Brigadier Ben Barry (ret.)
July 8, 2015
The British Army that entered Afghanistan in late in 2001 had a quarter century of successes from Northern Ireland, Zimbabwe, the Falkland Islands, Operation Desert Storm, Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor and Sierra Leone. All these operations were supported by Parliament, the public and the media. There were remarkably few casualties. Many aspects of these operations were demanding, but in all these conflicts the opposition was of lower average quality than British forces, was mostly unwilling to stand and fight and was overmatched by the arms and joint war-fighting capabilities of the UK and its allies.
So war in a broken country against enemies who rejected Western values and were prepared to stand, fight and die was a strategic shock. The army was faced with far greater challenges than it had expected. There were periods of intense fighting. Most soldiers, officers and units performed well, often outstandingly so.
Many International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) nations experienced similar shocks. Those who also provided troops to the US-led Operation Iraqi Freedom were doubly challenged. For the UK this was not only related to the difficulties of sustaining forces in two different operational theatres, but also to the fact that the ever-decreasing popularity of the Iraq War contaminated the public, media and parliamentary popularity of the UK operations in Afghanistan. These factors greatly challenged the British government, its Ministry of Defence (MoD) and the army. All were too slow to adapt. Overall, the British in Afghanistan were not as effective as they could have been.
The UK and ISAF – A Brief Summary
UK aircraft and Special Operations Forces (SOF) took part in the US-led operation to remove the Taliban in 2001. In 2002 there was a brief Royal Marines commando surge to support Operation Enduring Freedom, but otherwise a few hundred British troops supported ISAF in Kabul, then moved to establish the Mazar-e-Shariff Provincial Reconstruction Team.
As the final part of ISAF expansion, the UK deployed the UK-led Allied Command Europe Reaction Corps Headquarters to command ISAF in 2006. Together with Canada, the Netherlands and the US, the UK played a leading role in increasing troop numbers in ISAF’s Regional Command South and became the lead nation for Helmand Province. Here it met with unexpected opposition, which led to the abandonment of the initial plan for ‘ink spot’ stabilisation and development and resulted in heavy fighting.
Increasing UK troops from 3,000 personnel to a total of 10,500 took four years, as it depended on reducing troop numbers in Iraq. This was often problematic. Whilst British forces usually succeeded in clearing ground, they often lacked sufficient troops to ‘hold’ and it took time to develop the inter-agency and Afghan capabilities to ‘build’. It was only from 2009 when the British withdrew from Iraq and about 20,000 US Marines reinforced Helmand that there was sufficient capability to execute counter-insurgency in the key populated terrain.
Public, Media and Parliamentary Attitudes to Overseas Military Missions
Initially British participation in the removal of the Taliban and in stabilising Kabul received broad public, parliamentary and media support. The relatively small-scale British presence between 2002 and 2006 suffered few casualties. But during this time, the apparent descent of Iraq into chaos and the failure to find weapons of mass destruction rapidly eroded UK support for the country’s military role in Iraq.
The Helmand mission was sold to the British public as one which could be directly linked to 9/11 and to drugs on British streets. It was also portrayed as a stabilisation mission and one where heavy fighting was not predicted. But the unexpectedly heavy fighting that flared up and the unanticipated heavy casualties rapidly reduced popular support for the operation.
The army, MoD and government ministers made valiant efforts to better explain the mission, but these did not achieve the success intended. Public support continued to decline with every casualty. But at the same time the efforts of then-chief of the general staff General Sir Richard Dannatt to improve public support for soldiers and the emergence of a self-starting, modern charity, Help for Heroes, both resulted in an unexpected upsurge in support for British casualties and their families, and for soldiers as people doing a thankless, difficult and dangerous job. This greatly increased the popularity of the armed forces and their personnel, but carried with it the risk of soldiers being regarded as victims rather than victors. British commanders worry that this will have unanticipated consequences in future operations.
The combined unpopularity of both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars has resulted in an increased scepticism about the utility of force in the public, media and Parliament. The August 2013 parliamentary debate on Syria may have been a significant milestone. A narrow majority of MPs were unconvinced by the government’s case for military intervention to deter further chemical strikes by the Assad regime. Although the armed forces remained extremely popular, it appeared that as noted by Defence Secretary Philip Hammond: ‘there is a deep well of suspicion about military involvement in the Middle East stemming largely from the experiences of Iraq.’
