did collapse. It was a very close-run thing, far closer than people want to admit.

The reason Britain did not collapse was, in small part due to the PR genius of Winston Churchill. But in the main part it was due to the perseverance and endurance of all those organisations which kept the fabric of society functioning, from the civil service, local authorities, the fire services, civil defence, hospitals, the nursing service, the Womens' Volunteer Service, and many, many more – plus, of course, the people themselves.

What is so often called the Blitz was the main part of the Battle of Britain - it was phase 3. It was the battle for the hearts and minds of the British nation, fought by the entire British nation, which endured until May 1941. It was then that Hitler turned his attention eastwards and withdrew the bulk of his forces in preparation for the invasion of Russia. The phase two of the battle was an irrelevance, a strategic impasse. The "few" and their counterparts in the Luftwaffe were fighting a meaningless battle.

Seen in this context, the Great Churchillian Soundbite – "never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few" is exactly the opposite of reality. Given that those most at risk were the privileged élites, it would be far more accurate to say that never had so few owed so much to so many – a debt they were never to repay.

That is not in any way to disparage the actions of the fighter pilots, or to take anything from their raw courage and heroism. It is simply to put their endeavour in perspective. The battle as a whole, the real battle of Britain, was a battle fought and won by the people – the many. In truth, it was won more in spite of, rather than because of the actions of the government.

It was our battle, our victory. And didn't we do well!

COMMENT: Battle of Britain thread

The story so far

2010-08-12T14:16:00.001+01:00

With the new parliament now in place, I am no longer earning most of my living as a parliamentary researcher and must find new sources of income. But I have been fortunate in gaining a commission from my publisher to write a new history of the Battle of Britain, and am planning other ventures based on this project ... hence the focus also on The Tales of Glory blog and the fall-off in writing on this blog.

The fall-off will only be temporary. It is "silly season" and there is a certain ennui in the air, so I am taking the opportunity to get ahead of the game in what will be a long and difficult project. At this point, I must repeat my appreciation for all those who have commented on the forum – everything is read and stored, and there is some incredibly useful stuff there.

Crucially, at the moment, I am working on the air-sea rescue issue, and have made significant advances. And one of the sources to which I was directed to on the forum was this:

One problem area which did arise was the Air Ministry's fault, and a lot of people got killed as a result. I refer to the non-existent air-sea rescue service; the system should have had one but it didn't. ... [A] lot of pilots were killed, either through shock or burns or just being dragged away by their parachutes and drowned, never to be seen again through lack of co-ordination.

Later in the war, in 1941, we formed the Air Sea Rescue (ASR) Service, and if anybody came down there was somebody on the spot almost before they had landed in the sea. But this didn't happen in 1940, and this is a black mark which the system had to endure right the way through the battle.

These are the thoughts of Derek Wood (or some of them), co-author of the seminal text on the Battle of Britain, The Narrow Margin, articulated at a symposium in Bracknall in 1990, sponsored jointly by the RAF Historical Society and the RAF Staff College Bracknall.

What I now have to do is set out the case for why the failure to provide an adequate (or any) ASR Service is still relevant 70 years later. And the most obvious point is that similar failures are happening in the here and now in Afghanistan, were happening five years earlier in Iraq and most certainly have been happening earlier elsewhere.

My feeling is that, had even the background of what I already know about the 1940s failures been part of the public domain when I started arguing in 2006 for the replacement of Snatch Land Rovers, it would have been much easier to get the message across that the military was, through neglect and other diverse reasons, allowing their troops to be killed.

What makes the Battle of Britain experience so valuable are the many different facets which put the current experience in context. Firstly, we see established a failure of the "system" to take measures to safeguard the safety and lives of military personnel, and not just any personnel – those who were the key to the whole battle and from which shortage the battle could have been lost.

This demonstrates that, even when the whole campaign and even – as is asserted to be the case here – the whole nation depends on preserving the lives of a few men, the "system" failed to step up to the plate. And if it could do it then, it most certainly could do it in the context of operations where the survival of the nation was not at stake.

Secondly, we see that it is a "system", not a political failure. Although the problems were known at high level within the RAF – and therefore within the Air Ministry – not one of the critics even begins to suggest that prime minister Winston Churchill might have been responsible, or bore any responsibility at all for the resultant deaths. I am still doing the arithmetic but, over the whole period the system failed, we are talking thousands rather than hundreds of deaths.

The point here, of course, is the contrast with modern times, where the prime minister Gordon Brown has been blamed for equipment failures and the military high command effectively absolved from any responsibility – by the popular press, at least.

Thirdly, we see the effect of censorship, secrecy and lack of scrutiny. The combination ensured that, even when the problems were known, very little timely action was taken other than, to ensure the guilty persons were not censured, an extensive, multi-layered cover-up was embarked upon, which survives to this day.

So pervasive is this that Wood believes that Dowding managed to "pinch" twelve Lysanders and base them around the coast so that they could drop dinghies to anybody they could find. But, while this is supposed to have happened in the July 1940, it seems more likely that the aircraft were available from late September only, and in smaller numbers.

But, what is also fascinating is that the use of amphibious aircraft in the form of the Walrus (pictured above) was proven on a small scale during the months of July and August 1940, the lessons were not applied until late 1941 and amphibians were not fully integrated into the system until 1942 – when the Germans had been using dedicated seaplanes for ASR since 1935.

The story is far too long to tell in the framework of one post, and although I have already told some of it, there still much more to research. But I will build the story gradually on the other blog and keep you appraised of developments as they materialise.

Perversely - but rather predictably - some of the most useful starting points for learning about the inadequacies of the system come not British sources, but from New Zealand and the United States. This report here, for instance, gives a good overview. Originally "confidential", it has now been declassified, and even the fairly anodyne language makes it clear how hugely inadequate the system was.

What is so important though is that the British military establishment went to quite considerable pains to conceal its neglect and paint an entirely false picture of what was actually provided and its effectiveness. It really does tell us something about an establishment which is keen to applaud the exploits of "the few" for its own purposes, while allowing airmen to die needlessly in their hundreds and thousands.

Anyhow, I'll get back to near normal on this blog shortly, and thanks for bearing with me.

Comment: Battle of Britain thread

Cannon fodder

2010-07-17T12:22:00.004+01:00

Another two Brits have been killed in Helmand. One was a Royal Marine and the other was a trooper from the Royal Dragoon Guards.

The Marine was on foot patrol in the Sangin district, while the Trooper was a member of the Brigade Reconnaissance Force, part of a dismounted patrol that was providing security to enable new roads and security bases to be constructed to the north-east of Gereshk. Both succumbed to IEDs.

This brings total British military deaths in Afghanistan to 320, less than a month after the three-century milestone had been reached. That puts the current annual death rate at close to 280 and makes it highly probable that the figure of 400 will be reached before the end of the year – unless there in a dramatic change in operational tempo.

In due course, there will be another street exhibition in Wooton Basset, and we are not alone in wondering whether the displays here are getting out of hand. What happened, for instance, to quiet dignity and the famous British "stiff upper lip"?

Moreover, while it is always tragic to see lives cut short, the campaign in Afghanistan has been going on long enough for soldiers to know what they are letting themselves in for. They either joined the armed forces in that knowledge or have not sought to remove themselves from harm's way.

Either way, the Army and the top brass do not seem to be mightily concerned about the losses, otherwise they might be doing something to prevent them, instead of indulging in back-covering propaganda. One does wish, therefore, that the Army spokesman would learn some new lines to go on the press releases when fatalities are announced.

Of the latest casualty, "... tragically he was struck by an explosion," says Lt-Col James Carr-Smith. "His courage, sacrifice and selfless commitment will never be forgotten." But of course it will. If he has any next of kin in Army quarters, the papers for eviction are already being prepared. The pay termination notice applied before even the body was cool.

We need to be a little bit more honest here, and call these men what they are – cannon fodder. Whatever their own personal delusions, they are only dying to cover the backs of Mr Cameron and Mr Fox, while they work out a suitable face-saving formula to cover their political embarrassment at announcing a defeat. That honesty might focus a few minds and get us out a little faster.

The pic shows soldiers en route to Afghanistan on the last roulement, in the belly of a C-17. More than three times the number visible will have returned in coffins by the end of the year. At least they get a little more space on the way back, and a car to meet them at the airport.

COMMENT THREAD

Beyond demonstrable failure

2010-07-13T08:32:00.000+01:00

"Renegade Afghan soldier kills three British troops." That's the headline in The Guardian with similar replicated elsewhere and more detail here.

Two (or four, according to some reports) more were injured during what is termed a "joint patrol" with local forces in southern Helmand, part of the mentoring process which is supposed to be improving the capabilities of the Afghan National Army (ANA) so that it can take over duties from ISAF.

This is not the first time we have seen such an incident. In November last, a rogue Afghan policeman killed five British troops. In December, an Afghan soldier also shot dead one US soldier and wounded two Italian troops at a base in Badghis.

Sadly, over the weekend I was discussing the process with a very senior member of the previous administration, observing in my own inimitable style that: "The mentoring scheme is crap, always was crap, always will be crap ... a very expensive and stupid waste of money ... and by now a demonstrable failure."

"Consistently," I wrote, "we turn our faces away from experience, from tried and tested systems that have a track record of working, to embrace something with a poor record of success. We then pursue it well beyond the point where it has become a demonstrable failure ... and express surprise that it does not work."

This was written before the piece in the Independent on Sunday by Jonathan Owen and Brian Brady. This revealed that the strategic plan of creating an Afghan security force to replace US and British troops is in serious disarray with local forces a fraction of their reported size, infiltrated by the Taliban at senior levels, and plagued by corruption and drug addiction.

Rather than be negative (which I am not when talking to people who are prepared to listen), I had observed that, in nuts and bolts terms, the interesting thing is that to pacify the plains tribes, you often had to use hill tribesmen. This was in the days of the Raj. Conversely, it was almost impossible to get plains tribesmen to go up into the hills and fight effectively.

The trouble is, I then noted, that we have cut ourselves off from the hill tribes. They are now in Pakistan ... except that they come of the hills raiding and looking for work. But it is rather remarkable that we are prepared to hire Nepalese and use them but not raise native regiments, drawing them down from the hills with bribes and offers of work.

In fact, one of my many earlier suggestions had been precisely that we should raise native regiments, officered by the British, but as part of the British Army, not the ANA, equipped by us, with British NCOs, and paid by us. Once knocked into shape, we could then hand them over to the Afghan government.

The native levy system was one which helped us conquer the Empire, the regiments so formed then going on to form the core of the post-colonial forces. And the best examples currently are the Pakistani and Indian Armies, living testament to our past military skills.

But the point has been made. Consistently, we turn our faces away from experience, from tried and tested systems that have a track record of working, to embrace something with a poor record of success. We then pursue it well beyond the point where it has become a demonstrable failure ... and express surprise that it does not work.

The only thing we seem to be able to excel in these days is consistency.

COMMENT THREAD

Even stupid people deserve better

2010-07-10T15:30:00.000+01:00

"We have this old adage," says Captain Anthony Harris of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers (pictured): "70% skills and drills, 20% equipment, 10% luck". He goes on to say, "Unfortunately that's quite a large percentage for luck. You can overplay blame. We just happened to take the patrol on that path on that day."

This is after the man has been blown up in Helmand while riding in the commander's seat in a Jackal – as recorded by The Guardian. But the point is that it isn't an "old adage" – it is the sort of crap they are taught in soldier school by people who should know better.

What is more, some officers seem to believe what they are told, without complaint – this one still believing it after the trauma of amputation. That's why they get blown up in the first place, and keep getting blown up - yet they keep repeating the mantras ... skills 'n' drills, skills 'n' drills, skills 'n' drills ... BAMMMMMMMMM!

Compare and contrast with this - Lt-Col Roly Walker's experience of getting blown up. He is riding in a Mastiff and survives uninjured. "I always thought it was a case of 'when' not 'if' we drove over an IED," he says afterwards.

No doubt, Col Walker has his own "old adage": "100% equipment", as long as it's called a Mastiff. If you want to live, fly Mastiff. The problem is that, after the event, even after they have been blown up, some of our less intellectual people are still not putting two and two together: "I am sat over the wheel," Harris says. "The blast goes off underneath the wheel, the shockwave goes through the metal ...". Doh!

You do wonder what it takes to get the message through when, as here in September 2007, we have the Jackal being paraded, alongside Gen Dannatt telling us: "the mounting death toll in the country should not overshadow the success forces were having on the ground." The troops, he then said, "are winning the tactical battle".

Well, three years later, they're still winning the tactical battle, the ones that are still alive and in one piece - and Dannatt is collecting his pension. But his troops, after winning that tactical battle (again and again and again ...), are also pulling out of Sangin with more than 100 dead, mostly to IEDs, with three times that number very badly injured.

