Rachel Sylvester’s column today, highlighted by Pete this morning, raises the question of who should take the blame for the decline in Britain’s utility as a combat ally. This is principally a result of this country fighting wars on a peacetime budget. It was one of Tony Blair’s great failings that he did not tell Gordon Brown that the need for a serious and sustained increase in defence spending was non-negotiable. (When Brown became Prime Minister, the military had to fight two wars for a year without even a full time Secretary of State for Defence).
What the military can be faulted for is a series of high-handed comments and articles about the failings of the US military when it came to counter-insurgency. These were not politic. More seriously, the British military—unlike its American counterparts—has failed to learn the lessons of its recent campaigns. The Americans are now the more skilled force at counter-insurgency.
What has really hurt the special relationship, though, is the Basra debacle. David Kilcullen, an Australian who was General Petraeus’ chief counter-insurgency advisor, has said:
“I think it would be fair to say that in 2006, the British army was defeated in the field in Southern Iraq.”
When we have a public inquiry into Iraq it must concentrate on where the decision was made to effectively hand the city over to Shiite militias. Who made this call—the political advisors on the ground, the Ministry of Defence or 10 Downing Street? Those who did need to be held to account just as much as those responsible for the intelligences failures in the run up to the war.
An increase in defence spending must be a priority for the next Conservative government. The aim should be to raise defence spending over the next decade from 2.6 percent of GDP to 4 percent. But the military’s strategy also needs to be rethought. It would be sensible to ask Lord Ashdown, who has immense experience from his stint in Bosnia, to draft a nation-building doctrine for the British military that would be the intellectual equivalent of Petraeus’ Counter-Insurgency Field Manual.
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