Brit General attacks Brown, Blair treatment of military

Sunday Telegraph:

In a damning verdict, General Sir Richard Dannatt accuses Mr Brown of being a “malign” influence by failing to honour guarantees on defence spending during his time at the Treasury, and charges Mr Blair with lacking “moral courage” for failing to overrule his chancellor.

Gen Dannatt’s book, Leading from the Front, which begins its serialisation in The Sunday Telegraph today, is the first major public critique of the Blair/Brown administration by a senior outside figure who served under both men. He was Chief of the General Staff from 2006-09.

He describes his efforts to persuade Mr Blair and Mr Brown that the Army – fighting in both Iraq and Afghanistan and suffering heavy casualties – was facing almost unbearable pressures as “pushing a rock up a steep hill almost all the way through”.

His book is further evidence of the cripplingly dysfunctional nature of the relationship between Mr Blair and Mr Brown, which Mr Blair spelt out in his own memoir, A Journey, published this week.

The general also reveals in his book and in interviews for this newspaper that:

-By early 2009, at a time when the Army was suffering a punishing casualty rate in Afghanistan, he had not had a face-to-face meeting with Mr Brown for six months. Eventually he was forced to “ambush” the prime minister during a chance meeting in Horse Guards Parade to get his concerns across;

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He writes in his book: “History will pass judgment on these foreign adventures in due course, but in my view Gordon Brown’s malign intervention, when chancellor, on the SDR by refusing to fund what his own government had agreed, fatally flawed the en­tire process from the outset.

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I think the Brits, and particularly the Labor party give a higher priority to social services and tend to starve military spending. They were trying to play on the same stage with the US, but their troops did not have the equipment they needed such as helicopters and bomb resistant vehicles. They were also short of UAVs. Despite these failure their troops performed well although their military leaders some time chose strategies that were ineffective.