EU Referendum


Chilcot: slow in responding to the threat


07/07/2016




I was told, when the Chilcot inquiry started up in November 2009, that one of the first things they had done was procure a number of copies of my book Ministry of Defeat.

As the definitive story of the Snatch Land Rover debacle, it is still hard to beat, and from my perusal of Section 14.1, it seems to support my contention that the Army was largely at fault in failing to secure adequate equipment for its troops.

In a nutshell, the Army was late in identifying the need for what the Americans were to call a Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicle. When the need became apparent, it was reluctant to commit the funds to such equipment, for fear of prejudicing the funding stream for the more ambitious Future Rapid Effects System (FRES) project, which was dear to the hearts of the Army brass.

Although the invasion of Iraq had been over since April 2003, the insurgency was slow in building and the Army was not overly liberal with its theatre reports. It was not until we were well into 2006, therefore, that I personally started to realise that the casualty rate from troops riding in lightly armoured Snatch Land Rovers was disproportionately high.

By 18 June 2006, it was evident that more than a quarter of the total deaths were incurred in Land Rovers and, as a result, I wrote a long blogpost entitled: "How Blair is killing our soldiers", detailing the growing death toll.

I held back publication to coincide with a piece in Booker's column (which seems not to have been deleted), both of us featuring the South African-built RG-31 armoured vehicle, then operated in Iraq by the US Marine Corps. The machine in question had sustained a massive blast from an improvised explosive device (IED), from which the crew had walked away virtually uninjured (pictured above).

Why, we asked, was not the British Army fielding such equipment, especially when it was manufactured by a company wholly owned by the British defence contractor, BAE Systems.

On 22 June, there had been a defence debate in the House of Commons during which, working closely with Lady Ann Winterton, I had been able to place some pointed questions. Then, fortified with information directly from serving officers in the field, I was able to feed information to the Sunday Times which ran the story as a Focus investigation, alongside Booker writing once again in the Sunday Telegraph.

Immediately, I ran into a storm of flak, not least from the MoD whose spokesmen declared the RG-31 "too big for Basra", supported by the sneering condescension of military experts who dismissed "armchair generals" like myself for not understanding the limitations of armour in the protection of vehicles. 


Typical of what we heard was the argument latterly repeated by General Mike Jackson. He told the inquiry: "… there is a limit to the amount of metal you can stick on a vehicle … and the ability of the opposition to up the kinetic energy that can be applied can go rather faster than our ability to withstand that. So the amount of metal on a vehicle is important but it is not the complete answer, and you would finish up with a vehicle which is far too large often to go down small streets in an urban area".

Scarcely any of our critics understood that we were promoting a new approach in battlefield technology, using design to deflect and absorb blast, instead of relying on brute force. There are, actually, five key issues one must address in designing MRAPs: distance; absorption; deflection; isolation; and only then armour.

One tries to have a long engine compartment, with the front wheels positioned well in front of the crew cabin, to maximise the distance from the blast and the soldiers within the vehicle. For similar reasons, the vehicle bodies are mounted as high above the wheels as is possible.

Parts – such as wheels – in the path of the expected blast are designed to break off, absorbing energy as they do, while the hull is given a v-shaped profile, like a boat, to deflect energy away from interior. Inside, seats are suspended from the roof of the vehicle, with foot rests which do not touch the floor, so isolating troops from blast, which can kill or maim them even when there is no armour breach.

Intriguingly, when I condemned the Army's idea of a replacement for the Snatch, the Pinzgauer Vector, for failing to conform with these five principles of mine protection, I received a plaintive note from a former defence minister, asking what the principles were. Yet, properly applied, they can protect even a small vehicle from an explosive charge which will stop a 65-ton main battle tank (MBT).

As regards the RG-31 (who some dismissed because it was lighter than an MBT), what we didn't know then - but now know courtesy of Chilcot – was that, following our reports, the Army immediately despatched Brigadier William Moore, Director Directorate of Equipment Capability, to the South African plant where the latest models of the RG-31 were being built.

He records visiting on 29 June and subsequently advised (on 3 July) that, should the Army decide that "a better protected PPV (Protected Patrol Vehicle) was required", then the RG-31 had "the potential to meet that requirement". He added that it was apparent that RG-31 had "sufficient stretch potential" to take the additional weight needed to protect against the current threats, concluding that: "Should the Army want a heavier and better protected PPV, RG-31 would be a strong contender".

The problem, Brig Moore found, was not in the vehicle at all, but – as he told the inquiry - in "getting the Army to want such a vehicle to the point where it was prepared to allocate funding to it". He "pushed to try to make this happen" but, in the face of indifference from the top brass, was forced to go to the then Secretary of State for Defence, Des Browne, to ask him "to direct me to look into this issue".

Eventually, it was Des Browne with the assistance of his procurement minister Lord Drayson, who pushed for the replacement of the Snatch. Drayson (who took the brunt of our criticism at the time) observed later that "the Army's difficulty in deciding upon a replacement to Snatch was in part caused by their concern over the likelihood of FRES budgets being cut to fund a Snatch replacement vehicle".

Thus we find Drayson telling the inquiry: "The push to replace Snatch or to procure a new medium weight PPV so that commanders would not have to use Snatch came from Ministers, not the military".

The rest, as they say, is history. Having refused seven-ton RG-31s because they were "too heavy" and "too big for Basra", in August, the Army grudgingly accepted the 22-ton Mastiff, but only on the understanding that it would be funded though the Urgent Operational Requirement (UOR) system. No funds would be drawn from the defence budget.

Mastiffs started arriving in theatre by December 2006, and were later deployed to Afghanistan, saving many lives in both theatres. Their undisputed success entirely justified Browne's decision to order them in the teeth of opposition from the Army establishment.

In that context, the inquiry's response to the debacle is somewhat anodyne. "The MoD", it says, "was slow in responding to the developing threat in Iraq from Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs)". This, it says, "should not have been tolerated".


In fact, it was not "tolerated" by a growing number of activists, but more than "tolerated" by the Army. Replacement vehicles were actively blocked by top-ranking military officials, who did their best to prevent the new equipment reaching theatre. It was Ministers who forced the Army to act.

My abiding memory of the period, though – as we campaigned in the media and in Parliament, with Lady Winterton often a lone voice of reason – was of the Tory claque in the House, led by Liam Fox and Gerald Howarth. In opposition, the were concerned only to make political mischief, pushing the theme of "defence cuts" and "under-resourcing".

In fact, as the inquiry affirms, no UOR request ever went unfunded. More broadly, no request for equipment funding was ever refused. The problem with Snatch was, as Air Chief Marshal Sir Glenn Torpy, Chief of Joint Operations told the inquiry, he could not recall having received any requests for its replacement.

Not until Ministers intervened was the problem addressed and it is to them, not the Army brass, that so many soldiers owe their lives. And even now, despite the publication of Chilcot, I don't think that point is fully understood.

Furthermore, troop protection was by no means the only area in which equipment was scandalously deficient. The Snatch was the tip of the iceberg. Collectively, the failings were so great that they influenced the entire conduct of the counter-insurgency campaign – in my view directly leading to the failure of the British Army in southern Iraq.

In 2009, I rehearsed these issues fully in my book, but Chilcot does not seem to have caught up with the bigger picture. To that extent, it is a disappointing read. It should have gone much further, and been much more critical of the Army during the insurgency. Whatever Blair's responsibility might have been, the Army (and the military generally) cannot escape responsibility for their failings - which were not insubstantial.