Examination of witnesses (Questions 1
- 19)
WEDNESDAY 5 JULY 2000
DR CHRISTOPHER
COKER, PROFESSOR
CHRISTOPHER DANDEKER
and PROFESSOR HEW
STRACHAN
Mr Viggers
1. Good morning to you. This is the beginning
of a wide-ranging review that we intend to take up on armed forces
personnel issues. Many of the questions we will be asking and
issues we will be pursuing during this study will, of course,
be intensely practical, but I think it is right we should start
with rather broader issues in which you, our witnesses, are specialists.
May I ask you, please, for the sake of the record, to introduce
yourselves?
(Dr Coker) Christopher Coker, I am a Reader in international
relations at the London School of Economics.
(Professor Strachan) I am Hew Strachan and I am Professor
of Modern History at Glasgow University and Director of the Scottish
Centre for War Studies.
(Professor Dandeker) Good morning, my name is Christopher
Dandeker. I am a Professor of Military Sociology and I am Head
of the Department of War Studies at Kings College, London.
2. Thank you very much. You have each, helpfully,
sent to us a paper, either something which is specifically crafted
for our inquiry or a copy of a paper that you have published.
It is not our practice to publish in our report papers which have
been published elsewhere, but if after our deliberations today
you feel you would like to submit a memorandum to us on your thoughts,
this would be very helpful and would be published in our report
in due course. May I ask a general question? The armed forces
should reflect the society they serve. There must also be an acknowledgement
by society and by the armed forces themselves of the need to be
different. To what extent do you think it is necessary for the
armed forces to be different? To what extent do you think the
ethos has changed in recent years? To what extent do you think
we have drifted away, perhaps, from the idea, recognised in society,
that the armed forces are there to kill and be killed? It is a
very general question. To what extent do you think the military
needs to have a special ethos, and to what extent do you think
it has that special ethos? Professor Strachan, perhaps you would
care to start.
(Professor Strachan) It is an overarching question.
The armed forces clearly need to have an ethos that is distinct
to them. They do have a need to be different. I do not think that
is quite the same as a right to be different, and I think they
have made that distinction clear. I would start, though, from
a somewhat different assumption. I do not think that the assumption
that the armed forces, necessarily, have to reflect society is
the assumption from which you should start. I think there has
to be some element of convergence but the presumption that you
start from there, I think, is one of the causes of the difficulty.
You need to recognise that the professional armed forces which
we have, have made even more of a cult, if that is the right word,
of the need and right to be different than would be the case in,
obviously, conscript armies. I think professional armed forces
willy-nilly will be different. You are talking about a very small
body of men, roughly 200,000 across the three services, which
are going to have distinct differences from the rest of society.
That would be true of almost any other walk of life; they are
not going to be broadly representative of society. That is not
a very constructive start, I suspect, but I think it is important
to be clear of that distinction as a departure point, because
then you can start thinking "How can there be convergences
and ameliorations in what is inherently a tense situation?"
(Dr Coker) I would say this is a very important point
because I do think the distinctions between civilian and military
societies are, in fact, eroding very quickly. I think the balance
has shifted very much in favour of the civilian world. The civilian
world demands that the military conforms to its values or its
norms, and added to that you have a new international environment
of the European Court of Human Rights. You have a different dimension
altogether, so it is not just a question of British social values,
it is also a question of continental European values. Sometimes
they are very similar and sometimes they are quite distinct in
particular areas—the-gays-in-the-miliary issue being a key
point. I think if one sees it in historical terms the balance
has shifted and civil society is now requiring the military to
reflect some of its concerns and some of its norms and behaviour,
and some of its values. How far you go down that road is, I think,
the main point. The debate has opened up in the United States
where, usually, former serving officers and former Secretaries
of the Navy (?) talk about the American military becoming counter-cultural,
a culture that is so distinct from the civilian world that there
is very little linkage between the two. It is very dangerous in
a democracy for the military to try to seal itself off or quarantine
itself off from the values that it feels it represents and civil
society does not—values such as courage, honour, and honour
codes—which some military feel is distinctly absent in the
civilian world but which they embody. We do not want to go down
that debate, but we have to recognise there has been a shift in
the balance of power and the military are being forced to conform
more and more to civil society—however you wish to define
it. Plus the fact, of course, civil society has changed. The covenant
that the British Army adopted a couple of months ago was required
because civilians did not seem to understand the need for sacrifice,
the need for team working; they did not seem to be recruiting
from the same kind of civilian communities as they did in the
past because our communities have changed as well. So these collective
responsibilities and these collective obligations cannot be assumed
to exist out there in the civilian world, because at the end of
the 20th century things are very different from the 1950s and
1960s. These are some of the issues your Committee might want
to investigate a little further.
Dr Lewis
3. Are there any particular reasons why the
armed forces should reflect society any more than any other specialist
group, such as brain surgeons, lawyers or professional boxers?
(Professor Strachan) I take it that is directed at
me, given what I said.
4. Whoever wishes to contribute.
(Professor Strachan) The short answer, given what
I said, is no.
(Professor Dandeker) I would make three observations.
First of all, it is important to think hard about the concept
"reflect or represent society". There is an ambiguity.
