I doubt if many British soldiers would quarrel with the views of the Tory homeland security spokesman, Patrick Mercer, a former colonel who remarked last week on the racial rough-house that is a modern army, for which he had to resign. That, of course, is not the point. The army is now, like all public services, a politicised entity. It must respect the changing dignities and pretences of politics, not war.
It must not call a spade a spade, in any sense of that term.
Who would be a soldier these days? You must die for countries that pose no threat to your home and hearth. The people you protect are trying to kill you. You shoot the wrong target and must face a public inquiry. You go to battle with a lawyer on one shoulder and a journalist on the other. Meanwhile your ministry leaves you under-equipped because it is still buying ships to fight the Germans and planes to fight the Russians.
Having witnessed soldiers of many countries in war and near war I have no doubt that British troops are the most effective in the world. The contrast between an American and a British patrol in Iraq is stark. I am sure that had Britain enjoyed a free hand in a semi-autonomous southern Iraq since 2003 it would not now be retreating with more than 130 dead and the job unfinished. That is what happens when our military policy is made subservient to America.
The same is increasingly true of Afghanistan, where the army is struggling to obey probably the stupidest order it has received since Cardigan charged the Russian guns at Balaclava. For British politicians to denigrate other Nato countries for refusing to commit soldiers to a doomed mission is absurd. By the time Nato arrived in Kabul two years ago, America's tactic of search and destroy had ensured that peaceful reconstruction was not feasible. The British Army's mission, to defeat the world's toughest insurgents, wipe out the country's economic staple of opium and bring the entire south under the rule of Kabul, all with some 8,000 troops, is plain mad.
Soldiers facing death have a vivid sense of the worth of what they are about. They are now fighting two wars without that crucial prop to morale, a public back home that believes in their cause. The government has not sustained public support.
Tony Blair responds to interviews as if these wars were personal crusades. Former generals -even Sir Richard Dannatt, the head of the army -have questioned the purpose and conduct of both conflicts.
Hypersensitivity to public relations has led to the prosecution of officers and men for troop misbehaviour. An army trained to "tread on eggshells" in Northern Ireland has found it harder to do so in the more brutal environments of Iraq and Afghanistan, where even street patrolling requires courage and split-second responses.
Conventional military theory calls these conflicts fourth generation wars (4GW), succeeding conventional, nuclear and guerrilla ones. They are wholly new, characterised by a blurred line between civil and military realms, an absence of any clear enemy, a disregard of national boundaries, the exploitation of terror to incur overreaction and a reliance on primitive ethnic and religious sympathy to achieve a political goal.
Above all, 4GW involves trapping the enemy into a blundering counterproductive response, much as a cunning wrestler uses the superior weight of an opponent to bring about his fall. The American and British responses to 9/11 ignored all the maxims of 4GW.
Both nations now have armies bogged down in old-style guerrilla wars in territory they are ceding to jihadist Islam. Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, the kicking down of doors, crude airstrikes, random arrests, the boasting of kill rates, the undermining of traditional leaders and the distorting of local economies by ill-judged aid all defy the precepts of 4GW by playing into the hands of the enemy. As the International Institute for Strategic Studies notes, such tactics "reinforce Osama Bin Laden's narrative depicting the United States and its allies as seeking to establish western hegemony in the Arab and wider Muslim world".
A 4GW army is not about capture and hold, nor even winning hearts and minds, since its objective is not to defeat an army or dominate territory.
It is to prevent the dissemination of ideas and restrict the manoeuvre of those who plot terrorism. Such an army is light, mobile and possibly secret. Its interventions barely qualify for the term military but are rather diplomatic, economic and propagandist. If an army stays too long on foreign soil after its initial thrust it becomes a hated occupier. Its gains are consolidated by contractors, aid workers, journalists and spies.
A 4GW victory may be no more than a tilt in the balance of power within a regime, to encourage the suppression of a terrorist cell. Such wars are not pursued by threats, sanctions or military assault, so often welcomed by an embattled enemy.
America's most effective 4GW was to support the mujaheddin (later the Taliban) to defeat the Russians in Afghanistan in the late 1980s -hardly anyone knew.
What must be heart-breaking for the modern soldier is not just to see his hard work ruined by inept "nation building". More galling has been to watch defence ministries spend billions on weapons that have no relevance to the wars that modern soldiers are expected to fight -usually against enemies armed only with rifles and mortars. These ministries are stuck in the cold war.
As a lay member of the 1997 defence review panel formed by George Robertson, Blair's first defence secretary, I recall being told that we were free to debate anything. New Labour was open-minded, not least to 4GW. Not true. We could not discuss the merits of the navy's new aircraft carriers, the RAF's Eurofighters or the Trident submarine programme, despite their consuming much of the ministry's vast procurement budget. Desperate not to seem "weak" on defence, Labour was determined to go ahead with these projects, irrespective of their strategic obsolescence.
An example of Gordon Brown's weakness at the Treasury has been his inability, over 10 years, to cut even one of these cold war equipment programmes. Even a new batch of archaic destroyers, the Type 45, is still being built, at £ 800m apiece, and Brown has caved in to the nonsensical Trident replacement lobby. None of these weapons has a role in any conceivable war. But they are hugely expensive (with some £ 35billion in the pipeline) and thus have behind them Britain's monopoly arms supplier, BAE Systems, a company so powerful it could get the Serious Fraud Office to stop investigating bribery allegations against it.
Although only a third of BAE's employees work in Britain it always "threatens" to sack them if not given the orders it requires.
The one service that fights modern wars is the army, yet it constantly loses out in Whitehall battles over money. The army is down to 100,000 personnel and declares itself chronically overstretched, while the navy and air force employ 90,000, including more admirals and air marshals than there are serving ships or squadrons. Yet because navy and air force procurement is inflexible and expensive, it can browbeat a succession of weak Labour defence secretaries into capitulation.
The result has been the under-paying and under-equipping of the army. A soldier gets barely half the take-home pay of a policeman with overtime.
The shortages of helicopters, armoured vehicles, body armour and battlefield radios that regularly fill the press and army blog sites are not due to some considered view of military priorities. A decision to buy dud Merlin helicopters, or too few Viking troop carriers, or a jamming SA80 rifle, or a defective Bowman digital radio emerges from the clash of tri-service rivalry in Whitehall defence industry chauvinism. Most of this equipment could be bought more cheaply off the shelf.
Glib pundits may state that the nation "needs" both more army manpower and more expensive ships and planes. The truth is this cannot be afforded. What gets sacrificed is the manpower. Because there is no profit in soldiers, the nation gets planes and ships it does not need. The defence ministry fights, or rather buys, the last war and ignores the next.
The iron law of defence policy remains unaltered. It is dictated not by defence but by money. And the highest price, as always, is paid by the poor bloody infantry when the guns begin to shoot.
