Losing Small Wars, British Military Failure in Iraq and Afghanistan (Yale University Press) , former intelligence officer Frank Ledwidge catalogues the failings and mistakes surrounding those two hopelessly unplanned and misconceived operations.

Defence chiefs must be called to account | News | guardian.co.uk

Ledwidge says he has "no hesitation in calling the high command of the armed forces to account for...nothing less than dereliction of duty" He adds: "Yet no senior officer has been held to account; none has been dismissed; none has resigned; none has been removed from his position".

From the review of the book:

Partly on the strength of their apparent success in 'small wars' such as Malaya and Northern Ireland, the British armed forces have long been perceived as world class, if not world-beating. Yet under British control Basra degenerated into a lawless city riven with militia violence and fear, while tactical mistakes and strategic incompetence in Helmand province resulted in numerous casualties and a burgeoning opium trade. In both cases the British were eventually and humiliatingly baled out by the US military. In this thoughtful and compellingly readable book, former military intelligence officer Frank Ledwidge, a veteran of both campaigns, examines the British involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, asking how and why it went so wrong. With the aid of copious research, interviews with senior officers and his own experiences, he looks in detail at how British strategy is developed and how senior officers are trained. He discusses the culture of the British military and argues that at the root of these flawed operations has been a reliance on obsolete structures, approaches and tactics, a culture of not asking difficult questions and above all an inability to adapt to new challenges. This is an eye-opening analysis of the causes of military failure, and its enormous costs.

Without wishing to be seen to unduly defend our own; it would seem from the tone of the article and my limited knowledge of the subject (Basra in particular) that the problem is principally political rather than military. I'm not sure how the political restrictions placed on the UK forces in Basra prior to the end of TELIC are the fault of the military head shed. Likewise, the view that at the military level the UK has got Helmand wrong is, I think, questionable; particularly when we see footage of the USMC bulldozing mosques and firing Python equivalents along streets in areas hitherto in UK AOs. I won't be the only one to think that his suggestion that UK forces were bailed out in Helmand because of UK military incompetence is somewhat disingenuous; in fact I'd suggest the requirement came from lack of UK military resource (particularly troop density), hardly the military's fault.

Considering Jock Stirrup was telling everyone who would listen that the British forces in Helmand had everything they needed when your average Cub Scout could have seen that our forces were as woefully underequipped as ever, there's at least some senior officers who are just as much to blame as the politicians. He'll hardly have been the only one who thought of career and political advancement over where his real loyalties should have been - the men and women who made up the forces he was privileged to command.

Senior officers from all three services have let their men down over and over again for a long time - political posturing over the other services that have helped no-one bar the Treasury and diamond plated equipment projects that are clearly physically impossible (I'd like an armoured car with the same armour and firepower as a Challenger 2 but which weighs the same as a Land Rover please) while allowing the soldiers who serve under them to turn up to war after war after war with second rate equipment and not even enough of that while crowing about 'punching above our weight' and 'doing more with less' as if being pitied by other nations and being nicknamed 'Borrowers' is something to be proud of.

Originally Posted by jimmys_best_mate

Considering Jock Stirrup was telling everyone who would listen that the British forces in Helmand had everything they needed when your average Cub Scout could have seen that our forces were as woefully underequipped as ever, there's at least some senior officers who are just as much to blame as the politicians. He'll hardly have been the only one who thought of career and political advancement over where his real loyalties should have been - the men and women who made up the forces he was privileged to command.

Senior officers from all three services have let their men down over and over again for a long time - political posturing over the other services that have helped no-one bar the Treasury and diamond plated equipment projects that are clearly physically impossible (I'd like an armoured car with the same armour and firepower as a Challenger 2 but which weighs the same as a Land Rover please) while allowing the soldiers who serve under them to turn up to war after war after war with second rate equipment and not even enough of that while crowing about 'punching above our weight' and 'doing more with less' as if being pitied by other nations and being nicknamed 'Borrowers' is something to be proud of.

