Her Majesty’s Wasting Assets

Andrew Krepinevicvh in the latest Foreign Affairs has a paper on ‘The Pentagon’s Wasting Assets: Eroding Foundations of American Power‘. I’m afraid it’s password protected so if you’re not a subscriber or haven’t access through your university you can just read the summary and an excerpt at the link. It’s really quite an impressive overview–’a bit technocentric, not surprisingly from CSBA’, as the friend who pointed out the article to me says,  but nonetheless clear-headed and showing strategic insight.

The first point that caught my eye relates to my question of a few days back about insurgents and ATGMs:

The growing range of RAMMs available to irregular forces is not the only, or even the deadliest, problem. The U.S. military has long enjoyed a near monopoly on the use of guided, or  ”smart,” munitions, which offer the enormous benefit of high accuracy independent of a weapon’s range. But now guided RAMMs (or “G-RAMMs”) are proliferating from powers such as China and Russia. Once these are in the hands of irregular forces, those forces will be able to hit targets with great precision and reliability. Moreover, such weapons do not require a high degree of operator training. As a harbinger, during the Second Lebanon War, Hezbollah irregulars hit an Israeli warship with an Iranian-made guided ASCM and destroyed or disabled over 50 Israeli tanks with sophisticated Russian-made guided antitank missiles. The ability of irregular forces to precisely hit critical points, such as airfields, harbor facilities, and logistics depots, will pose serious problems for the U.S. military’s way of operating.

There is a good discussion going on under that post about why insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan are not using such things. My view, at the moment, is that they aren’t because no states–yet–have thought it a good idea to provide them with the hardware. Why that is the case is another interesting question. Bottomline, however, is that highly capable and well armed irregulars are going to provide a main challenge. Overall, I think the piece really reinforces the premise of the hybrid wars concept that ‘asymmetric’ techniques will not just appeal to irregulars but that states too will (already do, I reckon) see this as the most effective way way to contest Western power:   

Several events in recent years have demonstrated that traditional means and methods of projecting power and accessing the global commons are growing increasingly obsolete — becoming “wasting assets,” in the language of defense strategists. The diffusion of advanced military technologies, combined with the continued rise of new powers, such as China, and hostile states, such as Iran, will make it progressively more expensive in blood and treasure — perhaps prohibitively expensive — for U.S. forces to carry out their missions in areas of vital interest, including East Asia and the Persian Gulf. Military forces that do deploy successfully will find it increasingly difficult to defend what they have been sent to protect.

As Krepinevich notes, we actually ‘knew’ this in 2002 when Marine Gen Paul Van Riper playing the Red Team in a war-game exercise modelling an attack on Iran successfully foiled a large US conventional attack, sinking or badly damaging a large part of the naval forces in the Persian Gulf but then managed to convince ourselves otherwise. That suspension of disbelief is getting a lot harder to maintain. The implications are large. What with aircraft carriers, short-range attack aircraft, low-orbit and potentially high-orbit satellites, all looking increasingly vulnerable and also irrelevant to the main sources of threat it would seem that we have invested an enormous amount in a few very expensive bits of kit. I like the way Gen Mattis encapsulates this, arguing that American forces risk being ‘dominant but irrelevant’ though Krepinevich seems to be suggesting the situation is even worse–neither dominant or relevant. 

Krepinevich’s paper is really about the US but the question is even more crucial to be asked here in the UK where the down arrows in the defence budget will be as sharp or sharper and from a lower base. The UK military desperately needs an overhaul based upon a clearheaded assessment of our real strategic needs. As Anthony Cormack and I wrote in our paper ‘Iraq, Afghanistan and British Strategy‘ in Orbis a couple of months ago:

The British government has not emasculated its defense establishment to the degree that has occurred on the Continent. Nevertheless, while the Labour government has shown a willingness to deploy the armed forces as an instrument of policy (however ill-defined), it has not shown an equal willingness to pay for the privilege. Where it has shown a willingness to spend, money has generally been put into big ticket items that will prop up the United Kingdom’s defence industrial base, which tends to be precisely the sort of spending that is of least use in the current climate. This was the case during the economic boom years and now there is no money left in the till. Defence spending is a zero-sum game and the situation is complicated by inter-service rivalry, as General Dannatt has recognized (speaking at RUSI in June 2008):

‘This is a joint and increasingly inter-agency activity and I would welcome the widening of what has been a largely Army debate to include the role that all environments can have in these most demanding and likely of operations. As I have said, I am sure that we will end up with some down arrows in our existing resource requirement in the Army, and I am ready for that debate right across Defence, where I expect to see other down arrows. Overall, we must recognise that we are unlikely to have enough to do all that we would like – we must now look seriously at what we really, really need.’

