Angry Planet - How 9/11 Changed the British Military

Episode Date: February 26, 2021

It’s been a long time since the sun set on the British Empire and many institutions in British society have changed a great deal. In some ways, the British Army is the exception - a living linkage between imperial great power status and the current post-colonial European nation. In other ways, like the US military, the British Army has been comprehensively transformed by the long campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan since 9/11. The way the British Army has altered - and also failed to react - over the last two decades is the subject of the new book The Changing of the Guard: The British Army Since 9/11. Here to talk about it is the book’s author Simon Akam. Akam is a journalist whose work has appeared basically everywhere, including Reuters, the Economist, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Outside, Bloomberg Businessweek and GQ.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. I write in the book as well about Ali, so the British Army's culture of cool, which I think is the closest analogy to that. And again, I was unable to work out where the origin of this word came from. The best approximation I got was it was from aluminium because airborne troops got lighterweight mess terms. But there's also a possibility that's been given to me that it comes from an Arabic word meaning shade because in Oman in the 60s that people, the parachute regiment bent their berries of their eyes. But that, I think, is closely related that. And that was about looking like an operator. And what's fascinating for the British is that was reflected and manifested,

particularly in YouTube films. But it also really came to an end because a US, supposedly, a US commander arrived at a British outpost in Afghanistan and said, you look like our army at the end of Vietnam. One day, all of the facts in about 30 years' time will be published. When genocide has been cut out in this country, almost with impunity, and when it is near to completion, people talk about intervention. You don't get freedom, peaceful.

Freedom has never state-guided peacefully. Anyone who is depriving you of freedom isn't deserving of a peaceful approach. It's been a long time since the sunset on the British Empire. Many institutions in British society have changed a great deal. In some ways, the British Army is the exception, a living linkage between imperial great power status and the current post-colonial European nation. In other ways, like the U.S. military, the British Army has been comprehensively transformed by the long campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan since 9-11.

The way the British Army has altered and also failed to react over the last two decades is the subject of the new book, The Changing of the Guard, the British Army since 9-11. Here to talk about it is the book's author, Simon Aikam. Aikam is a journalist whose work has appeared basically everywhere, including Reuters, the Economist, the Washington Post, the New York Times, outside Bloomberg business. Business Week and GQ. Simon, thank you so much for joining us. It's great to be here. Thank you for having me. So we like to get basics out of the way at the top of the show.

But I know this is a big question, but can you briefly explain what the nature of, especially for the Americans in the audience? I don't think we all know exactly what the nature of the British Army's involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan was or Indians. Yeah, sure. So there was involvement in 2001 immediately after 9-11. on in relatively small numbers in Afghanistan. But the kind of major start date at scale was 2003, Iraq. So Britain deployed a division in the original invasion campaign. They crossed over and

they occupied Basra in southeastern Iraq. And they were there for six years until 2009. And in Afghanistan, the big expansion of the British commitment was in 2006 when they took responsibility to Helmand Province in the south. And British troops were present there right the way through to 2014 in the latter stages with a large U.S. Marine contingent as well. And these are both areas, both countries that Britain has history with and its colonial past. Can you explain that a little bit? Yeah, sure. There was fighting by British troops in Iraq in the First World War.

And in Afghanistan, Britain had a series of entanglements in the 19th century. I think what was particularly significant and that the army did not really register when it went to Helmand was in the 19th century. there was a battle at a place called Mai Wan that when an Afghan force defeated British troops, this had almost entirely vanished from the historical memory of the British military, but was still hugely culturally significant for the Afghans. So there was an idea that the British were the old enemy coming back for another round. There was, the Afghanistan was this place that empires played the great game in the 19th century, of which Britain was just one of the powers that was operating in the area.

So can you tell me about what the attitude and readiness of the British army like right before 9-11. Yeah, sure. I think the key point here is Northern Ireland. So British troops had deployed to Northern Ireland at the end of the 1960s, although there had been involvement by the British military in Ireland for centuries before that on and off. And the Northern Ireland campaign, which ran for decades, was the major focal point for the British military in those three decades up to 9-11.

There were major exceptions. So the Falklands in 1982, an expeditionary campaign, there, the first Gulf War in 1991, when Britain sent a large armoured force, and again, the Balkans in the 1990s. But Ireland was pivotal because it was so ongoing for most of the army. The fact that I explore at the beginning of the book is that it was the infantry who largely carried the burden for Ireland, so the armored regiment, my look at the beginning, didn't really deploy. But the island campaign, it was relatively successful. There's a debate, a strong debate, which has been bubbling on social media since the book came out about how it should be categorized.

but Britain felt, rightly or wrongly, by the time of the millennium, that it had a level of expertise that had been forged in counterinsurgency operations there. And it also liked to draw a lineage going further back to the legacy of late Imperial policing in Kenya, in Cyprus, in Borneo, in Malaya, in places like that. I think what is interesting is how this attitude was essentially manifested in the sense of superiority towards the US military that really unraveled in Iraq. And what is interesting is to try and separate fact from fiction in some ways. So, for example, with Ireland, the experience of Ireland by the 1990s was hugely different to the 1970s. In 1972, more British troops died in Northern Ireland than would

die in any year in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. But half of the casualties, roughly 800 soldiers who died were in the 1970s. And the previous campaigns were well beyond living military. memory by the time that went in. So I think it's fair to say that by 2001, the British Army had an extremely high sense of itself and self-esteem. And in some ways, was based on success. Certainly, the Falcons were successful, First Gulf War, the Balkans, and particularly these interventions in Kosovo in 1999 and in Syria and in 2000, that I think in terms of the mentality of Tony Blair, the then Prime Minister, that paved away for British interventionism after that. I think that Tony Blair thing is a really important point, because he had, I think, even

separate from Bush, a very different idea about the West's, the way the West should exert power on the global stage going forward. You started seeing that in the Balkans and then that extended out. What is this is such a big topic to be even trying to think of how to focus this question. I guess how quickly do you think the British Army was disabused of the notion that Afghanistan or Iraq would be anything like Ireland? I think it took about three years approximately. So the initial manoeuvre phase, if one calls it that, the invasion three weeks and the British took control of Basra.

