Jason Smith inquest: what are the verdict's implications for the military?

Poor preparation for heat, inadequate equipment and failure to grasp implications of duty of care are inquest’s main conclusions

“It was extremely hot, we were extremely busy, too busy, and we didn’t have enough resources – be that manpower, be that equipment – to do what we were asked to do.”

This evidence to the inquest, from Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Cattermull, Jason Smith’s commanding officer in Iraq, summed up the intense frustration, and on occasion real anger, among British soldiers of all ranks at the failure to prepare them properly for the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

That failure is likely to be a dominant theme in the report of the Chilcot inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the invasion which is expected finally to be published by the end of the year. So sensitive is the Ministry of Defence (MoD) still about the whole subject that reports it commissioned from senior officers into “lessons learned” from Iraq remain suppressed.

“We had asked for more manpower but we had a mission to do and we were going to do it the best we knew with the resources available,” Cattermull, a major at the time, told the Smith inquest. He added: “My best resource available, as ever, were my soldiers, who never let me down.”

One officer referred to a stadium where his soldiers were encamped in south-east Iraq, about seven miles (12km) away from Camp Abu Naji in Al-Amarah, as “an unbearable, hot, dusty, hellhole”. He said his men were forced to drink water mixed with sugar and salt in front of officers to halt dehydration after numerous heat injuries.

Air-conditioning equipment arrived at the stadium two days after Smith died. “It was hard, very hard indeed. Things were not right,” said Cattermull

The lack of preparation for Iraq is a recurring theme in inquests but also in evidence given by British soldiers to the Al-Sweady inquiry into allegations – hotly denied by the MoD and the troops concerned – that they murdered and abused Iraqis after a fierce gunfight near Camp Abu Naji in May 2004. Witness after witness have said how they received little or no training or advice about what they could expect in Iraq.

As equipment, including lightly armoured Snatch Land Rovers designed for Northern Ireland, proved vulnerable to mines and improvised explosive devices (IEDs), defence ministers promised to order more robust vehicles. But bureaucracy and institutional reluctance to spend money meant they took a very long coming.

Other inquests showed that the MoD – or ministers – had not learned these lessons by the time that thousands of British troops were sent to Helmand province in southern Afghanistan in 2006.

And MoD lawyers were extremely slow to recognise the legal obligations to protect soldiers notably, but not only, under the Human Rights Act. The supreme court ruled earlier this year that relatives could sue for negligence and claim damages from the MoD on the grounds that soldiers were not properly protected under the ministry’s duty of …read more