h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

An independent review into four separate deaths among young soldiers at the Deepcut Barracks in Surrey has reported after 15 months.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3743131.stm

Deputy High Court Judge Nicholas Blake QC has criticised an aggressive and oppressive Army culture, upholding previous judgements that the deaths were suicide. Blake has also decided that there are no grounds for a public enquiry.

What do Researchers think? Speaking personally, I find it surprising that the Army doesn't want a public enquiry. Mistrust must be damaging recruitment and morale, and an open investigation looks the only way to restore public confidence.

I don't know the difference between all these different types of reviews and enquiries - would a public one be likely to have a different outcome?

When I heard the news today I was surprised, given what I'd read about the number of gunshot wounds some of the recruits had.

But I'm not a ballistics expert.

As I understand it, looking at the suicide deaths rates in army training, the rate is higher than the national average and even higher than the suicide rate in asylums for those with mental health problems (according to news programme today).
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Now first of all, army training must be tough, lets face it, we are training people to fight and kill people.
But there is a differnce between training hard to fight easy, from vigorous(sp?) training, realistic battle training, live firing, etc, to beating trainees up in toilets at night.
There is no need to go all touchy feely, riot control is still part of being a soldier, and this can still be done agressively with throwing flash bangs, bricks, etc at soldiers shields to make it realistic, if it is done to everyone and in the open as a part of training, then that is ok, behind doors beatings is where the problems start, whoever is doing beating.

The first victim, Sean Benton, had five bullet-wounds, and some reports add that four were inflicted from range. This is another thing that doesn't stack up for me - public-domain forensic accounts that deny the possibility of suicide must be misinterpretations in the view of the authorities, so why are they seemingly never denounced?

Whether a public enquiry would have a different outcome is open to speculation. What's surely true, though, is that without a public enquiry a lot of people will continue to harbour suspicion about the Army's guardianship of its young charges.

I wonder whether Deepcut is an aberration or a statistical hot-spot? The parents have stated that 1750 servicemen and women have died outside combat in 10 years, which sounds a lot for people in the prime of life and fitness, engaged in an activity with copious medical back-up. Suspicious deaths at other camps, eg Catterick, have been reported too, I remember.

I know one young person who's decided against a career in the Army, in spite of long family tradition. He said he was more put off by Deepcut than by Iraq.

There may well be something 'particular' about Deepcut in the type pf recruits who have joined up, or the type of training that they face.

However if Deepcut is just a 'normal' training camp, IMHO the statistics do not stand up. It MUST be more than coincidence that so many recruits have died, in circumstances still mysterious.

Whatever the reasons the Command structure there would seem to be distinctly lacking. "To lose one can be considered unfortunate etc etc"
That is presumably the reason for resisting a full public enuiry?

Novo

A few ideas, in no particular order of importance.

i) With the collapse of the soviet bloc, the British gov't (whether Tory or Labour) did what it always does in the absence of a perceived enemy: it started to make massive and damaging defence cuts under the guise of a "peace dividend".

ii) The tory gov't at the time saw this as an opportunity to extend its free market doctrine to the armed forces - the ideology that the private sector will9 always deliver a service more efficiently than a government agency. Since 1997, New "Labour" has done nothing to challenge this ideology and has indeed expanded on it - witness PFI's)

iii) Thus, long-established Army units such as the Pay Corps, Catering Corps, Army Legal Dept (lawyers in uniform, God help us) Army Vetinary Corps, et c, were either disbanded, on the grounds that the services they provided could be more efficently bought in from outside, or they were seriously reduced in size and brought together in one amorphous great abortion of a unit called the Royal Logistic Corps. Crucially, giving civilian police powers over military bases that were previously done in-house by the miltary police; (in order to make cuts in the miltary police establishment) - bad move!

iv) The new RLC - which brought together what had previously been fifteen or sixteen seperate Army entities under one banner - was based at Deepcut.

v) The drive at the time was defence cuts and savings, regardless as to whether the manner in which the saving was made was a good idea or not. When you consider a lot of this was driven by flawed Tory ideology about the private sector always doing better than government, it is possible to see where a lot of the current woes of the British armed forces originated. You CANNOT have an Army on the cheap, as first John Major and then Tony Blair seemed to beleive. The shortages of everything that affflict our army now.... well, it all began with the defence cuts of the 1990's.

vi) An aspect of this "cuts at all costs" mentality concerned early retirement for senior NCO's. These are the most experienced and possibly the most expensive soldiers in the Army: when the drive was on to reduce manpower cosrs, then of course the longest-serving soldiers with the highest accumulated pension rights and highest wages were the first to go as it looked better on paper!

