Yesterday, Jack McDonald and I from Kings of War visited the British Army’s Force Development and Training Command for a show and tell about their vision and work to date for the Army in the post-Afghanistan and post-Iraq World. This event was aimed in part to demonstrate how the Army has been working to address the concerns raised during the run up to the 2010 Strategic Defence and Security Review about the Army’s failure to innovate and think.
I’m writing this post separately to Jack, as we both took different things away from the day, and so a point by point comparison would be fairly…pointless? (cue sound of two elephants falling off the edge of a cliff). Instead, I’m going to zero in on what struck me on the day, which is mainly that I thought things seem very hopeful. While realities are often hard to achieve, the Army is beginning to develop a vision – and a belief in that vision – of how it can improve over the coming years. So, here is a short list of the things that struck me as promising:
-> The process is being spearheaded by a dynamic and intelligent group of senior and mid-level army commanders - particularly Lieutenant General Paul Newton – who are prepared to challenge establishment thinking and really push the upper echelons of on some of the most important issues facing the British Army today. This is undoubtedly a good thing.
-> They are attempting to drive forward methods of internal learning, and find practical, workable ways of managing these process. For example, promoting post-operations briefings that bring together forces on the ground with other key players such as equipment designers and doctrine writers. Imagine a scenario in which an infantry commander who wears a flak jacket on patrol can feedback directly to the jacket designer that the item felt too cumbersome or didn’t provide enough protection. This is shockingly sensible stuff! Similarly, the Army is developing an evaluation process during which its members are asked to talk back through elements of an action, including the original objectives, a step by step description of what actually happened, if they were aware of other things going on around them, whether or not they felt they achieved their goals, and what future adjustments they would recommend, all accompanied by state-of-the-art analytical tools. Evaluation is more my wife’s topic than mine, but from what little I’ve gleaned from her, this sounds like a good quality process that rivals what we are trying to do in mainstream civilian institutions.
-> They are searching for and drilling into the issues that matter. For example, they have identified that just 5 to 20 percent of shots have been hitting the target during live fire tactical training, a stunningly low figure. They have identified why this occurs (firing training is often viewed as box ticking exercise) and why it matters (COIN campaigns require precision shooting to ensure we accurately hit the targets we want to and avoid collateral damage against non-combatants). They have even thrown a little history into the mix: drawing a fascinating parallel between the recognition of low small arms expertise during the Boer War, the subsequent focus on firing training afterwards, and the high quality of the British Expeditionary Force in 1914.
-> They want to invest more in people, not in terms of money or numbers, but rather by helping their officers to develop improved intellectual capacity, so that they can contribute more original thinking, critique established ideas and generally pursue a more informed approach in their work. Possibilities included seeking to engage potential recruits better at the university level, offering more higher education opportunities earlier (and potentially linking these to promotion, as per equivalent civilian industries) and supporting – rather than impeding – officers with undertaking PhDs.
-> Finally, they are reaching out to academics for input, commentary and feedback. And these are not limited to the same old people, with whom they have built up established – and possibly overly comfortable relationships – but are instead to fresh commentators (the invitation of authors from Kings of War is a case in point). At the end of the day the entire group was told to talk or write about the event as much as we wished and to be as critical as we wanted, even though the day itself had been splendidly frank and candid.
Now, my glowing comments thus far might suggest that I have been brought off by a free lunch and some coffees, which is of course not remotely true (although I must say that their sandwiches were stellar and their biscuit range impressive). It’s more that I honestly believe that they are going in the right direction. We have here a group of senior staff who are seriously critiquing the army and challenging establishment norms. This is no mean feat. The Lieutenant General told us that one of the very first questions he has to answer is: ‘Why?’ I am very happy that it is him, not me sitting with the Army’s leadership and having to answer that particular question!
I do have some concerns, most notably that while the Army is attempting to learn backwards from its recent experiences to prepare itself for the future, including through improving their capacity for fighting hybrid conflicts and conducting urban warfare campaigns, they aren’t really connecting with the forward looking, blue sky thinking that they need to in order to really cover their bases.
