Everybody fights!!

Posted on 21 June 2010 by SJPONeill

If there was one single takeaway from last week’s conference it was this…”Everybody fights…!!” It was hammered home by the US and Canadian representatives who attended and validates that concept that everyone deployed into an operational AO in high-end theatres like Iraq and Afghanistan must first and foremost be a warfighter…

Anyone who goes out the gate must have the same skills as those who habitually tread out in the bad lands and if there has been one single lesson for both these nations in the last six or seven years it has been that EVERYONE has the same probability of getting caught in a contact, activating an IED of some size, or getting in some other form of strife…

So EVERYBODY receives, extracts and delivers detailed and comprehensive orders; EVERYBODY conducts and participates in rehearsals; EVERYBODY is conversant with Immediate Actions and force SOPs; and, where possible, EVERYBODY has a secondary skill to bring to the party so that there are no single points of failure when it all goes noisy…

Those who may expect to spend a large proportion of their time within the wire might also wish to have a bit of a rethink as once all those containers are stacked, blankets counted and bolts tightened, they represent a large proportion of combat power that can be employed in local security, route clearance, population engagement, etc, etc, etc….

COIN is not and never will be a checklist…EVERYBODY needs to think and keep thinking to stay alive and achieve the mission…there is no room for rubber stamping compliance or templated solutions for their own sake – every situation is subtly different from the one before and must be considered in its own context…a key implication from this is that domestic training, outside the force generation or predeployment training environments, MUST provide opportunities for leaders at all level (including EVERY soldier – it’s called self-leadership) to confront complexity and uncertainty in every day they are on the job – and that this must be supported by a firm foundation of a well-embedded organisational ethos and culture…

Kudos to Dean @ Shiloh again for the top job he did in collating and distributing his detailed notes from the COIN Symposium at Ft Leavenworth – Dean, just so you know, we’re reading your stuff down here as well and it was interesting to see notes based upon your observations being distributed at the conference…unfortunately, significant portions of the conference material were classified so I’m unable to share to quite the same degree as Dean however a week away from home gave me a great opportunity to navel-gaze free of distractions and to also interact offline with a number of old and new colleagues and this is content that I’ll be developing over the next week or so…

It’s been bucketing down here for most of the weekend since I got home but I have been making the most of breaks in the weather to do outside jobs at the Lodge and Chalet in preparation for the ski season which starts here in a couple of weeks. In the wetter parts of the days, I have had a full range of inside jobs as part of that prep and this has eaten into PC time quite a bit…tomorrow, I am off to Ohakea again and, assuming that the Army has finally completed all the exit admin, I should be a member of the RNZAF by lunch time…

Getting it right

Posted on 3 June 2010 by SJPONeill

Japanese tank Type 2 Ka-Mi 1:25 by mrafalsk

Just snippets today…

A couple of interesting comments (edit: made by visitors to his page – I just omitted the names for privacy reasons) on one of Michael Yon’s Facebook threads…

I’ve been in the army since Regan was president. i lived through the drawdown and saw how within several years the Army culture changed dramatically. zero defects was the norm… PC culture was jammed down our throats by new “sensitivity” initiatives. anyone that dared cross a PC line was slammed and pushed aside. when i attended the Strategy program at CGSC, we were fed a steady diet of liberal internationalist philosophy by Barnett, Nye, Fukuyama , and surprisingly the failed Sec of State Kissinger. these aren’t the people that are going to solve our strategic problems. in fact, they are the problem. we need to return to the classics of Sun Tzu, Machiavelli, Clausewitz, etc.

Personally I despise Sun Tzu, or certainly the popular pulp interpretations of his philosophies…I always mentally deduct marks when I see Sun Tzu quotes in papers and books I am reviewing…it’s, like, couldn’t you apply yourself enough to find a supporting quote with some substance behind it? But that’s just me…I do however support a return to study based upon the classic thinkers, especially as a foundation upon which to consider more contemporary works…

The government of South Vietnam was inept and corrupt … so it was illegitimate as far as the population was concerned. The South Vietnamese gov’t never won the support of its people and could not stand on its own without massive U.S. financial and military support. So the end was inevitable. I don’t know how much effect we can have on Karzai and his clown posse, but without an effective government in Afghanistan the fight is already lost.

The positive and negative parallels with the war in Vietnam continue to grow…on the positive side we see the incredible dedication and professionalism of individuals at the sharp end, regardless of the direction and reasons for the conflict; and we see the opportunity to get it write through the writings of people like Jim Gant, Josh Wineera and Steve Tatham, all of whom have identified key aspects that might make this war winnable – although chance is becoming slim indeed as the US prepares to meet its 2011 drawdown target…On the negative side we see war in an environment we do not understand; the top-down political meddling in the campaign plan; and the bolstering of a government that only serves to reinforce the opposition…

The Enemy Within

As I type this morning, the news is covering a taxi driver’s murderous rampage in Whitehaven in the UK…already here, commentators are noting the difficulties faced by UK Police due to their unarmed posture and linking this to our own unarmed police force. The anti-gun lobby hasn’t arced up yet but it must be winding up already…the simple fact is that the UK already has very strict gun control laws ans still something like this occurs…

