The Top Brass (retd) Brexit Letter

On 24 February the Daily Telegraph published a letter from 12 retired very senior military officers addressing the security aspect of Brexit (as the more dramatic possible outcome of the June referendum on the UK’s leaving the European Union is known). Key extracts:

As former military officers, we think that it is time to consider the broader strategic issues. Between us we have led the Royal Navy, Army, and Royal Air Force, or held other senior positions in the military. … we are particularly concerned with one central question: will Britain be safer inside the EU or outside it? 

… Britain’s role in the EU strengthens the security we enjoy as part of Nato, adds to our capability and flexibility when it comes to defence co-operation and allows us to project greater power internationally. In a dangerous world it helps us to safeguard our people, our prosperity and our way of life. We therefore believe strongly that it is in our national interest to remain an EU member.

Originally the letter had 13 signatories. After its publication, various newspapers, for example the Guardian, explained that the letter had originated from Number 10. It was also revealed that Downing Street had had to apologise to one general for adding his name without his consent.

The word “military” tends to be misunderstood as referring solely to the Army, but correctly it is applicable (as in the letter above) to all three services. It is interesting, therefore, to consider the breakdown of the signatories by service (for the ranks see the note below):

The table raises two points. Firstly, I pointed out here five years ago that “One asset which British defence seems to possess in abundance is a large cohort of senior officers of all three services, serving and retired, …”. How big a cohort might that be? Well, in service currently there are about 100 men (mostly) of rank known as “three star” and above. Assuming that on average these people are in post for about three years, then retire at 60 and die at 80, it follows that for each one now working (and there were rather more than 100 a decade or two ago), there are six or seven predecessors enjoying their retirement. So Number 10 should have been able to call on, by my guesstimate, about 700 sound chaps but only alighted on 12.

Secondly, these “about 100” top posts have always been shared almost exactly among the three services, yet in the letter there are seven Army former top brass to one RAF. That is to say, only one RAF retiree among well over 200 who might have been approached. Odd, but then the referendum is becoming an increasingly odd business producing unlikely alliances. There is even one school of thought that whether the result is leave or remain, Boris Johnson will become the next leader of the Conservative party and therefore Prime Minister with hands then on so many levers of power. For example, the Daily Telegraph reported on 22 January that:

A senior RAF officer who commanded Britain’s 2011 intervention in Libya has been chosen to be the next Chief of the Defence Staff. Air Chief Marshal Sir Stuart Peach will take over the post as head of the military later this year after beating candidates from the Army and Navy. Sir Stuart was a surprise choice after being chosen ahead of the First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir George Zambellas, and Gen Sir Richard Barrons. The Prime Minister is believed to have met all three candidates in recent weeks to choose a replacement for the current Chief of the Defence Staff, Gen Sir Nicholas Houghton.

Johnson’s biographer, Sonia Purnell, has long held the view that:

I think he is the most ruthless, ambitious person I have ever met. (Introduction to Just Boris: A Tale of Blond Ambition, 2011)

Whether under Boris’s affable exterior, there is a man with a long memory for his friends and for his enemies, I don’t know, but the RAF, typically shrewdly, seem to have kept their distance. As for the argument expressed in the letter, there are other views. For example, those of General Sir Michael Rose, who would have been the 13th man and who told Sky News:

I have doubts about the wisdom of using military officers for a political campaign. I happen to believe sovereignty and security are intrinsically linked and in recent years we've seen the EU erode our sovereignty.

Notes on the Table

Anyone really interested in the breakdown by rank will probably understand the “Star” and "NATO Equivalent" column headings and can study the signatories’ titles in their letter. But this might help:

OF8, 3 Star: Vice Admiral, Lt General, Air Vice Marshal
OF9, 4 Star: Admiral, General, Air Marshal
OF10; 5 Star: Admiral of the Fleet, Field Marshal, Marshal of the RAF.

The 5 Star rank is no longer used for Chiefs of the Defence Staff who are now 4 Star like the individual service chiefs. However, they seem to be given the higher rank on an honorary basis on retirement – only the Brits …

Royal Marine officers are probably counted as part of the RN for these arcane astronomical purposes.


UPDATE 29 February

The Times today has a pro-Brexit article, Don’t count on the EU to protect us. Nato will do that, by a retired Rear Admiral and in the Sun two former Major Generals and a Commodore are opining under the heading Falklands heroes call for Britain to leave the European Union. So the Notes above need to be extended:

OF7; 2 Star: Rear Admiral, Major General, Air Vice Marshal
OF6; 1 Star: Commodore, Brigadier, Air Commodore

There are probably more than 70 OF7s and 200 OF6s currently in post, so the total retired cohort (using the rule of thumb above) could be as many as 2000. And there are 115 days to go before Referendum Day!


UPDATE early March

The big guns seemed to fall silent, at least temporarily, in late February following a withering barrage from a former Royal Marine “OF7 2 Star”, Major General Julian Thompson, in the Daily Telegraph: I fought for Britain and I know how the EU weakens our defences, The myth that leaving the EU would harm British national security must be destroyed once and for all.  He attacked what he regards as four common myths which obscure understanding of why “membership of the EU weakens our national defence in very dangerous times”.

The UK and ISIL

Looking back I find that Sir Richard Dannatt (once the general in charge of the British Army and now Lord Dannatt) was in six posts here in 2011, only one the following year and not at all since. Anyone who has the time might find the 2102 post, The Prescience of Mr Powell, of interest. It drew on Jonathan Powell’s account of the problems he and Tony Blair had had with Dannatt, in particular in 2006. The General had given an interview to the Daily Mail “saying that the presence of British forces in Iraq made things worse”.

Then, In the aftermath, we arranged for Tony to have a sandwich lunch with the service chiefs in Jock Stirrup's office at the MoD. Dannatt insisted on talking, and after a few minutes it was quite clear to me that he was unsuited to his job. Tony explained to those present that politicians would not support maintaining a first-division army if they were caused too much political pain by serving generals speaking out against their mission. It was always easier for politicians not to risk soldiers' lives. But I fear he was too subtle for Dannatt, who was divinely convinced of his own rightness.

So I was intrigued by an article by an article by Dannatt in the Mail on Sunday on 24 May 2015, I'm no gung-ho general, says the former Army chief LORD DANNATT - but the debate must start NOW to send in UK ground troops to combat evil of ISIS. Dannatt is appalled like most of us by the imminent destruction of Palmyra:

These majestic ruins represent thousands of years of human civilisation and there is now surely no doubting just how great a threat IS poses to civilisation in the region and beyond. If the problem of the IS caliphate is not resolved in Syria and Iraq, its ambition will spread across the Middle East, across North Africa and potentially into southern Europe and the Balkans – the historic high water mark of Islam in the 14th and 15th Centuries. And although the United States might think it enjoys the security of the Atlantic between itself and where IS wants to expand, it cannot forget the domestic terrorist threat. In light of this terrifying scenario, how much longer can Britain and the US continue to show such a lack of commitment to defeating IS militarily?

Since air strikes and what Dannatt refers to as “indigenous forces” are not defeating IS:

We have now reached a point when we must think the previously unthinkable and consider that British troops, acting as part of an international coalition, may be required to mount a ground campaign in Iraq and Syria.

