Frontline – first impressions

One of the penalties of being exiled to Bradford, 200 miles from the metropolis is that for what is a Londoner, an evening with an early return home becomes a major expedition – requiring forward planning, considerable expense and much exhaustion, not least because one tends to cram in as much as possible into the day to make the trip worth it.

Thus, the Frontline Club talk yesterday, which started at 7 pm began for me at 6.30 in the morning and ended up, after a grueling 400-mile round trip, with me falling into my pit at 5 am this morning, having driven through atrocious weather, a barrage of road works and a thicket of speed cameras, the verdict from which has yet to be delivered.

Inevitably, therefore, such a concentrated diet of impressions takes a considerable amount of digestion before a coherent view can be formed. It says something though, that earlier in the day, I had given a talk about the book to a small gathering at a private lunch and my attempt to give the "short" version, with some insight into the political ramifications, took an hour and a half. Yet there I was at the Frontline club expected to give an overview in 20 minutes and then take part in a panel discussion for an hour or so, covering the same territory.

Originally billed with General Sir Mike Jackson on the panel, he pulled out at the last minute, for reasons unexplained (apparently he has a reputation for that). The meeting was thus chaired by Bill Neely, foreign editor for ITN News, with the panel comprising myself, Kim Sengupta from The Independent and with Deborah Haynes, defence correspondent from The Times standing in for Gen Jackson.

To a packed audience, with standing room only (close to a hundred people), I chose to focus the talk very tightly on just one aspect of the British occupation of Iraqi – the lack of appropriate equipment – which, I averred, contributed significantly to the military defeat. Much to the concern of the management, who discourage the use of Powerpoint presentations, I chose to illustrate the presentation with pictures of key equipment and despite the reservations, it seemed to work well enough.

Memory then is a faulty instrument; players always find it hard to describe the action. But, of the contributions from the audience – including two passionate Iraqi expats – there is and will continue to be that difficulty in unravelling those two separate (albeit linked) episodes of the invasion and the subsequent occupation. Many of the questions were thus focused on the invasion and issues related to that.

That further reinforced by the response today to the launch of the Chilcot Inquiry, where it is clear that Tony Blair is to be the star of the show in what looks as if it will become a media three-ring circus.

As to my general thesis – that the occupation of Iraq was a military failure – there was in fact a strong measure of agreement from the panel and the chairman, and indeed a view that many of the same mistakes are being repeated in the campaign in Afghanistan, about which there was very little confidence expressed. It there was a consensus view, it is most definitely that the Military is paving the way for another glorious defeat.

The impressive Kim Sengupta disagreed that the lack of equipment was the primary factor in the failure of the British, arguing that the root cause was the arrogance in the Military, a belief that they knew it all, and a rooted obstinacy in refusing to learn any lessons from the experience.

A former soldier in the audience added his voice, referring to the retreat from al Amarah - which I had identified as the pivotal moment in the failure of the campaign – saying that the campaign had been lost long before. By then there was no political will to continue with an aggressive prosecution of the counter-insurgency action.

Not disputing any of these views, I made the point that the lack of equipment was symptomatic of that greater malaise. I offered my own thesis - not unfamiliar to readers of this blog – that military equipment is the window into the soul of the Army.

Look at the equipment an army fields (and does not field) and that will tell you how they intend to fight. You do not need to interview the generals as to their intentions – they are revealed in the order of battle, in which context the continued use of the Snatch Land Rover told a story more eloquent than a brace of self-serving memoirs.

The Army, in effect, was telling you its own story, there to see if you understood the language. It illustrated the points made and was symbolic evidence of them.

Chairman Bill Neely neatly put Deborah Haynes on the spot, asking her why the media did not pay more attention to equipment. Her view, if I have recorded it accurately, was that equipment alone was not "very sexy" and it was not until there were "body bags" to go with it, as had been the case with the Snatch Land Rover, that it became a story.