The incoming Chief of the General Staff, General Sir David Richards, has been making the same point and, in my view, suggesting the right course forward–see ‘Big Guns Don’t Win Today’s Battles‘ in the Telegraph from a couple of days ago commenting on his RUSI 2009 Land Warfare speech:

It is becoming clear that there is simply not enough money available to fulfil the separate aspirations of all three Services. To paraphrase Gen Sir David Richards, who spoke at the Royal United Services Institute on Wednesday, we can do many things inadequately or a few things well, but to try both will end in failure.

…

What Gen Richards is suggesting is that the military be put on a new footing to fight the wars in front of it and not those of yesterday. Old-fashioned wars between countries are unlikely; the future is about counter-insurgency battles, of the kind being fought in Afghanistan, with the Army taking the lead and the RAF and Royal Navy providing support. It is the “horse and tank moment” of the Thirties: whether to stick with the old or forge ahead with the new (Hitler, unlike Britain, went with the tank and bulldozed through Europe).

In the Guardian there are additional reports of concern about the state of the armed forces and its future development. From ‘Are we Getting Ready for the Wong War?‘:

Kearns [author of an Institute for Public Policy Research report on National Security in the 21st Century to be published on 30 June] said he was struck by how much spending was dictated by fierce inter-service rivalry and not long-term strategic thinking: “They get into a position of saying, ‘Well, if the air force is getting a Typhoon then it’s the navy’s turn next’, so they go for the aircraft carriers … There is a case for knocking heads together.” Professor Paul Cornish, head of the international security programme at the Chatham House thinktank, argues such rivalries have also weakened the MoD’s ability to plead its case inside government. “You can see the Treasury chiefs thinking, ‘They can’t decide anything because they are all at each other’s throats, so let’s decide ourselves’.” Yet the debate, he argues, should be “at the level of ideas and not at the level of the invoice”.

Amen to that, I say. There are hard choices ahead for the UK armed forces. To my mind, there are things that we really need–like a large ground force, supported by air and naval assets able to sustain operations in an era of persistent irregular conflict and better ability to shape the information environment–and things that which are merely nice to have. The nice-to-haves are, by and large, hugely expensive. I hope whoever wields the inevitable budgetary axe understands that there are no sacred cows.

Are British soldiers mercenaries?

The paper by Hew Strachan I mentioned last time makes another intriguing point:

The British armed forces are composed of volunteers who have enlisted because soldiering is their chosen career: in this sense (rather than in any pejorative sense) they are mercenaries. Britain has no tradition that men serve in the armed forces out of civic obligation, partly because it escaped the Rousseauist legacy of the French Revolution but principally because home defence has not been a prime requirement of strategy.

 I think that on this point, Professor Strachan draws the contrast between the military and civilian society too starkly. Civic obligation might not require that most British men serve, but nonetheless, I am sure that a great many of those who do are motivated by an idea of Britain and of its values, as well as by the desire to pursue their vocation in the military profession.

There is, however, a bigger point here about civil-military relations, and the separateness of the military from wider society – and on this I’m in complete agreement with Strachan. The military is necessarily different from the rest of liberal, postmodern British society, not least because – as I’ve written - its members must have a different view on killing and being killed than do many of us civilians. 
 
More broadly, the armed forces have a moral ethos that is radically different from societal liberalism that emphasises the individual’s worth. As Strachan writes:

The armed forces believe that they cleave to higher moral standards than civil society; that they elevate the collective good over individual needs; and that they do both for excellent reasons. Why, they ask, should they be required to forfeit such qualities? And, if they do, is there not a danger that they will fail in the next war? [...] The underlying tension in civil-military relations resides in the fact that civil society is predicated on an expectation of peace, whereas military society anticipates war.

