In Iraq, the "bomb" is no longer simply a quantity of explosives and a detonator: the insurgents have progressed to an "explosively formed projectile". The effect is of an anti-tank gun firing. The Army will be putting counter-measures in hand, but this is a business of challenge, response and counter-challenge: a deadly game of cat and mouse.
The effect on the Army of casualties such as yesterday's is twofold. In the short term, there will be a grim determination to soldier on. In the longer term - and the question is how long that will be in Iraq - casualties can be corrosive, with an erosion of resolve to do things properly and to see things through. Indeed there may already be signs of corrosion: anecdotal evidence of increased absence without leave, and of experienced officers and soldiers signing off in greater numbers. Perhaps, too, but more subtly, the conduct of the captive sailors and Marines before Iranian television cameras may tell us something.
At bottom is an increasing feeling that, to adapt Bismarck's opinion of the Balkans, Iraq is not worth the bones of another infanteer. Last month, the Washington Center for Strategic and International Studies spoke of "British political and military failure in Basra and Maysan province". This was an awfully big spoonful of criticism to have to swallow, but Tony Blair's recent announcement of troop withdrawals is desperately needed good news for the Army.
Mr Blair had no choice. The Chief of the General Staff, Sir Richard Dannatt, warned last year that we needed to keep focused on the goal of pulling out of Iraq. If the CGS's words have influenced policy, we should be grateful. The Army was in large part holding the ring, but civil reconstruction was not happening in the way it had been promised. Even the recent tactical successes of Operation Sinbad, to clean up the Basra police, cannot make up for the planning failures at the strategic and operational (theatre) levels.
The CGS urgently needs to rebalance the Army's commitments because the growing demands of Afghanistan, with the Taliban spring offensive under way [seems rather the reverse - MC], otherwise threaten catastrophic overheating. The worrying thing is that, just as in Iraq, the reason more troops are needed in Helmand is to try to recover the situation tactically following miscalculations at the strategic and operational levels. Unless, however, the civil reconstruction effort, which is stalling there too, is revitalised, strategic failure will again be staring us in the face by the end of the year.
Then it will be a choice of another withdrawal that smacks of defeat, or committing even more troops to hold the ring while the policy is "revisited". Except that there are not the troops to commit without further erosion of the 18-month tour interval that the Army Board judges necessary for proper recuperation and retraining.
Of principal concern, though, is that the Government seems not to acknowledge that military force can only achieve so much. Quite simply, there is a lack of focus, intellectual honesty and rigour. Neither do ministers recognise that, without patience and the concomitant manpower and matériel, any strategy of forward engagement with al-Qa'eda will ultimately fail. No insurgency in which Britain has been involved has been won without patience. So if the Government wills these ends it must will the means. Or as Sir Mike Jackson, the previous CGS, said in his Dimbleby lecture last December: "If it expects its soldiers to pay in blood, the nation must pay in gold. [emphasis added]"..
Allan Mallinson was a soldier for 35 years, and commanded the 13th/18th Royal Hussars.