At a point that I explored in my book, which had not really been made public beforehand, it's actually that the maximum reach of that British Armoured Brigade in 2003 was 95 kilometres because they didn't have spare parts for the vehicles. So actually they were not able to move further than that. And there was a kind of initial honeymoon period. And it is extraordinary, I think particularly if one looks back at footage from that time of how highly the army regarded itself and particularly how condescending it was to the Americans at that time. So a British brigadier called Nigel Alwyn Foster wrote excoriating piece about the US military in 2004, suggesting that they didn't know what they were doing. And I explore in detail in my book, this operation in 2004, when it was the only time that a major British unit was moved out of that area in southeastern Iraq.

It's called Operation Bracken, and a Scottish regiment went up, and they partnered closely with the Americans. It was the first time that they really saw suicide bombers and things like that. And I really focus in on that as a period of kind of intense military change. And I was fortunate to be able to interview several of the U.S. Marines who were there, who really saw what was going on. You had the Brits who were turning up and were literally handing out flyers saying, like, we're Scottish, we're not British, we're not the Americans. We wear soft hats, not buried. And what on a broader scale happened was the Britain effect. to be lost control of Basra. Now, it had become acutely politically toxic at home. I would define

Tony Blair's political legacy. But what specifically happened was that there was essential continuous pressure to reduce troop numbers and get them out. And up to about the middle of 2006, that looked like it was in concert with what was going on with the Americans, with the Iraq study group and so forth. What happened when the surge took place was that there was a dramatic division in the strategy between the US and the UK. So the US began to pour in troop numbers and what the British did in a situation of real extreme secrecy was that they struck a deal with the sheer militias who were terrorising Basra. And they had a man called in custody who had been scooped up in a raid. And essentially he became the interlocutor. So this extraordinary sequence of events, which is really the heart of my book,

played out where you had a British two-star general and this militia guy essentially sitting on two sides of a table at military prison playing poker really. And the deal that was forged was sequential releases of prisoners in exchange for a cessation of attacks on British bases. And the fundamental problem with this deal was that British leverage was finite. So they only had a certain amount of prisoners to do that. And it's a long and it's a convoluted story. But what essentially happened was that it fell to pieces in a really dramatic fashion in 2008 when there was a clearance of that was on the horizon, and Maliki jumped the gun very dramatically, essentially railroaded the Petraeus and Crocker, the U.S. Ambassador, and said, this is happening now. An extraordinary series of events played out in southern Iraq, which are in detail in the book, and the Atlantic excerpted this over the weekend. But Maliki snubbed the British Brigadier at Basra Airport because the British two-star was on R&R at a ski resort. And then George Flynn, who was a US Marine, well, in between Lloyd Austin, whose now Secretary of Defense, flew in, and he and Julian Free, who was the British One Star, flew into Basra Palace and Maliki refused to see

the Brit. And then another, essentially Basra became the core main effort for the first time in the campaign, and the US turned on the resource taps. And George Flynn, who was a US Marine Corps, two star, walked into a British headquarters. And the exact wording of what he said is disputed. But essentially, he said, we're here. What you're doing is not working and we're here to stop. And I think this is the dramatic heart of the book. But what it doesn't make sense without what we were discussing beforehand about what the British thought of themselves five years earlier. And I found writing it, in touch, you thought it's such a readable book that it's such a kind of primal story, right?

It's fowse. It's like you make a deal with the devil and pride comes before a fall. And those are really universal narrative topics that extend well beyond the military. I think as an American, it's especially interesting to me right now because I'm really, I'm interested in how other countries deal with post empire and what it does to them and how they act, because I got not great feelings about the direction that American Empire is going. If we even want to call it an empire, I know it's different. It looks and smells a little bit different than things that have come in the past, but I think there are similarities. And I think that was one of the really, that was one of the themes that really resonated for me through the book, was this idea of the way that Britain and the British Army saw itself.

And I think that there's one phrase that really encapsulates that. And I wonder if you can explain it just a little bit. What does it mean to be the best little army in the world? Yes, exactly. So this was a, I remember this being bandied around. We should talk maybe a little bit about how I'd come to this. And I spent a year in the army when I was 18 on a program called a Gapia commission, which gave me, it was a fleeting experience, but it gave me a snapshot of that 0304 culture of the army.

