Last Head of British Army Joins Current Chief In Dissent

The retired head of the British Army, Field Marshal Sir Peter Inge, has joined the current head, General Sir Richard Dannatt in attacking the conduct of current military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Observer today reports Inge's remarks to a meeting of European experts on Tuesday:

Inge's intervention, coming amid growing speculation about Britain's exit strategy from Iraq, is the first criticism of operations by a former head of the British army. His comments, made at a meeting of European experts on Tuesday and published here for the first time, reflect the growing dismay among senior military officers and civil servants involved in defence and foreign affairs, that in the critical areas of Afghanistan and Iraq Britain lacked clear foreign and defence policies separate from the US.

'I don't believe we have a clear strategy in either Afghanistan or Iraq. I sense we've lost the ability to think strategically. Deep down inside me, I worry that the British army could risk operational failure if we're not careful in Afghanistan. We need to recognise the test that I think they could face there,' he told the debate held by Open Europe, an independent think tank campaigning for EU reform.

Inge added that Whitehall had surrendered its ability to think strategically and that despite the immense pressures on the army, defence received neither the research nor funding it required.

'I sense that Whitehall has lost the knack of putting together inter-departmental thinking about strategy. It talks about how we're going to do in Afghanistan, it doesn't really talk about strategy.'

And the reason the UK government has failed to think creatively about stratgey, as we know, is that the U.K. government incompetently allowed all the thinking to be done by the incompetents in Washington.