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...

A long day…

Posted on 9 November 2009 by SJPONeill

…and probably one thing I won’t miss…a quick day trip dash to Wellington for the Lessons Steering Group today. The LSG went very well, showing the continuous improvement in discussion and results since we kicked them off again in September last year. It’s great to get the international participation that we’ve had at all the LSGs this year and this adds a while extra layer of richness to the discussion…it would be nice, one day, to get the Canadians and Brits along as well, just to get the set…Certainly now it seems we have the buy-in and consensus from around the table for the 2010 Action Plan and can now really hook into the detail of actioning that plan…but, as above, from here to Wellington and back in a day, + LSG engagement and LMS discussion in between and , makes for a long day so it’s off to nigh-nighs now…

A Day at Udvar-Hazy

Posted on 8 November 2009 by SJPONeill

Early in 2007, I had to layover in DC between Coalition Warrior Interoperability Demonstration (CWID) planning in Norfolk and a quick visit to the Marine Corps Lessons Learned Centre (MCCLL) in Quantico. Two of us drove up from Norfolk on the Saturday, losing a good chunk of the day in the Potomac Mills shopping complex. We both had separate to-do lists for the Sunday but Udvar-Hazy was at the top of both which sorted that decision.

The facility is out of DC near Dulles Airport but easy enough to find, with or without onboard GPS. There’s a quite reasonable flat-rate for parking which also includes the entry fee for the museum itself – whatever they charge, it is well worth it! The pictures in this album will give you a fair idea of what they have there – there would be more images but I filled the card in the camera and even though the shop in the museum sells wet film, it doesn’t sell spare memory cards. Two and half years later, I had the same problem at Duxford and Cosford – you would think that will digital cameras being the norm now, spare cards would be easy to get at such locations?

I left Udvar-Hazy a very happy plane spotter. Of all the very cool displays they have there my deepest impressions were:

The first Shuttle ‘Enterprise’, a name influenced more by the TV series than the aircraft carriers. Enterprise fills the entranceway to the second display hall.

ShuttleEnterprise-Udvar-HazyAirandS

The world’s first jet bomber, the Arado 234…I’d always thought it would ooze power but it is actually quite a petite and delicate looking aircraft, even though it could go like the clappers and its best defence was doing just that!! I remembering being some impressed with Dynamix when they included the 234 in Aces Over Europe in 1994.

AradoAr-234-Udvar-HazyAirandSpac-1

The aircraft that DID exude pure power and sheer grunt was the Dornier Do-335 Arrow: big and chunky, with two massive piston-engines; but probably a couple of years too late to really make any difference…even in the same hall as the SR-71 Blackbird, A-6 Intruder, and F-4 Phantom, the Arrow still holds its own as a grunter…

Udvar-HazyAirandSpaceMuseum019

As before, when I get time (and a decent high-speed connection!!) I’ll go through and add captions etc…

[Edit: fixed links to images…]

Visiting Museums

Posted on 4 November 2009 by SJPONeill

It’s taken me a while but I have now uploaded all my museums pics from my UK trip into Photobucket – too ages to get them all done: not sure whether the problem was Photobucket or just a dodgy broadband connection.

Defence Capability Centre in Shrivenham – I’m not sure what they actually do here but it is the coolest place to work: just chockful of tanks, big guns and other cool kit.

Imperial War Museum at Duxford. My first impression of the museum at Duxford was ‘oh, is that it?‘ before I realised that I had only completed one of six hangars. But even then I was in aviation geek heaven, having been up close and personal with a Vulcan, Victor and TSR.2. If you visit Duxford, it is easy to get to via the motorway system but give yourself a full day to look at everything. I can recommend the sausages, beans and chips as well…

RAF Museum at Cosford. If I had thought that Duxford was aviation geek heaven, Cosford just blew me away!! The very first plane I saw inside was the mighty HP 188 – almost even cooler than the TSR.2 if it had warpaint instead of its natural metal finish…and another Vulcan, another Victor, a Valiant too plus another TSR.2 – the displays at Cosford let you get even closer to the aircraft than at Duxford, so it’s a great place to go for details shots for any projects at home…

If I get time I will try to go back and add captions to some of the more obscure images. To follow is still Udvar-Hazy and the Pima Air Museum….

