A fighting chance

‘We remember it not only for the rain that fell, the mud that weighed down the living and swallowed the dead, but also for the courage and bravery of the men who fought here.’

The Prince of Wales was in good voice on Monday at the centenary commemorations of the battle of Passchendaele — more properly, ‘Third Ypres’. It was a pity he couldn’t say that we should remember it not only for the incompetence of the high command, but because the majority of the British troops were at best only half-trained.

One of the enduring myths about war is that armies can be raised quickly. They can’t, because armed conflict is the most complex human interaction known. A soldier’s skill is nine parts judgment. It takes time to acquire — as true today as it was 100 years ago, perhaps even more so. Yet we’re about to make the same mistake as we did before 1914: thinking we can influence events without putting boots on the ground and shrinking the army to a token force. The view in much of Whitehall seems to be that intervention leads only to entanglement — and that intervention by land forces leads only to bloodier entanglement.

‘Mission creep’ isn’t a term heard much these days, but its spectre seemed to be haunting Mark Sedwill, the National Security Adviser, last month at a Royal United Services Institute conference. ‘What is our core national interest?’ he wanted to know. ‘What can we live with in terms of outcomes? What should a western comprehensive strategic plan look like? Only after answering that should we work out what we can and should do.’

The Pentagon’s view of things was certainly putting the fear of God into policymakers at the event.