I have worked at officer-training establishments most of my life, and it is characteristic of my profession that casualty lists chart the fate of my friends. Lieutenant-Colonel Rupert Thorneloe, who was flown home yesterday, would not have wished me to suggest that he was more noteworthy than any others killed in Afghanistan, like Trooper Josh Hammond of the Royal Tank Regiment, who died with him. But I taught Rupert on a year-long master’s course, and remember how, in his understated, guardee way, he was a brilliant natural soldier, and a kind and generous man with a rich sense of humour. It is never wise to predict any officer’s ascent of the hierarchy’s greasy pole, but he was my tip for the top.

I write not simply to mourn a friend, but to use his death to illuminate the war — for such it is, however much we may wish to ignore it. We have been so preoccupied with other issues that it is easy to forget that our commitment to Afghanistan has rumbled on since 2001. It has lasted longer than the Second World War. There are currently about 8,000 British troops there, a steady stream of casualties, and every prospect — for this is an obdurate struggle against tough opponents — that the stream will roll on. I discern little evidence of public approval of the war. As Help for Heroes has demonstrated, there is abundant support for the men and women fighting it, and the mismatch worries me, for we may easily persuade ourselves that the best way of helping our heroes is to keep them out of harm’s way.

David Miliband recently affirmed: “What we are doing in Afghanistan is incredibly important. For the next three to five years it will dominate our foreign policy. It will be the defining issue for the next government.” Yet seldom has something so important actually been so poorly explained. Do we simply seek to keep the Taleban out, or to change the way that Afghanistan is ruled and to improve the lot of its people? Where do we stand over the poppy crop, women’s rights and governmental corruption? And are our aims achievable?

We need a real strategy, not a sequence of tactical ploys; winning battles will not necessarily win the war. Confident assertions that the “comprehensive approach”, a key plank of our doctrine (notable for its absence from Iraq), is in place must be matched by visible and accurate application of both money and talent, much of the latter by definition non-military.

A whole generation of Rupert Thorneloes, our bright and experienced middle-rank officers, is deeply uneasy. A recent British Army Review article uses the common analogy of mowing the lawn, going out time and time again to do much the same thing. It lambasts gobbledegook such as “strategy of delivering civil effect”, and laments the stultifying prevalence of ’elf ’n’ safety”: a sign warns its author to Take Extra Care When Using Stairways. An article by a recently retired major in June’s Journal of the Royal United Services Institute observes that the US Army has undergone a radical transformation as a result of early failures in Iraq, and the British Army has not.

It is tempting for some senior officers to lay the Army’s misfortunes at the door of our crippled Government, but the problem is more complex. Although the Army had considerable experience of counterinsurgency (and went on at unwise length about the fact), there is little sign that it applied its own doctrine in Iraq. There was palpable tension between the formal US-led chain of command from Baghdad and input from our own Joint Headquarters at Northwood.

Successive British divisional commanders in Basra (individually the stars of their generation) were in post for only six months, making it hard for them to grasp the changing nature of the conflict, and to build and maintain relationships with key Iraqi players. A British officer recently highlighted the difficulty of mentoring an Afghan colleague. “He has been in post for about three years,” he told me, “and I am something like the eighth mentor he has had.”

Within the military profession there is much debate as to whether Afghanistan is “the war” — the defining struggle of our times — or “a war”, to be followed by different sorts of struggle elsewhere, for which different techniques and equipment will be required. The discussion is wrapped round the axle of inter-Service politics, more than usually febrile as this cohort of single-Service chiefs departs in an air of budgetary gloom. If it is the war, then the Army needs more people to fight it, and it must change the way it does business. Quantity has a quality all of its own, and excessive recourse to long-range firepower (with all it means in that evasive phrase “collateral damage”) is often a sign that one is losing the real battle.

“We need to win a war, not spin one,” argues the lawn-mowing author. We need a proper strategy, which will mean nothing if it is not explained to a sceptical electorate. And we need to remember that those folk on their second row of medal ribbons demand attention, perhaps by constructive dissent.

Farewell, Rupert. May the dust lie light upon you, and may we use your example to apply ourselves better. And if we cannot, then we should not risk the lives of more brave men like you.

Richard Holmes is Emeritus Professor of Military and Security Studies at Cranfield University and the author of Marlborough, Britain’s Greatest General

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