The Making Of The British Army (77 page)

From my time in uniform, and from reflecting on its past, I know that the army is a conservative organization: it mistrusts revolutionary change. Field Marshal Lord Carver, Britain’s most intellectually able and battle-experienced soldier of the last century, perhaps explains why in his
Britain’s Army in the 20th Century:
‘Using the experience of the past as a guide to the balance required to meet future demands has often proved unreliable; but imaginative visions of how to meet them have also been, if not false, at least premature.’ But the army has more often than not proved exceptionally quick to change in wartime, when the requirement is crystal clear – if a little late.

The risk of false trails, of which Carver warns, is always present. Some senior officers have recently observed, for example, that as a result of working closely with the US army for the past ten years a certain ‘intensity’ is appearing in middle-ranking officers where before there was a ‘breezier’ style. This is more than just the old cricketing jibe ‘Gentlemen out, Players in’ when Montgomery arrived with his own men. It is rather that the easy pragmatism, ‘amateurism’ in the best sense of the word, that served the army so well when it was faced with ‘impossible’ situations may be giving way to a ‘professionalism’ which asserts that there is an absolute right way in any situation – a sort of military totalitarianism. But this sort of approach can work only when there are plentiful resources of men and materiel – which is not the usual situation a British officer finds himself in. Indeed, too doctrinaire an approach would rob the army of one of its true force multipliers: the original thinking of its officers. To what extent the Iraq bruising has dented self-confidence in British superiority in ‘small wars’ remains to be seen, but the dangers of an over-reaction, aping American methods when the British army has nothing like the US army’s resources, are obvious. The Iraq bruising may indeed prove to be a significant break in the habit of victory, but the army’s ability to pick itself up after a setback – as I have shown again and again – was a habit acquired much earlier.

Technology can also be beguiling, pointing down thoroughly
expensive
false trails. During the 2004 ‘stealth defence review’, the then CDS, General Sir Michael (now Lord) Walker, wrote in
The Times:

‘Imagine’ indeed. As I have tried to show in the previous chapter, the reality of fighting the insurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan has been more ‘Victoria’s wars’ than ‘network enabled’. But even if technology were – had been – the answer in Iraq and Afghanistan, are the battles of Helmand and Basra pointers to what war in the future will look like? This is the permanent dilemma facing service chiefs in deciding where the money should go.

The parlous state of the public finances in the next decade will make the dilemma more acute than ever. No longer will the chiefs be able to ‘advance on a broad front’. Instead they will have to choose between current operations and possible future operations. In this contest between wolves and sledges, as the former CDS Lord Guthrie calls it, the only sensible course is to shoot the nearest wolf: make sure you win the battles of today, for defeat today increases the chance of war tomorrow.
²⁸⁶
This means finding more men for the army and taking a risk that we can get away with fewer Eurofighters, say, and even aircraft carriers. But finding recruits and keeping trained manpower has proved extraordinarily difficult these past ten years. The infantry is chronically some 1,500 to 2,000 men under-recruited – three battalions’ worth – and many trained infantrymen are
hors de combat
through war wounds or injuries in training. In addition, an infantry battalion’s establishment – its authorized strength – has been so pared down in the past twenty years that most battalions are scarcely able to
deploy on operations without heavy reinforcement from another regiment, including the TA. In fact, for its true war footing the army is at least 10,000 men under-established. But could the under-strength army recruit more men?

Several former chiefs are convinced that they could, not least because the current economic climate with its rising unemployment is in the army’s favour at last (and an expanding organization, as opposed to a diminishing one, has its attractions).
²⁸⁷
Just as important, a bigger army would mean a less stretched army, one in which the soldier felt there was the right balance of training, operations, rest and personal development – and fewer seeking discharge in consequence. Avoiding the loss of serving personnel is particularly important among middle-ranking field officers (captains and majors) and senior NCOs, the repositories of operational experience in the regiments. There are other possibilities. The Brigade of Gurkhas, which bore a good deal of the burden of Malaya and Borneo, and now consists of just two infantry battalions and supporting troops (engineers, signals, transport),
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could easily be doubled in size. They are now virtually interchangeable with British units, and indeed have other characteristics that make them especially effective in places such as Afghanistan – not least facility in local languages. The ratio of infantry to other arms is also manifestly too small: in 1918 the infantry accounted for over half the army’s total manpower; today the proportion is well under a quarter, yet the nature of operations is once more becoming manpower-intensive. Imaginative schemes to integrate the TA more closely with the regular army have also long been discussed, although the sheer impracticalities and uncertainties of employing TA as ‘formed units’ as opposed to individual reinforcements except in times of national emergencies will continue to dog aspirations for greater integration.

Special Forces have never stood at a greater premium than now. The SAS are without question the world leader in clandestine operations against strategic targets, but their strength – at one regular regiment
and two TA – is far less than generally supposed.
²⁸⁹
Their manpower is never ‘capped’, however: the standard is an absolute one, and only a few out of every hundred who begin the process for ‘Selection’ make it to Hereford. One of the ‘critical mass’ arguments in debates about the size of the army is indeed the need for a pool large enough to yield the required number of recruits to the SAS; and equally one of the arguments for retaining the Parachute Regiment – though parachute operations in any strength are now almost inconceivable – is to foster a
corps d’élite
which not only has its effect in the army as a whole but is a fertile seedbed for the SAS.
²⁹⁰
It is also striking just how many senior officers in the army today wear SAS wings – in no small part due to Guthrie’s championing of men who had served with ‘the Regiment’ when he (himself a former SAS man) was CGS.

To what future, then, do the interventions of the past decade and a half in the former Yugoslavia, East Timor, Sierra Leone, Iraq and Afghanistan point? What will the army be for,
²⁹¹
and how will it be organized and equipped?

In
The Shield of Achilles
, published shortly after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Philip Bobbitt – American law professor, strategist, and former adviser to the US National Security Council – describes the transformation of the traditional nation-state model of international relations into ‘a new age of indeterminacy’, pointing to the heightened danger of the old cliché that generals prepare to fight the last war rather than the next one – although he is sympathetic, because for centuries the past was all we knew about the future: ‘Things were usually pretty much the way they have been’ because war had always had three characteristics – one country fights another; war is waged by the government, not private parties; the victorious side defeats its adversary. But this would no longer be the case, suggests Professor Bobbitt. In reviewing
The Shield of Achilles
in
The Times
in 2002 I wrote:

Eight years on, the new CGS, Sir David Richards, suggests that in fact there may not need to be quite such a competition for resources to fight both kinds of war. Policy-makers need to do three things, he argues:

Here, then, is a pointer to the road along which the army that Cromwell first envisaged in the aftermath of Edgehill ‘as if through a glass darkly’ – an army which has marched across five, arguably all six, continents over three centuries, has frequently been beaten but has very rarely been bowed, and under generals whose deeds are still studied – may find itself marching during the next military generation. But history and the mental approach to change which that history has produced suggests too that whatever emerges will be recognizable in its essentials to the generations that have gone before. For war – soldiering – has an enduring face at the tactical level. I am myself convinced, from both experience and study, that the old adage remains good: it is the
man
who is the first weapon of war. Or, as the former Great War infantry officer and man of letters A. P. Herbert
²⁹³
wrote in his 1944 encouragement to the ‘P.B.I.’ – ‘the Poor Bloody Infantry’:

Perhaps, though, we may extend Herbert’s sentiment to every soldier, for the rear area today has little security, or even meaning. Proud, plodding, peerless
British Army –
the foulest, finest job of all. An army long in the making, which yet remains very much a work in progress.