Defence of the realm: but at what cost?
The defence secretary is playing hardball with HM Treasury, but the MoD needs much more than a budget increase before it's ready for action
Let me get one thing out of the way at the beginning. I have known Ben Wallace, His Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for Defence, for a long time. He became a Member of the Scottish Parliament on the North-East Scotland regional list when he was but a baby, fresh from the Army’s Active List; he turned 29 a week after his election. I was still a student at St Andrews, and, since he worked in Holyrood, a manageable car or train journey away, he was in high demand as a “name” for Conservative events, debates and the like at my alma mater. He seemed to enjoy the experience, and a lot of societies probably relied on him. I think he’s been a very capable defence secretary since he was given the job in July 2019, and it’s obvious that, as a former soldier, he takes his position very seriously. He is, in my view, A Good Thing.
Wallace has, I’m sure he would not mind me observing, been on manoeuvres. In advance of the Budget in March, he is locked in the death-like struggle with HM Treasury to agree the Ministry of Defence’s expenditure for the next few years, and, rightly, he is fighting his department’s corner stoutly. He admits that the unexpectedly high rate of inflation has eaten into the MoD’s real-terms budget, but he has stressed that this is a regular part of the process.
I’ve been in this game long enough, I have been a minister for God knows how many years [almost eight years], but it’s always an uphill battle with the Treasury, no matter what department you’re in.
His story is one which will be familiar to any secretary of state. He is outwardly the epitome of sweet reason, stating that he will not conduct negotiations in public, that the department must get through to the next spending review in straitened circumstances, and denying that he might resign if the chancellor of the Exchequer, Jeremy Hunt, does not grant what he regards as an acceptable settlement. Interviewed by Sky News last Wednesday, he was keen to de-escalate the situation.
No, no. Let’s just go to the budget, OK? I think, first and foremost, the most important thing is that I present a good case to the chancellor, a good case to the prime minister… Then, we will see, you know, what I get at the end. But this is not about resigning or anything else: it’s about delivering defence to meet the threat.
The Ministry of Defence is a big spender in Whitehall terms. It has a bigger budget than any department except Health and Social Care, Work and Pensions, Education and HMRC, with an annual spending pot of around £55 billion. This is a huge sum, and it is to an extent inevitable: the MoD has to invest in some very big-ticket items for its equipment: the lifetime cost of the replacement of our nuclear deterrent, carried by Dreadnought class nuclear submarines, is expected to be £31 billion; each individual F-35 Lightning II multi-role combat aircraft costs £85 million (which casts a new light on the fact that the Royal Air Force lost one of them in November 2021 when it crashed into the Mediterranean Sea while on exercise); while the troubled Ajax armoured fighting vehicle programme has already racked up a bill of £5 billion, and, incredibly, may never enter service.
There is an international dimension too. In 2006, NATO defence ministers agreed that all members of the alliance should spend two per cent of their gross domestic product on defence, though for most NATO countries this remains a “target” or “aspiration”. The UK meets the limit, as, of course, does the United States, by some way the world’s biggest spender on defence. The only other countries to reach two per cent are Greece, Poland, Croatia and the three Baltic nations; that leaves 22 member states out of 30 failing to meet a target which is almost 20 years old. But for a British defence secretary, two per cent of GDP remains a useful backstop in its struggles with the Treasury.
The blink-and-you’ll-miss-it government of Liz Truss had grand plans for defence spending. The prime minister made an “unequivocal commitment” to increasing expenditure to three per cent by 2030, which would have been the biggest rise since the days of the Korean War in the 1950s. The highly respected Professor Malcolm Chalmers, deputy director general of RUSI, published a paper in summer 2022 which put this into context: the armed forces would need a regular personnel count of 190,000 (it is currently 148,000) and would allow substantially greater support to Ukraine as well as an accelerated replacement attack submarine (SSN) programme, additional reconnaissance and transport aircraft and a firm commitment to the Future Combat Air System, the replacement for the ageing Eurofighter Typhoon.