More guns, less guns is not the core issue…if someone wants to go out like this, they will find a way, guns or no guns…and while I support the arming of Police (why not? everyone else is armed), that is a response whereas I think that we need to be looking at how to interdict this threat before it ever gets played out…

On the run…

Right that it for now…have to dash as I have a big day ahead maximising the sun while it has been out…we have had a lot of rain over the last few days and everything is drenched. Fortunately we live in top of a hill and have escaped the floods that hit Whakatane and Oamaru this week…

I have made considerable progress this week is identifying potential options that might finally get us (affordable) broadband access at home – I do so miss being able to listen in on the monthly Virtual Brown Bag sessions at the CAC COIN Center – either through the miracles of satellite or mobile technologies…

I also am steeling myself for the inevitable jabbing and stabbing medical assessments as part of transferring across to the Air Force…so long as there’s no pysch assessments, I should be OK…!!

My two COIN-related priorities remain completing my review of the Mandelbrot book and offering my two cents to the incredible amount of great insights that Dean @ Shiloh brought back from the COIN Symposium at Ft Leavenworth last month…

Edit: This Just In…

Hawkeye UAV in action

This came in just as I hit the Publish button…it’s some of the imagery captured during Hawkeye UAV sorties in the South Island last week that shows off the Hawkeye capability – like Transformers, ‘more than meets the eye’…it is way more than just a little UAV with a camera…the true value to the client is the real time geo-referencing and overlay of imagery over 3D terrain models and subsequent analysis using the Hawkeye suite of tools…all this happens in the field in real or close to real time…very cool…

Seven Days in May

Posted on 29 May 2010 by SJPONeill

I’ve been on a recreational reading blitz over the last month or so…mainly to daily purge the professional reading I have been reviewing…sort of getting a literary life, I guess…

I started with old favourites from Steven Coonts (The Intruders, America), Clive Cussler (Raise the Titanic, Night Probe) and Dale Brown (Wings of Fire and Fatal Terrain). I overnighted at Carmen’s flat in Otorohanga a couple of weekends ago and, having forgotten to bring a book with me, grabbed Michael Connelly’s Echo Park for my pre-lights out read. This was followed by my two wins from Get Frank, Jonathan Kellerman’s Deception and Stephen Leather’s Nightfall.

Two nights ago, I felt the need to reread another favourite and grabbed Larry Bond’s Cauldron but while walking down the hallway, found I had picked out his Days of Wrath instead which was not really what I was in the mood for. As I was replacing it on the shelf in the study, I noticed Fletcher Knebel’s Seven Days in May beside it. I’d only ever read this as a teenager in the Reader’s Digest Condensed version and so opted to read it next.

What a great read!! Published in 1962, before Cuba, Dallas and Vietnam, it is set in the early 70s after a Cold War conflict that leaves Iran divided into Communist North and democratic South – logical for the time considering the Koreas, Vietnam and Germanys. A nuclear disarmament treat has been signed with the Soviet Union but elements of the US military have littler faith in either the Treaty or the President that signed it…to find out what happens you need to read the book (recommended) or see the movie (on my to-do list but it has Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster so I have high expectations).

In addition to being a damn fine read, delivering a gripping storyline without needing the prop of a high body count as perhaps a contemporary equivalent would, Seven Days in May has a couple of lines that I felt are relevant to our contemporary environment…

Cleaning up the “sad debris of surrender”, as Todd called it, took time

The sad debris of surrender – a good phrase…someone said to me earlier this week that the US is not good at nation-building and I had to bite back quite sharply…this is one of those myths that has appeared since the end of the OIF warfighting phase in 2003, a result of moral high-horsing from the UN and sniping from the UK when post-war Iraq didn’t snap nicely into a nice shining example of Middle Eastern democracy (now there’s an oxymoron for you)…my response included three names…Douglas MacArthur, Dwight Eisenhower, and George C. Marshall…three generals who, between them, rebuilt Europe and Japan from the ashes of WW2. If there was any failure of nation-building in post-war Iraq, it was down to three factors:

The failure of the UN to get over itself and not step to the plate to take the lead in rebuilding Iraq. Regardless of the nature of the disaster that struck Iraq in 2003, the sad human debris of its surrender was left to suffer and endure after the UN’s half-hearted attempt at a presence in Iraq. The few casualties suffered by the UN in Iraq are but a drop in the bucket compared to the casualties suffered by the people of Iraq and those nations that did step forward…

The decision by the US to allow the bulk of development and reconstruction work to be let to US-based mega-corps that only had an eye out for the quick big bucks instead of perhaps applying a fraction of those billions to developing those construction capabilities in Iraq itself, thus contributing to the development and stability of the Iraqi economy. This was a point made by COL Dransfield in his presentation at Massey yesterday on his recent experience in Afghanistan: he admitted some confusion as to how these contracts could cost so much when the daily rate for labour is about US$5 and all the raw materials like sand and gravel are there for the taking. He was surprised to learn that his PRT was one of the few forces in-theatre that purchased a lot of its support e.g. fresh food, minor mechanical repairs, etc from local resources.

