onwards, the tempo of the enemy in Afghanistan proved faster, since he possessed
both the initiative and the greater capacity for surprise. The advantages of the
British (and the American) armed forces proved to be (in the parlance of
the 1990s) attritional, the application of superior firepower in order to destroy
the enemy. The deployment of insufficient troops into theatres of war, a shock-
ingly inadequate force-to-space ratio, encouraged a resort not to manoeuvre but
to overwhelming firepower. In the conclusion to his book on the fighting in
Afghanistan in 2006, the writer, James Fergusson, speculated whether his use of
the title ‘A Million Bullets’ was hyperbole; it was not. Over a twelve-month
period, British troops in southern Afghanistan fired over three times that number
of bullets;pro ratathat was roughly twice the British army’s consumption in
1916, at the height of the First World War. 111 The use of fortified positions, so-
called platoon houses, and the creation of a garrison at Camp Bastion could not
any longer be sensibly construed within a framework derived from the military
philosophy of the 1990s.
These may or may not be the ways to prevail in counter-insurgency campaign-
ing (the consensus would say they are not), but that is also precisely the sort of
question which doctrine should ask, and which operational art should help to
answer. A clutch of scholars, significantly none of them British, has looked at the
twentieth-century British army and expressed surprise that an institution which
so doggedly refused to embrace doctrine until 1989 managed, nonetheless, to be
successful. An Australian, Alberto Palazzo, concluded that this was a deliberate
choice, a product of its ‘institutional ethos’. 112 Two Americans, Deborah Avant
and John Nagl, comparing what they saw as relative British success in the Malayan
campaign of 1948–60 with American failure in Vietnam, came to compatible
conclusions. All three of them relied on the image of the British army as an
adaptive organization, able to learn and respond, and better than the United
States at meeting the changing characters of the wars that it had confronted in the
twentieth century. The image was perhaps too rose-tinted for most of the army’s
historians and probably not even familiar to those who have served and loved it.
The army had not proved fleet of foot before 1989: it took the first year of the
South African War, the first two years of the First World War, the first three years
of the Second World War, and the first four years of the Malayan ‘emergency’
before it shaped itself and its way of thinking to the war in hand. Its character
traits had been less open to improvisation than the idealized version of its history
suggested. Indeed, its slowness to adapt to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
should have been a source of surprise and disappointment only to those, like
Palazzo, Nagl, and Avant, who had been bewitched by the notion that the British
army has had some ability to be more adaptive in the past.
In fact, the British army itself was surprised by the failings which the conflict in
Iraq and Afghanistan exposed. 113 Bagnall’s legacy was felt to have survived less in
the ability to wage the corps battle, the ‘intellectual flame’ of high-intensity
warfare which had in reality been all but extinguished, than in its offshoot, the
‘manoeuvrist approach’. The diffusion and division of campaign planning, and its
implications for the exercise of operational art, were meant to be offset by the fact
130 The Evolution of Operational Art