Word: britishism
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...Bean. They were laughing at me ... making me feel about three inches tall." That was the lament of Arthur Batchelor, a 20-year-old seaman seized in 2007 by Iranian guards in disputed territorial waters on the Iran-Iraq border and held for 12 days along with 14 other British service personnel. In a newspaper interview, Batchelor also confided that he'd "cried like a baby" during his captivity...
...understand the impact on the national psyche of this and other high-profile setbacks suffered by British forces deployed to Iraq, you must first appreciate the luster of Britain's military heritage. More than 60 years after World War II, Britons still grow up marinated in tales of their nation's wartime victories. By no means the world's most richly resourced fighting force, nor its largest, the country's military has long provided an international role model. Smart, flexible and cohesive, the services have been seasoned by working in contrasting terrains and in conflicts with a wide range...
...Sandhurst's program of officer training, compulsory for all British army officers, is a distillation of centuries of accrued knowledge combined with a rigorous practical regime. It attracts applicants from all over the world including China and the U.S., and has stiffened the sinews of the heads of state of eight countries plus a clutch of royals, including the British princes William and Harry. "When I was in Sierra Leone meeting a Kenyan battalion, it was exactly like being back at Sandhurst," says Major General Andy Salmon, former commandant general of the Royal Marines, the last British commander...
...relative success in Basra is due in no small measure to the self-assurance and comfort with foreign culture derived from centuries of practicing the art of soldier diplomacy and liaison," Vietnam veteran Major General Robert Scales told the U.S. Congress in 2004. Late the following year a British officer, Brigadier Nigel Aylwin-Foster, submitted a scathing critique of U.S. tactics to the U.S. army's own in-house magazine, Military Review. American "cultural insensitivity, almost certainly inadvertent, arguably amounted to institutional racism," he wrote...
...return for such wisdom, the sparsely equipped Brits called on the richer U.S. forces for material assistance. Major General Patrick Marriott, who since last September has been commandant of Sandhurst, led British troops alongside U.S. Marines during the 2003 Iraq campaign. "The Americans called us 'the borrowers,'" he says. "When we ran out of field kitchens, which we did because we were underresourced, the Americans delivered in a split second and it was magnificent. We've been underresourced in our history on numerous occasions. But within the psyche, we cope. Americans fix and we cope...