Author Archives: SJPONeill

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About SJPONeill

Retired(ish) and living on the side of a mountain. I love reading and writing, pottering around with DIY in the garden and the kitchen, watching movies and building models from plastic and paper...I have two awesome daughters, two awesome grand-daughters and two awesome big dogs...lots of awesomeness around me...

Doing the Business

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Neptunus Lex has a great link today to a story covering the work of pararescue crews in Afghanistan – take the time to read it and perhaps just reflect for a moment on the work that these people do…That Others May Live is their motto…one really does wonder what greater protection a Red Cross offers over a minigun when operating against an adversary that has made it crystal-clear that it does not and will not respect those laws and rules by which most of the rest of the planet lives…the journalist author has a Facebook page that I think will be worth following while he is in-theatre.

Also on Lex is an item entitled Overload on the growing mass of video data from UAV operations, currently at about 23 YEARS worth of continuous viewing and growing by the minute – the follow-on discussion on how to deal with this from an analysis point of view is worth thinking about. I, for one, am not a proponent of the belief that all analysis must be done by trained analysts especially those in a centralised reachback system because a. it takes too long and b. they are too removed from the situation on the ground. I once heard an experienced and well-thought-of operator get lambasted by the intel weenies at a conference when he said that all he wanted was to be able to review past and current imagery of a route himself before he conducted a patrol. Apparently HE didn’t understand what it was all about and why all imagery analysis had to be undertaken by specialists before the product got to him (in a few days).

Try him or just shoot him?

On Coming Anarchy, discussion rages over the fate of the Undie Bomber. Should he be treated by a criminal and tried according to due process, or simply squeezed dry of any information he may or may not have and discarded? From a domestic point of view, is there any difference between a criminal and a terrorist? The Brits would say no, and I guess that we would as well based on our experience with French terrorists in the mid-80s – eight years after 911, the US still doesn’t seem able to make up its mind.

On Influence

Still working on some comment re the Mackay/Tatham paper – my problem is not the paper per se but that I keep getting more and more information support the shift of emphasis from kinetics to Influence. I am able to say that I don’t think that Gian Gentile has ‘got it’ in his rebuttal to  Behavioural Conflict – From General to Strategic Corporal: Complexity, Adaptation and Influence when he says “War is about killing and destruction, it is not armed social science“. In fact, reading his comments yet again, I wonder if COL Gentile actually read the UK paper any further than the cover page? Perhaps it is fitting that he is currently teaching history at West Point because he seems somewhat stuck in the past, maybe has a nice little (sandbagged) cottage near the Fulda Gap, and appears blissfully unaware that the world has moved on from the kinetics of the Cold War – perhaps he lives in a far happy place than that which the rest of us are stuck with. The world we are in now requires decision-making and other responsibilities to be devolved far lower down the hierarchical food chain than every before in a further evolution of the strategic corporal and conversely an exponential increase in the level of detailed awareness at the other end of the chain, in the development of tactical general. The US Army’s own future capstone document (note to self – this still links to the draft – must chase down later to release version) identifies this as the key enabler for developing and maintaining credible and relevant land capabilities out to 2028.

To implement this fundamental shift, US TRADOC released the new version of FM 7-15 Army Universal Task List. It did so because there was a clearly identified need for change: not so much change in what armies do but a change in the emphasis of what they do. This change was reinforced in the new FM 7-0 Training for Full Spectrum Operations and the updating of the Soldier Manuals of Common Tasks (levels 1-5). I understand that the new version of FM 7-1 Battle Focussed Training is due out soon as well to further reinforce this doctrine.

The Last Commando

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Michael Asher‘s Death or Glory: The Last Commando hit the shelves here a couple of months before Christmas – I was tempted to grab a copy but, mindful of upcoming New Year’s resolutions and my current stash of unread books, I kept my card in my pocket. My eldest daughter did, however, buy it – this is Tasha, who left school early but now has a passion for history – so I got to read it over Christmas anyway.