In the handful of days before Truss’s fall became inevitable (or could be put to the back of the mind), this was a bonanza for the defence community. It was significant that some analysts (Chalmers among them) recognised that the uplift was so large that they could afford to be anxious about how the MoD would use the money systematically to grow the armed forces in a sustainable way and maintaining existing capabilities while accruing new ones. But the dream was short: Truss lasted 49 days as prime minister, the shortest tenure ever (unless you count the Patriot Whig the 1st Earl of Bath, who was appointed first lord of the Treasury on 10 February 1746, but had to return to the king and give back the seals of office, unable to find support for an administration, after “48 hours, three quarters, seven minutes, and eleven seconds”).
However, Truss’s predecessor, Boris Johnson, had also made some characteristically extravagant promises to the Ministry of Defence. In June 2022, he told a news conference at a NATO summit in Madrid that UK defence spending would rise to 2.5 per cent of GDP by 2030, on the grounds that “we need to invest for the long term in vital capabilities like future combat air, whilst simultaneously adapting to a more dangerous and more competitive world”. This was a more modest pledge than Truss would make in the autumn, as by last summer spending had already risen to 2.3 per cent of GDP because of increased support to Ukraine. But Johnson, true to form, was long on words and short on details: “The point I would make about the cost of freedom as it were, is that actually it is always worth paying.” Well, perhaps. But how?
Last weekend, The Sunday Times reported that Wallace was seeking an extra £8-11 billion from the Treasury over the next two years. This sounds a substantial amount, compared to the overall annual budget, and indeed it is, but the MoD maintains that it is needed merely to cover the costs of inflation, foreign currency fluctuations and the increased spending in Ukraine. Essentially it would only allow the department to stand still, rather than provide significant extra resources. Inflation hits the MoD particularly hard because of the size of the equipment budget (currently £14 billion a year), and an anonymous source in Main Building said ominously “The world has become significantly more dangerous, not less. It’s time to invest.”
Naturally—it is as formal and planned as a cotillion—the Treasury has pushed back at this demand. The chancellor is reported to want to keep defence spending around the two per cent NATO target until 2026-27, while pledging to increase it significantly to achieve Truss’s target (remember Hunt was her chancellor as well as Sunak’s) of three per cent by the end of the decade. Trying to dampen expectations, a government source told The Sunday Times that “the number is extraordinarily high”. Again, hard to dispute. The source sought to revert to a tabula rasa, noting that “the prime minister’s five priorities did not include an explicit commitment to defence funding”.
Wallace’s case in, in isolation, inarguable. Inflation is much higher than anyone expected, currently just over 10 per cent and very nearly double what it was 12 months ago. That will smash a hole in the procurement budget, which is already pared savagely and leagues distant from generous. In many programmes, there is no give at all; some systems require a minimum level to provide their overall capability, and if, say, the F-35 budget were cut significantly, it would become impossible to maintain an air wing for the carriers, HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales. The commitment to Ukraine is also obviously new, the conflict reaching its anniversary next Friday. It is unthinkable—well, almost; in government, nothing can ever be truly “unthinkable”—that we would diminish our support to President Zelenskyy, not least for reputational and presentational reasons, and would hand Russia a huge propaganda victory in doing so.
All of the above is true, but spending decisions are never made in isolation. With the economy still fragile at best, the Treasury is quite entitled to point out that increasing the MoD’s budget by a fifth means either raising taxes or making cuts in other areas of government. It is a brave politician who indicates what spending might be decreased to maintain the defence budget, rarely the voters’ most pressing priority. There have been a lot of rumours that increasing the MoD’s budget may come in the form of “back-loading” the latter part of the decade, hiking spending more steeply after 2026-27; but it has also been pointed out that there will be a general election before then, and a Conservative victory still seems a long shot.
The Budget will be unveiled to the House of Commons on 15 March. That leaves not much more than a fortnight for the defence secretary and the chancellor to reach an agreement. There is no potential outcome which doesn’t involve extremely tough decisions (“eye-watering” was a government source’s description) and no chancellor expects universal popularity on Budget day. But there are significant shortfalls still to be managed. A report by the National Audit Office in November 2022, The Equipment Plan 2022 to 2032, highlighted that the MoD’s assumptions include £3.2 billion in highly ambitious efficiency savings and £1.6 billion in savings on equipment programmes, while some programmes, such as the Type 32 frigate, have not been budgeted for, the plans withdrawn in July 2022 as unaffordable but now being factored into the armed forces’s overall capability. The NAO’s overall assessment was that achieving the equipment plan would be “challenging”, which in auditor-speak is at least DEFCON 2.