The UK perception that it was on top of both conventional state versus state conflict AND low-level conflict and that it had nothing to learn from the US. The corollarative effect of this was that it also contributed little back into the Iraqi nation-building process at either the national level (after all, the UK was the other primary collaborator in the WMD ‘justification for the war in Iraq) or within it’s own AO which ultimately had to be ‘pacified’ by a US force as the UK was packing its bags to go home, it’s job not done…

At the Australian Army COIN Seminar in 2008, the comment was made that no one ordered Dwight Eisenhower to conduct reconstruction and nation-building tasks as he advanced across France and into Germany – they didn’t have to because it was such a logical and common sense method of pacificying the region. Similarly, Douglas MacArthur was expected to inflict draconian Versaille-like measures against the Japanese after Japan surrendered in August 1945 and many would have believed that he had a major axe to grind with Japan over the way it had treated his beloved Philippines. No doubt he did but, again, this senior US general determined that this would be counter-productive in the bigger picture. As a result, Germany and Japan sixty years on are still two economic powerhouses and one has to wonder what the Army of that day got right in training its senior officers.

Or possibly, as I’m not sure that the US has too much wrong with how it develops its generals today, what was so different sixty years ago that the governments and civil staff trusted those officers to just get on and do the job…?

“…the trouble is that democracy works only when a good majority of citizens are willing to give thoughts and time and effort to their government…”

And that remains the single biggest issue with the current campaign in Afghanistan: at the tribal and provincial levels the majority of citizens may be willing to contribute to government and leadership, there is simply no interest in a strong central government regardless of its composition or ethical philosophies. No matter how much you flog a dead horse it still isn’t going to get up and haul the cart any further…The McCrystal ‘Cursed Earth’ plan essentially abandons the centre of Afghanistan to whoever wants and only maintain a Maginot-like ring around the outer edges of the country – which might be useful if Afghanistan faced any credible conventional external threat. But it doesn’t, and ISAF’s failure to adopt a provincial/tribal based campaign along the lines of that proposed by Jim Gant that might, over time, allow the ink blots of success to spread and merge only means that more lives and money will be wasted in ineffective and pointless kinetic operations.

MacArthur in particular achieved his success in reconstructing Japan not, by through kinetics or arbitrarily inflicting Western culture on the Japanese but by working within their own culture, evolving an his approach for that situation and no relying on templates from previous successes…what it it so hard to learn…?

This is for real

Posted on 21 May 2010 by SJPONeill

HMS Victory in paper

This is for real – details on PM here…

…but are these guys?

There have been a growing number of reports from Afghanistan that senior ISAF commanders are losing in their desperation to win the information war with the Taliban on collateral damage. Two of the latest ‘initiatives’ include the creation of a medal awarded for not using lethal force during war and ordering soldiers to conduct patrols without a round chambered in their weapons. It seems clear that the ‘commanders’ fail to grasp that the role of the military in this environment is the application of force in support of national objectives – everything is subordinate to this role, unique to the military amongst other instruments of national power. If the situation in Afghanistan is now so benign that soldiers no longer need to keep their weapons in an ‘action’ state, then we should be seeing an immediate transition from a military campaign to a civil campaign.

Of course, the fact that applying restraint in the use of lethal force in Afghanistan implies that there is still a significant threat against which lethal force might be used; and both ‘initiatives’ are is stark contrast to the indifference to collateral damage inherent in current cross-border UAV strikes into Pakistan. Possibly the further you are, and can keep the media, from collateral damage, the more palatable it is.

The Rules of War provide for the right of every soldier to use force in their own defence should they believe this to be warranted. Both of these ‘initiatives’ seek to undermine this right. Training provides both the means of applying that force and the means to determine a proportionate level of response. This training builds upon the organisational ethos and values developed throughout an individuals career. Maybe, in seeking to win what appears more and more tobe an unwinnable war, ISAF commanders are leading their own ethos and values be eroded in placing their soldiers at risk in favour of a population that doesn’t appear to be particularly supportive of either ISAF or the Karzai government.

One of the reports quotes one source linking this to the rules of engagement that contributed to the 1983 Marine Barracks bombing in Lebanon: this line is interesting…”…do not chamber a round unless told to do so by a commissioned officer unless you must act in immediate self-defense where deadly force is authorized…” …and we all saw how well that turned out…There’s never an officer around when you need one which is why most credible armies rely on the training and experience of their NON-Commissioned Officers to apply their judgement to any particular tactical situation. There must be a balance between experience and qualification which is a point that Dusty discusses in Security NZ this week.

On reconstruction

I see a recent note in the Marine Corps Gazette (real land forces have professional journals) that “…officials told lawmakers in Washington Thursday the reconstruction of Afghanistan is poised to become the largest overseas rebuilding operation in U.S. history…” Is there any point in rebuilding anything that is unlikely to last beyond that last helicopter lifting off the Embassy roof…? Who really gains from this rebuilding operation, the people of Afghanistan – or the corporate parasites clambering over them in search of profit before President Obama turns off the tap…?