And I think the idea of the best little army in the world, which it wasn't an official, it wasn't on their website or anything like that. But it was this idea that we didn't have mass, but we had skill and that we were sophisticated and that we always won. And it is, I watched over the weekend. I've pointed out to me, someone on Twitter did, but there's a series that was shot. And I really commend it. It was a documentary series shot, I think, in 1999 Brecken, which is everyone knows about Sandhurst, which is the Officer Academy. But Brecken is the infantry battle school. It's gritty and it's non-commissioned.

that it is in a sense the kind of guardian of the flame of the British infantry. And it's extraordinary to watch because the rhetoric is just this is the best infantry training program in the world. We are the best instructors. And you think, according to who, has this been audited? Who has said this? And obviously, all institutions develop their own mythology. But I think it's this idea that, and this was drilled into me in my generation at school. We did military cadets and everything like this. And it was just a sense that we were really good at this. And I think it was not entirely without a basis. But it's extraordinary now to look at it through the lens of what followed, of what came to pass after that.

Do you think that arrogance and that hubris was integral to the failure that came later? Do you think that if they had approached these wars with a little bit more of an open mind and a little bit more humble, things might have been different? I think you can split that into two questions. So I think there's one kind of fundamental question, which is can you build a country at the point? point of a rifle. I quote War Machine, the kind of Netflix satire on the McChrystal deforenestration with the guy going, for the problem with counter insurgencies, it doesn't work. And I do think there is a kind of open question, can you go in a military sense to societies that are completely different from our own and consider you can build them. And that is one point, this idea that,

you know, perhaps for anyone with the best intentions, resources and will, this was not a feasible outcome. I think there was certainly, I think the British did not help themselves. And they, I think essentially the broader, it's fascinating to see what people find in a book, because it's not necessarily what you think you've put in there. But I regarded this as a story that was essentially a story about accountability, that it was a story that the British military did not achieve its objectives, and it then mobilised extraordinary efforts to silence on use of conversation about them. And I think there is a clear argument, and I think a fairly indisputable argument that, particularly in comparison to the US, the British have a problem with command

accountability at senior levels, and they also have a problem with lessons learning. So I think I talk in detail about what has. happened to the commanders who ran these operations on the British side. And a lot of the pushback of this book has ignited a firestorm of debate and criticism in the UK. But a lot of the pushback to that has been that you didn't, you know, the politicians mobilized the war. This is politicians. And I think there's some truth in that. But what is certainly true is that that almost every senior British commander who ran these wars got promoted. And there were direct situations where their counterparts in the US were fired, where that didn't take place.

And I think, for example, what happened with McKin in Afghanistan when Obama removed the third commandant? That would have been inconceivable in the British military. What might have happened is someone might have had their tour slightly shortened or something like that, but the idea you would actually fire someone, impossible. And also with the attack on Bastion in 2012, the Battle of Bastion, when two Marine generals were forced to retire, their British counterparts were promoted. So I think that is problematic. And this is essentially the Thomas Ricks argument that you need, if you lose ability to

relief the cause, the incentive setup is all wrong. And it's equally true, the argument that he makes about the US in the Second World War and particularly in the First World War as well, British Commandos who didn't perform were removed ruthlessly, not exclusively, but the classic example of this is Montgomery, so the perhaps the most famous British general of the Second World War only became Montgomery because his predecessor was fired and someone else died in a plane crash. So obviously, there's luck to it. I think the other point is about institutional ability to learn lessons. Essentially, a point that I look at in the book is that the internal dialogue in the British military was intensively circumscribed. But that is beginning

to change. There is, what's been fascinating since the book has come out is the reaction to it and, you know, the variation from essentially a generational variation between extremely positive reception and real anger at it. But I think if you look at something like the Wavel room, which is the British Army's kind of internal but in editorially independent web discussion forum, I think that's a hugely positive step. But generally, I think I have some perspective on this because I am British, but I had a postgraduate full bright scholarship to the US. I did my journalism training in Columbia. I worked at the New York Times. And our entire culture when it comes to dissemination of information and discussion, not just in the army, is vastly more circumscribed

than in the US. And I think that's a problem. Yeah, I want to, I think that's a really important and is a really important part of this story. And I think it's one of those things that like American audiences may not quite understand. Can you talk about that a little bit? Because I think that like that cultural difference is so important to understanding what happened here. And like the back third of the book is just about accountability, right? Is it pointing fingers as the name of the blame game? Yeah. Blame game. That's right. So yes, please. I think in a sense here that the, obviously this book has had a pretty complicated journey to publication. And there is a, a dovetailing between the experience of the book and the subject matter of it.

And one way to look at that, I'll come on to the last third at the moment, but in terms of the way that journalistic access for the British military works is enormously more curtailed than for the British. So in general, in order to get access to serving troops, reporters have to sign a document that gives the military authorities pre-publication oversight of what they see, ostensibly on operational and personal security grounds, but that's usually used as a crowbar to have a much more general gutting.

ability for press scrutiny is vastly more limited. Now, I was able to circumvent that because basically I talked to people who'd left and I was able to get to Afghanistan using an economist assignment and so forth. But media scrutiny is a lot less. I think the point that I, yeah, essentially the last third of the book is bracketed by an investigation, which is going to be excerpted in GQ next month of the Alexander Blackman Marine A killing. So this is when a Royal Marine Sergeant in 2011 shot a winded insurgent. And it, unbeknownstretched, and it, unbeknownst to him, there was a helmet camera running, and the film eventually surfaced. It was a huge scandal. And the Navy, obviously the Marines are part of the Navy, not the army, but the naval authorities