All of this, however, is being discussed without anyone being willing to acknowledge the elephant in the room. The Ministry of Defence simply does not work. The biggest problem is in procurement, where programmes regularly soar beyond budget and are delivered significantly behind schedule. Partly this is a reflection of the prominence of single-source suppliers, who represent a third of contracts in 2020-21, or a hefty £9.3 billion, awarded without competition. It is difficult to achieve any leverage over a supplier when they are, and know themselves to be, the only possible option. In addition, the MoD has proved itself systemically poor at risk assessment. The budget for the Poseidon maritime reconnaissance aircraft increased by £110 million between 2019 and 2021, largely due to fluctuations in foreign exchange rates.
What exacerbates the problem of procurement which proves more expensive and lengthier than originally anticipated is a consistent culture of failing to accept or attribute responsibility. A central register of learning from experience was only established in December 2020. A Public Accounts Committee report in November 2021 concluded that the department “lacks the skilled personnel” to manage relationships with suppliers effectively, despite 13 reviews of defence procurement over 35 years. A House of Commons Defence Committee report on armoured fighting vehicles two years ago described “a woeful story of bureaucratic procrastination, military indecision, financial mismanagement and general ineptitude”, which meant that the Army would be unable to generate a single division for combat operations. This means the UK would be unable to replicate our participation in Operation TELIC, the 2003 campaign in Iraq, while placing question marks over other deployments. In short, we would currently be hard-pressed to go to war against any sizeable adversary, even as an influential part of a coalition.
And there is no apparent accountability: since management of procurement and logistics were merged in 2007 to form Defence Equipment and Support (DE&S), not a single head of the organisation has received any censure, let alone been dismissed or retired early, as a result of failures in the procurement process. Indeed, the most recent chief executive of DE&S, Sir Simon Bollom, a retired air marshal, received £120,000 in bonuses in his five years in post.
The only “disruptive” appointment has been Sir Bernard Gray, who was chief of defence materiel, as the post was rather limply called, from 2011 to 2015. His background was emphatically not in the armed forces: after working as an investment banker and then defence correspondent at The Financial Times, then was appointed special adviser to the secretary of state for defence in 1997, first George Robertson then Geoff Hoon. He directed the drafting of the Strategic Defence Review, announced less than a month after the Labour government took office. This was to be a comprehensive, foreign policy-led reassessment of Britain’s defence priorities and capabilities, and excluded only the Trident nuclear deterrent and the Eurofighter Typhoon programme, both of which filled an obvious capability gap and were nearing completion. It would be the last wholesale review until the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition government took office in 2010.
That unusual and varied background came into play when, towards the end of the Brown administration, one of the ablest of Labour’s defence secretaries, John Hutton, invited Gray to undertake a review of defence acquisition. His deputy was the talented and experienced Anthea Dolman-Gair, a civil servant in her mid-30s who worked within DE&S, and whom Gray praised highly in his introduction to the review. It may be indicative of MoD procurement that by 2012 she had moved to the private sector. The review was, after some delays, published in October 2009 (by which time Bob Ainsworth had replaced Hutton as secretary of state), and its conclusions were damning.
The Gray review noted that the MoD’s equipment programme was “substantially overheated” and “unaffordable”, over-ordering and under-costing was rampant because programmes were almost never cancelled, no matter how far over budget they went, there was no top-down strategic guidance of procurement, and that huge costs were incurred by late-running and overpriced programmes as well as by having to keep older equipment in service during unexpected delays. A calculation across equipment programmes found that the average overrun was a frightening 80 per cent (or around five years), while the average cost excess was an alarming 40 per cent or £300 million. These exacerbated “frictional costs” to the MoD of a jaw-dropping £2.2 billion each year.
Even a man as straight-talking as Gray tried to find some solace, but could only find two issues of any weight: he accepted that the department’s commitment to improve procurement was “genuine” (damning with faint praise), and, more importantly, he praised the efficiency of the system of Urgent Operational Requirements (UORs), which identified and made good capability gaps exposed during operations. In Afghanistan and Iraq, UORs were responsible for the provision of the L129A1 sniper rifle to give troops greater range and 400 Mastiff and 160 Ridgback infantry mobility vehicles with improved armour and resistance to mines and improvised explosive devices. There is no doubt that the UOR system, funded directly from the Treasury, saved lives.
