UK military problems & policies

[SJPONeill]

Spot on, Fuchs!!!

Any organisation that finds itself full of yes-men and followers in in trouble. When I teach lessons learned material as part of organisational learning, I use the example of the US forces that went into Iraq, which on D Day were (in my external perception) very much conformist, 'no black or even grey marks on my unit', etc because that is how one advances in a peacetime force. However, within a year of the insurgency erupting across Iraq, there was clearly a fundamental change where the philosophy became driven by the need to share (certainly at the tactical level) cock-ups and screw-ups so that others might learn and avoid the same errors. For a ling time, I think that the UK MOD was happy to sit back on its imaginary laurels from Malaya, Kenya and Northern Ireland and snipe at US COIN efforts when it should have been taking notes and getting with the programme for contemporary operations...

Those senior officers have a duty to speak out, just the same as they do if the issue was a simple criminal matter, and to not do so so that they might continue to enjoy the Queen's coin is a betrayal of the ethos and culture of service...

[davidbfpo]

Thomas Ricks has read the book; in what appears to be the start of a review he says:

I've just finished reading most of British Generals in Blair's Wars, a fascinating volume, one of the most interesting I've read this year.

Link:http://ricks.foreignpolicy.com/posts...e_last_10_year

[davidbfpo]

A very short Chatham House briefing paper (less than 30 pgs) and IMHO sits here: Depending on the Right People: British Political-Military Relations, 2001–10. The summary starts with:

There is a widespread view that Britain’s politicians should bear the main blame for the country’s military difficulties in Iraq and Afghanistan. In particular, they are accused of failing to heed professional military advice and of launching over-ambitious missions with insufficient resources. Recent evidence, including from the Iraq Inquiry, shows that this view is too simplistic.
Instead, Britain seems to have suffered a wider failure of the government system, with politicians, senior military officers and civil servants all playing their part.

Link:http://www.chathamhouse.org/sites/de...deWaal1113.pdf

For reasons lost on me the author, a UK diplomat on study leave, remarks:

Britain must learn from US experience and from its own mistakes.

Another article to read one day.

[davidbfpo]

Catching up with my reading backlog I have finally read Hew Strachan's Parameters article. It is an easy read, ten pages long:http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute...an_Article.pdf

Apologies if posted before, not sure where and when I found it!