Britain has not been lucky with her Defence Secretaries. I cannot remember one ‘fit for purpose’ since George Robertson, back in 1999. There followed, under New Socialism, the colourless provincial lawyer who helped Blair lie his way into Iraq (I forget his name, as it’s always imprudent to libel a lawyer). Then came the wee Scottie, Dr John Reid, who promised us that troops would leave Helmand ‘without a single shot being fired’. (That was in 2006; already by 2008 four million bullets had been fired by the British armed forces—and we’re still there). Finally, Socialism presented the PBI (Poor Bloody Infantryman) with Bob, the bemused sheet-metalworker.
Now we have the Tory’s pink-kneed Liam Fox, on whom the jury is still out—though so far he has presided over the most damaging defence slashes since 1945. Fox is a doctor (and a Scot, to boot). Some nights I go to bed wondering what would happen if instead we put an army general in charge of the NHS. It couldn’t be worse, you might say.
Frank Ledwige would disagree. In Losing Small Wars he argues powerfully the unorthodox view that it is not the politicians, not even the lack of proper kit, but the generals that are most to blame for what has gone wrong in both Iraq and Afghanistan. It has been strategy, rather than policy, that has erred.
Ledwige has spent 15 years as a naval intelligence officer, first in former Yugoslavia, then Iraq. In Afghanistan he served as a civilian legal adviser, and is currently in Libya. He writes with authority—and passion.
In our roles both in Basra and Helmand, Ledwige sees a fundamental failure of intelligence. ‘Our services talk to themselves and like what they hear...’, and in neither did they ‘understand the environment.’ This in itself is a damning view, given that — often by contrast with the Americans — intelligence was a field in which we rather prided ourselves.
In both areas, there was a trap of the army being sent to fight a war it would like to fight, as opposed to actuality. But then an army always fights a war with the weapons it has; in Iraq and Afghanistan it fought with weapons designed for the Cold War in Europe; or police work in Ulster.
Of Basra, Ledwige writes damningly:
It was luminously clear from the daily reports that British forces controlled only the area a few hundred metres from the barrels of the machine guns guarding our beleaguered bases.
Meanwhile, in our last days there, supposedly safeguarding the indigenous population, in ‘December 2007 alone more than 40 women were raped and murdered for wearing non-Islamic dress.’ Ledwige quotes a senior American officer remark as the British pulled out: ‘There will be a stink about this [Iraq] that will hang about the British military.’ Impatient with Brits harping on the Northern Ireland ‘experience’, they forbade them to mention it in any US HQ.
Helmand was, historically, a most unfortunate choice for us as a surrogate, or sequel, to Basra, claims Ledwige. With memories as long as the Khyber Pass, the Helmandis could not forget the disaster of Maiwand in 1880; to deploy British troops there, says Ledwige, was as if we had ‘returned in force to the west of Ireland in the 1950s’. Yet, in defence of the generals, could it not be argued that the choice of Helmand lay not with the MOD, but No.10?
Ledwige charges that, particularly in Helmand, we simply had too few boots on the ground. So one of the most mobile, modern armies in the world found itself fighting a kind of P. C. Wren war, stuck in isolated little forts, with mobility and initiative belonging to a 19th-century style of warriors, the Taleban. Surrounded by barbed wire and sandbags, the forces that had come to bring security to the Afghan civil population often ‘never left the safety of the highly secure bases in which they lived’. These stood ‘as a metaphor for a closed and defensive mentality’. But, again, who was to blame: the generals or the politicians? Surely it’s the politicos who stipulate the resources available?
Perhaps more to the point is the brevity of the ‘six month rotation’, accompanied by a ‘crack-on’ mentality, which means each successive brigade commander has little time to digest problems of the area, and then has to leave his mark by initiating some new, often ill-conceived op. If things go wrong, he will call up a NATO bomber to drop a 500lb bomb in the middle of a village. Perhaps not the best way to win Hearts-and-Minds. A Helmandi is quoted as saying:
if you want to bring us security, go and live in the desert. You can fight the Taleban from there.
Most telling is Ledwige’s critique of the sheer numbers of British generaldom: enough to crew three destroyers, and proportionately eight times more than in the US marine Corps. A shattering figure. Like the Lords, how do you decimate them?
But, again, who was to blame: the generals or the politicians? Surely it’s the politicos who stipulate the resources available?
Across the board, his comparisons are strikingly favourable to the US in Iraq or Afghanistan. ‘Unburdened by the useless shibboleths of the past, such as Malaya or even Northern Ireland,’ American commanders he finds quicker to see a need to change direction.
It is not a comforting picture for the home team. Meanwhile Ledwige leaves us with a favorite Taleban saying: ‘You have the watches: we have the time.’