And that's why the MoD under the new Cleggeron adminstration are spending £45 million on another 140 Jackals. That's so we can have another batch of young men (and the occasional women) to sit over the wheels of these insane vehicles - and they too can lose their legs, or even their lives. But hey! Skills 'n' drills, skills 'n' drills ... keep taking the mantras. These prosthetics are really good when you get used to them.

But you do also wonder why newspapers, instead of doing soft-focus, human interest stories, don't point out that so many of these deaths and injuries are entirely unnecessary, brought about by enhanced stupidity, bolstered by bad tactics, misleading training, blind faith - and duff equipment.

Even stupid people and Army officers (where there is a difference) deserve better than that.

COMMENT THREAD

You can't say it's a victory

2010-07-08T10:40:00.008+01:00

The British withdrawal from Sangin was formally announced yesterday by defence secretary Liam Fox to parliament. The date set for their departure is October. In the meantime, the theatre reserve battalion from Cyprus is to be deployed in the district, responsibility for which is to be handed to US forces.

This is the first major contribution by the Cleggeron administration to the conflict in Afghanistan, and one which is being interpreted as a major turning point which Kim Sengupta, writing in The Indpendent thinks makes it now America's war.

In some quarters, this move is being regarded as a defeat. The view of Col Richard Kemp, writing for Channel 4 News is that the Taliban would certainly attempt to present it as a defeat. Parallels are being drawn with our humiliating withdrawal from Basra, although the Americans reject the comparison.

Perhaps it has more in common with the retreat from al Aamarah, where an ill-equipped Army abandoned a city torn by tribal strife, not fully understanding the dynamics in which they had become involved. Certainly, Richard Norton-Taylor, in The Guardian, remarks that British intelligence had been unable to get a grip on the tribal structure in the area, making it hard to cut deals with the key players and therefore protect UK forces.

This is unsurprising as the tribal mix is unusually complex even for Afghanistan, and further complicated by the presence of the Alakozai tribe and the long-standing feud with Ishaqzai, plus the ever-present Kuchi, who remain a poorly recognised but important component of the insurgency.

Predictably, Richard Dannatt, in his new role as all-purpose media renta-mouth, is also on the case. And it says something of the media that they should continue to lionise a retired commander who has probably contributed more to our tactical if not strategic defeat in Afghanistan than any other man.

By his wilful failure to recognise and deal with the IED threat in a timely fashion, by his sloth in ensuring that sufficient of the right type of UAVs and other surveillance assets were made available in theatre - to say nothing of the helicopters - and particularly by his early misreading of the tactical situation and his espousal of FRES as a suitable weapons system, he ensured that our troops were ill-prepared to counter the threats to which they were exposed.

Nevertheless, the former CGS argues in The Daily Telegraph that since the USMC, now in considerable strength, has assumed operational responsibility for northern Helmand, it makes no sense to have a lone British battlegroup in the middle of the US area. Redeployment is an entirely logical move.

Despite this, he says, some will present the change as the Americans bailing out the Brits and some will choose to see it as the start of a wider British withdrawal.

He too sees the Taliban attempting to claim the move as a tactical victory. And, rather forgetting that he is no longer in the Army, where he can order people around, he states: "Those views cannot be suppressed in a liberal democracy such as ours, but they should not be allowed to gain credibility or traction. It is more important that the move be seen for the sensible development of the campaign that it is."

Whatever Dannatt might declare, there is a sense of defeat. With a multi-national force where contingents from different countries are used to operating side-by-side, there is no overwhelming reason why the British Army cannot work within a US zone. But it has clearly reached a limit to how many men it can feed into the mincer of Sangin, which it has long failed to understand and has had no idea how to deal with it.

Of course, there are those in addition to Dannatt who will seek to defend British performance, especially those who have had the dubious benefit of "being there". But – as we have pointed out here, such campaigns are not won or lost on the ground, but in the offices and minds of strategic commanders and their advisors. And it has long been evident that they have lost the plot.

Patrick Cockburn, in The Independent, argues that British troops were never geared up to make a lasting difference. There were never quite enough British troops to gain permanent control of Sangin, and the Taliban obviously sensed the vulnerability of British troops spread too thinly. Roadside bombs, he writes, could inflict a toll which was difficult to justify in terms of bringing an end to the war.

He is not the only one to argue that we never had enough troops, but we disagree. In just one one example (and there were many more), we showed that the lack of imagination and ponderous tactics led to excessive demands for manpower. Much could have been done, more effectively, with far less.

And nor can anyone assert that we are being wise after the event. We have been nothing if not consistent in our criticism of the lacklustre tactics, the inadequate equipment and the limited strategic vision. You cannot defeat an insurgency in a land of a thousand walls.

Nevertheless, this is not a strategic defeat in the mould of Iraq, where British forces scuttled out of the field of fire, leaving unprepared and ill-equipped indigenous security forces to face the insurgency. This time, the US forces have learnt their lesson.

While even now the British are still talking up their expertise in counterinsurgency, based on their Northern Ireland experience, they are regarded as unreliable, their experience irrelevant (not that they are actually implementing the lessons). They have thus insisted on an orderly hand-over rather than allow a moonlight flit and are now - as always - to do the heavy lifting.

Nor is the military getting any support from the population. Ben Farmer in The Daily Telegraph interviews Haji Akhatar Mohammad, from Bostan Zoi village near Sangin.

He says: "The British had been there for a long time. They were not helpful and there was no good result from them. They didn't understand the people and there was too much fighting." Now, adds the 45-year-old elder, "People are happy the British are moving."

Neither does The Guardian offer any comfort. Sangin's residents, it says, have criticised the planned withdrawal, complaining that four years of fighting have failed to bring peace or development. "The British have failed," says Haji Fazlul Haq, a former town governor. "They could not bring security to the town and that is why they are handing it to the Americans."

This " blunt assessment" says the paper, was shared by other residents who expressed greater confidence in US forces due to take control in November. "The Americans fight harder. I think the Taliban will be afraid of this change of command," said Haji Abdul Wahab, acting director of the peace commission of Helmand, a government body that promotes reconciliation.

Despite this, our military have learned something from Iraq: minor embarrassments like failure can easily be dealt with by removing the word "defeat" from the military vocabulary. They simply substitute words like "redeployment", "reorganisation", "force realignment" or "a sensible redistribution of manpower". This latter phrasing was how 13th Century Fox justified it, having learnt well the art of spin from the Labour government that previously he was so quick to deride

The establishment line, being touted by the BBC is that "the changes being unveiled will improve the effectiveness of the overall military effort." They won't, of course – not without a significant change in strategy and tactics. The US tactics are probably marginally better, but still not good enough and their strategic appreciation is probably as lamentable as that of their British counterparts.

The only significant difference, therefore, is that the US forces are better able to weather the running attrition. With more men in theatre, the number of body bags is not (yet) quite so critical.

That aside, however much British politicians and the military care to dress it up, even Con Coughlin admits it still doesn't look good. The mockery has already started and, if they do manage to avoid the taint of defeat, the military sure as hell cannot claim that this has been a victory.

COMMENT THREAD

A modern-day barbarity

2010-06-28T12:17:00.000+01:00

A bomb disposal expert was killed in a gunfight with insurgents yesterday, The Guardian tells us, using the MoD as it source.

The solider from 101 Engineer Regiment (EOD), was attached to the joint force explosive ordnance disposal group, part of the counter improvised explosive device (IED) task force. He was "... part of an EOD team that was extracting from an incident when he was killed by small arms fire," said Lieutenant Colonel James Carr-Smith, a spokesman for Task Force Helmand.

"He died seeking to rid Helmand of IEDs such that local Afghans could move freely throughout the province. He will be greatly missed and his actions will not be forgotten. We will remember him," adds Carr-Smith.

But fine words butter no parsnips, as the saying goes. There are occasions when EODs must work out in the open, and this does put them at risk. However, as long as there is vehicle access to the site of a suspected IED, then there is no need whatsoever for a soldier to expose himself to fire.

In the first instance, there is the Husky set, for detecting IEDs and for detonating pressure-pad initiated devices. Mine rollers and armoured bulldozers also have their place. Then there is the Buffalo armoured vehicle, which can be used to investigate suspect devices. There are also tracked robots which can be used for further investigation – these can be controlled from the safety of a Mastiff protected vehicle.

However, in this man's Army, great value is placed on the ability of the EOD to neutralise and then dismantle IEDs, for the forensic evidence that it yields and thus the assistance it gives in tracking and arresting bomb-makers. For that reason, it is held, EOD must expose themselves to danger – for the greater good.

That argument would stand up if the policy led to a reduction in the number of bomb-makers and the number of IEDs placed. In fact, despite four or maybe five EODs being killed (perhaps more), plus an unknown number of soldiers killed while using hand-held metal detectors, IED incidents are at a record level.

Further, there are different and better ways of gaining intelligence to thwart the bomb makers, such as automatic change detection, or even direct UAV observation, tracing bomb-layers back to their bases – plus more subtle techniques.

Two years ago, we were asking how many more times must men be pitted against bombs, when there are machines which can be used in place of flesh and blood. In fact, we have been pointing this out ever since 2005.

Sending men against bombs is the equivalent of the First World War practice of having men in orderly lines walk into the muzzles of machine guns, instead of using tanks. In this modern age, we find it appalling that the military could even consider such barbarity – so why is it acceptable for the modern-day military to do what amounts to the same thing?

We need to forget the fine words – and bring these people back home alive.

COMMENT THREAD

They do not compute

2010-06-28T00:02:00.000+01:00

If one had to rank British media coverage of the Afghan conflict, my winner would almost certainly be The Independent - not that I agree with much of it, but at least they seem to be trying to offer a coherent picture (in so far as that is possible).

A significant contribution to that picture is a report today which tells us that Gen McChrystal had issued a "devastatingly critical assessment" of the war against a "resilient and growing insurgency" just days before being forced out.

I can't quite go with the paper's interpretation of this – it seems to believe that this assessment contributed to Obama's determination to fire the General, hence the strap-line attached to the piece by Jonathan Owen and Brian Brady, which declares: "President Obama lost patience with Runaway General's failed strategy".

Anyhow, the thrust of the story is of some significance, however you decide to interpret it. Using confidential military documents, we are told, McChrystal had briefed NATO defence ministers earlier this month and warned them not to expect any progress in the next six months. He raised "serious concerns" over levels of security, violence and corruption within the Afghan administration.

His "campaign overview" warned that only a fraction of the areas key to long-term success were "secure", governed with "full authority", or enjoying "sustainable growth". And there was a critical shortage of "essential" military trainers needed to build up Afghan forces – of which only a fraction were classed as "effective".

McChrystal had pointed to an "ineffective or discredited" Afghan government and a failure by Pakistan "to curb insurgent support" as "critical risks" to success. "Waning" political support and a "divergence of coalition expectations and campaign timelines" were among the key challenges faced. Only five areas out of 116 assessed were classed as "secure" – the rest suffering various degrees of insecurity and more than 40 described as "dangerous" or "unsecure".

Just five areas out of 122 were classed as being under the "full authority" of the government – with governance rated as non-existent, dysfunctional or unproductive in 89 of the areas. Seven areas out of 120 rated for development were showing sustainable growth. In 48 areas, growth was either stalled or the population was at risk. Less than a third of the military and only 12 percent of police forces were rated as "effective".

Afghan people "believe that development is too slow" and many "still generally mistrust Afghan police forces". Security was "unsatisfactory" and efforts to build up the Afghan security forces were "at risk", with "capability hampered by shortages in NCOs and officers, corruption and low literacy levels".

The problem with the briefing, apparently, was its candour. The general was judged to be "off message", creating an "uncompromising obstacle" to an "early, face-saving exit" and Obama's plan "to bring troops home in time to give him a shot at a second term."

A senior Whitehall official thus says that McChrystal's departure is a sign of politicians "taking charge of this war", from which we might adduce that there is to be a structured attempt to deceive the public into believing that a victory is being secured in Afghanistan and that we will shortly be able to withdraw troops from the theatre, with honour.

The problem I have with this analysis is that in the recent past – i.e., in Iraq – the military had been only to keen to representing defeat as victory. The indications are that they would do it again with Afghanistan. In that light, what is being said does not make obvious sense. The politicians should not need to worry. When told to depart, the military will pack up its tent, declare victory and go home with the bands playing.

Perversely, though, it seems that McChrystal – he who had been so confident of military victory - had been urging Washington to "start the political track as soon as possible", a process which would require the politicians to take the lead (and the responsibility) in talking to the Taliban and other parties.

In other words, McChrystal could have come to terms with the probability – if not certainty – that we are losing, and wanted to dump the problem on the politicians, which is exactly the reason why I thought he had engineered his own dismissal.