This is convincing – the values of the British army have been tested in battle. I would though, add two important caveats: first, civil society does not always fit the neat liberal label I’ve given it. I suspect that old fashioned notions of patriotism, sacrifice and the greater good are still held by a great many civilians too. After all, many soldiers serve only a few years before returning to civilian society themselves. And second, soldiers may cede some of their rights as individuals while still holding to the importance of those values for wider society.

The article, well worth a read if you’ve got access, was written in 2003. Since then there has been much fretting within the armed forces about their relationship with wider society – what’s called the military covenant. One unpopular war in Iraq, and a troubled one in Afghanistan have exacerbated these concerns. But as public trust in other institutions crumbles, the military convenant seemingly remains strong.

Liberals like me seem to recognise that protecting our values sometimes requires the employment of people who voluntarily opt out of our ethical code. In that sense, Strachan’s point about mercenaries makes sense, provided the term is understood non-pejoratively, as he suggests. As a society, we have contracted out our defence to a group of people who espouse different values.

Kenneth Payne

Kinetic query

Are you familiar with kinetic warfare? If so, can you tell me where the term sprang from?

In military circles, talk of ‘kinetic’ and ‘non-kinetic’ approaches to warfare is rampant. It’s like Japanese knotweed. I recently read an assessment of the UK government’s ‘after-kinetic plan’ for Iraq – surely a ‘kinetic’ too far.

I’m interested partly because all this talk of kinetic clearly presupposes a contrasting  approach to the use of force. And so, I’ve just spent an hour or two trying to track down its origins;  but I appeal to the much greater knowledge of KoW readers. If you know when kinetic approaches started to feature in the literature or around the water cooler, please do let me know.

My first thought was to turn to the US AirLand battle operational doctrine of the 1980s. No mentioned of kinetic there, but then, perhaps that’s not so surprising in a document so overwhelmingly focused on conventional manoeuvre warfare. Still no mention in the 1993 version, and still none in the 2001 version either [pdfs].  

Next, I turned to the Joint Chiefs’ Joint Vision 2020 [pdf], which alerts readers to a ’system of systems’ that 

will provide the commander the broadest possible range of capabilities in responding to any situation, including both kinetic and nonkinetic weapons capable of creating the desired lethal or nonlethal effects.

 Joint Vision 2020 dates from May 2000. Clearly, though kinetic talk hadn’t yet made it into Operations doctrine, it was doing the rounds. Note that here the talk is about weapons, rather than broader approaches to conflict.

Finally, for this afternoon, I turned to JFCOM’s White Paper on Rapid Decisive Operations [doc], from August 2001. Again, there’s mention of kinetic:

“Strategic Objective to Task Linkage: [...] The means may be kinetic or non-kinetic means capable of creating desired lethal and nonlethal effects, information operations, or joint maneuver.”

The language is broader here: non-kinetic means, not just weapons, may be applied to create ‘effects’. There’s even more mention of kinetic and non-kinetic tools, weapons, means and options in an earlier version, from October 1999. But there’s no mention of kinetic in Ullman and Wade’s famous 1996 conceptual paper, ‘Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance’. [pdf]

One thing that’s clear from an afternoon spent reading doctrine and conceptual papers is that the English language often comes off second best in any encounter with military drafters.  The resultant headache made me think more broadly about the purpose of language in military writing.

‘Kinetic’, by my reckoning, serves three purposes: Most obviously, it clears space for thinking about the non-violent uses of military force. Second, it is a classic military euphemism to avoid plainer, more distasteful English words, like violent, or lethal force. And third, and most pernicious, like many military terms of art, it separates out a group of those in the know from those not.

A few months ago, General Mattis did a great service to US doctrine by pointing out that the terminology of Effects Based Operations left much to be desired:

We must return clarity to our planning processes and operational concepts, […] The use of effects “effects” has confused what previously was a well-designed and straightforward process for determining “ends.”

 I don’t feel quite so strongly about “kinetic”, but it is irritating when military writers take up an English word and wring the life out of it.

Perhaps they should issue incoming doctrine writers with George Orwell’s great essay on politics and the English language, in which he gives this sensible advice:

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?

Quite. Meanwhile – if you’ve any advance on the origins of kinetic - let me know.

Who should Red Team Britain’s SDR?