pushed this as a lone bad apple incident. And what I was able to do was basically to piece together that actually this was a result of fundamentally, almost diametrically opposed approaches by two commander units that were next to each other. But what I then tried to do was essentially trace, having in the previous section explained what happened in Basra in 2008 and the kind of Nadia that took place then and how everyone who ran it got promoted. I tried to explain why that had happened. And the phrasing that I used was a glut and a void of accountability. So what happened in Britain, through a concatenation of factors, partly the expanding reach of European human rights law, partly coroners and things like that, there was an unprecedented

series of probes that targeted junior people for individual malfeasance on the battlefield. And I tried to look at this with the straightest bat that I could in that. There's a narrative in certain sections of British society that these were exclusively vexatious, so that they were ambulance chasing lawyers that was all made up. And that's not true. Some of them were vexatious, certainly, but some of these things happened. But the argument that I made, which I think has not really been pushed beforehand, is that you cannot understand this glut of low-level accountability without the void of high-level accountability. And I looked in detail at Chilcott, which was the big public inquiry that was conducted into Iraq War. And I compared

that in detail with the Vinagrad probe that the Israelis did after their war, were essentially looking at the ugly stake, like this really mattered to the Israelis, so they were willing to have a much more robust process. And also at a series of the army's own lesson-learned probes, which again were heavily curtailed, essentially, almost in quite surreal ways that the guy who wrote the official Iraq Lessons Learned report had to spend years trying to get it out under freedom of information law and things like that. So again, what I tried to do in the book is to show not tell. this, to trace these narratives and these individuals that did them, but you've got the takeaway

of this essentially this problem about accountability. You lit on something really interesting there when you said that the Israelis after their war, they were very involved and concerned about what happened. Do you think then that part of what has happened in Britain, this lack of accountability at those higher levels is due to the fact that these wars are pretty removed from the general public and it feels like there's not a lot of consequences. for us at home because of them? Do you think it's much easier to get away with it? I think that's absolutely true.

There's some nuance with the Israeli stuff, which kind of came to me after I finished the book, which is that it was interesting, actually, in the immediate aftermath of 2006, it was regarded as a debacle that the most powerful military force in the Middle East had been essentially ground to a halt by Hezbollah. But actually, 15 years on, it looks like the war worked,

that its deterrent effects, achieved and things. So there's definitely, there's a longitudinal difference in how these things are perceived. But yeah, I used another very classic British Army phrase, but it was never the crocodile closest to the canoe. So it was never, there were always more important things that were going on. And so that fundamental change in civil military relations that takes place when a conflict is existential never took place. And I think actually, I've been thinking this through since seeing what people find in the book and what they perceive in it, I think the easiest way to understand why Britain did what it did at a military level was it was engaged in a campaign of institutional preservation.

that the people who were heading the army, they were devoted to it, understandably, and they were doing what they felt was in the army's best interests as an institution. So going to war at divisional scale in 2003 meant that you would justify. Britain was fighting for its relationship with America, I would suggest, really, at that time. And again, the classic example of this is the Afghanistan deployment from 2006 onwards. And there's a hugely disputed quote by Sherrod Capricoles, who was the British, ambassador to Afghanistan who claims that the head of the army told him it was use it or lose it, basically. If he did not send his infantry battalions to southern Afghanistan, they would be cut

in the defence cut. And people say that's outrageous and so I actually think, in some ways it's quite a understand that he was fighting for his institution. The paradox is that because of what happened, another round of defence cuts is scheduled to take place in Britain that used them or lose them became used them and lose them, essentially, because the army's reputation was was damaged. So I think it's, I raised this point right at the beginning. It's about stake if it really matters. And then the whole thing is different. But as soon as it's a discretionary, multi-year conflict fought by professional army a long way away, it's very difficult to have those discussions, particularly in the British system. So this goes to one of the things, another one of

things I really like about the book, because I'm a nerd this way, is there's a lot of great quotes in it from from pop culture and from other pieces of journalism. There's one at the beginning and then you quoted again, the German official account of the war in South Africa. I'll read it here and I wanted you to explain why this is thematically important to the book. All those long colonial campaigns, much as the demand from the troops, much as they demand from the troops in the way of exertions and of supporting privations, great as were the difficulties of war office administration, which they involved, had also the great disadvantage that they were prejudicial to the understanding of war on a large scale. It's a fantastic quote, firstly. I think it's worth explaining a little bit of what I was doing with the quotes from a kind of writerly perspective.

So I really wanted from the beginning this to be a book about the army that people who had no interest in the army would read. And I wanted it to make a case that it was really a book about Britain and our place in the world. And as a big expectation of the FT argued, it's about being a man and what it means. And I felt that it was key that it was accessible, that it wasn't a forest of acronyms. And that I wanted it, I wanted it to be literary and I wanted it to have an aesthetic. quality to it. And that's reflected in the way it looks and the cover imagery and stuff. And I felt that the quotes were a way, a kind of tonal way to set something up, perhaps less with this one, but something that's quite wry that has an element of humour to it and things like that.

I've got it's up on the bookshelf behind me. I'll just get it down so you can have a look, but this is the book we're discussing. I know this is an audio medium, but I'm just going to show you here. So this is the German official account of the war in South Africa. And And what is interesting about that is it wasn't the Brits writing their own military history. It was the Germans who, at that time, were the preeminent land war power in the world, arguably, looking in detail and pretty unsparingly at what the British had done. And I felt that you could make a claim that this has all happened before, this failure to learn lessons, this.

