Center for a New American Security

It has not escaped the British Ministry of Defense -- excuse me, Ministry of Defence -- that we colonists have a rather more lively public debate on our defense policy than does the mother country. As such, the MoD has partnered with known Canadian David Betz and the Kings of War Blog (hosted by the War Studies Department of King's College London) to seek fresh ideas from the educated public. CLICK HERE to read about the project David and the UK's grandly titled "Strategy Unit"* have embarked upon. Be you British, American, a member of the Commonwealth or just a nerd with an interest in UK defense policy, sound off and write in with your ideas.

*The US translation of "Strategy Unit" is "Shawn Brimley".

Drop your COIN manuals!  Here are some more lessons we can learn from 19th-century Brits.  The link to the original text is there too.

Money quote (from page 10-11):

"Now no man of ordinary sense should for an instant attempt to make any sort of comparison between Regular and Irregular Cavalry.  There is no greater resemblance between them than between Macedon and Monmouth.  'Look you there is salmons in both,' but it goes no further."

There's actually an important lesson in there.  Apparently involving salmons.

Seriously, can we get more flowery analogies and alliteration into modern doctrinal publications?

The Guardian:

Sensitive files detailing the extra marital affairs, drug taking and use of prostitutes by very senior officers in the RAF have been stolen, raising fears within the Ministry of Defence that personnel could be vulnerable to blackmail.

The Demise of the British Army (Economist)

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.

Underlying this malaise is concern about Britain’s relationship with America, its most important ally. Generals worry that the United States is losing confidence in Britain’s military worth. Some Americans have indeed been expressing doubts: policymakers ask whether British leaders are losing the will to fight, soldiers whether their British counterparts are losing the ability to do so. There is talk that Britain is becoming “Europeanised”, more averse to making war and keener on peacekeeping. Britain remains America’s closest and most able ally; its special forces are particularly prized. But one senior official in the former Bush administration says there is “a lot of concern on the US side about whether we are going to have an ally with the capability and willingness to be in the fight with us”. He is bemused by the “tyranny of the lawyers” who constrain British military operations and dumbfounded by how “you only see British officers wearing their uniforms when they come to visit Washington, not in London.”

The Battle of Wanat, Part II, Part III, Part IV (Tom Ricks)

Lots of good op-ed and editorial columns today:

Enough with the Militarization, Already (The Washington Post):

Is it good that the U.S. military has taken the lead on, well, everything?

Trimming the Military Budget, Part I (The New York Times):

The F-22, the DDG-1000, the Virginia class submarine, the V-22, Nukes, (blue water) Navy and Air Force? All bad. The Army, Marine Corps, Reserves and (brown water) Navy? All good. Readers of this blog will note that the New York Times has a crush on us. Is this staff editorial, then, a love letter? Because you guys are harsher on the USAF and USN than even we are.

Trimming the Military Budget, Part II (The New York Times)

Time to plan -- and budget -- jointly.

Iraqi Soldiers Hooked on Drugs (The New York Times)

This isn't an op-ed or editorial. It's just a depressing article. You too will need Xanax by the end of it. There might have been some other good stuff in the Times today, but my mom had thrown the paper away by the time I returned home from church. (Where I prayed for the Iraqi Army.) I did not, I confess, get the chance to skim the Chattanooga Times-Free Press. This last article, though, comes via Dave at SWJ.

Why does our Army suck? (The Sunday Times of London)

Key graph: Pride has certainly come before a fall. British commanders underestimated both the enemy’s effectiveness and the Americans’ ability to adapt. Some apparently failed even to observe how much had changed. At a meeting in August 2007 an American described Major-General Jonathan Shaw, then British commander, as “insufferable”, lecturing everyone in the room about lessons learnt in Northern Ireland, which apparently set eyeballs rolling: “It would be okay if he was best in class, but now he’s worst in class.”

Goodness gracious. I'm not sure if the British Army is as rubbish as Michael Portillo thinks, but it is significant that -- after several years in which the British Army seemed to elude any criticism from the British press, which instead directed its barbs toward those ill-disciplined Yanks -- voices have emerged who have really questioned the effectiveness of the British Army in that mission at which they were supposed to be the acknowledged experts: COIN.