The reason he thinks this would work is that:

IS has chosen to hold ground, and as such its troops are not classic insurgents but more akin to conventional soldiers. Unlike the Taliban, they're not moving in the shadows or hiding among civilians; tactics which caused huge problems in Afghanistan. Rather, they are operating in fully formed units and using conventional tactics. Therefore, they will present targets and objectives for international military forces to strike.

which is obliging of them, but several questions come to mind. Firstly why, are the air strikes failing if ISIL “are operating in fully formed units” which “present targets … to strike”? Secondly, if international coalition forces do appear, what will stop IS changing its tactics to “moving in the shadows or hiding among civilians … which caused huge problems in Afghanistan”? Thirdly, if the indigenous forces are performing so badly as they were recently at Ramadi, lacking the will to fight ISIL according to the US Defense Secretary, Ashton Carter, just how long term a commitment would any outside coalition be taking on? Fourthly, how would such a coalition deal with the mutual antipathy of the Shia and Sunni elements, the former linked to Iran, who constitute the “indigenous forces”? Rather obliviously, Dannatt later proposes:

… we should also be doing far more to support the indigenous forces currently fighting IS, giving them better equipment and information.

Although Dannatt says he is calling for a “public and political debate to begin immediately, so that the arguments for and against the deployment of Western ground forces can be aired”, it’s pretty obvious that his mind is made up:

If we decide to deploy, I think we should be looking at about 5,000 troops, a fully fledged brigade with infantry troops, attack helicopters, artillery, mortars, reconnaissance and surveillance assets.

which would be not that far removed from the size of the UK forces in Iraq in the later phases of Operation Telic and in Afghanistan in the later phases of Operation Herrick. Dannatt is clear that:

As the professional head of the British Army from 2006 to 2009, I will never forget the costs of the Iraq campaign in terms of the loss of UK soldiers, 179 of whom paid the ultimate price for the decision to invade. Likewise in southern Afghanistan, where more than 450 of our finest young men and women died trying to defeat the Taliban. But today we must find the courage of our convictions to put these costly wars behind us and go about defeating IS on the battlefields of Iraq and Syria.

There are some problems to be addressed on the way:

A UN Security Council resolution would be required to authorise such an intervention, with China and Russia persuaded not to veto the move. 

... [President Assad of Syria] should be forced to leave office as part of a deal and be granted sanctuary in another state. 

Regional powers such as Iran must also be consulted, perhaps behind closed doors.

Not to mention our own politicians:

… the incumbent Prime Minister and leaders of the other major parties adopted the mantra [in the run-up to the General Election] that wars are simply too politically toxic to be discussed.

But now:

While Prime Minister David Cameron is rightly not going to be pushed around by a retired general calling for this or that in terms of a ramped up British military involvement in Iraq and Syria, he should at least hear calls for a public debate.

At which point Dannatt ducks out on a modest note:

I am not suggesting that I have all the answers, far from it, but to those who would be wholly opposed to such a deployment, I would say do we really want to do nothing and simply watch what happens? Could the ambition of the IS caliphate get close enough to this country so that we face a far bigger problem later? I don't know. Such a deployment would be costly in terms of blood and treasure, and judgements must be made. The debate should start now.

Lurking in the background are some other problems: the UK government’s need to cut spending and, not unrelated, its forthcoming Strategic Defence and Security Review. An army which isn’t fighting, nor likely to, is in danger of being perceived as an outdoor and sporting activities club with high manpower costs, very expensive hardware and ceremonial uniforms – a likely target for savings measures. On the other hand, wars like the ones in Iraq and Afghanistan certainly cost billions of pounds – if only the benefits had been as clear. There are some serious questions, too, as to the US’s appetite for involvements of this kind – if the UK were to put 5000 troops into Iraq/Syria presumably it would be alongside, if no-one else, the US which would be fielding four to five times that level. As to whether the IS caliphate could get close to the UK – first time it was Tours, second Vienna:

And now read these pertinent extracts from Theresa May’s speech at the Conservative party conference last September, posted here. What, if anything, to do? As the Duc de Lévis, 18th century Maréchal de France, pointed out, Gouverner, c'est choisir (To govern is to choose).

The Prescience of Mr Powell

As yet the consequences of the use of sarin nerve gas as a weapon against civilians in Syria are far from clear. For the present, it looks as though the UK will not be involved in any punitive attack by the Western powers. In the days since the recall of the House of Commons and the vote by MPs on 29 August which forced the government to drop its plans to participate, there has been extensive media comment. Much of it is in the “damned if we do, damned if we don’t” vein, but not all. In an article in the Daily Mail on 31 August, A savage defeat for Cameron... and he brought it on himself, Max Hastings, avoided coming down clearly on the side of “Don’t”:

… the only proper test of a policy for Syria is not whether it will make David Cameron feel better about himself, but whether it will assuage the plight of the Syrian people. On this measure, the Government’s current ‘short, sharp shock’ proposal fails comprehensively.

Moreover,

Once the first cruise missile lands on Syria, we would have been in the struggle up to our necks. Cameron claimed that any strike would only be a little one, but you cannot do a little bit of military intervention. Once the United States and its allies start shooting at the Assad government, they are committed to regime change, and it is a gross deceit to pretend otherwise.

What worried Hastings was the UK’s longer-term position:

… in my view there’s no doubt the Prime Minister has made a colossal fool of himself, on a matter of the utmost gravity – that of war and peace. Almost the worst part of the fiasco is that one day we shall need to deploy our shrunken armed forces against a real threat from a real foreign enemy. And because our leaders have so often deceived us in the past, crying wolf amid their own hubristic delusions and pretensions, the British people will not believe them. That will indeed be a tragic day, and Mr Cameron has followed Blair in bringing it upon us.

But it was this passage which interested me most:

A couple of months ago, I was due to meet a British general for a routine chat when I received an embarrassed email from him, saying that all such meetings must now be approved by the Defence Secretary’s office. This had been refused. I wrote first to Philip Hammond, and then to David Cameron, asking why they were seeking to kill the sort of private dialogue with the armed forces that I have had for more than 40 years. Both the Prime Minister and Defence Secretary wrote back, defending their gagging decision. They said that there has been far too much military leaking to the media, and they are determined that this must stop. This sort of clumsy control-freakery derives in part, of course, from the fact that our leaders know that our professional soldiers are contemptuous of their antics on security policy generally, and Syria in particular.

