14 July 2010: Xinhua
The new British coalition government moved quickly on Wednesday to put in place the new professional head of the armed forces. And it has surprised no one that it is a soldier rather than a sailor or an airman.
General Sir David Richards will become the new Chief of the Defense Staff in October. His appointment marks another important foundation stone in the changes in defense policy that will take place over the life of the new British coalition government and beyond.
General Richards takes over from Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup, an airman, who was shunted out of his job by the new defense secretary, Dr. Liam Fox, shortly after he took office in the wake of the coalition's formation on May 11.
Air Chief Marshal Stirrup, who began his military career as a jet fighter pilot, has been criticized for his handling of the war in Afghanistan, which has seen an expensive and bloody escalation over the past few years.
A lack of troops on the ground and helicopters to move them around dogged the early years of a major additional deployment of the British army in Helmand Province in Afghanistan from 2006 onward.
He was also perceived to be too close to the outgoing Labor administration, and former prime minister Gordon Brown extended his tenure of office to prevent the then head of the army, who had been critical of the government, from stepping up into Stirrup's job.
General Richards will take over in October, some months after the Strategic Defense Review (SDR), which will radically redefine British military structure and aims.
The new coalition government and Defense Secretary Fox are another major foundation of the changes to come, as is the SDR itself.
General Richards' tenure of office will be defined by the changes he will have to implement as a result of the SDR.
Some clues as to the nature of the SDR, which will be unveiled shortly, were dropped by Defense Secretary Fox earlier this week.
Speaking at the leading London think-tank Chatham House, Fox said that the SDR "offers us an opportunity to make a clean break from the mindset of Cold War politics and dispense with the conceptual and physical legacies that persist."
He defined the roles of the three armed services, which General Richards will command. He said the future navy must be capable of "maritime-enabled power projection." He defined the air force's role as "the capacity to control air-space to guarantee freedom of maneuver." He added the army must have the ability to "deploy land power with the logistical strength to sustain it."
Fox added that the British armed forces would retain a "war- fighting edge."
However, the new coalition government has set as its principal task the slashing of the current record public spending deficit of 153 billion pounds (about 240 billion U.S. dollars) by 100 billion pounds (about 150 billion dollars) by 2014.
Against this background, Fox's Ministry of Defense has been ordered to prepare budget cuts of between 10 and 25 percent.
The result is that General Richards, aged 58, is certain to be responsible for implementing the most radical re-shaping of Britain's armed forces in over 50 years.
General Richards is an artillery officer who commanded British troops in Sierra Leone in 2000, when they defended the president in a civil war.
He commanded British and American troops in Afghanistan in 2006, and became the Chief of the General Staff, the professional head of the British army, in August 2009.
General Richards is unafraid of speaking out on military issues he considers important.
In January, at the beginning of the consultation process that will result in the SDR, he told an audience at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London: "Defense must respond to the new strategic, and indeed economic, environment by ensuring much more ruthlessly that our armed forces are appropriate and relevant to the context in which they will operate rather than the one they might have expected to fight in in previous eras."
"This is not a change that happens once in a generation, it is less frequent than that. And in many ways this one is more fundamental than from horse to tank," he added.
In his speech, he outlined why he thought the war in Afghanistan must be won by NATO.
"Our defeat would act as a match, lighting the fuse that is already finding tinder in Yemen and could so easily set light to parts of Africa, the Middle East and East Asia," he claimed.
General Richards also went public some weeks ago with what he called his "private view" that negotiations with the Taliban in Afghanistan needed to be opened sooner or later in order to find a peace agreement.
"If you look at any counter-insurgency campaign throughout history there's always a point at which you start to negotiate with each other, probably through proxies in the first instance, and I don't know when that will happen," he said in an interview with the BBC.
"This is a purely private view, I think there's no reason why we shouldn't be looking at that sort of thing pretty soon," he added.