Does one mean that the armed services should, so far as is consistent
with their operational effectiveness, reflect the core values
of the society which they serve, or does one say that given the
social and demographic profile of society, the answer is that
they should reflect that? So, insofar as 7 to 8 per cent of the
population come from minority ethnic communities, you would expect
and, indeed, set targets for the armed services to meet that statistical
replication of the wider society. Affirming the first concept
does not necessarily commit you to the second. I think you need
to think very hard about the concept of representation and reflection.
Now, insofar as one suggests that the armed services perhaps should
reflect society—either its core values or its social composition—and
you ask the question: "Why should the armed services be more
aware of this as a problem than, say, brain surgeons, or the academic
community, for that matter?" you could say "Well, there
is something rather special about the armed services which is
not just the unlimited liability of military personnel to sacrifice
themselves, if necessary, for a cause on behalf of their state";
it is because they are the ultimate backbone of the state that
you could say they have a certain responsibility to, as my colleague,
Hew, suggested, to converge insofar as it is possible with the
wider society. That is the first point. The second point, I think,
is that it is also unwise to underestimate the extent to which,
although one can identify enduring military values—if you
like (self-sacrifice being one) and it is important that those
are maintained—it is also important to recognise, taking
a historical view, how ethos has changed. Like any professional
community, ethos does change with the pushes and pulls of society.
I think what is peculiar over the last ten years is that the pace
of change on the armed services has increased. It is not that
change is new, it is the pace of change that is fundamental, and
it can be quite bewildering—and not just for the British
armed services but for the services of most of the western world.
The third point I would make is that when you start thinking about
the need to be different from wider society, I think the concept
of "need" is a very important as opposed to "right".
Perhaps we can return to that. The armed services went through
a period of talking about the "right to be different",
which I thought in a democracy was a rather unwise thing to do.
I think the terminology is now more appropriately defined as the
"need" to be different. That need is converted into
a right by the civilian political authority. I think when you
start thinking about the relationship between the armed services
and society in terms of the armed services needing to be different
from society and thinking of it as a, if you like, zero-sum relationship
then, I think that is unwise. That view has in it a built-in sort
of conservative assumption. When you look very hard at the question
there are some changes in society to which it is in the interests
of the military to conform. There are some changes in society
which are not helpful to its ethos and some which are positively
unhelpful to the ethos. However, not every social change should
necessarily be seen as undermining the ethos of the armed services.
If I can make a point here, insofar as the younger generation
become more questioning, become more self-reliant, become more
effective in using new technologies, that is something which the
armed services will embrace. Along with that may come a more questioning
view of hierarchy and "why should we be doing this";
which may undermine elements of traditional military ethos, but
may actually be used to transform the military ethos in a way
which helps the armed services in terms of the issues they face
in the 21st century. Those would be my three introductory points.
Mr Gapes
5. Can I take up your point about the need to
be different. Is there not a counter-argument that says that the
armed services, if they are to be effective in terms of having
the respect of society, have to have a need to change? In a sense,
in a society which is meritocratic and in a society where people
no longer accept deferential, hierarchical, traditional structures,
it would be totally unacceptable if the officer class came in
entirely from certain public schools, if people from working-class
backgrounds were not accepted if they got promotion, if a society
where, as you said, 7 or 8 per cent are ethnic minorities but
even today we only have a target of 1.4 per cent for the different
services for ethnic minority recruiting—which is not being
achieved—is there not, in fact, the need to change in order
to become more reflective of society, rather than the need to
be different to argue for arguments which are hierarchical and
based upon old-style developments of the 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s?
(Professor Dandeker) I go back to my third point,
which is that I do not think it is either/or. That is not a fudge.
I think the answer to this question is that on some aspects of
civil-military relations the social changes which one observes
in civilian society are ones which the military can feel enthusiastic
about, and there are some changes in that society which do pose
problems for it. For example, if you look at the more questioning,
individualistic society in which we live, that has benefits and,
also, problems. It poses problems for the armed services, insofar
as the British Army needs young, intelligent, initiative-using
people in very dangerous, difficult, complex circumstances under
the scrutiny of the media. You need these sorts of intelligent,
initiative-seeking people. On the other hand, insofar as an individualistic
society leads to a questioning of the necessary values of placing
one's own personal survival second to that of the service and
of the cause, then there is a tension there. I think the real
question is the armed services need to identify very clearly why
they need to be different in certain areas, and explain to the
wider society that this is not some sort of persistence of tradition
or throwback, it is as an operational rationale for what they
do. Then society and the services have to build a mutual understanding
and respect of that necessary need to be different.
(Professor Strachan) Can I make two comments on that?
One is that if you make an assumption that, let us say, 6 to 7
per cent of the UK population comes from different ethnic groups
and the armed forces should reflect that, you assume a willingness
on the part of those ethnic minorities to serve—just as
if you say there should be more people from certain educational
backgrounds, you assume a willingness on the part of those people.
The question is do you change the attitudes of those who wish
to serve or do you change the position of the armed services in
order to accommodate what those who wish to serve would see to
be a desirable career?