how about you do the fighting and let them do the talking

Originally Posted by brave-coward

Without wishing to be seen to unduly defend our own; it would seem from the tone of the article and my limited knowledge of the subject (Basra in particular) that the problem is principally political rather than military. I'm not sure how the political restrictions placed on the UK forces in Basra prior to the end of TELIC are the fault of the military head shed. Likewise, the view that at the military level the UK has got Helmand wrong is, I think, questionable; particularly when we see footage of the USMC bulldozing mosques and firing Python equivalents along streets in areas hitherto in UK AOs. I won't be the only one to think that his suggestion that UK forces were bailed out in Helmand because of UK military incompetence is somewhat disingenuous; in fact I'd suggest the requirement came from lack of UK military resource (particularly troop density), hardly the military's fault.

i agree that this was the main cause of the problems we had there but surely the CoC should've had the balls to turn to their political master and publically state that we could not achieve the mission with the resources we had.

Originally Posted by Draft Dodger

how about you do the fighting and let them do the talking

Is that a poor attempt at baiting/ trolling or are you just incredibly thick?

If you've read PJHQ's lessons learned for TELIC, we quite freely admit it's the Military's fault, just as much as the Politicians. Of course, this doesn't fit into the narrative about our "brave boys" in a "world class" Army, so lets just quietly ignore those facts shall we?

Anyway, MoD Civil Servants, what an utter waste of space - they lost us the war in Basra.....

Bit early to write off the Helmand mission but Basra in the latter stages seems to have been a retreat into inner-city bases with no real effort being made to suppress incoming fire for fear of civ cas. That strategy (if you can call it that) is unsustainable, so it is hardly surprising that we retreated to Basra Air Base and let the Iraqis charge in to restore order/civilization. And given that this was happening - ie giving up on the mission - when Bush staked everything on his surge, things look doubly damning.

Helmand is a different kettle of fish, and certainly force density was an issue in the Americans coming in to take over half the province.

That having been said, it took the USMC (with, I have been told, essentially the same force package in/around the town) approximately six months to pacify Sangin - something we had been unable to do for five years.

It would be nice to think that we had broken the back of resistance and the Americans simply mopped up, but they took very heavy cas at the outset. The lack of news and cas now coming out of the town suggest that the much more aggressive tactics used by the USMC - which faced heavy criticism on this forum (as per the above) - may have done the trick.

My personal feeling (from an armchair 8000 miles away) is that the British Army was very good at war, low-intensity and otherwise, throughout the 1950s (Korea, Suez and Malaya) 1960s (Borneo, Aden, Oman) and 1970s (NI and Oman), Of those, Korea was high intenstiy and protracted (three years); Suez was short but sharp; the rest were low-intensity but protracted.

Come the 1980s and 90s, - bar the very short, sharp businesses of Falklands, Gulf I and Sierra Leone - the UK military was involved in protracted but very, very low intensity work in NI, and peacekeeping operations in the Balkans.

These were the proving grounds where the UK's millennial senior officers got their knees dirty, and I sense an inability to rise to the challenges of not one, but two protracted COIN campaigns that - unlike NI - featured continuous high-intensity combat. IOW, the Iraq occupation and Helmand mission were totally outside their frame of reference.

Originally Posted by clownbasher

Is that a poor attempt at baiting/ trolling or are you just incredibly thick?

I think he's making a tongue in cheek reference to the PM's earlier comment. See today's Guardian:
Defence chiefs must be called to account | News | guardian.co.uk

"There are moments when I wake up and read the newspapers and think: 'I tell you what, you do the fighting and I'll do the talking'." This was David Cameron responding to comments from top navy and RAF officers suggesting they could not continue coping with the demands being placed on them.
They were intervening publicly in the running dispute over the defence budget as British jets and ships were daily bombing targets in Libya. Not long before, Cameron had brushed aside concerns expressed privately by the defence chiefs on the wisdom of embarking on the Libya adventure.
His intervention raises the most serious question, far too often avoided because of its delicate constitutional implications, of when and how should the heads of the armed forces confront their political masters.

cont.

Originally Posted by RP578

I think he's making a tongue in cheek reference to the PM's earlier comment. See today's Guardian:
Defence chiefs must be called to account | News | guardian.co.uk

Oh yeah... sorry. That'll be me that's being thick then.