It’s feast or famine here at KOW, slow-posting for weeks and then three posts in a day. Bad form, but hey, when the muse strikes…
As Rob notes in his post below the press has latched on to former MI5 head Lady Eliza Manningham-Butler’s testimony to the Chilcot enquiry on Tuesday. Pretty electrifying stuff, the US and Britain by invading Iraq ‘gave Osama bin Laden the Iraqi jihad.’ But it’s a shame that more attention has not been given to the testimony that followed Lady EM-B’s by MGEN Andy Salmon, commander MND (SE) 2008-9 because it was a hell of a jaw-dropper. Consider the following exchange:
SIR RODERIC LYNE: … to what extent was this happening under the aegis of an overall strategic plan given to
given to you rather than a set of individual departmental plans?
MAJ GEN ANDY SALMON: Well, we had a set of objectives. There was no comprehensive strategic plan that I ever saw. So what we decided to do — when I say “we”, that is the Consul General, the head of the Provincial Reconstruction Team who came in after a few months of my being there, Keith Mackiggan, and to a certain extent the head of US regional embassy office decided to ensure that we had much more collective consensus, joined-up approach, because nobody was in charge. So that was the only way that we could think of working out what the strategy needed to be and how we were going to prosecute that strategy, run it, steer it, effectively.
So, no strategic plan, not that the most senior commander on the ground was privy to at any rate, and there was really nobody in charge either. That explains a lot. But Roderic Lyne pursues the issue further giving the general an opportunity to make the point even clearer:
SIR RODERIC LYNE: … When you say nobody was in charge, who should have been in charge?
MAJ GEN ANDY SALMON: That’s a good question [then follows a smart and useful rumination on how things should be, read for yourself] … there are structural constraints in making sure that campaigns reflect whole-of-government approaches on the ground that probably need to be examined, and I’m sure some of them have been examined and there are some reasonable practices going on as far as the UK is concerned in Afghanistan. I’m sure that some of these things have been looked at as a result of our experiences. But who is in charge? I mean, that still hasn’t been decided.
SIR RODERIC LYNE: So if, a year and a half ago, when you were there, we had asked you and the Consul General, ‘Are you working to a strategic plan for this area?’, the answer, as you have already said, would be, ‘No, we have objectives, we have a timetable for withdrawal but we don’t have a single strategic plan for the area’. And if…
MAJ GEN ANDY SALMON: Not one that was visible to us.
SIR RODERIC LYNE: Well, it is no good if it is not visible to the guy in charge or the guys in charge on the ground. And if we had said, ‘Which minister in the British Government and which senior official in the British Government has overall responsibility for what we are doing, this big effort that we have been involved in, which is both civilian and military, over the course of six years in the southeast of Iraq?’, what would your answer have been?
MAJ GEN ANDY SALMON: It was in the main the military guy because it became a very military oriented operation.
SIR RODERIC LYNE: Yes, but at the time that you were there, the balance was shifting because the security situation had improved. And if you had been asked, ‘Who is the minister in charge of this back in Whitehall?’, would you have known the answer to the question?
MAJ GEN ANDY SALMON: Not really.
There is quite obviously a huge amount of public consternation about the decision by Blair and his government to take Britain to war in Iraq in 2003. A lot of people are outraged about it, hence the attention to Lady EM-B’s remarks. That’s fine and understandable but what really boggles my mind is that having made this colossal, momentous decision to go to war the Labour government appears then to have completely lost interest in running it. In 2009, six years after going to war there was still no strategy and really no one in charge. Insane? No, it’s childish; it is as though a child having pestered and begged for a complex and expensive toy realizing after having removed it from the eye-catching packaging that it was beyond its meagre ability shoved the unassembled bits into the back of the closet to be forgotten. It is to be hoped that henceforth our wars will be directed by grown-ups.
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Great post.
I would suggest that the ‘overall strategic plan’ in 2008 and 2009 was the same as it had been since around 2006: to get out and transfer responsibility either to local Iraqi institutions (regardless of their integrity and ability) or, as it happened after Charge of the Knights, to the US brigade that took over following Britain’s withdrawal. That, however, doesn’t make the analogy you make in the final paragraph any less salient.
If I may piggy-back on this post, I tried to elaborate on this point in a recent article on British operations in Basra, which may be of interest.
Yes, an impressive post. I wondered how much of General Salmon’s remarks could be sour grapes? Or personal disappointment? (This is a serious question, not a hint.)
Just on a side-note: there is probably no country with more experience with terrorism, insurgency and political violence than where I live right now, Israel. And there is probably no democracy that has a higher ratio of flag officers-turned-politicians. But despite of an impressive level of military expertise in the political echelon, Israeli politicians are impressively inapt at managing military operations, and consistently so. The frustration among some of the brightest IDF officers is palpable. The last two wars should illustrate the point.
What does that mean? I’m not sure. Perhaps some of our dear ideas about civil-military relations need to be rethought in a more fundamental way.
I agree.
I find this monograph on the subject compelling:
“Alien: How Operational Art Devoured Strategy; Authored by Brigadier Justin Kelly, Dr. Michael James Brennan.; September 16, 2009; Available for download at: http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pubs/display.cfm?pubID=939”
Summary: the West has wrongly chosen to give the military the whole job for the strategy of war, which they can’t do, since war is a continuation of politics, and not a seperate activity spawned by politics.
Childish too, in the complete inability to remain focused on the task in hand. Forget Afghanistan after the 2001 invasion, stick with Iraq for a while then, when it gets tricky, focus back on Afghanistan. All the while trying to impress the big boy when really you’re too weak.
Just maybe if British forces had been committed to one country for a decent period they might have been able to carry the job through to a satisfactory conclusion. As it is, they’ve never been given the chance.
To answer Thomas Rid’s serious question: no sour grapes, no personal disappointment – just objective reality.
Andy Salmon