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Deborah Haynes

Defence Editor

British deaths on the front line were greater during the last Parliament than in any other since the Korean War. The toll, 369 service personnel, coupled with public anger over a lack of helicopters and armoured vehicles for troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, helped to draw the military into the political debate in a way not seen for a generation.

It did not happen straight away. Britain was a country at war on two fronts for most of the five years, but servicemen and women returning home would find themselves bemused at how little attention their efforts received. There was an underlying sense of disconnect between the politicians in Whitehall and the soldiers, sailors and airmen fighting and dying on their behalf in Helmand province and across southern Iraq. The sight of Tony Blair and after him Gordon Brown sporting flak jackets, helmets, sand-coloured boots and wide smiles on fleeting visits to fortified bases in both warzones did little to change this impression.

The political-military divide was further hindered by the rotation of four different defence secretaries in five years. Des Browne, who held the post from May 2006 until October 2008, was simultaneously made Secretary of State for Scotland when Mr Brown became Prime Minister, an appointment that many in the military saw as an insult, confirming their suspicion that the Government had failed to attach sufficient importance to its Armed Forces.

Mounting questions about the legality of the Iraq campaign, however, coupled with revelations in the media about the state of medical care for wounded troops, inadequate equipment on the front line and a litany of other shortfalls, began to create awkward political questions for ministers to answer. Driving home this sense of unhappiness, General Sir Richard Dannatt, then the head of the Army, broke with a tradition that frowns upon serving officers criticising the government and gave warning in September 2007 that the presence of British Forces in Iraq was worsening local militia attacks. He also spoke out on other emotive topics, such as inadequate accommodation for soldiers, unfair pay and the need for more boots on the ground in Afghanistan. Retired military chiefs added their voices to the chorus of complaints, with high-profile figures such as General Lord Guthrie of Craigiebank, a former chief of the defence staff, becoming a regular critic of Mr Brown, who was accused of cutting the defence budget during a time of war.

The mood of blame and betrayal differed sharply to the plaudits that Margaret Thatcher earned when she took Britain to war in 1982 to recover the Falkland Islands from Argentina. That successful campaign, despite the loss of 255 British lives, helped her to secure a landslide victory in a general election the following year. In contrast, the invasion of Iraq and its bloody aftermath, while defended by military commanders and politicians at the time, cast a shadow over the 2005-10 Parliament that did not disappear when Tony Blair stepped down. Instead, the Government’s conduct in siding with the United States over Iraq began to be scrutinised in the Chilcot inquiry, set up to learn lessons from the Iraq campaign.

The previous Parliament also oversaw the deployment of British Forces into southern Afghanistan on a mission that was supposed to be about reconstruction but evolved into the bloodiest combat operation for the British military in decades. The punishing toll of casualties in Helmand over four summers belatedly captured people’s attention back in Britain. Every week at Prime Minister’s Questions the names of the dead were read out to a silent Commons, while television screens across the country tuned in to watch crowds line the street of a town called Wootton Bassett as convoys carrying the bodies of repatriated service members were escorted from a nearby military airbase. The reality of soldiers with missing limbs, horrific scars and the less obvious but equally debilitating problem of mental disorders also awoke a sense that Britain was at war and more needed to be done to help the Armed Forces. The Government came under increased scrutiny.

Public outrage at the continued use of Snatch Land Rovers, dubbed “mobile coffins” by the soldiers who used them because of their inability to protect against roadside bombs, was one of the emotive issues that changed the relationship between the military and the politicians. So, too, did anger at an inadequate pool of Chinook helicopters, which was forcing British troops to move by road, making them more vulnerable to improvised explosive devices, the biggest killer of British Forces in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The criticism added to a growing perception that the Government had tried to fight “Blair’s wars” on a peacetime budget. Even coroners were calling into question how frontline soldiers were being kitted and trained. To their credit, ministers responded to urgent requests from commanders on the ground, with the Treasury signing off on new, improved armoured vehicles and helicopters in record time. The damage, however, had already been done and repeated assurances that no request had been turned down rang hollow amid the belief that the military had never been properly funded in the first place.

