Two speakers — Marston and David Kilcullen, who moderated the panel and is Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s special adviser for counterinsurgency — were sharply critical of the British military’s performance in Iraq and Afghanistan, saying that the British had failed to back up their boasts of superiority in counterinsurgency and in fact had fallen behind the U.S. military.
“The British Army has the reputation of being good at counterinsurgency, and in 2003 and 2004 there was lots of fairly snide criticism of the United States by British commanders saying that Americans didn’t understand counterinsurgency [and] were taking too kinetic an approach,” said Kilcullen, who described the British attitude as, “‘Look at us, we’re on the street in our soft caps and everyone loves us.’”
Marston, who was until recently a senior lecturer at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst — the British Army’s rough equivalent of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y. — said that “as an American working in the British system for the last five years” in 2003, he watched the British “act as if they were the best in [counterinsurgency] in the world.”
But the British performance on Iraqi and Afghan battlefields since then has not backed up such strident talk, according to Kilcullen and Marston.
“It would be fair to say that in 2006 the British Army was defeated in the field in southern Iraq,” Kilcullen said, adding that there were numerous “incidents” in Afghanistan that further undercut the British claims of superiority in counterinsurgency.
“They’ve been embarrassed by their performance in southern Iraq,” Marston said. Meanwhile, the Taliban “almost destroyed” the British Army’s 16th Air Assault Brigade in Afghanistan. In some places, he said, “they just held on.”
The British military was simply unprepared for the challenges it faced in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to Marston, who stressed he was not speaking in his official capacity as an employee of the British Ministry of Defence.
“There have been major problems with their pre-deployment training,” he said. “There were a lot of problems with their education. … The staff college had one day for counterinsurgency for majors. The RMA Sandhurst lieutenants course was a bit of a joke, bit of a video here and there.”
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