British military chiefs will be criticised by the Chilcot inquiry for “taking on too much work” in Iraq and for over-stretching their forces, a former head of the army has predicted.
General Lord Dannatt, who was chief of the general staff between 2006 and 2009, expects that the army will face criticism for shortening tour intervals and taking on too much risk, after thousands of soldiers were sent to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In the first comments made by a senior figure on the probable outcome of the £10 million inquiry into the Iraq war, he said: “I think the military is most likely to be criticised over its active, can-do attitude. Maybe we’re guilty of taking on too much work.
“Between 2006 and 2009 the army had eight deployable brigades. We managed to develop an operational rotation of five brigades cycling through Iraq, and five brigades cycling through Afghanistan. We generated two more out of our own resources by working people far harder than they should have been worked, by shortening tour intervals, and accepting risk.”
In 2006, Britain chose to commit thousands of troops to Afghanistan despite security in southern Iraq deteriorating since the 2003 invasion. “Whether we liked it or not we were locked into two significant operations, one in Iraq, one in Afghanistan,” Lord Dannatt said. “Maybe we should have put our hand up earlier and said we can’t do it.”
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The inquiry into the decision to join the US-led invasion was commissioned in 2009 by Gordon Brown and was expected to last a year. Sir John Chilcot, its chairman, said on Wednesday that he soon expected to be able to provide David Cameron with a timetable for publication. Giving those criticised in the report a chance to respond is said to have caused the delay. Sir John said he expected the last responses “shortly”.
Last week a source told The Times that senior military figures, rather than politicians, could be behind the delays. Lord Dannatt would not confirm whether he had been contacted by Sir John’s team but said he was not “holding anything up”.
An analysis of the evidence from the inquiry reveals how far Afghanistan constrained military options in Iraq. Lord Dannatt told the inquiry: “What we could and could not do in Iraq in 2005 and 2006 was constrained by what we were doing or were going to do in Afghanistan from 2006. We could have deployed another 5,000 [soldiers] for a short period of time in 2006, but of course, we couldn’t, because we had already decided to reinforce in Afghanistan.”
Sir Lawrence Freedman, one of the inquiry members, asked another witness, Lieutenant-General Sir Robert Fry, why the decision to commit troops to Afghanistan, made in 2004, was not revisited. He said: “There must have been an argument that, ‘Please wait, we really just can’t do this until we are absolutely sure that we can get out of Iraq’.’”
General Fry said that “there was a view within the British Army that they could have more success in Afghanistan that they would in Iraq”.
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Lord Dannatt said yesterday that there had been pressure “to reduce the 45,000 we had in Iraq to a much, much smaller and sustainable number”. He criticised the navy and air force for fighting to protect “vested interests” while the army was doing “the heavy lifting, the fighting and the dying”.