Credit to Mick Smith (ST), for the following article.
December 07, 2006
The Great Man Speaks
General Sir Mike Jackson, the former head of the army, the soldier’s general, has lashed out at the government for asking too much of his men and at the MoD for not caring enough about them. The great man's presentation of the BBC's annual Richard Dimbleby lecture was a bravura performance. On the difficult problem of Iraq which is exercising so many great minds this week, he has thought long and hard, he says. Some of course – he won’t mention the name of his successor General Sir Richard Dannatt - have called for a swift withdrawal. But the great man has decided that it would be immoral simply to cut and run. Who could disagree with him? Put him on a pedestal, give him a seat in the House of Lords and let’s all stand back and admire the sheer personal courage of a thoroughly decent man who throughout his time in charge of the army tried his level best to hold back the ever increasing demands imposed on his men by the government and the evil monster that is the MoD.
(Rapturous applause)
Sorry, you say. Could this possibly be the same General Sir Mike Jackson who, when he was actually head of the army and they were actually his men, insisted against all the evidence that they were “stretched but not overstretched”? Is this the very same General Sir Mike Jackson who decided that fighting the war on terror in Iraq and Afghanistan was such a bed of roses for his men that he could axe three frontline infantry battalions at a stroke? Is it the same great man - the soldier's general - who insisted that his men were ready to cross the start lines into Iraq with all they needed, amid major shortages of everything from toilet rolls to the chemical and biological filters to protect them against Saddam's so-called “weapons of mass destruction”? Could this possibly be the same General Sir Mike Jackson who when he sent several thousand extra troops into Afghanistan while thousands more were still stuck in Iraq, insisted that there were plenty of men to do the job? Asked by the BBC’s Andrew Marr: Do you have enough people? The great man replied: “Yes, We've looked at this very carefully, we can do it - there is no doubt about that.”
But the mere fact that you have asked these foolishly simplistic questions is evidence enough that you clearly don’t understand. Those were dark, dark days and the great man could do nothing, crushed as he was by the evil monster that was the MoD. It didn’t care about his soldiers. It made too many demands on them and didn’t treat them properly. But there was nothing the great man could do because he didn’t even have control of his own budget. “I did not hold the budget for the Army, believe it or not,” he intones. “We have over-centralised in my view, and this has diminished the Chiefs of Staff's ability to take personal charge of the running of their Services. Their ability to determine, for example, personnel matters - pay, terms of service, accommodation; medical - we have not recovered from the disastrous decisions over the medical services which were made in the aftermath of the Cold War, especially where the hospitalisation of wounded soldiers is concerned. There is a perverse reluctance to acknowledge the psychological importance of comradeship in the ward as well as on the battlefield.”
So now surely you understand why the great man was unable to speak any of these great truths when he was actually in charge of his men and actually able to make a difference, why he repeatedly appeared in fact to say the complete opposite of what he says now.
Perhaps someone needs to explain all this to the great man’s successor General Sir Richard Dannatt because he clearly doesn’t understand the realities of life. Even though he is of course still mired in this MoD plot to do the army down, the first thing he did after replacing the great man was to point out how pathetically poorly British soldiers were being paid to be used for Taliban target practice in southern Afghanistan and astonishingly it produced more money. Not enough, the great man tells us wisely but surely something at least. The next thing Dannatt did was shout very loudly that the army was close to breaking point because of the demands made on it in Iraq and Afghanistan, embarassing the government into starting to talk about withdrawing from Iraq, and in between time he managed to ensure that wounded soldiers were treated properly in a military-only ward by telling the defence secretary in no uncertain terms that he was not prepared to accept that his men should be dumped into any bed that happened to be available in a civilian ward just to save money.
Great minds will no doubt ponder and argue among themselves for years to come how Dannatt managed to do all this within a few short weeks of taking over, while the great man could not do it in three long years. Perhaps the readers of this blog could help them unravel what must surely be one of the great mysteries of our time.