MPs voting against the government were not condoning the Assad regime’s chemical attacks. But they were expressing Iraq-influenced doubts about the intelligence that was presented, and opposed being railroaded into rapid action while UN inspectors were still at work in Syria. Many doubted that the strikes being contemplated would have any useful effect. It was not clear if the vote was an exceptional event, the beginning of the unravelling of the last two decades of broad political consensus on defence, or showed that important elements of the UK people and political elite were losing confidence in the utility of force.
It is too early to tell how long it will take for this strategic caution to change.
International Military Cooperation and Its Effects on NATO and European Military Cooperation
Britain regarded the US as its main military partner in Afghanistan. But weaknesses in British strategy and capabilities in both Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as an apparent failure to adapt in both wars as quickly as the US, were exposed. This created some US scepticism, as well as denting British military self-confidence. But the British have subsequently attempted to recover their status with the US, not least by supporting the US-led coalition against the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham.
The British also see Afghanistan as proving the value of the ‘five eyes’ intelligence-sharing partnership with the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. This has often been uncomfortable for NATO allies who are not part of this community. But it is probably an enduring feature of NATO or coalition operations involving these countries.
In southern Afghanistan the UK worked with familiar partners: Canada, Netherlands, the US, Denmark and Estonia. The lack of caveats placed by the Estonian government on its contingent was particularly welcome. These relationships have been further developed by the UK inviting Norway, the Netherlands, Denmark, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia to develop a Joint Expeditionary Force.
There were considerable improvements made in interoperability, particularly in the ability of tactical air controllers to call down fire from any nation’s aircraft, as well as the implementation of a mission secret IT network. British commanders would echo the sentiment of the NATO Connected Forces Initiative (CFI) that these and the other interoperability lessons of the war should be preserved and further developed.
Strategic Lessons
Like the US, the UK struggled to adequately match ends, ways and means in both Afghanistan and Iraq. So it was often difficult for tactical success to have the desired operational effects that would achieve progress towards both Coalition and national strategic objectives. There were complex failures, with many contributing factors and multiple examples of suboptimal decision making in Washington DC, London, CENTCOM, Kabul and Helmand.
After the regime change, British commanders sensed a profound lack of civil–military coordination in London, a palpable absence of top-down leadership, and a government approach to Helmand that was under-resourced and inadequately led and coordinated. The evidence paints a picture of suboptimal leadership and management of the war.
A stark conclusion reached by General Dannatt was that there was
a profound lack of leadership on the part of the organs responsible for delivering UK Government and coalition policy. We failed to organise ourselves properly in a single, transparent chain of authority, with the result that internecine squabbling over roles, resources and responsibilities dangerously damaged the combined effect we were trying to achieve
Although the British chiefs of staff were rightly frustrated by the inadequate coordination of the inter-agency effort in London, they were themselves guilty of some suboptimal decision-making and delivery. So just as US troops on the ground often found themselves dealing with the consequences of inadequate political and strategic leadership and management of the war, so did the British.
There are many lessons to be learned about the strategic leadership and management of war. The most essential is the importance of strategic leadership by the head of government, his key ministers and senior military officers and officials. The evidence strongly suggests that UK prime ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown failed to provide the essential direction. Both chose not to use the tried and tested mechanism of a War Cabinet, which had been used with such success by Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher. So their strategic leadership was more ad hoc and less focused than was required.
To improve strategy formulation and execution, a National Security Council (NSC) was convened by Prime Minister David Cameron on his first day in office. It has often met to give strategic direction to operations and planning. For example, it was used extensively to manage the National Security Strategy (NSS) and the Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR). The UK’s role in Libya seems to have succeeded in making the Ministry of Defence, Foreign Office and Department for International Development integrate their work by design. By acting as the prime customer for the Joint Intelligence Committee, the NSC has improved direction and prioritisation of intelligence. Security officials consider this a significant improvement over the ad hoc and suboptimal direction and management of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan by the previous government, which have been repeatedly exposed in evidence to the independent Iraq Inquiry.