14/06/2013
More than a few eyebrows have been raised today by CGS Peter Wall's
assertion that if there are any further defence cuts, "we won't win wars".
That, at least, is the headline claim. Sir Peter actually puts it differently, suggesting that the Army has got to the point in a number of parts of its set-up where, "we can't go any further without seriously damaging our professional competence and our chances of success on the battlefields of the future".
The most obvious response to this is to remark that, since the Army (or Armed Forces, of which the Army was the lead service in theatre) has lost the last two war it has fought â the Iraqi counterinsurgency and Afghanistan â what else is new? To cut Army funding further simply gives us the opportunity of losing our wars slightly more economically.
Exploring Gen Wall's remarks further, his reference to "seriously damaging our professional competence" is an odd one. In the context, one normally talks about "capacity" or "capabilities", as the word "competence" â outside of the Brussels usage â tends to refer to intellectual prowess, as with its antonym, "incompetence".
The difference is important in the sense that, while capacity â or broad capabilities in the physical sense â are very much related to funding (although not as closely as the Army would assert), "competence" as an intellectual property is to an extent an independent variable.
In this particular context, it is too late for Wall to argue that that Army stands at risk of having its "professional competence" damaged. It was precisely because it already has been, with the High Command displaying both tactical and strategic incompetence in Iraq and Afghanistan, that it has so egregiously failed in both theatres.
At the height of operational intensity, when Iraq and Afghanistan were on the stocks simultaneous, I was aware at a very high level of acute frustration of the lacklustre performance of the High Command (of which, incidentally, Gen, Wall was part), and a growing awareness that command failings were as much responsible for operational failings, as any political input.
When, against a background of spiralling costs and a mounting death toll, senior military officials started briefing against their own ministers, diverting blame for their own poor performance into the military arena, it left a legacy of mistrust that has carried over into the current administration.
And, given that the military has shown no great skill in recovering the position in Afghanistan, despite the estimated expenditure of £20 billion, ministers have indeed come to the conclusion that, if they are to preside over failure â for which they are to take the blame â then it might as well be done more economically, to limit the political fallout back home.
What the Army has lost sight of â and Gen. Well in particular â is that, while success brings success, failure brings its own penalties. In short, the Army lost its ability to fight counterinsurgencies, failed also to learn lessons from its experiences and forgot also how to apply old lessons, learned from past campaigns.
Add to this and extraordinary capacity for wasting money, while an overstaffed and over-privileged High Command live high on the hog, Wall himself
earning substantially more than the Prime Minister, and you have the elements of a perfect storm.
More prosaically, the military have not delivered the goods and have expended every last bit of sympathy from their political masters that they might otherwise have relied upon. They have sown the seeds of incompetence, and have reaped a whirlwind of cuts.
COMMENT THREAD
