Defense of the Realm: Britain’s Armed Forces Crisis

Three casualties sprawl in
 the mud, unnoticed amid a confusion of gunfire and sweet, choking smoke. “Get a move on! They’re bleeding to death,” shouts commanding officer Major Emily Greenwood. The assault — against a nest of “Maliban” insurgents — is a simulation in Wales, the wounds faked. But Greenwood’s urgency is all too real. Within a year of completing their training this month, some 60% of these officer cadets from Britain’s élite Royal Military Academy Sandhurst will deploy to Afghanistan. There, says Greenwood, “the pace of operations is so fast and there’s constant enemy contact. We have to make sure they’re ready.”

Rebecca Marsden, a 25-year-old cadet, says there will be no problem with that: “We can’t wait to go to Afghanistan.” But it’s not just the Taliban that Sandhurst’s alumni will have to worry about. As it prepares for a general election on May 6, Britain is having to come to terms with a grim reality: its armed forces are in a state of crisis. Soldiers are profoundly battle weary. Grim statistics tell one part of the story: 179 British soldiers killed in Iraq between 2003 and 2009; 280 lost to the conflict in Afghanistan since 2001. Silent crowds gather to pay respects each time casualties are repatriated to an air base on the edge of a town in southwest England called Wootton Bassett, but displays of public sympathy for the troops mask plunging support for British involvement in faraway wars.

(See pictures of British soldiers in Afghanistan.)

Politicians continue to justify the adventures in Iraq and in Afghanistan, where British troop levels now stand at 9,500, in terms of national security. Britain, it is said, must take the fight to the bad guys to keep its citizens safe. Yet as the list of rickety states and terror havens has continued to expand, defense spending has failed to keep pace even as equipment costs have spiraled upward. The prospect of lean times as Britain reins in its budget deficit has pitched army, navy and air force commanders into open turf wars. Lower down the ranks, the endemic overstretch expresses itself in a stark statistic: according to Britain’s Ministry of Defence, 1 in 5 troops is unfit for frontline duty, often as a result of injury or psychological damage. Officials from France and the U.K. have discussed burden-sharing, including the possibility of joint nuclear-submarine patrols, and a Feb. 3 Green Paper recommended Britain’s cash-strapped military seek “greater cooperation” with the French. That didn’t go down so well everywhere. “The pride of our forces has finally been surrendered with our leaders admitting we can no longer afford to go to war — without going cap in hand to our historic enemies,” spluttered mass-market daily the Sun.

Britain’s jingoistic press always likes to revisit the Battle of Waterloo, but such fulminations obscure the deeper significance of the Green Paper and the Strategic Defence Review it foreshadows. The SDR, expected this autumn, will be the first such exercise in 12 turbulent years. Any decisions Britain takes on the future role and capacity of its military — on exactly what the country expects of those bright-eyed Sandhurst cadets — will help determine the way Britain is perceived in the world. And that will determine the way Britons see themselves. The biggest challenge for this once great imperial power lies not on distant battlefields but at home, in reaching a long overdue accommodation between past glories and present realities, between lofty ambitions and diminished global sway. Can Britain, whose military has for many years been considered one of the best in the world, make the leap?

(See pictures of the British election being called.)

Who Dares Whines
“All I could make out in their language were the words Mr. Bean. They were laughing at me … making me feel about three inches tall.” That was the lament of Arthur Batchelor, a 20-year-old seaman seized in 2007 by Iranian guards in disputed territorial waters on the Iran-Iraq border and held for 12 days along with 14 other British service personnel. In a newspaper interview, Batchelor also confided that he’d “cried like a baby” during his captivity.

To understand the impact on the national psyche of this and other high-profile setbacks suffered by British forces deployed to Iraq, you must first appreciate the luster of Britain’s military heritage. More than 60 years after World War II, Britons still grow up marinated in tales of their nation’s wartime victories. By no means the world’s most richly resourced fighting force, nor its largest, the country’s military has long provided an international role model. Smart, flexible and cohesive, the services have been seasoned by working in contrasting terrains and in conflicts with a wide range of allies against myriad opponents. The guerrilla war against the U.K.’s colonial administration in post-World War II Malaysia and the stubborn conflict in Northern Ireland endowed British commanders with invaluable expertise in counterinsurgency. They learned different lessons in the Falklands, Bosnia and Sierra Leone.

