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

That said, the problems British forces have faced in Iraq and Afghanistan stem far more from strategic than from tactical errors. The invasion of Iraq was strategic idiocy from the start, the intervention in Helmand almost equally doomed. Antonio Giustozzi, one of the foremost experts on Afghanistan, comments that ‘the insurgency is the result of aggressive and predatory behaviour of local authorities’. When Nato troops deployed to southern Afghanistan in 2006, ‘local communities interpreted the deployment as being intended to strengthen the repression to which they were already being subjected’, and therefore rose up in arms. The very presence of British troops, rather than being a solution to the rebellion, has thus been a major cause of its growth. More men, more helicopters and better vehicles might have saved the lives of some soldiers, but would not have prevented Helmand from descending into chaos.

In the end, it is the politicians who make the decisions on whether to deploy troops overseas. Nevertheless, senior officers have a duty not only to ensure that troops are used in sensible ways, but also to ensure that they are used for sensible purposes, and to tell the politicians what those would and would not be. Alas, Britain’s military leaders have failed to restrain the Labour government from its strategic follies.

Bureaucratic interests explain why. In the late 1980s the British armed forces were orientated almost entirely towards the Soviet threat. The collapse of communism left them without a raison d’être. It would have been easy for the Labour government to make major cuts in military spending. It did not. Rather than destroying Britain’s military, the Labour party saved it. The 1997 strategic defence review provided a new mission — expeditionary warfare to be a ‘force for good’ around the world.