It reminded me of something I had posted in January 2011, but which took almost the opposite point of view, quoted from Jonathan Powell’s The New Machiavelli: How to Wield Power in the Modern World, published in 2010 (Powell was Tony Blair’s Downing Street Chief of Staff from 1997 to 2007 and his book, he said, was not a memoir but combined a present day evaluation of the applicability of Machiavelli’s maxims, lessons on leadership and power based on his experience in Number 10 and supporting anecdotes for the use of future historians):

... When Mike Jackson retired as chief of the general staff in August 2006, the MoD sent over to No 10 the CV of his proposed successor, asking for the prime minister's agreement. Tony's foreign policy and defence adviser Nigel Sheinwald came to see me and we agreed that it wasn't worth consulting Tony about such a trivial subject, and Nigel wrote back to the MoD agreeing to the appointment on the basis of Mike Jackson’s recommendation. A few months later we faced a serious problem with the new chief, Richard Dannatt, when he chose to attack the government through the pages of the Daily Mail while we were in St Andrews engaged in crucial Northern Ireland peace talks. Tony complained about him to me, and I, forgetting what had happened earlier, said that it was his fault as he had appointed him. He denied that he had and said he had never been consulted. I went back to the files and discovered that he was right and had to confess to Tony. (pages 89, 90)

Powell returns to this incident later in the book:

General Dannatt's attack on the deployment of British forces in Iraq caught us completely unawares in 2006. Tony and I were engaged in delicate Northern Ireland negotiations in St Andrews. When we were told the news of the interview he had given to the Mail, saying that the presence of British forces in Iraq made things worse and they should get out soon, we couldn't get hold of anyone. Des Browne, who had succeeded John Reid as Defence Secretary, was in a plane on his way up to Scotland. The Chief of the Defence Staff was in Australia and unreachable; the Vice Chief was giving a lecture and couldn't be disturbed. And Dannatt himself was refusing to return calls. We thought for a moment about sacking him but concluded that that would just make him into a martyr. His comments certainly didn't help our troops in Basra; Muqtada al-Sadr's JAM militia leaders celebrated, claiming that his comments proved that their efforts were working and that they should redouble their attacks on British forces. We immediately received complaints from the NATO Secretary General, the Americans, Australians and other countries with forces serving in Iraq. Although some of the responses in the military internet chat rooms were favourable, his fellow chiefs were furious with him. In the aftermath, we arranged for Tony to have a sandwich lunch with the service chiefs in Jock Stirrup's office at the MoD. Dannatt insisted on talking, and after a few minutes it was quite clear to me that he was unsuited to his job. Tony explained to those present that politicians would not support maintaining a first-division army if they were caused too much political pain by serving generals speaking out against their mission. It was always easier for politicians not to risk soldiers' lives". But I fear he was too subtle for Dannatt, who was divinely convinced of his own rightness. (pages 269, 270)

Perhaps Cameron and Hammond aren’t being quite so foolish as Hastings seems to think. Nor was the development which peeved Hastings entirely unheralded. During the Libyan operations in 2011, Cameron was quoted as saying about the military chiefs "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'." But on revisiting Powell’s book, it was the next paragraph which caught my eye:

The sort of surprise attack that Dannatt launched will make political leaders think twice if military action is proposed in future, certainly if the military engagement is likely to be sustained over a year or rnore. Our armed forces will no longer be deployed so regularly and will lose their cutting edge. We will gradually become more like Germany and other Continental countries, unable to put our armed forces in harm's way. That is a choice, but one we should make consciously and not just stumble into it. It would be another step towards losing the ability to control our destiny as a country, a far more important one than sharing our sovereignty in NATO or the EU. (page 270)

The UK seems to be in danger of stumbling in the direction Powell so presciently identified three years ago (or possibly four, when actually writing it). So far I haven’t come across any comments by him on the situation the coalition government now finds itself in.

‘We don’t have to stay, Henry’

The review section of the Daily Telegraph on 15 August offered readers its Pick of the paperbacks, starting with Leading from the Front by General Sir Richard Dannatt, ‘A searing indictment of how Labour failed the armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan’. (Back in May, I commented on Dannatt’s appearance at the Hay Literary Festival in connection with this book, and in April posted on Matt Cavanagh’s articles on Labour and the generals.)

In contrast, but also on 15 August, Sir Rodric Braithwaite reviewed in the Financial Times Frank Ledwidge’s Losing Small Wars:

… a savage indictment of the military leadership that got British soldiers into one impossible situation after another in Iraq and Afghanistan. His conclusion is stark: “The reputation of the British army has been seriously damaged. The British were at sea in both places, devoid of viable doctrine, without awareness of their environment, lacking adequate forces and minus any coherent strategy to pursue. All this was coupled with a hubris which attracted its inevitable riposte – nemesis.”

Braithwaite concluded:

The generals can be blamed, as Ledwidge says, for not insisting that they were given objectives that were clear, consistent, adequately resourced, and achievable within a reasonable time. Instead, they assured ministers that they could do whatever was asked of them, in a misguided desire to show off their prowess and secure their future budgets. They acquiesced, may even have believed, in the dubious proposition that we needed to follow the Americans to Iraq and Afghanistan to pay, in Tony Blair’s distasteful phrase, “a ‘blood price’ to secure [Britain’s] special relationship with America”. No wonder they failed to produce a convincing military plan. It was, however, a failure of moral fibre rather than strategic thinking.
The real problem, however, goes far beyond two failed wars and it is not only the politicians and generals who are to blame. The British public, too, seems to want the country to have aircraft carrier and missile submarines so that we can “punch above our weight”, sending military expeditions hither and yon, provided the price in blood and treasure is not too high. That will not change until Britain finally works out what sort of country it is – a floundering former empire still dreaming of a global reach, or a serious medium-sized power with a realistic view of its national interests. Then it can decide what kind of armed forces it really needs and is prepared to pay for. Meanwhile, Britain will have no coherent strategy and its foreign and defence policy will remain in its present sad muddle.

Sir Rodric has been UK ambassador to Moscow and Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), and is the author of the recently published and well-regarded Afgantsy, a history of the Soviet involvement in Afghanistan. So lesser mortals ought to take care when picking over anything he writes, but nonetheless …

Firstly, was it ‘Tony Blair’s distasteful phrase, “a blood price” ’? In 2002, prior to a visit to the US, Blair gave an interview for a BBC Two programme, Hotline to the President. The BBC News website still has an item (image below) on the programme, headed Britain will pay 'blood price' – Blair, and starting with:

Britain must be prepared to pay a "blood price" to secure its special relationship with the US, Prime Minister Tony Blair has told the BBC ahead of talks on Iraq with President Bush.

But further on it reads:

Hotline to the President presenter Michael Cockerell asked Mr Blair whether one of the elements of the UK-US special relationship was whether "Britain is prepared to send troops to commit themselves, to pay the blood price".
Mr Blair replied: "Yes. What is important though is that at moments of crisis they (the USA) don't need to know simply that you are giving general expressions of support and sympathy.
"That is easy, frankly. They need to know, `Are you prepared to commit, are you prepared to be there when the shooting starts?'"

Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem likely, according to the BFI, that this programme will be turning up soon on YouTube or anywhere else. But from the BBC webpage it appears that it was Cockerell’s ‘distasteful phrase’, not Blair’s. Unless, of course, Blair had used it earlier, somewhere off the record, and Cockerell was primed to spring it, gobbet-style. Although an admirer of Cockerell’s work for many years, I knew very little about him, so his entry on Wikipedia (which, of course, may not be accurate) proved worth reading. He is 71 this month and has had seven children from three relationships, two former wives coming from high Tory circles.

Secondly, Sir Rodric’s remark ‘The British public, too, seems to want the country to have aircraft carrier and missile submarines’ touched on something I posted here, much less elegantly, earlier this month:

Perhaps in 2011, if the UK is envisaged in some quarters as having accepted being on the way to minor power status (eg eventually abandoning its nuclear deterrent, aircraft carriers and a serious intelligence capability), keeping on good terms with the US is not seen as worth the price. However the UK would need to be confident that it could address the current and future threats to cyber security without close cooperation with the US.

and I quoted the National Security Strategy:

2.11 Our strong defence, security and intelligence relationship with the US is exceptionally close and central to our national interest.