6. You could do both.
(Professor Strachan) There might, indeed, need to
be convergence, I entirely accept that. However, that then leads
on to the question of the operational rationale, which Christopher
has just referred to. We are talking about armed services here
in a vacuum. I am not saying that is necessarily an inappropriate
way to proceed, but it does depend, crucially, on what you think
your armed services are going to do, because you structure your
armed services accordingly. You can make various assumptions about
close convergence between an army and society. If you are talking
about a massive conscript army configured for major war in Europe
over a long period of time you are going to have a rapid turnover
of men. That would create all sorts of different requirements
in the relationship between armed forces and a society than if
you are talking about what is, essentially, a peace-keeping/peace-force
combination. Even if the armed services deny that peace-keeping
is their sole rationale, is increasingly becoming their major
rationale. If you would see that as the prime requirement and
if those forces are being deployed well away from their home base,
or if they are out of public sight and not evident on the streets
(even if they are allowed to wear uniforms in public now, in a
way that they were not before the Northern Ireland peace process
got under way) if you have all these conditions, then you are
creating different expectations and are likely to recruit and
attract from different sectors of society.
(Dr Coker) Can I just make one point? I think when
we are talking about convergence of civilian and military, we
are not suggesting—or I am not suggesting—that the
military become more like civilians but that they start thinking
like civilians. That has been a major change. We have moved from
the kind of vocational service to a much more contractual understanding
of what the military profession is. It is a job which offers opportunities.
People go into the military because they want a career. They do
not go into the service society, to the same extent as they did
before, to serve their country or to serve some collective entity.
If you look at the opinion polls carried out amongst serving soldiers
on the continent you will find serving any collective entity comes
right down the list. They are in it because it is a career; it
is a career they have chosen and it is a career they want to do
well in. There are two reasons why the military are thinking more
like civilians, I think. First, we have had some form of civilianisation
of the military in the past 15 years in terms of productivity,
performance, cutting costs, thinking more in terms of finance
and less, perhaps, in terms of some form of collective service.
That has been there since, in fact, the late 1970s but it has
become much more marked in the last 15 years—particularly
in the United States and Britain. These are the two countries
that are distinguished from other NATO powers in this respect.
The second thing is that the military service is much less covenant
and much more contractual. Covenant, as people frequently say,
is open-ended, it is not enforced by penalties; you give of yourself
as much as you wish to give of yourself. Contracts are very different.
They are enforced by penalties, there are penalty clauses if you
break the contract, but they also stipulate very clearly what
you are required to do for the money that you are getting paid.
I do not think the military have reached the stage in which they
have, perhaps, become as contractual as my own profession has,
or as perhaps the medical profession is becoming at the moment
(with the BMA debate last week), but we are going in this direction.
That is something that civilian society is asking—indeed
demanding—because they feel that that is the direction in
which you get more value for money. As the money is less and less
there, as our defence budgets get cut every year, you have to
think of value for money. That is thinking like a civilian.
Dr Lewis
7. Dr Coker, you gave us your paper in advance
and one very interesting paragraph relates to this question of
what people expect to do once they are in the armed forces. It
is certainly the case that most people in society at large do
not expect to have to kill people as part of their job and put
their lives on the line. On page 16 of your paper you say that
according to a Harvard study carried out in the mid-1990s only
3 per cent of US army women believe that they should serve in
combat on the same terms as men and that, given the opportunity,
only 11 per cent of enlisted women and 14 per cent of female officers
would volunteer for combat, and 52 per cent—or more than
half of all army women—would probably or definitely leave
the service if forced into combat positions. Is this not eloquent
testimony of the dangers of trying to construct armed forces as
a mirror of society?
(Dr Coker) It also, probably, shows the dangers of
opinion polls.
8. You put it in the paper.
(Dr Coker) Absolutely. Academics have no particular
responsibility except to their own reputation rather than to that
of others. I would accept that is what is happening. This, of
course, is about the American armed forces, but if you ask women
soldiers why they join, they join because of social security benefits,
they join because of education benefits. If you look at the married
profile of women soldiers they tend to marry nine years earlier
than civilian women do, precisely because they have a welfare
net inside. The US army is called the last aspect of the great
society programme; it is still there. The rest of the great society
programme was dismantled in the 1980s and early 1990s, but the
great society is alive and well in the US military. If you look
at what you get for being a soldier, if you are a woman you get
a very good package indeed, so it is a smart career move. Does
this attract the kind of people you want? Does the military socialise
the kind of people you do not want, but after they have been in
uniform for four or five years they are starting to think like
everyone else, so you have this collective sense of duty and responsibility,
etc? So that is an open question, but it is a point, I think,
Professor Dandeker has made. I lifted the statistic out of a book
to which he contributed, so he probably has some more incisive
comments than I have.
Mr Viggers: We have tried to structure
our questions, and we are going to come back to that point quite
soon.
Laura Moffatt
9. I was listening very carefully about trying
to establish a link between the armed forces and civilian life.
It seems to me that what is crucial is not only that you have
people in the armed forces who are able to do what we ask of them
but that we also return them to society in, presumably, a reasonably
well-rounded way, and not people who then become completely separate
from the society from which they have been plucked and then taken
to the armed forces. Could you say a few words about that? Is
there a responsibility, looking at it through that end of the
telescope?