I had high hopes for it based upon the author’s stated Para and SAS experience (although the blurb doesn’t actually say what he did in these units) and publishing history i.e. this book is not a first attempt, although it may be at a work of fiction. Tasha hadn’t finished it because she had trouble getting her head round the military jargon (this is the girl who ate up Blackhawk Down, Pearl Harbor and who is now starting to work through the Stephen Ambrose collection) but after the first couple of chapters I could see why. Not only only does this guy go into mindless detail on weapons and their effect e.g. a rifle can’t just be a rifle, it has to be endlessly referred to as a Gewehr 41, but he makes up his own words and thrashes them to death…Germans don’t just collapse, drop, or even ‘spin and fall’ when hit, they endlessly potatosack and gunnysack, whatever that is supposed to mean. The author’s clear knowledge and experience of the desert is not enough to overcome his over-enthusiasm for adjectives and adverbs (do we still teach what these are in schools?)

This is the third book I have reviewed recently that would benefit from the services of a good editor – Accidental Guerrilla was one and I don’t recall the other – it annoys me that a book like this was hyped so much when it was released instead of being concealed on the shelves with the Mills & Boone and other pulp fiction. The basic premise of the story is good and interesting but it is let down by verbose prose, poor (or no) editing and too much jargon…imagine if you will, Executioner-clone does Popski’s Private Army…

The stories of the Middle East Commando and the other fledging Special Operations forces operating around the same time like Stirling’s SAS, Popski, and the LRDG deserve to be told as fact and fiction but not like this…for me, Death or Glory‘s sole redeeming feature is in the last five pages where a minor plot line is resolved in a most satisfying way…

First Tui of the year

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A poll has found New Zealanders rate watching online porn as more morally acceptable than illegal downloads.

Downloading music and videos is considered less acceptable than watching online porn.
A UMR Research poll shows three times more New Zealanders think it is morally okay for a single person to view pornography on the Internet, than those who agree with downloading copyrighted videos.
Thirteen percent of those surveyed see downloading copyrighted video as acceptable, while 18 percent consider downloading copyrighted music acceptable. However many who believe illegal downloading is morally wrong still admitted doing so.
Although 69 percent think that it is acceptable for someone who is single to flirt with another Internet user, just six percent think it is fine for a married person to flirt without their spouse’s knowledge.
The survey shows up substantial gender differences, with more men than women accepting online porn.
It is based upon questions asked of 1,000 New Zealanders from November 20 to 26.

These 1000 New Zealanders must have been asked at the 2009 Music and Film Industry awards because the 4,348,851 (as at Tuesday, 12 Jan 2010 at 01:30:00 pm) are busy downloading everything that they can – and without too much knashing of teeth, conscience wresting or tearing of hair. I note that the ‘many who believe illegal downloading is morally wrong’ but who still do it, were unable to be quantified into a percentage…

Fortunately these aren’t stats upon which any great and momentous decisions are likely to be based…

Every time a coconut

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Last month, I mentioned Kirk’s fascination with The Dog Show – it was on again last night (yes, dogs up well past their bedtime) and the first time wasn’t just a fluke or coincidence…while they both turn their nose up at classics like The Dam Busters or B5, as you can see, this really grabs them….

Desperately Seeking Mayberry

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Mayberry is the utopian township in which the Andy Griffiths Show was set a long long time ago; you know, where Ron Howard was born (and where Gomer Pyle hails from as well…Gaaw-aawl-ly, Surprise, surprise, surprise!) …Neptunus Lex has a nostalgic item today entitled The Itch in which he talks about seeking the ideal home town with a

“…local hardware store that has the same breadth of inventory as Walmart, at the same low prices but who knows you by your name. With a coffee shop that serves the routinely excellent quality of a Starbucks or Peets, but which lacks all of that big city franchise homogeneity. A house with a porch that runs around the front and an acre (at least) of land, and friendly neighbors who know you well enough to stop by uninvited and yet be welcome for all of that. Where all of the kids are above average….“,

…someplace where…

“…it’s somehow all tied together, the airplane I’ll own and make my own, the little town I’ll fly it out of. With the airstrip by the river, the trout kissing the pool tops, the elk bugling, the bird dog slumbering by the fire, my girlfriend by my side. The kids all grown up and successful, leading happy, productive, satisfying lives. Nothing left to worry on...”

