HOW THE WAR WAS WON

Q. Earlier this week the Chief of Defence Staff, Admiral Sir Michael Boyce, said that the UK's Armed Forces were “overstretched” and could not engage in another war for at least 18 months without what he called “serious pain”. Did this come as a surprise to you?

A. No. It is a reflection of the defence planning assumptions on which we have been working for several years now – that at any one time the Armed Forces could handle one major war and some smaller responsibilities, but not more than that.

Q. So the headline attention given to Sir Michael's remarks was overplayed?
A. There was nothing new in what he said, except the emphasis he placed on it immediately following our successful involvement in Iraq. There is a need for recovery and re–training and this will take until the end of next year. The underlying assumptions of these policies have been published in the annual Defence White Paper and they reflect the change that has taken place in defence thinking since the end of the 1980s when the Cold War came to an end. Until then, for more than forty years, the role of the military had been to ensure national survival in the face of possible attack from the Soviet Union. With the fall of the Berlin Wall this changed and our theoretical planning assumptions have had to take this into account.

Q. There has been a lot of interest, and criticism, about the role of the media in the Iraq operation. “Embedded” reporters, and so on. What has been your perspective on this?

A. There were so many journalists wanting accreditation that there had to be a fairly strict apportionment. We were given a number of journalists to be on Ark Royal and they had to stay with us. Some wanted to move on but the deal was that if you jumped ship, literally you lost your accreditation. That caused quite a lot of frustration for some journalists.

Q. But on the whole the idea worked well?
A. Yes, I tell you what was interesting – having accredited journalists on board did not just affect the reporting of information but also the formulation of information. If I went public with any announcement to the crew, by definition that was also heard by the press who were here, so I had to be very careful what I said. In many ways that's salutary because, like it or not, you have to spin information for your own people for the purposes of morale or reassurance.

Q. Was there any oversight of what the journalists were writing or reporting for TV?
A. Yes there was, but only that we were required to vet all their copy for reasons of security. The only grounds on which I was empowered to ask them to delete things or amend things were on grounds of national security. I had no control on spin.

Q. And the journalists accepted this arrangement?
A. Yes, they did. As part of the accreditation process they sign the Official Secrets Act. So they go along with it. One of the advantages of this arrangement is that the journalists are inside your tent and they depend on you for their security and it wouldn't be in their personal interests to reveal information that might put it at risk.

Q. It must be a problem for ship's morale if less than positive reporting comes back to the ship via TV.
A. 24 hour news programmes do present a problem. Of every hour broadcast maybe five minutes maximum is hard news and the rest is speculative and those of us watching just got bored with it. The one we watched most of was BBC News 24. When we got bored with that we flicked to Sky for something different but we found it was even worse, so we went back to the BBC.

Q. There was a big shift in public opinion about the prospect of war when people saw that the Armed Services were out there. It must have made you very proud to know that you had the admiration of the British public.

A. That came home on the day we sailed. Back in January there was quite a lot of controversy about this whole expedition and a lot of families were worried, of course they always are. And there was the sense through the newspapers and TV that this was not something that the British public was right behind. The day we sailed from Portsmouth we thought we would be slinking out of harbour quietly but there were thousands and thousands of people on the beach waving us goodbye, and that was real lump in the throat stuff. And at that point it was another salutary reminder that although politicans will always take stick over these sorts of issues, once British forces are committed it's impressive to see how most of the British public – not all but a large vocal majority – will be behind us, which is wonderful and I think it will continue until the time we start to get things horribly wrong. By and large we are trusted and I think that's a huge privilege.

Q. The other day Greg Dyke, the Director–General of the BBC answered criticism that the BBC's war coverage had not been impartial by saying, “BBC News cannot afford to mix patriotism and journalism when British forces are in action”. Do you have a problem with that?