Again from the bureau of old news, via Abu Muqamama news that the next American Quadrennial Defense Review will be Red Teamed by some real heavyweights Andrew Marshall, director of the Office of Net Assessment, and Gen. James Mattis, commander of U.S. Joint Forces Command. It is long past time that the UK conducted its own Strategic Defence Review. The next government will certainly have to take this on as a high priority. So, my question is who should Red Team the next SDR?

Iraq, Afghanistan and British Strategy

KOW readers may be interested in this paper ‘Iraq, Afghanistan and British Strategy‘ which I wrote with Anthony Cormack that has just been published in Orbis (the excellent journal of the Foreign Policy Research Institute). Those of you with an ATHENS password can click on the link–others, get thee to a library! Regular readers may recognize some of the arguments which have been ‘test-driven’ on thsi blog. I’m afraid that our conclusions are rather bleak, although not as bleak as we imagined when we started to write it. There are some ‘green shoots’ to be observed. But not many, unfortunately and there are  a lot of challenges to be surmounted. Here’s a bit from our introduction and then the conclusion:

The British Army has struggled with ongoing campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan because, for reasons largely having to do with insufficientresources, it has not applied its own principles of counterinsurgency.Moreover the army today is a different force than the one that endured and ultimately ‘‘waited-out’’ the troubles in Northern Ireland; it is a much leaner ‘‘high-tech’’ force in structure, equipment and outlook. This makes it a formidable generator of combat power but compromises it in counterinsurgency.However, the root cause, given that a fish rots from the head, is that the British Government, in part as a reflection of public opinion, is lukewarm in its commitment to Afghanistan, mutedly hostile to the Iraq war, at the highest levels, and fears (probably correctly) that operations in both countries are undermining its domestic counter-radicalization program. The confluence of these factors has created a strategic void into which the Army has fallen.

…

Conclusion: Where Now?
When this article was in its embryonic stages, it was the conviction of the authors that virtually nobody, including the British Army top brass, was prepared to face up to some of the uncomfortable truths that have beset British operations since 9/11. This is no longer the case, though reform is in its early stages and remains somewhat tentative. Senior British officers, including Sir David Richards and Sir John Kiszely amongst a handful of others, have shown a willingness to engage with the problems at hand and to set things to rights. This is good news—so far as it goes. The problems to be faced, however, are drastic and do not represent grounds for great optimism.

Old Mother Hubbard SyndromeThe British government has not emasculated its defense establishment to the degree that has occurred on the Continent. Nevertheless, while the Labour government has shown a willingness to deploy the armed forces as an instrument of policy (however ill-defined), it has not shown an equal willingness to pay for the privilege. Where it has shown a willingness to spend, money has generally been put into big ticket items that will prop up the United Kingdom’s defence industrial base, which tends to be precisely the sort of spending that is of least use in the current climate. This was the case during the economic boom years and now there is no money left in the till. Defence spending is a zero-sum game and the situation is complicated by inter-service rivalry, as General Dannatt has recognized.

This is a joint and increasingly inter-agency activity and I would welcome the widening of what has been a largely Army debate to include the role that all environments can have in these most demanding and likely of operations. As I have said, I am sure that we will end up with some down arrows in our existing resource requirement in the Army, and I am ready for that debate right across Defence, where I expect to see other down arrows. Overall, we must recognise that we are unlikely to have enough to do all that we would like – we must now look seriously at what we really, really need.52

The army, unfortunately, is going to have to make some tough choices if it wishes to remain a viable force for counterinsurgency. In an ideal world, the army would get a larger share of a larger pie, but the fact is that army reformers may well have to be prepared to realign resources closer to home. This will be a serious test of commitment.

The structural issues challenging British counterinsurgent institutional memory have already been mentioned. The current conflicts do, however, offer the possibility that veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan will be able to form a cadre upon which the Army can build going forward. The question is whether these experienced troops, particularly company-level officers and senior NCOs, will stay around for the party. Recruitment figures for the army are reasonably healthy, perhaps a function of the economic downturn.53 Retention, however, is a serious problem.54 The question seems to be whether the Army can keep its best people or whether the accelerated operational tempo will drive them into the civilian sector—as seems to be the case at present. Moreover, given that seasoned officers and NCOs cost a great deal of money there is also always the possibility that the government will decide that after Afghanistan and Iraq making some of them redundant would be a good way to ‘‘trim the fat.’’

Did somebody mention strategy?

