Do 'the lessons of our grandfathers' still apply today?

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Tom Griffin (London, The Green Ribbon): "The conflicts of today and the conflicts of tomorrow require that we relearn many of the lessons of our fathers and grandfathers somewhat overlooked in the stasis of the cold war," the Chief of the General Staff, General Sir Richard Dannatt said on Thursday.

In a speech to Labour's Progress group, Dannatt outlines his proposals for permanent cadres of army stabilisation specialists.

These small units would specialise in the training and mentoring of indigenous forces – the type of tasks conducted by our Mentoring and Training Teams in Afghanistan and Iraq. But I see these organisations as being far more. My vision is that they would form the spine of our enduring cultural education and understanding. I can envisage a multi-disciplined and inter-agency organisation that would be capable of both fighting alongside local forces, and delivering reconstruction and development tasks in areas where the civil agencies cannot operate.

I believe we should develop a career path that would see an officer spending a tour with indigenous forces, followed perhaps by an attachment to DFiD overseas, or a local council at home or a police force in Africa or elsewhere. Perhaps, this is where we start to embed our deep language and cultural training, not just for our current areas of operation, but potential future conflict zones. This is the stuff of our grandfathers and great uncles but, we are in a continuum, not in a new paradigm – so these skills are still very relevant.

If Dannatt's speech harked back to an earlier era, the subsequent discussion highlighted constraints that are different from those of the past.

One member of the audience asked why the British Army didn't intervene in Burma or Zimbabwe.

In response, Dannatt suggested that Burma was "probably an area of the world beyond our acknowledged sphere of influence and beyond our capacity to do anything about."

In Zimbabwe, he said: "The problem may just have been too great for us not just in terms of distance and the size of the country, but of course also there was really no international support for Great Britain to have done that. Certainly to have got ourselves involved in operations in somewhere like Zimbabwe without at least implied United States support would have been difficult to do. I think also the same would have applied for many of the other African countries around. The notion of 'African solutions to African problems' is probably the right long-term solution, as painful as it is watching what Zimbabwe is going through at the moment."

One could argue that very similar contraints existed in Iraq, with one notable exception, and are likely to exist across much of the world in future.

As a result, the scope for the 'liberal interventionism' which Dannatt advocates may well depend on the kind of multilateral diplomacy that liberal interventionists have increasingly disdained in recent years.

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