(See a brief history of WWII movies.)

Sandhurst’s program of officer training, compulsory for all British army officers, is a distillation of centuries of accrued knowledge combined with a rigorous practical regime. It attracts applicants from all over the world including China and the U.S., and has stiffened the sinews of the heads of state of eight countries plus a clutch of royals, including the British princes William and Harry. “When I was in Sierra Leone meeting a 
 Kenyan battalion, it was exactly like being back at Sandhurst,” says Major General Andy Salmon, former commandant general of the Royal Marines, the last British commander of British coalition forces in southeastern Iraq and now head of force readiness at NATO’s Supreme HQ Allied Powers Europe.

The confidence that comes with Britain’s heritage helps explain the insouciance with which Brits strolled into Basra in 2003 unhelmeted while their U.S. counterparts kept a wary distance from the Iraqis they had liberated in those heady early days of the Iraq war. And at first, it did seem that Britain, very much the junior partner in terms of numbers and resources, could teach the Americans a thing or two about how to deal with the manifold challenges of post-Saddam Hussein Iraq. “Great Britain’s relative success in Basra is due in no small measure to the self-assurance and comfort with foreign culture derived from centuries of practicing the art of soldier diplomacy and liaison,” Vietnam veteran Major General Robert Scales told the U.S. Congress in 2004. Late the following year a British officer, Brigadier Nigel Aylwin-Foster, submitted a scathing critique of U.S. tactics to the U.S. army’s own in-house magazine, Military Review. American “cultural insensitivity, almost certainly inadvertent, arguably amounted to institutional racism,” he wrote.

In return for such wisdom, the sparsely equipped Brits called on the richer U.S. forces for material assistance. Major General Patrick Marriott, who since last September has been commandant of Sandhurst, led British troops alongside U.S. Marines during the 2003 Iraq campaign. “The Americans called us ‘the borrowers,'” he says. “When we ran out of field kitchens, which we did because we were underresourced, the Americans delivered in a split second and it was magnificent. We’ve been underresourced in our history on numerous occasions. But within the psyche, we cope. Americans fix and we cope.”

But there’s something to be said for the American way. In 2008, after thinly spread British forces had effectively lost control of Basra to Shi’ite militias, the Iraqi army turned to the U.S. for support to drive out the insurgents. The British, though nominally heading up the coalition forces in the region, played a subsidiary role and, according to some reports, only found out about the operation once it was under way.

Read: “As Britain Leaves, Basra Dares to Dream of Peace.”

See pictures of Prince Harry in Afghanistan.

British soldiers can certainly be overconfident. But John Nagl, president of the Center for a New American Security, believes the real roots of British humiliations in Iraq lie in London. “If the politicians back home are not completely committed to this thing, if they have not leveled with the people on the likely costs of the war, then you’re putting an unsupportable burden on the army in the field in a counterinsurgency campaign,” says Nagl. “And so as you look at explanations as to why the British army performed better in Malaya than Iraq, one of the questions is to what extent did the British government support the army better in Malaya, and to what extent was the government in Iraq only for a short, cheap war.”

Nagl, a former U.S. Army officer, credits Britons with providing valuable expertise to their American colleagues in Iraq. “Much of what the American Army ended up doing in Iraq under General Petraeus was as a result of lessons learned largely from the British,” says Nagl, who helped Petraeus revise the U.S. counterinsurgency manual. “My own evaluation of how the British army adapted to the demands of counter-insurgency in Malaya had some role in influencing how we thought about the importance of building an adaptive learning organization.”

(Read a TIME cover story on Petraeus.)