It’s difficult to argue against a former Chairman of the JIC if he thinks it a ‘dubious proposition that we needed to follow the Americans to Iraq and Afghanistan’, but I wonder what Sir Rodric would make of the programme Document broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 15 August. (Don’t worry, dear reader, you have the rest of your life to catch up – apparently it will be ‘Available until 12:00AM Thu, 1 Jan 2099’; hopefully so will the BBC).

Mike Thomson investigates the collapse of the US UK special relationship in 1973, via a revealing transcript of a phone call between President Nixon and Henry Kissinger which suggests the split was deeper and more severe than previously thought.
As Britain joined the EEC, US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger became increasingly annoyed at the lack of support by Edward Heath's government for American foreign policy. Mike uncovers papers which suggest that in retaliation, the US switched off the supply of intelligence to the UK.
Among those Mike speaks to are former Defence and Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington and Lord Powell, later Margaret Thatcher's Private Secretary.

The problem which arose in 1973 had been described in Richard J Aldrich’s GCHQ, and he appeared in the programme. This is an extract from the chapter, Trouble with Henry (pages 289-90):

Kissinger was looking for a symbolic area to hit that would send a clear message to London. He chose the intelligence relationship. The next day, intelligence relations between the two Countries were halted. NSA went quiet, and officials told Heath that the CIA had 'suspended the supply of certain intelligence materials to us’. NSA and the CIA had been instructed to cease intelligence exchange with GCHQ and SIS. British officials regarded this as ‘sinister’.  ... the JIC discussed Anglo-American intelligence relations at four consecutive meetings during late August and early September as it struggled to address the problem. Kissinger's 'cut-off' had the desired effect, and sent shock waves through the British establishment. This event is so sensitive that even after more than thirty years have passed, the Cabinet Office still [2007] refuses to declassify further documents on the subject.
The reactions of the American intelligence agencies to Kissinger’s insistence on a cut-off varied. NSA offered a legalistic response, insisting that its relationship with GCHQ was governed by 'a binding international treaty", so it would have to investigate and see what could be done. This was a polite way of telling Kissinger that it intended to ignore him. The CIA also fudged its reply on the matter of human intelligence or reports from agents that were supplied to SIS. Certainly at a station level, some cooperation continued. The area that was hit hardest was imagery the supply of top-secret photographs from spy planes and satellites. The senior RAF officer tasked with collecting this sensitive imagery, who travelled to Washington once a week on an RAF Comet airliner, turned up and found that 'The bag just was not there.'

The Document programme had uncovered a recorded telephone conversation between Nixon and Kissinger. The President’s exasperation with the emergent EEC led him to remark: ‘We don’t have to stay, Henry’ [ie we can withdraw US forces from Europe].  Document ended with contributions from Powell and Carrington, the former very pro the UK/US special relationship, the latter now very sceptical – “ … a figment of the British imagination”. Aldrich records (page 282) Carrington’s attitude at the time:

Carrington explained that the Anglo-American partnership was perhaps a natural one, given that the two allies' 'geography and size are so different'. Although the scope and scale of Britain's residual empire was continually declining, the small remnants were nonetheless supremely valuable. Carrington continued:
Because of the number of our remaining island dependencies, we are able to provide the Americans with facilities which they would get from no one else on a comparable scale. Indeed, the very fact of our possession of these dependencies enables us to make a considerable contribution to an alliance which is important to both of us but in which otherwise our respective contributions might be very ill-balanced.
All this allowed Britain to benefit from what he called 'the massive American military technological and intelligence machine'. Carrington argued that the hidden reciprocal benefits to Britain were in three areas: nuclear weapons, research and development, and intelligence. While these things were relatively invisible compared to the requested British real estate, they were nonetheless extremely valuable. Without American intelligence, he argued, 'and particularly that derived from the NSA/GCHQ Agreement', Whitehall would be unable to assess the key military developments inside the Eastern Bloc and China, and indeed would struggle even to produce good intelligence on lesser threats in the Middle East.

Sir Rodric is surely right to propose that Britain should ‘… decide what kind of armed forces it really needs and is prepared to pay for.’ However, what if the UK concludes that it must have the capabilities provided by ‘aircraft carrier[s] and missile submarines’? Since RN submarines are equipped with either Trident or Tomahawk missiles, both from the US, and the future carriers are likely to carry the F35 Joint Strike Fighter, perhaps we should not forget what happened in 1973. The film, Fair Game, recently released on DVD, is a reminder of the US’s intolerance of anyone who wasn’t ‘with us’ in 2002. Whether Bush’s White House would have behaved like Nixon and Kissinger’s is something that only insiders can judge.

Dannatt at Hay, Levene at MoD

The Hay Festival (of Literature and the Arts) is currently underway at Hay-on-Wye (Powys, Wales). Hay is now sponsored by the Daily Telegraph, at least to 2013. The events already over (28 May) include Leading from the Front, Richard Dannatt talks to Nik Gowing, “The forthright Chief of the General Staff (2006–2009) reviews his military career and the current state of the nation’s defences.” I’ve noted previously that Lord Dannatt described himself as “a periodic contributor to the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph” (under the byline General Sir Richard Dannatt, as indexed here, rather than Lord Dannatt). His book (same title as the event) has just gone into paperback.

I don’t know whether the Telegraph sponsorship of Hay helped to generate the large and apparently supportive audience, but, if they were expecting Dannatt to be particularly controversial, they might have been disappointed, as the Sunday Telegraph report next day suggests. He expanded on the point he had made in his Daily Telegraph article a day earlier that “May has been a bad month for evil men” – OBL’s demise, Mladic’s arrest, - and talked about Libya, and the contribution which the four UK Apache attack helicopters could make if there were to be no "boots on the ground". (The first priority for our other 60 odd Apaches is Afghanistan and their activities are described here).  He saw no justification for aircraft carriers coming from the Libya operations – other aircraft which couldn’t operate from carriers were needed and would have to operate from land bases. The implications of this constraint were not debated properly, he said, during the Defence Review in 1997/98 which had started the current carrier building programme.

Gowing, who had done his homework (though General Rupert Smith, not Dannatt, popularised “war among the people”), asked Dannatt about remarks by Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, discussed in a post here in January. His response started with “Like him, get on well” but ended less warmly. The billing of “forthright” was lived up to again when Dannatt blamed Blair and Brown for the £B38 overspend (inherent in the plans for the following 10 years)which the MoD had built up by the time of the 2010 election, because of their reluctance to make the necessary decisions. But he also criticised David Cameron for committing to increased defence expenditure only in a second term – which might not happen – when MoD planners needed numbers for 2014/15 now. This was in the context of the UK/US relationship and whether the UK was essential to the US – the US was certainly essential to the UK, and the former did not want further erosion of the UK’s defence capabilities.

Some other points of interest: Dannatt clearly felt that his outspokenness in defending the army, which he did not regret, had cost him the top job, Chief of the Defence Staff. The Army had wanted a family of medium-weight, multipurpose vehicles (FRES) – these were cancelled by the Defence Board in 2008 to fund the carrier programme. There was a risk after Afghanistan of the army being left with a mix of vehicles which would be unsuitable for whatever came next. Much had been done to rectify past equipment deficiencies in Afghanistan (body armour), and this meant that coroners’ judgements on shortcomings could be a couple of years in arrears of the current situation. He thought the Army needed a strength (“critical mass”) not much below 100,000 (as opposed to 95,000 post-SDSR).

