My understanding of the jurisprudential pearls uttered, no doubt daily, by Judge Windle must remain imperfect, for I fear I have never had the pleasure of being in a court which had the great good fortune of having him preside over it. My loss, my loss, Yet I cannot but feel he was on solid ground when he cast doubts about the usefulness of the continued presence of the Army in the Lebanon, though courts are not often the forum for dilations upon our defence policy.
If you can call it that. Policy, after all, is the implementation of ideas according to a coherent plan; and I'm not sure that the word has applied to anything related to defence matters since the founding of the State. We have an Army which has attracted some of the most loyal, diligent and patriotic servants this country has produced; but that Army has not been armed, trained and deployed around recognisable military objectives as defined by its political masters. Instead it has been given guns and damp barracks and wretched pay and occasional missions, which seemed to be good ideas to governments of the time. One such mission was UNIFIL.
Unmilitary
Now if a UN Force had been deployed in Ireland after the 1916 Rising, it would still have been in situ when Britain handed back the Treaty Ports; and if it had been deployed along the white cliffs of Dover in response to the Battle of Britain, it would have been still kicking its heels there when the Cuban missile crisis occurred. In other words, the UNIFIL operation has gone on for a long time indeed, and it, and the many and largely unmilitary duties imposed by the obligation to aid the civil power at home, have gravely affected the culture and the habits of the Army.
There's no reason why Ireland should continue to send troops to UNIFIL, other than that it is a task with which it is extremely familiar. But familiarity with a duty, especially if so much of it is unmilitary, is a very good reason why soldiers should not constantly be doing it. It is not a fashionable thing to say, but soldiers are not social workers or rape crisis counsellors with guns: their first and their primary skill is the infliction of lethal violence to achieve some military end. Arms training uses humansized targets for a reason. Military skills violate a fundamental legal and personal taboo. Soldiers plan and prepare for the unthinkable: to take life and even to give it, preferably in the hope they have to do neither. No other profession is so highly trained to do a job, which if it is done properly, is not done at all. The best army is the one which succeeds by deterring; and it deters by threat of murderous violence. By that measure, the most successful armies in Europe are the Swiss and Swedish.
Twin concepts
That is why armies should not be representative of society at large, and why they should not reflect the feminist and egalitarian agenda which is now the dominant political force in western democracies. Armies not dedicated to the twin concepts of hierarchy and homicide may just as well go by the name of The Society of St Vincent de Paul and give out soup to the cold and hungry.
The desire to infuse the military with civilian priorities is not uniquely an Irish problem; UNIFIL is, for the fulfilment of the mandate comes at the expense of very many military skills. Peacekeepers deploy conspicuously; soldiers on active service deploy invisibly. Peacekeepers only respond to violence; soldiers in the field must be prepared to initiate it, unprovoked and murderously. Peacekeepers must relax and seem unaggressive; fighting soldiers may never relax, and do not give a damn about how they appear.
It is not impossible for an army to develop a culture to cope with differing challenges, if those challenges are realistically encountered in service. However, the enduring problem for the Army is to convince its soldiers that they could be the real target and to behave accordingly the whole time, when in both the Lebanon and at home, for more than a generation, have they almost never been. Military skills are like any other; unless they are practised as an integral part of one's life, they grow rusty. A trained pastry cook who only prepares vegetables for 22 years is unlikely to dazzle the world with his millefeuille when the normal desserts chef is eaten by marauding cannibals.
Questions
Enormously complex questions lie ahead for the Army, especially within the Partnership for Peace. The history of multinational military forces is a mixed one: lesser powers invariably harbour the suspicion that their troops get the dirtier jobs so as to spare the larger country the unpleasantness of casualties. Indeed, Australian national identity was forged on this belief following the ANZAC experience at Gallipoli, though British casualties in that fiasco were actually greater.
We should thrash these questions out now and be prepared for the ramifications rather than when a battalion of infantry is attached to a PfP deployment in the field under a British commander (that'll go down well with a certain TD for Cavan-Monaghan). Equally, we should be preparing the Army for the complex soldiering duties which lie ahead. That means extricating it from this ceaseless UNIFIL mandate. The first step towards that end is of course to make the excellent Judge Windle Minister for Defence.