Petraeus, on the other hand, is supposed to be arguing "that we need to get the upper hand militarily and regain the military initiative, and then negotiate from a position of strength". Sources are saying that it would take time to recover from McChrystal's loss, "particularly if Petraeus just ploughs on with trying to get the upper hand militarily".

This could be reflecting another, as yet unexplored possibility that there is a schism within the military, with genuine differences of opinion as to whether the conflict is winnable – and over what timescale.

Such complexities get even murkier – or even more complex, if you prefer – when you read Patrick Cockburn. A seasoned, if not veteran war reporter, Cockburn got it completely wrong in southern Iraq during the British occupation – he was too focused on the US occupation. But he was worth listening to on American actions (although he wasn't exactly an objective observer).

Cockburn would have it that Petraeus is taking command in Afghanistan "to stage-manage a war that the US has decided it cannot win militarily, but from which it cannot withdraw without damaging loss of face."

Now, human nature being what it is, there is never judged so fine and perceptive a commentator as the one who articulates exactly what you personally believe to be the case. And that is so close to my "take" that it is all I can do not to remark on what a fine, perceptive fellow Cockburn has become.

But, if that is what Petraeus is in position to do, what was the real problem with McChrystal? Did he, unlike Petraeus, see that the public was not going to believe the victory bullshit a second time round and thus decide that, if someone was going to get blamed, it wasn't going to be the military? And if McChrystal had decided he couldn't pull it off, what makes Petraeus think he can?

One way or another, it seems, we are no way near getting to the bottom of this affair, even less so with Call me Dave twittering away about having "achieved results", when McChrystal is saying that things are going down the pan.

Then we have Gen Richards saying (apparently spontaneously – and you can believe that if you like) that we should be talking to the Taliban – one of the things, supposedly, for which McChrystal got dumped, with the Pakistanis also getting in on the act (of which more later).

There are things going on here which do not compute – they really do not compute.

Comment: Afghanistan thread

The wages of stupid?

2010-06-26T16:39:00.003+01:00

In the continuing drama of the Afghan military adventure, Guy Adams of The Independent argues that McChrystal's minders blundered by underestimating a title with a history of heavyweight journalism. And that, he says, is how Rolling Stone was able to bring down a general.

It takes little textual analysis, however, to work out that Adams is guessing. "It's impossible to know what exactly persuaded McCrystal's press staff to invite Hastings (the author of the Rolling Stone piece) into their inner sanctum," he writes, "where he would be privy to a frat-boy atmosphere and culture of contempt for the White House which would ultimately this week force the General to resign from his job as commander of US forces in Afghanistan."

The thesis here, that McChrystal (and through him his staff) have made a massive blunder, is intriguing, but it would seem to fly in the face of the perceived wisdom. The general and his team have a reputation for intellectual depth, and for a comprehensive grasp of their subject and allied matters.

If they really did not know how the Rolling Stone piece would be seen inside the Beltway, and thus be treated by Obama, then we are looking at a staggering level of incompetence, and an alarming degree of naïvety. Even here, where we have been quick to argue that stupidity is a driving force in the military high command, this takes some believing.

However, not only is it very hard to believe that McChrystal could be that stupid, it is equally hard to believe that his boss David Petraeus knew nothing of what was going on and, if he did, that he chose not to intervene - unless he approved it, even if tacitly.

As an alternative, we could go with Con Coughlin who is asking whether McChrystal is the fall guy for the president's failure. The general lost his job as a result of Obama's lack of input into the Afghan war, he argues.

I think even Adams's thesis is preferable to that, but if this was a blunder by McChrystal, we are faced with a terrifying prospect. In a key military adventure, we have a US system that can appoint an idiot for its theatre commander. We also have a situation where the entire military and political establishments on both sides of the Atlantic can roll over and revere an idiot.

Readers here will know that we were not particularly impressed with McChrystal's military (or political) appreciation of the Afghan situation, and we always thought his "surge" ill-founded. But, since all the big-wigs, not least Liam Fox seemed to think the general was the "dog's bollocks" (the correct military term, I believe), who am I to argue?

Actually, this self-deprecation does not become this site. We do argue – this is what we do. The McChrystal "surge" always was, is and always will be dangerously flawed and ineffective – and we have said so. It is a waste of time, money and lives. And the fact that Fox and his mates seem to think differently says more about them than us.

Interestingly, The Times is telling its readers that a newly-elected Tory MP has declared the "war" to be "mission impossible" – and such is the weight of this pronouncement that it puts three of its journalists' names on the story by-line. There's glory for you.

The MP in question is Rory Stewart, "former soldier and diplomat" and prime candidate for replacing Patrick Mercer as favoured media "rent-a-mouth". And out Rory believes that a "radical rethink" is the only option if the Nato-led surge of 40,000 extra troops fails to achieve results by next July. Jeeze! There's real intellectual analysis for you.

And it gets better. Rory believes that only a few thousand troops — perhaps 1,000 of them British — should remain in Afghanistan after next summer. "You would have a few planes (he means aircaft, not a carpenter's tool) around but you would no longer do counter-insurgency. You would no longer be in the game of trying to hold huge swathes of rural Afghanistan."

One way or another, though, it looks as if we are on our way out. Call me Dave has gone public to say that the "very exciting prospect for bringing our troops home" was within sight as Afghans began to take control of security, but that the coming months would be critical. Then asked if troops would be home before the next election, he said: "Make no mistake about it, we cannot be there for another five years having been there for effectively nine years already."

The idea that the Afghans are beginning to take control of security is just bollocks, without even the dog attached – and that is by no means a military term. Neither is the evidence hard to find. Just last week, local UN officials in Kabul were reporting that insurgent violence had risen sharply over the last three months, with roadside bombings, complex suicide attacks and assassinations soaring over last year's levels.

But if talking bollocks is what Call me Dave thinks is necessary to get the troops home, then perhaps it is a small price to pay. In between then – whenever "then" is – and now, Dave will have to go through the charade of fighting a war, and being terribly sorry when the latest squaddie has his brains spread over the terrain. And he is admitting that it's going to be tough going.

At least, though, it looks as if the Buffaloes have turned up in theatre – eighteen months after they were ordered (picture above). They are far too late and too few in number to make a strategic difference but they will reduce the number of times Dave will have to read out the names of the dead from the despatch box. For that small mercy, at least, we can be thankful.

Comment: Afghanistan thread

A vehicle "incident"

2010-06-24T13:15:00.001+01:00

The MoD is reporting the death of four soldiers last night in "a vehicle incident." They were, we are told, part of a team travelling to assist in an incident (another "incident") at a nearby checkpoint in the Nahr-e Saraj area, near Gereshk. This brings the total British military deaths since 2001 to 307.

The Daily Telegraph is reporting that all four men were drowned when their 18 ton Ridgeback plunged into the Nahr-e-Bughra canal.

The "accident" happened at 11pm last night and it is likely, Thomas Harding writes, that the driver was travelling using night vision aids rather than headlights in an area that is under threat of IEDs. The track next to the canal is unmarked and has no crash barriers.

This is the first time soldiers have been killed in the Ridgeback which, as we illustrated recently has proven very resilient against IEDs. However, MRAP "rollovers" have become a significant cause of casualties, coming to a head in July 2008 (pictured) - although other vehicle types, including Pinzgauers, Land Rovers and even Warriors have been involved in this type of accident.

Not least of the problems is the road shoulders rarely meet modern engineering standards and may collapse under the weight of MRAPs, especially when the road is above grade and can fall to lower ground (ditches and canals). Thus, we have long argued that more money should be spent on road construction and improvement, rather than vanity projects such as Ferris Wheels and the like.

We appreciate though that such advanced concepts are difficult for the military, officials and (especially) politicians to take on board, which is why it is much easier to require soldiers to thunder down in the darkness in heavily armoured vehicles, from which escape is difficult, with the occasional risk of death when they tip into canals.

But since the senior ranks of the military, the officials and the politicians are not actually at risk, while platitudes come easy and are dirt cheap, this doesn't really matter. Soldiers, as always, are expendable.

Comment: Afghanistan thread

Obama stuffs the military

2010-06-23T19:43:00.002+01:00

In what must rate of a stroke of political genius, Obama has seen off the challenge by the US military over Afghanistan and, by firing McChrystal and appointing his boss Gen David Petraeus, has dumped the problem back in their laps and told them to get on with it.

On the basis that there is nothing new under the sun, there must be a precedent for a field commander being fired and his boss being appointed to replace him, but such incidents are few and far between. However, few can have expected that Obama would take this option and, in the brief period while McChrystal's fate was in the balance, you did not see Petraeus's name in the ring.

What we have been seeing is a huge amount of thrashing about, as commentators struggle and largely fail to make sense of recent events, not realising that this was most likely a deliberate ploy by McChrystal to destabilise Obama and dump the blame for a failing campaign in the lap of the president.

As such, it is most unlikely that McChrystal's quite deliberate and studied coup de main was done without the knowledge and acquiescence (if not approval) of his boss.

By appointing Petraeus to take over from his uppity subordinate – effectively a demotion – Obama demonstrates the skills acquired and honed as a street-fighting Chicago politician. He has reasserted control over – as The Guardian puts it – a politicised military, with the generals out of control.

In so doing, he dumps responsibility for success in Afghanistan in the lap of the supposed architect of the campaign, leaving McChrystal isolated and irrelevant. The Army is still very much in the frame and Obama's message about "civilian control" could not have been clearer.

Hero of the Iraqi "surge" and a Bush appointee, Petraeus must now deliver the goods in Afghanistan or go under. His appointment, to a very great extent, insulates the president from the fray. The new chief is in the hot seat, and with him the military. The game has just changed, and taken on a whole new dimension.

Comment: Afghanistan thread

A quote too far?

2010-06-23T10:00:00.002+01:00

In the closing stages of the film, A Bridge Too Far, we saw Generals Urqhart and Browning starting to distance themselves from what was then evident as a military disaster, with Browning uttering the immortal words: "I always felt we tried to go a bridge too far."

There seems to me to be something of this with Gen Stanley McChrystal and his interview with Rolling Stone magazine. With the man admitting that everything said was on the record, and the magazine checking back with the General's aides before using the quotes, we have on the face of it an example of a senior soldier committing professional suicide.

Reading the article, however, one finds that McChrystal, like other advocates of COIN, readily acknowledges that counterinsurgency campaigns are inherently messy, expensive and easy to lose. "Even Afghans are confused by Afghanistan," he says.

But even if he somehow manages to succeed, after years of bloody fighting with Afghan kids who pose no threat to the US homeland, the war will do little to shut down al Qaeda, which has shifted its operations to Pakistan.

Dispatching 150,000 troops to build new schools, roads, mosques and water-treatment facilities around Kandahar is like trying to stop the drug war in Mexico by occupying Arkansas and building Baptist churches in Little Rock. "It's all very cynical, politically," says Marc Sageman, a former CIA case officer who has extensive experience in the region. "Afghanistan is not in our vital interest – there's nothing for us there."

"Throwing money at the problem exacerbates the problem," says Andrew Wilder, an expert at Tufts University who has studied the effect of aid in southern Afghanistan.

"A tsunami of cash fuels corruption, delegitimizes the government and creates an environment where we're picking winners and losers" – a process that fuels resentment and hostility among the civilian population. So far, counterinsurgency has succeeded only in creating a never-ending demand for the primary product supplied by the military: perpetual war.

To break out of this acknowledged "quagmire" we are seeing perhaps a subtle if not devious ploy, on the lines of the "bridge too far" excuse. As did the British military in Iraq, the US military are going to need an alibi and a "scapegoat" – they need to dump the blame on the politicians.

McChrystal has put Obama in an impossible position. With the president's popularity evaporating, if he fires McChrystal – still a popular General – he takes the blame for when the campaign finally falls apart. If he doesn't fire our Stan, in effect he is endorsing (or not denying) the "contemptuous" comments about the National Security Team, which can then be held responsible for the disasters to come. Obama still gets it.

Basically, it's a win-win for the military, and a sign that the military has lost faith in its own ability to prevail in Afghanistan. The end is nigh and McChrystal may be signalling that all that matters now is who takes the blame.

Comment: Afghanistan thread

We're shocked, shocked!

2010-06-22T17:20:00.000+01:00

We saw recently another example of the vulnerability of the coalition supply chain in Afghanistan and now, under the pretext of news, the BBC, the Washington Post, the New York Times and others, tell us that the US military has been giving tens of millions of dollars to Afghan security firms who are channelling the money to warlords.

Truckers carrying supplies to US troops – according to a Congressional report entitled "Warlord, Inc: Extortion and Corruption Along the US Supply Chain in Afghanistan" - allegedly pay the firms to ensure safe passage in dangerous areas of Afghanistan. And what is more, the convoys are attacked if payments are not made.