The review’s principle systemic recommendation was that DE&S should partner with a private-sector programme management organisation to give it access to the tools and skills it was obviously lacking. Gray believed this should be done through the creation of a government-owned, contractor-operated entity (a “Go-Co”), but he recognised that this would be controversial and that therefore it should be examined further over the proceeding 12 months.
By the time the review was received by the MoD, published and the government’s response to it given in the House of Commons, John Hutton was gone. The work and pensions secretary, James Purnell, had resigned from the cabinet in June 2009 because of disagreements with the direction of Gordon Brown’s government, forcing the prime minister into a desperate reshuffle to shore up his position. Hutton, regarded as very much a Blairite, decided that the Labour Party’s fat lady had sung, took the opportunity to leave the cabinet and announced that he would stand down from the Commons at the following election.
He was replaced by the experienced armed forces minister, Bob Ainsworth, but it was a surprising choice: the new secretary of state was a reliable minister of state, with something of the air of a patient sergeant-major, but had not generally been considered cabinet material. His bluffness, and an asthma-related illness which made him sound gravelly and short of breath, led many to underestimate him and regard him as intellectually lightweight. It was an unfair assessment, although Ainsworth himself said plainly that he was no great strategic thinker, and holding the post of defence secretary for the last year of the Labour government was never going to be a comfortable or profitable experience.
Ainsworth delivered his response to Gray’s review on 19 October 2009. Many of the smaller recommendations were accepted, though the defence secretary tried to make it sound as if the MoD and Bernard Gray had been singing from the same hymn sheet all along, but the major proposal, for a Go-Co to develop programme management skills, was rejected. Ainsworth did not believe, he told the House, that it would achieve the improvements Gray suggested it would. Instead he prioritised the close working relationship between DE&S and the department as essential to getting acquisition right. There was a great deal of criticism of what was seen as the government’s complacency, but, in truth, the matter was let drop: the House spent only 37 minutes on the secretary of state’s statement and questions thereafter. It was by now creeping towards an election year, during which defence regularly plummets down the list of voters’ priorities.
There were hopes that a breakthrough might be achieved when the coalition government took the bold step of appointing Gray as chief of defence materiel in January 2011. The defence secretary, Dr Liam Fox, described him as a man with “deep knowledge and experience of Defence generally, defence procurement specifically, of the Whitehall machine and the commercial world”. Surely, the implication was, the man who had written the very review in 2009 which had identified so many problems with procurement was the ideal candidate to take over DE&S and make good on his recommendations.
Gray spent nearly five years in charge of DE&S, and on balance his tenure was a successful one. He revamped the organisation as a government trading entity, with flexibility on issues like pay, arranged contracts with Bechtel, CH2M Hill and PwC to train staff in programme management and above all brought much-needed stability to Abbey Wood. Some accused him of having an abrasive management style, a claim he denied, but he certainly improved the condition of DE&S and was asked to stay on beyond the end of his term; the government wanted someone to commit to perhaps another four or five years, while Gray was only willing to stay an extra year, so he left as scheduled with a knighthood.
Eight years on, however, it is evident that Gray’s improvements did not substantially outlast him. Ajax—which had its roots further back even that Gray’s tenure, in the Future Rapid Effect System (FRES) requirement of 2004—has been perhaps the most egregious failure of the procurement process, but it is clear that cost overruns and time delays are so rife as to be almost universal. This indicates not only that skills remain lacking in DE&S and the MoD more broadly, and that lessons are not being learned. If, as is entirely possible, no Ajax vehicles are ever delivered for operational use, more than £5 billion of taxpayers’ money will have been spent with literally nothing to show for it.
An upbeat article in Civil Service World last November by supply chain specialists Proxima asserted that “we are seeing a perfect storm brewing in defence procurement”, with rising defence spending, a need to replenish UK stocks of ammunition and other items, and a potentially lucrative international market as other countries do the same. It goes on to offer rather generic platitudes under the flesh-crawling heading of “three key learnings”, but the article makes the point that we do face an interweaving of opportunities, though they are equally tangled up some very serious failings. If DE&S and the UK defence industry are to take advantage of the circumstances, they must have the capability to do so.