The questions included a dignified and thoughtful point from a woman who had lost a son in Afghanistan in 2009. A man who said he was a brigadier’s son asserted that the UK had four times as many generals as the US (pro rata, presumably) – their soldiers weren’t as good as ours, but their generals were better! Dannatt pointed out that the UK had to fill a lot of senior posts in NATO and the like, but as deputies to US staff when there was less opportunity to shine. In conclusion he commented that while forces from the air and sea could enable, it was on land that things could be brought to a decision – that was where “war among the people” took place.

There was no mention of Trident. Perhaps if the Guardian were still sponsoring Hay, Dannatt might also have been asked about Nick Hopkins’ article which appeared that morning: “Armed forces face radical changes under Lord Levene plans”.

A blueprint for the services and how they should be run is being drawn up by Lord Levene, who was appointed last year by the defence secretary, Liam Fox, and tasked with coming up with root-and-branch reforms. Levene is due to submit his final report by the end of July, but early drafts of his main proposals, and the principles behind them, have started to circulate around Whitehall.

The suggestions include:

• Thinning the ranks at the very top of the military. At the moment each service has, effectively, two chiefs – one responsible for strategy and management, the other for operations. Levene believes that there should only be one chief for each arm.
• Establishing a new appointments committee that would be responsible for choosing the highest ranking officers in the army, RAF and the Royal Navy. The committee would be chaired by a non-executive director, chosen by the defence secretary. At the moment, the services make most mid-ranking and senior appointments in-house.
• Creating a new defence board that will have only one member of the military sitting on it. This would be the overall chief of the defence staff .... At the moment, chiefs from all three services sit on the board.

These proposals are likely to receive a ferocious response from the senior service echelons (perhaps already starting with a leak to the Guardian). If the new appointments system were implemented, it is difficult to imagine a man (or woman) as “tribal” (to use the term applied by Blair to died-in-the-wool Labourites) in their service attachment as Dannatt, rising as far as he did - see Jonathan Powell’s view of him in an earlier post.

Levene was Chief of Defence Procurement from 1985 to 1991, and appears in Alan Clark’s first volume of diaries (In Power) during his defence ministership (1989-1992). Clark, who wasn’t slow to form a poor opinion of his fellow-men, seemed to like him: “… Peter Levene, is thoroughly congenial. A quick mind - and so important – a sense of humour” (page 263). In February 1990, Clark was at odds with his boss, Tom King, over the conduct of the defence review addressing the new post-Cold War world.

Peter had an ingenious solution. To set up a ‘review Controllerate’ with him in charge, three Young Turks form the three services, reporting to me. Mouthwatering. … But Tom would see it a mile off. (page 280).

In April, Clark was in a state of exasperation after challenging senior army officers over a new piece of equipment:

I want to fire the whole lot. Instantly. Out, out. No 'District' commands, no golden bowlers, nothing. Out. There are so many good, tough keen young officers who aren't full of shit. How can we bring them on, before they get disillusioned, or conventionalised by the system? If I could, I'd do what Stalin did to Tukhachevsky. [Footnote: The purges of the Red Army in 1938-9 when three-quarters of all officers of field rank and above were put to the firing squads.] (page 291)

Five years later, Michael Bett (then with BT and who has recently stood down as Chancellor of Aston University) delivered a report to the MoD, Managing people in Tomorrow’s Armed Forces. This proposed a much simpler rank structure (see below for its impact on the army).

The rationale was given in paragraph 3.11:

Looking forward to 2010, we have identified a number of developments which suggest that significant rationalisation of the rank structure is necessary. … Most organisations in industry, commerce and government … have found that [such] 'horizontal' co-operation can be more effective if levels of authority are not emphasised and. the number of layers is kept to the minimum. This reduction in the number of layers is facilitated and enhanced by the availability of much better communications and by the higher level of general education attained by the work force. Simpler and often leaner structures, and more able people exercising more individual discretion seem to act very positively with modern information and communication technology.

Bett recommended the disappearance of the “five star” rank of Field Marshall, but apart from that, no significant changes to the rank structure were made. Whether Levene’s Defence Reform Unit’s equally radical proposals will be adopted should become clear by the end of the year.

Puzzling Lord Dannatt

In a previous post, I mentioned the “large cohort of senior officers of all three services, serving and retired, unafraid to speak their minds”.  One of the most prominent of these gentlemen (no-one at this level seems to be female) is the former head of the British army, Lord Dannatt (formerly General Sir Richard Dannatt).  His opinions are called for at present on Libya. On Saturday 16 April on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme he addressed the extent of the stalemate in Libya and was subsequently reported by the Daily Telegraph:

Lord Dannatt, the former head of the UK's armed forces [sic], has called for the UN to pass a resolution authorising the training and arming of rebels fighting Colonel Muammar Gaddafi's forces in Libya. Lord Dannatt urged the international coalition to seek a fresh UN Security Council resolution specifically authorising the move.
…
He also said that reports that Gaddafi had been using cluster bombs during the siege of Misurata had further weakened the Libyan leader's position.
…
"We have got to move this one on, we have got to be innovative about the way we do it. I have thought about it long and hard: go back to New York, get a strengthened UN Security Council resolution and arm, equip and train the opposition."
…
Speaking to Radio 4's Today programme, Lord Dannatt added: "If we thought that Gaddafi had lost the moral right to rule this country a month ago, he has lost it in the last 24 hours, that's for sure."

According to Google news this was one of over 4000 articles generated from the Today piece. (Don’t bother going to the Today website (limited duration) to hear what he actually said, the player link is wrong and you will find yourself listening not to Dannatt, Richard but to Dilmott, Andrew on funding for adult social care.)

The same morning in Tim Walker’s Mandrake column, the Daily Telegraph was running another story:

Walker didn’t explain where and when Dannatt made these remarks, but Dannatt has links to the Telegraph newspapers – in his maiden speech in the House of Lords he described himself as “a periodic contributor to the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph” (Hansard 10 Mar 2011: Column 1815).

Lord Dannatt’s views, whether one agrees with them or not, are always expressed with the clarity to be expected of a former senior officer.  However, it's a bit of a puzzle when, at the same time as appearing on one of the BBC's most influential programmes, elsewhere in the media he is criticising one of its senior correspondents .  The puzzle extends to deciding who is he speaking for.  He may be speaking for himself. On the other hand, he could be articulating opinions on behalf of the Army which it would be inappropriate for serving generals to express publicly. Although in the past he had links to the Conservative party, he sits in the Lords as a crossbench peer (non-aligned).

And the Today programme clearly doesn’t ignore the Daily Telegraph!

David Cameron on Today, 19 April 2011

Text of Mandrake article:

Libya: General Lord Dannatt's concern over BBC giving succour to Gaddafi

A lugubrious presence at the best of times, Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s Middle East editor, stands accused of not accentuating the positive in his dispatches from Libya on the British, French and American-led coalition’s efforts to bring to an end Col Muammar Gaddafi’s bloody regime.
“People hang on the words of the BBC in Libya and throughout the Middle East and I do wonder if what he has been saying has been entirely helpful,” says General Lord Dannatt, the former Chief of the General Staff. “Mr Bowen has, of course, every right to report what happens, but when he dwells to such an extent on intangible things — such as how long the operation will take and whether the will is there to see it through — then it sets a tone that could hardly have given heart to members of the rebel forces.”
Dannatt urged Bowen, whose Wikipedia entry already boasts that he was “the first British journalist to interview Muammar Gaddafi since the start of the Libyan uprising against him and the government,” to “weigh his words with care.”