I’m out of town for a couple of nights and this is my first attempt at a remote scheduled blog post…hope it goes well…

Images of Owhango

Posted on 3 November 2009 by SJPONeill

This is Owhango, a small town near the Central Plateau of New Zealand’s North Island. This is the main road, State Highway 4.

Owhango Market Day 006

Owhango has been a bit sad in the last month since the pub closed. A typical story these days: out of town owner, purchased it with a mega-mortgage and charged mega-rent to cover the mega-mortgage; the business couldn’t sustain the mega-rent and so now there’s half a dozen or so less jobs in Owhango, no pub and no fish’n’chips…the next closest pub is National Park one way or Taumarunui the other but there’s no taxis or Dial-a-driver…welcome to the country…

Owhango Market Day 008

This is State Highway 4, looking the other way towards Taumarunui. It’s a busy day – market day…

Owhango Market Day 007

We popped down for a look, even though we aren’t really locals yet: we’ve only been here for five years. I thought I might get some ‘what’s around the area’ pics for the Chalet website I’m building as my experiment in marketing this summer to supplement its site on Bookabach…and you never know what might turn up at the market…

Owhango Market Day 005

Normally you can drive through Owhango and see no one but on the first Sunday of each month, it’s market day…

Owhango Market Day 003

…and the population explodes…

Owhango Market Day 002

…I can never resist a sausage sizzle but managed to stay away from the fresh cheese and wild venison salami tasting…I really liked the slat hammock in the background and think I will invest in one next month (the same stall also had children’s rope ladders but Carmen wouldn’t let me get a couple for the twins – I guess they’ll have to stick with ripping up their sheets to getaway for now)

Owhango Market Day 001

…it could be typical small town anywhere…

Owhango Market Day 004

After a good hour or so browsing, we had a coffee in the sun at Out of the Fog – it is a damn shame that it is only open on weekends now – again, welcome to life in the country…

It struck me as we sat in the sun and chattered with the locals how much small towns are alike anywhere and how intrusive WE would consider an occupying force that did not speak our language, did not understand our culture and thundered through town at speed in its armoured vehicles…even if the local police officer had stopped for a sausage, some conversations would have slowed, some people might have slipped back into the shadows…how incongruous and invasive we would consider it to have soldiers in their reflective shades, bulky body armour and guns at OUR market…would we talk with them or look away til they left. Would WE be more receptive to someone who lived amongst us, understood who WE are and how WE think, who know what WE value and hold dear…? You’re a smart guy, MAJ Jim Gant…

Microcosms

Posted on 1 November 2009 by SJPONeill

Chalet in Springtime 002

This was the Chalet on Thursday morning, not much short of idyllic, blue skies, birds singing…what more could you want. On Friday morning, the Chalet was much the same, albeit slightly overcast. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Mountain, it was:

Waiouru in Springtime

This got me thinking about micros…cosms, ecosystems, stuff…it’s about 70km from home to Waiouru. In that distance it’s not unusual to experience three, maybe even four, distinct microclimates ranging from blue skies through rain and sleet to a foot of snow on the ground – I almost drove Little Red on Friday, without the hard top – which, as it turned out, would have been interesting with the broken zip on the back window of the soft top…

Once upon a time, we knew when it was Winter, Spring, Summer and Autumn – it was all quite logical and simple – you couldn’t set your watch by the seasons but not far off it – nowadays…who knows? How many of us had to repopulate our vege gardens these year after a false spring disappeared in a flurry of hail and snow not so long ago? What sort of mitigating mechanisms do we develop to get around this growing uncertainty?