I queried the Lieutenant General on this, and was told that that they are not attempting to undertake revolutionary new changes, but instead “reclaiming the right for the army to think for itself” and conducting “a rectification of absurdity”.
Admirable goals both. But this still doesn’t quite answer how the above changes will be useful if the threat we face turns out to be one that we don’t expect. And it is here, for me, that the army really needs to stop and think: How do we prepare for threats that we don’t yet know about? How do we avoid training our forces for one type of campaign (e.g. an urban focused ‘war amongst the people’) that ends up being an entirely different one (e.g. a war away from the people in the arctic)? Looking backwards is a good way to avoid repeating mistakes, but as the French have so learned so dearly, preparing for the wars of the past doesn’t necessarily mean being ready for the wars of the future (see Grandstander’s post towards the end).
Furthermore, How do we ensure that we don’t abandon our conventional methods in such great measure that in the event of a major new conventional war we are left totally unprepared? This isn’t quite as infeasible as it sounds. During the 1920s and the 1930s the British failed to focus on developing tank warfare because we believed our future wars would be fought in the colonies, not mainland Europe. Hitler proved us staggeringly wrong.
On top of all of the other work we do, we need to ensure that at the most basic level we don’t make this mistake again. You can lose a COIN war and survive intact – albeit painfully – you can’t lose a world war and do the same.
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Francis thanks, great post. Lessons learned (from history) is something that needs expanding and also needs to be put into better context.
I would not entirely agree with the idea that the British failed to develop armoured doctrine because they were focused on imperial policing. The British army or the BEF for the continental commitment was the only fully mechanised force (albeit small I know) going into the war. The point about 1940 is that the unthinkable happened and France fell. This was not part of the strategic paradigm that foresaw Germany being squashed between the French army (with the assistance of a mechanised British corps or two), a British economic blockade and a strategic air campaign. This was a sound strategy and would have worked. Britain was only saved because it had its core strategic assets to fall back on and they remained intact.
The lesson here is don’t rule out the unthinkable. Two pertinent examples in the case of Britain:
- Autumn 2010, General Richards rules out Britain’s need to wage a strategic air campaign, a few months later Libya.
- 2009/10-carrier debate, subtext being we don’t need carriers, as we won’t fight independent expeditionary wars. From nowhere the Falklands erupts as an almost daily issue and it’s the only place where you might need an independent carrier capability. Now that debate is contrived and the Falklands has become a self-fulfilling prophecy but the point still remains valid.
Thanks MF for the reply and thoughts.
You may be right about the British Pre-WW2, but I do know that there was a lot of debate between military thinkers such as Liddell Hart and others (I forget the names) about where the next war would be fought and that there was at least susbtantial argument in favour of the colonies being the next battleground. I have a book on it somewhere – I’m away from home at the moment, but will try to track it down when I’m back.
I agree with your general point though. And this is my slight concern – ‘wars amongst the people’ are one kind of conflict, but assuming that the wars of the future will generally all be like this seems to risk the very real possibility that, as you say, the unthinkable happens and we’re not even kind of ready for it.
The simple fact is that the empire was vital to the British economy – the Imperial preference system and historical trade created a vast economic bloc. It is no real surprise that it would feature large in any national security strategy (those were the days when we actually had a strategy). In fact I seem to remember reading somewhere that prior to the build up to WW2, the U.S. military worked on conflict planning with the British empire as the most likely adversary – control of rubber plantations or some such thing(?).
“Between 1902 and 1905 fifty out of eighty meetings of the Committee of imperial Defence discussed India.” (written evidence from Dr. Patrick Porter to PASC).
Invest more in officer intellectual development?
This cannot be the same army that stopped offering the excellent War in the Modern World from Kings, a great adjunct to ICSC(L) due to cost?