This precisely accords with the impression that I have formed of the way the media thinks. If I did hear correctly, then it is a stunning confirmation of part of my thesis on media behaviour.

Neely himself invited me to explore by broader thesis on the failure of the media, noting that, while I had criticised the British media, I had relied extensively on British sources for my book. My point was that, while much of the information supplied was valuable, I had found that I had not been able to assemble from the British media any sense of a narrative of the conduct of the occupation. I had had to trawl many different sources, the most valuable – in helping me construct a framework – being the Arab press and insurgent sources.

Thus, as far as it goes, the British media offered many reports, but failed entirely in presenting a factual narrative which would put the material in the broader context. In that sense, I told Neely, Sengupta and Haynes afterwards, a rounded account is like a string of pearls. They had provided many pearls (and some dross) but not the "string" with which to bind them into a coherent whole.

Anyhow, those were my first – or at least, abiding – impressions of the meeting. There was much, much more and I hope that, should the video of the meeting become available, I will be able to do a much more comprehensive review of what was a fascinating event.

COMMENT THREAD

Where were you?

Yes, Mr Bush, we know it is bad - we've been saying so for a long time. Yes, we agree with you when you tell our prime minister, Tony Blair, that "we need a new approach". And yes, we entirely agree with General Sir Mike Jackson (now retired) that it would be "morally wrong" to pull out of Iraq at the moment.

And we even agree with Jackson when he accused the government in his speech of neglecting soldiers and of "asking too much" of the armed forces.

But what we also want to know is why it has been left until now? What have our professionals and analysts being doing all these years and, in particular, what was the professional head of the Army doing in August 2003?

This blog, of course, didn't exist back then. But General Sir Mike Jackson – or "Macho Jacko" as he was already known - was Chief of General Staff, the professional head of the Army. He had been appointed on 1 January 2003, he had seen the successful assault on Basra by British troops and then enjoyed the short-lived fruits of victory with the official termination of hostilities in Iraq on 1 May 2003.

Then, on 14 August - two days after Basra had been swept by organised riots, with mobs protesting against the lack of fuel and electricity in the city – when British forces were shot at and returned fire, killing at least one Iraqi - Captain David Jones was travelling from Basra with his driver in a clearly marked military ambulance (pictured above left), conveying a soldier to the military hospital in the Shaibah logistics base outside the city. He never arrived. Shortly after 9am British time, the vehicle was struck by a roadside bomb, killing Captain Jones and injuring the other two soldiers, and badly damaging the vehicle (illustrated right).

One national newspaper at the time reported that this had been the most serious attack on British forces since six military policemen had been killed in Majar al-Kabir, north of Basra, on 24 June. Furthermore, as this was the very first roadside bomb attack on a British military vehicle, the fear was that the "honeymoon" was over – that British troops in the southern, mostly Shia, part of Iraq, were now to be targeted by guerrilla attacks. Up to date, these had been reserved for American troops in the ethnic Sunni area around Baghdad.

As reported by The Scotsman, the BBC had defence analyst Paul Beaver saying that the attack had been very different to any incident dealt with by British forces in Iraq before then. "This looks like a step up in operations by a group you can only call terrorists," he told BBC News. "This is very much a pre-meditated act of terrorism. There's no doubt at all what we're actually seeing here is someone making capital out of the fact there is now a greater awareness of discontent in the Basra area."

The newspaper suggested that the campaign in Iraq had "entered a dangerous new phase".

One swallow does not make a summer though, but any thoughts General Sir Mike Jackson might have had of disagreeing must have been disabused by reports of an incident on 23 August. Three soldiers from the Royal Military Police - Major Matthew Titchener, Co Sergeant Major Colin Wall and Corporal Dewi Pritchard - were killed in an ambush in central Basra.

Witnesses said the RMPs were riding in a sports utility vehicle in a routine two-vehicle convoy and came under small-arms fire from an unknown number of men in a pick-up truck at around 8.30am. The soldiers returned fire, but appear to have been killed either by a grenade thrown from the other vehicle or when their own vehicle crashed into a wall.