My point in this is that we should be getting used to complexity and uncertainty whether it’s the weather, ACC levies, mortgage rates, etc, etc; if we go back far enough (and it probably won’t be that long a trip) in talking with our parents and grandparents, we’ll probably find that this is nothing new – complexity and uncertainty are more likely constants than new phenomena. Could it be that until we got back into actual warfighting (“You’re not in peace support anymore, Dr Ropata!!”again on a large scale, the decades of the Cold War since Vietnam had lulled us all into a nice safe Fulda Gap sense of complacency?

If that is the case, surely the draft Capstone Concept for the US Army needs to be leading far further forward than where we are today? I’m still so disappointed in the draft – if I had the time, I would give it a crack myself – if 20-25 pages is the aim, if 2016-2028 is the game, and Interbella is the tool, then where might we be in 2028? What then will be causing us to lose sleep

The Small Wars Council is linked into my Facebook page and this article from the New York Times this morning’s post really got me going – this opinion and the subsequent comment are setting the scene for a withdrawal from Afghanistan. While I have my own concerns regarding the benefits of any troop surge (the situation is totally different from that addressed by the surge into Iraq) and the lack of detailed campaign strategy, I don’t believe that apathy is a good enough reason to just bail.

Ultimately, if ‘the people’ of Afghanistan are not interested in buying into this war and/or democracy – and there’s not much to suggest that they are – then we are not going to achieve much in tactical-level combat with the Taliban. Maybe we would be better off leaving the ‘government’ of Afghanistan to muddle through on its own and to direct our support to anti-Taliban (or should our focus really be on anti-AQ) elements in Afghanistan, probably at the tribal level…?

Subscribers will have noticed the lack over updates over the past two days. Partly this is due to actually having to do some work but also because I got handed a review copy of the UK’s new Joint Combat Operations Virtual Environment (JCOVE – a bit of an odd name although I have known some Joint coves in my time!)
JCOVE Lynx HMA

I’ve still only scratched the surface of it but was impressed right from the outset at the standard of presentation and development of the package, especially in comparison with the ADF version I got to review a few months ago (which lost me in the first ten minutes with a clumsy interface and lack of situational awareness. JCOVE (it is only the Lite version) is very slick with a comprehensive range of training, single player and multi-player missions plus a decent mission editor. It replicates just about every bit of equipment that the UK might currently bring to a land battle and the only significant omissions so far are any maritime platforms (ships for the uninitiated!) although the promo videos included on the DVD imply a maritime capability, as does the presence of the Lynx HMA.8 above…

I’m very keen to see VBS2 (the underlying game engine) go fully joint as that will add a richness and depth to training that we only dreamed of back in the late 90s when we first started to experiment with off the shelf games to support training…possibly more to follow in a few days when I drill into it in more depth…

Viewing the future through the lens of Interbella

Posted on 29 October 2009 by SJPONeill

My mission yesterday was to review the US Army Capstone Concept (another ACC) and feed some comment back in through the Small Wars Council. I got to page 38 just before 5pm (mercifully the last dozen or so pages are just summaries and glossaries). The ‘mercifully’ comment is probably a clue that I was less than happy with the result – correct. There isn’t very much comment on the Small Wars discussion thread for this document – probably because it is a chore to work through and is somewhat of a disappointment:

It reads as though it has been written by a team of writers who are probably not even in the same part of the country let alone the same building or room. Parts of it are quite disjointed and it does not flow as smoothly as a key capstone publication must – if you actually want anyone to read it. Possibly, hopefully, the publically released draft is an early one and the current draft is more polished and advanced.
Most of the writing is rather verbose and clumsy with overly complex sentences and long, sometimes almost incoherent, paragraphs.
At 55 pages including glossaries, indexes etc, it is too long. All the key concepts are in the first 10-20 pages and I believe you could turn out a good product in no more than 30 pages.
An essential quality for the author of a Future Operating Concept has to be an imagination. After a not too bad start, the draft document reverts to describing current not future scenarios. There is ample open source material available to analysis to get a feel for what a future force for 2016-2028 have to face and then reverse engineer back into the capabilities and qualities that force may need.
It needs a catchy name like the Complex Warfighting, and Adaptive Campaigning developed by the Aussies or even our own Precision Manouevre.

