Missing the target

It has been a mixed week for Parliamentary Select Committees: they have regained some of their bite, but recent events have also served to remind us of their supine performances in the past. Yesterday it was the turn of the Defence Committee to seek our attention, briefing their latest report on the British military campaign in Helmand to the Sunday Telegraph. Under the headline ‘British Force Was Too Weak to Defeat Taliban’, we read of ‘a devastating report’ which is ‘deeply critical of senior commanders and government ministers’. But, the Committee have got some fairly crucial things wrong. They conclude that the task force was ‘capped at 3,150 for financial reasons’. This is untrue: more important than finances was the ongoing commitment in Iraq, together with the Army’s own ‘cap’ on the number of soldiers it could deploy on a sustainable basis across both operations. They also conclude it is ‘unlikely’ that the decision to deploy troops to Northern Helmand in summer 2006 was put to ministers, and argue that it should have been put to Cabinet. This introduces an unhealthy degree of hindsight: there was no deliberate attempt to keep the decision away from ministers, and any lack of due process is better explained by the failure of all those involved to appreciate the ramifications of a decision which only later came to seem like a turning point.

The Committee does expose some useful truths, for example that “Defence Chiefs told ministers they had enough helicopters in Helmand, even though field commanders complained of shortages.” Whether on helicopters, protected vehicles, or pre-deployment troop numbers, the dynamic inside the Ministry of Defence was not the crude version peddled by the Sun newspaper – of ‘Generals begging for more and being ignored’ – but the more insidious problem of self-censorship by a military hierarchy who saw Afghanistan as a chance to restore their reputation after Iraq and were determined not to frighten off ministers with a full account of the problems, uncertainties, and risks.

In particular, when it came to equipment for dealing with ‘Improvised Explosive Devices’, or IEDs, ministers would have given the MOD as much money as they asked for, if they had even half an idea of how to spend it. The problem was that the MOD simply didn’t take the IED threat seriously enough, early enough – and this goes for the senior military as much as civil service ‘pen-pushers’. The Committee complains that ‘Mastiffs, one of the few armoured vehicles capable of surviving a blast from an IED, were not supplied to the British force until 2007’. This is both true and regrettable. But if it had been up to the Army, they might not have been supplied at all. When in July 2006 Defence Secretary Des Browne obtained additional funding from the Treasury to buy Mastiffs, the Army lobbied hard to divert the money to buy extra Vectors, fine all-terrain vehicles but hopelessly vulnerable to IEDs.

So yes, there were shocking failures in decision-making during in this period, but the Committee failed to bring any real insight to identifying and analysing them. It’s all been done better elsewhere: the pre-deployment planning was deconstructed by the Times, the decision-making during summer 2006 by Professor Anthony King – both over a year ago. Most importantly, the Committee get the balance wrong. Put simply, there were four things the British military didn’t have enough of in Helmand: troops, equipment (like helicopters and protected vehicles), intelligence, and strategy. I have argued before that the public debate has been distorted by excessive focus on the first two, at the expense of the latter two, and this latest report will reinforce that.

The other big military story in the Sunday Telegraph was genuinely new, and important. They reported that the Government will today announce a further cut of 10,000 to the Army, on top of the 7,000 announced in the Strategic Defence and Security Review, reducing its overall size from 101,000 to 84,000. The pill will be sweetened with the promise of more funding from the Treasury after 2013, which (if it actually materialises) will finally unfreeze a number of programmes frozen since the election, including the heavily reduced order for Chinook helicopters. Liam Fox will use the Reserves Review to put a brave strategic face on the Army cuts, arguing that a more effective and more deployable TA will more than compensate. But the fact remains that once again it is money, rather than strategy, which is really driving the decisions. Reserves are far cheaper than regulars, and neither ministers nor officials have been able to find another way of making the sums add up.

Back in October, David Cameron’s statement to Parliament on the SDSR contained the following passage:

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“We inherited an Army that was forced to face the threat of deadly IEDs in Afghanistan in Land Rovers designed for Northern Ireland. We have a Royal Air Force hampered by an ageing strategic airlift fleet. And a Royal Navy locked into a cycle of ever smaller numbers of ever more expensive ships.”

These were indeed legitimate criticisms of the legacy Cameron and his ministers inherited. But they were odd things to say on the day the Government published a strategic review which contained no significant good news in any of these areas. “Mr Speaker, we cannot go on like this”, Cameron concluded that day. But neither in the SDSR nor since has his government shown any real ability to grip the cause of the problem: the failure to control the costs of big equipment programmes, in particular the ever-increasing unit costs of surface ships, submarines, and fast jets. Instead, they are going to cut 17,000 troops from the Army – because in a way, it is the easy thing to do. Of course, it is far from easy in political terms, as Cameron knows: we are reliably informed that he vetoed similar proposals repeatedly over recent months. So will we see him and George Osborne smiling together on the front bench as Liam Fox tries to defend this decision later today? Somehow I doubt it.

Matt Cavanagh was a special adviser to the Labour government, including in the Ministry of Defence in 2006, and wrote a recent cover story on Afghanistan for The Spectator. 

UPDATE: A former colleague has challenged my criticism of the Defence Committee’s account of ministerial involvement in the decision to deploy forces to Northern Helmand in summer 2006. I have amended the post accordingly.