Tag Archives: COIN Center

A slow day today….

Posted on by
Reply

…it’s raining again which would normally be a good excuse to spend the day inside modelling or exercising myself intellectually but the twins are overnighting so that’s meant putting everything breakable and valuable out of reach of little hands and then providing a one on one overwatch on both of them them all day as, man, they are fast now…

It’s also been a long day as I got up just before 4AM for a COIN Center online brief (we always get the short end of the time zone stick!) only  to find that when Adobe says that Connect will work over a dial-up connection, they don’t really mean it and you will be lucky to get a second of sound over the whole hour. Josh also missed it after a few too many vinos before bedtime on Friday night but there was a still a good turn out of some 60 staff from across the community. I suppose I will have to resign myself to nighting over and logging in from work for future activities until such time that Telecom or some other ISP can give us affordable (i.e. not $250/month!!) broadband here…

I have been chipping away at the Trumpeter B-4 203mm cannon most nights since getting home and it is progressing nicely. One of the beauties of this kit is that most of the major subassemblies can be completed prior to painting so construction is a. simple and b. relatively fast – be nice, though, if they could do a barrel without a ditch of a seam running down each side…Carmen picked me up some paint in Taupo on Friday on her way back from getting Little Red panel-beaten after her little faux pas in the driveway last month so I’m all good to go there – once the bloody rain stops as the humidity levels are still too high for smooth airbrushing…

It’s been quite nice taking a break to day but will be back in to the Thursday/Friday War tomorrow once the twins depart…I’d like to be outside chopping the rest of the wood and getting it under cover but it’s looking like MORE rain again tomorrow which precludes the use of an electric saw outside (we use a drop saw for dicing firewood that is less than 5-6 inches thick – Carmen scored it at a garage sale in 2005 and it has delivered sterling service since)…

Two blog entries that I have noted over the weekend have been this great one from Steven Pressfield on Resistance and Self-talk; and John Birmingham’s commitment to end each week on Cheeseburger by writing on writing which will be both enlightening and useful for struggling wannabes like myself…

I also finished Jim Molan’s Running the War in Iraq tonight and there are some great general insights on COIN and conflict generally (no pun intended) that I will try to distil down into a single post in the next few days…

Something’s missing…

Posted on by
1

Today I’ve made similar comments on both the COIN Center blog and Steven Pressfield’s blog on the war – maybe I’m missing something but has anyone recently i.e. since December 2001, actually clearly articulated what we are trying to achieve in Afghanistan? Every man and his dog (maybe we should start listening to the dogs?) are presenting their theories on how to win the war BUT, if these is one lesson we think we have learned since WW2, it is don’t get into anything unless you have some idea on how you’re going to get OUT of it. So what is the endgame for Afghanistan? Please… anyone…?

  • Exploit the mineral wealth of Afghanistan? Which minerals would they be?
  • Prevent Pakistani nukes falling into Taliban/AQ hands?
  • Return Afghanistan to its pre-1979 state?
  • Save it for/from democracy?
  • Prevent Iran or someone else filling the power vacuum left by the Taliban post-2001?
  • Secure new markets for globalised industry?
  • Something else?

Maybe I’m just dumb, or wasn’t  paying attention that day the endstates were being explained…I’ve read FM 3-24 and similar publication on the subject of COIN, irregular threats and stability ops and actions and a common theme in most of the is the absolute need to identify what the root issues of the conflict are and set out to address them in your long game…are we doing that? Have we done that? Is there a cycle of ongoing review and adjustment….?

As LCOL Malevich says in the Center blog “The Taliban have a simple message “foreigners out.” And, they promise only “security” and “justice.” What is our mission, what is our compelling narrative?”

I suppose the other question that we might want to review is why does America care? When is NATO going to get its act together and get into the game; Ditto the Islamic Brotherhood – if they really do care for all Muslims, where are the aid packages, the troops and the initiatives from closer to home – would an Iranian Brigade be more effective than an SBCT…?

And some more in a similar vein here that I stumbled across while tag surfing…

The Birmoverse

Posted on by
1

John Birmingham, the Australian author of World War 2.1, 2.2, and  2.3 (Axis of Time trilogy), and Without Warning (1st of the ‘The Wave’ series) has set up blog entry  over at Cheeseburger Gothic for discussion on both series…if you haven’t read any of these you really want to give them a go…a secondary theme of the AoT trilogy is a prescient (probably because it agrees with me) glimpse of one version of the next decade of so of the 21st century….