What really gets me is that drafting a futures concept isn’t hard…yeah, sure, you have to think and bit and maybe get out of the square…look at the Australians, it wasn’t even two months ago that they had John Birmingham out to Pucka to chat about what 2020 warfare might look like (which reminds me I must chase that up and see if anyone at FDG took any notes from that session)…even TRADOC which owns the COIN Center had Josh Wineera present the Interbella [link goes to the Powerpoint] model, again no more than a couple of months ago…you need a couple of people with a bit of imagination…I just did a bit of a blogjack and suggested on Cheeseburger Gothic that JB and those who contributed to his future war thread might want to contribute to the US Complexity and Uncertainty document…

We were talking about Interbella [link goes to the article in Colloquium] products yesterday, while Josh chunks away at his broader thesis; specifically a play-book in three parts, targeting strategic, operational and tactical levels, focussed on managing complexity and uncertainty; no more than 25 pages and written in simple practical terms…oh, like a Marine Corps publication, you say? Yep, simple, concise and cuts to the chase…

So on the drive home last night I started to think about what might happen if you applied the Interbella model to the Future Operating Concept that the US Army is developing. Even though, Interbella uses a solar system analogy, it’s not rocket science…it might look like this:

What is the sun, or may be suns, that everything rotates around?
What are the things we know, that we’re pretty sure will stay the same…the planets perhaps?
Toss in some dark matter…things we think are there or that may occur but we just can’t prove it at the moment…
What happens perhaps when some of these factors, possibly innocuous on their own, align?
Consider what might be the rogue comets…things perhaps that may be less likely but most dangerous…911, Pearl Harbor, topping ArchDuke Ferdinand, collapse of the Berlin Wall…
Consider the broad approaches and strategies that might mitigate these factors…

Uh-oh, suddenly, we’re almost there…a fledgling FOC…

The discussion on Jim Gant’s Tribal Engagement Team strategy continues on Steven Pressfield’s blog. I like his comment today regarding the way that Jim Gant has produced this paper…no one asked him or compelled him to write…but by doing so and placing it out there in the webspace, it has attracted a degree and depth of comment and feedback that would be unlikely if it had to worm its way through a formal hierarchical structure…go the Information Militia!! When I think about it, Interbella is another example of the same sort of initiative…someone just got off their bum and did something…

I’m in Waiouru today and it’s snowing quite heavily…if I had remembered the cable for my camera , I would post an image of Waiouru In Springtime!!

Back in the office…

Posted on 28 October 2009 by SJPONeill

…after the better part of five weeks away. I find that I didn’t really miss it that much…some interesting new content in the inbox though and this week will be largely occupied by book reviews I think:

MAJ Jim Gant has completed his Tribal Engagement Team paper and the full text is available with a broad range of comments on Steven Pressfield’s blog. The closing paragraph says it all: ” There may be dozens of reasons not to adopt this strategy. But there is only one reason to do so—we have to. Nothing else will work.”
JFCOM has released JP 3-24 Counterinsurgency, the US DOD’s joint slant on COIN which should encapsulate and further develop the themes in FM 3-24. There is some comment on JP 3-24 on the COIN Center blog.
The US Army is developing its Army Capstone document Operating under Conditions of Uncertainty and Complexity in an Era of Persistent Conflict for a planned release date of December 2009. For all those who have been happy to sit back and snipe at US policy and doctrine here is your chance to have some input: the draft document has been published online and comments may be submitted through the Small Wars website (you do have to join up). The news release has more information.

