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‘Victory’ and ‘defeat’ things of past, says top UK general

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Last British troops leave Camp Bastion in Helmand, Afghanistan

There will be no clear victories and no clear defeats in the wars of the future, the head of the British army has warned, with the “perceptions” of those involved just as important as action on the battlefield.

Sir Nicholas Carter, chief of the general staff and formerly Britain’s most senior officer in Afghanistan, said in a speech on Tuesday that “the character of conflict has changed in this information age in which we find ourselves”.

His remarks come just three months after the last British soldier was withdrawn from Helmand, marking a close to the country’s longest conflict of the modern era.

A generation of officers and soldiers from Afghanistan instinctively understood the nature of conflict was fundamentally shifting, Sir Nicholas said in an outline of a sweeping new doctrinal approach for the UK’s land forces.

He pointed to Russia’s covert and complex informational war in eastern Ukraine as a pattern for future engagements.

The British army is still trying to define a role for itself amid swingeing cuts to troop numbers enacted as part of the last five-yearly strategic defence and security review in 2010 and amid a more isolationist political climate in Westminster.

That task has been a priority for Sir Nicholas and his predecessor Sir Peter Wall, who stood down last September.

The army is particularly vulnerable to further cuts to the Ministry of Defence’s budget — widely expected to fall in the next parliament — even though senior officials have warned this would mean the military’s structure and capability having to be radically overhauled.

The army was leading the way in shaping Britain’s ability to deal with an uncertain strategic environment and the growing threat of hybrid warfare, Sir Nicholas stated in a speech at Chatham House, the international affairs think-tank in London.

Under its new doctrinal approach — dubbed “integrated action” — strategists and tacticians would be encouraged to think of allies and adversaries as “audiences” to be influenced while the use of traditional “hard power” would feature far less, he said.

“We need to breed a generation of staff officers who understand that if you remove the weaponry from a Reaper platform [the UK’s armed drones], you get an additional 12 hours of endurance for surveillance.”

“Soft power” methods such as psychological operations, diplomacy, aid and covert action will be tools in which troops will have to become expert, he said.

At the forefront of this new warfare will be the revitalised 77th Brigade, also known as the “Chindits”, who will spearhead the “new way of operating”, according to Sir Nicholas. The Chindits will have as many as 1,500 personnel whose tasks will range from traditional psychological and media operations through to battlefield and operational diplomacy, as well as more complex digital information and subversion campaigns on social media.

“Manoeuvre is now multidimensional. It started being two-dimensional with fire and movement. We introduced a third dimension with air and artillery. We moved through manoeuvre in the electromagnetic spectrum and we now find ourselves in an era of information manoeuvre.”

Sir Nicholas added. “It is a truism that war is about minds, not stuff. It is much harder now to distinguish between defeat and victory. It is much more about the perception of those who are involved.” 

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