Taking Command by David Richards

Author:David Richards [Richards, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Headline
Published: 2014-10-09T07:00:00+00:00

ELEVEN

Fighting Battles on My Way to Kabul

It was near the end of my tour as Assistant Chief of the General Staff that I was told that my next appointment, on promotion to Lieutenant General, would be as Commander of the Allied Rapid Reaction Corps (ARRC). This was the British Army’s senior operational command.

Not many days before that, the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, had agreed at the Istanbul NATO summit that Britain would lead NATO’s adoption of responsibility for Afghanistan in the south and the east, thereby completing its authority over the whole country. So I knew, as I left London and reported for duty in January 2005, that this huge operation was going to be mine.

I arrived in Rheindahlen in Germany, where the ARRC was based, to find that Richard Dannatt, my predecessor, had agreed on advice from his own and NATO’s staffs that the headquarters would do conventional war-fighting training until October that year. No commander wants to change his predecessor’s design for the immediate months ahead; I felt obliged to do just that.

I had done a lot of studying in preparation for Afghanistan before I arrived in Germany, something that Richard and the ARRC staff had not had time to do because of other pressures. I knew that what we were going to be asked to do needed a team that was well trained and well honed, and that understood the country and the people as well as possible. Leaving just a few months to prepare for such a complex task risked failure.

When I raised the issue on my arrival in Rheindahlen the atmosphere became ‘interesting’ because the senior staff – the Major Generals and the Brigadier Generals – had all contributed to Richard’s decision. I asked Chris Brown, a Major General and my Chief of Staff.

‘Why have you left less than six months to prepare?’

Chris explained that the NATO training system designed to prepare headquarters for operations had decreed that the ARRC would not be placed on their training roster until October at the earliest. The ARRC staff had not been very happy with the decision but had gone along with it, deciding that the headquarters would make virtue of necessity by concentrating on conventional warfighting until then.

‘Right,’ I said. ‘I’m going to think about this.’

When I got him and a couple of others back in, I told them I was not happy with the existing plans. Not for the first or last time, I found myself ignoring my superior headquarter’s intentions. I directed that we were going to turn our attention to Afghanistan immediately. I could feel resentment. I could sense my staff thinking, ‘Who the hell is this new guy? He doesn’t know anything.’

Six weeks later, Brigadier General Steve Layfield, my outstanding American one-star operations officer on my Afghan tour, came to see me. ‘General, I wouldn’t normally say this, because it might seem like sycophancy,’ he said, ‘but that was the best decision any General of mine ever took.’ This was because, by then,

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