Incidentally, I’m not sure that rebuilding Afghanistan will be a larger operation that the rebuilding of Germany and Japan and the Marshall Plan post-WW2…possibly only in terms of modern dollar levels…?

On networking…”

Michael Yon has been reporting from Bangkok and offering a distinct contrast to the pro-Red Shirt line taken by most of the mainstream media. One thing I have noticed is that large number of Thai people commenting on his Facebook page posts. Even accepting that Thailand is far more connected than Afghanistan, it is interesting to compare this with the number of Afghans commenting on his page which appears to be minimal at best. The Sicuro Group report from 19 May states that there are 3.8 million Afghans subscribed to Roshan, the largest telecommunications operator in Afghanistan. You’d really think that if any of those 3.8 million people cared, they might offer up some comments; that they don’t might be an indicator to the true level of support for ISAF and the fantasy of a central government led by Karzai or anyone else.

Hanging in there…

Posted on 19 May 2010 by SJPONeill

Take you to our leader?

Man, the Russians come up with some cool looking machines…this is the…Obyekt 279, a Soviet prototype heavy tank developed in the Kirov industrial plant, Leningrad. Work on the tank started in 1957, and was based on a heavy tank operational requirements developed in 1956. The special-purpose tank was intended to fight on cross-country terrain that was inaccessible to conventional tanks and act as a vehicle to break through enemy defensive positions….(cheers to Wikipedia)…

I came across this beast in a Paper Models thread asking for ideas for new armour models so if it tweaks a designer’s imagination, maybe it’ll be a builder…I’d have a crack at the design myself but at the moment I am running at capacity doing year-end accounts, working with Hawkeye UAV, gearing up for the Winter season, and completing some of my COIN-related review commitments…I finished Benoit Mandelbrot’s The (mis)Behaviour of Markets on Monday, am almost done with Amanda Lennon’s Fourth Generation Valkyries, and have a local work on hybridism to read…

So, the blog has taken a back foot for the last week or so and this state of affairs will most likely last until next week when normal services should be resumed…

In the meantime, Dean @ Travels With Shiloh has returned from the COIN Symposium at Fort Leavenworth and started to upload this thoughts and findings..please head on over and value-add to the his comments and observations…it’ll be interesting to see what Kiwis attending the symposium took away from a national perspective…

PS…forgot to mention that Michael Yon has left Afghanistan (probably best for all concerned) and is currently in Bangkok covering the troubles there…if you’re on Facebook, it is well worth subscribing to his page where he has been delivering a steady commentary – a dozen + feeds each day – on the situation there…he offers an interesting counterpoint to the more sensationalist news media ‘reporting’ and depicts the human side of this drama very well…it is great to see that Michael has returned to the type of .boots on the ground’ that he is so very good at…

Good Answer

Posted on 11 May 2010 by SJPONeill

Nice one, Mike!!

Just when I was about to write Michael Yon off after his disembedment, he comes up with a comment that is both insightful and relevant…

The father of a veteran now in Afghanistan emailed with a question: “Michael: What would you say to a group of US soldiers if you were a company commander (and it’s easy for me to imagine you in this role) if after a briefing you gave them as you and they were about to participate in the BfK – when after inviting questions a soldier asked: “Sir, are we being asked to risk our lives to prop up Wali Karzai and if so, is he a good man or just my generation’s Diem? (Or some such question.) A beneficiary of the drug industry, a thug, feared and hated by the people of Kandahar City? How would you Michael Yon answer this US soldier?”

Answer:
I would likely say, “Yes, we are being tasked to prop up a drug lord. That’s our orders. Let’s get to work.”

It’s a good point – as much as some elements continue to portray the war in Afghanistan as a ‘nice’ war in which no harm really befalls anyone, except the bad guys, and which is conducted according to the highest moral principles….which, of course, is totally false…if what is going on in Afghanistan was anything close to nice, then there would be no need for the thousands of combat troops, strike aircraft, etc, etc, etc…NGOs and aid agencies could run rampant over the country to do-good their little hearts out…but it’s not like that and we shouldn’t be kidding ourselves that it is…

On the same theme are the bedfellows that we might have to partner up with in order to achieve our national objectives…let’s NOT forget that the reason that all these forces are in Afghanistan in the first place is not an overwhelming concern for the wellbeing of the nation or people of Afghanistan…some nations are their for flag-waving purposes, others because the rest of their gang is there, others again perhaps hoping to secure trade or commercial gains…whatever the underlying motives, there is little room for altruistic partnerships based on niceness and the moral high ground. To be blunt about it, most of the nice people that you might be able to partner up with are probably amongst the least effective…

To get the job done, your partners of opportunity will more than likely be those whom you would NOT bring home to meet Mother or the voters but they are way more likely to advance your aims and objectives…

The other insight that falls from Mike’s comment is that these issues of lawful or unlawfulness generally exist at levels stratospherically above the tactical level where the down and dirty fighting occurs…as Mike implies, these issues are not things that the troops on the ground need to be worrying about – so long as someone has taken the time out to remind them why they are face down int eh dirt and the sand, listening to bullets zing by, just over their heads…the direction and ownership of said bullets is largely irrelevant when you’re face down in the sand and the dirt….