In other COIN-related news

The UK is reroling four armoured and mechanised battalions into light infantry for service in Afghanistan on the understanding that these units will be able to revert back at a later date and noting that this will take possibly up to five years. This move is somewhat unusual in light of public comment in the UK this month regarding the overly-light nature of British vehicles in Afghanistan and the perception of a direct link between this and a number of battle casualties. The Canadians not only swear by their LAV3s in this theatre but also reversed a decision to get out of the tank game and are spending some billions of dollars for the rapid acquisition of Leopard 2A6M tanks. The US has deployed SBCT 5/2 into Afghanistan as well and initial reports indicate that Stryker is as effective here as it has been in Iraq. One wonders if this move is driven more by efficiency than by effectiveness?

I am (really, I am) making some progress in redrafting the paper on Countering Irregular Activity and it might even be complete next month…after that, Josh has been cracking the whip for the Future War rewrite/update…

Is this for real?

Posted on 26 October 2009 by SJPONeill

Stuff was my IE homepage for years but got too slow to load up over a dial-up connection so I don’t go there so often now. I wandered there this morning in search of some bit of trivia and couldn’t believe this story. Who cares if a primary teacher poses nude in a magazine? Three points:

Half the students in her class would be thinking about her anyway…
It’s not like she was stripping in a local bar…
If it’s good enough for Marge Simpson…

That’s all for today. It has been a beautiful blue skies mountain day and I have busy working outside since breakfast:

the lawns are now all mown, including the Chalet, and I am eternally grateful to the guy who invented the ride-on mower: these are not small lawns.

all the bush and trees we cleared for the mancave are now either firewood or mulch – if you’re going to buy a mulcher, buy a grunty one.

I helped Carmen tidy the garage…and we will see how long that lasts…

Not sure what’s for dinner but it sure smells good…

Back to work tomorrow…

View from a roof

Posted on 25 October 2009 by SJPONeill

…we have guests in the Chalet at the moment, indirectly the cause of my drenching on Thursday morning; being the top host that I am, I had gone to set the fire prior to their arrival so it would be cosy inside. I couldn’t get the damn thing to burn not even after half a pack of Lucifers and bringing some guaranteed dry wood over from the Lodge – the air would have turned blue if the room hadn’t been full of smoke already. We’d only had the chimney swept a couple of months ago so I was not impressed and with the crap weather there was no way I was going up to check out the flue in any detail.

With the return of decent weather (finally) over the weekend, I made myself the ACC poster boy yesterday and hopped up to see what the story was and discovered some enterprising sparrow had managed to cram 8 inches thick of pine needles down the flue – and it was crammed: I had to chip it all out with a screwdriver…

View from a roof 009 This is not a journey I intend making too frequently so I made the most of taking a few pics from this vantage point…it’s always difficult to get good shots of the Lodge due to the bush and this isn’t one of the better ones…not until Lotto Day when we can go fully down the Alternate energy path and tell the Lines Company to get their crappy lines and poles off our property!!

View from a roof 001

Once that happens it will be a major improvement all the way round. The TV aerial on the far side needs to go as well – it has been years since it has done anything but rattle in the wind – the only reason that it is still there is that it is a long way up (and down) on that side of the Lodge…the spa area on the far right is about to get a major ‘tough love’ pruning effort as it is just a little too encroached by scenic beauty at the moment. The two windows are the spare room on the right and the bunkroom on the left. In the next round of renovations, the bunkroom will become the study/library, and the current study/library will become another bedroom on the sunny side. The mega-renovations planned for some time will lift the roof from a point around the top right corner of the spare room window to enable the installation of en suites and walk-in areas – the extra head room will also allow a proper rear staircase with a mid-level landing…

