Defence

The failures of American intelligence

The terrorist attacks on 9/11 succeeded because US intelligence failed to bring the various pieces of information together to prevent them. The attempted terrorist attack on a North West Airlines plane headed for Detroit almost succeeded because US intelligence failed to bring different pieces of information together that would have prevented the bomber getting on the plane. Between 2001 and today, the US has spent around $40 billion on counter terrorist improvements and even more on trying to improve intelligence. And yet, nothing much seems to have changed. In the current case, there was intelligence that the Yemen branch of Al Qaeda was using a ‘Nigerian’ as a bomber. There

2010: my predictions and yours

It’s that time of year – TV and radio are packed with special editions of Dr Who, news reviews and numerous best-ofs. So let me add to the cacophony with a look ahead to next year. Here are thirteen (and a bit) predictions for 2010: 1. The Taliban will mount a Tet-like attack on an Afghan town centre, such as Laskar Gar, prompting the Lib Dems to call for a British withdrawal from Afghanistan. 2. Iran’s regime will arrest and condemn to death one of the contenders in the 2009 presidential election. 3. Brazil will win the World Cup in South Africa. 4. The Pakistani president will be forced from

The case for John Hutton as a New Labour hero

Ok, so identifying the heroes of the New Labour era may not sit well with CoffeeHousers – but I’d still recommend you read through the latest Bagehot column in the Economist, which does just that.  It identifies five figures from the past 12 years who have “done the state and country some serious and lasting service,” and whose “virtues [are] not be clouded or cancelled by grave mistakes or misdemeanours”.  They are: Lord Adonis, Donald Dewar, Lord Mandelson, Sir William Macpherson and Robin Cook.  James Purnell, Alistair Darling and, strikingly, Bill Clinton finish in the runners-up list. You can debate the merits and demerits of those names all day long,

The Chopper Wars

CHESTER, ENGLAND – DECEMBER 03: A soldier of 1st Battalion The Royal Welsh waits for a Chinook to land during an exercise before deployment to Afghanistan. Members of 1st Battalion The Royal Welsh, who are based in Chester, are to be deployed following Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s announcement on Monday of an extra 500 troops for Afghanistan. Photo: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images. The omnishambles at the Ministry of Defence is such that, astonishingly, it may have supplanted the Home Office as the government department least fit-for-purpose. This is no small achievement and, one suspects, owes little to any improvement on the Home front. It’s been apparent for some time that defence

Blair admits to misleading the British public over Iraq

It has taken eight years, but Tony Blair has finally leveled with the British public and admitted that the WMD thing didn’t really matter: he wanted to depose Saddam Hussein anyway. That’s what he has said in a BBC interview, presumably to pre-empt his appearance before the Chilcot inquiry. His chosen confessor: Fern Britton. His medium: BBC1 on Sunday. It has been trailed to the newspapers, including tomorrow’s Times. As it says: “He said it was the ‘threat’ that Saddam presented to the region that was uppermost in his mind. The development of weapons of mass destruction was one aspect of that threat. Mr Blair said that there had been

Not Foxy enough

Analysts analyse, reporters report and politicians, well, they are meant to make decisions. When in power, they are meant to decide things; when in opposition they are meant to set our alternatives to government policy. But not, it seems, when it comes to defence policy. Or at least not always. I have just sat down to read Liam Fox’s NATO speech (as I could not attend), which he gave at Chatham House recently. To say that I am disappointed is an understatement. I think Liam Fox is a first-rate politician. His ongoing exposure of the Government’s military under-resourcing has been excellent. On a Tory team that is sometime accused of

Has Labour u-turned on protecting defence spending?

Back in July, Lord Mandelson added defence to health and education as an area of spending that Labour would protect from cuts. But looking at page 97 of the Green Book, defence is conspicuously absent from the list of areas of public spending that are protected in 2011-2012 and 2012-2013. The only areas mentioned are NHS spending, schools, sure start, policing and overseas aid. As some of these are only receiving funding increases in line with inflation, it seems reasonable to assume that everything else – including defence – is likely to be cut in real terms.    (There is a commitment to spend up to £2.5 billion from the

The clock is ticking on Iran

When I visited Israel last year, various sources there were convinced – adamant, even – that Iran was within a year or two of creating an atomic bomb.  That may or may not have been the case, but it’s still ominous that that hypothetical timeline is nearly up.  We can all too easily forget that, in the background to all the column inches and comment pieces expended on Iran, there are genuine and pressing concerns that the country is on the cusp of becoming a nuclear power. Which is why the two latest news stories from the country are particularly worrying: the capture of a racing yacht by the Iranian

The Iraq inquiry we should be having

Do we still have the will to win in Afghanistan? If so, the question the Iraq inquiry should be asking is not “how did we get into this war” – we have had a number of separate inquiries into that already – but “why were the military defeated on the ground in Basra?”. If the Chilcot Inquiry were to focus on that, it might actually serve a purpose: not just in unearthing new information (which it has signally failed to do so far) but drawing lessons that just might help the troops in Afghanistan. I make this point in my News of the World column today. I am in a

Tory government should be manoeuvrist government

The greatest challenge facing a new government may be that Britain’s national security institutions are not fit for purpose. They were built for a different era and focused on a set of now obselete threats. Notwithstanding a few exceptions, like the Cuban Missile Crisis, the threats during the Cold War were slow-moving and predictable. Even in the immediate Cold War period, threats were nasty, but rarely novel.   Now, however, Britain faces all manner of fast-moving, asymmetric threats. Terrorists and insurgents can get inside our decision-making loop. In Helmand, the Taliban stage attacks around their media strategy, not the other way around as we do it. Countries like Russia and

