Stop your whingeing, lads

The first thing armies do when they go to war is moan - and British soldiers over the centuries, as we are reminded today, have turned moaning into an art form. Twelve years ago in the Gulf the black humour was all based on Blackadder, and if there was a patron saint of cheerful moaning then it was that cheery misery guts Baldrick.

So how seriously should we take the complaints? Certainly at face value the claims are pretty alarming: that our troops lack proper food, clothing, goggles and other equipment for confronting a chemical attack. These are serious charges, and ones not to be treated lightly. But the general context of the soldier's lot - and his willingness to air his feelings, has to be understood.

First of all the weather has been "gibbering", the catch-all term for wet, windy, full of sand storms and unseasonably cold. All the tents blew down in a freak storm shortly after the first troops arrived in Kuwait. As last time round, there has been ice and strange pieces of grass springing up in the desert. Besides, the food has been "gopping" - mucky, cold and nothing like the best the Americans are getting - or at least so you would believe from some of the messages now being picked up by anxious families. Queues for food in the tented barracks have been nearly half a mile long.

Army food, like school food, tends to be a problem. In the first wave it is always a struggle to get field kitchens up and running. Regularly the British Army loves to show off "the bakery that last saw service at Alamein" - - banks of gasfired ovens and rings enough to fry a troop of boy scouts. But, unless my age and harsh upbringing are getting the better of me, on the whole the standard of cooking and food on operations has been high.

It is said that British soldiers prefer the MREs (Meals Ready to Eat) that the Americans carry when out in the field (as opposed to back at base). Frankly this strains credulity. Unless they have improved miraculously in the past two years, the British field ration pack with its eight variant main menus is infinitely superior.

It is true that many of the rations nowadays are "boil in a bag" and need a fair amount of ingenuity and customisation, but there's no harm in learning to make do. Experienced soldiers often carry their own embellishments, from Marmite to 57 varieties of pickle. In the Falklands, a Royal Marine colone l regarded one of the key implements of his trade as the large bottle of tabasco he took to spice up Arctic rations.

The technological age has brought its own brand of complaints. Today Kuwait is one of the best places in the world for mobile phone coverage, so younger soldiers have found little difficulty openly complaining of homesickness as the biggest drawback to joining the colours.

Predictably there have been corresponding instant rebuttals from the Government's information machine. Under the iron command of Alastair Campbell, HMG has responded by issuing blankets - blankets as in blanket denials. E-mails have been sent to all defence correspondents from the MoD's chief press officer in the Gulf saying that our lads and lasses in the desert are as happy, obviously, as sand boys and girls. The shortage of lavatory paper was merely " temporary". (In fact many of the soldiers rifled the loos in the base camps for any spare rolls to stuff in their packs for use when they are deployed in further forward and ablutions become difficult, uncomfortable and extremely exposed.) And, for good measure, the Ministry of Defence has ordered all mobile phones to be handed in.

But that isn't to say there aren't a good many legitimate grumbles as well, particularly over the quality of the equipment. It is indeed shocking that there has been a shortfall in the arrival of chemical suits and masks. The only consolation, if it can be seen as such, is that in wars equipment often arrives late. The important thing is that it not arrive too late, and thankfully hostilities have not yet begun. For the moment, though, the troops are vulnerable, almost as vulnerable to chemical attack as Saddam's own troops were throughout the last Gulf War.

Last time round some of the scout cars and personnel carriers were twice or even three times the age of their drivers. The biggest difficulty is over the standard infantry rifle, the SA80, which has continuously suffered a bad press and consequently shaken morale. The problem is that despite a major refit it simply is not "soldier proof " - particularly in the extreme conditions of the desert. This is far from being the only hardware problem.

The other serious weakness is the problem of communications, which appears to be worrying the Americans as much as the British in the desert. Many of the troops are having to use the Clansman radio, which saw service in the Falklands and was less than reliable in the desert in

1991. The problem is that communications are not secure in many cases, at least not to American standards, and there are fears that they can be overheard.

But let's not exaggerate. War, particularly the British way of war, is always fraught with spectacular cock-ups and glitches. There is always something like the shipload of left boots sent to Raglan's army in the Crimea. The ships were loaded with the wrong things in the wrong order for the Falklands, and took weeks of reloading at Ascension to sort out. But sorted out it was, and it did nothing to mar the outcome. Clearly we are not prepared for war - yet - and that must be rectified. This sort of lastminute chaos, along with the ritual whingeing, is, as the old saying used to have it, what being in the Army's all about.