The government provides a great deal of information about its procurement processes. There is no doubt that some of these are not working, but it may also be that a greater failing rests in how they are operated. My own feeling is that cultural problems—optimism bias, lack of commercial nous and experience, willingness to trade cost overruns for delays, major lack of individual accountability—are insidious and will poison the well of any structural attempts to improve systems and procedures. But, for the very reason that they are cultural and insidious, they are the most challenging problems to solve. I cannot easily see beyond the imposition of a kind of Year Zero within DE&S, effectively saying that all mistakes and mismanagement before a certain point will be regarded as historical, but that there will be much stricter forms of accountability, both organisational and personal, as the organisation goes into the future.
This is not some unsurmountable or impossible task. Programme management is one of the functions carried out by DE&S which most resembles an activity in the private sector. Accountability and performance management exist there, so there is no reason which they cannot be mapped across, perhaps not identically but broadly the same, to the public sector? There will be difficulties, wrinkles to be ironed out, but all of these have to be subjugated to the fact that we have been failing properly to manage acquisition for more than 20 years—perhaps much longer than that—at the cost of billions of pounds. That is a huge amount of money which could be spent elsewhere, something that should be remembered by ministers every time they have to turn down some small project or expenditure which might represent only tens of millions of pounds. Responsible public expenditure is not only a duty to those who supply the resources, the tax-paying public, but also a critical driver of performance and morale inside government. Picture a three-month delay on a major procurement project as a few degrees of efficiency chipped away from the edifice of the governmental machine. They may be small in themselves, but we cannot expect the public sector to survive death by a thousand cuts of mismanagement.
The issue of accountability is a wider one than just the procurement function of DE&S. It is about the relationship which the “professionals” of the MoD and armed forces—the service personnel and the civilian employees—have with their political masters. We have traditionally relied very heavily on the convention that ministers take decisions and shoulder responsibility, while officials advise, but, in return for not having control over the final decision, they are not held ultimately accountable. The edges of this convention are now fraying very badly, especially as Whitehall seems to be suffering from a culture of mutual distrust between ministers and officials. The disintegration of relations between the then-home secretary, Priti Patel, and her permanent secretary, Sir Philip Rutnam, in 2020-21, which led to a legal settlement of £376,000 in Rutnam’s favour and the finding by the independent adviser on ministerial standards that Patel was guilty of bullying, was only the most lurid example of a chill setting into relations between the political and permanent leadership of Whitehall.
And this issue has lapped at the shores of the MoD too. Sir Stephen Lovegrove, the permanent secretary from 2016 to 2021, was criticised in some quarters when he told a staff call in June 2020 that supporting Black Lives Matter was “not a political position at all”, and therefore wholly appropriate for civil servants (who are required to refrain from any activity which could be regarded as party political). Given BLM’s positions on imperialism, capitalism and “white supremacy”, some felt that this was a hostage to fortune for the impartial head of the Ministry of Defence. Lovegrove fell foul of political events once again after his time in Main Building; in March 2021 he was appointed national security adviser to succeed the acting David Quarrey, after Mark Sedwill’s departure the previous September. Lovegrove had only been in post for 18 months when Liz Truss assumed the premiership last September, and he was shifted to a new post of defence industrial adviser, allowing Sir Tim Barrow, a Foreign Office mandarin, to become NSA.
Yet, almost paradoxically, the senior armed forces personnel face none of this pressure. Simon Akam, in his 2021 book The Changing of the Guard: The British Army since 9/11, makes the observation that “no British general was fired or resigned over Iraq and Afghanistan”. These deployments, Operation TELIC and Operation HERRICK, can hardly be regarded as failure-free, textbook campaigns, yet it seems that when things go wrong operationally, it is somehow an anonymous, impersonal fact of life, or perhaps an act of God. It is indisputable that British forces made strategic and tactical mistakes, that setbacks were often of our own making rather than simply force of circumstance, but the armed forces have created a narrative almost of victimhood—this is something I want to return to in the future in more depth—to portray themselves as doing their best, no matter what challenges are thrown their way and however heavy the odds against them.