I talk again in the afterwards of the book about the suppression of the lesson learned reports into the First World War. This is in the context of a slightly surreal conference I went to at the anniversary of the Battle of the Song. But there's form here, essentially, is what I'm saying. There's a long history of essentially a kind of coterie politic at the top of the army and a failure to learn these lessons. And I thought that kind of by doing that, I also, you know, the same beginning section, which looks at the sort of ossification of the army before Iraq, I quote Josef Rot, so the Austrian novelists, because, you know, that is exactly the same thing.

That's about an Austria-Hungarian cavalry regiment on the Russian borders in 1912 or whatever, it's the same phenomenon. And I think, although it's been enormous change in technology and so forth, what I found very interesting is less the what that happens and more the why. A lot of the things I write about how what happens when an army doesn't have anything to do and how people respond to incentive structures and so forth are tropes that have existed for years and for generations. But I'm delighted you picked that up because I feel, I feel asked me that the quotes were aware of saying, this is a bit different. This is a little distinct. Yeah, it's something I normally see like a fiction novel, Stephen King does that quite a bit. He opens different sections with quotes.

And I thought it was, they were all great. They really helped set the mood for each different section. And I've got another one here, but this one's you. The Army, the ultimate unreconstructed British institution, is a microcosm for all that we do and do not do and indeed maybe should not do as a country. Can you talk about that connection between Britain itself and the British Army and how what happened with the army here is that how does it reflect on the society? So that's in the opening of the book, which is in the first person. And the vast majority of the book is not first person. I'm not there at all. It's all repertoire. But the way it's bracketed as a way is it opens, well, it opens with flying to Afghanistan in 2014 on

assignment for the economists. But it rolled back to being at school in the high school in the early 2000s and doing cadets, which private English schools do. And we had a teacher at school who was a is a hugely inspirational guy and inspired loads of people to join the army that had no experience of war. And the ending of the book is about me going back and talking to him about how he felt. But the kind of instigation for it in some ways was I went to a launch in 2013 of a book called British Generals in Blair's Wars that was created at Oxford University from a series of seminars by senior commanders coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan. And this was like the sort of most licensed and we're all going to be very sensible about this and not insurrectionist event at all,

but the British military still tried to ban that book. And I remember going to the launch and just finding it, this was been in 2013. So it was a year before the British pulled out of Afghanistan. But it was pretty clear by that stage how it had gone. And I just remember seeing these. And again, I was 28 at the time. And because this took so long, this book, because I'm not the person now that I was when I started writing it. I'm in my mid-30s. This was, it's been described as an angry young man's book. And I think that it's interesting because I'm a bit less young and perhaps a bit less angry. now, but I think it's important that it survives as an artefact like that. And I remember going to this event and seeing these guys, these senior commanders together, who they all knew each other, and it was all very Pally. And Robert Fox, who is an extremely well-regarded British defense correspondent, who's in the Falklands and everything just stood up and said, guys, what is going on? This is surreal. And I think the idea is that, yeah, like you discussed in the intro, that the army is just linkage between what we were as a country and what we are now. And that Britain, I've written about this before, actually, but it's almost unique among Western European countries and that it passed the 20th

century without a catastrophic military defeat or a revolution. So if you look at Germany, it defeats twice. You look at France military occupation for the Spanish experience of civil war and dictatorship. We never did that. So we had this enormous change in our global status, but we've never had to do the kind of year zero reassessment of who we are and what we stand for. And I think that is partly why we get into so many difficulties, politically as well as militarily. I've got, again, you won't see this audio, you won't see this here, but I've got this series, I'm just using them to send out with copies of the book, but these are like cards from the 1990s of the different bits of the British Army, including some pretty esoteric, one features a goat

and stuff for reasons I don't quite understand. But it's really imbued in our, it's really imbued in our culture. And I wanted this book to have a kind of rawness to it, to have a sense of there were all these stories that we were told, and a lot of them weren't true. And this is going to do the kind of best to really pull off the rugs and show what was on the day. All right, Angry Planet listeners, we're going to pause there for a break. You're listening to a conversation about the changing of the guard. All right, Angry Planet listeners, thank you for bearing with us. We are back. We're talking about the changing of the guard. Can we talk a little bit more

in depth about Blackwatch? Yeah. And what happened there and how was the infantry reorganized afterwards and what did that mean more broadly for the British Army? Yeah, sure. So this is the second section of the book. It's called Something Happened. And we alluded to it to earlier, but it's about the experience of the Black Watch who were a Scottish infantry regiment on this operation in Iraq, 2004 that went, it was pretty violent. But I layer in the context of the reorganization of the infantry that was going on at this time. So essentially, that the number of points that, again, will be worth raising for an American audience, which is that the British Army historically is a federation. It's not a single institution. It was comprised of regiments that predated the central organisation. And what happened in the First and Second World Wars was that this enormous centralised bureaucracy arose in order to maintain and sustain that. But nonetheless, the regimental system continued. And it was problematic, particularly after the Second World War, when the equipment of the infantry became more sophisticated. So you had some units that were armored. So they had 4-3-2s originally, which were like M1, 1.1.

