Britain needs more troops, says General Sir Richard Dannatt

[SO19]

Britain needs more troops, says Army chief General Sir Richard Dannatt
By John Bingham
Last Updated: 2:16PM BST 13/06/2008

The head of the Army has ordered plans to be drawn up for a new corps of specialist troops capable of both fighting and conducting aid operations in unstable states.

Gen Sir Richard Dannatt, Chief of the General Staff, disclosed he had called for a feasibility study into setting up "permanent cadres" able to work alongside with local forces overseas using experience gained from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

But, setting out his ideas on how the Army should develop by 2018, he rejected the idea that the future lay solely in combating insurgency and called for a halt to the process of shrinking Britain's forces.

While accepting the Army would always be subject to budget pressures he insisted: "We cannot get any smaller and I would argue strongly that we need to be bigger."

In a wide ranging speech delivered at the Royal United Services Institute in London, he said the Army should be ready for both combat operations and stabilisation efforts - often at the same time.

He told an international audience that the future lay in "liberal interventionism" and said the Army had to adapt to the wishes of the Government.

Drawing from experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan, where small teams of British forces are already working alongside local police and armed forces as mentors, he said it was now time to create a complementary force to specialise in what he called "Military Assistance, Security and Development" jobs.

"These small units would specialise in the training and mentoring of indigenous forces ... but I see these organisations as being far more," Sir Richard said.

He called for a separate career path for officers entering the new bodies, routinely spending time on attachments with foreign police and armies or even local councils in Britain.

"I can envisage a multi-disciplined and inter-agency organisation that would be capable of both fighting alongside local forces, and delivering reconstruction and development tasks in areas where the civil agencies cannot operate," he told the conference.

But Sir Richard insisted military planners should not forget the lessons of the past by concentrating solely on combating insurgency while forgetting about the need to prepare for old-style military combat between opposing nations.

He poured scorn on the popular idea that there had been a "paradigm shift" away from the notions of inter-state conflict common in the Cold War, saying: "Life is not so straightforward."

Following criticism in a series of high-profile military inquests, he also acknowledged the Army had a "legal and moral duty" to provide soldiers going into action with the best equipment possible.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstop ... nnatt.html