HOW SHOULD A general and the head of the British Army be judged by his peers? By his exploits on the battlefield as he climbed the promotional ladder, or by his adroitness and skills as a Whitehall warrior, serving the interests of his soldiers in the stifling bureaucracy of the Ministry of Defence?

General Sir Mike Jackson was never happier than when he was in command of thousands of troops, making tactical and strategic decisions upon which the lives of his men depended. He was a tough commander who was ready to stand up to his superiors when he believed that they were giving him wrong advice or questionable orders – notably in the Kosovo campaign in 1999 when he had bitter arguments with General Wesley Clark, his American military boss, whom he believed had gone “barking”.

However, in Whitehall, Jackson was not a happy man. He never warmed to the Civil Service/military rivalries unique to the MoD, and hated the bureaucrats’ obsession with “process”. His view was that if a job needed to be done, it should be done. But “process” always got in the way, and his frustrations often spilled out, although not in public.

Unlike his successor as Chief of the General Staff, General Sir Richard Dannatt, who has caused minor earthquakes inside the MoD, Jackson largely kept his criticisms private until his retirement, and now his autobiography.

Not all his predecessors have written their memoirs, which makes his recollections insightful and valuable. He does not hide his contempt for Whitehall. “I did not find the MoD a comfortable place to be,” he writes. “Its values were not mine.” Jackson loved the life of a soldier, although he missed out in the Falklands in 1982 – when he had a defence intelligence appointment back at home – and the Gulf in 1991, when he was a brigade commander in Northern Ireland. But his time in Northern Ireland and Bosnia and as commander of the Nato force in Kosovo provided him with an insight into the way that insurgencies should be tackled, a subtle combination of military aggression and winning hearts and minds.

In his account of his career, spanning nearly 45 years, he has exposed the weaknesses and failures that led to the challenges facing troops in Iraq and Afghanistan today. Why were lessons not learnt from the Balkan campaigns, he asks. He complained to his fellow service chiefs about the lack of planning for the postconflict phase of the Iraq war and was bewildered when the Americans in charge in Baghdad disbanded the Iraqi Army and sacked any Iraqi official who had joined the hated Baathist Party of Saddam Hussein.

Jackson, of course, is joining a long line of critics who have bewailed the short-sightedness of America’s strategy in Iraq. But his harsh comments will not go down well in Washington, coming as they do from one of Britain’s best-known military commanders, albeit 12 months into his retirement.

On Iraq, he writes: “There is some substance in the Iraqi complaint that the Americans could put a man on the Moon but they couldn’t fix the Iraqi power supply.” However, Jackson was in charge when many of the British troops sent to fight Saddam in 2003 complained about the lack of proper desert boots, and insufficient stocks of personal body armour, nuclear, chemical and biological protection kits . . . and toilet rolls.

Strangely, Jackson skims over his time as a battalion commander of 1st Battalion the Parachute Regiment – surely, the finest period of an officer’s career – but devotes much of his service recollection to his command of Nato’s Kosovo Force (Kfor), when he led 45,000 troops into the former Yugoslav province to implement the peace deal under which the Serbs agreed to stop ethnically cleansing the majority Albanians and withdraw to Serbia.

It was Jackson’s finest hour. Comforted by tumblers of whisky at the end of each long day, he won the hearts of the locals and, single-handedly, defused a potential confrontation with the Russians after they preempted Jackson’s military plan by sending troops to seize Kosovo’s Pristina airport.

General Clark was all for sending in tanks to block the runway to prevent the Russians reinforcing their unit at the airport, but Jackson refused the order, cautioning his superior: “I’m not going to start World War Three for you.” Instead, he flew by helicopter to Pristina airport, and, in his reasonably fluent Russian, made friends with the incumbent Russian general and offered him a shot of whisky from his hip flask. This was Jackson at his best.

SOLDIER: The Autobiography by General Sir Mike Jackson

Bantam, £18.99; 416pp

Buy the book for £17.09 (free p&p)

General Sir Mike Jackson appears at The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival on October 9 at 2pm. Call 01242 227979 www.cheltenhamfestivals.com

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