The situation—not least with regard to procurement and force structure—is complicated by the persistent lack of strategic direction. A new strategic defense review is badly overdue and work needs to be done on every aspect of national strategy from the grand strategic level downward. The last strategic defence review was conducted in 1998 with an update in 2002.55 At the moment, the British public possesses little sense of the reasons why the expeditionary operations in Iraq and Afghanistan are vital to their security and worth the substantial cost in men and materiel. Meanwhile there is an impending clash between the expeditionary campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan and the desperately failing domestic counter-radicalization campaign which is itself a counterinsurgent operation (though it is not acknowledged as such) of daunting scale. There is an increasing apprehension in government that the wars that Britain is fighting abroad are making the situation with respect to its own Muslim minority all the more volatile. This may well cause a readjustment of strategic priorities in the short- to mid-term.

In capsule form, the attitude of the British government is analogous to a certain breed of player in a high-stakes poker game. American readers should not underestimate the extent to which British ‘‘strategy’’ is motivated simply by the desire to be in the world ‘‘game’’ and to be partnered with the United States; policymakers of both major parties value the ‘‘special relationship’’ greatly. That is why Whitehall behaves strategically rather in the manner of an inveterate gambler with a small pot of chips. Britain wishes to stay in the strategic ‘‘game,’’ the rules of which are set in Washington, and it perceives that in order to do so it needs to place a stake on the table. That stake is the Army.

In the final analysis, the problems Britain faces in meeting the challenge of operations post-9/11 (and of formulating and sustaining a coherent national strategy) are extremely serious and the current Government seems unlikely to ride to the rescue with either better guidance and strategic direction or much more money—indeed less money is a possibility. Solutions, therefore, must come from within via professional self-criticism and the facing up to uncomfortable truths. Fortunately, professionalism is a quality that the army does not lack. John Nagl has written of the ‘‘flexibility of thought and action that has long been a tradition of the British Army.’’56 It is notable that despite all that has occurred, that the British Army remains amongst the most professional in the world. It is also extraordinarily psychologically self-contained, used to muddling through and expecting little else. It was that which underpinned its ability to meet the challenge of counterinsurgency in the past and it is that particular historical tradition that it may have to draw upon if it is to overcome current challenges.

Still a warrior nation?

In the Economist this week a hard-hitting piece on the British armed forces Losing their way?

…the armed services are going through unusually difficult times. This is challenging Britain’s belief in itself as a fighting nation with an important role in the world. The severe strain of waging two wars in faraway countries has been aggravated by undermanning and equipment shortages. More serious still is a new mood of self-doubt. The invasion of Iraq was controversial and its occupation inglorious; the campaign in Afghanistan is going badly. British commanders have belatedly realised that they have much to learn, or rather relearn, about fighting small wars in distant lands. “We have lost our way,” says one general.

Read it all. There is not much in it with which I’d disagree strongly. The British Army has struggled with the ongoing campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan because, for reasons largely having to do with insufficient resources, it has not applied its own principles of counterinsurgency to the task. Moreover, the army today is a rather different force than the one that endured and ultimately out-waited the troubles in Northern Ireland. It is a much leaner and more ‘high-tech’ force in terms of structure, equipment and in outlook. This makes it a formidable generator of combat power but compromises it in counterinsurgency. However, the root cause, given that a fish rots from the head, is that the British Government, in part as a reflection of British public opinion, is lukewarm in its commitment to Afghanistan, mutedly hostile to the Iraq war at the highest levels and fears (probably correctly) that operations in both countries are undermining its domestic counter-radicalization programme. The confluence of these factors has created a strategic void into which the Army has fallen.

Fresh from the Bureau of Old News

KOW has been very quiet lately. In the run-up to Christmas I had the normal rush of marking to complete. On top of that two writing obligations that could not be put off longer than they already had been. Then I came down with the sort of flu that reminds you that flu is not just a bad cold–truly, debilitatingly awful. And then my children both managed to get chickenpox. All better now, however, and feeling quite energetic for 2009. If KOW has any readers left here are a few thoughts on a selection of the zillion interesting things which have happened since I last blogged.