Indeed, once British forces acknowledged the flaws in their Iraqi strategy they successfully recalibrated their approach and made substantial strides in the stabilization of Basra before their final withdrawal last year. General Salmon, who took command of coalition forces in 2008, says he reinterpreted his role to be a “catalyst and a convening authority” for Basrawis and the different agencies working in the area, most of them outside his command. “As a military commander, not owning quite a lot of the other organizations and lines of development on the social, economic, political and development front, how do you then start to really fill the vacuum with positive things? That’s the challenge we face,” Salmon says. The reflexive assumption of authority that came with Britain’s colonial power has no place in the messy conflicts of the 21st century. Says Nagl: “One of the keys to learning is to recognize that you don’t know everything.

Something Rotten
Another key to learning is a readiness to confront past mistakes. In January, a British public inquiry into the Iraq conflict heard evidence from former Prime Minister Tony Blair. “In the end, [the war] was divisive, and I’m sorry about that,” said Blair. But he continued: “If I’m asked if we’re safer and more secure, I believe indeed that we are.”

(See pictures of the Bush-Blair friendship.)

Such assertions cut little ice with 60% of his compatriots who, according to a survey for the National Army Museum, believe Britain should never have gone into Iraq. The real value of the inquiry may lie in the detailed testimonies provided by witnesses from politics, civil service and the military that are forming a kind of virtual manual of how to not to run such operations. General Frederick Viggers, Britain’s senior military representative in Iraq in 2003, told the inquiry that a lack of expertise in Whitehall was responsible for — and continues to create — problems on the ground. “We are putting amateurs into really important positions and people are getting killed as a result of some of these decisions,” he said. Nigel Adderley, a former army officer and now an analyst at the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, agrees there’s a problem. “Today I don’t think there’s a government minister or anyone in the present government who has military experience. There becomes this disconnect between what the military is trying to tell the politician.”

Britain has also begun to examine questions of its culpability for civilian deaths. A second public inquiry into the death of Baha Mousa, a 26-year-old receptionist killed in British custody in September 2003, has heard that internal warnings about the treatment of prisoners were ignored. “The procedure for detention and collection of evidence can only be described as a shambles,” wrote Lieut. Colonel Nicholas Mercer, the army’s senior legal officer in Iraq, in a memo written only months before Mousa’s death. A further inquiry has started to examine claims that up to 20 Iraqi detainees were killed in British custody in 2004, an allegation denied by Britain’s defense ministry.

Read: “U.S. Officials Downplay Rash of Baghdad Attacks.”

See pictures of Iraq’s revival.

Missions Impossible
In Afghanistan, British troops confront unrest, devastation and chaos every day, and the vast majority do so with bravery and honor. Most of Britain’s contingent is based in the southern province of Helmand. Deployed among a desperately poor population and struggling to bring stability to an area largely devoid of civil structures and institutions, the troops face an insurgency that is fluid and increasingly deadly.

But before the start of the U.S. surge last summer, morale among British forces was undermined by mounting casualties — three-quarters from improvised explosive devices — and public skepticism about the NATO mission. Operation Moshtarak, this spring’s offensive led by U.S. troops, has helped buck up spirits but misgivings remain. Prime Minister Gordon Brown denied that the decision made at a January summit in London — to offer cash to insurgents to lay down arms — amounted to a bribe. But the idea is a hard sell to soldiers who saw colleagues killed providing security last year for presidential elections stained by fraud and intimidation. Another key task, training the Afghan army and police to take over from coalition forces — the only plausible exit strategy for the coalition — is fraught with danger from Taliban infiltration, especially among police recruits. In November, five British soldiers mentoring police training were shot dead by a member of the Afghan national police.

(See a TIME video with Gordon Brown.)

It’s hardly surprising that some soldiers question their presence in Afghanistan. “When we went to Kosovo, we knew what we were there to do — to drive out the bully boys. I didn’t know what we were supposed to be doing in Iraq,” says one army sergeant who asked that his name not be used. Now in Afghanistan, he considered leaving. “But then I’d have lost my job, my friends,” he says. Ferocious loyalty to their comrades and regiments sustains soldiers in the teeth of dangers and privations. “We are going into the heart of darkness,” Lieut. Colonel Matt Bazeley told his troops at Camp Bastion as they prepared for the first phase of the Moshtarak push. “It is bloody dangerous out there. This is real. This is it. This is what you have been trained for.”

