As I noted on KOW a few months back the Ministry of Defence has decided to shut down the Research and Assessments Branch after forty years. Quite honestly, I don’t get it. Nobody gets it. MOD maths are curious. At the same time as the military and political leadership is saying that there has hardly ever been a greater need for strategic thinking why cut this particular part of the institution? Is it just value for money? Here’s some food for thought:
The Research and Assessments Branch comprises by my estimate 4 Senior Research Fellows, 5 Analysts, 5 Scholar-Practitioners, 7 support staff and possibly a handful of others. Meanwhile according to Michael Evans in The Times ‘MOD Faces Questions on Why the Army Majors on Generals‘ there ‘are now 65 generals in the Army, with 43 major-generals, 17 lieutenant-generals and five four-star generals–all for an army of about 100,000. In addition there are 190 brigadiers, a one-star rank.’ I wonder how many admirals and air marshals there are? Lots, no doubt. By contrast, the Israeli Defence Forces, approximately the same size as the UK’s, appears (to judge by their ORBAT) to get by with just 40 brigadiers, and 16 generals of all types (1 Lt Gen) for all three services. How do they get by?
Do any KOW readers know how many people work in the IDF’s equivalent of the Research and Assessments Branch?
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I don’t know the answer to that.
But I do agree with your points about the Research and Assessments Branch. It is total madness. They need more of this stuff, not less.
And to build that capacity again will take years.. and, I would gently suggest, is next to impossible within a higher education system that seems set to receive successive batterings in the next few years as it becomes the cut of first choice for a bankrupt nation.
It seems to me that the UK’s situation could parallel that of Great Britain in the Crimean War: a nation burdened with an excess of generals and admirals left over from the last big war, who created a military equipped to fight that same war. When the old guard surpressed innovation and was forced to engage a new threat, the military they forged proved ill-equipped and unprepared, causing excessive blood and treasure to be spent and rapid reform to fix it. Shutting down the RAB doesn’t look very encouraging if this analogy were to hold true.
A reason why there are so many general officers in UK Armed Forces (and in most NATO countries forces too) is that they are an export item and also because it is part of the cost of participating in so many international agreements and expeditionary forces. UK senior officers are exportable . For political reasons, they are sometimes more acceptable as heads of international missions than US officers. NATO and UN missions also require senior staff officers.
Israel is a bad country for making this comparison . Do the Israelis have a single commitment in an international force of any description ? Are Israeli Generals in hot demand at international Staff Colleges ? Are Israeli officers deployed anywhere as international observers ?
JM
John, I can see that there are reasons why there might be a need for a few more general officers in the UK because of its more substantial commitments internationally. However, two thoughts:
1. On its own I really don’t see how this is sufficient to justify the large numbers which seem to me surplus. We’ve got a brigadier for every country of the UN. We’ve got a general for each country in the G2o times three with room to spare.
2. I think the comparison is a good one. You’ve got left of arc, Israel-a country with pretty profound reasons to want as streamlined and efficient a fighting army as it can get. And you’ve got right of arc, the UK. Or is the UK right of arc? I don’t doubt that all the NATO countries possess this problem to one degree or another. I know that Canada does. Is the UK better or worse than most others in NATO?
An afterthought: Israelis are actually in pretty hot demand at staff colleges. Shimon Naveh is now at the Army War College, no? Love him or loathe him Naveh is the biggest military thinker on operational design and maooeuvre since Simpkin. Are there any Simpkins in the British Army today? I think Rupert Smith is enormously important but he retired six years ago–as a Brigadier. Britain would do well to have some Israeli colonels talking at our staff college but we can’t do that because some idiots will seek to serve a warrant on them the minute they step off the plane at Heathrow. This is our loss. as to where else the Israelis might be observing/advising, well, my suspicion is that they are, and to good effect, in quite a few places–certainly not under UN auspices though. Which is not a compliment to the UN.
“Are Israeli Generals in hot demand at international Staff Colleges ?”
Yes, US PME schools receive great benefit from their participation/assignment.
How exactly does that work, JMcKay? I mean, what are the criteria for promotion to general rank in the British army that cause the situation referred to above? Does someone decide that a certain number of officers of a certain rank will be required each year for UN and NATO operations? Also what percentage of the British brass are involved in UN and NATO missions but aren’t commanding/integrated into British forces? I ask because if they do form part of British forces involved with NATO and the UN then I think the point in the post remains valid.
And also, it would be interesting to know something about the demand from international staff colleges that makes it essential to have so many generals and brigadiers.
A slight correction concerning the IDF: by my count IDF has 21 Major-Generals. Several staff positions, like the Military Secretary to the PM, don’t show up in the ORBAT. Best to look at the General Staff article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Staff_(Israel)) – it gives 20 MGs plus the Military Attache in Washington, DC.
For precise figures, DASA’s Build your own table tool can create a table showing UK armed forces strengths by rank and service:
http://www.dasa.mod.uk/applications/newWeb/www/index.php?page=30
Cdr Steve Tatham and Maj Gen mackay have recently submitted a paper at Shrivenham that has caused quite a stir within the MoD. They have stated that yes, we need the research centre and to focus more on Influence ops etc than just going out with the focus on fighting the last war.