vii) But with this exodus of sergeants and warrant officers, who is then left to supervise and train the next generation of soldiers? A failing of Deepcut remains the low ratio of supervisory NCO's to recruits: recruit soldiers are left with time on their hands to misbehave and brood, with next to no monitoring from training NCO's, which is a dnagerous thing!

viii) Deepcut trains recruits for the support arms, who are generally not of the same calibre as the infantry, tanks, artillery, combat engineers. The very best recruits go to front line formations. So do the very best NCO's and officers.

ix) Second echelon troops - as at Deepcut - are not the best human material the Army attracts.

x) Bases like Deepcut also attract second or third-rate officers and NCO's: sometimes known to be weak or flawed people who the army deliberately chooses to post to places where their incompetence "can cause least damage". Witness the sergeant, busted for homosexual rape, who somehow managed to cling onto a place in the military system at Deepcut.

xi) Even in today's Army, influence and hidden currents count for a lot.
I served in a long-established County regiment where it was estimated over half the Regular officers and virtually all the Territorial battalion's officers were Freemasons. If the establishment wanted to close ranks or protect one of its own - I'm sure it could. And even without Freemasonry, any Sergeants' Mess worth its name could run rings around the officers and protect its own - these are men with at least twenty years' experience each of the way the army runs, what strings to pull, what buttons to press. A Sergeants' Mess that has gone rotten - as the one at Deepcut seemed to have - won't be broken easily, not if it condones bullying and beasting as a legitimate part of Army life.

xii) And of course, a man who might have been a relatively junior officer twenty years ago - a Captain or a Major or a Lieutenant-Colonel - might today be a Brigadier or a Major-General with enough influence to hide or lose or conceal inconvenient evidence of their lack of leadership lower down the line, say when they had a lower-level command at a place like Deepcut... similarly, today's Regimental Sergeant-Major (khaki God) might twenty years ago have been a flaky Corporal with a bad rep for beating up recruits or coercing sexual favours from womwen soldiers.


This is depressing, I know, but I hope it gives a glimpse of the worst.

There was a very interesting report on Deepcut in Private Eye a few weeks back (one of their occasional forays into extended investigative journalism of the sort Paul Foot used to make). I don't have it any more and it's probably hard to find now, but it made for pretty startling reading.

Firstly, it endorsed pretty much everything AgProv's just said - the Major government expected Deepcut to continue doing the job it had been doing with well under 50 percent of the officers and NCOs it had had previously. A succession of senior officers in charge there protested vociferously down the years, to no avail.

Secondly - and even more worryingly - the idea that systematic bullying was connected with what happened seems to have been something of a smokescreen, put up in a panic when the police started to get involved. Of the recruits who were shot, only one seems to have been on the point of wanting to get out of the army. As far as the family and friends of the others were concerned, they were getting along just fine, right up until the point they were killed, by assailants unknown, in circumstances that no one in their right mind could really put down to 'suicide' (as this report pointed out, it's not impossible to use an army rifle to shoot yourself... but to do so twice or three times - not easy if you're already dead from the first shot).

Something of a mystery then (I'm sorry I don't have the details to hand now).

Hi, Tag Revision!

Going back to a point I raised about the Army making two fundamental mistakes at Deepcut

i) Leaving recruit soldiers with spare time on their hands is wrong. You just do not do it: the weaker ones, the ones who are prone to introspection and inward-looking, to give them time and space to brood and get depressed about why they joined the Army in the first place - you just do not do it! That's a recipe for attempted suicides straight away. As for recruits with more outgoing, dominant, personalities: give them unsupervised time on their own and there is a risk that you are going to foster the sort of conditions in which bullying happens.

ii) And with hardly any good NCO's to supervise, I can see a Deepcut remake of "Lord of the Flies" happening, so easily...

iii) And if semi-trained recruits are used to run perimeter patrols with loaded weapons, the possible results are horrendous. You'll either see things that aren't there and shoot at shadows, or you'll misread what IS there and shoot at another patrol coming the other way... even trained soldiers, even the elite (the Royal Marines in the Falklands)can do this and spray unexpected friendly troops with fire.

And that's without assuming any malice or deliberate intent - ie somebody wanting to sort out a barracks argument with live ammo and then claim it was suicide or accidental discharge afterwards...

And with a shortage of NCO's, or weak/negligent NCO's, what happens to the Army's accounting procedures for weapons and rounds, which I KNOW from experience could be falsified if two or more people collude?


the more I think about these scenarios, the worse it gets...