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Sleepwalking into Helmand
From the Daily Telegraph, excerpting a paper published in the British Army Review:
Writing in the British Army Review, an official MoD publication, Major SN Miller, stated: "Lets not kid ourselves. To date Operation Herrick [the British codename for the War in Afghanistan] has been a failure".
He claimed that hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers money had been wasted on a war which had failed to deliver any real reconstruction, governance or security.
Rather than "winning hearts and minds", Major Miller, who serves in the Defence Intelligence Staff serving Intelligence Corps, said the British presence had had the opposite effect.
But his most blistering attack was on the UK's counter-narcotics policy, where the illicit sale of drugs has been successfully used by the Taliban to fund the insurgency and kill British troops.
He wrote: "British policy towards the poppy crop has been an unmitigated disaster. The chief "effect" of the British presence in Helmand has been to transform Helmand into the opium centre of the world.
"This remarkable milestone was achieved just two years into the British intervention."
I recently read a much more sympathetic portrayal of the British efforts in the south that was co-written by Theo Farrell (who has a lot more love for the British Army than you would expect from an Irishman married to a Frenchwoman). And in conversations with U.S. officers in Afghanistan, it appears as if there is good understanding that the conflict in RC-South is much different from -- and in some ways more difficult than -- the fight in RC-East. Still, blunt talk from a British officer should not be ignored. And the British national security establishments have, if possible, emerged from Afghanistan with even more egg on their faces than their American counterparts. A U.S. Marine Corps officer I know who recently trained with the British reported they were all reading FM 3-24, largely because their own military has failed time and time again since 2005 to write a new COIN manual of their own.
Maj Miller claimed that the British government "sleepwalked" into Helmand in 2006 "without any meaningful reconstruction plan, without the resources to undertake-nation building tasks, and, critically, without any desire to fight a major insurgency".
He added: "It was thanks to the tenacity of the common soldier and the paratrooper that British embarrassment was saved."
A U.S. Marine Corps officer
A U.S. Marine Corps officer I know who recently trained with the British reported they were all reading FM 3-24, largely because their own military has failed time and time again since 2005 to write a new COIN manual of their own.
As you well know from Nagl, the British army doesn't really do written doctrine.
That's not to say that they've been doing everything they can to prepare themselves organizationally, but we should maybe take with a grain of salt the suggestion that developed written doctrine is essential to organizational learning or tactical proficiency.
I once heard Col David
I once heard Col David Benest, who was one-time COIN advisor to the Brit ambassador in Kabul and a man who has written and spoken about as much on COIN as any other Brit officer, give a talk saying that doctrine manuals were a waste of time - nobody reads them, and even if they do, nobody does anything just because it's in a manual. I see that he also gave a talk at Oxford University at which 'he suggested that too many strategy papers have been penned and disseminated, whereas the emphasis should be on getting on with ‘doing’.' [http://ccw.politics.ox.ac.uk/events/reports/tt08_benest.asp]
Good man, David, with lots of interesting things to say about Brit COIN experience - very British approach: suspicious of doctrine and of over-intellectualizing what are seen to be essentially practical matters.
KMF
I think the British
I think the British COIN/stability ops manual either just came out or is coming out soon, right?
I have just returned from a
I have just returned from a short trip to Helmand, where I spent time with both U.S. Army National Guard and British Gurkha police advisor teams. I was struck by two things: 1) The frustration the U.S. troops had with the British, whom they viewed as risk-averse, and 2) The fact that, contrary to my expectations, the British were the ones who, on joint patrols, were much faster to get out of their vehicles (little Land Rovers as opposed to huge MaxxPros) and spread out dismounted. Interesting stuff.
This should be no surprise,
This should be no surprise, the Brits were defeated in the field in Southern Iraq as well. I say this not as a slap against the British Army, whose troops I have personally seen perform briliantly and valiantly in combat, but as a rebuke for the lack of British political and moral will at home.
How is this different from
How is this different from any other conflict the British have been engaged in? They are the masters of "muddling through" on the backs of their own and commonwealth troops.
Not a fun article. On a
Not a fun article.
On a related note, according to the BBC (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8114054.stm) we are now counting number of IEDs defused as a metric. I've no doubt defusing IEDs is a good thing, but if that's all the good news there is...
Also, I doubt the Americans would classify 350 men as a major assault.
Sounds like you enjoyed it
Sounds like you enjoyed it Tom.
The article does not say that defused IED's are a metric and for the british it is a major assault.
The most scandalous British
The most scandalous British failing has been their terrible performance in training the ANP in Helmand and the South. Another important question is why 205th ANA Corps (British, Dutch, Canadian, Danish and other country trained) has performed so much worse than the more US trained 201st and 203rd ANA Corps (there has been substantial non US participation in training these two ANA Corps.)
What is wrong with the Brits and their OMLTs? Are the British soldiers really vested in training the ANSF?
How has British mismanagement been a factor in sharply increased support for the Taliban in Helmand and the South? Why are the East Afghan Pashtu (US troops predominate in the east) so much more anti Taliban than residents in British parts of Afghanistan (such as Helmand)? How has British incompetence lead to British trained ANA and ANP being much less popular in the South than the ANA and ANP are in Pashtu parts of East Afghanistan?