Wouldn’t we all, I hear you sigh…yes, absolutely but the most telling part of this item is the last couple of lines “…it’s cleansing, but ultimately meaningless, to try and escape. If we want to live in Mayberry, it’s useless trying to find it on a map. We have to create it…” And therein, folks, lies the lessons…like Sarah Connor always used to say before she made it big on the small screen “…we have no fate but what we make…” So whatever your ideal is out there, the first person you have to motivate to create it is yourself – as I type this, it strikes me that our adversaries in the War on Terror are currently singularly better at this than we are…

And speaking of our adversaries, Coming Anarchy has a interview with a guy called Christopher Hitchens – I’d never heard of him either but now that I have, I think he probably needs some serious adjustments to his medication. But anyway, I would like to comment just a little on one of the lines he spouts in this interview “… Islamophobia is vague and linguistically clumsy. A phobia is an irrational fear. My fear of Islamic terrorism is not irrational…” Islam ≠ terrorism just like Christianity ≠ crusadism and Rugby World Cup Year ≠ All Blacks Victory…enough said…

Part of the fallout from the Christmas Day Undies Bomber is yet another series of calls for better interoperability and information sharing between agencies…without hopping on my soapbox on this one again (not this morning anyway), maybe we need to be looking at some things that already exist and ramping some horsepower in behind them…I mean things like:

  • The Coalition Interoperability Warrior Demonstration aka CWID – it’s been running since the mid-90s previously as the Joint Interoperability Warrior Demonstration aka JWID but regardless of the clumsy names, the key word is INTEROPERABILITY – since 911, this DoD-led annual event has been focussing more and more upon information sharing and interoperability issues, not just between the services, or between major allies, but extending these links right down into the nitty-gritty of interaction with and between other government agencies and the myriad of first response agencies in the US, and by implication, for any that might be interested, in other participating nations. Every year, dozens of emerging and developing technologies are thrashed throughout the month of June in connected sites around the world. However, IMHO, one of the biggest payoff for CWID participants comes from the three major week-long planning activities that occur prior to each execution phase where operators, developers and geeks have their respective expectations and perceptions hauled over the coals towards a shared reality.
  • The ABCA Coalition Lessons Analysis Workshop aka CLAW, lead by the ABCA Program Office in the Pentagon, that every one or two years assembles an international team of lessons learned professionals and subject matter experts to review and analyse the raw Observations, Issues and Lessons (OIL – yes, it really is all about OIL!!) from the preceding 12-18 months of operations and training within the five member nations and distil these into findings and recommendations. Following an inaugural ABCA lessons conference in Ft Leavonworth in 2004, CLAWs have been conducted in 2005 (Salisbury, UK), 2006 (Kingston, Canada – what a beautiful location!!), 2007 (Hobart, Autsralia) and 2009 (Shrivenham, UK). The CLAW process is exportable and applicable to OILs from any source not just military activities…There is also a link between CWID and the CLAW: analysis to date finds that around 60% of the issues uncovered in the CLAWs are further investigated or resolved on CWID…

My point here is that, rather than angst about what’s not working, there are already some usable processes and forums and systems that can at least be talked about and looked at as potential stepping stones towards long term systemic solutions (why is it that only problems are systemic?)…Like Neptunus Lex said, “…we have to create it…“

The View From My Window

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Saw this idea pop up on Travels with Shiloh and wondered ‘who the hell is Sully?‘ After a bit of Bing-ing, I found Davos Newbies, and from there got to the source at The Daily Dish. I thought it was quite a cool idea and so here’s my view…above is as it is now and below is as it will be once the current study gets converted back to a bedroom and I get relocated to the shady (how appropriate!) side of the house.

