LIONS, DONKEYS AND DINOSAURS
by Lewis Page
Heinemann, £12.99; 256pp
An obituary in The Times of January 11 perfectly illustrates the supreme importance of moral courage in the soldier, and its price. Hugh Thompson was the 25-year-old US NCO-pilot whose moral and physical courage stopped the massacre of Vietnamese civilians at My Lai becoming worse than it was, and brought the perpetrators to justice. He received less than wholehearted support from politicians and senior officers, however, and the hostility of his peers.
The disintegration of discipline and morale in the US Army in Vietnam was due principally to four things: the perception that the war was unjust; loss of respect for the Vietnamese people; poor doctrine for an unfamiliar kind of warfare; and reliance on non-professionals — that is, conscripts.
We must hope that there are enough men and women like Hugh Thompson in the US Army today; and for that matter in the British Army. Today, the core of the US military in Iraq, and almost all the British Army, is professionals. Discipline ought therefore to be better than in Vietnam, for discipline is the regular soldier’s signature quality. And discipline, which distinguishes an army from a mob, counterbalances much of what makes for low morale: fear, and loss of public (and thus self) esteem. Discipline does not come up with the rations, though: it is a function of quality, both leaders and led, and the way that troops are employed.
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Counter-insurgency and its like — what the former British Nato commander General Sir Rupert Smith calls “war amongst the people” (The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World, reviewed here September 24) — is probably the most demanding sort of warfare morally, in the widest sense, and intellectually. Arguably, it is the only type of warfare that Western forces will be committed to in future. If so, it requires a fundamental rethink in the allocation of defence resources, for “war among the people” is, self-evidently, a ground war, the province of armies. The British Army has always said that it equips the man, whereas the other two services, the Navy and the RAF, man equipment. The trouble is that in the past 20 years the Army’s equipment has become so sophisticated that increasing numbers of non-combatants are required to maintain and supply it.
Paradoxically the front line — predominantly the infantry — has been drastically cut to pay for equipment and supporting manpower, so that increasingly the Army looks like the Navy and the RAF. Worse, it is equipment that has little or no utility in war among the people — such as the Apache attack helicopter. What are really needed are “boots on the ground” and, as important, moral and intellectual capacity. The MoD is cutting these because the very things with least utility have priority — monstrous cuckoos in the defence budget nest such as the RAF’s new Cold War aircraft, the Eurofighter. It is not just ruinously expensive: it distorts the MoD’s whole vision of war. For if the RAF needs the Eurofighter, the Army needs the same high-tech equipment.
In Lions, Donkeys and Dinosaurs: Waste and Blundering in the Armed Forces the former naval officer Lewis Page makes just this point. Unfortunately, whereas General Smith’s book is merely rather convoluted, Page’s is shot through with inaccuracies (he seems to believe everything he was told) and his remarks are frequently facile, which undermines his judgment on important procurement issues he raises.
The books are a start, nevertheless. Generals are habitually reproached for preparing to fight the last war instead of the next — too easy a gibe when their fellow-countrymen and political leaders have too often prepared for no war at all. The present failure, however, is not primarily of resources: it is intellectual. Yet hard thinking and hard decisions cost nothing but brainpower, determination and moral courage. The very qualities to be prized in a military leader.