One way in which this is done is by a refocusing on how we see the human costs of war. The novelist and journalist James Meek captured it perfectly in an article in the London Review of Books, covering several volumes about Afghanistan, when he said:
The acceptable form of exculpation and remembrance involves obliterating any consideration of dead Afghans and folding the British war dead into a single mass of noble hero-martyrs stretching from 1914 to now.
Ultimately it is disempowering and its saps morale, but one obvious effect is that it abdicates any individual responsibility. But it is not a universal military condition. One might, of course, look at the progress of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, during which Vladimir Putin has freely sacked general after general. More comparably, after the failure of the Israeli Defence Forces to achieve a clear victory in their conflict with Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2006, the chief of staff of the IDF, Lieutenant General Dan Halutz, was heavily criticised for his direction of the campaign and his position was weakened to such an extent that he resigned over a number of scandals in January 2007. This followed the resignation in September 2006 of Major General Udi Adam, head of Northern Command, bordering Syria and Lebanon, who had already been sidelined at the beginning of the conflict because of his handling of operations.
(Ironically, there was a British resignation over the war in Lebanon: Jim Sheridan, Labour MP for Paisley and Renfrewshire North and an enthusiastic partisan of the Palestinian cause, stepped down as a parliamentary private secretary at the MoD in protest at the government’s largely positive attitude towards Israel during the conflict.)
I absolutely don’t suggest that we pick a general from the Active List and dismiss him (or her; there is currently one female general, Lieutenant General Sharon Nesmith, deputy chief of the general staff) pour encourager les autres. But we cannot imagine that senior officers are merely passive recipients of orders; admirals and generals and air marshals are intimately involved in the decision-making process of international security policy, rightly so. But they should not be absolutely insulated from any consequences.
Yet if you try to find the last example of a general officer removed from his post for operational failure, as far as I can find, you have to go back to the Second World War. The closest example I can find is of Brigadier Tony Wilson, late King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, who commanded 5th Brigade during the Falklands War; he was responsible for the southern flank of British forces on East Falkland as they approached Stanley in June 1982, and his indecision resulted in the exposure to air attack of RFA Sir Galahad, the crowded landing ship which was bombed with the loss of 49 lives. Wilson was widely blamed for that loss and regarded as incompetent, but he was not dismissed. His fate was not to receive an honour or decoration after the war, the only senior British officer not recognised, though in 1991 he would inherit his father’s baronetcy. He retired from the Army on 31 January 1983, probably having been informed that his career would not progress further, but being denied a medal and then advised to quit as a 47-year-old one-star is hardly the deepest disgrace.
Very occasionally, general officers are required to resign. In 2021, Major General Chris Bell, GOC Army Recruitment and Initial Training Command, was forced to resign his commission after lying about a relationship with a female junior officer; while in 2019, Brigadier Alex Macintosh, late Welsh Guards, was forced to step down as military adviser to the King of Jordan after he became seen as too close to and too influential with the sovereign, attracting the distrust of Jordanian politicians. But this was a local issue and Macintosh returned to the UK to take up another appointment.
We seem to have, therefore, virtually no accountability for serving officers of one-star rank and above. Only time will tell whether Afghanistan or Iraq go down in those minatory annals of “worst defeats in British military history”, but one could certainly select as a competitor the occupation of Basra in 2003-04. During and after the invasion in March 2003, British forces had been allocated supervision of the southern part of Iraq, based on the city of Basra. The senior British land commander was GOC Multi-National Division—South-East, a force based on a British division but augmented by troops from other coalition partners. Much had been made before the war of the British Army’s long experience of counter-insurgency and security experience, especially in Northern Ireland (Operation BANNER), and we had deliberately pursued a low-key approach, deploying soldiers in soft hats rather than helmets and on approachable foot patrols rather than buttoned-up in armoured vehicles.
By 2004, the British chain of command felt that it was largely “mission accomplished” in Basra, and Lieutenant General Rob Fry RM, deputy chief of the Defence Staff (Commitments) was instructed to draw up plans to move troops from southern Iraq to southern Afghanistan, where NATO was hard-pressed by the Taliban. It seemed an obvious move. If peace was largely maintained in Basra, the forces could be redeployed to Helmand Province, exchanging an unpopular conflict for one which still had some public support, and the MoD felt that supervision of Helmand was a task of about the right size for the UK’s capabilities and resources.
