Britain’s armed forces have not been short of work since Tony Blair came to power. This week a small number of troops will fly to southern Afghanistan as the advance party of yet another difficult and dangerous operation.

About 6,000 Nato troops — led by 3,200 Britons, with the remainder made up equally of Dutch and Canadians — are due to take over from Americans in three of Afghanistan’s most dangerous provinces.

However, yet again it looks as if the British are suffering serious handicaps to their preparation and planning. With the Taliban resurgent and both Iran and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi seeking to replicate their success in stirring things up in Iraq, British commanders still will not know precisely how many troops they will be sending until just a few weeks before they leave.

The problems are caused by the Dutch. They had promised to send 1,400 troops but their parliament is expected to veto the deployment as being too dangerous, leaving our boys to pick up the pieces.

So this time, at least, neither senior officers nor the Ministry of Defence (MoD) can be blamed for the mess. But, as an angry new book written by a former Royal Navy officer makes clear, this is the exception rather than the rule.

Lewis Page abandoned a naval career in despair in 2004 after 11 years because, as he wrote in a corrosive valedictory article in Prospect magazine, the British fleet seemed designed for cocktail parties rather than modern warfare.

Now he has returned to the fray with an attack on the entire British military establishment — apart from the benighted minority of men and women who actually do the fighting.

In his book, Lions, Donkeys and Dinosaurs, Page deconstructs many of the most cherished beliefs of the men and women who run our military. Most spend their careers defending the indefensible, Page says, largely because it is the only way to keep their jobs and inflation-proof pensions. The number of officers is way out of proportion to the number of service units that actually need commanders.

“The army’s two combat divisions — one of which is at least partly fictional — might call for 10 or 15 brigadiers, two or three major-generals and a single lieutenant-general to run them,” Page said.

“Maybe we should also have some extra generals — say two or three times this number. What we actually have is more than 10 times as many.”

There are 180 brigadiers and 60 generals. And, as Page points out, the military hierarchy is even more distorted in the Royal Navy, where there are 41 admirals with only 40 major warships or submarines to look after. The RAF has 40 air marshals for 36 squadrons. Little has improved since C Northcote Parkinson of “Parkinson’s law” fame first identified the problem 50 years ago.

The distortions do not end with the top brass, as Page explains. There are 10 different officer ranks in each service, far more than are needed to command actual units. So the rest are given desk jobs.

“Nearly all our mid-to-senior officer ranks are not employed on any work that justifies having them. The proportion of desk jockeys at any given rank often runs above 90%.” The result, Page complains, is that they make work for themselves.

Explore UK News

• Crime News

• Education News

• Health News

• Science News

• Scotland News

Times Recommends

• Time-worn Freddie gives up Test matches
• Brighton company 'involved in cyber attack'
• The art of survival: it’s all in the mind