What type of Army do we want?
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What type of Army do we want? Since the 1960s the UK army has focused on being a high-end warfighting army able to adapt to other contingencies; a generalist army. The issue is now, with the costs of defence and our small size, do we want to become a specialist niche army, perhaps specialising in some aspect of COIN? That debate is ongoing. There is a danger that if we as an army focus overly now on Afghanistan we will pre-empt the debate. Personally I think we cannot do both. I also look at our current training regime and think we are losing core warfighting skills. I also look at the experience of the IDF in 2006 in Lebanon and how they transformed themselves over 2 years, what they focused on and then their experience in 2008 in Gaza and I wonder.
Eight years into Afghanistan and the Brits are still trying to decide whether to take the whole thing seriously. To mask this indecision the process gets framed as a pseudo-intellectual debate as to what direction the army as a whole should move in.
Sad.
The next war will certainly be different to the current one in Afghanistan.
If the Brits had decided that they could afford to provide 7 or 8 or 9,000 troops on an ongoing basis in Afghanistan then a plan could well have been hatched to ensure that the Afghanistan troop obligation was handled competently by dedicated and committed soldiers in a manner ensuring maximum operational continuity.
The inability to attempt specialise an element of the existing regimental structure for operations in Afghanistan to do justice to the international and domestic expectation the Brit military proceeded to trot various Bde HQs and battalions through the Afghan theatre on a leisurely rotation.
The end result is that the forces so used are neither Afghanistan specialists nor at a competent level at their core role. Hence the befuddled intellectual position the Brit forces find themselves in at the moment.
You can have it both ways... all it requires is a little lateral thinking so in years to come it will be so "blindingly obvious" what the solution was that the army will be at a loss as to why they never did it that way.