(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.
The Utility of Force is more like a primer on military history, or a staff college paper made readable. Smith gives us a historical digest on the western military from Napoleon to the second world war. With the appearance of the atom bomb in 1945, he contends that heavy conventional forces became obsolete. He appears to suggest that the Nato tank armies which faced the much bigger ones of the Warsaw pact on the iron curtain were pointless. Military historians and policymakers of the day might disagree with him here, and indeed one might reasonably be sceptical about the willingness of Britain or France to go nuclear in the face of an unopposed, lightning-swift Soviet seizure of West Germany—let alone the willingness of America to destroy the world for such a reason. Without Nato tanks on the inner German border, it is reasonable to suggest that a quick grab for West Germany would have looked very tempting to the Soviets.
But Smith does not develop this debate, rather he moves on to what he sees as the prevailing model of modern war, what he terms "war amongst the people." We are shown the development of modern insurgencies through the Boer war, Malaya, Borneo, Indochina, Algeria, the Palestinian/Israeli struggle, Vietnam and so on. In fact, most modern wars and conflicts are covered, even some which do not seem to fall into the category of "war amongst the people." Smith also revisits Korea and the Arab-Israeli wars, but he suggests that these were exceptions to the modern trend. He hardly mentions the Falklands at all, except to say that it was a classic old-fashioned war of the type which can no longer be expected. (We must acquit Smith of any bitterness at not having been in the south Atlantic while his fellow paras were covering themselves in glory.) The apparent success of conventional military action in the first Gulf war—to a significant degree Smith's own personal success—is also brusquely dismissed on the grounds that it did not remove Saddam. Indeed, Smith seems to suggest at times that his own devastating armoured assault into Iraq and Kuwait might have been carried out using other means. He states quite categorically that the last real tank battle to take place in the world was not in Iraq two years ago, nor even under Smith's and Norman Schwarzkopf's command in 1991. According to Smith, the last real tank battles were in 1973, in the Sinai and Golan Heights.
The only one of Smith's own campaigns which he discusses in any detail is his command of Unprofor in Bosnia, which seems to have formed his thinking more than anything else. He has many useful pointers for military commanders on dealing with the media, and he explains the problems of commanding and operating a multinational force very clearly. "There is no such entity as an international soldier," says Smith, and anyone with practical experience knows he is right. There are some people who believe intensely in the UN—perhaps even to the point where they would fight and die for it. Such people, though, seldom take up the profession of arms. National soldiers are always more under the control of their own government at home than of any officer that the UN or even Nato may put over them. He offers a useful principle for those who must assemble and command international forces: they can only reliably operate at the level of their national components. If, like Smith in 1995, you command a force of single national battalions, the biggest operation you can carry out is a battalion-level one. If on the other hand, like Mike Jackson in 1999, you have two British brigades under a largely British HQ, you can mount corps-level manoeuvres. Undermining his argument somewhat, Smith goes on to describe operations of his own using sub-units from more than one nation in lifting the siege of Sarajevo. (However, all the nations in this case were north European Nato allies rather than more variable-quality UN ones.)
In the end, many of Smith's points about "war amongst the people," while evidently true, are rather general and not very new. There seems no reason why we should use this term in preference to "low-intensity operations," "guerrilla warfare" or "counter-insurgency." And it is all too obvious that one should try to avoid an operation where there is little chance of ever winning over a majority among the local population.
"Our conflicts tend to be timeless," according to Smith, and it is true that British soldiers remain on the ground in Northern Ireland to this day, and some UN operations are in their fifth decade. Even so, there seems no reason to accept that lengthy struggles are inevitable. The Falklands, the first Gulf war, and more recently the British deployment to Sierra Leone or the Australian one to East Timor all seem to suggest that military action can be both effective and brief. Even where interventions do drag on for decades, that does not mean that they should not have been undertaken. The international community—parts of it, at least—is learning from its mistakes. And some of the conventional forces of the western armies would seem to have a great deal of "utility," despite still being trained and equipped for the cold war, as Smith points out.
As to how our forces' utility could be improved, Smith is maddeningly vague. Rather oddly he lumps together foot soldiers, artillery and jets as conventional forces of decreasing utility. He ignores the fact that artillery and jets do nothing except cause big explosions, while foot soldiers can often select the people they will kill individually, or even be effective without killing anyone at all. Furthermore, while jets are seldom useful to ground forces in the way that guns are, guns require an enormous, potentially vulnerable supply effort on the ground, which jets do not.
In the last four pages of the book, Smith finally does anticipate some developments. He expects to see a greater emphasis on "operatives who are familiar with the people they move amongst, who speak their language and understand their norms of behaviour." In this he is too sanguine. It is true that British special forces have recently expanded their secret undercover unit, but even so it contains only a small number of people, not anywhere like enough to gain much familiarity with the myriad languages and cultures of the world's war zones. In any case, members of this unit are selected principally for physical toughness rather than language skills or cultural adaptability. Most of our military reconnaissance and surveillance personnel will continue to be strangers to the cultures they observe.
Smith is a compelling writer, even if he has not quite shaken off the staff-college jargon—there is a tell-tale liking for words like "paradigm" and "geostrategic," or the staff-college comfort zone of long-ago wars. But if The Utility of Force sells as it deserves to, we might hear from him again. Perhaps next time he will speak more freely.
