Notes From a Small Military - I Commanded and Fought with 2 Para at the Battle of Goose Green. I was Head of Counter Terrorism for the M.O.D. This is my True Story. Major-General Chip Chapman
can recover, time, never’. So it was for us at Sandhurst. My space was in Room 101 (George Orwell would have been proud), a tiny enclave where dust was the enemy of the righteous and bad hospital corners on blanket ends incurred the wrath of the colour sergeant. To conserve time, and never having perfected the art of hospital corners (a fact to which my wife can testify), I spent too many nights sleeping on the floor in an army issue sleeping bag. I am glad to say that we have now progressed to the point where the duvet is now an acceptable sleeping accessory and that the modern generations of officer cadets do not know how lucky they are. Duvets are a real sign of progress. A wizened old Parachute Regiment quartermaster, Norman Menzies (inevitably nicknamed ‘Norman the Store Man’), who had joined the army in the late 1950s, once bemoaned to me that the army had gone soft when they started issuing sleeping bags in the 1960s instead of two blankets as part of the marching order equipment for exercises or operations.
Despite my incompetence, I graduated well. This had as much to do with the fact that I was very fit and very sporty. Being in the football First XI and one of the Academy’s star boxers was always a bonus. You even got to miss some exercises (a double bonus, as there were no show cleans on the hills of Scotland or on the rainy/snowy hills of Brecon). I even got to miss some of the drill parades in the mornings, as I would damage my nose (or rather my opponent would – I was no malingerer) in just about every bout and needed to report sick the morning after my pugilism to be patched up. I think they called this ‘duty of care’.
I left Sandhurst consciously incompetent. Fortunately – for the army and defence – I managed to move further to the right on the scale of competence with time and each succeeding job. With our postings system we change jobs roughly every two years, and the cycle begins again – subconsciously incompetent leading to consciously incompetent status and onwards to a state of being consciously competent and then the real nirvana of subconscious competency.
I had the illusion that I was competent when I received my first appraisal report. It told me that I was ‘GOOD’. I was rather pleased that I was good. I did not realise, due to inexperience, that this was code for CRAP. Above GOOD stood VERY GOOD and above VERY GOOD was EXCELLENT. This led to the pinnacle, which was OUTSTANDING. I was initially a D-grade officer.
During my RMA Sandhurst course, Ronald Reagan was elected US President, which I marked with a ‘permission to break out the live rounds’ radio message to higher HQ on a wet November night on Salisbury Plain. This message was a marvel – it showed I had managed to tune the impossibly difficult A41 Larkspur radio and that the batteries worked. The A41 battery resembled four house bricks in size and weight. Radios and batteries are the bane of all those in the infantry. If anyone out there can invent a battery that does not weigh far too much and that holds its power long enough not to require so many house bricks, I promise to buy them their choice of ale. Volunteering to carry five days’ worth of batteries on an airborne exercise was never the choice of a sane man.
Fortunately, we were issued with the new Clansman radio system in time for the Falklands War. This worked perfectly, and we were now down to two house bricks. The technological advancement of the last decade means the army now has the Bowman radio system. In its initial trials, its initials were deemed to stand for ‘Better Off with Map and Nokia’, thus proving that technology never delivers what it says and on time. Field Marshal Rommel once said that his most important weapon system was a radio; he never mentioned the batteries.
Weight is the bane of the infantry. Those who crossed no man’s land at the Somme in 1916 were carrying 90 pounds on their backs. Now we have equipment such as Osprey – the ballistic protection system (or body armour for those who like their language brief and simple) and one of the most inaptly named pieces of army equipment. An osprey is fast and agile, seizes its prey in an instant and carries the fish away (the fish is caught and carried so that it is forward facing, both for aerodynamic reasons and so it gets a good view of the world on its final fatal journey). The modern infantry is anything but agile, fast, and aerodynamic. The Osprey body armour weighs 22 pounds.
I thought I had put my description of the curse of weight to bed in my musings when I came upon an article in the August 2011 edition of Jane’s International Defence Review2 This is what it said, with my reflections in square brackets:
Burden reduction has been an abiding theme of DCC [Dismounted Close Combat. I preferred the more descriptive former title: FIST (Future Infantry Soldier Technology). But we always made a ham fist of bringing any equipment in which actually reduced the burden] systems since 2008 and will remain so. To date the maximum weight carried by the individual infantryman has been driven down by 9kg to 66kg. [That’s 145 pounds in imperial weight2a] through battery and power management improvements, adoption of lighter radios, polymer magazines, lighter equipment, water scavenging, and ‘other measures’. [So why is it still more weight than the first day of the Somme?] The aim is to reduce the maximum to 60kg by the end of Epoch 1 of the DCC capability management plan (which runs from 2010 – 15) to 40kg by the end of Epoch 2 (2016 – 20) and to 30kg by the end of Epoch 3 (2021 – 35).
This is a classic example of how defence ‘mystifies and misleads’ (a phrase first used about the Confederate general, Stonewall Jackson – acknowledged as one of the few geniuses of the American Civil War). The reader will be quite content with the familiarity of a number of years bracketed together and quite baffled (as am I) by what on earth the meaning of an epoch is that so sets it apart from the years.
Apparently, the insights I have let you into in the preceding section came from Major General Colin White. Now, I have come across Colin White and he is a very sound and competent officer. I remember him mostly for the fact that he had the most outstanding eyebrows of anyone I have met in the British army. You could land a helicopter on them: they protrude like a landing pad, and with such length. They are a marvel of eyebrow technology.
Major General White worked in the Defence Equipment and Support area (DE&S) when he shared his insights at a conference into the weight-carrying burden of the infantry. Given that we are still asked to carry more than the average mule, you might think that Major General White is one of those senior officers who must be a Gilbert and Sullivan caricature: the real life model of a modern major general. He is not. I am being careful here in not equating mules and donkeys in case you think I am one of those ‘lions’ (our soldiers) ‘led by donkeys’ (our officers). I am more in favour of Talleyrand’s suggestion (from the French Revolution) that he feared one lion leading 100 sheep more than he feared one sheep leading 100 lions. I would like to think that my career has shown a lion leading a pride of lions – an apt description of the pure leadership joy of working with motivated men – which is always the most efficacious outcome.
Major General White’s eyebrows and their proximity to helicopter landing pads and his employment in equipment procurement lead me to think of disastrous stories in this field. Helicopters (unlike General White’s eyebrows) are fragile machines. God created birds to fly. He did not intend helicopters to invade the space of birds, and that is why the testing of helicopters before they enter service includes their potential to cope with bird strikes. One test apparently involves launching dead chickens from a machine to simulate a bird flying into the windscreen of a helicopter. To show that this is a contemporaneous story, the helicopter in this case was the Merlin – the newest in the aviation inventory of the armed forces. What was not supposed to be in the test was the launching of a frozen chicken. It will not surprise you to learn that not only did the chicken penetrate the windscreen, but it also passed completely through the helicopter and exited after having punched its way through the disintegrating tail rotor. I hope I am never in a helicopter that runs in to a frozen chicken while in flight, for there is a sage lesson here that has nothing to do with the recipe for stuffing.
You would never expect two frozen chicken stories in a career, but another appeared during my sojourn in Tampa. This one was even more bizarre. During the Arab Spring of 2011 – 2012, a Yemeni garrison was beleaguered in a town called Zinjibar near the historic former Royal Naval coaling station of Aden. Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) was poised to overrun the garrison. The