one threes basically. Later had warriors. There were some that were mechanised with Saxons, which are sort of armoured trucks, some that were light roll with lorries. But so you had a variety of equipment and a variety of postings. And so in order to maintain career variety for individuals and to ensure that no regiment was stuck in a sort of grim garrison that would decimate recruiting, you had a mechanism called the arms plot. So the entire infantry was basically playing musical chairs and every three years they would up and change the gear they were using and where they were located. And the problem with that was that it took a year to retrain. So it meant that at any one time, about a third, the estimates vary, but it had been a quarter and a half of the army was out of

commission or the infantry was out of commission at any one time. So it was inefficient. The defenders of it argued that there had been rounds of kind of reform and development, but in the 19th century that units have been tied to a geographical area and that that created a strong recruiting force and a sort of a spruity court. I think the other point, what, we have only this is hyper-complicated, but to talk, what also happened is about social class, which is another sort of huge theme in the book. And again, to simplify a very complex issue, officer level, arguably for the British Army, at least at the end of the 20th century, you could plot where constituent units were on two axes. So one was how militarily hardcore they were. And that axis ran to the

parachute regiment and outside the army, but also as infantry to the Royal Marines. And the other axis was how socially smart they were. So essentially how aristocratic is not quite the right word, but how grand their officers were. And this was reflected in family ties, officers had been to private school. And that axis ran to the cavalry or to the household cavalry or to the guards. And the Black Watch were a smart regiment. They were the kind of Scottish guards. And the Scottish army, as it were, is in many ways sort of, there were too many of them. Right back to the 19th century, there were disproportionate number of Scottish infantry regiments,

basically because Queen Victoria loved tartan. And so this kind of, like, Victorian fetishization of everything that was Scottish was reflected in all of this. And so essentially what you had in, and then there were basically moves from the 1950s onwards to move from a single battalion model to a large regiment model. Because if you have a single large regiment, with say three to five constituent battalions, you can cross-post people internally within that unit.

And so you can offer individuals' career variety and location variety without having to re-roll the entire units. It's more efficient in that sense, although the criticism would be that you lose a spriticor. And there'd been rough attempts to that in the 50s, but it was all voluntary, basically because the people at the top of the army were emotionally invested in what had happened. And then in the 1990s, as Ireland drew down and running into the 2000s, there was pressure from the Treasury to cut units. And this Mike Jackson, who was head of the army, he was chief of the general staff at the time, was a paratrooper, although he'd been in the Intelligence Corps beforehand. And so he grasped the nettle in his terms and said, we're going to reform this. And essentially what happened was the Black Watch, who regarded themselves as the cream of the Scottish infantry, basically the superior to everyone else in there, were forced to amalgamate with them. And so what I tried to achieve in this was to write a really visceral account of this operation,

which was brutal in many ways, but say actually this fight, there was an equally bitter bureaucratic fight that was going on at home. And a point that it didn't really make the final cut of the book just for length time, but this wasn't the first time that had happened. So in Aden, I think in 1968, the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, another Scottish regiment, were going to be cut. And they went under a colonel who was known as Mad Mitch. And he, He basically did a lot of very telegenic stuff and the regiment was saved from amalgamation. So there was a precedent that operation performance could save you. But again, what I was trying to hit in that was like, this is when the rubber hit the road for the British Army.

This was like you couldn't pretend it was Northern Ireland. They'd never dealt with suicide bombers before. And they're dealing with the Americans. Again, I allude to this bit from this Marine, I think it was a major. He's literally sitting in a British headquarters watching this acute and speedy process of institutional change. But I think it's also worth pointing this out because it shows how curious things can be highlighted. So when these regiments were amalgamated, some of them, like the rifles were very forward-looking and said, we're going to have a single identity with, you know, a cohesive identity.

But the Scots just argued about spats and like kilts and stuff like that for in a way that it was easy to obsess about stuff that was perhaps not that important. And it's a story about tribalism, I would argue, really. It was important for them to hold on to that identity as the Black Watch, hence why they're wandering around with pamphlets that explain to people who they are and why they are important and why they are separate and have their own. I just got a message actually this week. I can't name him, but he's a serving military guy.

And he said, I'm training the Black Watch for Optoral, which is the current deployment of Afghanistan. He's like, they haven't changed. And I thought, yeah, that's a kind of interesting point. They also tied up with that is the personage of James Cowan, who, was their commanding officer, who's a fascinating, I think complex characters, clearly an extremely smart and able guy who rose meteorically through the army. He was a battalion commander in 2003. He was a divisional chief of staff in 2006. He commanded brigade later on. And he had this fall that came about. He would dispute this, I think, but he wrote an email about etiquette

that was leaked to a newspaper. And I think Karen is fascinated, but he's clearly extremely capable man. There was absolutely no doubt about that. and but functioning in accordance with a set of rules that were perhaps no longer the appropriate ones to have. I think he responded, I tried to give everyone a chance to respond and he wrote a sort of detailed letter giving his side of all of this, which I printed in full in the notes at the back. Yeah, it's an issue one. And I think it's also what I, some of this stuff is, I'd be fascinated to see how it reads as an American because even to like British civilian people, a lot of this stuff is really pretty weird, the things the army gets up to. And I'd be, I'd be interested in

know as an American how it seems, but they're taking their pipers into action and finding each other with champagne and all that kind of thing. It's all very bizarre to me, but it also, like, it's funny. It reminded me of operator culture in America. Do you know what that is? I'm not familiar with that. No. That is, I think like special forces or like special operations forces, I think Navy SEALs and Delta Squad and these groups of the elite warriors that are separate from the rest of the American military and therefore get to follow slightly different rules. They can grow beards and have tattoos in places that other branches can't have tattoos. And I think this is probably different, but are revered on the home front in a way that other

parts of the military may be art. Like there's guys when they come back, even if they were on base and just sat in the green zone, they will want to try to appear as close to an operator as possible. And like most of the movies here are about these kinds of people. The American military is so good at each individual branch absorbs you into its culture and shatters all individuality. And so like to see the different regiments in things in your book playing out in the British Army, these fights over those identities was really fascinating. And that's the closest kind of parallel in the American system that I can think of.