Well, we are shocked, shocked, I tell you. In fact, we're so shocked that we were writing about this in June 2008 and then in more detail on 3 September 2009, again on 13 September 2009 (based in part on reports from February 2009, with references from the previous year) and then again on 10 December 2009.

Apart from the obvious comment – like "what took you so long?" – the issue here is of some considerable importance. We are six months into McChrystal's so-called "surge" and even before it started, we knew that huge bribes were being paid to the Taliban, effectively enabling them to keep the war going.

It would have been such a good idea to chop off the flow of funds, before we started pouring men and materiel into the "surge", but no ... such logic is clearly quite beyond the military and political geniuses running this war. So, six months in, the Taliban are likely better off, better equipped and richer than they were before the surge started.

And, while the evidence here is focused on US payments, it is equally the case that the UK is making similar payments. Thus, not only are we the taxpayers funding our own troops in the Afghan adventure, we are also helping to fund the Taliban, alongside the Americans.

Despite this, we have Lieutenant-General Nick Parker tell us that the most important ingredient of success (in Afghanistan) is "an aggressive political strategy that can build on the improving security." He adds: "It should draw further strength from improvements in governance and development and a sense of the inevitability of progress."

I might have written in these terms before, but either the general is irredeemably stupid – which he must be if he believes this guff – or he thinks we are stupid if he is expecting us to believe it. But even someone as thick as an Army Lieutenant-General should be able to understand that paying your enemy to fight you is not a recipe for instant peace or military success.

How then can there be "improving security" when he and his over-paid, over-promoted mates can't even sort out the basics? How can any current plans have any credibility whatsoever when this situation has been known about for years and still nothing is done about it?

Short of stupidity, there can only be massive self-delusion here, which brooks no confidence whatsoever in the conduct of the Afghan mission.

Comment: Afghanistan thread

Clichés by the coffinload

2010-06-21T14:38:00.000+01:00

I was wrong about the blogs to some extent. Craig Murray already has a piece up on the 300 deaths, noting: "We immediately have David Cameron and Liam Fox spewing out the standard propaganda about the occupation of Afghanistan making the world a safer place. This is quite simply a ludicrous proposition, and one to which the security, military and diplomatic establishments do not subscribe."

The BBC refers to this as a "tragic milestone" but what is quite stunning in this intensely political event (and it is a political rather than a military milestone) is the response of Shallow Dave. He is saying that Britain must "keep asking why" its troops are in Afghanistan. That is according to a report in The Times, with the Cleggeron leader leading the tributes to the "sacrifice" made by the 300 British service personnel who have died since operations in Afghanistan began in October 2001.

Says Dave: "It is desperately sad news: another family with such grief and pain and loss. Of course the 300th death is no more or less tragic than the 299 that came before. But it is a moment, I think, for the whole country to reflect on the incredible service and sacrifice and dedication that our Armed Services give on our behalf."

Then Dave tells us: "We are paying a high price for keeping our country safe, for making our world a safer place, and we should keep asking why we are there and how long we must be there."

To that, the man adds: "The truth is that we are there because the Afghans are not yet ready to keep their own country safe and to keep terrorists and terrorist training camps out of their country. That's why we have to be there. But as soon as they are able to take care and take security for their own country, that is when we can leave."

So the clichés are trotted out, carefully honed and polished, kept nicely chilled ready to trot out for such occasions, as meaningless now as they day they were crafted by the 16th PR Battalion of the 31st Right Wing Corps of Spinners – now officially special advisors to the Cleggerons, complete with official salaries and luncheon vouchers.

What is so offensive about all this, of course – apart from the total artificiality of the occasion - is that we have a politician telling us to ask a question: "why are our troops in Afghanistan?" Shallow hasn't quite got the hang of this politics business. We ask the questions, he gives us the answers – except, of course, he doesn't.

Even Con Coughlin thinks "it's not really good enough" for Cameron to say this. "One of the biggest disadvantages that has affected this campaign," he writes, "is the failure of our governing classes to provide clear and effective leadership, and to explain precisely why we have upwards of 10,000 British troops locked in mortal combat with the Taleban."

And, as always, in our desperately cynical age, whenever a politician starts using the word "truth", one learns to check the family silver and the contents of our wallets, certain in the knowledge that the man (or even woman) is up to no good.

The "truth" on this occasion is almost certainly nowhere near what Shallow Dave claims it to be. "We" – i.e., nearly 10,000 very expensive military personnel, several hundred officials and an unknown number of highly-paid contractors – are there because Dave hasn't yet worked out a mechanism for getting them out, and it is probably too early for him to try.

So, for the time being, young men – and the occasional woman – must be slaughtered, to absolutely no effect, to achieve nothing, a process which must continue until such time as it becomes politically convenient for the British contingent to depart. Then it will be up sticks, "job well done, chaps" and the charade of turning defeat into victory starts all over again.

With that the case, though, the very least the political classes could do is to avoid insulting our (collective) intelligence. We really do not need Liam Fox telling us that: "Our armed forces are the best in the world." Even if they were, which is doubtful, what does that mean? Best at what?

He tells us they are "operating daily in the most dangerous and demanding conditions". You don't say! "Some have made the ultimate sacrifice to ensure this essential mission succeeds," he says. Nah. Very few who look upon the prospect of their own deaths regard it as a "sacrifice" – human motivations are much more complex than that.

But then we get the money quote: "My thoughts and those of the nation's are with the families and friends of all those servicemen and women who have fallen but our resolve and determination to see the mission through remains steadfast."

No they are not. The thoughts of the nation are largely with the World Cup, with Wimbledon and with making a living – and keeping the shysters from the government and the other nobs off your back.

But it is always remarkable to hear from the politicians and generals, well clear of the front line and the dangers attendant therein, how our "resolve and determination" must remain "steadfast." So, from the rear, as they pocket their generous salaries and expenses, they say: "stand fast". That is so easy when you are not personally at risk.

Meanwhile, three Australian soldiers and one American service member were killed today in a helicopter crash in southern Afghanistan. Including the crash, at least 57 international troops, including 35 Americans, have died so far this month, a rate that could make June among the deadliest for US and other international forces in the nearly nine-year war. So far, the deadliest for the international force was July 2009 when 75 troops, including 44 Americans, were killed.

But hey! As long as the rest remain "steadfast" and act with "resolve and determination" - until the politicians pull the plug that is - everything in the garden is rosy. But one can't help but feel that if these young men and women are to spread their brains over the Afghan terrain, they deserve something better than second-hand clichés.

Comment: Afghanistan thread

It's happened

2010-06-21T10:56:00.000+01:00

The 300th soldier has died in Afghanistan.

It is a totally meaningless figure, which includes non-combat deaths – and bears no historical comparison: medevac and surgical procedures are so much better that many who in previous campaigns would have died now survive. Did you know, for instance, that 371 British soldiers died in the "official" Cyprus emergency in 1956?

However, being a "round" number, 300 has a certain magic which means it becomes a media event. I bet the Sundays are seriously pissed off, as they were all waiting – bit like vultures, really, but that's the name of the game – for the single soldier to die and make their day.

Actually, the poor sod was hit by an explosion while on patrol in the Sangin district (Sangin again - the mincer) on 12 June and only died yesterday at the New Queen Elizabeth hospital in Birmingham. One should not be too cynical about this but ...

Anyhow, stand by for a certain amount of media comment on the Afghan war, some of it ill-informed, much of it drivel, with some nuggets buried deep in the mass – but very little of interest from the political blogs. Because it's what I do, I'm going to pull together a number of pieces and offer an analysis later today.

In the meantime, The Independent publishes a leading article about Dave's attempt to wrap himself in glory as a war leader. Flags are not the answer, says the paper.

I agree. There is something tawdry and unwholesome about these artificial displays of emotion and ... whatever. They don't ring true. But then, what does these days. More comment to follow.

COMMENT THREAD

What is going on?

2010-06-21T00:15:00.000+01:00

I really did have no plans to do another piece about Bloody Sunday, wanting to move on to other subjects - which I'll now have to do later. But what pulls me back into the fray is an admission to being perplexed, although perhaps one should not be ... was it going to be any different?

Here, I refer to a significant social phenomenon, where we see the Saville Report embraced by the left wing media, and almost totally ignored by the right. That transcends the subject material and makes for an unresolved issue of wide and continuing importance.

It is that which has got me worked up, because I fully expected a rash of stories in the Sundays, for what by any measure was a big and important event – a £191 million report from a 12-year inquiry on an incident which contributed significantly to the length and intensity of a conflict on UK soil which lasted nearly 40 years.

With 5,000 pages in 10 separate volumes, would someone like to tell me that this is not important, that it should not get an airing in the Sundays - all of them? Yet, while we see stories in The Independent on Sunday and others in The Observer, there is nothing of note in The Sunday Times or The Sunday Telegraph or anything by way of useful analysis in The Mail on Sunday.

One can see the direction from which the left wing papers are coming. They have always tended to be "anti-army", or at least non-militaristic, and have been supportive – or more so – of the Irish campaign groups. If not absolutely true, those are certainly the perceptions, while the Right is pro-military, "patriotic" and broadly Unionist in sympathies.

In partisan terms, therefore, one can see the Left being more enthusiastic about Saville, and that is proving to be the case. But the inability of the Right to see the point of the inquiry, and break out of its narrow partisan boundaries is short-sighted and self-defeating.

What should concern the Right are two things: military effectiveness and the proper workings of the judicial system. And in both these areas, there are lessons to be learnt from Bloody Sunday for, on the one hand, it was a military "cock-up" and, on the other, a failure of the justice system.

These are dealt with in three pieces variously in The Independent and The Observer. The first is by lawyer Michael Mansfield in The Independent on Sunday, who asks: "Is nobody bothered that Widgery got it so wrong?"

Hey! That's a good question – and very pertinent. The concluding paragraph of Saville's overall assessment was:

The firing by soldiers of 1 Para on Bloody Sunday caused the deaths of 13 people and injury to a similar number, none of whom was posing a threat of causing death or serious injury. What happened on Bloody Sunday strengthened the Provisional IRA, increased nationalist resentment and hostility towards the Army, and exacerbated the violent conflict of the years that followed. Bloody Sunday was a tragedy for the bereaved and the wounded, and a catastrophe for the people of Northern Ireland.

Yet it wasn't just the events of Bloody Sunday that did this. It was the fact that the British establishment closed ranks – that Lord Widgery and his team during the first Bloody Sunday inquiry in April 1972 compounded the felony and inflamed bitterness for generations to come.

In a Channel 4 television programme entitled Secret History: Bloody Sunday broadcast in 1992, Bishop Daly said: "What really made Bloody Sunday so obscene was the fact that people afterwards, at the highest level of British justice, justified it."

This failure also needs to be acknowledged, says Mansfield. No system of justice is worthy of its professed principles if, as soon as it is under pressure, its independence and judgement evaporates. And, he says, the system of justice must never again allow itself to be subverted.

Then, also in the IOS is a piece headed: "How the killing of an innocent man may have paved the way for Bloody Sunday".

The man was William McGreanery, shot dead by a British soldier on the streets of Londonderry 15 September 1971, with subsequent allegations that he was carrying a weapon, that he was attempting to fire on the security services and even that he was a member of a paramilitary group.

But McGreanery, who was 41 when he died, has finally been exonerated by an official report which shows that he was an innocent, cut down in what police viewed as cold-blooded murder. However, at the time, the government's response sent a signal to soldiers that they "would be protected as far as the prosecution authorities were concerned."

This meant that the British Army was effectively "being told they would be immune from prosecution, and whatever they did they could do with impunity", thus helped to pave the way for the Bogside assault on 30 January 1972 – in effect, giving the green light to soldiers to act with impunity.

This story is expanded upon in The Observer. It tells us that more than 150 killings committed by soldiers during the Troubles were never fully investigated because of "an informal understanding" between the police and the army, under which soldiers who shot civilians were questioned by the Royal Military Police (RMP) rather than police detectives.

This has been highlighted by a Derry-based human rights organisation, the Pat Finucane Centre, and meant, according to the centre's Paul O'Connor, that between 1970 and 1973 soldiers were unlikely to be held responsible for the consequences of their actions. During that period they shot dead more than 150 people in the province.

An agreement was made in 1970 between the chief constable of the Royal Ulster Constabulary and the army in Northern Ireland and was not revoked until September 1973 after being found "unsatisfactory". So lax were RMP investigations into killings that they were known as "tea and sandwich inquiries." This failure encouraged a culture of impunity to develop among troops who felt they were above the law, says Paul O'Connor.