Fish for Dinner again…

Dinner last night was a bit of a mixed bag….fish again because Carmen had the same ‘let’s have fish‘ flash as I on Friday and had picked up some snapper on her way back from Te Kuiti…I found a recipe in the Healthy Food Guide book and semi-modified that to suit. I say ‘semi’ because I didn’t actually adjust it as much as I should have; in fact, apart from halving the quantity of fish and pan-baking instead of oven baking it, I kept all the quantities of spices etc the same. As the twins would say ‘uh-oh’…I served it up with a good serving of tabouli but, man oh man, it was hot!! Too hot for the taste of the fish to really come through. I have some issues with the recipe and wonder if the HFG team actually made it before they published it as the picture in the book just looked like normal baked fish (clean and white) when the marinade is actually very dark. I wondering perhaps if they have skipped out a key ingredient like some form of cream to take the marinade from a paste to something that will actually be enough to cover the fillets AND be poured over the fillets – even using twice the quantities there was barely enough to paste over each fillet…

In Other News

I was checking the blogstats with morning and noticed an incoming link from an unfamiliar site – thinking perhaps I had made a break-through in the blogspace I clicked on it. While it was beyond me to find any connection between it and The World…, M|O|N|G|K|O|L was a fascinating and diverse read; Memoirs of Saigon brought back many memories of my brief time in Vietnam a decade ago, in particular the bubbling friendliness and hospitality of the people of south Vietnam – I don’t think the writers of the Lonely Planet on Vietnam had ever visited the place, or certainly gone any further than the bars of downtown Saigon. My deepest regret is that I did not purchase the painting I saw in a gallery in Saigon: using just four colours, the brown of the rivers, the orange of the dust, the bright green of the foliage and the blue of the sky, it encapsulated my first image of Vietnam as we made our approach into Tan Son Nhut. I was saddened by Cambodia: A Country For Sale – at the time I was in Vietnam, it was still relatively untouched by the depredations of the big corporates and multinationals. One of the reasons that I am not sure I want to return is that in ten years all this may have changed and I don’t want my memories tainted by sights of such a beautiful nation going the same way as so many others…Coming Anarchy this morning has a graphic image of that way….

The Strategist has also picked up on the ‘Always Blow on the Pie‘ story – if you haven’t had a look already, please do…Peter’s latest post regards ‘modern slavery‘: I am less than sympathetic…these people choose to have these lifestyles and it reads to me that greed (in the form of £200k bonuses) is the primary motivator. If you can’t stand the heat…but before jumping out of the pan and emigrating to New Zealand…(to be continued)…

Cheeseburger Gothic has the next of JB’s insights into the perils and pitfalls of being a writer: anyone with aspirations of writing even casually should track both these posts and the ones on a similar theme by Steven Pressfield. Having collected a lot of DIY writing material of varying standards and usefulness over the years, I can recommend both as key resources for budding or even experienced writers…

B-4

I have been fairly consistent in my stated aim of doing some minor work on the B-4 each night. It has turning out to be a rewarding and fun build: although relatively simple in construction, each sub-assembly looks delightfully complex. I’m working on the assumption that it should be able to be assembled almost fully before painting so except for some minor fiddly bits I will put on last – to save me refixing them last after snapping them off with careless handling – I am building it pretty much out of the box…progress so far:

B-4 203mm build 001

Things that go well together…

Posted on 24 October 2009 by SJPONeill

Bert and Ernie…

Fred and Ginger…

Fish and Filo

I’ve been hanging out to try a fish and filo package for a while and thought that I would surprise Carmen with dinner when she got home last night. Lessons Learned:

Where it says use three sheets of filo, use three sheets of filo. Otherwise your herbed cheese filling will melt through the pastry and require an urgent transfer from flat oven tray to over dish to prevent spillover into the depths of the oven.

When folding filo packages, fold the ends in first and THEN roll. This tidily secures the ends and is less likely to crack the filo. Place the filling on one edge not in the middle of the sheet – this makes it easier to roll.

