The Telegraph
For General Sir Mark Carleton-Smith, the head of the British Army, there is no better illustration of the rapidly changing nature of modern warfare than to compare his own experience with that of one of his distinguished predecessors. When Field Marshal Lord Guthrie served as Chief of the General Staff in the 1990s, he claimed to be the last Army chief to have had a spear thrown at him, an event he experienced while serving as a young officer. For his own part, Sir Mark claims to be the first Army chief to have been bombed by a drone while conducting operations outside the Iraqi city of Mosul. “I was bombed by a commercial unmanned aerial vehicle operated by a terrorist organisation,” he recalls. “It just shows how quickly the nature of warfare has changed.” At the time Sir Mark, a former head of Britain’s Special Forces, was involved in the US-led effort to destroy Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) after it had created its so-called caliphate. The most radical transformation of the Army of modern times And, in his current role as Chief of the General Staff, a position he has held since 2018, Sir Mark believes there are many important lessons that can be learned from Britain’s successful involvement in the coalition effort to destroy Isil as he seeks to undertake the most radical transformation of the Army of modern times. “We fought a very successful campaign that resulted in the destruction of the caliphate in Syria and Northern Iraq,” Sir Mark explains in an exclusive interview with The Telegraph. “That was done by applying some of the lessons from our experiences in Afghanistan. “We came to realise that the main priority was to build up the Afghan security forces so they could independently manage their own insurgency.” “We have taken the lessons of how to create local indigenous forces and to harness them with 21st century Western technology. We applied it very successfully against the caliphate, and we did so almost without a single combat fatality. “This form of remote warfare has almost become our house style.” Sir Mark is speaking in his spacious modern office at Army Headquarters in Andover which is filled with mementos of an action-packed career during which he has seen active service in all of Britain’s major military engagements of the past four decades, including Northern Ireland, the Gulf War, Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan. The ability to fight hi-tech wars of the future His task now is to undertake the Herculean task of restructuring the Army in such a way that it retains the ability to conduct the type of successful military campaign that was undertaken against Isil while at the same time providing it with the ability to fight hi-tech wars of the future. The template for the future structure of Britain’s Armed Forces was set out in the Government’s recently published Integrated Review, which set out an ambitious vision for the future role of the military as part of Global Britain. And to fund the ambitious reforms being undertaken by all three Services, Defence Secretary Ben Wallace has managed to secure an extra £24 billion in funding from the Treasury. But as part of the restructuring, the size of the Army is being cut from its current establishment of 82,000 to 72,500 by 2025. Coming after the controversial cuts made in the 2010 Defence Review, which saw the Army’s size cut by 20,000 as part of the drastic defence cuts implemented by the Cameron government, the prospect of the Army being reduced further has led critics to question whether it will in future be able to conduct operations on the scale recently seen in Iraq and Afghanistan. Concerns have also been raised about its ability to fulfil its Nato commitments and support future US operations.
