Matthew Parris Has Gone Too Far This Time

Matthew Parris, desperate for attention, may usually be ignored but his latest ill-thought outburst in the Times on Saturday, “Our Afghanistan Heroes Died for Nothing,” should not go unchallenged.  Parris took issue with the sentiment, expressed in a letter signed by a lot of senior military and political figures, that the dedication of those who died in Afghanistan should be respected in the current accommodation with the Taliban, a ceasefire and effective US withdrawal from that theatre.  The sub-headline, “the army’s top brass let down their men in a shambolic campaign and now don’t even have the decency to stay silent,”  a monstrous generalisation, tells us all we need to know about the thrust of the article.  Parris is outraged and demands that the retired army leadership should apologise. 

To borrow a phrase from the article, “need I bother to spell out the flaw,” in Parris’ argument?  History will probably record that the recent Afghanistan campaign was a failure.  The difficulty arises in allocating blame for that failure.  Parris, with his usual infallible insight, is convinced that the blame lies with the Generals who he lampoons as chinking their gongs and swishing their ermine.  I am not a military historian and neither do I have any special knowledge of this period of military history but I learned enough whilst at Bracknell attending the Royal Air Force Staff College that matters are seldom so clear cut and that it is unwise to be selective in argument, particularly if one’s grasp of the facts is tenuous.  Even if Sir Sherrard Cowper-Coles believed that the army in Afghanistan looked for action in order to justify its existence, that many tactical leaders were recklessly overconfident or that the UK armed forces punched above their weight, that is, fought with inadequate reserves, the accumulation of these tactical military failures would be unlikely to amount to an explanation of the strategic disaster.  For the root cause we will need to understand how the whole Whitehall apparatus, military and civilian, failed to think through the strategy in the first place – to select and maintain the aim, the first principle of war.  For example, to what extent did Tony Blair’s apparently unconditional assurance to George Bush in July 2002 that “our job is to be there with you,” trump common sense in the following years of mission creep?  Historians will, no doubt, provide the answers but not yet.

Matthew Parris has little of no life experience to bring to the debate.  He “worked,” briefly in the FCO before becoming an MP.  Thereafter he wrote speeches for David Cameron and became an MP.  He has been a journalist since.  He was decorated by the RSPCA, received a “gong,”  for jumping into the Thames to rescue a dog and he has been very active in favour of gay rights but his relevant military experience, from which he appears to comment with such authority, is obscure.

Parris concludes his article by pointing out that “we lost” and opining that “sacrifice has been in vain.”  He says that military leaders of the period should respect a “period of embarrassed silence.”  Quite so Matthew Parris; let us leave it to the mature judgement of future historians who will be able to examine all the facts.  Meantime, rather than rake over current grief, to borrow your own words again, “about 50 years” would be a good time for clever dicks like you to observe a respectful silence.

PS

I am most grateful for the thoughts of a friend and former colleague, somewhat more senior than me, who adds:

"Generals do not select a war in which to get involved. Nor do they seek to put their men in harm's way. It is politicians who throw them the hospital pass, and Parris should acknowledge that - and also remember that those in senior command positions were not plucked from nowhere. They, without exception, had worked their way up, experiencing the dangers and hardship of being  a soldier. And probably, on the way, vowing to be better than those who led them."

Spitting Mad

If Covid-19 can be transmitted through hand contact and we then touch our nose or rub our eyes I understand that we have opened the door for the virus to enter our body and do it’s worst.  Government advice to wash our hands thoroughly and frequently makes sense.  In Hong Kong in 1974 spitting in public was prohibited and punishable by summary fine. I understand the ban was not because expectoration was considered socially undesirable but for the very sound medical reason that serious diseases could be transmitted through human gob. So why is spitting in public permitted in UK? And why is it that role models, professional footballers in particular, are always framed by the TV cameras, spitting or emptying the contents of their nose on the pitch. The hypocrisy of the same footballers ceasing to shake hands with opponents before the beginning of the game beggars belief.

Will the BBC Survive Covid-19?

The news that 20% of the national workforce could be unable to work because of coronavirus is worrying. Nevertheless, a pro rata reduction in BBC staff would appear to be welcome and could save us from some of their less useful offerings.  Except, perhaps, like Police contingency plans to only deal with major crimes whilst otherwise assisting matters arising from a public health emergency, the BBC, recalling the Dunkirk spirit, will prioritise their resources to ensure a sustained output of their important news stories. Thus we shall not be deprived of a regular menu of anti-Brexit barrel scrapings and heart rending illustrations of climate doomsday.

More Banging On About Defence

I finished the piece, Banging On About Defence, with the conclusion that the Government should link defence posture to foreign policy – to decide what is essential precious and valuable to us as a Nation and to allocate resources to defend it accordingly.  It may be that our policy ambitions would cost too much to defend; in which case we should cut our coat to match.  It follows that the foreign policy and defence debate is an iterative process.  It may be helpful, therefore if we examined what sort of thing we could expect our armed forces to do on our behalf since what we are prepared to defend on defence will normally limit our policy ambitions in the first place.  Presumably we require our armed forces to do more than look pretty on parade as Max Hastings suggested he believed to be the general public’s aspiration?

