A military retreat we can’t allow to happen
BY dawn’s wan light, I looked up as an RAF Hercules transport aircraft dropped Land Rovers dangling from parachutes. A sergeant had me by the scruff of the neck to make sure nothing landed on me.
The next wave of planes disgorged elements of the Parachute Regiment, chutes billowing before they thumped down all around. They formed up silently using glowsticks. It was eerily impressive as they moved off into the gloom.
The smallest guys seemed to tote the biggest loads. ‘Best to carry the machine-gun ammo and mortar bombs,’ whispered the sergeant. ‘Heavy, but they get shot away fast. The batteries for the radio have to be carried all the time.’
I was reporting on Exercise Purple Warrior, designed to show we could still stage the sort of amphibious operation that retook the Falklands.
What I witnessed shaped the way I see our military.
They are not super-humans but highly trained, highly skilled and – crucially – highly motivated individuals.
Their language is salty, but their purpose and ability are clear.
I’m uneasy using the term ‘squaddies’ about such people. It smacks of thick lads in the infantry because they weren’t bright enough for anything else. These days it’s tough mentally, not just physically, to get in. Officers battle for the few vacancies with infantry regiments.
Soldiering that would once have been the preserve of Special Forces – reconnaissance, say – is now bread and butter for ‘regular’ infantry.
Today’s equipment, from laser target designators to grenade launchers, is challenging and complex. As our forces shrink, ever more is demanded.
And how the military has withered. As I stood in the pre-dawn gloom of that Wigtownshire drop-zone in the late Eighties, the Army was over 120,000 strong. On paper it is now down to 82,000 regulars, but struggles to hit even that complement and has more ceremonial horses than Challenger tanks.
Only 6,910 recruits signed up in the past 12 months – despite a target of 9,850.
Things are little better afloat. The Navy has a nominal strength of 32,000, which includes 7,000 Royal Marines.
So dire is the dearth of technicians and marine engineers, around 1,500 key personnel are hired from the US Coast Guard and Commonwealth navies.
Over at the RAF, the Few are now the Too Few – they also lack technicians.
It’s grim stuff for a country facing threats on several fronts. There is a real and abiding terror menace; Vladimir Putin is flexing his military muscles; we are committed to aiding South Korea should the North attack.
President Trump wants a ‘two-ocean US Navy’. Forget isolationism – he intends to dominate the Pacific and Atlantic.
And he is going to be looking for real back-up from his foremost allies as he stares down China over its creation of islands, really unsinkable aircraft carriers, in the disputed waters of the South China Sea; the nuclear-obsessed ayatollahs of Iran; and yes, even Putin.
His defence chief, James ‘Mad Dog’ Mattis, is not the loose cannon his nickname suggests; and he has already warned of Putin’s designs on Russia’s neighbours.
Today’s young men and women do not lack the desire to protect this country. But why sign up?
It’s risky, though the forces have always attracted risktakers. But the demands are great – ‘overstretch’ means little time for family life. Accommodation can be shoddy; pay is meagre. Lawyers sit waiting to unleash witch-hunts on troops who took life-and-death decisions on bloody battlefields, then must justify them in rarefied courtrooms.
There are intangibles too. Most Scots have some link to a regiment – a father who fought in Malaya; a great uncle in Korea or the Second World War; a great-grandfather in the trenches confronting the Kaiser’s Great War aggression.
Much of that was lost with the act of cultural vandalism that saw glorious Scottish regimental names reduced to Americanstyle numbers.
The men and women of our forces stand in the way of evil we like to pretend doesn’t exist.
We may pay a high price for stripping our military in the name of a long-gone ‘peace dividend’.