Matthew Ford

Bandwagonistas: rhetorical re-description, strategic choice and the politics of counter-insurgency

This paper seeks to explore how a particular narrative focused on population-centric counterinsurgency shaped American strategy during the Autumn 2009 Presidential review on Afghanistan, examine the narratives genealogy and suggest weaknesses and inconsistencies that exist within it. More precisely our ambition is to show how through a process of ‘rhetorical re-description’ this narrative has come to dominate contemporary American strategic discourse. We argue that in order to promote and legitimate their case, a contemporary ‘COIN Lobby’ of influential warrior scholars, academics and commentators utilizes select historical interpretations of counterinsurgency and limits discussion of COIN to what they consider to be failures in implementation. As a result, it has become very difficult for other ways of conceptualizing the counterinsurgency problem to emerge into the policy debate.

Finding the Target, Fixing the Method: Methodological Tensions in Insurgent Identification

This article is concerned with exploring the recent observations of Lieutenant-General Lamb who stated that there was no simple binary between counterintelligence (COIN) and counterterrorism (CT). Specifically, the article will use the intelligence-gathering, assessment, and target identification processes and methods used on operations in Iraq and Afghanistan to examine this further. What makes this an interesting exercise is that the effectiveness of a COIN/CT intervention totally depends on whether an insurgent has been properly identified. If the wrong person has been targeted then kinetic, influence, or policing activities are at best exploratory and at worst wasteful or even positively harmful. Thus, by investigating the intelligence model that frames the way adversaries and communities are identified, it becomes possible to understand the limitations in the processes and methods used. At the same time this approach makes it possible to cast light on how and to what extent various techniques drawn from COIN and CT work together in Overseas Contingency Operations.

Influence without power? Reframing British concepts of military intervention after 10 years of counterinsurgency

British attitudes towards military intervention following the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan have undergone what appears to be considerable change. Parliament has voted against the use of Britains armed forces in Syria and the public are unenthused by overseas engagement. Conscious of the costs and the challenges posed by the use of British military power the government has been busy revamping the way it approaches crises overseas. The result is a set of policies that apparently heralds a new direction in foreign policy. This new direction is encapsulated in the Building Stability Overseas Strategy (BSOS) and the more recent International Defence Engagement Strategy (IDES). Both BSOS and IDES set out the basis for avoiding major deployments to overseas conflict and instead refocuses effort on defence diplomacy, working with and through overseas governments and partners, early warning, pre-conflict prevention and post-conflict reconstruction. Developing a number of themes that reach from across the Cold War to more contemporary discussions of British strategy, the goal of this special edition is to take into account a number of perspectives that place BSOS and IDES in their historical and strategic context. These papers suggest that using defence diplomacy is and will remain an extremely imprecise lever that needs to be carefully managed if it is to remain a democratically accountable tool of foreign policy.

Marksmanship, Officer–Man Relations, and the Short Magazine Lee-Enfield

This article examines the British army’s decision to adopt the Short Magazine Lee-Enfield (SMLE) in 1903. Historians invariably assume that this weapon was developed in response to demands to modernize and improve the army following the failures and poor marksmanship of British soldiers fighting in the Boer War. Understood this way the SMLE’s selection appears inevitable and as a result is rarely examined in close detail. This stands in contrast to the wealth of attention dedicated to exploring how the cavalry fought to hold onto the arme blanche despite the apparent revolution in machine-gun and artillery firepower. Upon closer examination, however, neither way of thinking about the changes occurring in the British army after the Boer War does justice to the complexities surrounding the development and selection of the SMLE. Rather, by considering the manner in which different communities within the army thought about battle, and in particular how engagements on the North West Frontier shaped perspectives on marksmanship, this article demonstrates how the cavalry and the Indian Army played an important part in the adoption of the SMLE.

Building Stability Overseas: Three case studies in British defence diplomacy – Uganda, Rhodesia–Zimbabwe, and Sierra Leone

In 2011, the Department for International Development, the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, and the Ministry of Defence launched the Building Stability Overseas Strategy (BSOS). This document sought to integrate cross-government activity as it related to conflict and security so as to ‘take fast, appropriate and effective action to prevent a crisis or stop it escalating and spreading’. At the heart of the strategy was the recognition that addressing instability and conflict overseas was morally right and in the UKs national interests. This confluence of foreign policy realism and ethical outlook most clearly found harmony in the acknowledgement that it was cheaper for the international community to avoid conflict than it was to try to manage it. Through an examination of three historical case studies (Uganda 1964–1972, Rhodesia–Zimbabwe 1979–1981, and Sierra Leone 2000–2007), this article seeks to demonstrate just how difficult this seemingly sensible strategic outlook is. In particular, the article shows there are historical parallels in British postcolonial history that very closely resemble contemporary policy choices; that these can be used to define what is different about past and present practice; and, which in turn, can be used to – at least tentatively – mark out the potential strengths and weaknesses in BSOS.

Military identities, conventional capability and the politics of NATO standardisation at the beginning of the Second Cold War, 1970-1980

ABSTRACT This paper uses equipment standardisation as a lens for examining power relationships and the importance of military identity in framing the development of NATO conventional capability. In the face of the Warsaw Pacts overwhelming military capacity the logic of standardisation was compelling. Standardising equipment and making military forces interoperable reduced logistics overlap, increased the tempo of operations and allowed partners to optimise manufacturing capacity. Applied carefully, standardisation would help NATO mount a successful conventional defence of Western Europe, a crucial aspect of the Alliances flexible response strategy. In this paper, we apply Actor Network Theory to standardisation discussions thereby revealing the incoherence and volatility of NATOs collective strategic thinking and the vast networks of countervailing interests on which this is based.

Innovation strategies for defence: the successful case of Defence Medical Services

Over the past 20 years, the Defence Medical Services (DMS, the umbrella organisation for medical provision within the British armed forces) has been innovating consistently and at pace within the Ministry of Defence. The result of this sustained effort has led to progressive improvement in the outcomes of the critically injured. Separately, it has also led to global transformational innovation in support of the response to the Ebola epidemic in Sierra Leone. Through planned and orchestrated interventions across the entire organisation, from leadership to technology, medical practices to training and organisational design, the DMS can legitimately claim to have achieved a ‘Revolution in Military Medical Affairs’. Matthew Ford, Timothy Hodgetts and David Williams examine the innovation lifecycle within the DMS as it defines its response to the challenges of the changing character of conflict and consider the way defence medicine is an example to the wider military.

Operational Research, Military Judgement and the Politics of Technical Change in the British Infantry, 1943–1953

Abstract The central claim underpinning the Revolution in Military Affairs is that battlefield imperatives drive technical and more widely social change: that technology evolves according to a logic that starts with the relationship between the offence and defence in battle. Thus the ambition of the military organisation is to develop weaponry that can beat the adversary. A failure to grasp this essential truth leads to defeat in battle. This paper demonstrates how technology change happens in practice. By looking inside the ‘black box’ of the military organisation, what emerges is a more complicated picture that takes into account the way arguments for technical change are constructed and deployed within the bureaucracy based on a variety of battlefield interpretations. This shows that technology development is not necessarily driven by either frontline demands or scientific understanding but in reference to who has organisational power and how they use it.