Obama Breaks A Promise to Britain

Perhaps there’s more to this than meets the eye, but on the face of it the Obama administration has not only broken a promise made to Britain but reneged upon a vital agreement that would have given the UK full “operational sovereignty” over the new F-35 Joint Strike Fighters we’re supposed to be buying for our new aircraft carriers. Back in December 2006 Lord Drayson, minister for Defence Procurement, travelled to Washington for urgent talks to save Britain’s participation in the programme. Crucial to this was the signing of a memorandum of Understanding that would give Britain, the only “Tier 1” partner, full access to software codes that would allow

The case for 40,000

As President Obama continues to consider his options on Afghanistan, The New York Times has a good primer on what the military could do with the various levels of reinforcements being considered. This is what the military believes it could do with an extra 40,000 troops: “Should President Obama decide to send 40,000 additional American troops to Afghanistan, the most ambitious plan under consideration at the White House, the military would have enormous flexibility to deploy as many as 15,000 troops to the Taliban center of gravity in the south, 5,000 to the critical eastern border with Pakistan and 10,000 as trainers for the Afghan security forces. The rest could

Money talks in Afghanistan

Afghan politics stinks; we all know it.  But it’s still shocking to read how the former governor of Helmand, Sher Mohammed Akhundzada, encouraged his supporters to join the Taliban after he lost his position, in 2005, under a cloud of drug-running allegations.  Here’s what he tells today’s Telegraph:   “When I was no longer governor the government stopped paying for the people who supported me ….  I sent 3,000 of them off to the Taliban because I could not afford to support them but the Taliban was making payments. Lots of people, including my family members, went back to the Taliban because they had lost respect for the government. The

Cutting MoD staff will not win wars

Liam Fox has made clear that the Conservative Party is planning to slash the number of civilian posts at the Ministry of Defence as a way of balancing the military budget if they win the general election in 2010. “We have 99,000 people in the Army and 85,000 civilians in the MoD. Some things will have to change – and believe me, they will,” Fox has said. But if the Conservatives thought they had stumbled across a sure-fire criticism of Labour’s way of war, in The Times, ex-soldier, author (and, I will wager, future MP) Patrick Hennessey asks the public not to lay off the “MoD desk-jockeys.” ‘The MoD deploys

Helicopter reality

There is something oddly comforting about discussing NATO’s Afghan mission in terms of kit, helicopters and troop numbers – or the lack thereof. These are tangible categories. You either have the right amount or you don’t. And if you don’t, then it is because somebody made the wrong decision or failed to make a timely one. Even Mrs Janes, grief-stricken after the killing of her son, seems to take some comfort in the question of equipment while Liam Fox has made much political capital of the Government’s failures. There are just two problems with this kind of approach to warfare. First, the stories in the press about helicopters take precedence

Commanders on the ground were concerned about helicopter shortages

The Mail has obtained a memo sent to the MoD by Lieutenant Colonel Rupert Thorneloe. He warns that helicopter shortages would cost lives; tragically, he was prescient. The Mail is not publishing the complete memo, which contains sensitive information, but Lt. Col Thorneloe wrote: ‘We cannot not move people, so this moth we have concluded a great deal of administrative movement by road. This increases the IED threat and our exposure to it… The current level of SH (support helicopter) support is therefore unsustainable… and is clearly not fit for purpose.’ This appraisal, widely circulated within the MoD, demolishes Gordon Brown’s denial that helicopter shortages cost lives during Operation Panther’s

A report that must inaugurate reform

Chairman of the Nimrod inquiry Charles Haddon Cave QC is convinced that the fire on board Nimrod XV230 would not have occurred had those tasked with ensuring airworthiness fulfilled their responsibilities. Haddon Cave lists Air Commodore George Baber, Wing Commander Michael Eagles and the leadership of BAE Systems among the chief culprits – the MoD and BAE face costly negligence suits and perhaps criminal proceedings in consequence. Identifying culpable individuals is unusual, illustrating quite how damning this report is to the MoD and the Defence industry – those bodies, as well as allegedly negligent individuals are responsible. The report provides a clear insight into the MoD’s modus operandi. Haddon Cave

The West’s intelligence deficit on Iran

At the headquarters of the Defense Intelligence Agency outside of Washington DC, there are no cardboard mockups of Iran’s nuclear sites that can be used for briefing the military on plans of attack. Instead, there is a very cool 3D map table that allows the viewer to fly into and through the many layers of the nuclear facilities. A movement of the hands can expand or contract the view from an image of an individual room to the perspective from an overhead satellite. On the basis of that briefing, an attack on Iran’s nuclear sites looks easy, right down to the dialing in of the depth at which a new

Karzai the Envoy Slayer

I have just returned from DC, where the talk of the town, or at least of the foreign policy community, is how long Richard Holbrooke has left in the Obama administration. A well-connected friend suggested The Bulldozer has, at most, two months left. Perhaps most telling has been Holbrooke’s absence in the recent efforts to persuade Hamid Karzai to accept a second round of voting in the presidential election. The Economist hailed John Kerry’s impromptu diplomacy, which secured Karzai’s consent and gave Holbrooke the epithet “now-absent”. Diplomats I have spoken to say President Karzai is currently refusing to see Holbrooke at all, possibly sensing a chance to divide and weaken

Speaker Bercow asserts himself

Despite the circumstances of his election, Speaker Bercow is showing scant regard for the party who secured his election. First, he recommended that ministers who sat in the House of Lords, particularly the Lord Most High, should be cross-examined by MPs, and today he gave Battlin’ Bob a severe dressing down in the Commons. The very damning Gray report was debated today, and Ainsworth can hardly have been anticipating this event with generous thoughts and easy gaiety. To avoid total disaster, the cunning Defence Secretary played the ‘George Carmen card’ – that is, release the evidence an hour before the debate so that none of the participants have the time