General Sir Michael Jackson, 1944-2024

According to Viktor Chernomyrdin, Russia’s special envoy to Serbia, the world has not been so close to the risk of a nuclear conflict since the cold war. It was June 1996. The scene was Pristina airport, right after the Kosovo war. A Russian army has just suddenly occupied the airport, showing solidarity with their traditional allies, the Serbs. Wes Clark, NATO’s supreme commander, feared that Moscow was about to fly in reinforcements, so he ordered General Sir Mike Jackson, commander of the alliance’s peacekeeping forces on the battlefield, to block the runway.

Jackson, who has died at the age of 80, had a different view. His grizzled face, closed eyes and steely voice testified to months of late-night diplomacy with Balkan warlords over drinks and cigars. But his chaotic dining room nickname “The Prince of Darkness” also masked a finely honed military mind.

“Sir, I will not start World War III for you,” Jackson told his superior officer. Clark repeated the order. Jackson replied in his characteristic, no-bullshit style: “Sir, I’m a three-star general, you can’t give me orders like this. I have my own judgment on the situation and I believe this order is beyond our mandate.” “Mike, I’m a four-star general, and I can tell you these things,” Clark countered.

In the end, the situation was defused – thanks to a stylish flask of whiskey that Jackson shared with his Russian counterpart. Clark soon thereafter left his NATO position. And the reputation of “Macho Jacko,” as the British tabloids dubbed him, was sealed with the Distinguished Service Order medal.

Michael David Jackson was one of Britain’s most senior generals in the post-World War II period. Born in Sheffield in 1944, 10 weeks before his father took part in the D-Day campaign, his first memory is of sailing on a troop ship with his mother to Libya to join his father after the war. in Tripoli. At Stamford boarding school in England, Jackson enjoyed making Airfix models and reading books. Eagle And Rampant comics, and became a boy scout and then a cadet. At the age of 17, he successfully applied to Sandhurst military academy and then took a degree in Russian studies at Birmingham University while serving in the Intelligence Corps before transferring to the Parachute Regiment in 1970. There was the beginning of a varied and illustrious military career. “I am a soldier. I have held every rank in the British Army from cadet officer to four-star general. . . “I am still a soldier at heart,” as he wrote in his candid 2006 memoir. Soldier.

Jackson served three tours in Northern Ireland: the first, as a junior aide during Bloody Sunday, when British troops killed 13 Catholics during a civil rights march in Londonderry in January 1972; during his last stint, in the early 1990s, as one of three UK brigadier generals there. He also worked at the Ministry of Defense in London. The first in 1982 meant he missed the Falklands War; the second time in 1992, as head of human resources, which meant he missed the first Gulf War. Jackson, with his characteristic sense of humor, liked to describe that seemingly dull role as being all about B: “bands, belts, berets, badges, buttons, banners, bars (medals) ), bar (alcohol), theft, bullying, tranquilizers, breasts, babies, jostling and strollers.”

Happier on the scene than civil servants, Jackson returned to military service in 1995 with his first tour of the Balkans. In 2000, on his return to Britain, he was promoted to general and in 2003, a month before the invasion of Iraq, he was appointed chief of the general staff, head of the British Army.

Ironically, given the controversy over British involvement in the Second Gulf War, one of Jackson’s stormiest moments as CGS came after a hugely unpopular military reorganization favored regiments, including some famous regiments, such as the Royal Scots. Jackson argued that was the right thing to do, arguing that if the British army never accepted the need for change they would “still wear red coats and fight in the squares”. Twice married, with three children – two of whom joined the armed forces – Jackson retired in 2006, just a month short of 45 years of service.

Unfortunately, Jackson never played an active role in a conventional war: all of his tours involved peace support operations. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, he also worried that the UK was deriving excessive peace benefits from military spending. But contrary to his reputation as a tough soldier, Jackson was not aggressive.

He always emphasized that war was a continuation of politics by other means – a Clausewitzian adage he first read as a teenager – and was adamant that some struggles, especially The “war on terror” can never be resolved by military means alone. He also criticized the US’s lack of post-war planning in Iraq, calling Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s assertion that the US was not “building the country” “intellectually bankrupt” and “nonsense”.

Rupert Smith, a famous former British general who worked with Jackson, described him as a natural commander who had “intelligence and broad vision, the ability to analyze the problem at hand, determine the nature of of it, and the action needed to address it, were very clear. . . Human and moral factors are always present in his thoughts.”