Sounds good. Looking forward to hearing more in early summer.
Nick, I was resisting the urge to say exactly the same thing. The Army had a moment in which to demonstrate its commitment to officer intellectual development, to show that all the last decade’s rhetoric about ‘thinking man’s wars’ calling for officer ‘education not just training’ etc and so on was not just hot air and guff, and…they flubbed it. What gets me is that at the top of the army there are guys who ‘get it’–I think Newton is one and so is David Richards–and at the bottom there’s a whole generation of company commanders who’ve lived it but in the flabby middle there is a cohort who do not and will not. My impression is that basically the British Army thinks with its gut, not its brains at the top or, ahem, balls at the bottom, but with a cellulitic self-preserving and pension-spying class in the middle which refuses to be shifted.
War in the Modern World is doing terrifically well with a terrific cohort of students from all over but I miss the days when there was quite a lot more British military presence, of which now there is not much. That’s bad for us and bad for the Army too, I think.
There was a fair bit of discussion about military education, particularly framed around ARAG and how it was a bit of a blooper to can it. I think they’d like to start up something similar. Also, early career MAs were cited as something that might help with retention post-Afghanistan. I think they’d like to use them as an incentive to keep decent people in at/after the Captain level, so maybe the military students will return!
Interesting, Jack. The closure of ARAG was, in my view, mental. I blogged about it here at KOW when it was happening. The MA discussion just drives me up the wall. I honestly don’t know if on average it makes for a better soldier because it’s hard to evaluate in those terms. I think that it probably does, see Mark’s point about analytical skills and ‘academic discipline’ (which kind of makes me laugh but you know what he means). Certainly when Her Majesty invests in soldiers in this way it might improve their sense of worth and morale. But it can do harm too if handled badly which I think War in the Modern World was in some ways. We had some terrific Army students and some not so terrific ones. The biggest difference between the two though was not brains but whether the student’s boss thought what they were doing was worthwhile and allowed them to work it into their professional schedule or that it was a purely personal jolly thing which they bloody well better not think about on company time. Obviously I favour the former but the latter is at least marginally defensible. But it didn’t seem the Army really had any sort of policy on it from the top. So for some people MA War in the Modern World was a great thing, a mind-expanding, all-paid-for graduate course in your life’s vocation. For others it was a total bag-drive, one more stress in an already stressed out schedule, the message being that the Army wanted officers to have MAs but that it wasn’t prepared to give them time to do them ‘properly’. There’s no doubt that compared to the cost of taking someone out of the line for a year and putting them into residential study War in the Modern World is very cost-effective. Anyway, it’s a sore spot. It’s led me to be a bit cynical when I hear talk of the army as a ‘learning organisation’. How can they be learning when they hardly ever seem to pause for thinking?
I think one of the key problems (which was raised in a tangential way on the day) is the shifting placement/importance of post-grad education in civilian life. Nowadays, basic administrators are expected to have a degree of some sorts, whereas such a thing used to be reserved for the people the could go or wanted to go to university. Since MAs are fast becoming the new BA, many people (like me, incidentally) are segueing straight into an MA after their undergraduate and graduating at 22.* Obviously Sandhurst would affect this in the Army’s case, so it would be unlikely that they would have time for an MA until 25-26. If the army were to lock them into an MA with post-qualification service, then they’d come out at 30 with years in service, plus an MA, looking for a second career. Even though Army Officers tend to have good career prospects, they are still some eight years behind from a purely academic perspective.
There was, however, quite a good discussion of the value of a PhD to the military, which I hadn’t really considered before. Whereas there is quite a good case for upping the depth of study in the 25-35 y/o range to MA level, is there a similar benefit to giving generals 2-3 years leave to study/write a book?
*Which makes little economic difference – I saw an ad from IISS yesterday who were offering a post-MA research position at £6 an hour.
