Generals look for a new role for the Army | News

Britain's top generals are profoundly worried about what role their
army will have once combat troops leave Afghanistan at the end of
2014, the exit date set by David Cameron.

What are they worried about, we may ask; have not the generals been
insisting that the army is more relevant than ever, mocking the navy
for demanding a new fleet of ballistic missiles armed
with nuclear warheads, and the RAF for insisting that Britain still
needs fast high-flying jets? What use are these against the new
enemy - groups of insurgents charging around in pick-up trucks or
sending suicide bombers to attacks soft targets?

Surely all you need are "boots on the ground", assets which only the
army can offer.

No. And that is why the army's most senior officers are preparing a fundamental shake-up of how their soldiers are trained and what they are taught. Afghanistan, and now Libya, has demonstrated once again that there is a limit to what air power can achieve (you cannot "drop democracy from 14,000 feet", said David Cameron just weeks before enthusiastically joining Nicolas Sarkozy in imposing a no fly zone over Libya).

Even low-flying (Army Air Corps) Apache helicopters, vulnerable to
attack from small arms, will not end the conflict in Libya, and what
the former British, UN, and Nato, commander General Rupert Smith,
predicting future conflicts, has called "war amongst the people".

A new and remarkably frank, internal British army report states: "The army is not ready, in both preparedness and capability terms, for the demands of
future urban operations". It continues: "We will also have to develop
air manoeuvre doctrine specifically for high density urban areas -
where the lower airspace may become increasingly contested".

These highly significant comments appear in the latest study of the
army's "Agile Warrior" programme, an attempt to foresee what kind of conflict
Britain's soldiers will face and how they should be trained for them.

The point was starkly put by Lt Gen Paul Newton, the army's head of training and developing doctrine, a most thoughtful general in a most crucial post. "If rather than a monolithic enemy that fights according to a standard doctrinal template, we are likely to encounter adversaries and problems that are localised and unique, the implications are profound", he says.

Writing on the Future Character of Conflict in the latest issue of
the British Army Journal, he adds: "It is unlikely that we will face
an adversary in purely traditional combat power terms again. Why
should [states] risk their hard-won economic and social achievements
to confront us conventionally...when they have cheaper levers of power
with less associated risk at their disposal; and when they are able to
secure their objectives semi-autonomously through cyberspace or
through guerrillas and/or proxies, or in ways that they know are
contrary to the west's preferred mode of combat?"

By 2029, Newton notes, 60% of the world's 8.3bn people will be
urbanised, with 6bn of those living within 100km of the coasts. Within and around the urban areas, adversaries real and potential are already turning to "concealed underground facilities immune to much of our surveillance systems" and close to civilians.

Newton was one of the speakers at a barely-reported conference on land
warfare at the London-based Royal United Services Institute. Gen Sir Nick Parker, commander in chief of UK land forces, told the conference: "We do not understand the environment we are operating in".

If senior army figures did not understand the importance of the
internet's social networks then "we will fail", Parker warned
referring to the role they have played in Libya and elsewhere during
the "Arab spring".

General Sir Peter Wall, the head of the army, observed: "We tend to
get involved when countering despotic behaviour".

In Libya, those opposed to despotic behaviour have been screaming for more help on the ground. Yet for a host of reasons - including the limits of UN security council resolutions, political opinion in Britain and the Arab world, the British army will not intervene in Libya.

Will they intervene ever again en masse in foreign fields? No wonder the generals are worried.