But it's not quite the same. I mean, I think it's interesting because I write in the book as well about Ali, so the British Army's culture of cool, which I think is the closest analogy to that. again, this is, I was unable to work out where the origin of this word came from. The best approximation I got was it was from aluminium because airborne troops got light away mess terms. But there's also a possibility that's been given to me that it comes from an Arabic word meaning shade because in Oman in the 60s that people, the parachute regiment bent their barriers of their eyes. But that, I think, is closely related that. And that was, you know, about, yeah, looking like an

operator. And what's fascinating for the British is that was reflected and manifested, particularly in YouTube films. But it also, it really came to an end. because a US, supposedly, a US commander arrived at a British outpost in Afghanistan and said, you look like our army at the end of Vietnam. And again, that was a huge amount of the report in this book was trying to pin down stories and legends, that something would be passed on. And that, I was told it was Ronald Newman, who was the US ambassador to Afghanistan. It wasn't because I checked with him. But in a sense, that anecdote acquired a historical way to its own because that became an implementation for a huge change in how people dressed and how people

behave. But I think there's a distinction between sort of Ali, which is like unofficial coolness and historical fussiness. They're not totally separate, but they are, yeah, all the kiltz and the Scottish stuff and things like that. That's a pretty uniquely British way. Yeah, there's a little bit of that stuff here. Like, you're a member of the 82nd Airborne, there'll be a sense of pride in that, but it's not quite the same. It doesn't go to the level that it does in Britain. And I also thought, I found it fascinating that the army is so sticks to this because I spoke to 200 people for this book.

And no one I spoke to said they were motivated because of what their regiment did at the Battle of Ramalese in the early 18th century or anything like that. It didn't really, people were strongly motivated by the current, I think all the usual arguments about small group cohesion and everything like that were hugely significant. And that a sense of current regimental identity was profoundly powerful. this huge historical mother load that the British have consecrated for so long, to young soldiers seem almost irrelevant in some ways. Yeah, that's funny.

That was actually one of my questions I wanted to ask you was who joins the British military? What is that cross-section of people? Yeah, it's a really good question, and it's changed. So historically, the top and the bottom of society. So that, and this is generations ago, but in peacetime that it would be officered by gentry and that it will be working class of people who would join as soldiers. Now, that I think a really interesting question. So it was historically really tied in with our class system.

There's a really interesting point about that the British Army is still yet to work out what an officer is. So at least from the 1980s, there's been a clear kind of institutional idea that it's not about social class. It's about meritocracy and ability and all that. And certainly, the way the army selects its officers at a centralized level, in order to get to Sandhurst is really pretty fair. Once you get to Sandhurst, you then have to be selected by a regiment, and that's much more opaque. But there's a fascinating book about this from the end of the 1980s called New Model Army, which says that when the Army officially decided that it wasn't about class, they then decided to try and get everyone up to a sort of certain middle-class

levels. Hence, Sandhurst did these things like teaching your etiquette or inspecting your civilian clothes and stuff like that. I think that has changed substantially. At the, and at the bottom, the bottom is the wrong term, but the soldier entry, people looking for adventure, local links. Also, the economic factors are certainly part of it. I explored in detail in the book how the special forces memoirs in the 1990s had a huge role in pushing people on. I think what is interesting, and this is clearly a huge factor in the US as well, is it created a huge generational divide because you did get people who were joined to play sport and go skiing and to drink in the 1990s were then followed by a generation you joined to fight.

And what is in some ways a very interesting question and one that I don't really wrestle with in the book is who is joining now. Over the past five years, Britain withdrew from Afghanistan in Leicester and Special Forces, there aren't these hot operations. Who is joining to go and do that? And I examine right at the end of the book what happened to recruitment, only really in passing and through the experience of a guy who was involved in officer selection. He talks about how they were forced to pass people through who were really not, not reaching the required standard at all. So it's certainly true that there are sections of society where it'd be historically your family would always have done it and everything like that. There were others who weren't. But it's, yeah, it's changed. Our army is really small now, like really small. It's good. It's going to go down to 70,000 people in a nation of 60 million. The way recruitment is changing is fascinating because that's something I've been doing a lot of reporting on here in the past year. As the pandemic has forced, our military to really start to look and advertise for lack of a better word to people online and through video games. And they have not relaxed standards and it's hurting them in a way.

In a lot of ways, like the recruitment pool keeps shrinking because young people keep doing things early and earlier, whether that's, taking psychiatric medicine or getting tattoos or facial piercings that preclude them from joining. And I'm wondering if they're going to have to relax standards or change things and what it's going to do to our military. But that's a whole other side conversation. So another thing I want to make sure that we hit before we get off is that this book, and again, this really speaks to the difference between American and British culture is this book had a little bit of a hard road coming out, right? Can you explain like what the pushback was, what the legal pushback was, like why this? book was fought against and who fought against it?

Yeah, sure. So it was sold off proposal in 2015. There was a lot of interest to five major British publishers did for it competitively. I then spent three years writing it. And certainly, my reporting undoubtedly stirred a lot of disquieting the army. So I'd been to journalism school in the US. The majority of my work is for American magazines. And I approached this.