Sallying Forth

My brief foray out into civilisation last week went very well. I had (another) great visit to the Air Power Development Centre @ RNZAF Ohakea and am looking forward to doing a lot more work with them. I overnight in Ohakea this time and must comment on the standard of the rooms in the Mess, even for a casual guest like myself…my room had all the amenities necessary for someone working away from home…especially the little details like an alarm clock, towel, bathrobe, iron and ironing board, even a Do Not Disturb sign for the door and some of those little soap and shampoo thingies…all the little details that are such a PITA to lug around with you on the road…very nice…

The following morning I drove down to Wellington – catching the early bird parking deal @ the James Cook by less than two minutes – to listen in on Josh Wineera’s lecture The Contemporary Operating Environment to Victoria University’s Counter-Terrorism course; after which I delivered Doctrine, COIN and Kilcullen (critiquing The Accidental Guerrilla). It went OK but only OK and I am really annoyed that I ran overtime (despite numerous rehearsals to the big dogs at home) and had to skim over the Kilcullen section. Hopefully I will have other opportunities to polish up my delivery for this type of work as I think that part of the problem is that I haven’t had any opportunities this year to practise let alone hone presentation skills.

I’m now converting the elements of that PowerPoint brief into a loose paper, combining the images with the accompanying words, for Jim Veitch at Vic as a record of those thoughts. I found last year that both MS Word and OpenOffice’s Writer are sub-optimumal tools for this and have opted to try this using a dedicated desktop publishing application called Scribus. It’s open source as well and like much of these open source apps has an almost vertical learning curve (the reason I uninstalled it last year) but I cracked it last night and am now making pretty good progress. The result for this project probably won’t win too many marks for prettiness as I am learning as I go but progress is progress….

You turn your back for just a second…

Posted on 3 May 2010 by SJPONeill

Exhibit #1 – authorities believe Grasshopper is just an innocent victim, in the wrong place at the wrong time…the usual suspects (both of them) are being lined up…

We had the twins for the weekend – it’s always fun but full-on and this is just a none-too-subtle reminder of how quickly they are growing up (literally)…the jar was only about one-third full when one of them swiped (the evidence is difficult to argue with) it off the kitchen bench after lunch. It was quite a good effort as they managed to keep most of the jam off themselves (something they refuse to do at actual meal times) and were only busted when the penny dropped for me that there was simply way too much jam around the house to have come from the jam on toast we had for lunch (with healthy stuff as well) in the lounge…

It’s a lesson that one can never become too complacent that little hands will not extend their reach, the guy you install as president of Afghanistan will not decide to go his own way, or that the service you dedicate 18 years to will not dump you like a hot and embarrassing potato…I refer here to the case of Royal Marine Sergeant Mark Leader [PDF: Two war-weary Marines with a size 10 wellington boot] who was court martialed and dismissed, after 18 years of top quality military service five times decorated with campaign medals , after throwing a Wellington boot at a Taliban terrorist. The Taliban in question had been found burying an IED just 50 metres from base where Leader had witnessed his best friend and two other mates blown up by an IED just prior to this.

It’d be interesting to see the full facts of this case – perhaps there is way more to it that was has been reported to date – but this certainly seems to be yet another application of the perception that we, the good guys, can fight nice wars. Unfortunately the price of niceness is the blood of US and NATO soldiers…The opposite of ‘nice’ is not ‘brutal’ – it is ‘practical’ and ‘pragmatic’ – and this seems to be totally lost on British leaders who seem think this war (lower case) is simply an over-resourced exercise in flag-waving and a great gesture of unity with the US (which, after all, might be required to sail across the Atlantic and bail out the UK for a fourth time)…

Eon

I’ve just finished a great book, Greg Bear’s Eon, which is one of the main reasons that blog updates have dried up over the last few days. Carmen picked it up for me at the Sally Army shop in Hamilton for a dollar at the same time as she bought me The Star Trek yarn Garth of Izar…I must have read another Bear story in the dim dark past as I have always avoided his books for well over two decades but Eon really gripped me right from the start and I will probably have to go off and ferret out some others once the ‘have-to’ reading list gets a little shorter….

The fractal guy…

Benoit Mandelbrot’s The (Mis)Behaviour of Markets was recommended to me as a fresh look at irregularity and uncertainty, and as such, a possible source for some out of the square illumination on the complex contemporary environment…I haven’t even got to the end of the preface and already I a. love it, b. have dredged out some really good material, and c. taken off on some wild tangential thoughts…once the employment situation becomes a little more stable, I think that this one will be a permanent addition to the library.

