On 12 June 2010, in an interview on BBC Radio 4's "Today" programme, he described the planning for the UK's 2006 deployment of 3,300 troops to Helmand Province in Afghanistan as flawed, relying too much on lessons from Borneo, Malaya and Northern Ireland. The subsequent BBC News article quotes him as saying that senior commanders had obdurately resisted "ditching the lessons from the past", preferring these to the "radical and progressive ideas" which were needed.