So, yet another piece of the jigsaw locks into place, to which is added in the IOS article news of a "unique insight into the mindset of soldiers" on the eve of Bloody Sunday.

This is revealed in an unpublished extract of a book by an officer who served that day. The identity of the author has never been established, but his account was submitted from the Parachute Regiment to the MoD for clearance in the 1970s, only to emerge as new evidence at the Saville inquiry.

It recalls the frustration of dealing with protesters at a march at Dungannon the day before Bloody Sunday: "It was almost as though we were willing them to come out fighting, and bring the whole business down to a level which we could at last understand and appreciate – violence." And the officer tells how morale was high on 30 January:

... after briefing on the promised confrontation – which they were all looking forward to" and "the expectations of 'preparation for battle' kept out the chill of the bright winter morning we had woken up to... This time the 'enemy' had promised us the biggest and best civil rights march... And we would be ready for them – indeed, this was an opportunity we had been waiting for. We, at last, had plans of our own.

The author cites fears that the "plan" was "fraught with danger" of becoming a "GMFU" (grand military fuck-up), and recalls how one officer's wife, on being told of the plans, remarked: "I can just see the headlines – Londonderry's Sharpville."

Also in the same paper is another account - which shows you how seriously the IOS takes the issue. It is a long piece, but the most salient comments comes towards the end, where it describes how the CSM of the 1 Para Support Company - whose men did the killing - broke ranks.

He said he never saw any gunmen, weapons or bombers: "I feel in my own heart a lot of these people were innocent. It was badly handled by everybody." In effect, some of the Paras "lost it". That is what happened on Bloody Sunday.

That now brings us to The Observer which asks: "Were Bloody Sunday soldiers involved in 'Ballymurphy massacre'?" This puts us in the same territory as in my earlier piece with the news that relatives of 11 people killed in Belfast by the army in 1971 are now calling for an inquiry into their deaths

So, what have we got here? On the face of it, we have an Army out of control, imbued with the idea that it is above the law and can kill without penalty, we have that Army actively seeking confrontation in circumstances where civilian deaths could have been foreseen. Then, according to this commentator (or here if that link does not work), the cover-up by the Widgery tribunal amounted to, in effect, retrospective sanctioning by the British government of a massacre.

That thesis is explored here and here and is one of many sober analyses which challenge the perception (and claims) that the Army's counterinsurgency operation in Northern Ireland was in any way a success.

But, to this day, the Army avers that its "great skills" at counter-insurgency were developed and honed in Northern Ireland, a false prospectus which surely cannot be allowed to stand (especially as the Army seems to have difficulties in recalling the lessons it learned). Did it - as some allege - murder and blunder its way through the campaign, just as it seems to have done with all its other poster-child campaigns such as Malaya, Kenya and Cyprus, or can what it says (in whole or part) be taken at face value?

Further, the perception that troops are immune from or above the law seems to survive in other operations, such as the occupation of southern Iraq, and the culture of violence to civilians and cover-up seems to continue to this day. Goodness knows what will emerge from Afghanistan.

These issues, it would seem to me, are not or should not be solely left wing concerns, but should be of interest to the political right. That they seem not to be is the unanswered mystery of this affair. What is going on? Why, even after the elapse of nearly 40 years, is the establishment so keen to bury the lessons (and the debate) instead of learning from them?

Saville Inquiry thread

The greatest failure of them all

2010-06-20T15:14:00.001+01:00

"When the IED detonated, I knew immediately what it was. There was a loud, elongated pop, a lot of dust and the vehicle was thrown about six feet into the air," says Lieutenant Colonel Roly Walker, the commanding officer of the Grenadier Guards battle group.

"The vehicle landed in such a way that I thought we were about to roll but we didn't. Nobody was hurt, we were all wearing helmets and body armour at the time but it's a pretty unnerving experience."

Outside, it was a scene of devastation. The blast ripped off the front wheels of the 15-ton Ridgeback, tossing it high off the ground. The anti-rocket bar armour was shredded and the heavily reinforced hull was cracked. But, amazingly, all six soldiers inside the vehicle escaped uninjured.

The colonel and his team were returning from Patrol Base Silab in Helmand, in January, and had decided to take a route through the desert. It was open and flat. "It wasn't really an obvious vulnerable point," says the colonel.

He continues: "I always thought it was a case of 'when' not 'if' we drove over an IED. So I felt a sense of guilty relief, to be honest. We were unhurt after all ... there was a fair amount of nervous laughter. 'Squaddie' humour kicks in and you don't think too deeply about the 'what if'. The memory stays with you and the next time you move through a VP [vulnerable point], you tend to take it a little more gingerly."

Of course, if Walker had been riding in a Viking, like his predecessor Lt-Col Thorneloe, the chances are that he would now be dead.

Yet, according to Army doctrine – which has spawned the Jackal and other absurdities – these soldiers should not have needed a protected vehicle. After all, they had decided to take a route through the desert, where mobility and unpredictability was supposed to be their protection. Unfortunately, it wasn't, but fortunately they were in a Ridgeback, the smaller cousin to the Mastiff, first introduced in 2006.

And that is why you see Ridgebacks (example illustrated above) leading convoys of highly mobile Vikings. If there is a pressure IED, then the Ridgeback will cop it and the crew will most likely survive. Anything else, apart from a Mastiff, and there is a high probability that you are breaking out the body bags.

That is what is precisely happens in another account which records the experience of a sapper going to the aid of Danish soldiers, one of whom has his body "ripped apart after his vehicle hit a roadside bomb." Although not stated, this is actually this incident where, as we record, the soldiers were driving in a Piranha armoured personnel carrier.

What is highly significant here is that both accounts appear in the same edition of a newspaper were Gen Dannatt (ret) is in given pride of place to promote "Armed Forces Day". This is the man who did his best to block the purchase of protected vehicles in 2006, who supported the purchase of the Vector and, in particular, wanted to buy the Piranha for use in Afghanistan by British forces.

In his writing, Dannatt chooses to quote from Kipling's poem "Hurrah! For the Life of a Soldier", penned in 1892 about how hard-done-by is the British soldier characterised by Tommy Atkins. Dannatt tells us the poem has much resonance today but he neglects another Kipling poem which perhaps has greater resonance, specifically to himself.

This is "The Lesson", written over a decade later, after the British failure in the Boer War. And, in neglecting the other poem Dannatt misses the opportunity to bring to our attention the lines: "It was our fault, and our very great fault—and now we must turn it to use. We have forty million reasons for failure, but not a single excuse."

But "fault" is the very last word you will find in Dannatt's vocabulary. Not only has he been the blockage, in preventing the Army being properly equipped to deal with the counter-insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan, this is the man who, as CGS during the seminal years of August 2006 – July 2009, presided over the failure of the British campaign in southern Iraq and the successive tactical and strategic failures in Afghanistan.

Crucially, he only realised the importance of the IED and its strategic effects towards the very end of his tenure so, while he emotes lyrically about Tommy Atkins, he skates over the fact that the death rate of British soldiers in Afghanistan is four times higher than that of US soldiers and is twice that of 2006, when they were described as being involved in the fiercest fighting since their involvement in Korea 50 years ago.

No one would accuse US forces of lacking aggression or of being reluctant to engage with the Taliban, but there are three very obvious differences between the US and British forces. One is that the Americans have a much higher proportion of protected vehicles, and have not gone down the route of using high mobility, unprotected vehicles in their search for protection.

The second is that the US forces employ mine clearance vehicles – equipment not available to the British – reducing the need for vulnerable foot patrols and equally vulnerable bomb disposal personnel. And thirdly, far more helicopters are available to the US forces – the lack of which in the British ranks has also been influenced by Dannatt.

One cannot help but feel a certain sadness, therefore, to see an officer who so egregiously let down his own troops now at the forefront of a campaign enjoining the public to support those same troops. And it is a reflection of the media, which has so often failed to identify the failings of the Army and its Generals, that it now gives so much space to the one General who was perhaps the greatest failure of them all.

Nevertheless, this seems very much in tune with the times, where there is rarely any premium on success and failure is so often rewarded. As he pockets his fees and his pension, Mr Dannatt must be mightily glad this is so. In earlier times, he might have been told to fall on his sword.

COMMENT THREAD

A jolly good unit

2010-06-19T20:35:00.000+01:00

Simon Hoggart in The Guardian today recalls how he had had published in his newspaper six days before "Bloody Sunday", a story headed "The Brutal Soldiery".

In the article, he had made specific allegations about the conduct of the Parachute Regiment and had asserted that some Army units were so fed up with the Paras storming into their areas, firing rubber bullets, beating people up, and undoing months of improved community relations in 10 savage minutes, that they had asked for them not to be sent in again. "Thugs in uniform," one officer had called them.

The article, says Hoggart, caused a great furore, even though he did make it clear – as he was later to do in oral testimony to the inquiry - that the Parachute Regiment was one of enormous skill, enormous courage and enormous resource, but not entirely appropriate in a civilian setting.

Rather than any of the allegations being investigated, though, they were flatly denied. Hoggart and his newspaper "were frozen out for months by the military". He was thought to be in the pocket of the IRA.

From the written evidence submitted to the Saville Inquiry, we can see precisely how the establishment reacted, with Army public relations complaining to Hoggart's boss that even to produce such an article was "unethical and unprofessional conduct."

We can also see that the Army actively considered launching an "attack" on the journalists in the papers Belfast bureau, although it noted that it did not have "enough concrete evidence" against one, who had "covered his tracks very carefully." "However," it went on to say, "Hoggart is professionally vulnerable as a result of his unethical conduct."

Nor were the politicians any better. From the undersecretary of state came the view that there was a "growing feeling" that soldiers were talking too much to the press. HQ Northern Ireland also issued a general warning against any approach from Guardian journalists.

Sadly, one of the observations recorded by Hoggart had been from an Army officer who had told him (of the Paras): "I have seen them arrive on the scene, thump up a few people who might be doing nothing more than shouting and jeering, and roar off again ... They seem to think that they can get away with whatever they like."

It appears though, that the rejection of Hoggart's charges stemmed for a more nuanced position than just a simple, outright refusal to believe them – and anything bad of the Paras. This is hinted at by 1 Para's then adjutant, a certain Captain Mike Jackson – who was to become in 2003 the CGS as General Jackson.

Back in 1972, he dismissed the report as "designed to be divisive", adding: "This is not a realistic picture of the relationship between the Paras and other units in Belfast. We are here to give operational assistance, and we shall continue to do so."

The position is explained more fully in an article by T E Utley published in The Sunday Telegraph on 23 April 1972, nearly two month after Bloody Sunday. He then claimed:

The strategy of the civil rights movement henceforth [that is in context in the autumn 1971] was to keep up a sustained, efficiently directed propaganda campaign, not only against internment, but also against the Army as such. The most vulnerable targets for that campaign were the paratroopers who had been brought into Ulster to act as a reserve force for employment in emergencies that required quick reaction and tough tactics.

On 14 January, two weeks before the shootings, Richard Cox, then defence correspondent for The Daily Telegraph had "alerted his readers to the next phase in this propaganda chain." He had claimed that Irish journalists were seeking to entrap officers of other regiments into admitting that the use of the Paras in Ulster had been disastrously counter-productive.

In effect, therefore, the allegations against the Paras were all part of an IRA propaganda campaign and could safely be ignored. Thus, almost exactly 30 years later, the first soldier to give evidence to the Saville Inquiry was to describe the Paras as a "jolly good" unit.

This was General (then Brigadier) Frank Kitson, in January 1972 the commander of 39 Brigade, of which the 1 Para was part. In his oral evidence, he told the Saville Inquiry:

If some people in Northern Ireland associated 1 Para with a reputation for toughness and brutality, I think they were mistaken. The regiment's reputation in this respect was probably fuelled by its effectiveness in controlling difficult situations. By their resolute action they often prevented situations escalating into violence between the Catholic and Protestant communities which was the one thing above all others that we wished to avoid, because it provided an excuse for gunmen to present themselves as defenders of their local community. I believe that 1 Para's effectiveness in this field contributed greatly to the saving of life.

Hoggart, however, takes "a little satisfaction" in the Saville Inquiry finding that he was right. He was in Belfast on Bloody Sunday and, he writes, "everyone realised instantly what a terrible turning point it would be ... Even the army immediately realised what had happened."

For the IRA, says Hoggart, it provided in an instant all the moral justification they needed to kill as many people as they pleased. Every victim of the Paras, shot while crawling down the streets of Derry, carried dozens more people with him to the grave.

But, if the Army had realised this, there was still the charade of the Widgery Inquiry later in 1972, when the cover-up was cemented into place. And a few months later, the CO of 1 Para, Lt-Col Derek Wilford, a man now criticised by the Saville Inquiry, was awarded an OBE.

