The Utility of Force by Rupert Smith
(Allen Lane, £20)
Rupert Smith could reasonably claim to be the most operationally experienced British general of his generation. As a junior paratroop officer in 1978, he was a company commander in South Armagh’s “bandit country.” He was caught in the blast of an IRA bomb, and won the Queen’s gallantry medal for his service. He went on, among other things, to train the nascent Zimbabwean army after the fall of Rhodesia. Later, as a general, he commanded the British ground force in the 1991 Gulf war. He was then in charge of UN forces in Bosnia during the Srebrenica massacre and its aftermath, and broke the siege of Sarajevo. He returned to Northern Ireland as commander of British forces in the mid-1990s and thereafter, as deputy to Nato supreme commander Wesley Clark, had a ringside seat at the Kosovo conflict and the bombing of Serbia. At one time Smith was also thought to be in the running for a top job in the UK forces—he might have been head of the army. In the event, it was the generals who succeeded him in the Balkans who were put on track for such posts, while Smith went on to be second in command at Nato, retiring in 2002.
Since then, under Mike Jackson, Smith’s fellow para and the current head of the army, the British forces have been passing through some big changes. In particular, the infantry has been cut by four battalions and its beloved regimental system has undergone radical change, while artillery and tank formations have survived unscathed. We can be sure that Smith has some views on all this: the more so as the central thrust of his book is that old-style tank and artillery battles are things of the past. Somewhat disappointingly, however, he never really spells these views out. Given Smith’s vast experience of ethnic, religious and political violence—and of military solutions ranging from the steel fist of 1991 to the almost impotent blue berets of 1995—it could have set fire to the current rather muffled debate on how the British services should be reorganised.
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