(Professor Dandeker) I think you have identified a
crucial question, and I would preface it with a more general response,
which is that to their credit, I think, the armed services over
the last year have begun to take what I would call a strategic
approach to personnel issues, of which the one you mention is
one. That is to say, when you look at the personnel problems of
the armed services—recruit, retain, re-settle with the appropriate
skills, and not just labour market but social skills, that will
connect them back into society and a decent way of life—these
things are inter-related. It is rather like someone once said
at a conference: all of those issues are like a rather loose bag;
if you press one bit of the bag something else happens to another
dimension. So these things are inter-related very much. The one
you have referred to, I think, is quite crucial because it has
an impact on recruitment as well as public perceptions of the
armed services. If you do not return military personnel to society
in a way which they feel is satisfactory, there will be a negative
impact on recruitment. One of the worst negative effects on recruitment
is someone going back to the "happy hunting grounds"
to say "dreadful time". I think the armed services are
acutely aware of this. This is reinforced by the fact that their
recruitment pattern is not random, there are "happy hunting
grounds"; there are certain regions which, for many years,
have been strong recruitment areas, and one of the worst things
that can happen to a poor recruiter is to have negative feedback
from those who have left the armed services. The second point
(and we need to know more about this, so this is an informed guess
on my part), is that I would suspect that, given we live in a
society where both military and civilian people have greater aspirations
for themselves and their children—and I think that is going
to continue—the armed services do not so much have a problem
now but they are aware of the potential problem. Not so long ago
it was fairly satisfactory for the armed services to say "Join
us and you will have a reasonable opportunity when you leave.
Enjoy your military service, we will give you experience, we will
also give you qualifications which will assist you in your later
life in civilian society." I think it is now becoming, I
would say, a little bit more difficult, in that the armed services
are going to have to increasingly tell their potential recruits
"Join us and not only will you be all right when you leave
but you will, hopefully, with the education and the experience
that we provide, be in a position to go back into society in a
better position than you would have been in had you not joined
us". That is what I would call the opportunity cost issue.
I would suggest this is not just a matter of education and training
when you are in the service, it is the resettlement process, which
a lot of work goes into, and, I think, the follow-up—that
is to say, not "goodbye, I hope you enjoy your civilian career"
but following up veterans to see that they are all right, to see
what they feel and, maybe, looking at them as potential explainers
to civilian society of the need to be different, and thus to assist
in the recruitment process. I would have thought ex-military personnel
are a great asset to the armed services and, indeed, a great asset
to some of the problems we were talking about when we first started
this session. So I think you put your finger on a very crucial
problem.
(Professor Strachan) I would just endorse very strongly
that last point. There seems to be a crucial difference, which
is not always apparent, between resettlement—which the services
tackle very thoroughly and very extensively—and the care
of veterans and attention to veterans where, on the whole, many
do feel neglected and pushed out of the institutions they were
made to feel part of. Can I also make a second point? You are
treating the armed services as though these are all long-service
soldiers or sailors or airmen. In fact, we are looking at what
is essentially a two-structure service where some people will
be in for a comparatively short period of time—three or
four years—and some will be in for 22 years, and you do
not necessarily need the same strategies, in personnel terms,
for both groups. We tend to talk about them as though they are
a homogenous group. One of the things that the SDR supporting
papers said very clearly was that there was a demand for more
service after 22 years in the services. One of the things that
comes through very strongly in the schemes that are designed to
help resettlement and the schemes that are designed to give you
civilian qualifications is that you are sending a clear signal
"Actually, this is only half a career, it is not a full career,
it is not a lifetime's career". At the same time, of course,
you are making a demand, as Christopher Dandeker has said, which
is, in many ways, a demand on your life. So there is a paradox
here. I think there does need to be greater recognition, whatever
the armed services do, of the need to extend at least some people's
careers into a full career, because they still have much to give.
They may not be up to running around an assault course and their
skills may have changed, but, also, the demands of the service
change. There are many different jobs in the three services and
many careers—if for example you become an academic or a
doctor—do last for life.
10. That is interesting and takes me very much
on to my next point, because we have accepted, I believe, that
we ask individuals to support other individuals to the greater
good. Much of that is about saying to them when they are coming
into the armed forces "You are coming into a professional
organisation. You will get something out of this". It is
something you see in all the ads, it is the whole thing that is
being peddled about becoming somebody in the armed forces. "You
will become a professional and you will have something to shout
about." Has the armed forces got anything to learn from any
other professions? Professor Coker, you mentioned how in the teaching
and medical professions they are very contract minded. Have the
armed forces got anything to learn from that?
(Dr Coker) The first point I would make is that as
military service ceases to be as vocational as it was in the past—of
course, a vocation demands a lifetime's commitment or, at least,
until retirement age—we will have people now who go into
the military expecting to have another job, and, possibly, expecting
to have three jobs in their lifetime. As I tell my civilian students
"You will probably be doing two different things in the course
of your life." I was the last generation, or one of the last
generations, that expected to do the same job until I retire.
This is going to, obviously, affect the way people see military
service and what it is they think will be expected of them during
miliary service. That is important. You meet quite a lot of people
who, in fact, join specifically to get a skill and then leave.
In a sense, they are using the military as a launch pad into the
civilian world and, clearly, an excellent example of that is the
US military and black soldiers who now have the largest number
of middle management jobs in the United States. It has been a
remarkably good integrative process; it has given an education
and it has set them up for life. This does have, and will have,
enormous repercussions in what soldiers expect to find and expect
to be asked during their military service. If you are already
thinking of civilian life for your late 30s, obviously you will
not be terribly happy to do certain things that might not allow
you to have that civilian life—ie, get killed, essentially.
The second thing is in relation to technological skills. As the
military and civilian world begin to look more like each other
because of the technological skills required in the new technological
era of warfare, you might get a two-tier military, which, in one
sense, is interested in the skill sector but not terribly interested
in what one might call "grunts" who are there, largely,
to patrol streets and do what is required of them but do not have
the kind of long-term skills which the military will wish to retain.