Kilcullen again…

The other recent tome that I have decided to add to the physical library is David Kilcullen’s The Accidental Guerrilla. I am speaking on doctrine, COIN and Kilcullen this Friday and have had to wait for the library to reloan me a copy to use as an aid for any parts of my review notes that I can’t, read or remember why I wrote what I did. Dr Kilcullen has secured a place for himself as one of the most influential figures of the last decade and as such is deserving of a place on the shelves in the study here at the Raurimu Centre for Thinking About Stuff (CTAS). He’s just released a new book but I think I’ll test read this from the library first as the abstracts for CounterInsurgency @ Oxford University Press and Small War Journal sounds a little too much like a rehash of previous works…

Ginga Ninja

Andrew Inwald released his 1/33 Yokosuka P1Y Ginga at Paper Models last week…and it surpasses even his Judy and Il-14…those who are into this sort of creative expression might want to download it just to see how it’s done…you can do that here at Paper Modelers although you will need to register and make one post on the forum to get to the downloads…

Yes, it’s paper…!

In other paper news, Ken West of XB-70 Valkyrie and B-58 Hustler fame has announced the start of the design phase of a 1/32 Lockheed SR-71, although the exact model or models is still TBC e.g. A-12, YF-12A, D-21 drone carrier etc…

More snakes than ladders

Posted on 26 April 2010 by SJPONeill

I started to draft this post on Saturday night, thinking to comment on the ups and down of life…eight hours later, an RNZAF Iroquois had crashed on its way to Anzac commemorations in Wellington, and this morning we heard that a young soldier had been killed outside Linton Army Base in the Manawatu so…more downs that ups at the moment…

The second-guessing of yesterdays Iroquois crash has already started…people just need to STFU until the inquiry is done and released…there’ll be no whitewash and the truth will out…in the meantime, so-called experts show feel for the families and show some respect…

The picture is of a cool playground version of Snakes and Ladders, clicking on it takes you to the GoogleMap of how to find it…found the picture on Doing New Zealand…

Because of the downs, it’s just snippets today…

You think?

Wired has a brief item wondering if US pilots will fire on Israeli strike aircraft crossing no-fly zones in Iraq to attack Iranian nuclear facilities…it is really in question? I think that any qualms about engaging targets disappeared on the morning of September 11, 2001, when US pilots had to confront the spectre of engaging hijacked airliners. If Israeli still doesn’t get the message, it may find that big brother carries a very big and nasty stick…and in some ways, a good punch in the nose from the US may be the best way to drag Israel out of its Masada mentality into the 21st Century…

Oh, no!

Yeah, St Michael of Yon again…Wired reports that “Smears Turn Milbloggers on their Frontline Hero“. Actually, Yon is a hero to few but the most blinkered of his followers, the hardliner conspracy theorists who would still follow him if he reported that GENs McCrystal and Menard are actually alien lizards planning to take over the world. Guys like Herschel Smith who may soon be having second thoughts after his latest outburst…

From what I have heard, Canadian BG Menard fired more than 1 round. The high-profile person in his presence was the Canadian 4 star general. This is a stupid investigation, however. Worst kept secret at TF K is BG Menard’s adulterous affairs with female soldiers at KAF under his command. This is a distracted and selfish commander. He should not be leading troops who are sacrificing everything.

…and even his Facebook fans are now starting to kickback (I wonder how many more will have their ability to comment blocked?)…

Michael… This is not reporting. This is rumor proliferation akin to a TMZ. Come on, man. You’re better than that.

So this reaches us third hand. You’re accusing the man of serious crimes. You’d better have some evidence.

Rumors of rumors of rumors. Mike, you are above this.

Michael. Seems like you take this too far.

Third stool down rumors mean nothing to me!! Just makes you look even worse..why don’t you just stick to reporting about the troops and leave the brass alone.

I agree with Carol. This is the rumour profligation, bordering on tabloid rumour mill, versus professional journalism. It makes a reader wonder if this is bitterness from losing embed privileges, or the inability to report on news because of the lack of access. I wonder if Canadian attorneys are monitoring for possible slander?

Regarding that last comment, I think it would be funny as all hell if the targeted generals play Yon at his own game and actually do start a campaign against him – probably starting with Facebook and any other services and ISPs that host his libel…as an independent, I’m not sure how far journalistic privilege will protect him, if at all…

On target

Smart guy that GEN Mattis…

Mattis is an evangelist for risk with two core principles. The first is that intellectual risk-taking will save the military bureaucracy from itself. Only by rewarding nonconformist innovators will the services develop solutions that match the threats conceived by an enemy that always adapts. The second is that technology cannot eliminate, and sometimes can’t even reduce, risk. Mattis warns about the limitations of sophisticated weapons and communications. They can be seductive, luring military planners into forgetting war’s unpredictable and risky nature, leaving troops vulnerable.

