UK military problems & policies

[SJPONeill]

This should be a damn good read but two questions...

Why, oh why will they not let serving officers contribute? This is so short-sighted and having followed a number of senior British officers' public comments over the last 4-5 years, I can not imagine that the blocked contributions to this book could be that damaging to the Blair or the current administration.

Why not release this as a Kindle version as well? The cost of shipping books internationally continues to climb and a large (and growing) proportion of audiences are switching to e-books, including oldies like myself...

[davidbfpo]

I overlooked adding to my post that this week IISS hosted an hour long panel discussion on the book:http://www.iiss.org/en/events/events...-generals-5a6c

Note I have yet to watch this.

[davidbfpo]

SJPONeill asked two questions, I can only offer an explanation for the first:

This should be a damn good read but two questions...

Why, oh why will they not let serving officers contribute? This is so short-sighted and having followed a number of senior British officers' public comments over the last 4-5 years, I can not imagine that the blocked contributions to this book could be that damaging to the Blair or the current administration.

British officialdom is rarely open to public servants, at all levels, contributing on contemporary public issues - I exclude "whistle-blowing". This policy has been reinforced by politicians reluctance to have informed "insider" contributions, which often are contrary to the "spin" the public and media are fed with.

The UK Secretary of Defence, Philip Hammond, made it very clear from taking office that public comments had to be approved and "on message".

What happened to two 'lessons learned' internal unclassified reviews of British military performance provide some insight. The 'Operation Banner' review on Northern Ireland appeared in public via a Republican-leaning group (IIRC it is linked here) and that on Iraq remains an official document - partly I suspect as the Official Iraq Inquiry (known as the Chilcot Report) has yet to be published.

Historians often attest to the value of combing US National Archives for UK documents.

[Fuchs]

the British army struggles to foster effective debate within a hierarchical command chain

A German general, Uhle-Wettler (one of the few notable German military theory authors since the 60's) has recounted meetings at SHAPE in one of his books.

He depicted German officers as openly disagreeing and ready to criticize superior's opinions. meanwhile, British officers displayed themselves a a solid bloc.

H also pointed out that the British officers knew exactly how many and which personnel slots for generals exist in the UK's army, while German officers weren't even aware of the quantity in the Heer.


Maybe such organisation culture differences may be important to such issues.


There is a simple fix: Some roleplaying games and wargames are being done without uniforms and ranks, with all participants in civilian clothes. This removes hierarchies if the people don't know (recognize) each other.

Why not simply establish a forum with anonymised accounts (and moderators who ban or rename members which gave away too much info about their rank) to discuss such internal affairs?
The elder officers are often less tech-savvy and would probably be underrepresented, which would reduce the role of conservatism and inertia in the discussion.

[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!