If it seemed a simple proposition to our leadership, it was much less so to the US. As James Meek describes it:
This was not the situation as the US saw it. Senior American officers in Iraq had become weary of British boasting of their superiority in counter-insurgency. What the Americans saw in Basra was worsening security and Britain losing control. What they wanted in 2004 was more British troops in Iraq, not for the troops already there to move to another country. They saw a defeated ally coming up with a cover story for retreat.
This was, then, a catastrophic miscalculation, not only on an operational level but on a diplomatic one. Our full-throated commitment to the invasion of Iraq had been made primarily to cement our status as the US’s most reliable, most faithful ally, their go-to guys. Tony Blair, having found an unexpectedly warm personal connection with President George W. Bush, wanted to re-imagine the so-called “Special Relationship” as the United Kingdom playing the part of the trusted retainer. As we know now but did not then, Blair had written to Bush in 2002, six months before military operations began, pledging “I will be with you, whatever”.
(This is not the place to expand too much, but it is a fascinating approach to policy. For once, Blair was being deeply transactional and failing to see the bigger picture. What he had done was effectively to abdicate our strategic decision-making to Washington. What we would do is concentrate on how closely we could cleave to the US, how much we could please them, rather than to question why they, and therefore we, were doing what they were doing. I am not 100 per cent certain this was the wrong policy, but it was a very striking direction to take. It supplanted “why” with “how”.)
In September 2004, Fry presented a draft plan which saw UK troop levels tapering smoothly while numbers in Helmand rose, and at a certain point those lines would cross. The whole plan, however, was based on the assumption that we had done enough to pacify Basra so that our departing soldiers would not need to be replaced like for like. But we had not. In fact we needed more troops in Basra as well as in Helmand, but we had insufficient resources for two simultaneous deployments. We were struggling to manage one. So delays began to creep in. The security situation in Basra, far from being stable, was worsening, and continued to do so after the election of a democratic Iraqi government in 2005. Iranian-backed militias were growing in strength and presenting an ever-more-severe challenge to coalition forces, shooting down a Lynx helicopter with a ground-to-air missile in May 2006.
By the time I visited Basra for the first time with the House of Commons Defence Committee in July 2007, British forces were restricted essentially to the fortified Contingency Operating Base at Basra Air Station and the Provincial Joint Coordination Centre at Basra Palace in the centre of the town. The urban area was regarded as generally hostile, and resupply operations from the COB to Basra Palace required heavy escort including Challenger 2 main battle tanks. Some months after our visit, we published a report entitled UK land operations in Iraq 2007, in which, without revealing the classified information to which we had been privy, we attempted to capture the mood and atmosphere of southern Iraq. It bears reading (it is short).
Why am I dwelling on this at such length? I think it is indicative of a cultural aspect of the armed forces. The British stewardship of southern Iraq from 2003 to the handover to US troops in March 2009 was more or less a disaster. For all that we perceived minor improvements in the security situation at the time, we were rarely able to do more than hold the line against the various militia groups, and at times were penned into fortified compounds like besieged castles in the Middle Ages. Rarely, if ever, did we manage to dictate the strategic situation or put ourselves on the front foot; worse, though, certainly in the early years, we told ourselves that we had done a good job, using our Old World sophistication and experience to engage with the local population and appear as the liberators we felt ourselves to be, not the occupiers as which we were too often painted. Our greatest success, in truth, was weaving a positive narrative which we ourselves believed. But with it we committed our worst blunder: failing to realise that our allies and patrons, the Americans, were not taken in by it. Writing in The Atlantic in 2021, Simon Akam put our tenure of Basra on a par with Suez and the fall of Singapore as a military failure and humiliation.
Who paid the price for this concatenation of falsehood, self-deception, strategic misapprehension and sheer poor performance? Well… no-one. As Akam noted, no general was dismissed. It is true that after the 2005 general election, the long-serving defence secretary, Geoff Hoon, was shifted from the MoD to be lord privy seal and leader of the House of Commons, at best a sideways move; but he had been secretary of state for defence for five and a half years, had survived the scandal of Dr David Kelly’s apparent suicide and his demise had been predicted for at least two years. He had been an indifferent defence secretary at best, rather overrated by the service chiefs at first, but, apart from following slavishly Downing Street’s presentation of intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war, had committed no huge solecisms. So the responsibility for Basra was not pinned on him.
