A Peacetime Army Goes to War - War on the Rocks

The senior British officer was proud to witness one of his non-commissioned officers destroying so many of the enemy’s tanks. “That’s the type of aggression I want from my commanders,” Brig. Graham Binns told the soldier from the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards, one of the oldest cavalry regiments in the British Army. The tank ace’s audacious attack, carried out with his mind alive to his regiment’s past glories, would have been foolhardy in a real war. Yet, on a training exercise in a phony war, it was applauded by his superiors and quickly assumed its place among his regiment’s tribal myths.

The exercise took place at the British Army Training Unit Suffield, a sprawling base in the south of Alberta in Canada, where tank crews assemble to hone their technical proficiency in armored warfare. The Scots Dragoon Guards were there in May 2002 to wage simulated battles against a peer opponent — a force led and organized in their own image. Less than a year later, the regiment would take part in the invasion of Iraq, a war that ended up looking very different to the one rehearsed on the Canadian prairie. The idea that peacetime corrodes and ossifies armies, making them less combat effective, is a central tenet of Simon Akam’s new book, The Changing of the Guard: The British Army Since 9/11, though what also comes across loud and clear is the debilitating effects of tribalism on what some have referred to as “the world’s best little army.”