About a week ago Michael Portillo wrote a piece in The Times ‘Britain has Lost the Stomach for a Fight’ which caught a fair bit of attention in the blogosphere. Says Portillo:

Last week Gordon Brown announced a date for Britain’s withdrawal from Iraq. Most troops will be back in time for a spring general election. The prime minister posed with soldiers and expressed his sorrow over yet more fatal casualties in Afghanistan. He did not dwell on Britain’s humiliation in Basra, nor mention that this is the most inglorious withdrawal since Sir Anthony Eden ordered the boys back from Suez.

The fundamental cause of the British failure was political. Tony Blair wanted to join the United States in its toppling of Saddam Hussein because if Britain does not back America it is hard to know what our role in the world is: certainly not a seat at the top table. But, for all his persuasiveness, Blair could not hold public opinion over the medium term and so he cut troop numbers fast and sought to avoid casualties. As a result, British forces lost control of Basra and left the population at the mercy of fundamentalist thugs and warring militias, in particular Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army.

The reasons that I remark upon this piece are these: 1) with Anthony Cormack I just wrote a longish paper on this very subject which will appear in Orbis sometime which supports Portillo’s argument; 2) Portillo seems to me one of a relative few in Britain’s political class who seems actually to enjoy thinking about stuff; and, 3) because reading some of the comments on American blogs about this has sort of pissed me off. It would seem that some people are still smarting about Brigadier Nigel Aylwin-Foster’s sharp critique of the US Army ‘Changing the Army for Counterinsurgency Operations‘ in Military Review from a couple of years back. The extent to which the US defence community has been willing in recent years to meet uncomfortable truths head-on and to embrace reform is simultaneously commendable and testimony to the fact that there were serious problems with American strategy and operations. Aylwin-Foster’s paper was timely, constructive, and accurate; it would be good as Britain looks to its own house if we could keep the discussion on that plane.

Meanwhile, on Christmas Day, Channel 4 broadcast an alternative to the Queen’s Christmas Day message from Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Why did our other public broadcaster grant such an opportunity to the leader of a country which has armed and trained militias that have maimed and killed British troops and whose armed forces not so long ago kidnapped a group of British sailors? Really, why? Do you think Channel 4 is right in ‘offering our viewers an insight into an alternative world view’?

And finally just a couple of days ago Samuel Huntington died. When I was a grad student it seemed like no seminar (on practically any topic) was complete without at least one heated debate about the ‘clash of civilizations’. Come to think of it things haven’t changed all that much… It is a shame that he will be remembered so much for Clash of Civilizations which in many ways is his least good book. I was very much influenced by the Soldier and the State which was published in 1957 (I wrote my PhD on civil-military relations partly because of it).  I also think that both Political Order in Changing Societies (1968) and The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late 20th Century (1991) are excellent books. I like Huntington’s books for their breadth. (Yes, I know this is also the problem with them). To have written one seminal work would satisfy most scholars. To have written a handful over almost five decades is remarkable. I never met Huntington. I wish I had.

General Sir David Richards to be Chief of General Staff

General Sir David Richards who was ISAF commander in 2006-7 is to be the next Chief of General Staff. As it happens I was attending a conference last week in Reading at which he gave the keynote speech. That was under Chatham House rules so I cannot speak of the content. I can say that I was impressed by him and think this is a sensible appointment. Chatting afterwards it was he who directed me to the 29 September speech by Secretary of Defense Gates which I blogged about earlier. The Times report says that Richards is an ‘an advocate of stepping up attacks against the Taleban’ and that he believes ‘a “surge” of 30,000 troops was needed to fight the Taleban in Afghanistan, with 5,000 troops from the UK and rest from the United States and the newly trained Afghan Army.’ I have written earlier of Brigadier Carleton-Smith’s comments on the situation on Afghanistan which seemed to me not defeatist (as they have been portrayed) but realistic and clear-headed. Ultimately, I think the Afghan government and coalition will have to engage in some form of negotiation/reconciliation with the Taliban. But that negotiation will only be of use to us if it is conducted when we are in a suitable position of strength and the Taliban are convinced that they can achieve nothing through continuing armed struggle. Right now we are not in such a position of strength nor are the Taliban convinced they can achieve nothing through armed struggle–far from it. Hence I support Richards’ idea of an Afghan ’surge’.