The meaning of the signal sent to the Irish by that award is obvious. The Paras were a "jolly good unit", and no amount of killing was going to change that.

Saville Inquiry thread

Richards for chief?

2010-06-18T18:08:00.000+01:00

"The most important appointment of a generation", writes Con Coughlin on the appointment of a new CDS. And, given the portentous title of the piece, you might have thought that it would get better exposure than being tucked into the print edition after the editorial page.

But such is the competition for space that the more important news story gets poll position. And who are we to argue with such fine editorial judgement? One is simply amazed that Guido or Iain Dale didn't get there first, or that The Boy has not made a statement in the House about a development of such importance.

Back in the trivial world inhabited by the likes of Coughlin, he is saying that the new CDS will be "the most important appointment of a generation" – and he is not wrong, although the choice should be determined by the intentions.

In my view, if this current administration has any real intentions of winning through in Afghanistan (not that it has much chance of so doing), it might be better opting for Gen Richards, the recently appointed CGS. If it wants to manage defeat, then Houghton is probably the better man.

What emerges from Coughlin's piece, though, is what purports to be an insider view of The Boy's recent summit at Chequers, where his newly instituted National Security Council was convened to discuss the war in Afghanistan, the culmination of which was to adopt the Labour government's strategy.

We are told that deep gloom pervaded the proceedings as a succession of speakers explained how Britain was involved in a war that was not only increasingly unpopular with the public, but one that would ultimately end in failure. Even Cameron appeared to subscribe to the view that the sooner he ordered "our boys" to return home the better.

Coughlin, of course, was not there, so he is picking this up second or even third-hand – or maybe he has several sources. However informed, he feels able to tell us that what turned the meeting round was "some blunt speaking" on the part of the military professionals. Their argument was that while the war might be costly, both in terms of the blood and treasure, and present enormous challenges, there are encouraging signs that it is finally moving in the right direction.

This is from a man who himself must be one of the few journalists who still believes the war is still winnable and, thus fortified, he tells us that the alliance now "has a clearly formulated and effective strategy for ending the conflict and rebuilding the country after nearly three decades of strife."

But, where The Boy has earlier seemed equivocal on Afghanistan, Coughlin notes that he appears to have taken the "wise" military counsel to heart, throwing his full support behind Nato's (i.e., Gen McChrystal's) surge strategy, warning that the British public should brace itself for further casualties during this summer's offensive.

You have to do a double-take, though, to check you are not reading a copy of Private Eye when you read Coughlin earnestly telling us that, in its first weeks in office, the Cleggeron administration (he calls it "the government") has discovered first-hand "the importance of being able to draw upon well-informed and expert military advice".

Quite where that advice is coming from it difficult to determine, especially as Gen Richards (of whom Coughlin rather approves) was not present at the meeting. But, "to guarantee this advice remains of the highest calibre" writes Coughlin, it is crucial that Mr Cameron makes the right choice when he comes to appoint a successor to Jock Stirrup.

In principle, one would not disagree with that, and on that basis Coughlin definitely thinks the man in the hot seat should be Richards. The only problem he sees is that the current CGS has a reputation for speaking his mind, a virtue that might not be appreciated by the Cleggerons, who are "anxious to avoid controversy".

That opens the way for Houghton, says Coughlin, a man regarded as a smooth Whitehall operator – a "civil servant in uniform". But, since Britain is entering a crucial stage in this nation's proud military history, one that will demand strong, effective and professional leadership, Coughlin personally hopes that Cameron has "the political courage and good sense" to appoint Richards as the next CDS.

What no one has ascertained so far, though, is whether Richards actually wants the job. Depending on one's view of the future, in the short-to-medium term, the best career option for Richards might be to put as much distance as he can between himself and a widely expected disaster. And, putting it that way, one might argue that anyone mad enough to want to become CDS is clearly totally unsuitable for the post.

COMMENT THREAD

The politics of delusion

2010-06-17T20:27:00.000+01:00

How much traction this is going to get is difficult to judge. So far, only the BBC seems to have covered it – the so-called Ballymurphy Massacre in August 1971, just short of six months before Bloody Sunday. Then, 11 people - ten men, including a local priest, Father Hugh Mullan, who was shot while giving the last rites to a dying man, and a mother of eight children - were killed, again by soldiers from 1 Para.

Now, on the back of the Saville Report, the relatives are demanding their own inquiry into what they claim is the brutality of the Paras, remarking on the similarities with Bloody Sunday where the British system also "connived in a cover-up."

The events followed the introduction of internment on 9 August 1971, and the details of the affair are admirably set out in a Times archive blog. There it is noted that "the tone of the Army statements shows an extraordinary lack of awareness of the real nature of the struggle they were engaged in."

In a struggle that was about to be launched into a whole new phase and was to drag out for more than two decades before a resolution even began to look feasible, Brigadier Marston Tickell, the Army chief of staff in Northern Ireland, was claiming that the hard core of the IRA had been "virtually defeated".

Looking back at those events, even at the time - as we saw them recorded in our newspapers and on our TV screens – the Army's optimism seemed delusional. But what was less evident was the brutality with which the Army – or some sections of it – was operating.

However, almost immediately after the internment programme had been implemented, reports started to come in of Army mistreatment of prisoners. On 17 August, allegations were published that soldiers had urinated on prisoners, subjected them to electric shocks and threatened to hurl them from helicopters.

What was so significant, though, was that even as detailed allegations of troops' brutality continued to be made, most Army officers were prepared only admit that their soldiers had been "brisk" in their handling of Irish civilians. They largely believed – as did most of us - that many of the allegations being made were so totally out of character with British troops' behaviour as to be "ludicrous".

As it turned out, the allegations were very far from being ludicrous and, as the evidence mounted, they served to poison the image of the British Army in the eyes not only of the Roman Catholic community here and of a large section of the population of the Irish Republic, but also in overseas countries and particularly in the United States. That was not only to do a great deal of damage, but was also directly to prolong the conflict.

Thus are the "Ballymurphy Massacre" relatives currently saying that, had their allegations been taken seriously at the time and acted upon, then maybe Bloody Sunday might never have happened. The corrective action would have been taken, and history would have been changed.

But it is an Irish columnist, Kevin Myers, who puts his finger on the issues, noting that Bloody Sunday, was not unique: it was merely an extravagant example of what the Parachute Regiment was already doing - and would continue to do - in Northern Ireland.

Something like 90 percent of clearly unlawful army killings throughout the Troubles were by the three battalions of the Parachute Regiment. Both Catholic priests who died in the Troubles were shot by the Paras and were, to his mind, murdered.

Other Para killings included shooting dead Patrick Magee, an innocent 20-year-old student teacher on the steps of St Comgall's school on the Falls Road as he left teaching practice. The same day, the Paras shot dead one-eyed Patrick Donaghy, aged 86, one of the oldest victims of the troubles. He was killed as he stood at his window, eight storeys up in Divis Towers.

The real crime, Myers says, was not just the killings that Lord Saville has been investigating in his insanely wasteful enquiry, but the tolerance of the Parachute Regiment's conduct by both the British army and successive British governments. He continues:

That is the real mystery. Because the IRA had no better friend than the Parachute Regiment; wherever the Paras went, IRA recruitment subsequently rose. The price to be paid for their random and reckless brutality was the lives of other soldiers and the many, many more civilians killed by the IRA.

So why wasn't it stopped? Why, asks Myers, was the Parachute Regiment deployed in Northern Ireland and why was its often evil conduct tolerated?

Here, we have the clue in the response of Army officers to accusations of brutality – a belief that they (the accusations) were so totally out of character with British troops' behaviour as to be "ludicrous".

This is the politics of delusion, the determination to believe what you want to believe, a rejection of anything which might contradict the received wisdom and what I call "constructive ignorance", a wilful, culpable refusal to seek out any information which might challenge the preferred narrative.

And this is why, contrary to the genuine expectations of commentators such as Subrosa, there can be no real closure, partial or otherwise. The system has been caught out but there is no real contrition, no acceptance of blame and no real change. Delusion is still a powerful policy driver, pervading every nook and cranny of government.

This is evident in the likes of Iain Dale, who seems to prefer the idea that Bloody Sunday was an aberration, with "merely a small part of the British armed forces" at fault that day, and even Owen Paterson, who has agreed to meet the Ballymurphy campaigners, cannot offer a remedy to the underlying ailment.

Slugger O'Toole believes that the publication of the Saville report heralded a good day for reconciliation, others would castigate Tony Blair even for allowing the Saville Inquiry, calling him "insane" for agreeing to it, and Daniel Finkelstein insists that the soldiers are treated with the same leniency as the IRA, thus not even beginning to understand the issues.

Martin Meenagh thinks the greatest unindicted villain of the piece was Edward Heath. Lurking behind the Paratroopers' action that day is the general fuhrerbefehl he issued, to show the natives who was in charge. Meenagh may not be wrong.

Jim Greenhalf, on the other hand, reminds us that sometime this week, next week, the death toll of British soldiers in Afghanistan will reach 300. The ultimate political result when we pull out next year, or the year after, will be "job well done", as it was after we left Iraq, which cost us 179 dead soldiers, he says.

And that will be another delusion, to sit alongside the delusion that the British Army is a saintly (and competent) institution that can be relied upon to do the job and do it well.

If nothing else, Saville has challenged that, although the wider lessons have hardly begun to be appreciated. But, if we the public, in general, and the politicians and military in particular, believe that Saville applies only to Bloody Sunday, that will be another delusion.

Saville Inquiry thread

A high level failure

2010-06-17T00:17:00.000+01:00

Too quickly it seems, Dannatt is getting his way: the media is moving on from the Saville Report – although the Sundays may return to the issue. But, with over £190 million spent on the damn thing, the very least we should do is get our money's worth from it.

Thus, before we leave the issue for the time being – doubtless to return at some time in the future – I feel impelled to offer a few more observations, not least a suggestion that too many of the current pundits seem to be missing the point, the very point I made in my original piece about 1st Para, a Regiment which has a proud history of "killing people and breaking things".

But, by no means all of the pundits are missing the point. In The Independent there is Robert Fisk, who writes:

We knew the First Battalion, the Parachute Regiment. "Tough" was the word we reporters used if the soldiers were beating up rioters. Brutal was the word we should have used. But sometime towards the end of 1971, I think we all realised that the Parachute Regiment was being prepared for some pretty nasty confrontations. They were the hard men, the reserve battalion at Palace Barracks, Holywood, a boring seaside town on the south side of Belfast Lough, a unit that spent most of its time waiting for trouble.

If that is from one end of the political spectrum, though, we also have Max Hastings, writing in The Daily Mail, who was in Derry on Bloody Sunday. From him we get:

An English reporter friend of mine that day in Derry found himself trapped among demonstrators and rioters. He asked a soldier manning a barricade if he could squeeze past their line to find safety behind the troops. "No, you bastard!", snarled the squaddy. "You stay there and take what's coming to you."

At that stage, mid-afternoon, only CS gas and rubber bullets were being used. But I myself met Paras preparing to conduct the planned "scoop-up" operation to arrest rioters, who were obviously spoiling for action. The Paras are a great military institution, but quite unsuited to peacekeeping. They are a fighting regiment, and that day they expected and wanted to fight.

Hastings, the terribly grand former Daily Telegraph editor, is the man who writes with the authority of "being there", and is therefore treated with great respect. But he nevertheless talks a great deal of tosh, as when he tells us: "The Army, enraged by terrorist killings, was in a savage mood, and still relatively new to the restraints essential for counterinsurgency."

Here the point is that, virtually since the end of World War II, the British Army had been doing little else but counterinsurgency, and no more so than 1 Para. Formed on 15 September 1941, the battalion operated in Haifa during the Palestine Mandate until British troops withdrew in 1948. It was then temporarily disbanded on return to the UK but reconstituted in 1949.

From mid 1951 to 1954, it saw active service in Cyprus, the Canal Zone in Egypt and during counter-terrorist operations against EOKA in Cyprus in 1956. It participated in the Suez landings during the crisis in November, before being back in Cyprus in 1958. Between 1962-3, the battalion served in Bahrain, in early 1964 undertook a UN peace-keeping in Cyprus and in 1965 and 1966 was back in Bahrain. The battalion covered the eventful withdrawal from Aden in 1967 after 127 years of British rule.

The first of its 12 Northern Ireland Op Banner emergency tours began at the end of 1969, two years after it had left Aden – at which time the use of firearms in riot control was standard procedure.

Much is made (not least by The Independent) of the evidence of General Ford, commander, land forces in Northern Ireland (pictured above). He revealed to the inquiry that in 1971 he was "coming to the conclusion that the minimum force necessary … is to shoot selected ringleaders among the Derry young hooligans after clear warnings have been issued".

