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...Rebecca Marsden, a 25-year-old cadet, says there will be no problem with that: "We can't wait to go to Afghanistan." But it's not just the Taliban that Sandhurst's alumni will have to worry about. As it prepares for a general election on May 6, Britain is having to come to terms with a grim reality: its armed forces are in a state of crisis. Soldiers are profoundly battle weary. Grim statistics tell one part of the story: 179 British soldiers killed in Iraq between 2003 and 2009; 280 lost to the conflict in Afghanistan since...
...Dares Whines "All I could make out in their language were the words Mr. 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...
...Great Britain's 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...
...Indeed, once British forces acknowledged the flaws in their Iraqi strategy they successfully recalibrated their approach and made substantial strides in the stabilization of Basra before their final withdrawal last year. General Salmon, who took command of coalition forces in 2008, says he reinterpreted his role to be a "catalyst and a convening authority" for Basrawis and the different agencies working in the area, most of them outside his command. "As a military commander, not owning quite a lot of the other organizations and lines of development on the social, economic, political and development front, how do you then start...
...Britain has also begun to examine questions of its culpability for civilian deaths. A second public inquiry into the death of Baha Mousa, a 26-year-old receptionist killed in British custody in September 2003, has heard that internal warnings about the treatment of prisoners were ignored. "The procedure for detention and collection of evidence can only be described as a shambles," wrote Lieut. Colonel Nicholas Mercer, the army's senior legal officer in Iraq, in a memo written only months before Mousa's death. A further inquiry has started to examine claims that up to 20 Iraqi detainees were...