A. I can completely understand that and I don't have a difficulty with it. One of the reasons that the British people get behind us is that the newspapers are tremendously influential. If the Sun says, “Back our boys”, people back us. But if it said “Don't back our boys” I wonder where the majority would lie. But I also sometimes wonder what it would take to swing things the other way. Maybe some poorly planned operation would perhaps turn things the other way. This was a point I made to a very senior officer recently. He said that it seemed that whatever goes on the Brits are always involved and, looking ahead, he couldn't envisage a coalition operation where Britain would not be involved. But I said, “You say that now, but one thing that would change that is if we took a defeat somewhere.The whole thing would change.” We're riding the crest of the wave at the moment. As far as I can see, the Government does not comtemplate failure. They put us in there on the assumption that we're going to succeed every time.” Q. Didn't Margaret Thatcher say on the Falklands, “Defeat is not an option.”?
A. Well, yes, and I'm not being defeatist here – I think we've got fantastic forces, I'm extremely proud to be where I am now, what better job is there? But you can envisage scenarios in the future where we'd be involved in some defence commitment where we'd actually fail. And there must have been moments when it crossed the government's mind on this operation.

Q. Are you saying that the British public expects military action always to be a success?
A. Yes. Look at the form book. But it can't always be like that.
There were moments in this campaign where we were definitely taking risks. Whereas the first Gulf War was a relatively straightforward military case of getting Iraq out of a country it had invaded, the objective of the second one was to liberate Iraq, not conquer it, and this involved a much greater degree of military risk.

Q. The media coverage of Britain's part in the war concentrated on the Army and Basra. Tell us something about the Navy's role.
A. Putting this ship and HMS Ocean where we put them and held them for weeks was actually a high military risk. There were 22 coalition ships altogether and Ark Royal and Ocean were the only two capital ships there. There were only two fingers of water deep enough for us, each less than a mile wide, and we were very exposed as a target. The strategy was very courageous – and it worked.

Q. Do you think the risks involved in the Iraq operation provides an opportunity for the Ministry of Defence to argue for much larger expenditure in the future?

A. I'm lucky here on Ark Royal. I've got fantastic equipment here. You will never get everything you want and the costs can be enormous. For instance, Combat Identification which has been much talked about because of the friendly fire incidents is almost infinite in its demands on you.

When you put a quarter of a million people into the field you're going to get friendly fire. You will never ever be able to say 100 per cent that it will not happen again. But in general the maritime forces now have an opportunity now to make the case for their importance. There's an open goal and if we don't score it will be our own fault. The sort of commitments the UK is likely to be going into now speak very much for the kind of capability maritime forces offer.

Q. Looking at the US Armed Forces, isn't the trend increasingly to high–tech warfare with its astronomical costs?
A. It's not all high–tech. What this campaign has demonstrated is that it all comes down to the basic soldier, his commitment and belief in himself, training, morale.

The high–tech bits are just as likely to get things wrong. What I think was particularly stirring was the way the British Army performed at Basra. Absolutely text–book – how you deal with warfare when it's anything below the all–out flattening type of warfare. The hearts–and–minds stuff. But, yes, it's true that technology is increasingly determining the way wars are fought.

For instance, in communications there have already been enormous developments.
The internet based technology has increased my ability to know what is happening on the battlefield exponentially since ten years ago.
Q. You mentioned the Sun newspaper earlier. It has been running a campaign for a victory parade in London. Do you think it would be appropriate or would a memorial service be better?

A. I think we should avoid triumphalism. A distinction should be made between paying tribute to the fallen and any suggestion of triumphalism.
Q. When you get back to Portsmouth what are you going to tell your crew?
A. What I've been telling them all along – that what we achieved here is a very big deal and the fact that nothing happened to us apart from the tragic losses of those aircrew is not because nothing was going to happen to us but simply because through their professionalism and their endurance and stamina and commitment we achieved hugely difficult objectives with no fuss whatsoever.

I come back to the point about military risk. We had two capital ships within 17 miles of the Iraqi coastline well within the range of Saddam Hussein's missiles, his chemical delivery systems and mines and suicide boats – one of which I saw – and we sustained the ships there under that kind of threat for a long time because it was the way of guaranteeing that that bit of Iraq would be solved – and it was.