Certainly Rob Fry was not damaged by his connection with the plan to move troops to Helmand. In March 2006, he became the senior British commander in Iraq (and deputy commanding general of Multinational Force, Iraq) then retired from the Royal Marines in 2007. Having reached the highest regular rank he could, he slipped seamlessly into the role of CEO of HP Enterprise Services Defence & Security UK, running a business worth $1.5 billion, moved to be chairman of McKinney Rogers International in January 2010, then assumed the chair of Albany Associates in 2011. He is a knight commander of the Most Honourable Order of the Bath, and a commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. It is not a career blighted by involvement in failure.
It is not that no lessons were sought. In 2009, as the Labour government’s strength began to wane, the Ministry of Defence (by then with Bob Ainsworth at the head) commissioned Lieutenant General Chris Brown, late Royal Artillery, the final senior British military representative in Iraq, to examine Operation TELIC from a military perspective, from the build-up to war in 2002 to our departure from Basra in 2009, and put together an analysis of the armed forces’s performances and a series of recommendations to set right failures which were uncovered. The Operation TELIC Lessons Compendium was published, in redacted form, in April 2011 by the coalition government, but, as the wider inquiry into the Iraq war headed by Sir John Chilcot was then still underway (it reported in July 2016), the government declined to offer a point-by-point commentary on Brown’s work.
Still, however, no individuals were identified. Next month is the 20th anniversary of the beginning of military operations against Iraq, and no-one has been formally held responsible or removed from office or post because of failings relating to Operation TELIC. Lest the reader think I am obsessed with the idea of a witch-hunt, a show trial or a scapegoat, I stress that this is a presentational and cultural issue and it has broad implications: within the armed forces and the civilian MoD staff, there has been no sanction pour encourages les autres, and the electorate sees only the orphan of failure running unsupervised, unclaimed by anyone. The same has been true in the US; as veteran journalist and historian Thomas E. Ricks has noted, the highest-ranking US officer to be relieved of command was Colonel Joe Dowdy USMC, commanding officer of the 1st Regimental Combat Team, who was dismissed on 4 April 2003. At the time, his immediate superior, Major General James Mattis USMC, later US secretary of defense, declined to comment on the dismissal, but it was later revealed to be because Dowdy was thought to have failed to keep up the tempo of operations adequately.
In fairness to the MoD leadership, both civilian and uniformed, it is very difficult to identify one person adequately responsible for the deployment to Basra and its management. British generals undertook six-month tours of Iraq, almost laughably short, while further up the chain of command, tenure was often not much more than a couple of years (Fry, for example, spent three years as DCDS (Commitments) but his successor served only one year and the next incumbent only two). But the response to a complicated chain of command and diffuse authority is not to dismiss the problem as too hard and move on.
Akam cites Suez and Singapore as analogous in disastrous nature: the prime minister, Sir Anthony Eden, resigned because of Suez, and after the fall of Singapore the war secretary, David Margesson, was dismissed (despite in no way being at fault), while GOC Malaya Command, Lieutenant General Arthur Percival, GOC III Indian Corps, Lieutenant General Sir Lewis Heath, and most of the senior officers became prisoners of the Japanese. One, the Australian Major General Gordon Bennett, GOC 8th Division, escaped and returned to Australia, initially received as a hero, but a royal commission after the war found he had disobeyed orders to surrender and left his post without permission. There seems no appetite for a similar reckoning over Basra.
All of this began with the current defence secretary pitching for a budget increase. It is, of course, significant for him and the MoD how much the department is awarded in the chancellor’s settlement. But, like many of our vital and revered public institutions, we miss the point if we attempts to address faults and weaknesses simply by tipping in more cash. There are systemic problems in Main Building, more of them than I have highlighted here, but consistently incompetent procurement and complete lack of personal accountability are very high on the list. Of course anyone who supports the armed forces hopes that the Treasury will find more money, perhaps billions of pounds, but that is treating a symptom rather than a cause. Going to Jeremy Hunt for contributions is, if you like, emergency care; for long-term therapeutic treatment, Ben Wallace must look within the thick walls of his fortress on Whitehall.