Number 10: Provision of hospital facilities for soldiers fine as it is

A while ago on KOW I posted a link to an ePetition to (re)create a dedicated Military and Veterans Hospital to meet the needs of the large number of grievously injured soldiers whose needs are not being adequately met under current arrangements whereby repatriated wounded are treated by the NHS. A few minutes ago 10 Downing Street issued this response: No.

I think this is disappointing. According to the Government’s response the MOD’s Surgeon General has said:

“I am adamant that the interests of sick and injured Servicemen, both in peace and on operations, is best met by the current partnership between the Defence Medical Services and NHS Hospitals and that a return to Service Hospitals would be to the detriment of the increasing quality of care provided.”

It continues:

This view was supported by the cross-party and independent House of Commons Defence Committee in a report on ‘Medical care for the Armed Forces’ published in February this year. It found that:

“The principle behind the decision to move from stand-alone military hospitals to facilities which co-operate with the NHS was the right one, from a clinical, administrative and financial point of view.”

Are there any KOW readers who know when the Surgeon General said this? I’d also be interested to see the context of the Defence Committee report. Sentences which begin with ‘principle’ usually introduce some sort of caveat along the lines of ‘but…’ or ‘in practice…’ Perhaps the above is above-board but I sense there’s a bit of spinnning going on here. Good little research project for any student eager to get cracking on primary sources!

This part, however, seems to me quite wilfully obtuse:

The former UK military hospitals, which have been progressively phased out from the mid 1990s, increasingly failed to offer the range and volume of cases that military doctors, nurses and allied health professionals needed to remain at the leading edge of their professions. This is a pre-requisite for providing the best possible operational medical care which is at the heart of the Defence Medical Services.

That is why, in addition to the Royal Centre for Defence Medicine with its links to NHS hospitals in Birmingham, we now have arrangements with five major NHS Trust hospitals. They have all agreed to host MOD Hospital Units (MDHUs) to provide training, development and maintenance of the clinical skills of Defence medical personnel. The NHS hospitals that host the MDHUs are also close to military population centres, and so can offer local secondary care facilities for military patients living or working in the region.

It is precisely because our military medical personnel keep their skills at the forefront of increasingly advanced medical techniques by working in major NHS hospitals that our troops receive such unprecedented levels of medical care in our field hospitals in Iraq and Afghanistan. And, of course, our medical reservists who play such a significant role in our field hospitals have developed their life saving skills in the NHS.

Let me see what has changed since the mid-1990s? Could it be the 315 wounded in action and 1,583 personnel medically evacuated from Iraq between 1 January 2006 and 31 August 2008? Or maybe the 453 wounded in action and 1,302 personnel medically evacuated from Afghanistan between 1 January 2006 and 31 August 2008? Army medical personnel don’t need to train in big metropolitan hospitals to see blast and gunshot wounds anymore. Active military operations have alleviated that particular supply problem.And finally:

We fully appreciate the need for Service patients to feel part of the military family…

Would that I could believe this is true. But I don’t. I don’t think they get it at all. Wounded soldiers should not be convalescing in ordinary wards, isolated from their comrades and surrounded by people with no understanding of the war zone from which they have been evacuated.

A grateful nation?

Diligent readers may have noticed that I have not been blogging of late. Pressure of work, I’m afraid. But this story has driven back onto KOW simply to vent.

The BBC reports today that a hotel in Surrey refused to give a room to a British soldier. Cpl Stringer was on leave from Afghanistan to receive medical care in Britain, and was in Surrey to visit a fellow soldier, also injured and being treated in a local hospital. When Cpl Stringer showed his service ID card at the reception of the Metro Hotel, he was told that the management policy was not to accept service personnel. Cpl Stringer spent the night instead sleeping in his car.

What an utter, complete, bloody disgrace!!!

Cpl Stringer’s mother rightly drew comparison with how service personnel are treated in the United States:

“We’ve been to America and their military get treated like heroes over there. I think it’s terrible they [UK service personnel] can’t even wear their uniform with pride.”

I’ve also experienced first hand American public gratitude for their military. It left me wondering about the lack of openly expressed public appreciation in Britain.

The Armed Forces Minister made some bland comments suggesting that there was little the government could (or really would) do about this. I say, any company that discriminates against a member of the armed forces should be subject to an immediate, thorough and, I would hope, painful tax audit. If anybody from the Inland Revenue is reading this, the company owning Metro Hotel is American Amusements Ltd. This is where they can be found in Woking.