Matt Cavanagh on Labour and the Generals

Matt Cavanagh was a special adviser to Defence Secretary Des Browne from 2006-2007 and then to Gordon Brown from 2007-2010. He drew on his experiences during the Labour government to provide a very thoughtful review, Inside the Anglo-Saxon war machine, of Bob Woodward’s Obama’s Wars for Prospect magazine in November 2010. He said:

… This is a book about the British experience too, for essentially the same internal debate played out here over the same period, with the same camps in the same positions—and the same result. 

Of course, there are differences. In the British debate, a great deal of time and effort went into working out what the Americans were thinking, and it is all too clear from Woodward’s book that the reverse was not true. It would be unfair to blame this entirely on American insularity. However important our decisions were to us in Britain, they mattered far less in strategic terms, as a glance at the numbers shows. Obama sent 20,000 more troops to Afghanistan early in 2009, and spent the second half of the year debating whether to send another 40,000, while Gordon Brown and his generals were arguing over 1,000: one per cent of the international force. ...

By summer 2009, at the same time as Brown’s and Obama’s doubts and frustrations were growing and public concern was rising, they were coming under increasing pressure from the senior military to approve an escalation in troop numbers. For although the senior military had also begun to realise that things were not going well, their reaction was to press for greater resources and greater urgency. To them, defeat was unthinkable, even if the more thoughtful and intellectually honest of them weren’t sure if victory was achievable either. In both Washington and Whitehall they ensured that debates over troop numbers crowded out more important debates over military strategy, a political settlement, governance, corruption and aid effectiveness. They placed great store by generic concepts of decisiveness, leadership and “momentum”—more than the specifics of strategy—and they railed against what seemed to them to be indecision and delay from the politicians. ...

Does this mean the military are too powerful? Certainly, in the current political and media climate, any leader (and in particular any Democrat or Labour leader) should pick their battles with them very carefully. Few besides Paddy Ashdown—who made the case this October in an article for the Times—would recommend that politicians wrest back control of running wars. Few generals besides Richard Dannatt are seriously arguing for handing it all over to the military. ...

... the senior military are almost without exception genuinely wedded to the national interest, and genuinely supportive of civilian control of the military. It is true that they can’t always resist the temptation to open up a second front in the media. They know the odds are stacked in their favour: the public admire and trust them, and distrust ministers; journalists tend to lack the knowledge or energy to question their assumptions or motives, finding it easier to lionise them in contrast to base and shallow politicians. But high-profile generals like David Petraeus or our own Mike Jackson and David Richards manage for the most part to tread this line—and if they step over it, like Stanley McChrystal, they accept their fate. Those like the second world war US general Douglas MacArthur—whose self-delusion, belief in their own infallibility and contempt for democratic politics make them potentially dangerous—are mercifully rare. ...

Towards the end of the book, Woodward reports General Lute wondering if “Obama had to do this 18-month surge just to demonstrate, in effect, that it couldn’t be done.” We must hope this was not the only or even the main reason: it cannot justify the 500 more combat deaths in those 18 months, and the $150bn added to the deficit. But either way, if come July Obama decides it is time for Plan B, the senior military—British as well as American—must accept that Plan A hasn’t succeeded. They must start working up, in good faith, the alternatives their political leaders ask for, and resist any temptation to encourage—even with their silence—the inevitable stream of chickenhawks and conspiracy theorists complaining that victory would have been assured if only the politicians hadn’t once again stabbed our brave boys in the back.

Cavanagh has returned to the war in Afghanistan in an article in The Spectator, (8 April 2011), Operation amnesia, which is well worth reading in full. He sheds some more light on political-military relationships towards the end of the New Labour period:

… We don’t have five years’ experience in Helmand, we have six months’ experience ten times. Successive brigades have relearned the painful lessons of their predecessors, or overcompensated for their perceived failings. Debriefings of battalion and company commanders, and attempts to harness their valuable experience, have been perfunctory. Four years ago, when I was working for the then defence secretary, Des Browne, we pressed senior military officers to look for ways of mitigating this short-termism: longer tours, or a staggered rotation of units, or greater continuity in the command structure. The army, then led by General Dannatt, flatly rejected the first two options. They dismissed longer tours on the basis of the strain on soldiers and their families, and rejected staggered rotation due to the importance of ‘a brigade training and deploying as a brigade'.

We were sympathetic to the former argument, both on human grounds and because we knew that the American military, in which tours routinely lasted 15 months, struggled to retain experienced personnel. We were less sympathetic to the argument for training and deploying as a brigade, which appeared rather dogmatic. I suspected it encouraged precisely the kind of large-scale set-piece engagements I was sceptical about. It also put our creaking helicopter and transport fleet through the added strain of mass troop rotations, and required us to keep scarce equipment in Britain so an entire brigade could train with it.

But as happens so often in politics, we civilian advisers and strategists shied away from overruling the military. We worked with the less dogmatic generals to identify a small number of senior posts (and junior posts in specific areas like intelligence) where tours of duty could be lengthened. We were assured that other initiatives would improve continuity, but these too were relatively minor and seemingly given a low priority. The issue of command structure got lost in wider debates about troop numbers and the looming arrival of American forces in Helmand. ...

This is not to deny the importance of the limits on British troop numbers, the subject of such heated debate during 2009. As someone who had a share in responsibility for those limits, I was acutely aware of the dilemmas they forced on commanders. But I was also aware of the potential for troop increases to exacerbate the military’s dominance of what was meant to be a joint civilian-military campaign, and to feed the tendency of new commanders to try to do too much. For three years the top brass had argued that additional troops would enable us to ‘thicken’ our forces, increasing their effectiveness, reducing casualties, and enabling proper stabilisation work to begin. But when we sent reinforcements, it had the opposite result: an expanded footprint, increased activity, and increased casualties, to no obvious strategic effect. …   

The military’s obsession with troop numbers and the media’s failure to challenge it have obscured the wider lessons of the Afghan campaign. Before the American surge, lack of troops was blamed for everything. … 

… More troops will not help our militaries master the complex tribal dynamics, nor judge whether they are making friends faster than they are alienating people. More troops will not change the attitude of the Afghan and Pakistani authorities, nor create a political process that addresses Afghan grievances. 

Because of these wider political problems, Britain’s lack of success in Afghanistan in strategic terms cannot be blamed on the military. But at the operational level, most of the responsibility is theirs. They took the tactical decisions in summer 2006 — admittedly under great pressure — to disperse our forces across the ‘platoon houses’ in northern Helmand. They chose, in the years that followed, to continue to prosecute the campaign in an expansive and aggressive manner, despite the constraints on resources and the lack of evidence that this approach had a lasting positive effect. And while they lost no opportunity to plan and lobby for more troops, they were slow to fill the gaps in our intelligence, or to respond to the Taleban’s shift in tactics towards improvised explosive devices.

Cavanagh’s conclusion echoes that of his Prospect piece:

When failure becomes not just a possibility but a reality, it ought to provide the impetus for change. In war it is vital to learn from mistakes. … But it won’t happen if politicians are blamed instead, as in America over Korea and in Britain over Iraq.