Serve to Lead
“We all want to make a difference,” says Stephanie Manning, 23, spattered with mud at the conclusion of the Welsh exercise. Manning worries that strengthening public opposition to Afghanistan may thwart her ambitions to serve there and brushes aside the risks such service would entail. “You can’t have a job with such great highs without great lows as well.”

(See pictures of Afghanistan’s dangerous Korengal Valley.)

The more wars Britain engages in, the greater the spike in applications to join its armed forces. (The economic slowdown has also boosted interest in military careers.) But some of those potential recruits are going to be disappointed: the army is only 570 troops short of its mandated full strength of 102,070. On March 22 the Ministry of Defence announced a “rebalancing” of the army that will see some soldiers discharged and troops with appropriate specialisms brought in to replace them.

Nobody expects overall troop numbers to be boosted any time soon. On the contrary, a January report by defense analyst Professor Malcolm Chalmers for the Royal United Services Institute predicts cuts of 20% to military personnel over the next six years. Political leaders justified the last cutback of this scale, the replacement of the British Army of the Rhine in 1994 by a standing force of less than half its size, as a “peace dividend” arising from the end of the Cold War. But with failed states on three continents giving cause for concern, the chance of a new peace dividend seems remote.

General Richard Dannatt, head of the army from 2006 to last year, says a lack of resources had left the military conducting operations “with at least part of one arm tied behind one’s back.” Facing brutal decisions about priorities across the services, the army, navy and air force are now turning their fire on the government and each other. Afghanistan is “not the only show in town … We must remain prepared for surprises and strategic shocks,” declared navy chief Admiral Mark Stanhope in a recent speech.

Army chief General David Richards countered with a swipe against “hugely expensive equipment” of the kind procured for navy use. The spat highlighted a fundamental problem for defense planners: nobody knows where future conflicts will erupt or what kinds of resources they will demand. Governments set the aspirations of their military according to best guesses. “We’ve got to think through much more carefully whether Britain should get involved in a foreign conflict, and if so, how to cope with the consequences,” said David Cameron, the Conservative Party leader campaigning to win the upcoming parliamentary elections. “Britain will have to reduce the scope of its ambition,” says Chalmers.

Until that happens, Sandhurst is overseeing a production line of officers who must expect to be plunged quickly into the complexities of modern missions. Captain Matt Woodward left Sandhurst in April 2002, and deployed to Iraq the following year. “On my first tour my squadron leader was 50 miles away from me,” he says. “I was running a town of 40,000 on my own with a troop of 16 people. I went to Iraq with some armored vehicles and they said, ‘Right, here’s your town. There’s a police force here that’s largely ineffective, there’s no law and order in the city. Make it work.'” Now a grizzled veteran of 30, Woodward is back at Sandhurst preparing cadets to encounter similar challenges in Helmand.

The dawn assault at Druid’s Ridge in the Welsh mountain range known as the Brecon Beacons was the culmination of an eight-day maneuver that forced cadets to survive the claggy cold without cover and on minimal sleep. The physical exertions are complemented by intensive academic study of military history and strategy. “Where we are fundamentally different from our peer academies at West Point, Saint-Cyr and Dresden is that we are a military academy that has a significant intellectual, academic component. They are military universities that do military training,” says Colonel Tim Checketts, Sandhurst’s chief of staff. The academy is uniquely placed “to develop character, intellect and professional competence.” He adds: “At their age [the cadets] are all wonderfully optimistic. We do give them some intensive lessons in the realities of war.”

(Read: “A Window on a Lost World.”)

If the cadets look around, they may spot amid the splendors of Sandhurst’s 1812 Old College and its New College, completed a century later, another sobering lesson in the realities of the career they have chosen. Sandhurst’s iconic buildings, like the armed forces, are showing signs of wear and tear. Britain’s soldiers remain a focus for national pride, and the fresh-minted officers being turned out by Sandhurst embody a grand tradition. But unless Britain’s politicians find a way of reconciling the U.K.’s reflexive desire to take a leading role on the world stage with the nation’s straitened circumstances, they risk letting down those brave and tough young men and women so eager to exchange the simulated battlefield for the real thing.

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