I would do that. That you, everything is cross-checked, that everyone, every accusation is put against people, all of that. And bear in mind that I was a free agent. I was outside the military system. But it's certainly, partly because the army is small, it created a bow wave of alarm. And there was undoubtedly resistance to it. But I suppose what I would say, there's certainly things I could have done differently,

but I would say the rigor of the book. And that's another thing that's come up. The fact that there's 100 pages of references at the back that everything is cross-referenced. That is a function of that same process. But what happened was in 2019, it was GDUB published in March. And I had a visiting fellowship at the Changing Character of War Program in Oxford, beforehand. And when it had become clear that this book was critical of the army, my supervisor just essentially wouldn't engage with me at all. He was a guy with close relations with the military.

And eight weeks before it was to be published, seven maybe, he wrote to Random House and said, you're going to get sued. You shouldn't publish this. And they, in response, demanded that I give the manuscript to the British Ministry of Defence and let them edit it. And they demanded the imposition of copy approval so that everyone would sign off in writing about what they'd said, which obviously is totally against accepted journalistic practice. They then cancel my contract. They then asked me to pay back my advance and to pay their legal fees. So I then organized a coalition of eight press freedom organizations, including reporters without borders, index on censorship,

the European Center for Press and Media Freedom, to write to a random house, which they did. They wrote right to the top of the organization. That didn't move their position. So I then gave the material to the Guardian. The Guardian wrote about it in 2019. And then after that, Scribe, who was essentially a very bold Australian publisher, took it on. And they've done this before with another book called Billion Dollar Well, and they

published it. And I think not for the first time, the boldness of Australians has been the important thing in getting this out. It's also worth saying that Radham House continued to demand large sums of money from me for the privilege of not publishing my book as well. So it'll be interesting to see how that debate plays out. But I think the amount of coverage that this is getting in the UK means that I think the stable door is open now, right, this is happening. But I think I'm very happy to talk about stuff. I think at this stage, the significant thing is that the book is out. And I think in many ways, the book is also its own best offence as well. What's reaction been like in the British media and from British

people that you've spoken with? So very polarized. Hugely in terms of it, so we're in the middle of the reviews at the moment, hugely positive from the Guardian, very positive from the Times, absolute outrage from the Daily Telegraph, fascinatingly conflicted review from the Sunday Times. And then from again, essentially it's been generational, I would say, is how it's. looked. So both in terms of people writing about it, but the response I've been getting internally up to a huge theme in this book is about the generational divide of the military. And I think that in 2003-4 would have been between captains, of tenants, people above them. But obviously that generation has moved up. And my sense of where the kind of boundary between hooray and harumph, as it were,

in terms of response to this book, is probably somewhere between Colonel and Brigadier, I'd say internally. But interestingly, there are exceptions. So I had a retired two-star who left in the early 2000s, I went, I went to triangle at him, who wrote me a hugely complimentary email about this and said this is fantastic. Senior naval people as well have been very complimentary, although that may be because they just want to give the army a kicking. But so it's not universal. I think there certainly is a generational divide that has emerged from it, but I also think that is in some ways inevitable. And it's also what is perhaps important to put across here is that raising criticism in the army in the UK is tantamount to treason.

Our culture around these things is really distinct to how it happened in the US. But I think in some quarters, there's almost just a sense of relief, really, that someone has tried to really drag these things into the light. So it's certainly true that this is an angry young man's book and all of that. But I also felt that's quite important because those were the people who fought those wars. So I think really this is going to, this is going to continue. There's, there's going to be another round of review. It's a big piece in GQ next weekend. And I suppose it's just a wave I really need to ride. But I think what is important is that this debate is happening and it's happening in public now. What do you see is the immediate future for the British Army?

Being cut, I think is the most likely in this round of defense cuts next month. I think that what I fear is that there will be, there will not be a proper. discussion. That there will be a, again, that the institutional preserve the institution message will be perceived to be that we had this historic murder around what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan, that we talk about what we did with COVID. And I think that is a problem because it will store up messages to the future. I think what would be good to happen would be that there was a really serious, very open discussion that firstly, A, it's actually okay to have a discussion. B, what is the kind of army we want and what, how do we affect that? And a huge thing I came away

from this book is that individuals are important, but how an institution behaves is determined by incentives, really. That's the key thing. And how are we incentivising our people to do this? Now, it's a really interesting question because I, in a part of me came away from writing this book thinking that the British military is fundamentally allergic to reform. And I don't think that is true, but particularly at this time where the budgetary pressures are on, What are we going to do? All the money's being spent on the Navy. I think it would be great if this book really does stimulate a discussion and some reform, whether it will or not, I don't know. Simon Aiken, the book is The Changing of the Guard, the British Army since 9-11. Thank you so much for coming on to Angry Planet and walking us through all of this. It's been great to be here. Thank you so much.

That's it for this week. Angry Planet listeners. Angry Planet is me, Matthew Galt, Jason Fields, and Kevin O'Dell. myself and Jason Fields. If you like the show, please consider subscribing to our substaff, which is at Angry Planet Pod.com. For $9 a month, you get a weekly newsletter and two bonus episodes a month. They're pretty damn good. Kevin and I are working on a series about Angry Oceans, which is going to be coming out shortly through the regular feed.

Look forward to that. We will be back next week with another conversation about conflict on an angry planet. Stay safe until then.