Then, on 27 August, Fusilier Russell Beeston, a Territorial Army soldier in the 52nd Lowland Regiment, was killed on after a crowd surrounded his patrol vehicle in Ali As Sharqi, southern Iraq, and opened fire with guns and rocket-propelled grenades. He was 26 and from Govan. Shortly afterwards, on 7 September, a roadside bomb in Basra exploded when a British diplomatic convoy was passing killing four people of unknown nationalities, wrecking the car and flipping it upside down. When a later explosion killed ten more, there can have been no doubt. The honeymoon was definitely over and an insurgency was in progress.

Now, in his speech entitled, "The Defence Of The Realm In The 21st Century", General Sir Mike Jackson tells us his lecture was "a way of taking stock". He has been considering "what may be demanded for the defence of the Realm in this uncertain century; and how ready we are for those demands."

But he adds: "We also need to be honest as to how well we are meeting these demands now," effectively admitting that we are not doing enough. He says: "we must do better in this complex situation, faced as we are today by a determined and ruthless enemy".

That "determined and ruthless enemy" was to continue slaughtering British troops. But, in August and September and points thereafter, Jackson was not only thinking about the war in Iraq. As befits the professional head of the Army, he was thinking in grander terms, of the longer term. "How should the United Kingdom position and defend itself?" he was asking.

He doesn't actually tell us the timeline but we know from other events that this was the thinking going on in the MoD. The arch Europhile secretary of state for defence, Geoff Hoon, had his own political priorities. They were to put clothes on Tony Blair's 1999 initiative, making good his St Malo promises to co-operate with Jacques Chirac, building a European Rapid Reaction Force.

Through 2003, as the attacks on British troops intensified, Blair's high-level political initiative was filtering down to Army level for implementation. General Sir Mike Jackson was thus required to look at the broader strategy - a European strategy to balance the US-orientated Iraqi strategy. As conveyed to us in the Dimbleby lecture, he rationalised it thus:

The UK cannot isolate itself from the wider world, so I'm not at all sure that it is an available strategy, even if we wanted to choose it. That said, I think perhaps the most fundamental question, is the relationship, the strategic relationship, between the United States and Europe. ...

And the UK's position as between the US and Europe has been a dilemma for this country for many decades. A black or white choice, one way or the other, would be fatally flawed. The fate of this country, given its geography and its history, is to wrestle with the conundrum that whilst we sit unequally in geographical distance between the United States and the mainland continent, of Europe, the political distance is a much more equal proposition.

We had our "special" relationship with the US but, "we are also part of the continent of Europe, and a member of the continent's polity, the European Union." Thus said the General, "...it is inevitable that there will be an ebb and flow to the UK's relationship with these two centres of gravity." We could not sit on the fence, he mused. "We are so closely involved strategically with both the United States and with Europe, that in our strategic posture we must embrace both."

So, instead of concentrating on dealing with the war in Iraq, with its special equipment needs, in November 2003 he palmed the troops off with second-hand "Snatch" Land Rovers, drawn from stocks held in store in Belfast.

That done, Jackson then devoted his energies to feeding the European fantasy, as he set about reorganising the Army to fit in with the demands of the ERRF. The rest, as they say, is history. The attacks continued, "Snatches" burned and soldiers died for want of better equipment.

Except that the history has yet to be written. Thus, in his Dimbleby lecture, General Sir Mike Jackson put in his bid for his version. "We could well be asking too much of our Army," he says:

It all comes down to a question of balance: balance between capabilities within the defence budget - how much of this, how much of that; current operations against what may be required in the future; not only current operations, but current training which is the investment for our capability in the future; people against technology - that's pay for example, accommodation standards for example, against current and future equipment.