It is the retention problem which is the major crisis in the British
armed forces at the moment. The retention crisis is mostly at
the officer level, but, also, I think, you are going to see this
further down. So it is a question of how integrated a force you
have or whether you have a two-tier system. This is something
the military will be aghast at—the concept of the two-tier
army—but it may well come at some point in the future.
Mr Gapes
11. Professor Dandeker talked about the pace
of change increasing over the last ten years. Clearly, this is
not just related to post-Cold War development, it is also related
to the increasing use of our armed forces in peace enforcement
or peacekeeping operations—Bosnia, Kosovo, Sierra Leone,
wherever—and deployment away from traditional NATO roles.
Do you foresee a time when individuals, as a result of these changes,
no longer are prepared to accept the idea—as Dr Coker implied—of
being killed or putting their lives at risk? In a sense, you will
have a group of people who want the action, who are prepared to
go into these kinds of deployments in a global peacekeeping role
and others who want the comfort of staying at home and doing the
strategic planning, or the targeting or the American air force-type
operation where you do not get any casualties?
(Professor Dandeker) I stand by the pace of change.
I think it is a complex process, it is rooted in simultaneity
of change in different contexts: new strategic challenges since
the early part of the 1990s, social change, to which we have referred,
and legal change—not least as a consequence of our relationship
with the rest of Europe. I would have thought, interestingly,
the more the armed services operate not simply jointly but with
other countries—other allies or ad hoc coalitions -those
in charge of personnel issues have to be aware that our personnel
are serving with others from different traditions, and sometimes
different legal frameworks, too. So that complicates the pace
of change. On your point about peace operations being deployed
away from high-intensity, major war in Europe to the kind of operations
we saw in Sierra Leone, and so on, I am not sure about the consequence
of that, in terms of soldiers' (let us just take soldiers) self-perceptions
and definitions of risk on what the meaning of these operations
are to them. To start with, we do not know enough about what they
think, at least I do not, but from a historical point of view
you could say—and I defer to my historical colleague—in
some respects, what the British Army, particularly, is now doing,
post-Cold War, is not actually that unusual. If you look at the
longer term and look at imperial history: operations far away,
relatively small packets of force, complicated environment, dealing
with issues on the fringe between war and peace, having to use
your initiative in rather difficult circumstances: when you latch
all that on to 30-odd years or more of the experience of Northern
Ireland, you could argue there are more continuities than discontinuities
in terms of British military culture. This raises the question
which, I think, is an interesting one to ask: is it the case that
the continuities are stronger, let us say, for the British Army
or even for the French, compared with the more discontinuous experience
of some other European partners, for example Germany or elsewhere?
That is an interesting question.
(Professor Strachan) I would endorse entirely that
idea of continuity, and that is why, in many ways, I think some
of the questions that we are asking ourselves about the relationship
between the armed forces and society are, actually, quite familiar
ones. I do not think the current concern about recruiting and
retention is a particularly new one. The current concern about
whether the armed forces should reflect society or be different
from it is, also, not a new one. Late Victorian Britain was rather
worried that if the armed forces did not reflect society as a
whole then that was a sign of decadence; the beginnings of the
end of the Roman Empire were traced to the period when Roman citizens
no longer saw themselves as having a patriotic obligation to serve
but got other people to fight for them. That is a question you
want to ask yourselves: is it important that other people do the
fighting for you? If you take Christopher's point about the colonial
past, what is interesting is if you actually look to see what
happened to the armed forces—and particularly the British
Army, as opposed to the Navy. Much of the fighting was actually
done by local forces supplemented by a regular battalion. So that
the Punjab Frontier Force, or African forces, or whatever, were
dealing with the crisis on the spot. Those people were totally
disaggregated from civilian society. It did not undermine the
validity of what they were doing or the effectiveness with which
they did it. Obviously, in pursuing the argument about continuity,
you are in danger of neglecting the crucial questions, which,
as we have heard concern the use of the buzz word "technology"
and what exactly that means, and the pace of change, and what
exactly that means. There is a two-tier pressure, it seems to
me, developing in relation to how we see the future of warfare.
One tier of pressure is caught up in that whole bundle of ideas
associated with the revolution in military affairs, and whether
we are talking about high-tech solutions and IT solutions to the
fighting of war—which implies, actually, a lowering of all
sorts of standards in relation to things like physical fitness
and physical capability, but, of course, a heightening of standards
in relation to certain skills—or a change of standards in
relation to certain skills. Or are we talking about continuity?
A lot of what is going on in terms of the very effective work
the British armed forces are doing throughout the world is continuity.
A lot of this business of being on the streets is continuity.
This is not high-tech stuff at all. That is an argument for staying
much where you are. Together continuity and change constitute
a twin pressure. If we want to go down the RMA route, we are going
to have to think pretty hard about it in relation to the costs.
There is not much sign that the wherewithal is there to do it,
but that is what our primary ally is doing and is expecting its
allies to do.
(Dr Coker) I would make two observations. I would
stress that while historical continuities are extremely important
there are certain discontinuities or differences. One difference
is a technological one, and it is a medical one. We live in a
society in which our bodies are more important to us than they
have been for a very long time, in which we contemplate longevity
and a third of our life after retirement. It is sometimes called
"health fascism", but whether we like it or not we are
encouraged to conserve our lives as much as we can. We find this
as much in the British Army as anywhere else. A quarter of all
the related personnel in the Gulf War were medics or medical related,
to keep the other three-quarters alive and fit. I suspect if you
are recruiting from today's generation of people they will have
a very different attitude towards "life" than they might
have done in the past. We do not talk about principles, we talk
about biological factors, and biological factors are to have a
quality of life and a risk-free life, and a life in which, essentially,
we are the centre of our own universe. This, of course, is not
necessarily to deprecate that at all; there are some good things
that flow from that but there are also some adverse things that
flow from it. The second is risks. We do not take risks any more.