Be interesting to see how many others pick up on this idea in the next few days…

Those who don’t think like us, can leave anytime

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1930s Germany or 21C Britain?

Wootton Bassett is a small town near RAF Lyneham through which the bodies of soldiers killed overseas are driven on their way to the morgue at Oxford. It is now becoming a centre for ‘grief tourism’ in the UK but not only for loyal and partiotic Brits. An organisation called Islam4UK now plans to march through Wootton Bassett apparently to protest UK involvement in wars against Islam. If you are on Facebook, you can see the furore as it unravels – if you thought that the only nutjobs were on the Islamic side of the fence – think again…

There are a bunch of issues arising from this proposed march and the reaction to it. First and foremost, the outpouring of anti-immigrant emotion from opponents to the march can only serve to further any extremist cause as ‘a clear indication of the racist nature of white Britons’ – that’s how it will be portrayed anyway when 700,000 people join what can be easily portrayed as an anti-Islamic FB page. I think that if I was Facebook, I would just kill the whole page and be done with it. So far as the march is concerned, perhaps UK authorities SHOULD let it proceed: very possibly no one will turn up anyway and it will be a non-event; if rowdies on either side do turn up they should be treated equally by the law just as are hooligans from opposing footy teams – because that’s all they are…

On the moral outrage front, Neptunus Lex has an article on Iran’s response to the killing of Neda Soltan. It’s disgusting but a great example of taking the truth i.e. what really happened, and totally twisting it to suit your own purposes. Once again, we choose to take a back foot in the information battle…

Can you hear the bagpipes?

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piper bill millinThe relief column! It’s here at last…!!!

Royal Navy Commander Steve Tatham is the author of Strategic Communication: A Primer that I found in the Staff Collge library when I was in Shrivenham in October last year. At the time I commented that it was “…quite positively the best reference I have found for IO, Influence and Perception Shaping…it should be compulsory reading for anyone in the PR, IO or COIN games…” Well, the good Commander has just released another work which is even more required reading than Strategic Communications…Through the power of Facebook (don’t knock it!), Small Wars Journal advertised the release of Behavioural Conflict – From General to Strategic Corporal: Complexity, Adaptation and Influence The link goes directly to the College library site but, curiously, Small Wars Journal has yet to load the paper onto its main site – this is quite surprising as SWJ is normally very proactive in getting papers like this into circulation. It is interesting that there are currently two significant papers in circulation that have been produced by Major-Generals (the other being MG Flynn’s Fixing Intel) but of the two, I believe that this new paper by Steve Tatham and Major-General Andrew Mackay (the ‘other’ MG) is far more important and far-reaching in its implications – let’s be honest about it: the int world has been FUBARed since some Neanderthal first lined his tribesmen up and called them an army – his wife said he had to give his gammy-legged, drooling brother-in-law a job and that’s how the S2 came into being (nice to have on the orbat but no great loss if someone puts a rock through his head).

My opening lines re the relief column reflect a feeling that finally someone else has stated unequivocally that we need to take this Influence stuff seriously and not keep it as an afterthought on the opord after all the cool blowing stuff up and mandatory ‘hearts and minds’ buzzwords have been massaged to death.

More than that, we MUST change the fundamental mass-focussed industrial age emphasis of our training and start to empower individuals from Day 1 of getting of the bus at initial training institutions – I say training institutions because this is way broader than just the military: this approach must be implemented across government, and, eventually, maybe even into the general education system.