The media, the Conservatives and the military have already prepared the way for a similar narrative on Afghanistan: blaming the previous government, mainly for not providing enough resources. If only we’d had more troops and better equipment, the argument will run, we would have defeated the Taleban, and got out on our own terms. It suits a great many people to go along with this, but in the long run it will only prevent us from learning the real lessons of the past five years.

Hopefully Cavanagh will write more about Afghanistan as he saw it from the privileged position of a government special adviser, and about the lessons that need to be learnt. While he is probably realistic in anticipating that the military will attempt to pin the blame for any unpleasantness in the eventual Afghanistan end-game (planned for 2015 at the latest) on the politicians, it could be that, by then, the previous government will no longer be their primary target. NATO’s Libyan operation is now, with the US no longer in the driver’s seat, largely reliant on France and the UK. The resulting pressure seems to have opened up tensions arising from the UK’s 2010 Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR) between the army and the other services. The FT reported on 8 April:

A plan brought forward by General Sir David Richards, head of the armed forces, proposed shedding up to 5,000 additional army personnel to free up money for other priorities. However, this was rejected by David Cameron’s team because the prime minister was unwilling to back cuts that could lead to some veterans of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan being laid off. The proposal reflected the widespread realisation in Whitehall that the army emerged relatively unscathed from the defence review, at the expense of civil servants and the other services.

“Even the army are now prepared to entertain the idea of more army cuts. But No 10 are just not interested,” said one senior Whitehall figure. Richards and Wall realised that they overplayed their hand during the SDSR,” he added, in reference to the chief of defence staff and General Sir Peter Wall, the head of the army.

A few days later a senior RAF officer, Air Chief Marshal Sir Simon Bryant (Commander-In-Chief Air Command) was reported (somewhat disjointedly) by The Scotsman and the Daily Telegraph to have said about SDSR:

"The thinking behind it was sound, but I'm not sure we're going to end up in a balanced place."

“I think it's appropriate we have a review of where we go to make sure what we are able to deliver at no notice is replicated in five years' time, and in 50 years' time."

“I think it's appropriate we have a review of where we go to make sure what we are able to deliver at no notice is replicated in five years' time, and in 50 years' time." 

In Libya, “the ability to go and see and hear what the enemy are doing” was vital and that may not be possible with an “unbalanced set of Armed Forces”.

Then, not for the first time in recent months, a group of former naval persons wrote, on this occasion to The Times (£ 11 April 2011), complaining:

… if all three services had the same "harmony rules" as those of the Royal Navy and Royal Marines, significant reductions in the strength of the Armed Forces would be possible. These reductions would more than match the numbers now being cut, but with no loss in capability ...

… the RAF is already indicating that the current Libya operation will be unsustainable beyond June, or not long after. There are about 40,000 personnel in the RAF, including some 120 officers of air rank each paid about £100,000 a year or more, and there are many hundreds of aircraft. If the RAF can't sustain current operations, what are all those people and all that expensive equipment for? There is much that curious Defence and Treasury ministers should question about the RAF's structure and management.

There would have been no comparable complaint from the Royal Navy, after just one month, about sustainability of the Libya operation were an aircraft carrier, with a Harrier force, now operating off the north African coast.

One asset which British defence seems to possess in abundance is a large cohort of senior officers of all three services, serving and retired, unafraid to speak their minds and, when not at odds with each other, ready to criticise the government of the day. (Perhaps the implementation of career average, rather than final salary, pensions in the armed forces, as Lord Hutton has recommended, will eliminate one of the incentives for this top-heaviness). Depending on the robustness of the Coalition, the next election could be at any time up to the planned date of UK’s leaving Afghanistan in 2015. However, when it comes, the dominant issues are more likely to be the economy and the NHS than the extent of Labour’s shortcomings on resources pre-SDSR in 2009, despite Cavanagh’s misgivings. One might also expect the uniformed Top Kneddies to show some inhibition about criticising politicians, much as they dislike SDSR, given their natural inclinations towards the Conservative party.

Lord Dannatt has featured in earlier posts on this blog. One quoted Jonathan Powell’s observations of Dannatt at Tony Blair’s lunch meeting with the service chiefs in 2006, and another featured Dannatt’s widely-reported remarks about “boots on the ground” in Afghanistan in July 2009 when Gordon Brown was PM.

Wikileaks and recent posts

A Wikileaks report in the Daily Telegraph last week has linked two of my recent posts. One of these was about the Iraq Inquiry and the other, posted a week earlier, was about a public falling out between the former head of the British Army, Lord Dannatt, and the former UK ambassador to Afghanistan, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles. The Iraq Inquiry Secretariat has been headed since its formation in 2009 by a career civil servant, Margaret Aldred. Previously she had been deputy head of the foreign and defence policy secretariat at the Cabinet Office and it was in that role that she met with the ‘Political Minister Counselor’ at the US Embassy in London on Wednesday 15 July 2009. The cable sent from the Embassy the following day which summarised their meeting was the basis of the Daily Telegraph Wikileaks report headed:

Lord Dannatt wrong on troop numbers, civil servant told US

The senior civil servant organising the Iraq Inquiry secretly briefed against Britain’s top general after he called for more troops to counter a surge of deaths in Afghanistan.

Going back to an article by Rosa Prince in the Daily Telegraph on 16 July 2009 helps shed light on the atmosphere at the time of the meeting and the subsequent cable from the Embassy:

Richard Dannatt: Boots on ground key to victory in Afghanistan

The head of the Army has added to the pressure on the Government to send additional troops to Afghanistan by saying "more boots on the ground" were vital for victory.

Following heavy British losses in Helmand Province, General Sir Richard Dannatt said that he would like to see "more energy" putting into speeding up the provision of equipment to UK troops.
He said: "I have said before, we can have effect where we have boots on the ground. I don't mind whether the feet in those boots are British, American or Afghan, but we need more to have the persistent effect to give the people confidence in us. That is the top line and the bottom line."
The General was speaking during his last visit to Afghanistan before retiring later this month, as Gordon Brown insisted that "everything we can" was being done by the Government to provide British soldiers with the equipment they needed.
The war in Afghanistan dominated Prime Minister's Question Time yesterday, with David Cameron saying that the number of British helicopters in Afghanistan was "simply insufficient".
Gen Dannatt appeared to back the Tory leader's warning, adding: "We are trying to broaden and deepen our effect here, which is about people and about equipment, and of course to an extent it is about helicopters as well.

It looks as though the purpose of the meeting at the Embassy the day before this appeared was to reassure the US “that HMG remains committed at the highest levels to maintaining its mission in Afghanistan.” The cable states:

[Aldred] stressed that HMG has "worked hard to get the right number of helicopters" ... Referring to General Dannatt's call for more troops, she stated that the PM decided how many British troops would deploy to Afghanistan only after close consultation with the MOD.
Aldred strongly criticized partisan ‘party politicking’ which, she asserted, attempted to capitalize on 15 British combat deaths over a recent 10 day period to cast doubt on HMG’s prosecution of the war effort. "Both opposition parties are seizing every opportunity to attack the government," Aldred said.