I see on the COIN blog today that Canadian forces are advocating a new approach in Afghanistan but as discussed by a number of members on the blog, this appears to be a desperation-driven attempt to accelerate the course of the campaign and it probably hasn’t been all that well considered. Trying to make the people the new bad guys is probably one of the more innovative approachs to COIN I have seen but will it fly? Like a brick…

From the COIN blog:

“In Afghanistan one of my close friends (an Afghan that would die to save me and almost did) let me know the difference in “their ways” of thinking.  “If you just give me something I may be thankful, but I am not grateful.  I think – look what I was able to get from you, not thankful of what you gave me.  If you attached a price to what you gave me in favors or later chips to be used when you needed something, now we are communicating and building our relationship.”  At first that bothered me but I then began to see through his eyes.  If we take that to winning the “hearts and minds” we have missed the boat.  It does nothing to give to these people as it does to have their own countrymen give, help, and make choices for themselves.  We need to be the facilitators and not the handout.”

Think about it….

While YOU were sleeping…

Posted on by
1

Amir stirred at his post and sat up…he always hated this last stint before Salatu-l-Fajr…with the Americans, bad things always seemed to happen when it was dark. All the faith in the kingdom couldn’t overcome their cursed technology.

A faint rumbling filtered through the mist. Probably the brothers in the next valley getting a bounding from NATO aircraft again – he hated the German Tornados with their time-expired MW-1s that scattered a deadly rain over the fields for a kilometre or more. A intermittent groaning rose through the rumbling – it sounded nearer. That, whatever that was, wasn’t in another valley, it was here!

He should wake the others but what would he say? What if it were only the wind – they would laugh at him and make him do more sentries, like the time he had mistaken chickens for soldiers crawling towards their position. He squinted thought he could make out a dim shape, or was it just a shadow? There, again!

A squat shape emerged from the mist, carrying the distinctive H antenna of the New Zealanders. Had they deployed a new secret weapon? Over the sandy camouflage, he could barely make out a word stencilled on the hull: What in Allah’s name was Interbella? A head that could have come off a Roman coin 2000 years ago emerged from a hatch. The devil El Josh! He had heard whispers of this wily foe from the elders but it looked like that day had come….

The Kiwis had deployed their Think Tank…

In a war of ideas and ideologies you have to come to the party armed. There is also no monopoly on good ideas and the US Army in particular has realised this. As a result it was a Kiwi conducting an online presentation to a COIN Center audience at 0300 this morning…the topic? An alternative method of considering issues and influences in the complex environment we now live in…

It’s name? Interbella…

And now the embarrassing bit – I’m in Singapore at the moment and have just realised that I brought the wrong flash drive with me so don’t have a copy of the presentation to post here – will fix this as soon as I can get a new copy sent up…

More than meets the eye…

Posted on by
Reply

…reading through the programme for the Chief of Army’s Conference this morning, I wondered if this whole transformation thing is nothing more than just more buzzword bingo like the great (NOT) RMA from the 90s – I think it is and, in fact, one of the presentation’s covered exactly that issue and came to a similar conclusion…but move away from the lingo and the underlying theme is the clear need, not so much for change, but ongoing evolution to match the environment of today and tomorrow…no more Maginot Lines or Malemes…

It has been a long day, departed the hacienda at 5 and got back around 9 tonight but so very worth it: I have screeds of notes to digest before I forgot what my scribbles meant; caught up with some people I haven’t seen for years and made a couple of new contacts on the lessons front. Exceptionally well-catered which is good as a general principle but must have been appreciated by the participants who had travelled from all over the country and good food  during smoko and lunch breaks always fosters better discussion…

I was disappointed not to have been able to catch up with Michael Evans who I have corresponded with off and on but never actually met – he has said he will be back over this way a couple more times this year so we will see – his presentation on Krulak’s (bastard) step-children was my favourite of the day – I don’t think I should really get into good, better, best comparisons because I thought they were all rather good – certainly I got a nugget or two from each…A really good turn-out: Minister of Defence (in the PM), the Army obviously (not all of them but enough for challenging discussion), Air Force and Navy, as well as reps from Police, MFAT and Customs and a good mix of civilian staff and academia (would a loony academic be an academia nut?)

I’m assuming that there’s a Virtual Brown Bag this week – erk! 3am in this timezone and I am trying to muster the energy to wait up for it so I can test where it really does work at the end of a dial-up connection and also so I can see if the new recording software works…