The Changing of the Guard: the British army since 911 by Simon Akam

The Changing of the Guard: the British army since 911 by Simon Akam

Author:Simon Akam
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: POL069000, HIS027060, LAN008000, POL011000, HIS037080, POL012000, POL062000, POL036000, POL037000, POL034000
Publisher: Scribe Publications
Published: 2021-02-11T00:00:00+00:00


Chapter 16

Reform

As its campaigns continued, the army changed in multiple ways. This evolution encompassed physical things — equipment. It also took in processes, and in a more abstract realm, doctrine: the institution’s theory for how it should conduct itself out in the world.

Change with kit accelerated at the same time as the beginning of the end in Iraq. In 2006 David Eadie, a lieutenant colonel, deployed to Basra as equipment advisor to the general, who at this stage was John Cooper, Richard Shirreff’s predecessor. The equipment advisor position had existed only for six months prior to his tour, and Eadie was the first officer to hold it who had a genuine understanding of how military equipment development and procurement works. He commissioned into the 16th/5th Lancers,1 then equipped with the early Scorpion variant of the CVR(T) reconnaissance vehicle. He deployed in 1982 to Cyprus with the 13th/18th Hussars with the primitive Ferret scout car, and went to Beirut in 1983–4 on the same vehicle. After completing the technical course at staff college, despite having failed his physics O-level and scored a very poor pass at maths,2 Eadie moved into the equipment world.

The glacial scale, and stop-start nature, of normal peacetime military procurement is best indicated by the fact that one of the areas he worked on, the Challenger 2 midlife improvement package, was only implemented in 2018, fifteen years after Eadie’s involvement with it. Another, the Multi-Role Armoured Vehicle, was cancelled, before resurrection in a slightly different form.3 Eadie commanded the armoured corps training regiment at Bovington, before moving to instruct back on the technical course at the staff college in Shrivenham. There he drilled into the students that design of any military vehicle is always an act of compromise: more armour and a more powerful armament requires a more powerful engine for the same motive power, which in turn makes the vehicle heavier. He ran a simulation exercise so that his students could design their own vehicles, enabling them to understand these intractable relationships.

Overall, this background meant that when Eadie was selected to deploy to Iraq in 2006, he had a deep understanding of how military technology was designed, built and delivered. It was also a significant deployment for him personally. He missed out on the first Gulf War in 1991 as he was at staff college, and had not been on an operational deployment of any sort since Cyprus in 1994–5. He was of a generation prior to that which conducted much of the actual fighting in the new wars.4 Yet Eadie, and a number of others in his peer group, would make their own contributions in a different way.

The longstanding instrument to re-equip British forces at pace is the Urgent Operational Requirement — a vastly speeded-up variant of the traditional military procurement cycle. Significantly in 2006 UORs, once signed off, were still paid for completely by the Treasury out of their contingency funds, rather than by the MoD. They therefore represented, to the army, ‘free kit’.5 In the early stages of the Iraq campaign, UOR spending had concentrated on IED counter-measures.



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