Major General Chip Chapman slammed the wayward prince, who renounced his royal duties in 2020, as “naive”, “stupid” and “disloyal” for the claims he made in his forthcoming memoir 'Spare.'
“We have a code of conduct. It's the values and standards of the military and he's broken at least four of those values that include respect for others, integrity, loyalty, and selfless commitment,” Chapman said.
"You can't be any more disloyal, either both to the Crown and the Crown being a member of your family," the general added. "It's crassly and naively stupid from Harry, his publishers and his ghost writer."
Chapman said Harry’s boast that he killed 25 Taliban* guerillas while serving as a gunner on an Apache attack helicopter in Afghanistan betrayed a US-style "body count mentality" that he had “never, never” encountered in the British armed forces.
"You would have found it in Vietnam, it was the macro level thing. But it's an awful lack of judgement and maturity. It's a naive approach to how the military should act,” Chapman said.
"Also he was not on the ground,” he pointed out. “There's no way that he could ID anyone or bury them so to give a specific number is, quite frankly, slightly ridiculous."
Chapman is a Paratroop Regiment veteran of the Falklands War and Northern Ireland, as well as a former head of counter-terrorism operations for the Ministry of Defence and a senior British military advisor to the US Central Command in the Middle East.
Harry has already come under fire for the self-pitying claims in his book and previous Netlix documentary — while complaining that he and his US actress wife Meghan Markle were hounded by the media.
He has alleged that his older brother Prince William, now the Prince of Wales, knocked him over during an argument in the kitchen and that William and his wife Kate Middleton were responsible for him dressing as Hitler for a fancy-dress party.
"For him, who wants privacy and security, he's just opened himself up to every jihadist and nutcase out there," Chapman observed.
Colonel Richard Kemp, who served in Afghanistan, echoed the general’s warning that Harry had made himself a target.
"In terms of the numbers he’s talking about… He himself is already under threat for his own secret and by resurrecting it in quite such stark terms now undermines his own security." Kemp said.
"That sort of figure that doesn’t need to be given. It will remind people that 10 years ago there was this very high-profile man killing people that they might have sympathy for in Afghanistan and might well be provoked to attempt revenge."
* Organization is under UN sanctions for terrorist activities