Euclid’s Army, Think Defence and the Book “What I wrote.”

William F. Owen, here. The bottom line up front: if you like the work Think Defence does, you should buy my book, Euclid’s Army

OK, Big Nose, why?

Euclid’s Army

Euclid’s Army aims to force people to think about how armies should equip, train and organise for land warfare in the 21st Century

This should be with equipment that exists today and based on a far broader understanding of warfare than what is happening in Ukraine.

I laid out how I think it should be done, and if someone disagrees, come up with a better solution.

I didn’t write the book to “start the debate.”

Debates and discussions, which never yield concrete answers, and in this game, you need concrete answers. Debates and discussions are required for making human beings better informed, but unless you can deliver a solution, it is all for nothing.

Debates allow people to look clever. Solutions require them to stand by testable assumptions. The challenges of “Show me how that works” and “explain how that works” have exposed many a budding military thinker.

In my view, TD has always done an excellent job of laying out the left and right of arc as to where capability and kit lie, as in what is, and isn’t, really possible, right now, today. That is far more useful than some retired officer, academic, or journalist telling you about “Future Warfare.”

As Euclid’s Army explains, I had some, not a small amount of involvement with the British Army in terms of Force Development, concepts, and doctrine.

How a former L/Cpl whose greatest achievement in uniform was losing an arm-wrestling contest to a stripper in the NAFFI came to be in such a position is a long, boring story that takes more than a few beers to get into, but here we are.

The fact that I struggled to command the Gun Group or Delta Fire Team doesn’t stop me from gobbing off about Formation Tactics. Providing the gobbing off is actually based on some level of testable expertise, something useful might occur. That is not to say being entirely wrong doesn’t teach a few hard lessons.

Beware the experts!

Think Defence has always done a fantastic job of showing what the art of the possible looks like in terms of kit. Kit is important, and unlike a night out in Colchester, no soldier can walk out the door naked and expect to get much in the way of results. That said, kit monkeys and tank nerds usually don’t know much about warfare.

The internet is packed full of clowns debating which tank is best, but almost none about the best way to train a tank crew or train a Tank Squadron. Do I know how to train a Tank Squadron? There are men who know better than I do, but the output should include time, track miles, litres of fuel, range time, training areas, and ammunition required. 

What is written in Euclid’s Army directly evolved from close involvement with Divisional Commanders and Staffs on a number of CPXs, as well as a wider body of work, including development of the Strike Brigade.

Many people can sketch out unit, formation, and even divisional designs, but few can detail how these units, formations, and divisions should or could train for war. No one knows why, where, when or against whom they fight, but you have to know how to fight, and the only thing that delivers that is training.

There is no shortage of innovators and disruptors who can come up with wild and wacky ways to fight, but most go quiet when you ask to see their training program. Thus, while many bang on about urban operations, as with the tank squadron, not many can tell you how many training days it takes to get a battalion through a complete urban ops training package and how many training days a unit has in a year.

Likewise, when it comes to kit, many internet experts pop up talking about the “best GPMG” or why the SLR (L1A1) was the “bestest rifle ever!!”. Almost no one can tell you how to equip the catering detachment or how much water a battalion needs to have on hand in A1 Echelon.

How many cubic meters of frozen food storage does a brigade need? Does it require any?

The upshot of this, for me, was that I really needed to get into the weeds about how and why things were done in a way that could translate into actions that could actually be taken in the real world. Nothing is better for honing that skill than a sceptical military audience that does not hold back from telling you that you are talking bollocks.

Very often, they are also talking bollocks, but that is not to say good ideas do not emerge.

For me, this meant that telling a 2-Star and, more importantly, his staff, why you disagreed with his plan. That meant being able to understand Divisional Command to the degree that you could reasonably present where the flaws were apparent. If you don’t know how a division fights, then you are on thin ice in the eyes of the General and his Staff.

That is not to say that stellar work cannot be done at a far lower level, such as designing a better four-man trench, to the degree you can describe and list all the materials a rifle company needs to dig in within a specified time limit.

None of what I wrote was breaking new ground.

If there is genius on the page, then that genius is not mine because whatever insights my work revealed were often just confirming what others had said.

General Wavell famously cautioned the arch poodle faker and charlatan, Basil Liddell-Hart, that if he had the time and ability to study war, he would focus on the “actualities of war” such as tiredness, hunger, fear, lack of sleep, and weather, arguing that these factors, rather than the seemingly simple principles of strategy, tactics, and logistics.