Unfortunately, we are in the position that any organisation that suffers a defeat (and lets not be coy, Iraq was a defeat for the British military in comparison to the US) or a tremendous victory, automatically organises itself to re-fight the last battle. The old way of ‘promoting until reaching level of incompetence’ is dying, but slowly as with any bureaucracy. Unfortunately, these uneducated officers are still at the top; they are getting fewer, but they still run the show.
By the way, the RN has more Admirals than we do Warships, Surface vessels and Submarines; over 40 at the last count. We are incredibly top heavy.
Shimon Naveh is viewed derisively by many in the Israeli military (including a whole bunch of those top generals) who see his Deleuzian approach and OTRI’s po-mo language detrimental to warfighting.
As for the Israelis teaching UK forces something, do you really want officers of a military whose fighting ability has atrophied to brutal (and often extralegal) policing of a fortified ghetto and whose basic assumptions about the enemy’s war-fighting abilities are wholly predicated on a racialised portrayal of that enemy (e.g. bungling Arabs) to come teach the UK how to do peace-keeping and other operations? Really?
I know that Naveh’s regard in Israel is ambivalent at best and that SOD is considered a busted flush in the IDF. I also find Naveh frustratingly hard to read. That said, personally, I think it’s worth the effort. And so do the Americans apparently who appear determined to make SOD work. Good luck to them. Anyway, you’re as entitled to your opinion as anyone.
Further on a point of opinion I don’t share yours of the IDF or Israel and yes I think it would be a very good idea indeed for officers in the British Army to sit down with officers of the IDF to exchange ideas. I suspect this would be fruitful in many respects. But, alas, we won’t have this discussion because your opinion is the one which prevails in political and public imagination making it impossible.
An afterthought: I am just now reviewing a book manuscript by an Israeli officer on recovering from surprise through adaptability and flexibility which is very good in places and excellent in others. Given that these things are evidently the preoccupation of the British Army at present I think it would do very well to hear what he has to say. My former PhD student Eitan Shamir’s book on Adoption and Adaptation of Mission Command in US, UK, and Israel should be taught in the Defence Academy. Dima Adamsky’s work on innovation is cutting edge. KOW’s own Thomas Rid is currently in Israel on a fellowship; so presumably he sees something of significant worth to learn by being there. I could go on but why bother. If you really think there is nothing to learn from Israel despite the outpourings of Israeli scholarship on contemporary warfrare and scholarship by others on the experience of Israel then your mind is closed. Your loss.
Did I mention scholarship? The people who are being targetted by the arrest warrants are military officers not scholars. That is what I was talking about. Why so defensive?
“you’re as entitled to your opinion as anyone.”
I didn’t voice an opinion on Naveh.
Laleh,
The British army spent the 70s and 80s engaged in brutal and frequently extralegal ( or rather, with the definition of “legal” stretched as necessary to fit) policing in NI. And I don’t imagine that the average British soldier expressed his view of the residents of, say, South Armagh, in particularly PC terms.
I think it was a right and necessary campaign but let’s not come over all morally superior .
Eamonn, there was a blog posting on the Economist (ages ago, can’t find it I’m afraid), which suggested that it is precisely because we had done such things in the past that we are qualified to preach about them now. I don’t think it’s moral superiority to do so.
That’s absurd. As far as I know, the British Army is quite proud of the way it conducted itself in NI and presented with a similar challenge in the future would conduct itself in a similar manner. Remember all the rubbish that was talked in Iraq about the lessons learned in NI being applied and how this made the Brits better at COIN than the Yanks.
Eamonn, I think we are treating NI too generally. We were too brutal to start with, and worst of all, our brutality was untargeted (see internment). We learned that lesson, we are qualified to tell others of the merits of it, and by the 80s our campaign was indeed something to be proud of, not least because our intelligence was sophisticated enough to allow us to target our occasional extra-legal efforts.
I think, to return to Laleh’s point, a failure of the IDF in recent years has been that it has failed to discriminate sufficiently, and has consequently failed to split the population from Hamas.
(On a side note, there are better measures of effectiveness than whether the army is proud of having done something).
Getting rid of organizations like ARAG clearly demonstrate MoD is being run by numbskulls. Meantime, highly dysfunctional outfits such as DSTL grow ever larger, despite the quality of their products being mostly rubbish. Perhaps the Research branch can be paid for by the Americans. I suspect more Americans than Brits actually read their products anyway.
Heyzeus Jeff M, stop being such a tit, MOD is clearly run by accountants so don’t be so silly. That is the context to this irrelevant unit being chopped.
That being said, where are the ARAG products that are relevant to the difficult questions of the day? Yeah maybe the odd officer who did a bad job in the first place was allowed a forum to air his views retrospectively. Wasn’t one of the major points of concern re ARAG that Brit officers couldn’t direct the fine pool of minds to attempt to answer one of the very difficult questions of the day.