The most scandalous British
The most scandalous British failing has been their terrible performance in training the ANP in Helmand and the South. Another important question is why 205th ANA Corps (British, Dutch, Canadian, Danish and other country trained) has performed so much worse than the more US trained 201st and 203rd ANA Corps (there has been substantial non US participation in training these two ANA Corps.)
What is wrong with the Brits and their OMLTs? Are the British soldiers really vested in training the ANSF?
How has British mismanagement been a factor in sharply increased support for the Taliban in Helmand and the South? Why are the East Afghan Pashtu (US troops predominate in the east) so much more anti Taliban than residents in British parts of Afghanistan (such as Helmand)? How has British incompetence lead to British trained ANA and ANP being much less popular in the South than the ANA and ANP are in Pashtu parts of East Afghanistan?
The most scandalous British
The most scandalous British failing has been their terrible performance in training the ANP in Helmand and the South. Another important question is why 205th ANA Corps (British, Dutch, Canadian, Danish and other country trained) has performed so much worse than the more US trained 201st and 203rd ANA Corps (there has been substantial non US participation in training these two ANA Corps.)
What is wrong with the Brits and their OMLTs? Are the British soldiers really vested in training the ANSF?
How has British mismanagement been a factor in sharply increased support for the Taliban in Helmand and the South? Why are the East Afghan Pashtu (US troops predominate in the east) so much more anti Taliban than residents in British parts of Afghanistan (such as Helmand)? How has British incompetence lead to British trained ANA and ANP being much less popular in the South than the ANA and ANP are in Pashtu parts of East Afghanistan?
The most scandalous British
The most scandalous British failing has been their terrible performance in training the ANP in Helmand and the South. Another important question is why 205th ANA Corps (British, Dutch, Canadian, Danish and other country trained) has performed so much worse than the more US trained 201st and 203rd ANA Corps (there has been substantial non US participation in training these two ANA Corps.)
What is wrong with the Brits and their OMLTs? Are the British soldiers really vested in training the ANSF?
How has British mismanagement been a factor in sharply increased support for the Taliban in Helmand and the South? Why are the East Afghan Pashtu (US troops predominate in the east) so much more anti Taliban than residents in British parts of Afghanistan (such as Helmand)? How has British incompetence lead to British trained ANA and ANP being much less popular in the South than the ANA and ANP are in Pashtu parts of East Afghanistan?
perhaps from the pashto
perhaps from the pashto point of view this is the fourth afghan war for the british, have any of the units deployed there been involved in the previous three british afghan wars???
Well, 1 ANGLIANS are the
Well, 1 ANGLIANS are the descendants of the 44th Foot, which famously came to grief at Gandamack in 1842 (see Flashman - stand fast Forty-Fourth!) and they were out on Herrick 6...
How has British incompetence
How has British incompetence lead to British trained ANA and ANP being much less popular in the South than the ANA and ANP are in Pashtu parts of East Afghanistan?
How has the wording of your question led to your conclusion?
"As you well know from Nagl,
"As you well know from Nagl, the British army doesn't really do written doctrine."
Recent finds seem to suggest a wide amount of COIN and IS (Internal Security) literature created and provided by/to the British Army but a lack of a single unifying written doctrine (even if Britich COIN followed certain trends). The failure to provide a COIN manual now is a shocker though as troops lack the imperial experience of their predecessors. The fact that FM3-24 is being read shows demand for a British manual.
Of course bigger problems remain than doctrine. The key hindering factor behind much of the British failure has been the European Union but as the EU is hands down the most tedious political organisation in the world very little attention has been paid. The British Army's force structure, procurement and equipment are all focussed to allow the Army to act as part of the European Rapid Reaction force, a force so RMA that Rummy has a woody every time he hears about it. Hence the constant stream of casualties via IED because soldiers were in badly protected Land Rover's or Jackals, rather than MRAP's which don't fit the Rapid Reaction model. And so forth.
Sadly despite signs of self-criticism and increased intellectual awareness in the British Army I doubt it will come to much. The current campaigns are not essential to British interests and whilst plenty of blood and treasure has been sunk in, the UK has nothing like the USA's attachment to these conflicts and therefore none of the pressing need to reform. The collapsing British economy will almost certainly necessitate British withdrawal at some point in the next decade and cuts will probably neuter UK Armed Forces even further, though I hope that instead a bunch of Young Turks, blooded in foreign climes will instead reform the Armed Forces and streamline them for modern warfighting, cutting away large chunks of expenditure. Or possibly the Americans will expand their bonuses system, that has seen them paying the SAS serving alongside US forces, to the whole Army.
[anyone better on the UK Armed Force feel free to correct me, I'm only a humble student.]
"They are the masters of "muddling through" on the backs of their own and commonwealth troops"
Muddling? Had an awful big empire for an army reduced to muddling... ;)
You can get an amazingly
You can get an amazingly long way by muddling.
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