To simplify the discussion it could be helpful to examine only conventional forces – to leave the submarine based nuclear deterrent out of the argument.  The threat of nuclear retaliation would probably deter a rogue state from loosing off a nuclear weapon in our direction but potential aggressors may calculate that the UK may not be prepared to fire a Trident missile in retribution for a conventionally armed attack, say on a British flagged vessel, overseas territory or even, more problematic, a terrorist or rogue state attack on our infrastructure, utilities or services.  To protect ourselves from conventional attack in the first place we sufficient conventional force in the right places to convince a potential attacker that it would not be worth the while.

The right level of forces would comprise an armed force equipped with a variety of weapons and capabilities sufficient to wage war, to some extent or other, in the circumstances required by our foreign policy.  This almost certainly does not mean the capability to wage all-out total war of the sort of conflict we last saw in WWII.  Since 1945, wars have been “limited” and our armed forces have been structured such that we could only engage in a total conflict as part of a US led coalition.  On our own, we could only achieve very limited military objectives without the risk of catastrophic failure because of lack of supporting capabilities.  Think of it in terms of getting the landing party on the beach but then being unable to sustain the fight because a better equipped enemy had cut our supply lines and take control of the sky above.  Specifically, imagine the level of support we would require to sustain one of aircraft carriers should we decide to sail her into harms way?

NATO, of course, provided a solution.  By pooling resources and specialising within a coherent alliance structure, the North Atlantic Alliance has maintained a credible deterrent posture throughout the Cold War and even some time after.  Alliances are by their very nature usually limited by the duration of the threat and since the collapse of the Soviet Union that threat has become ever more difficult to define.  NATO worked just fine when everyone agreed on the enemy but today that is not so clear. NATO also depended upon the Americans – of course for a nuclear umbrella but also for vast conventional forces large numbers of which were based in Europe during peacetime.  What should we make of NATO today with President Trump shifting US focus to China and the Pacific whilst regularly accusing Europeans of not pulling their weight, President Macron questioning the very NATO relevance and the disgraceful evidence of every European Nation spending far too little and taking far too much, to say nothing of a fragile political commitment to defence.  Article 5 of the NATO Treaty requires all the signatories to come to each other’s aid in the event one of them is attacked – the principle of collective defence.  Can that be relied upon today? Following the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014 , Julian Roepcke, writing in Standpoint, reports a black joke in the German security community:  “if Russia invades the Baltic states, Germany will of course honour its NATO commitment and defend them – once the German public approves this in a binding referendum.”  As for EU defence initiatives, they offer a full spectrum of military assistance short of actual fighting capablity and could be safely ignored.  As Richard Barrons put it, their several Headquarters "provide day care for middle-aged officers" and are "unable to deploy anywhere robustly and quickly."

There is a growing feeling, not least in Germany and in our own Corbynista, that we should never use armed force and that all disputes should be resolved through dialogue.  Fine in theory but it takes two to tango – and we don’t negotiate with terrorists, do we?  So, if we don’t negotiate, to what extent do we respond with force?  Do we aim to destroy our enemy completely and deny him the ability to cause us further harm or are we more “civilised,” employing proportional force, limited in time and scope?  This decision obviously depends a lot on geography – if the enemy is sailing up the Thames the use of force is more urgent than if some hostages have been taken somewhere in Africa. In calculating the sort of forces we might need to maintain we need a lot of intelligent foresight in defining the threat.  It probably is not helpful to rely on history as a guide and we must look at the way warfare and technology are advancing.  For example, to what extent will robotics and artificial intelligence replace the traditional concept of boots on the ground. Do we need lots of men in uniform training on Salisbury Plain or lots of civilian nerds guarding cyber space? I remember meeting a friend for lunch in London in the late 70s.  He had just been posted to the MOD Procurement Executive and I was in Defence Intelligence.  I asked him what it was like and he replied, wearily that there was a whole army of civil servants there with slide rules poised just waiting to develop the next generation of V Bombers.  Nevertheless, the defence and security review must not be rushed because hasty, politically convenient, decisions now could have catastrophic consequences in the future.  That said, we must get on with it since delay merely prolongs our weakness.  Above all, it will be expensive and I am a little reassured by some of the noises from Whitehall that say it will not (necessarily) be a cost cutting exercise.  But let us be clear, as military man I fully accept the politics of cutting costs, just so long as commitments are cut concomitantly.

However, all the above is straight forward only if our potential enemies identify themselves and behave in reasonable and predictable ways.  Arguably the greatest danger we face is not from conventional armed force but from unconventional enemies who could chose to attack our infrastructure, water and food supplies, banking and money transfer systems, national grid, and health services or worse infect our population with debilitating disease, with the aim of imposing their will.  Alongside our military armed forces we must ensure that our society is resilient in face of such attacks – the cost of which could put the military spending, required above, into perspective. Any one care to put their hand in their pocket for a resilient 5G network, nuclear power station, or HS2 train?