The point here is that Force Design is where military theory meets practical solutions.

Does the Division have a shower and laundry unit? How long does it take to put a Battalion through, give everyone a shower, and do their laundry? If a battalion has spent 14 days in defence, how many days rest and refitting do they need? These are all far more consequential than debating the future of manoeuvre warfare. Manoeuvre is important, but unless you know how many litres of fuel it takes to march a brigade 400 km, then you will need a lot of fairy dust to make it happen.

The future of manoeuvre is the future of logistics and planning.

Instead, what most academics, journalists and even retired officers write about is “drones,” warning of a transparent battlefield that assumes that the war in Ukraine is the only war ever fought or that fighting a Russian Army that is very badly trained and very badly equipped provides some signposts to the future of warfare.

If the tank is dead, so is every bit of equipment on the battlefield. The idea that someone can declare that there are “lessons of NATO” without describing in practical detail the training, equipment, and organisational consequences of that observation offers very little insight.

This is where the line between “Military Thinker” and “Social Media Influencer” begins to blur.

There is no better example of real grown-up work than that done by “Think Defence”, whose work perfectly spans that gap.

There is no shortage of experts on the internet, but very, very few produce work that can be applied in the real world. Think Defence was nothing but useful to my work and told me more than any number of long-winded footnoted peer-reviewed papers.

As the editor of an academic journal (militarystrategymagazine.com), I am better equipped than most to make that judgment. I can comfortably debate the origins of Air Land Battle and the Clausewitzian nature of war, as I can lay out a bridge defensive position, but I still get drawn back to reading Think Defence for how many and what type of Japanese mini-digger I load onto an EPLS rack.

Of course, it is tempting to think that kit defines capability, yet concepts, training, and doctrine are equally important. To paraphrase General Melchett, Doctrine is not a dirty word, unlike crevice, which is a dirty word!

Doctrine means what is taught, and concepts are merely ideas. In many ways, the backbone of an Army is teaching and ideas, and if one accepts that culture is shared ideas and beliefs, then the lines become very blurred and hard for those without a military background to navigate. A lot of what’s imparted as facts, best practices, or how something is done is, most often, just the way someone was taught to do it, so they just repeat it with no deep understanding of why.

Doctrine isn’t without fault. Not all ideas are good ideas.

Ideas have culture and real-world consequences. For example, why does British infantry still believe in bayonets, or as I used to call them, “swords”?  Is the future of the bayonet something worth talking about? Well, compare and contrast all the Special Forces groupies on the internet and YouTube talking about CQB, “battle belts”, and “SHF loadouts.”

What it means to carry a bayonet and why, plus how to train to use one, might yield more insights than aping SF hostage-rescue training. I am not a fan of the bayonet, yet I know men who have used them in real combat. Still, little that they tell me suggests the acme of dismounted close combat in the 21st century is about moving into the enemy position or structure with the expectation that you should be using a bayonet.

Many people say the bayonet is important because they want to sound salty, along with silly statements about “SLR stopping power.” Still, all this proves is that much of what is said about light weapons is not about evidence, but rather fashion and fads. Read Matthew Ford’s excellent “Weapon of Choice” for more insight.

More importantly, if you think the bayonet is important, will the British Army’s new small arm have one, and how many men in the platoon will be able to “assault with the bayonet?”

The reality is that bayonets don’t matter and haven’t for a very long time.

Yet, why does so much ink get spilt on that debate, or would get spilt if the British Army ditched the bayonet? Why did the Royal Armoured Corps cling to the doctrine of having a 120 mm rifled gun when everyone else ditched it, only to ditch it 30 years after the debate was settled?

Fundamentally, the kit is about ideas.

Lots of kit debates can be objectively assessed with data, but none of that data tells you which is the best tank if you have to have a rifled main gun with a limited selection of two-part ammunition.

Culture eats evidence and shits ideas, for breakfast.

All in all, the UK lacks a useful, structured debate on current and, therefore, future warfare. Debate and discussion fail to be grounded in coherent solutions. I felt so strongly about this that I wrote a book, albeit not a book about fixing the British Army because specifying the British Army attracts too much vested interest.

While culture reigns supreme, basic facts must get a say.

I hope you read my book, Euclid’s Army

I hope this article has upset some people so badly that they are now pounding their keyboards in furious reply about the best way to organise a Divisional laundry unit, or train a tank squadron.

At the very least, perhaps some readers enjoyed this enough that they will recommend Think Defence to others!

William F. Owen

Click the image to purchase Euclid’s Army…