Page 61 - Journal Compilation

1st The Queen’s Dragoon Guards 3
Colonel of the Regiment’s Foreword
A new country, a new barracks, a new role, a new focus, a new commanding of cer, a new chain of command, and new af liations. I could list several other novelties in the life of the Regiment over the last 12 months, and they all add up to a signi cant challenge. So, all change for the Queen’s Dragoon Guards, but they seem unequivocally to be relishing the experience. The great Tory Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, was once confronted by an enthusiastic back-bencher extolling the virtues of reform and innovation. ‘Change’, said Salisbury with all the weariness of years at the political helm, ‘what do we want change for; things are quite bad enough as they are’!! At times I believe we can all sympathise, to an extent, with the sentiments of this Victorian titan. I can well recall the upheavals of ‘Options for Change’, which came hard on the heels of the 1991 Liberation of Kuwait, and which saw the Army cut from 155,000 to 110,000. It was a time of major transformation, and many people said: ‘what the Army needs now is a period of stability’! What we got was Bosnia, Sierra Leone, East Timor, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, the ght against ISIS, and the challenges of resurgent Russian ambition. I could add any number of other smaller operations and deployments that we have also undertaken.
I used to use Salisbury’s lament on a brie ng slide when I was ACGS, which I would then counter with a quote from General Rick Shinseki, the US Army Chief of Staff, who lead the massive Transformation Programme in the late 1990s. He wisely pointed out that the
He wisely pointed out that the military had no option
but to evolve...
military had no option but to evolve: ‘if you do not like change’ he said, ‘you will like irrelevance even less’. He is often quoted by CEOs of big American companies. However, the difference between a civilian company and the military is, as we all well know, that failure for them means bankruptcy and lay-offs, while
for us it means military defeat, death and injury, and all that that would entail for our nation’s well-being and security.
So, we continue, as we have done across the decades, to carry a huge responsibility on behalf of the British people, and our friends and allies, as we contribute to national security and to a rules-based international order. Given that we are doing so in the context of further reductions in the size of the Army, shortage of resources, and a highly complex global situation, means that we have to be ever more adaptive, broad- minded, exible, and intelligent about how we train and prepare ourselves for whatever comes next.
I have quoted him before, but we must never lose sight of General Douglas McArthur’s admonition to the West Point cadets at his farewell address to the Academy in 1962: ‘Your mission remains xed, determined, inviolable. It is to win our nation’s wars’. We must never lose sight of that ultimate responsibility, although governments also have a matching responsibility to ensure we have the wherewithal to exercise that duty. But, in our current role, as light cavalry, within 7 Infantry Brigade, a formation regionally- aligned to West Africa, QDG also have the opportunity to hone skills speci c to that complicated and fragile area, but also with wider application to how the UK projects power and in uence. Many of you will know that I am a passionate advocate of ‘Defence Engagement’, and how I believe the UK could be so much better at ensuring that the nation achieves greater ‘strategic effect’ through