HIGH-RANKING officers who had never seen action were damaging the Army’s fighting abilities, The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival was told yesterday.

Colonel Tim Collins, whose speech on the eve of the invasion of Iraq inspired the world, said that British forces in Afghanistan and Iraq were being put at risk by a cohort of officers more interested in their careers than fighting.

He described such officers as “civilian soldiers” and said that they were very able at thriving on internal Whitehall politics and encouraging inertia, but made poor frontline generals.

He told a festival discussion on leadership that the same problem had limited British soldiers’ effectiveness at the start of the First and Second World wars and that it might take a military “disaster” before they could be weeded out.

“One particular little red, fat general has never been in a fight in a playground. He’s a civilian soldier in the true sense of never letting anything happen,” Colonel Collins said. “When we find ourselves in a shooting war, not only are these chaps at sea but they are frantic to survive. There’s a conflict at the heart of the Army. It’s almost a congenital condition.

“The stuffy generals of the First World War had to go before fighting generals were put in place and led us to victory. The same was true of the Second World War. I think we are on the cusp of a disaster. Only then, when a few sinecures at the Chelsea Hospital have been handed out, will we get a few fighting generals.”

Colonel Collins said that the proposed scrapping of the Army’s regimental system — in favour of a European-style force in which soldiers switch between large super-regiments — was a form of cost-cutting that would have a blood price.

The traditional system, he argued, was tried and tested and shown to be extremely effective. Soldiers took pride in their regiments and fought for them, whereas he feared that the new organisation would never manage to win such loyalty or fighting spirit.

“There’s no reason why a European army should do the extraordinary things that regiments do. They will be the cause of the first great defeat for the British Army. You will see guys running away — there’s no reason to stay, there’s no Black Watch or Royal Irish or whatever. It’s just a European army.”

He was critical of the financial management of the Army and said that centralisation of services such as recruitment had damaged efficiency. When he took over the Royal Irish he was 250 men short of a full complement and had been told that there was no one willing to join up. He took over recruitment and within weeks he had enough, having discovered that recruits were being turned away for “bizarre reasons such as having too many tattoos”.

While being widely scathing of senior officers, he said that there were some very able exceptions to the “civilian soldier” label, such as General Sir Mike Jackson.

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