I couldn’t agree more. I’d heard a few ripples in the pond that the US military (or elements of it) might be reverting back to the old Fulda Gap zero defects way of thinking, what you might call i-don’t-want-to-get-into-trouble-itis rather than making judgement calls. Ben Shaw’s comments on Herschel Smith’s Yon post at the end of last week are worth reading regardless of the original post. Ben raises a number of issues regarding this – I’ve since contacted him direct and it sounds pretty dire in some units. It’s unknown yet whether contributing factors could be ‘winning the war in Iraq’ or maybe a lowering of standards to meet deployment outputs. More to follow on this…

There is also still a strong school of thought in the US DoD that still sees this whole COIN, ‘little war’ thing as an aberration, a side step or even a step backwards from ‘real war’. This especially seems to be driven from senior echelons of the USAF (except for the A-10 drivers) and USN, with a following in those branches like Armour and Arty that perceive that they have taken a back seat to the SF and infantry in Iraq and Afghanistan. For these types, technology rules in the sterile structured environments of a Tom Clancy story – wouldn’t be surprised if some sleep with The Bear and The Dragon under their pillows…dreaming of push-button wars…

In the end it’s all about risk-taking AND judgement – and teaching and practising it before ever getting close to the start line. Of course that would mean that DS might have to part with their trusty whites and actually think…

Wow! Way cool…

http://www.geocities.jp/ikenohata2005/sovereign4-e.html

It’s not logical…

Posted on 15 April 2010 by SJPONeill

On February 12th 1942, No 825 Squadron, based at RAF Manston, carried out a virtual suicide mission in an attempt lo damage or sink the Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, and Prince Eugen, and remove them from the Kriegsmarine’s order of battle when they made the infamous Channel Dash from Brest back to Germany. All six aircraft were lost for no effect on the enemy ships, but for the sheer courage shown in carrying out the attack, a posthumous award of the Victoria Cross was made to the CO of the Squadron Lieutenant Commander Eugene Esmonde, and the other aircrew were mentioned in dispatches, only five of the eighteen men involved in the attack survived. (c) http://www.marklittlejohn.com

@ Small War Council yesterday, I kicked off a thread The Dumbness of Oneness. Readers will, I’m sorry, have to pop over to Small Wars to view the original post and subsequent comments [edit: not anymore: PDFs below]. The short version is that I am challenging the industrial age mentality that is still so evident in much of our thinking, even after eight and a half years, 5000+ combat casualties and thousands of civilian victims of this ‘new war’ against takfiri jihadists of all races, religions and persuasions.

The Dumbness of Oneness pt 1 The Dumbness of Oneness pt 2

In the quotes in the thread, a theme emerged that perhaps the commanders from WW1 and WW2 actually had a far better handle on the art of war than those today who seek to make it a simple push-button science based more on Harvard Business School methodologies than the accumulated experience and lessons of history. War is not simple, not is it logical nor rational…it can not be distilled down to simple formulae and calculations that will determine the outcome of an engagement. War is about much more than a simple financial bottom line.

It was no more rational for 825 Squadron to fly into the German guns than it was for the New Zealand Division to break out from Minqar Qaim, the Marines to hold out at Wake, or for any of the hundreds of US CSAR missions in Vietnam and other conflict zones – these actions do not stack up in a balance sheet calculation that has no place for courage, camaraderie or commitment, no value that quantifies the human spirit. This is the myth of modern manoeuvre warfare – that achieving a position of dominance over a foe takes the place of actually defeating that opponent. History is as full of ‘sure thing’ plans that ended in tears as it is of desperate acts that paid off.

The myth of oneness is equally false. Although there is no dispute that there are advantages in common approaches and equipment, this should never be allowed to adversely affect effectiveness. Amanda Lennon stated at the New Zealand Chief of Army’s Conference last year that “…coalition interoperability requirements drive conceptual laziness…” and this is the risk of oneness as well: under the guise of interoperability, we create a bubble of dumbness that expands throughout an organisation. Driven by drives for efficiency, we forgot not so much how to do things but WHY we do them. We rationalise away the need for drill and colours and things as unnecessary in modern war, forgetting that they foster the courage, camaraderie and commitment that bolsters a force when the going gets really tough.

I surf the Get Frank site periodically, mainly because it has good competitions, and came across this editorial item Schama on New Zealand. In summarising, it states “…but beyond that, these people see only money. They measure the worth of a society solely in terms of GDP. As a result, they are utterly blind to our real achievements, and place no value on them…” This is not simply a question of core values although they are part of it. It is about remembering what is important in maintaining, nurturing and evolving the art of war…for there will come a time when we will face a foe is both prepared to and capable of going toe to toe with us in real War…where the blandness of oneness will be exposed at what cost?

Edit: 20 Nov 2018. The original Get Frank article is gone but I found a similarly-themed article from Simon Schama from the same period that also notes the value of diversity to New Zealand.

bbc-news-behold-newstralia Download

The New War #5 the new intelligences

Posted on 13 April 2010 by SJPONeill

“…the game of chess, even three-dimensional chess, is simplicity itself compared to a political game using pieces that can change their minds independently of other pieces…” ~ Mr Spock, Garth of Izar, Pocket Books, 2003.

It being the twins’ birthday the weekend just gone, I was offline most of the weekend and it was only last night that I saw a Stuff report of the contact involving Kiwi personnel in Afghanistan on Saturday “…a group using small arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades attacked a combined New Zealand and US patrol from the New Zealand provincial reconstruction team in the northeast of Bamiyan province…the patrol returned fire, driving the insurgents off after a 15-20 minute engagement…”

There’s not much information in the Stuff article but with the recent changeover of Operation CRIB (the NZ PRT) contingents this might be simple cases of the local likely lads testing the mettle of the newest kids on the block – although ‘newest’ may be a bit of the stretch as some of these troops will be on their third or maybe even fourth deployment in this theatre…chatting with a colleague yesterday, the conversation turned to ‘what is an insurgent?‘ and ‘who says so?‘.