The way we fight wars is to avoid risks. We live in risk-aversive
societies. What sociologists call risk societies, the calculus
of risk, is the basis on which we elect our politicians. "Who
do we trust best to manage the system that we have; to manage
the economy; to manage social life? What risks do we incur in
making the wrong political choices? What risks do we incur by
not insuring ourselves against certain things?" This element
of not taking too many risks is something which has definitely
penetrated American military life, and, I suspect, where America
leads we often follow, and this could well be one of the instances.
I know British officers like to say that we are less risk-averse
than most of our other NATO allies. This may be true today but
I am not sure it is going to be true for very much longer. I am
not sure how really true it is now, either. Sir Charles Guthrie
said, the other day "We only do what the market will allow".
What the market wants is zero-tolerance of casualties; it wants
fewer wounded soldiers coming back, it wants, essentially, no
casualties at all if you can get away with it, and that is bound
to permeate, I think, the way that you look at your career if
you are a soldier.
12. Is the reason that we have got rid of conscription
so long ago, whereas many other countries have still kept it,
in fact, that we are less risk-averse? In a sense, other countries
with conscription are less willing, or more reluctant, to get
involved in conflicts. It was an issue, for example, with the
French in the Gulf and it has been a problem with Britain and
France, in many senses, acting as mercenaries when the Germans
were refusing to have people deployed because they did not want
any casualties at all, as well as for their historic reasons.
Is there a reasoning behind that? In a sense, is the move away
from conscription by other countries welcome? That they may be
more willing to take the burden internationally that we disproportionately
take?
(Dr Coker) I am sure Hew Strachan will talk about
the historical points. The reason we are abandoning conscription
is to ensure that we have soldiers that can actually be used as
opposed to a huge group that cannot be sent anywhere. As we are
in the collective security business now, rather than, narrowly,
the collective defence business, we have to do things and send
forces to extraordinary, exotic parts of the world which we would
not, necessarily, have dreamed of sending them a few years ago.
We do need professional forces, and that is something the French
have understood. There is a big debate in Germany because I am
not sure the Germans are willing to make this jump. They say they
are but so far their politicians seem reluctant to face the consequences.
Some countries will keep conscription, certainly, because they
think it is character-forming. The Norwegian Government will not
get rid of conscription for that reason; you should get your young
men to do a couple of years or 18 months' in uniform. The German
Government will not because where do all the male nurses and hospitals
come from? They come from the large number of people who do not
wish to do military service, and if you had to pay for all these
nurses then you would have to raise taxes, etc. So people keep
conscription for many reasons which have very little to do with
war and, I suspect, have kept conscription for 20 years or so
for precisely those reasons.
Mr Viggers
13. We are on the edge of a very important subject,
which is risk and risk aversion. I would like to pursue that line,
but, in fact, Dr Coker has to leave at 11.30. Is that so?
(Dr Coker) I am afraid so.
14. Therefore, if I may, we will move on to
the broad subject of equal opportunities.
Mr Brazier
15. I must say I am aching to come back to this,
but before Dr Coker leaves us we must come on to equal opportunities,
which we touched on for a moment earlier. Let me put the question
to you bluntly, Dr Coker, because you were unusually restrained
in your answer to my colleague earlier. What differences do you
think greater opportunities for women have made in the effectiveness
and ethos of the armed forces? Feel free to take American parallels
where, obviously, it has gone very much further than it has in
Britain at the moment.
(Dr Coker) This is an interesting but a rather emotive
subject, as to whether you think the presence of women is, in
a sense, a reflection of our lack of seriousness about war or
whether you think the presence of women shows a re-valuation of
soldiering and attempts, in the early 21st century, to try and
change the ethos and nature of the military to see them in a very
different light. I take the view that the latter is probably what
is happening, but I do understand the reservations of many people
who feel the presence of women is a negative factor. In my paper
I show the instances, based on reports, of sexual harassment in
the military. It has not been a very great social success, it
has to be said. The number of social tensions that have been produced
as a result of the presence of women shows that many men are unhappy
that they are there and that they are in uniform. That is something
that officers are going to have to address in the future, if it
is to be as successful as, shall we say, the integration of African
Americans was in the US forces from the 1960s and onwards. I think
we are revaluing the nature of the soldier. I think civil society
wants the military to do things that they would not have done
a few years ago. It wants them to do, for example, humanitarian
wars. That is a tricky subject—whether a war can be humane—but
they want to see that. Our PR people from the Ministry of Defence
promote this face of the warrior. I quoted that great line of
Ian Long, the first Tornado pilot who came back from the Gulf
War after the first flight mission: "The caring face of the
1990s soldier". Society wants the military to have a caring
face, they want the military to be engaged in peace-keeping operations
and peace-support operations—if you were in the Danish Army
you would be building kindergartens and schools in Kosovo, etc—they
want a social role for the military in the reconstruction of civil
societies, those civil societies devastated by war as they were
in Kosovo. That makes a soldier a jack-of-all-trades. I will not
finish that, but you might think that it is those very missions
which are demoralising a lot of people in the military and dissuading
people from entering it; forcing them out earlier than might otherwise
be the case because they do not think this is soldiering. This
is not the reason why they joined the military. So we are at the
very beginning of this debate; it has only just started in the
last few years and it is, I think, a key issue facing all our
militaries in the west.
