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Former Head of British Army Attacks Ministry of Defence, PM
General Sir Mike Jackson, formerly Britain’s Chief of the General Staff, gave the annual Richard Dimbleby Lecture on BBC One on Wednesday. Having spent nearly 45 years in uniform, his lecture was a topic for which he is uniquely qualified, “The Defence of The Realm in the 21st Century.” After a discussion of Britain’s military commitments around the world, he turned to a rather uncomfortable truth, Her Majesty’s Ministry of Defence and Mr. Blair’s government have failed, and continue to fail, to give the men and women in the field the support they need.
Sir Mike said, “Throughout my career, I have been taught, and I have striven to instil, that soldiering requires the Army’s leaders always to have in the forefront of their minds that it is the soldiers themselves who will make the endeavour succeed; one’s loyalty must be from bottom up. Sadly, I did not find this fundamental proposition shared by the MoD.” He added,
There is far too much reverence for process. The purpose of process is to achieve an outcome, to achieve the mission; it is not the purpose of process to maintain process. As an example, I recently read of a senior MoD civil servant quoted as saying of an even more senior MoD civil servant that the latter was ‘not just leading the workstream process, but driving it’. I hope he knew what he meant -- I'm not sure I do. All of this matters, because process is an overhead; the more that overheads can be reduced, the more capability we can obtain from a given defence budget.
To put it another way, “No combat ready unit has ever passed inspection. No inspection ready unit has ever passed combat.” Sir Mike added, “The Armed Forces’ contract with the nation which they serve, and from which they very largely recruit, is to take risks, if need be, the risk of life. But this must be a two-way contract, it has to be reciprocal.” Sir Mike is clearly a soldier's general, who are the only ones worth following.
Yet junior officers get £1,000 a month, and “some accommodation is still, frankly, shaming and hemmed around by petty regulations,” the general said. “If you will the military means, you must also will the financial means. I am confident that the Nation trusts the Army to do that which it is directed to do, and in which it succeeds; that trust must be reciprocated - the Nation, represented by the duly-elected Government of the day, must provide all the tools that the job requires. It is indeed a great support to hear the Prime Minister say that ‘the Army can have everything it needs’; I await with interest the manifestation of that fine sentiment.” One hopes Sir Mike would not take umbrage at being told he might have made a fine diplomat.
On both sides of the Atlantic, it seems that civilian leaders have wanted aggressive war on the cheap, and it is the people in uniform who suffer. First, they will pay on the battlefield in blood, which was part of their deal. Second, they pay by having their needs ignored while in uniform and being denied the help they need afterward. “Support the Troops” should be more than a bumper sticker; it should be government policy. Along with the general, one awaits “with interest the manifestation of that fine sentiment.”
© Copyright 2006 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.
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