I have two questions on Army 2020

• Who red-teamed the reserves concept?
• Who is going to be held accountable for it?

Army will hit its Reserves target by the year 2553

You might have noticed a lot of Army Reserve adverts on TV recently. This is because one of the Army’s key policies is collapsing around its ears.

The Army has committed itself to increasing the Reserves to 30,000 to counter-balance a decrease in 20,000 in the regular forces. The annual run rate target is around 2,200 (+11,000 / 5 years). But in the last twelve months the size of the Reserve has increased by just 20 (net). At the current rate the Army will miss its target of adding 11,000 reservists by 2018 by about 535 years. This has led the Army to increase the upper age limit for certain recruits from 45 to 50.

RUSI added fuel to the fire when it said the reserves plan was unfit for purpose and “has not been effectively managed and is often neglected and misunderstood”.

Julian Brazier MP, one of the policy’s authors, was called to Parliament to answer questions on 24 Nov. As expected, his answers were specious. Unfortunately for Brazier, and for the nation, the Reserves don’t go to war with gross recruits, it fights with net recruits — and well into his five-year policy, net recruits are just 20. Brazier was not asked, and did not volunteer, precisely what the catalysts might be that could change the current situation.

There are clearly problems with the thinking that got us here

It’s no secret that Army 2020 was determined by financial constraints, or that politicians are dictating defence policy to the generals. In its report on Future Army 2020, the House of Commons Defence Committee wrote:

We were also concerned to hear that it was the Ministry of Defence’s Permanent Secretary who told the Chief of the General Staff the future size of the Army under the Army 2020 plan. (para 32)

The generals by and large did not believe the reserves concept would work, and made this clear to the government. But they were overruled. Unfortunately Cohen’s “unequal dialogue” does not preclude poor judgement by civilian leaders.

That does not entirely absolve the generals from guilt, however. Consider this challenge from the Defence Committee:

We have received no definitive evidence of an active experimentation programme in the development and implementation of Army 2020. Furthermore we note with concern that the Chief of the General Staff’s update on the implementation of Army 2020, published in July 2013, provided no detail on experimentation. The MoD should set out in more detail, with specific examples, how the plans for Army 2020 were, and are, being tested and challenged. (para 26)

In response, the government wrote a page and a half describing the various ways it tested the impact of Army 2020 on combat power. Unfortunately, the government failed to address whether it would actually be able to recruit enough reservists to execute Army 2020.

Insight into this little oversight can be gleaned from General Lamb’s answer to the question of what will happen if Reserves recruitment fails (at 1:07:30):

If it doesn‘t work, my view is, like all these things, it’s just a question of application of will. It can be made to work.

That comment should send chills down the spine of anyone who wants the British Army to be successful. The reserves concept is central to the future of the Army: it is designed to offset a reduction in the size of the army to its lowest level since the Napoleonic wars. But one its chief architects naively suggests that recruiting thousands of additional civilians — in a country that has already been sending huge numbers of reservists to war for more than a decade — while simultaneously increasing reservists’ required training to 40 days per year, is just a question of will.

Red teaming would have improved Army 2020

Red teaming is a core part of defence doctrine. It is outlined in JDP-5 Campaign Planning, and the second edition of the Red Teaming Guide was published by the MOD in Jan 2013. The Guide defines a red team as “a team that is formed with the objective of subjecting an organisation’s plans, programmes, ideas and assumptions to rigorous analysis and challenge” (emphasis added). Red teaming is “is the independent application of a range of structured, creative and critical thinking techniques to assist the end user make a better informed decision or produce a more robust product” (again, emphasis added).

A competent organisation that is making important decisions or setting important policy should red team, providing it has the luxury of time. As described above, it is particularly important for testing critical assumptions. It is exactly the kind of tool that can help test the hypothesis that the British Army can recruit thousands of incremental civilians to join the Reserves.

As noted above, it is unlikely that red teaming would have changed the policy, which was being foolishly pursued in defiance of the military’s advice. But it would have surfaced some critical assumptions underpinning it, such as that national culture can be re-shaped (Big Society). This could have helped the Army get the cross-governmental support it needed—it would have evened up the unequal dialogue just a bit. It would also have served as a “minority report” when the policy failed, as the military expected it would.

Someone needs to lose their job (and not just at Capita)

Let us run a thought experiment. Imagine Brazier and Houghton were running a private-sector company and committed to an annual target of 2,200 over five years (Lamb, as a retiree, is brought in as a consultant). After a little over a year they are achieving 0.9% of their targeted run rate.

IF Brazier and Houghton prostrated themselves, and IF they had a very good explanation for what was going wrong, and IF they had a compelling plan for how to fix it, and IF they had a supportive board, and IF they were very lucky, then they might keep their jobs.

Otherwise, absolutely without question, Mr Julian Brazier MP and General Sir John Nicholas Reynolds Houghton GCB, CBE, ADC Gen would be sacked with extreme prejudice.

So, to my questions:

• Who red-teamed the reserves concept? And where is their minority report or footnote dissent?
• Who is going to be held accountable for it?