The big problem though is not changing the training – that is simple – but changing the mindsets of of more senior embedded generations to both truly embrace (lip service not accepted here) AND keep up with the shift from a focus on mass to focus on individuals (sounds like that Scheiern guy again…). When this shift reaches its tipping point, the natural flow-on effect will be seen in other functional areas like the much bagged intel sector…

That this paper has come from the UK is gratifying as well – it shows beyond a shadow of doubt that all is not lost in the land of Empire and the paper is open and honest in flagging the issues to be overcome for Influence to be truly implemented in the UK. If for no other reason, professionals should read this paper as a heads-up on the institutional problems that are endemic, not just in UK MOD, but across Western militaries…

I will do some more work on this topic later but it is Saturday today and Carmen comes home for the weekend tonight – so it’s off to tidy the house and grounds so it looks nice for her when she gets in…

 

Manage is a good word

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This is a picture of happier slower days.

Those happier slower days have gone now and we need to adjust to a new environment, one in which we must manage more information at far higher levels of resolution than ever before. I use the word ‘manage‘ deliberately – it has had a bit of a thrashing over the last decade or so, especially in the military, where management is a term reserved for stuff that people out of uniform do e.g. ‘…they’re just a manager…‘ Well, girls and boys, if you can’t manage, then it is unlikely that you will ever be much chop at command or operations. Here’s what one source thinks ‘manage’ is:

In 2005, the USMC’s Michael Scheiern posited a shift from platform-based tracking to individual-based tracking and was pretty positive that, in terms of the complex contemporary operating environment, tracking at the individual level was realistically achievable. But, here we are in 2010 already, with knashing and wailing over yet another failure of intelligence. The problem, as I see it, is that we simply don’t want to change: despite the thousands of lives and billions of $$ expended in this war, too many people are still too wedded to the nice safe days of the Fulda Gap and nowhere is this more apparent than in military information  management (which, by the way, is NOT the realm of the 6 community any more than it is that of the 2 weenies).

Over on the CAC COIN Blog (which I have been somewhat remiss in not visiting more often), there is an article entitled I Know Something You Don’t Know: Intelligence and COIN which touches on this topic, inspired by the 25 December Undies Bomber. Not only should we ensure “…every civil servant/diplomat/aid worker a collector…” in addition to “…every soldier a collector…”, we should be extending this to ‘every one an analyst‘ as well. This means that everyone out in their respective field must be sufficiently  trained and aware of their environment to act, when needs be, upon that information that, so far, we only want them to collect. And, by the way, “…every soldier a collector…” is not a theory as stated on the CAC blog – it is doctrine and as such should, indeed must, be part of the training regime.

One of the reasons that we are still not getting into this (after EIGHT years of war!!) might be those alluded to here on Coming Anarchy, or more specifically, this Wikipedia page referenced in the CA article. I’d never heard of Baconian method (not that that means much) – I have heard of bacon jam though – but it identifies four obstacles (idols) in considering a problem:

  • Idols of the Tribe (Idola Tribus): This is humans’ tendency to perceive more order and regularity in systems than truly exists, and is due to people following their preconceived ideas about things.
  • Idols of the Cave (Idola Specus): This is due to individuals’ personal weaknesses in reasoning due to particular personalities, likes and dislikes.
  • Idols of the Marketplace (Idola Fori): This is due to confusions in the use of language and taking some words in science to have a different meaning than their common usage.
  • Idols of the Theatre: This is the following of academic dogma and not asking questions about the world.

Sound familiar? Seen any of these in YOUR work place? Perhaps even subscribed to one or two yourselves…?

