[A-List] UK state: military unhappy with HMG

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

Interesting article from Max Hastings, a staunch Tory. Here he reveals the
sort of thing that used to go on under successive past governments, when
military officers would freely mingle with journos and others in order to
ensure that their opinions were given an airing. During the 1960s and 1970s,
this often involved military high-ups confirming the worst suspicions of the
gentleman's clubs' afficionados and conspiring with those afficionados to
bring down the governments of Heath, Wilson and Callaghan. Now they can't do
that so easily any more, though why they would want to is far less clear -- 
unless, of course, they are fed up with the recklessness of British policy,
dictated as it is by the Bush administration. Meanwhile, Hoon, the defence
secretary who publicly considered the circumstances in which first use of
British nuclear weapons would be conceivable and correct, has re-emerged as
a candidate for sacrifice, with Hastings only the latest baying for his
blood. Hoon, of course, should have gone in the wake of the Hutton
whitewash, which was ill-judged in its one-sided treatment of the whole mess
surrounding Tony's rationale for war. Now Hoon's survival is coming back to
haunt Tony, who was once backed by Hastings, a very good representative of
the conservative centre that anchors British state policy.

-----

Our troops fear Whitehall more than they do Iraq

Geoff Hoon is inadequate and his meddling makes things worse

Max Hastings
Monday May 24, 2004
The Guardian

At the time of the first Gulf war, when Tom King was defence secretary and
Alan Clark procurement minister, a senior civil servant observed to me
gloomily: "There's only one minister in this department with any brains, and
he's mad." It would be mistaken, therefore, to pretend that the Ministry of
Defence has always been managed by titans.

Yet the current tenure of Geoff Hoon has shifted dismay about ministerial
inadequacy into a new dimension. It would be unkind to dwell upon the
secretary of state's performances in the House of Commons, where he
rehearses the latest tidings from Iraq with the wooden imperturbability of a
Victorian parish beadle telling off corpses in the workhouse.

It is only fair to make allowances for a minister who became so convinced of
his own doom while the Hutton inquiry was running, that he has never quite
got over the shock of being told, in the event, that he was not needed on
the scaffold, thank you very much.

Hoon is expected to perform only one further service for the prime minister:
remain at his post until the general election without getting into any more
trouble.
Unfortunately, however, he is the minister operationally responsible for
Britain's share of a bitterly controversial war. He is also charged with big
budgetary decisions. Who can be surprised, in such circumstances, that Hoon
is in an almost permanent state of funk?

To laymen, his most recent action might seem of marginal significance. He
has replaced the officers who traditionally head each service's public
relations department with civilian appointees of his own. Yet, in the eyes
of those of us who care about the armed forces, this is both important and
pernicious. Like so much done by this government, Hoon's measure is designed
to increase political control. It significantly curbs contact - and
especially off-the-record contact - between the services and the media.

We live in an age in which the armed forces and the public are already
remote from each other. The vast majority of people have never met a
serviceman. Many of us regret this divide. The decline in mutual
understanding between the services and the civilian world is bad for both.
Officers should be seeking out and socialising with journalists - and
especially younger ones - as much as possible.

Instead, and especially in the wake of the Kelly imbroglio, the politicians
are doing their utmost to quarantine the services. I recently invited a
senior officer to have lunch. Delighted, he said. But of course you realise
it will have to be on the record, with a press officer present. Cancelling
the invitation, I told him I did not know whether to laugh or cry. This was
untrue. I cried.

His pitiful response reflects a grotesque situation. A weak minister, whose
only merit is that he does Downing Street's bidding, is taking steps to
safeguard his own neck which have consequences far more important than that
sorry strip of flesh.

A few days ago I met a Washington defence journalist, who expressed
disbelief about the fashion in which British ministers are attempting to
ring-fence their servicemen from the media. Did I think this was being done
at Blair's personal behest, he asked? I answered that we assume Hoon has
been encouraged by the Downing Street information machine to act to curb
"disloyalty" and "hostile briefing".

A long list of retired top brass has gone public to deplore what Hoon has
done. Sir David Ramsbotham, himself a former army head of PR as well as
inspector of prisons, says: "At stake is the credibility of the army."
Admiral Sir Jock Slater, former first sea lord, told Mark Urban on
Newsnight: "What we will receive in future is a somewhat watered-down
message, delivered by a worthy voice-pipe of a minister."

The current chiefs of staff cannot be acquitted of responsibility for
allowing Hoon to get away with this. The chief of defence staff, General Sir
Michael Walker, is an amiable figure whom the prime minister finds
sympathetic. He has just been invited to extend his term, when he was
expected to move to Brussels. Walker is a natural compromiser. He issued a
poker-faced statement about the transfer of public relations to the
politicians: "The revised arrangement should meet the needs of defence and
represent a professional and coherent military view."

This is tosh. It is impossible to imagine General Sir Charles Guthrie, a
famously forceful CDS, having any part of the new policy. Guthrie possessed
the self-confidence both to get on with Tony Blair, and to take a tough line
about issues which he believed mattered. He also briefed journalists
skilfully. Admiral Sir Michael Boyce, his immediate successor, was a weak
man lacking "street cred", who spoke his mind only when he was about to
leave his job. Walker is cleverer than Boyce, but shows no more stomach for
asserting himself with ministers and is visibly uncomfortable with
journalists.

The services are heading towards storm-tossed waters about money. There is
yet another cash crisis, and it is a big one. I wrote some months ago in
these pages that the right way forward is to conduct a dramatic rebalancing
of the forces, to fund the army properly by cutting big and unnecessary
aircraft and warship programmes. We should keep saying again and again and
again (because the public is reluctant to listen to anything about defence)
that the £20bn Eurofighter programme is a complete waste of money. It has a
political rationale, as a job-creation scheme and as an earnest of our
European commitment, but absolutely no military one. It would make more
sense to spend the money building Spitfires, which are at least pretty to
look at. As it is, of course, the Eurofighter will go ahead because nobody
has the bottle to stop it, while the British army endures another round of
"salami-slicing".

If they were doing their jobs properly, the secretary of state and chief of
defence staff would be addressing the big questions in an imaginative way.
Instead, the wretched Hoon is preoccupied with sealing off the armed
forces - which command a hundred times more public esteem than any
politician - from the media, to plug leaks in his Whitehall bath.

This is what happens when a small man is made master of big issues, which
overwhelm him. He shifts deckchairs, because he is incapable of better. Tony
Blair must accept ultimate responsibility. He is the man eager to use the
armed forces, while shunning responsibility for funding and managing them
properly. Hoon is his creature. It is not the Iraqis who make serving
soldiers roll their eyes in fear and despair. It is their own masters in
Whitehall.