Britain's military machine was ill-prepared for the Iraq invasion, failed to prepare for counterinsurgency warfare and was slow to adapt to situations it did not foresee, according to a damning internal Ministry of Defence report.
"The MoD is good at identifying lessons, but less good at learning them," it says. "In comparison with the US, the UK military was complacent and slow in recognising and adapting to changing circumstances."
Moreover, the government failed to provide a coherent defence or explanation of what it calls "an unpopular war", with potential damaging impact on the reputation of Britain's armed forces.
The report, by Lieutenant General Chris Brown, was commissioned by defence chiefs but is so critical that it was suppressed by Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock (now Lord) Stirrup, the former chief of defence staff. It has been released, with many redactions and after months of argument, under the Freedom of Information Act, nearly a year after a reader, Michael Bimmler, heard about it in the Guardian.
Military personnel who bore the brunt of the failures of top policy-makers in the Foreign Office and Department for International Development – as well as the MoD – were furious that Brown's report was being suppressed.
Assumptions within the MoD that the armed forces should train and equip simply for high intensity conflict and then quickly adapt for "peace support" were discredited in Iraq, Brown says. Such an expectation "proved illusory"... "very significantly, we were not prepared for counterinsurgency".
The report adds: "A widespread sense that Operation Telic [the UK name given to the invasion of Iraq] was a temporary distraction from normal defence business was reinforced by a mistaken belief that the campaign would be short-lived and compounded by the limited engagement of other [Whitehall] departments."
While it criticises the MoD for being "slow to adapt", the report notes that the invasion and its aftermath "highlighted the paucity of training in cross-Whitehall teamwork at ministerial level".
The absence of any British strategy for Iraq undermined its ability to provide support for the emerging Iraqi government and was compounded by a "paucity of military Arabic speakers" forcing commanders at all levels to rely on contracted interpreters.
It would have been better for British troops to have bought off-the-shelf and more reliable US communications equipment rather than British kit, Brown's report says. Shortages of up-to-date equipment meant service personnel had to "revert to obsolete equipment in training".
The report continues: "Inevitably, given the timescales of defence procurement, the majority of the equipment used in the initial stages [of the Iraq invasion] stemmed from the cold war. An exception was the RAF "whose involvement in continuous operations in the region since 1990 had at least ensured that the majority of their equipment was both climatically suitable and interoperable with the US".
Furthermore, the report says – referring to "an unpopular war" – that "no serious attempt appears to have been made to forge a convincing coalition-wide strategic narrative".
It warns: "The planning of strategic communications must address what it means to fight an unpopular war and what additional effort is required to compensate for this. It is crucial that an unpopular war does not undermine support for other operations, or indeed for the UK military's wider reputation."
• This article was amended on 7 April 2011. It said "that the majority of their equipment was not climatically suitable and interoperable with the US". This has been corrected.
Richard Norton-Taylor, guardian.co.uk
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