Over at The Times today, former Lib Dem leader Lord (Paddy) Ashdown has an article arguing that the the Ministry of Defence is not fit for purpose, branding it sclerotic, inefficient, hamstrung by inter-service rivalry, and resistant to change. Here’s an excerpt:
While the American Army under General Petraeus has developed a culture of listening, and learning, to troops, whatever their rank or experience, the culture in the MoD is that you don’t take lessons from junior officers. The ministry needs to become a learning institution if it is to become effective.
The adaptation to counter- insurgency operations seems to have been much slower in the UK than the US, despite our much vaunted experience from Northern Ireland of which we were so proud in southern Iraq in the summer and autumn of 2003.
A national security review would provide the leadership of the MoD with a clearer set of activities and missions. The ministry must then adapt itself to deliver those in as effective and transparent a way as possible. …
Future conflicts may not be exactly the same in terms of the enemy, the terrain and the weapons employed. But those adversaries who threaten the UK will look to our successes and failures in Afghanistan and Iraq and use these to plot their own strategic review. We must be faster at learning to be better than our enemies.
You can read Paddy’s article in full here.
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One Comment
It is in the nature of any military organisation that it is authoritarian and top-down.
How else can that be so?
A soldier has to learn to kill without mercy, otherwise he will be killed instead. Not something many of us want to do. So join the army and you are trained to do this. You have to obey orders without question. You have to accept the authority of your higher ranked officers.
Can an army operate effectively in any other way?
After WW2 many new recruits of the Tory party were war veterens who wanted society to be run along army lines.
According to Paddy Ashdown, General Petraeus is a liberal, at least in the sense that unlike in the British army, he favours a 2 way communication with his junior officers. Personally I am intrigued, maybe this is what the army should be doing? I wonder how far junior ranked officers can go. So far General Petraeus has not been able to repeat his success in Afghanistan that he had in Iraq. What does he do if he is being told to get out?
I suppose what I really want to also know is how Paddy Ashdown knows these things. It is very believable that there is chronic inter-force rivalry at the MoD. But where is the evidence? How long has this been the case? Why is it still not resolved?
Even his single paragraph on Afghanistan raise questions. Defeat the Taliban? What does “defeat mean? I remember he had to clarify this term at a Lib Dem conference fringe meeting a couple of years ago. But he still uses the term.