Author: Simon Akam
ISBN No: 9781 913348489
Review date: 08/05/2024
No of pages: 571
Publisher: Scribe
Publisher URL:
https://scribepublications.co.uk/books-authors/books/the-changing-of-the-guard-9781913348489
Year of publication: 24/04/2021
Brief:
British Army
price
£25, hardback
A reader who works in private security can read Simon Akam’s book about the British Army (which also has much to say about the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force) with profit for two reasons. First, because the private security sector in the UK is shot through with former military types. Second, the book is not so much about the combat the Army saw since 9-11 brought in the ‘war on terror’, but (to concentrate on quotes from the very end, first this from page 557) the ‘reality of recent military denial – the fact that no one wants to accept what really happened in Iraq and Afghanistan’.
It may seem odd that the military is, or can be, in denial. Of all the lines of work that cannot afford to have illusions, the military, like private security, must be near the top of a list. Your country’s army is world-class, adaptable and so on? Why then the embarrassing pull-out from Kabul in August 2021? Your site security is sound? Why was that thief or fraudster able to steal from there?
The connections between the military and private security matter because the ‘British Army has been failing to properly look itself in the mirror for a very long time’. Akam goes back to the world wars, but he might as well have gone back to any century. Akam spent five years researching for this book, and says he ‘became fascinated’ (page 559) ‘with the afterlives of the men who had run the Iraq and Afghan wars’. The verb there is important. This is not a book like Neil Sheehan’s A Bright Shining Lie, that took the story of one United States officer, John Vann, to tell a Homer-like epic about the US in Vietnam. Nor is Akam able to overcome his background to tell the story of the private soldier, who far from moving smoothly from Ministry of Defence to corporate settings, or more like military-security postings such as the Tower of London, may be inhabiting the fire exit of some empty Debenhams or M&S store. The story of quite ‘how badly awry Britain’s military adventures had gone post-911’ became ‘inescapable’ to Akam (page 561). His book is an after-event history rather than by a witness, such as Thomas E Ricks (among those quoted by Akam) in his book about the United States in Iraq with the telling title, Fiasco.
He reports how the retired Army men (‘all men, at the top level’) tended to dress the same and to wear highly polished shoes, and fluent in ‘Army English’ with their own vivid, or quaint, adjectives and an ‘alphabet gazpacho of acronyms’, which again is something the military and private security have in common.
The links between the military and private security continue to be substantial because of ‘the extraordinarily fast half-life of the institution – soldiers on average do not serve for long’ (page 556), and soldiering is a ‘young man’s game’. It does mean that through US and UK private security flow veterans of past wars; as late as the millennium you could meet US corporate security men who had served in Vietnam; a generation on, it’s Iraq and Afghanistan. In the military and private security alike, it makes for ‘generational gaps’.
Akam is writing about 21st century war as done by Britain, which requires a political decision to go to war (which is only the beginning), and the economic means to prosecute war, and societal backing. Akam’s book is about how Britain in Iraq and Afghanistan tried ‘haphazardly, imperfectly, and often simply unsuccessfully, to impose accountability’ for what happens in war – violent death in stressful situations. The Army changed between 2001 when it went into Afghanistan and 2014 when ‘it was time to go’ and the giant Camp Bastion was evacuated, much like when the Roman legions pulled out of Scotland, having bitten off more than they could chew. Just as Akam, having served in the Army, had got older, so had the Army changed, visibly and in the heads of its personnel. Akam, now a journalist, and an outsider, had the experience to see through the Army’s illusions; for all the talk of taking responsibility, ‘much of what I remembered from the Army was the opposite, the endless search for ‘top cover’, for someone else to sign off on a decision, so that if fucking up occurred, it was someone else’s fault’. Akam has identified ‘the complete lack of accountability for those at the top’ (page 548), which goes not only for the military but in politics, the politicians and civil servants who made the decisions to go to war in the first place.
Akam also delves into the psychology of those two wars; the western military (and perhaps their opponents) had really been testing ‘the idea that there is individual strengthening to be achieved by exposure to hazard’ (page 550). Akam suggests that ‘in many ways, the British Army is just a great big band of boys’ (page 550). Like Britain’s wars in Afghanistan, there’s nothing new under the sun; the pop star Prince sang about much the same thing in Sign O’ The Times.
Others have already analysed where Britain went wrong in those two wars. Akam muses also on his own life so far – that he went into journalism, and staying in the Army was ‘a road not taken’. To have stayed in the Army, and to have been a casualty or seen others hurt and killed, may have strengthened, and damaged, at the same time, ‘and that is the hardest thing of all to understand’ (page 551).
Arguably most important of all is what Akam has to say about selection and recruitment, because from those unglamorous things, so much else for good or bad flows. Akam makes the case for ‘firing people’ (page 563) for under-performance (which in wars means people getting killed unnecessarily). Akam argues it’s not about creating scapegoats, but to prevent (as has soured the British Army) ‘a culture of imperviousness’. It’s as bad in politics. Akam doesn’t investigate what the other ranks think about the hypocrisy, though he does point out that a soldier can be bawled out (even locked up) for failing to shave, or having a dirty rifle, while generals have ‘free passes’, while they enjoy their apartments that come with the job, and comfortable seats in London gentlemen’s clubs.
Akam’s book is about seeking closure, for what he and the circle he grew up among went through as Army officers; and pointing out quite how wrong the Army has gone, institutionally (recruiting has ‘collapsed’, now it’s outsourced, a political decision, to a private sector company – anyone accountable for that, or medals and pensions and ‘business as usual’?). Akam ends on a visit to his old school, that was built ‘to train boys to run the Empire, or pass army officer selection boards’. The Empire is long gone, and those last two wars were, ‘by any sensible judgement, defeats’. The old ways ‘had so palpably not worked’. Akam ended (page 571) by wondering if other British institutions were struggling. To answer that – in the police, and other emergency services, universities to name only a couple of possibilities – would have meant a 1571-page book. Akam is not short of writerly roads to take.
About the author: visit http://simonakam.com/about/.