16. Before we go down the line, can I ask one
supplementary point directly on that? One thing you did not mention
in that list is the question of physical standards. I think you
used the word "grunt" earlier, but one was very much
reared on the principle—rightly or wrongly—that toughness
was fundamental and that the person who came last had to do the
press-ups. I am not saying it is impossible to conceive of circumstances—I
understand that in the Russian Army there was a bit of an ethos
like that in the 1940s, but one finds it quite difficult in terms
of 21st century Western culture to see that adapting to a two-sex
environment. Do you think the physical side is an important dimension?
(Dr Coker) I think it is a dimension. How important
it is has a lot to do with the size of your armed forces. You
should always remember that the reason why women were recruited
into the US military in the early 1970s was because not enough
men were volunteering for the all-volunteer force, as it became,
in 1972. So if men are not coming forward then the other human
resource you have in society is the one you have to tap into and
use, but in doing that, of course, you are introducing a factor
that we have not seen in war before. Does this mean the de-gendering
of war? I do not think it does, and I think your question about
stamina is, really, addressing that issue. We are not de-gendering
war, we are adding a new dimension to it. It is very early days.
We know that in the early 1980s, for example, with middle management
employees in industry, the emphasis was on recruiting women, who
were considered to have the skills that made them better middle
managers than many men. This is, I think, the only time you can
find a social experiment of this kind taking place in another
sector—the industrial sector. Unfortunately, a lot of those
middle managers have been the first to be laid off at the end
of the 1990s and the beginning of the 21st century. I think you
should look at it as adding another dimension to the military,
and tapping into 50 per cent of the population that has not, traditionally,
been asked to do anything in combat-related roles. Of course,
they have been involved in war efforts but not combat-related
roles. If we look at the potential of that dimension, we might
be a little less eager to look at the negative sides in terms
of physical stamina, or whatever. I am not going to suggest that
in the virtual reality world of modern warfare physical stamina
is not important. One hears that argument again and again. Muscle
is important, endurance is important. Physical stamina is more
than being able to carry a pack on your back, it is being able
to be out 18 hours a day on the streets for 4 or 5 days a week
in a place like Kosovo. That requires an enormous amount of physical
stamina, emotional stamina and mental stamina. I am more interested
in the potential that women in the armed forces serve and the
revaluation of military service that our society seems to be requiring.
However, I am not necessarily coming here today to say that it
is going to be a successful experiment. The jury is out on that.
(Professor Strachan) I would say that it is important
to distinguish between equal opportunities and equal rights. I
think one of the problems in the American armed forces has been
the determination of equal rights rather than equal opportunities.
This is exactly where the physical issue comes in. You do not
have to make a distinction on the grounds of gender if somebody
is not physically capable of doing the job that you have in mind
for them. Although they might have the opportunity to do it, they
are not going to get that opportunity because they are not capable
of doing it. So I think you do need to make that distinction.
I would go on, of course, to point out that the armed services
encompass a very wide range of jobs. Therefore, just because there
is not an opportunity to do one particular job in the armed services
does not mean there is not an opportunity to do another sort of
job. What is important here, in terms of how these jobs are perceived,
is that towards the top of the service the respective service
boards—and I think there is change here—are not dominated
by a particular group of skill specialisms. If you are going to
create equal opportunities then it has to be across all services.
If I can just pick up, very quickly, the point that Christopher
made about the caring face of soldiers—something I entirely
agree with—we have this paradox whereby soldiers or sailors
or airmen are meant to appear as everything other than what they
really are; they are not portrayed as warriors. But you are not
going to recruit people to the armed services who wish to be social
workers, nurses, or whatever else. You are going to recruit people,
who wish primarily, to be soldiers, sailors and airmen. So the
image that society wants is somewhat different from the image
that your potential recruit might want. Your potential recruit
is actually going to be attracted by the more macho features of
the service, and you need to accept that. This is one of the things,
for example—to go back to something that was raised earlier
in relation to conscription—that the Germans have had great
difficulty with: if you move away from conscription to a professionally
recruited army then you are in danger, of course, of becoming
victims—as the Germans would see it—of neo-fascism.
The argument is that this is tied up with the macho culture, and
that there is, therefore, a danger in moving away from armed forces
that are configured to reflect civil society as a whole.
Mr Viggers
17. Could I just jump in on a rather different
point. We have been mercifully fortunate in Kosovo, with virtually
no casualties, in the Gulf, with very few casualties, in the Falklands,
where there were casualties but we were anaesthetized from them
by the absence of television that was not able to show the numbers.
Brigadier Cordingley said during the Gulf War that when the action
started he anticipated 10 per cent casualties a day. How would
that have played, particularly with women in the armed forces,
in the armed forces and in the public?
(Dr Coker) It would not have played very well with
women soldiers in the United States. In fact, Congress was getting
ready to pass legislation forcibly bringing back all mothers from
the Gulf area. The Gulf War came to an end before that could be
implemented. Society, too, has certain expectations of what you
can ask woman to do and what you cannot in combat and if you are
talking of combat shyness, society is very shy that women should
get killed in war, there is no doubt about that, particularly
mothers. It is not just a military problem, it is a social problem.