Many of the comments put on the Telegraph website about their more recent article brought Andrew Marr’s comment on bloggers to mind – “the spewings and rantings of very drunk people late at night” etc. Margaret Aldred’s role as a top official was to support the policies of the government of the day, but the tone of the article, and many of the rather personal criticisms attached in the comments, failed to recognise this. Dannatt presumably saw his role at the time as supporting the British army, rather than the UK forces as a whole or the government. We now know that Dannatt and Number 10 had been at odds in late 2006 according to Jonathan Powell, and about Cowper-Coles’ version of his conversation with Dannatt in mid-2007 (earlier post). Then the goings on seemed to provide some sardonic amusement to a mere nonentity like me, albeit tinged with kleinburgerlich schadenfreude. However on this occasion that wouldn’t seem to be appropriate, and one’s sympathies have to be with the Madam Top Kneddy.

Watching BBC1’s Panorama programme on 14 February, Wikileaks: The Secret Story, and its depiction of Julian Assange, should increase anyone’s misgivings about Wikileaks. Listening to some of his former associates, the expression attributed to Lenin, ‘useful idiots’, came to mind. While it seems unlikely that the Wikileaks cables initiated the unrest which is spreading through the Middle East, we may well not yet appreciate all the damage that Assange’s activities can cause. The whole underlying principle seems dubious. A bank clerk who steals his employer’s money, even if to give to worthy causes, is a thief and goes to prison. Is that different from an employee who takes his employer’s confidential information and makes it accessible to the world, purportedly in the public interest? Wikileak’s first associate in the UK media was the Guardian. Assange, having fallen out with them, is now working with the Daily Telegraph, who ran the MP’s expenses revelations of 2009.

Kleinburgerlich Schadenfreude

Middle-rankers soon learn the pluses and minuses of coming into contact with “Top Kneddies”. FLIGHT International magazine (now lovingly preserved at Flightglobal/Archive) used to feature a humorous column, Straight and Level, whose author, 'Roger Bacon', poked fun at the top people in the air industry and related government departments, for example, in 19 February 1983:

Top Kneddy: Come and see me when you've got less time.
Bottom Neddy: It's this idiot Bill Walker MP with another Parliamentary Question asking how much it costs to answer Parliamentary Questions. Money isn't everything, is it?
Top Kneddy: Tell me something it isn't.

Of course, many people at the top are exceptionally able, grasping complex problems quickly and resolving them while inspiring their Bottom Neddies who they treat decently. They deserve their knighthoods (which presumably raised them in Roger Bacon’s eyes from Neddies to Kneddies). Others, I’m afraid, are less impressive: ambitious egotists, skilled at self-advancement, usually only mildly contemptuous of their underlings but that mainly to conserve their energies for doing down their rivals. So it goes. But it's difficult to resist some kleinburgerlich schadenfreude as provided by a recent public spat between two big cheeses, Lord Dannatt (until very recently Sir Richard) and the improbable sounding Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles.  (Western Independent has never had anything to do with either of them.)

Sir Richard was head of the British army (Chief of the General Staff) from 2006 to 2009 and Sir Sherard was British Ambassador to Afghanistan from 2007 to 2009. Their row seems to stem from Sir Sherard’s evidence to the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee in December 2010, in particular:

... 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.

When this was published in January, Sir Richard revealed his annoyance. His reaction in The Times was widely reported:

"I have great respect for Sherard Cowper-Coles as a diplomat but believe that many of his comments with regard to the military are somewhere between mis-judged and mischievous - they are largely based on snapshots and passing conversations,"
"He has strayed out of his lane in a most unfortunate manner - particularly on issues such as unit tour lengths and Army organisation. I would not dream of telling him how to organise an Embassy."

Cowper-Coles struck back: "He is lying, I am afraid. I can recall him saying it, sitting in his office in the Ministry of Defence."

This was already well up the Richter scale for Top-Kneddy-brawling-in-public when the next blow was dealt by Dannatt on BBC Radio 4's Today programme (as reported in The Guardian). Cowper-Coles views were "somewhere between outrageous and downright horrible". However,

"Sherard Cowper-Coles has withdrawn that remark and has apologised to me personally and is trying to find a suitable place and time to do that publicly.
"Sherard Cowper-Coles and I have had conversations about that this week. He has withdrawn that allegation from me and he has done that privately and is deciding how to make that public."

On 21 January the following letter appeared in The Times:

Sir, Following your report "We went to war to keep the Army busy, senior diplomat says" (Jan l4), and the remarks by General Sir Richard Dannatt on the BBC Today programme yesterday, there is some confusion about my position.
I have apologised to General Dannatt for suggesting that he had Iied. I used that word in an immediate and off-the-cuff reaction to being told that General Dannatt had completely denied having made certain comments about the deployment of troops to Afghanistan, at a meeting with me in his office in the Ministry of Defence in the summer of 2007. I now accept that General Dannat has a very different recollection of our meeting.
I have not, however, apologised for, or withdrawn, my evidence on this subject to the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee on November 9 last year.
SIR SHERARD COWPER-COLES

Cowper-Coles evidence to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee seems to have been in two parts, oral on 9 November 2010 and written. The oral evidence has no record of Questions 1 to 88, probably explained by:

Q110 Chair: Sir Sherard, may I share a problem with you? I have just been told that due to a technical glitch we failed to record the first 10 minutes of this session.
Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles: Thank heavens.
Q111 Chair: Maybe you feel relieved. Do you feel that you have covered the points that you wanted to make about the role of the military after those 10 minutes?
Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles: Yes. ...

Nothing in the oral evidence as published seems to relate to Dannatt’s remarks in 2007. But these do come up in Cowper-Coles’ written evidence which is dated 23 December 2010, then “Prepared 13th January 2011”. So it’s not quite clear what at the Select Committee his Times letter is about.

Dannatt has been a controversial figure for some time, as Blair’s chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, describes in extracts from The New Machiavelli: How to Wield Power in the Modern World:

... When Mike Jackson retired as chief of the general staff in August 2006, the MoD sent over to No 10 the CV of his proposed successor, asking for the prime minister's agreement.
Tony's foreign policy and defence adviser Nigel Sheinwald came to see me and we agreed that it wasn't worth consulting Tony about such a trivial subject.
A few months later we faced a serious problem with the new chief, Richard Dannatt, when he chose to attack the government through the pages of the Daily Mail while we were in St Andrews engaged in crucial Northern Ireland peace talks. Tony complained about him to me, and I, forgetting what had happened earlier, said that it was his fault as he had appointed him. He denied that he had and said he had never been consulted. I went back to the files and discovered that he was right and had to confess to Tony.

Blair was so enraged by Dannatt's attack that he met the service chiefs for lunch at the Ministry of Defence. Powell writes that Dannatt, an evangelical Christian, dominated the meeting.

Dannatt insisted on talking, and after a few minutes it was quite clear to me that he was unsuited to his job. Tony explained to those present that politicians would not support maintaining a first-division army if they were caused too much political pain by serving generals speaking out against their mission. It was always easier for politicians not to risk soldiers' lives. But I fear he was too subtle for Dannatt, who was divinely convinced of his own rightness.

After retirement, Dannatt seems to have been much better-regarded by the Conservatives than New Labour. At the Tory party conference in October 2009, David Cameron said:

I'm proud to announce today that someone who has fought for our country and served for 40 years in our armed forces will not only advise our defence team but will join our benches in the House of Lords and if we win the election could serve in a future Conservative government: General Sir Richard Dannatt.

However, the extent of Dannatt’s advisory role seems to have been fairly limited, and when his peerage was announced in November 2010 it was made clear that he will sit as a crossbencher in the Lords.