I was lucky enough to complete the War in the Modern World MA before they pulled the funding and mainly did so because I was so thoroughly disappointed with ICSC(L). The academic discipline and assessment tightened up my writing, massively increased my capacity (a busy staff job and new baby combined) and improved my analytical skills.
However, because there is no career gain to completing that standard of MA, it is seen by many as a career foul.
ICSC was designed by the flabby middle David talks about, and is the same flabby middle who now accuse the young combat professionals of lacking ability and a lot of the time ‘deference’ to their greater experience.
Well, experience comes from actual experience, not time served.
This really reminds me of Billy Connoly talking about class; He had no issues with the Upper class and working class as they were in their place and knew it, it was the social climbers in the middle who were the problem. They still are, we reward talent in this flabby middle the same as we reward mediocrity and pedestrianism, hang around long enough and you’ll be as good as a rising star for a little while at least.
‘However, because there is no career gain to completing that standard of MA, it is seen by many as a career foul.’
One of my former students described the attitude in his mess toward MA study as one in which his brother officers remarked with such like as ‘I joined for the stabbing and strangling’ and ‘why are you here [reading] when you could be out playing rugby?’
The MA massively helped me be a better officer – at company command and at staff. I was incredulous when it was cut as a savings measure, yet the MPhil at Cambridge was kept. When you take into account it was a full time residential course you would have paid for lots to study at King’s.
There is a large appetite for intellectual development – one of my Platoon Commanders is doing the Terrorism Studies from St Andrews and he and another are both thinking of enrolling with Kings.
I have noted that some senior officers are very suspicious of officers who study for a masters in their own time! Getting a masters at Advanced Staff College is too late, your abilty to critically engage with the course content will be limited.
Basically boils down to wether or not the officer corps wants to remain as gifted ameuters, or perhaps graft some real intellectual development onto the career profile. The Americans do it well and reap the rewards: Petraeus, McChrystal, Hammes and Nagl are a few.
Anyway, I need to go and proof read my dissertation and submit it. So I can move onto the next project.
Nick, you’re welcome back anytime. You should trade up for a PhD.
‘the root of the problem is that the qualities required for fighting conventional war are different from those required for dealing with subversion or insurgency’ and that qualities endowed by traditional training and conditioning to be ‘strong, courageous, direct and aggressive’ are ‘good points’ which can be exploited by the enemy. Deviousness, patience, and a determination to outwit their opponents by all means compatible with achievement of the aim’ are not qualities which can be developed by all Commanders, and those who can’t develop these characteristics ‘retreat into their military shells…..longing for the day when they can get back to preparing for the next – or last – war, as opposed to fighting in the current one.’
If you want to stab and strangle, your opportunities as an officer are limited, better to join as a soldier.
If you want to play Rugby, don’t join the military at all.
If you want to read, don’t do it in a building with a cash free and very cheap bar.
Funny old thing, most of us with the MA have done all the operational stuff too, so we have all of that AND an MA.
Many thanks all for the feedback and commentary.
It sounds like the army has previously created a fair amount of bad will with regards to military education – particularly through the close of the War in the Modern World course – and hopefully they will acknowledge that they need to redress this breach before they can really restore academic faith in their sincerity. That said, I don’t think they can be faulted really for recognising their error and attempting to set it right by focusing back on education again.
One area of slight concern for me was that they talked about their desire to develop up an intellectual hub in the heart of the army itself, because they felt at the moment that all of their intellectual weight had become concentrated outside of their hands at places like the JSCSC. I can kind of see their point, but at the same time am a little worried that this could ultimately result in them becoming less devoted to joint education/training and ultimately pursuing an ultimately harmful path of ‘splendid isolation’.
I concur in not entirely agreeing re armoured doctrine. Especially in the light of the economics (debt) of the time and the impact of the ‘Geddes Axe’ on defence expenditure during the inter-war years.
Many factors were at play. Although, superficially, it is interesting to compare defence capability and expenditure (or cuts) to today’s post SDSR era.
Off at a slight tangent here, so apologies.
