The “Best Little Army in the World” (Scott Nelson/Getty Images)

The Armed Forces, and the Army in particular, are surely the only arms of the British state that still retain a popular reputation for institutional competence. Consider the recent book The Habit of Excellence, a sort of retread for civilian CEOs of the motivational anthologies handed out at Sandhurst. Or the Government’s drafting in of the former Vice-Chief of Defence Staff (though a Royal Marine rather than a soldier) to institute wide-ranging reforms to the NHS — a clear nod to the military’s residual reputation for no-nonsense, hard-nosed efficiency.
It is difficult to square this perception with the Army’s shambolic and wasteful recent record in procurement. And yet a sense lingers, whether true or not, that the armed forces remain a refuge area for a type of stoic effectiveness lost to the rest of the country, an ability to get the job done, without complaint, against intimidating odds.
This may say as much about Britain as a whole as it does of the armed forces itself. Consider the wave of affectionate sentimentality about the Army, perhaps a working-class analogue of middle-class sentimentality about the NHS, which swept the country in the late 2000s. The popular mood at the time, manifest in the Help for Heroes campaign (est. 2007) and the Sun’s Military Awards (est. 2008), was immediately inflamed by the sense that troops in the field were being put in harm’s way by the Government’s budget cuts, and by dissatisfaction with heckling and burning of poppies by jihadist sympathisers as troops paraded home from Afghanistan. Then the Army was a potent symbol of a pure, betrayed institution around which the British people could explore its wider anxieties, a metaphor for growing unease with the direction of the British state itself.
Yet even the Army’s most devoted supporter would be forced to admit that the past two decades have not enhanced its reputation. Both the Labour government’s two wars of choice were painful strategic and tactical failures, entered into with little popular enthusiasm and abandoned with little fanfare. In both wars, units and individual soldiers fought bravely on a tactical level, in pursuit of misguided and ultimately fruitless strategic aims.
It is within this context that two recent books aim to dissect the Army’s failings in Iraq and Afghanistan to make sense of this lacklustre performance. In The Changing of the Guard, Simon Akam, a former gap-year officer, chronicles the Army like a disappointed lover, twisting the knife into the institution’s sorest wounds. In Blood, Metal and Dust, Brigadier Ben Barry, a former director of the British Army Staff, chooses a higher target. Yes, the successes of the small interventions of the Nineties had led military chiefs to rest on their laurels, so that “operational success had become the mother of complacency.” But for Barry, whose book draws from his still-classified official postmortem of the post-9/11 wars, the ultimate cause of failure can be placed at the hands of the Labour politicians managing the war.
Both retell the bare, painful facts of the Army’s two most recent defeats. In Iraq, the initial capture and occupation of Basra, entered into with soft hats and the self-congratulatory confidence of an Army that believed it led the world in peacekeeping and counterinsurgency, ended in a humiliating negotiated withdrawal of British forces to the edge of the city, where, pinned down by constant bombardment by the Shia militias who now ran the city, they lost all capacity to exert their influence.
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