In other words, wrote Ford, "we would be reverting to the methods of IS [internal security] found successful on many occasions overseas" – precisely the methods 1 Para would have been trained to use in Palestine, Egypt, Cyprus and Aden. Thus, with its reputation, background, experience and training, it would have been entirely predictable that committing 1 Para to the pressure cooker of Londonderry in January 1971 would have produced a violent outcome.

And "pressure cooker" it was. On 8 July 1971 in Derry's Bogside two rioters, Seamus Cusack and Desmond Beattie, had been shot dead by soldiers in disputed circumstances.

The military had claimed the pair were armed, which had been denied by local people. Moderate nationalists including John Hume and Gerry Fitt walked out of the parliament of Northern Ireland in protest. A British Army memorandum stated that as a result of this, the situation "changed overnight". The Provisional IRA's campaign in the city beginning at that time after previously being regarded as "quiescent"

In January 1972, to all intents and purposes, violence is what the Army and the media expected, as indeed did the politicians. Heath apparently told his cabinet committee on Northern Ireland that: "As to Londonderry, a military operation to re-impose law and order would be a major operation necessarily involving numerous civilian casualties."

Where the failure came, therefore, was in not realising the political implications of such violent scenes, spread over the pages of the newspapers and on the TV screens. 1 Para would have done much worse in Aden and elsewhere, but not in the full glare of the media.

Journalist Kevin Cullen was later to write (now two years ago): "Over the years, I met dozens of men who joined the IRA because a British soldier harassed or humiliated them or their families." He went on:

Thirty-six years ago this week, the army rounded up hundreds of Catholic men and teenagers, few of whom were actually in the IRA. Far from smashing the IRA, the army's overzealous policy of internment without trial infuriated the entire nationalist community.

And in 1972, when British paratroopers killed 14 unarmed demonstrators in Derry on Bloody Sunday, the IRA was flooded with recruits. Half of the more than 3,500 people killed in the Troubles died in the fury of the five years that followed Bloody Sunday.

From General Michael Rose, we get confirmation of this. On Bloody Sunday, he says, it was absolutely clear that in exchanging fire with the terrorists, the British Army had fallen into the trap laid for them by the IRA, who had set out that day to commit murder and mayhem, caring nothing for the lives of their own republican supporters. Claims Rose:

Indeed, I believe it was their specific aim to get as many people killed as possible. For the deaths would serve as a ruthlessly cynical recruiting tool. As the news of the dead in Londonderry that day spread around the world, the result was much the same as Irish people everywhere rallied to the nationalist cause. In Northern Ireland, in the Irish Republic and in the US, thousands of young men and women joined the IRA.

And all of this puts the focus up the chain of command, into the high level military and political arenas, where – clearly – tactical and strategic errors were made in terms of the conduct of the campaign.

The other day, I wrote about the battle of Dien Bien Phu being lost not in the little valley in Viet-Nam's highland jungles but in the air-conditioned map room of the French commander-in-chief.

By the same token it seems to me, the slaughter of Bloody Sunday happened through the failures of the military brass and the politicians to appreciate the special demands of a counterinsurgency campaign in Northern Ireland. One has to marvel at the political naïvety.

What did the Army really think would happen, with the media camped on the doorstep and TV cameras on permanent standby, if they started shooting rioters and demonstrators? Were they really so stupid or so isolated from the political realities that they did not realise that images of dead bodies plastered all over the TV screens and the newspapers might have an adverse effect on public sentiment?

But, as always, the BPI are in the frame. That much I wrote earlier but, with even greater clarity, the idea of a high level failure stands up. This is where we should be looking to lay the blame. One wonders, therefore, precisely for what Mr Cameron was apologising ... the incompetence of the Army High Command, or the greater and more serious incompetence of the Heath government, which bears the ultimate responsibility.

Saville Inquiry thread

Let's not

2010-06-16T13:03:00.000+01:00

Move along there, nothing to see here, writes Richard Dannatt: "We must not dwell on the errors of the past". The fact that the Saville Inquiry has taken nearly 38 years to arrive at the truth means that its lessons are of limited use, Dannatt then asserts. "How we view things in 2010 is inevitably different from how we viewed them in 1972."

Well, that may be the case, although the assertion is highly debatable - even if there is a great deal of revisionism going on. But we are certainly not always doing things differently. British soldiers are still murdering people, with officers turning a blind eye, and Ministers still lie about events.

Furthermore, the Paras are still slaughtering civilians in the mistaken belief that they are being fired upon – although if only brown people in faraway places get killed it doesn't seem to matter so much.

But, most of all, the cover-ups still go on and, as Raedwald points out, there are still plenty of bent inquiry chairmen and whitewashers, obedient to the political class rather than to truth and to honour.

It is, thus, all very well Cameron apologising to the relatives and friends of the Bloody Sunday victims, but what about an apology to us, for being lumbered with a bill of £191 million to remedy the cover-up? What happened on Bloody Sunday, he says, "was both unjustified and unjustifiable." But what happened afterwards was also "unjustified and unjustifiable."

Equally "unjustified and unjustifiable" is the assertion by Gen Sir David Richards, current CGS – ranking alongside Dannatt's claims – his insistence that the Army had changed greatly over the 38 years since Bloody Sunday.

But it is just over 100 years since the Army failed so egregiously in the Boer War, following which Kipling published his poem, The Lesson. "Let us admit it fairly, as a business people should, we have had no end of a lesson: it will do us no end of good," he wrote.

Yet we are dealing with an Army which, 100 years later failed in Iraq and has since refused publicly to examine the lessons of that failure, only to repeat its mistakes in Afghanistan.

So, no Mr Dannatt, I don't think we should move on just yet. We should dwell on the errors of the past, long enough at least to learn the lessons from them, otherwise, as the Army seems so keen to do, we are doomed to repeat them, again and again and again.

Saville Report thread

And now for the Saville Report

2010-06-15T16:19:00.000+01:00

As The Boy stands up to make a statement on the £191-million Saville Report, news comes in that two soldiers from 1st Battalion The Duke of Lancaster's Regiment have been shot dead in separate incidents in Afghanistan. They died while on patrol in the Nad Ali district of Helmand province.

Their deaths bring the total number of UK troops killed in Afghanistan since 2001 to 298. Two more and we have a magic round number, so we can have another media blut-fest. It may just beat the historical account of the Paras slaughtering 14 innocent civil rights demonstrators and bystanders, an event which was to rack up the intensity of the "Troubles" and cost many more lives.

It is axiomatic that crowd control requires very special skills and discipline. Putting poorly-trained troops under the command of inexperienced officers on the front line, with rifles and live ammunition, is asking for a disaster. We did not need a report costing £191 million to tell us that.

The disaster happened on 30 January 1972, so-called "Bloody Sunday", when the gung ho* 1st Para manned the line, a Regiment which has a proud history of "killing people and breaking things", for which purposes it was designed, trained and equipped.

The resultant carnage, therefore, was not the fault of the soldiers (the Army was to lose over 100 troops that year), any more than the failures in Afghanistan are the fault of individual soldiers of the line. For that, we must look to the politicians who put them there and their senior officers. Talk of prosecution of the soldiers who fired the shots is misplaced.

But, as so often when innocent people get killed, the PBI takes the shit and we pay the bills. The lawyers walk away with the dosh (in this case, several of them have "earned" millions in fees), the officers get gongs and more sewing badges and the politicians get honours and awards. Then as now, nothing really changes.

* Saville Report: Chapter 4, para 4.8: "... a force with a reputation for using excessive physical violence".

COMMENT THREAD

Moral and intellectual cowardice

2010-06-15T15:15:00.000+01:00

It is a bit of a cop-out for the Tory Boy blog just to paraphrase Liam Fox's speech to RUSI yesterday, and then to offer a link with no analysis. But, like the rest of the Tory blogosphere, they're running frit on defence issues, not even picking up on the Great Leader's speech. It seems they can do the soft and girlie issues but can't cope with real political meat.

Talking to a journalist yesterday about the reluctance of the "right wing" blogs to deal with defence, he suggested that individual writers might be deterred by their lack of first-hand experience. They are intimidated by men in uniform, with their medals and sewing badges and tales of derring-do, and fear laying themselves open to criticism for "not being there".

I certainly had to deal with that in writing Ministry of Defeat - a whole book about the campaign in southern Iraq without ever once going as far as Basra. In that precise context, reading accounts of the great 1954 battle of Dien Bien Phu (where I was also absent), I came across in Bernard Fall's book this observation:

The Battle of Dien Bien Phu was lost during the brief fortnight between Novermber 25 and December 7, 1953. It was not lost in the little valley in Viet-Nam's highland jungles but in the air-conditioned map room of the French commander-in-chief. Once Giap had decided to accept trial by battle at Dien Bien Phu, it remained only for 15,000 French and 50,000 Viet-Minh troops to act out the drama in pain and blood and death.

So it was with Iraq. The British lost the battle not in the streets of al Amarah and Basra, but in the corridors of Whitehall and the claustrophobic rooms of 10 Downing Street (yes, I have been inside). "Being there", in the sense of being where the action was, would mean being in many different places (often simultaneously) and many where only insiders had access. Constructing a historical narrative, therefore, requires the use of research skills, not direct observation of events.

In the context of the military telling us that there is no military solution to the conflict in Afghanistan – one thing the limited intellects of the military brass seem to be able to understand – the "battle" is essentially political. Thus, the battle is being lost not on the streets of Kabul, Kandahar and Musa Qala, but in the corridors of Whitehall and the claustrophobic rooms of 10 Downing Street.

The refusal to follow the narrative and engage with the politics represents one of the greatest failings of the right-wing "claque". There is a moral and intellectual cowardice here – which explains the lack of response to my recent challenge. However, this is not the first time I've taken on the "claque", having written a strongly-phrased piece in September 2006 and again in January 2007.

I know the pieces were read, and the lack of comment and response is driven by a sense of shame and embarrassment – some have admitted as much to me privately. And as well they might hang their heads in shame.

But one person not afraid to get stuck in is our feisty "Dundee wifey" who vastly outshines these big, butch political bloggers who are so full of themselves. She picks up a military blog called Think Defence which has The Boy's strategy sussed. This is the "Iraq gambit", which comprises two broad elements:

1. Get the fuck out of dodge;
2. Pretend it was a victory.

In fact, while the girly-boy bloggers cower in their bunkers, it is very much the fairer sex which makes the running, with Mary Riddell telling us that, "Britain is stuck with a war it can't afford and can't win".

In a powerful turn of phrase, she writes of "Mr Fox's batsqueak of truculence" which "echoes the discredited Blairite credo that Britain should punch above its weight and beyond its purse." Both Mr Cameron and the opposition, she says, "owe the country more honesty."

Indeed they do, but as long as the fabled right-wing blogosphere is sitting on its hands, with its collective heads in a physiologically impossible position, The Boy has neither need nor incentive to do anything other than to continue on his ruinous course. But he will need more than a metal detector (pictured) to chart his way though this minefield. We've seen it all before with Iraq so some of us already know what he is doing. We will not be silent, even if the "claque" has muzzled itself.

COMMENT THREAD

Our mission is doomed

2010-06-15T00:02:00.001+01:00

So, "Call me Dave" made a statement to the Commons yesterday, his first since his trip to Afghanistan as Cleggeron leader, supposedly spelling out his administration's approach to the ongoing conflict.

Heavily trailed as paving the way for a change in strategy, it followed extensive talks with Karzai at Chequers and meetings with US defence secretary Robert Gates and Gen David Petraeus in Downing Street – all on the back of a delegation of three Cabinet ministers being sent to Afghanistan to see the situation on the ground for themselves.

But, if there were expectations of a change in strategy, they were not fulfilled. One even wonders why The Boy actually bothered with a statement. He offered nothing new, nothing different. All he really wanted to do was emphasise why, in his view, our troops were in Afghanistan. It was all about national security. Afghanistan was not strong enough to look after its own security and without our presence it could emerge again as an al Qaida base.

What had changed then, one might ask, to which The Boy provided the answer: we needed to be clear on national security perspective.

Our route home was to put security first. We were six months in to the surge and had to give it time to take effect. We would not stay a day longer than necessary – the key was in training the Afghan security forces so that we could transfer the security responsibility, but based on facts on the ground not pre-determined timetable. Then we could come home, job done, heads held high.

And that was it. In a sparsely attended chamber there was no hint of the huge controversy which has been raging over the weekend, with the likes of Matthew Parris asserting that Cameron and Clegg "must know our mission is doomed", up against the controversial General Dannatt who believes the war can be won.

Of these two, soldier Dannatt is ostensibly better qualified - but Parris has the advantage of consistency. He has always been against the Afghan adventure, right from 2006, when he decided that the mission could not work with 3,000 or even with 30,000 men, in June 2008, when he declared we couldn't win and now, when he thinks we are simply sacrificing soldiers to keep the US on-side.

