Supplementary written evidence from Sir
Sherard Cowper-Coles KCMG LVO
One of the problems which the war in Afghanistan
has thrown up is that of the management of military machines in
democracies where few if any politicians or civilian officials
have much or any military experience.
Almost by definition, good soldiers are irrepressibly
enthusiastic, unquenchably optimistic, fiercely loyal to their
service and to their own units within that service, and not especially
imaginative. Nor, until relatively recently, did many senior officers
have intellectual pretensions.
The war in Afghanistan has given the British Army
a raison d'être it has lacked for many years, and
new resources on an unprecedented scale. In the eyes of the Army,
Afghanistan has also given our forces the chance to redeem themselves,
in the eyes of the Americans, in the wake of negative perceptions,
whether or not they were justified, of the British Army's performance
in Basra. Not surprisingly, in a profession paid to fight, most
have been enjoying the campaign.
Against that background, the then Chief of the General
Staff, Sir Richard Dannatt, told me in the summer of 2007 that,
if he didn't use in Afghanistan the battle groups then starting
to come free from Iraq, he would lose them in a future defence
review. "It's use them, or lose them", he said. In my
view, the Army's "strategy" in Helmand was driven at
least as much by the level of resources available to the British
Army as by an objective assessment of the needs of a proper counter-insurgency
campaign in the province. Time and again, Ministers were pressed
to send more troops to Helmand, as they became available from
Iraq.
This "supply-side strategy" was also reflected
in the Army's policy of rotating entire brigades through Helmand
every six months. This policy was based on the spurious argument
that the brigades were fighting as brigades, and that the Army
generated its forces through brigades, even though several of
the brigades were specially formed for the Afghan campaign, and
then disbanded on return to the United Kingdom. Similar arguments
were used at the start of the Northern Ireland campaign. But by
the end we would never have dreamt of rotating the General Officer
Commanding (GOC) or the Brigade commanders and their key staff
in Ulster every six months.
The result of this policy in Helmand was to have
brigades re-inventing the wheel every six months. Brigade after
brigade would spend months or years training up for its deployment,
involving lectures from Afghan "experts" such as the
Hon Member for Penrith and the Border and brigade study days of
various kinds. Each brigadier would say that he understood the
"comprehensive approach", and planned to work with DFID
and the FCO, as well as with the Afghan authorities. But each
brigadier would launch one kinetic operation, before returning
with his brigade to Britain after the best six months of his professional
life. And then the whole cycle would start again.
Personally, I would rotate the troops fighting in
the front line more often than every six months, perhaps doing
away with the very expensive and inefficient mid-tour R&R
break. But I would keep the senior staff, and key intelligence
officers and others, in Helmand for longer, while putting them
on new terms which would enable them regularly to see their families,
perhaps in Oman or back in the UK. Interestingly, both the Chief
of the Defence Staff and the Chief of Joint Operations advocated
such an approach, but it was blocked by the Army, and never put
to Ministers, either formally or informally.
In my experience, Ministers were reluctant to question
the military advice put to them, for fear of leaks to the press
suggesting that they weren't supportive enough of the troops.
Thus, I remember the Royal Air Force producing a paper arguing
for Tornado bombers to be sent to Afghanistan, even when NATO's
Joint Statement of Operational Requirements made clear that the
one category of weapons system ISAF did not need more of was ground
attack jets. The original draft paper for Ministers argued that
the RAF aircraft were necessary for the morale of British forces
on the ground—not an argument that carried much weight with
anyone familiar with the average British squaddie's view of the
Royal Air Force, and one which was dropped from later versions
of the paper. When I suggested to a Cabinet Minister that he might
like gently to probe whether it made sense to spend £70 million
just on extra taxiways at Kandahar for the deployment, he remarked
that he couldn't possibly ask the Chief of the Defence Staff about
this, as he didn't know the difference between a Tornado and a
torpedo. The same Minister asked me, after three years of seeing
papers on the deployment of troops to Afghanistan, to remind him
of the difference between a brigade and a platoon.
I am not blaming the military for being optimistic,
or for constantly lobbying for more resources for Helmand. But
I do think some of the advice they put to Ministers was misleadingly
optimistic, and that Ministers' professional advisers, both military
and civilian, sometimes did not spell out for Ministers the costs
and risks of engagement in Helmand. I well remember a brave young
officer in a Footguards regiment asking for a private word with
me on a visit to Helmand. He confided in me that he was very doubtful
about the "strategy" of training up the Afghan police
to secure Helmand after Western forces withdrew. He claimed to
have warned his superiors of the dangers and difficulties in such
an approach. But he said that his advice had been repeatedly rejected
on the grounds that it was too defeatist, and it had therefore
been re-written to put a more positive spin on what was happening.
I also thought that the military blamed Ministers
unfairly for the shortages of equipment in Helmand, when those
Ministers could not possibly have been reasonably expected to
have known the details of logistics needs associated with a particular
deployment. As Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, was particularly
unwise to have allowed the military and the Opposition to criticise
him over helicopter availability—a very technical subject
which requires years of planning. I cannot help remembering an
RAF movements officer in Helmand showing me a pie chart of British
helicopter movements in southern Afghanistan in my first year
there: 27% of the helicopter movements were for moving VIPs around
theatre. And most of those VIPs were senior military tourists
from London!
23 December 2010
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