Recently I have been reading much on Auftragstaktik and Mission Command. One very interesting paper, “Trust, Manoeuvre Warfare, Mission Command and Canada’s Army” by Lt-Col Charles Oliviero, made me pause for thought and which this discussion I think adds weight to.
Being a graduate of the German General Staff course he is of the opinion that mission command was poorly translated from Auftragstaktik, as well as poorly applicable to the armed forces of Britain, Canada and the U.S. He argues that to social culture, history and wartime experience makes for the ‘thinking’ of Auftragstaktik to work for Germany. That it is not a “cut and paste affair”, he says. “Neither the current command climate, nor the TRAINING PHILOSOPHY [my capitals] …. allows for the prerequisites demanded by Auftrastaktik.”
As an outsider looking in, trying to immerse myself in the subject and then reading the discussion thread & comments, I suspect that he may be right.
No intellectual development = no Auftragstaktik
I agree that we are a long way from pure Mission Command in some but not all parts of the UK military.
But….
Intellectual development is not the foundation of mission command, and the academic progression to MA etc, though a route I have followed, is not the critical element for progress, though it is an actual measure of intellectual ability that satisifies those who require evidence for everything.
Mutual trust is the missing element, up and down the command. It allows freedom of action and clear intent to be stated.
Te personnel system is the obstacle to mutual trust. You must tolerate those who you do not instinctively trust, because it is difficult to remove them. You must trust the system to send you the right people, based on the individual’s ambition, not the organisation.
You suffer at the hands of careerists and overtly ambitious officers who lack humility and generate distrust.
None of this is new. This is the real challenge for the Army in its Force Development. Getting the new guys in is easy. Getting the old guard out is almost impossible.
‘Te personnel system is the obstacle to mutual trust. You must tolerate those who you do not instinctively trust, because it is difficult to remove them. You must trust the system to send you the right people, based on the individual’s ambition, not the organisation.
You suffer at the hands of careerists and overtly ambitious officers who lack humility and generate distrust.
None of this is new. This is the real challenge for the Army in its Force Development. Getting the new guys in is easy. Getting the old guard out is almost impossible.’
I think this is an idea which deserves wider notice and elaboration. You are right, I’m sure.
I take your well made point (especially as you are far, far better positioned to comment than I!) but I would still argue that as training is one of the key pillars to Mission Command, that the thread comments are a symptom of the sick man. The intellectual ‘thinking obedience’ of Mission command, and debate that is necessary are manifestly missing (trust, training and simple orders being the modern pillars according to Lt-Col Oliviero). It looks to me that this thread is full of comment on both the poor policy, strategy and implementation of the intellectual part of training, and the internal attitude to the pursuit of it. However, in the formation of Auftragstaktik there is ample evidence of intellectual thought, argument and debate both before it was accepted as doctrine and during implementation. e.g. see Hans von Seeckt’s transformation of his army into an “army of 100,000 officers”.
I therefore still maintain that with no internal intellectual development, no Auftragstaktik will result. It’s a key missing element. What does result might be called Mission Command, but it won’t be the real deal – which is part of what Charles Oliviero is getting at in his paper.
On the other hand I am not saying that without an MA you cannot develop effective Auftragstaktik. Or that the careerist, ambitious or old guard are not an issue writ large.
Having said this I will now keep quiet for better men to comment further!
Be always at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let each new year find you a better man.
Benjamin Franklin
It should be no surprise that Auftragstaktik does not translate well, trust, training, simple orders- and a clear, overriding intent that allows action in the absence of orders are what count.
What do you do in the absence of orders? Waiting for a better man to act may not work out, but if you have to wait, best you study- for there is ‘no excuse for any military officer not having a 5000 year old mind’
I know I am now breaking my own self imposed silence, however, in my defence this is to refer those interested to the words of another on this subject – today’s blog post by Julian Lindley-French (at http://lindleyfrench.blogspot.com/). Here he comments on military education.