Parris is too sincere and his case too well argued for it to be dismissed as cynical, while Dannatt is too stupid for his case to be considered at all. He trots out the bog standard "exit strategy" meme, arguing that the Afghans must run their own security and "the Afghan economy must be converted as quickly as possible from one based on the illegal opium trade, to one profiting from traditional cash crops, such as wheat, saffron and pomegranates."

If pigs could fly and politicians could think coherently, the world would be a very different place, but either is about as likely as Dannatt's nostrums for Afghanistan. And then you realise that the General is offering exactly the same prospectus as "Call me Dave". The mission is indeed doomed.

COMMENT THREAD

Houghton the pathfinder?

2010-06-13T17:16:00.004+01:00

It was The Sunday Times which broke the news today that Jock Stirrup was to be "axed" by the new administration, alongside Sir Bill Jeffrey, the permanent undersecretary at the MoD.

That the CDS should be given his marching orders comes as no surprise. He had always been regarded as a Labour man or, as a slightly partisan Col Tim Collins told the paper, "... a well-known apologist for Labour muddled thinking over Afghanistan."

Actually, Stirrup had played a key role in securing mine/IED protected vehicles in August 2006, over the heads of the Army which did its best to block the purchase, and had thus attracted the gratitude of ministers who were having to carry the can for the Army brass's indifference to casualties.

Then, with the increasingly erratic CGS, Richard Dannatt, playing the prima donna, it was necessary to ensure that there was no possibility of him stepping up to become CDS. It being the Army's turn to take the top slot, extending Stirrup's term to block Dannatt was a necessary move, giving breathing space to Dannatt's successor, David Richards who, after a short period as CGS, could rightly step up to replace Stirrup in the April of next year.

Unfortunately (for him), Stirrup's apparent favour with Labour ministers – together with an impression that he was under-performing (which indeed he was) – essentially marked his cards. Certainly, he has attracted no great support from the Army. Lt-Col Stuart Tootal, who commanded the first detachment of 1,200 UK troops into Helmand, told the BBC that he bore a share of the blame for the "chronic mismanagement" of the armed forces.

Tootal admits that, "We have a tendency to blame ministers," but, he says, "we can't ignore the role of the professional heads in the form of the CDS and PUS (permanent under-secretary), who advise our ministers on what the armed forces should look like and what they do." He claims Stirrup was forcefully advised by commanders on the ground in Helmand of the "absolute requirement" for more troops and helicopters, but was "very slow" to recognise the need to act.

This may be an additional reasonb why the new defence secretary has decided to "let him go" as early as he decently could, which will be this autumn. Ostensibly, his departure – alongside the lack-lustre Jeffrey, who never amounted to much – marks the new administration seeking to draw a line under past failures in Afghanistan, and is intended to improve the military's performance on the Afghan front line.

However, the announcement from Fox – which comes in an interview with The Sunday Times rather than as a formal statement to parliament – is inviting some rather bizarre commentary.

Patrick Mercer, the standard renta-mouth for such occasions, tells The Sunday Times that change at the top of the MoD was desperately needed. "The last regime allowed our men to go into Helmand improperly prepared, while huge sums of money were squandered on projects such as the refurbishment of the Ministry of Defence," he says.

That is the sort of partisan irrelevancy one would expect from Mercer (as if the CDS was the driver behind the MoD refurbishment), but Adam Holloway does himself no favours by remarking: "There was a tendency under the Labour government to promote 'politicians in uniform' rather than officers willing to give frank advice about the strategic drift in Afghanistan."

The we have Rear-Admiral Chris Parry saying the Stirrup's successor should "stand clear of political considerations". His view is that: "Officers have been willing to let themselves be politicised as a means of climbing up the promotion ladder."

But both the Chiefs of Defence Staff the General Staff are always "politicians in uniform". To expect their successors to be any different is fantasy. In fact, by acting early, Fox is more likely to ensure a "political" successor, as the two likely candidates for the job are David Richards and the vice-chief of the defence staff, General Sir Nicholas Houghton (pictured).

It is a little bit early for Richards to take the job as he is only just bedding in as CGS, working on undoing some of the damage done by Dannatt. Thus, Houghton, a consummate politician, is favourite to get the job.

This is the man who, according to his own testimony, was instrumental in engineering the extraction of the British Army from Basra, working to the highly political brief of: "getting out of Iraq with reputation intact, with a defendable legacy."

And that might be the best clue as to what is going on. Fox is emphasising that he wants "the best people to be in the appropriate posts," while hinting that he is looking to substantial personnel cuts in the armed forces, to help him trim budgets – which can only happen with a reduced commitment in Afghanistan.

With Houghton in post, Fox would have the ideal man to manage an expeditious retreat from theatre. He will have a man practiced in the art of lying through to teeth to protect the reputation of the British Army and in pretending that its legacy is substantial and enduring – thus allowing the new defence secretary to sharpen his axe.

Houghton the "pathfinder" will pave the way.

COMMENT THREAD

Approach to Helmand "flawed"

2010-06-12T14:55:00.001+01:00

The Today programme has picked up on the Afghanistan series in The Times, interviewing Conservative MP Adam Holloway and Rear Admiral Chris Parry, the MoD's director-general of development, concepts and doctrine in 2006. The interview has since been reported by the Press Association and The Sun.

Parry's comments are especially interesting as he played a key role in discussions leading up to the initial deployment of troops to Helmand in 2006 and he has now admitted that the MoD's approach to the mission was "flawed".

Echoing then defence secretary John Reid's comment at the time, that he hoped the UK would leave Helmand without a shot being fired, Parry confirms that the MoD top brass were not expecting to have to fight the Taliban in the province.

"I think we had an immature approach to what is now known as counter-insurgency," says Parry. "We didn't realise the complexity and the character of the context in which we were going to fight. In fact, we didn't envisage we were going to fight."

He goes on: "I think we took too much baggage with us from previous experience from Borneo, Malaya and Northern Ireland and we hadn't really recognised that the lessons we had taken from those campaigns were valid, but they weren't sufficient for the context of Afghanistan, or indeed Iraq."

Then, for the coup de grace, Parry says: "I think at the time there was considerable senior resistance to ditching the lessons from the past and moving on to more radical and progressive ideas. The senior military at the time actually believed different things about what should be done in Afghanistan. The old doctrine, the thinking about how we conduct that sort of campaign still prevailed."

At this stage, as my readers may well imagine, this blogger's blood pressure was escalating to a dangerous level. Multi-adjectival descriptive sentences were forming, in which the word "fuckwit" could qualify as one of the mildest and most complimentary.

When I think of the shit I took from any number of commentators for daring to question the wisdom and expertise of our military "experts", who so obviously knew what they were doing ... and now we get the admission that these great experts were "immature" and that they "didn't realise the complexity and the character of the context in which we were going to fight."

However, one must take a calmer, more analytical approach – which I managed to do after walking several times round the garden, kicking the cat, slamming a few doors and only with difficulty resisting the temptation to punch the laptop keys through the machine and embed them in the table below.

Thinking back to the time, we knew that our great military geniuses like Jackson and Dannatt were basing their strategy on "memories" of Northern Ireland, but actually more so in Iraq than in Afghanistan.

It is interesting though that Parry speaks of "memories" – it was the memory rather than the actuality that was being applied. While the British military was lording it over the Septics, claiming greater knowledge of counter-insurgency though NI experience, the one thing that became very clear was that the lessons of Northern Ireland were applied neither in Iraq or Afghanistan.

In fact, as I point out in Ministry of Defeat, the lessons learned were almost completely ignored in Iraq – which makes it rather interesting that Parry, the man actually responsible for doctrine, is still claiming that Northern Ireland experience did guide strategy.

As regards Afghanistan, the very attraction of this theatre was that the Brown Jobs – having been roundly whipped by the Mahdi Army in Basra and al Amarah – were looking for a new venue where they could play with their toys, without the fuzzies getting too uppity and breaking them. Insofar as there was a strategy in the early days, it was made "on the hoof". It owed nothing to COIN and stemmed more from Rourke's Drift and the Alamo, only with more modern toys.

Once of course, the mad mullahs of the Taliban found that they too – like the Mahdi Army – were having difficulty ousting the British Army from fixed positions, they also went "asymmetric" and started using nasty things like old Soviet mines and then IEDs on an industrial scale.

It was only latterly that there was talk of Borneo and Malaya, but that was not until 2009, after Parry's time (he retired in 2008). By then, even the Septics were getting a bit dubious about British strategic wisdom and the brass were looking for something that might restore their credibility. Thus, briefly, the Far East campaigns became fashionable.

With not a great deal of jungle in Afghanistan, the brass might have been better off studying the campaigns in Aden and Cyprus, then Rhodesia and Bosnia, where land mines and IEDs were widely deployed and countermeasures were being developed. But our "immature" brass obviously had difficulty coping with more than one idea at the same time, so the lessons there went begging.

Eventually, our geniuses alighted on the military equivalent of putting men in front of vehicles with red flags, as way of dealing with IEDs, reasoning – if that is what it can be called – that the public was less concerned with the odd bod getting blown up, provided they weren't in Snatch Land Rovers, which the media might notice.

Then we got the US version of COIN, with Gen McChrystal articulating ideas about "take – hold - build", which have about as much relevance to Afghanistan as a spaghetti sandwich does to an eight-man bobsleigh. But, relieved from the responsibility of doing their own thinking by the Septics, our Brown Jobs have fallen in with a strategy which Adam Holloway complains is "fatally flawed".

This is the man who was less than impressed with the fun and games in Iraq and argues that it is time to seek deals with the hardcore Taliban leaders. Personally, I would suggest killing them – in very large numbers - and then bribing the survivors, once we have re-engineered their towns, demolished their walls and straightened their roads.

However, Holloway is on the right lines when he says, "We have to have a political settlement". For that, we need to listen to what people like Maharajakrishna Rasgotra have to say. He regards the current policy as "the march of folly", and offers his own ideas. Being a former Indian government minister, his views are neither practical nor trustworthy, but his preferred direction of travel is interesting.

Certainly, it is far more realistic than anything produced by our politicians, and far better than anything our brass have ever considered, not that that would be at all difficult. Given the revelations of late – combined with what we already knew – there are very few of our generals that we would be happy employing on road-crossing duties or as school dinner ladies.

COMMENT THREAD

A political own goal

2010-06-11T00:02:00.000+01:00

An unannounced visit by the Cleggeron leader to Afghanistan yesterday - intended to underline the improving security situation in the country - has partially backfired. "Call me Dave" was forced to cancel a visit to the Army's Shazhad forward operating base in Helmand.

This, we are told, followed two successive mobile phone intercepts, the first referring to a possible rocket attack on a helicopter and the second, intercepted close to the base, which suggested that a VIP was flying in.

A decision was thus taken by military commanders to call off the visit. The base is in an area which was previously an insurgent stronghold and which was heavily contested in the recent Operation Moshtarak offensive in central Helmand.

Dave's Chinook was diverted to Lashkar Gah where he met some British troops for a photo-opportunity and was forced to eat a hamburger with ketchup. He was said to be disappointed that the diversion gave the impression that the security situation was not good when to all intents and purposes the opposite was the case.

So there we are ... three helicopters – to our knowledge – have been lost to RPGs – two within one month. Others, including two RAF Chinooks, have been downed by Taliban gunfire. But hey! This gives a false impression about the security situation. Why it is though we are fed such drivel and why it is that The Boy feels the need to offer himself as hostage to fortune, Heaven only knows.

Despite his fond wish that the progress can be speeded up, this is unlikely to happen. Even US Gen McChrystal is admitting that operations were not going as planned and winning support from local leaders was proving "tougher than expected". In Marja, where the US Marines have claimed early success, residents see signs that the insurgents "have regained momentum" in recent weeks.

Where the US forces, with their vastly superior resources and larger reserves of manpower are having such problems, a BBC "expert" put the task facing Cameron as: "How do you withdraw in good order without giving the impression of defeat?" But, as it stands, Dave seems determined to set himself up for a fall. Building expectations of "progress" which the armed forces cannot deliver, he is confronted with not just with the impression but the actuality of defeat.

When that happens, it will be something of a political own goal. He could have distanced himself from the failures associated with the previous administration but has accepted responsibility for achieving success in a war he did not start, does not understand and is not temperamentally equipped to resolve. "This is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity," he says. "This is not a war of occupation. This is a war of obligation."

Despite a second-rate defence team, a dysfunctional military, a fragile political base and empty coffers, Cameron has still fallen into the trap of casting himself as a (reluctant) war leader. This lack of acumen could well be his undoing, the failure which defines his short tenure as prime minister.

COMMENT THREAD