Civil society is divided on this issue and has taken a very paradoxical
stand. If you have women in the military you must allow them to
combat. If they want to do that you should not forcibly repatriate
them home the minute their lives seem to be in danger. That is
the point I would make to that. You asked a question of the media.
I think we are moving away from an age in which legality is very
important to an age in which legitimacy is very important. That
is what the media does. The media is not terribly interested in
whether something is legal, they are interested in whether a war
is legitimate or not. The images that they show night after night
on their screens determine, as far as the public is concerned,
the legitimacy issue and that is what happened in Kosovo. The
public considered whatever the legal requirements might be, whether
the United Nations did or did not give us an mandate, whether
we were on sub-contract or whether we were doing this without
full legal authority—and arguably we were doing it without
full legal authority, which is still a much disputed question—as
long as it is legitimate that is all that counts. That is why
the media can be an immensely powerful instrument if played well.
The problem is that the media is now becoming globalised. If you
look, for example, at the BBC World Service and Internet service
you will find that they no longer see themselves necessarily as
a national broadcasting company. They cannot afford to be a national
broadcasting company. Their money comes from having an international
audience. At that point they are being asked to represent legitimacy
in a somewhat different light, not just what the British public
or Europe finds legitimate but what perhaps Asia might find legitimate
and that is a completely new factor that is to be added into this
long set of equations because we are evolving this media relationship.
Finally, I think media representation is going to be much less
important in terms of legitimising war and therefore allowing
our soldiers to fight when there are citizen subscribers of the
Internet who will be tapping into their own wide range of national
and international media sources and who will be coming to conclusions
themselves. That happened in the Gulf War where some American
citizens were able to challenge some of the information that was
being provided by getting satellite access to different pictures
which gave a rather different interpretation of events. The citizen
subscriber now is going to be a very very important factor. Of
course only part of that 10 per cent of the informed public will
be interested enough to wish to know more about the war, but an
interactive public is going to want to discuss strategy, tactics
responsibility, success or lack of it while the war is going on
and will expect generals to be accountable while the war is going
on on a fairly regular basis. Not just accountable to politicians
any longer but also accountable to citizen subscribers. That is
a completely new dimension and if Internet takes off, as we are
told it will, this is something that all of us, politicians and
the military, are going to have to deal with—inter-active
citizenry interested in how and why wars are prosecuted. Citizens
in the past have always done this ex post facto. They have
been critical of generals after the fact; now they may be critical
during the fact as well.
Mr Brazier
18. I had a point I was going to make later
on under another heading but I would very much like to pick up
on Mr Coker's point. I was reading the other day Michael Howard's
very punchy summary of the Thoughts of Basil Liddell-Hart
and he puts the thesis forward that the greatest flowering leadership
ever was in the American Civil War. He asked why were the generals
so much more effective at exploiting the new technology of the
railway and telegraph and so on, compared to the British and German
high commands in the First World War where they not only failed
to exploit the wireless and manpower and so on but even the previous
generation's technology as well, nearly as effectively as the
Americans had, and his answer rather seemed to me to tie into
what you said just now but from a quite different angle. Almost
every successful general in the American Civil War spent time
in the civilian world either as part of a civilian career, many
of them with railway companies or as engineers whereas every single
senior commander in the British and German high commands had never
done anything but professional soldiering. If you put your last
answer on top of that in terms of the civilian community being
night after night actively involved on their television screens,
it does seem to me the fact that we have not come on at all from
the First World War and all our senior commanders are still people
who have never done anything and never had any real experience
outside it, and with the speed of change of technology and the
media growth you have mentioned, that we have a rather frightening
cocktail there.
(Dr Coker) We have a frightening cocktail because
we are not quite sure what the end result is going to be. It is
the unpredictability factor which is frightening, but on the other
hand it may throw up opportunities/potentials that we have not
been able to tap into in the past. I am, thinking in terms of
human resources and making more of our soldiers, requiring more
from them mentally not just physically, giving them a greater
range of things to do as soldier, making the career of the soldier
more interesting than it might have been in the past. You are
right, the question you have asked me is really for you but the
point I would make is—I have lost the thread of my argument
but this is a process that we are looking at and it is something
that takes us in different directions which is very emotional
as well because we like trusting to our instincts and our first
principles and our basic ideas of what war is about. You may well
be right. I believe that we are at this turning point. We talk
about soldier scholars, we talk about soldier statesman and we
talk about soldiering, every aspect of it except generalship.
That may be fine if we are planning to fight societies like us,
but since we are told that societies like us do not fight each
other, they fight societies that are fundamentally different from
us, that is something that is going to be proved on the battle
field and I think your analogy of the American Civil War is quite
an interesting one because the next war which will not be a Kosovo
or Gulf style war but a much messier affair which is going to
really test some of these issues that we have been raising this
morning. On that note I have to leave which is perhaps the best
risk aversion strategy!
Mr Cann
19. Could I ask you one question before you
go on the issue of pregnancy of service women and the fact that
the Army and Navy seem to be paying out for loss of career prospects
for people leaving the service who are pregnant. Apart from rape,
which is of course a totally different thing, there is no need
for anyone to get pregnant any more so why should we be paying
out of the public purse?
(Dr Coker) I do not think we should.
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