The generals must share the blame

14 October 2009

It’s fashionable for military top brass to attack politicians when things go wrong. But, says Paul Robinson, many of the army’s problems are of their own making

As a result, when things go wrong, the natural tendency of many in uniform, especially the generals, is to blame the politicians rather than to look in the mirror. The combination of this self-satisfied culture and the moral elevation of the soldier in the popular imagination has led to a modern version of the infamous dolchstosslegende, the stab-in-the-back theory which encouraged Germans to believe that they had not really been defeated in the first world war.

For the past two years, elements of the British press and the British army (with General Dannatt to the fore) have worked all out to propagate a similar myth. The sharks at the Daily Mail have led the way. ‘A shameful betrayal of our servicemen’; ‘Treachery, politicians, and the shameful betrayal of this man of honour [Richard Dannatt]’, its headlines have screamed. Sensing blood, the rest of the press have joined the frenzy (‘The betrayal of Britain’s troops’ — Independent; ‘How Labour has betrayed the troops’ — Sunday Express, and so on).

The army’s humiliation in Iraq, and its failure to bring peace to Helmand, are not, we learn, its fault. Rather, the Labour party, and in particular Gordon Brown, coldheartedly sent the troops off to die without the proper equipment and without the reinforcements which might have enabled them to achieve victory. If only they’d had the tools to do the job, our fine ‘boys and girls’ would have dispatched the Taleban long ago.

This is, of course, perfect nonsense. One of the more galling sounds of the past two years has been that of Americans smugly observing that the British have been slow to learn the lessons of modern counter-insurgency. The criticism has been especially hard to bear because it is true. Many of the British army’s problems have been of its own making. As one officer participant has eloquently put it, the decision in 2006 ‘to scatter small groups of soldiers across the north of Helmand, in isolation, in an intelligence vacuum and with complete disregard for the most basic tenets of counter-insurgency was, quite simply, a gross military blunder’. And even if it is true that this decision was the result of ‘political pressure’ from London, it was the responsibility of the generals to resist such pressure and to insist that the troops be used sensibly. In the second world war, General Alan Brooke would argue all night with Churchill when he thought that the Prime Minister was making absurd military judgments. This does not seem to happen any more.