This should not be a dilemma incidentally, this should not be a zero sum or an either/or. We should be able to provide what is required for soldiers to be fully and properly equipped, thoroughly trained, decently paid, and, together with their families, decently housed. They deserve nothing less.

So they do, General Sir Michael Jackson, GCB, CBE, DSO., so they do. At a time when even the Americans were beginning to realise that better equipment, like the superb RG-31, was needed (even available as an ambulance), why weren't our soldiers "fully and properly equipped" instead of being palmed off with second-hand Land Rovers?

So, when the real history comes to be written, it will include the question: "Where were you, General Jackson, when the Army really needed you?"

COMMENT THREAD

Winning the war

Should we give half a cheer that at least one newspaper has picked up on Dannatt's plea for more resources to be devoted to the armed forces, or will this have no more effect than any of the tons of fish and chip wrappers produced each day?

Well… a micro-cheer – if there is such a thing. But, while the world's favourite newspaper (not) has come up with a stunningly obvious headline declaring that, "Winning the war will need more" – the problem is that the nature of "more" is not specified. What we do get though is this:

For the foreseeable future, the Army's basic task will be to defeat hit-and-run insurgent groups in hostile terrain. Yet the priorities for the defence budget are still geared towards frustrating an attack by the Soviet Union on Western Europe. A very substantial slice goes on our nuclear deterrent; more still will go on updating it. Some £18 billion has been expended on our share of the Eurofighter: a plane that still does not work properly, and for which no military function has been found.

...

The "peace dividend", the pot of gold politicians so love, has long since disappeared. We face a prolonged war against an implacable enemy. Mr Blair has recognised the threat. He, and his successor, now need to provide the resources our Armed Forces need to defeat it.

Clearly, the egregious hacks on The Sunday Telegraph did not fully read the Sarah Sands piece in the Mail (which is hardly surprising as most of them have been fired) but, had Patience given it to the dog, he might have reminded her of this:

What will make a difference is the arrival of more heavily armoured vehicles. Sir Richard is open about the vulnerability of some of the vehicles his soldiers have been using, particularly in Iraq.

"The threats we have been facing in Iraq from last summer grew considerably. The sophistication of the mines and rockets used to attack our vehicles went up significantly."

Thus, 160 six-wheeled, four-ton armoured patrol vehicles are on their way to Afghanistan. There is also a 20-ton vehicle called the Mastiff ready for use in Iraq or Afghanistan. The controversial Snatch Land Rovers, which give little protection, should be replaced. "Over time I want to modernise all patrol vehicles," says Sir Richard. "The snatch vehicles were getting old. They were originally developed for Northern Ireland. I want people to have adequate vehicles for the tasks they carry out." There is also a family of armoured vehicles called FRES (Future Rapid Effect System). The cost of this future equipment is £14 billion.

And there it is. Dannatt, like his predecessor Jackson, is committed to FRES – with a price tag of £14 billion – the biggest single procurement programme for the Army ever devised.

Is anybody out there? FRES, i.e., Future Rapid Effects System, is the biggest single procurement programme for the Army ever devised.

This is not "geared towards frustrating an attack by the Soviet Union on Western Europe" but neither is it suitable for defeating "hit-and-run insurgent groups in hostile terrain." In fact, its primary purpose is to equip the European Rapid Reaction Force, the function of which is unknown – other than to pursue the "colleagues'" ambitions for further defence integration.

It is all very well taking a cheap shot at the Eurofighter (the only thing cheap about it) but the money is spent – or committed. It would cost us more at this stage to cancel the contract than buy the aeroplanes, unless we can dump more on the Saudis.

But when it comes to FRES, we are talking about the future – decisions yet to be made. And not for nothing have we called it a blunder of Eurofighter proportions with serious political implications.

There is still time to reverse course and equip the Army to deal with "hit-and-run insurgent groups", but that is not going to happen unless the media (to say nothing of the politicians) start waking up and discussing forward plans instead of ancient history.

COMMENT THREAD