This is the problem – we talk up the need for learning organisations, lessons learned, better information and intelligence but here we are – having just bumbled through someone trying to blow up a plane with his undies…

But as much as the intelligence world may be long overdue for a shake-up, we also need to have a good hard look at the rest of the organisation and ask ourselves just why it is that we have to rely on the ‘2’s (sounds a bit like Battlestar Galactica: the 2s versus the 6s….) for analysis instead of applying some common dog common sense ourselves…uh-oh it’s that old Information Militia thing again. The intel weenies and command geeks together need to get out on the streets and see what police officers do and how they do it in thinking things through on the spot…what was it we found in the COIN Review? Oh, yeah…intelligence in the COE may be closer to CRIMINT than that required for conventional high-intensity operations e.g. the Fulda Gap…

Interbella asked the question: What’s in the price of bread? Changing how we look at intelligence may help with the answer…

Fixing Intel

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Yep, you better believe it’s broken alright…

Neptunus Lex has comment on the recent paper by Major General Michael T. Flynn, the Deputy Chief of Staff, Intelligence (CJ2), for ISAF since June 2009, entitled Fixing Intel: A Blueprint for Making Intelligence Relevant in Afghanistan. My comments on Lex are below:

“…A good grasp of the specific operating environment is a requirement for anyone in or supporting the theatre, not just the intel crews…Iraq is not Afghanistan is not East Timor is not Sierra Leone – it’s way more complex than the good old days of the Cold War and the Fulda Gap (those who remain enamoured of small maps, big arrows, and linear plans being known as Gapists) and I just wonder if intel training and doctrine has actually caught up? The reason I ask, is that this is not the first time this particular gripe has come up, and I also wonder if we are making sure that we have the right people filling the intel slots i.e. intel is not being used as a drop off area for those who have issues elsewhere? This whole thing of cultural awareness is not new and it should be as embedded in mission prep training as tactics and blowing stuff up…

I went home for Christmas and my Mum had boxed up a bunch of my old books to take home with us. I was sorting through them with my brother-in-law and he pulled out what I had always thought (for decades) was just an old social studies text book on Libya and Tunisia – until he had a look at the inside cover and found that it had been produced by 2 NZEF before they helped kick Rommel out of North Africa. Apparently the production and distribution of such publications within the div was SOP back then – EVEN IN A CONVENTIONAL CONFLICT…so have we lost something along the way in the succeeding 65 years…? I know that both the US Army and Marines have produced theatre-specific cultural awareness publications for Iraq and Afghanistan but it seems from Flynn paper the general awareness of the theatre still isn’t there.

When we reviewed COIN doctrine a couple of years back, one of the insights that leapt out of the findings was that the COE required fusion of far more disparate information from a far broader and disparate range of sources than ever contemplated for conventional high intensity conflict e.g. the Fulda Gap. Unfortunately, under the current structures, the responsibility (and blame) still comes down upon the 2 community for information planning, fusion, interpretation and dissemination and maybe this is what we have to change…? Maybe we all need to get into the 2 game a little more…?…”

I’m not sure if it is gratifying or simply sad that this war has been going on for over eight years and this penny is only dropping now…Part of the issue is trust – we like the old hierarchical information systems because they are safe and comfortable and each level add another layer of security but they are also too slow and unresponsive for what we face today. We talk and talk and talk about empowering commanders at the lowest levels to make decisions and get on with the job but then we repeatedly scrimp on the training necessary to develop these skills.

Another issue is ownership – some people don’t like sharing, because knowledge is power and/or because if decisions based on their information go wrong, it might be their fault – is that how that nutcase got to be on a Delta flight on Christmas Day? Well, welcome to the big time…this is it…this is war whether we like it or not and the time for playing silly office games is over.

The last issue for this morning’s rant is accepting that times change and that we need to change with them – if not change may happen around or over us…yes it is possible that Putin might run amok and send Third Shock Army streaming across the German Plains towards the Fulda Gap – in which case the Gapists should have just enough time to scream “told you so!” before the juggernaut rolls over them – but that’s probably not very likely…more likely is that the current mess operating environment will remain much the same for the next decade or so at least and THAT is what we need to be configuring ourselves for now: getting to grips with the realities of dealing with complexity and uncertainty because they are here to stay…