The issue became hugely sensitive, with the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats keen to knock Labour’s record, while the Government was anxious to demonstrate that it was doing everything possible to improve the situation. Highlighting the politicisation of what should be a military matter, a decision to replace the Snatch Land Rover with 200 new vehicles was revealed while Mr Brown was on a trip to Afghanistan. He embarked on the March visit immediately after giving evidence at the Chilcot inquiry in which he delivered a strong defence of his military spending record. He was, however, later forced to make an embarrassing correction to his evidence.

As well as requiring more of the Government, the growing political awareness and appreciation of defence also prompted the politicians to look more closely at how the Ministry of Defence conducted itself. The Defence Select Committee and the National Audit Office produced damning reports on its procurement record, with billions of pounds wasted on delayed projects.

Under Bob Ainsworth, Labour’s final Defence Secretary, the MoD published a Green Paper that set the scene for a long-overdue Strategic Defence Review, although it was left to the Lib-Con coalition to implement. The failure to conduct a review sooner – the last one was in 1998, before the world-changing terrorist attack on September 11, 2001 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – was regarded as another legacy of Labour’s inability to understand the military and, arguably, a failure of commanders to push for it. As a result, many of the long-term programmes to which the MoD was committed, such as two new aircraft carriers, planes to fly off them, and scores of additional fast-jets, were seen as out-dated and no longer suited to equip Britain for the wars of the future with only limited resources available.

Separately, a realisation of cash shortages in MoD coffers to look after wounded personnel and veterans prompted the creation of a number of new military charities on top of the established organisations to raise extra money for serving and former members of the Armed Forces. They moved quickly to capitalise on the sudden, public appreciation of the military, with The Sun newspaper backing a charity called “Help for Heroes” that ran a hugely successful campaign selling blue and red wrist bands as well as a host of other money-raising events that further boosted the profile of the military.

Joanna Lumley added an unlikely dimension to the relationship between MPs and the military when she fronted a bid to secure Gurkha veterans with at least four years’ service in the British Army the right to resettle in Britain.

It was not just the Armed Forces that were in focus. The Times ran a campaign in 2007 to urge the Government to help hundreds of Iraqi interpreters who were facing death at the hands of militiamen in Iraq because of their association with the British military. In response, Mr Brown created a scheme to relocate the interpreters and their families in Britain or give them a cash payment.

Another unfortunate legacy was a growing pile of lawsuits against the Ministry of Defence ranging from allegations of torture and abuse by Iraqi detainees to claims of negligence by the families of soldiers who died in Snatch Land Rovers. This costly process will take a long time to resolve.

The increased awareness of the military among the public and politicians during the last Parliament failed to translate into a heightened interest in the general election. Military insiders had hoped that a debate would take place about what sort of country Britain aspires to be: does the nation want to maintain its costly but influential place on the top table as a nuclear power alongside the United States or is it happy to downgrade to a less-significant player?

This fundamental question was left to be answered in the Strategic Defence Review. Aligned to this will be the extent of expected cuts in the defence budget, which will affect the scope of future operations, from the size of the Armed Forces to the weapons at their disposal. Unlike the first half of the previous century, the number of MPs with military experience remained low, although the new Parliament has the highest tally in at least the past two decades – 19 Conservative MPs and one from Labour, according to Byron Criddle, of the University of Aberdeen. Despite a shortage of hands-on experience, MPs look set to retain their rekindled appreciation of the military, at least for as long as British troops are deployed in Afghanistan.

Armed Forces Day, created by Mr Brown in June 2007, created an annual programme of events to celebrate all three services nationwide. The real test of Britain’s relationship with its military, however, will occur in the decades ahead.