Dave tries to talk our pale friends back from the edge of the cliff here. I will say, though, that Portillo is wrong to say all the blame lies with the politicians. If the British have failed to keep pace with the Americans with respect to COIN doctrine, that is a failure of the British Army and its officer corps. I know several senior British generals who understand this, even if Portillo does not.

Was a good commander in Afghanistan, by all accounts. I didn't see this when it was announced. Hopefully he'll be what the British Army needs as well. I sat next to him at dinner once and made some snide remark about his beloved Welsh Rugby Team. He then turned to Nagl and told him that "Young Exum" should do a stint in the U.S. Army to teach me some manners. Nagl laughed and replied that the U.S. Army had revealed Captain Exum to be unteachable.

Picking up on Dr. iRack’s post below on the impact of British policy on the security situation in Basra, Britain’s much discussed competence in counterinsurgency has come under serious criticism recently. Speaking at an event last month, David Kilcullen knocked the early (2003-2004) British approach in Basra: “look at us we’re out on the street, [in] soft caps, and everyone loves us.” By 2006, in Kilcullen’s estimation, “the British army was defeated in the field in southern Iraq.” British operations in Afghanistan similarly failed to live up to the hype.

Daniel Marston, a former counterinsurgency instructor at Sandhurst argues that the British were not actually very well prepared for counterinsurgency operations as the outset. Instead of having deep institutional memory and competence for conducting small wars, there were “major problems with their pre-deployment training. There were a lot of problems with their education….the staff college had one day for counterinsurgency for majors. The RMA Sandhurst lieutenant’s course was a bit of a joke, bit of a video here and there.”

In fairness, there were a number of senior British officers, most notably General John Kisley who questioned whether or not the British Army really excelled at COIN to the degree they thought they did. Moreover, since suffering setbacks in both theaters, the British have undertaken a concerted bottom-up effort to re-learn counterinsurgency for the contemporary operating environment.

While Americans who are still sulky over the Aylwin-Foster critique would undoubtedly like to rub the Brits nose in it, it is worth taking a look at the impact operations in Iraq and Afghanistan have had on the British military. Keep in mind that, in terms of manpower and equipment, the British Army and RAF together are basically the size of the U.S. Marine Corps. Maintaining operations in both theaters has put a serious strain on the military. With only 50,000 deployable soldiers, present deployment cycles are estimated to lead to a crisis within 12-18 months. In an attempot to backstop the Army, the Royal Navy is planning its largest deployment on land in 50 years, sending 1,000 sailors to Helmand province in the fall to provide radio operators, drivers and medics.

Morale in the British armed forces is reported to be quite low and internal MoD surveys indicate that nearly half of all officers and men in the Army are considering resigning. This is compounded by a failure to meet recruiting targets. In addition to the operational tempo, resources for equipment and training are extremely scarce. Troy’s interlocutors have told him that, with the exception of funds for domestic counter-terrorism, the MoD is broke. (Though somehow that doesn’t prevent the Royal Navy from signing up to buy two aircraft carriers.) In one telling example, the military is so hard up for operational helicopters that they are considering renting them from third countries or perhaps Blackwater. Troy is not sure whether this should make you laugh or cry. Probably both…

Given the circumstances it is probably worth cutting the Brits a bit of slack…

With things improving in Basra, the debate has resumed about British vs. U.S. COIN tactics in Iraq. For a long time, the Brits claimed they were operating in a very different environment down south from the Yanks in the central and northern parts of the country. But with the Basra offensive, the American and British models seemed to be tested in the same laboratory. The early post-mortem is shaping up something like this: the Brits were too soft and accommodating, which led to the take-over of Basra by criminal gangs and Iranian-backed militias, while the Iraqi Army (with critical U.S. support) went in hard and the gangs ran away. Poof, presto, things got better . . . and it's all because the Coalition moved away from the British model. True? The Brits don't think so. They argue that, regardless of the merits of their earlier approach, what facilitated the recent success was the British decision to pull out of the center of Basra, pushing the Iraqi Army into the lead. So it is the Iraqi face on the operations, not the doctrine.

Who is right? Dr. iRack thinks its too soon to tell. But as readers ponder the question, check out this good piece in today's NYT.