When making a leek sauce to be served under the filo packages, go over on the leek – what looks like heaps on the chopping board becomes barely enough for two once cooked up with herbs, pine nuts and cream. More is less, way more is enough…

The parsnip/turnip/carrot/kumara puree served in a scooped out potato half was a good idea but execution needs work. Baking these in tinfoil seemed like a good idea at the time but I can’t remember why now – it probably would have worked if I had literally spiced it up a bit – a better way would have been a straight bake sans foil. This would also have meant the spud cooking time would = filo cooking time.

Presentation needed work but it tasted primo.

Score:

Fish and filo 6/10

Leek and pine nuts 7/10

Potato halves with vegetable puree 4/10

Total: 17/30 which is still more than half!!!!

Afghanistan and TET

I’ve really bitten over this comment on Steven Pressfield’s One Tribe At A Time thread. [PDF: The “How” of Tribal Engagment – Steven Pressfield] My first reaction to Jim Gant’s Tribal Engagement Teams (TET – possibly an unfortunate acronym, remembering another COIN war) was ‘…yep, here we go again – more taking lessons from other wars and blindly hammering them into the round hole of the current war in Afghanistan…‘ Right up to the point, where the stated aim for the Afghan campaign was reaffirmed as creating an environment that could not be reoccupied by Al-Qaeda and its ilk. Against that objective in an essentially tribal culture like Afghanistan, the TET concept makes way more sense than free fire zones, big guns and high tech:

It is debatable whether the ‘clear zones of fire’ (free fire zones from another war?) or technological advantages are major contributors to a successful conclusion to this campaign (an Afghanistan that can not be reoccupied by AQ or its like?) At best the technology is an enabler for the initiatives that may lead to success; free fire zones, IMHO, are a legacy from conventional (Fulda Gap) mindsets and do not meet the spirit of proportionality, discrimination and precision required for countering irregular threats in a complex environment. It is these that may be more suited for “..low conflict area which is in relatively pro-government hands…” and NOT for an environment like Afghanistan where ‘everyone’ (outside the cities) has traditionally been armed – the only real way to discriminate between good guys, bad guys, fence-sitters and genuine non-combatants (who may still be armed) is up close and personal. This why, over the last week or so, I have gone from mild opposition to the TET concept to a firm advocate. After eight years of high-tech and big guns (which have proven of limited utility in other low level wars), it is time to get back to first principles:

ditch any coalition partners are can’t/won’t step up to the plate, and/or won’t comply with the theatre strategy. This is not peacekeeping where the number of different flags waving in the wind outside the theatre HQ is a reportable metric: this is war fighting with no time for passengers or social members.

Confirm the campaign objectives; identify the lines of operation to achieve those objectives; and then implement the tactical operations necessary to progress those lines. This isn’t COIN/CIT-specific – it must be 101 material from just about any military school in the Western world.

Implement the best Information Operations campaign on the planet to seize the new high ground – Al-Jazeera will fight you for it.

It’s all very easy to pick holes in concepts like Tribal Engagement Teams and that’s how I started. BUT it is even easier to pick holes in the current strategy where we once again seem to be winning all the battles and losing the two wars (in-theatre and home front).”

The crux of a successful lessons is analysing and validating observations, issues and lessons (OIL – yes, it really is all about OIL) against your current context – not trying to hammer a square peg into a round hole with your forehead. We saw this when the ‘experts’ all trumpeted the absolute need to implement a Malayan Emergency-style COIN campaign in Iraq. The fact this campaign’ success was due to a number of unique demographic and geographic factors that definitely are not duplicated in Iraq was lost on the ‘experts’. They also overlooked that while the official end of the Emergency was in 1960, it was not until 1988 that the last of the Communist Terrorists (CT) surrendered to Malaysian authorities.

In my ever so humble opinion, I think that Jim Gant has analysed the current situation and campaign objectives in Afghanistan, developed a model and then validated it against that analysis. I doubt there are many other who could same that they have done the same, certainly not those from the big guns and high tech schools of thought…what was that about lessons from other wars…?