Obviously a lot of information on this contact has not been released but one wonders what confirmation there has been that the instigators of this attack were actually insurgents i.e. activists seeking to render political change through acts of violence. Or were they were something else? Perhaps…

a couple of lads out to impress some local lasses with their courage and prowess…?

some bored locals seeking to spice up a small ISAF patrol because they could…?

an attempt at ‘accidental insurgency’ to meet local quotas for attacks on the ‘infidel invaders’…?

As it appears in the Collateral Murder story released by Wikileaks last week, if you go out in the badlands looking for insurgents, then ‘insurgents’ are what you find, often with significant second order effects at both strategic and tactical levels. In all fairness, those who engaged the combined NZ/US patrol on Saturday may very well have been insurgents of some sort, possibly even more focused than accidental…but as attacks go in this theatre, it was in “…good country for ambushes…, “‘…driven off...” in “…15-10 minutes…” and was all over before air support arrived on the scene.

In places like Afghanistan, carrying an AK or an RPG does not necessarily an insurgent make, not does arcing up in the general direction of an ISAF patrol. So if the shooters have been confirmed as insurgents, which would be a an outstanding intel flash to bang noting the time between the attack and the NZDF media release, well and good…if not yet proven, then perhaps some less martial language would be more appropriate.

As David Kilcullen proposes in The Accidental Guerrilla and is further discussed in The New War #4 – Normalcy, the birth of an insurgent is a direct reaction to actions of host nation or foreign interventions…we need to understand not just the process of ‘accidentalisation’ but the local nuances and catalysts that often make incidents of ‘accidentalism’ so distinct and different between different areas and groups.

I was interested to read in Wired that the UK is deploying its Defence Cultural Specialist Unit (DCSU) to Helmand Province. This may be an example of learning from the experiences of others, specifically the US Army’s Human Terrain Systems teams that have been operating for some years now. I was intrigued by the last paragraph in the Wired article “…the US Human Terrain System has seen its fair share of controversy. It will be worth watching this initiative as well to see if it provokes backlash among British social scientists…”

I did some research into the HTS teams after mention of them appeared in one of the Interbella briefs. From what I saw then, I rated the HTS as a damn fine idea that’s time had definitely come; more so when it appeared to be a logical consequence of Michael Scheiern’s platform- to individual-based transition model.

So, I was quite surprised to find the degree of active resistance within the anthropological community, or certainly a very vocal element within it, to the employment of HTS teams in operational theatres like Iraq and Afghanistan. I’ve yet to find a copy of Roberto Gonzalez’ Human Science and Human Terrain [note: I reviewed it later]. Gonzalez is reportedly critical of the US Army’s adoption of anthropological techniques to aid in the understanding and interpreting of contemporary operating environments. In all the reviews and articles I have read in the last day or so that support Gonzalez, I can find few threads of logic; instead I get a very real feeling of rampant prima-donnaism amongst what is really quite a small and relatively insignificant strand in the broader carpet of science. Indicative of this content are Fighting militarization of anthropology, The Leaky Ship of Human Terrain Systems, and The Dangerous Militarisation of Anthropology.

Another finding of the New Zealand COIN doctrine review was that intelligence in the complex environment will need to transformed to closer resemble police-style criminal intelligence (CRIMINT) focussed on a. individuals and b. providing fast and accurate response to an initiated action. This would require a clear shift, transformation even, from traditional military intelligence that is…

…focussed on conventional platforms and groupings, and

…driven largely by predictive philosophies.

Science and warfare have always gone together in an alliance that is both logical and inevitable. Eight years into the war on terror, there seems no reason why the CRIMINT finding does not stand true. We should also accept that sciences like anthropology offer us useful tools to assist with the uncertainty and complexity of the contemporary environment.

The moral objections of Manhattan Project scientists are somewhat strained when these same scientists were remarkably silent on such topics as the firebombing of German and Japanese cities, actions which causing far more civilian deaths than the atomic bombs ever did. The ‘do no harm‘ stance of Gonzalez and his fellow bleating liberal anthropologist cronies is sickening in both its naiveté and its preciousness. If this group really cared about those most likely to be harmed through misuse of social sciences, then surely they embrace the HTS concept as a practical and employable means of promoting greater precision of both information and effects in current theatres of operation?

Tied into the need to transform towards individually-focussed CRIMINT, was a need to better integrate operational analysis (OA) techniques into contemporary intelligence systems. These techniques would enhance and evolve pattern analysis processes to better grapple with the greater amounts of information in far greater detail than conventional intelligence systems were ever designed to manage. Unfortunately this finding seemed to die a death when the term ANALINT developed a perverse life all its own, alienating a proportion of the OA community.

In the last two decades, we have spent too long declaring war (lower case) on every real or imagined threat to western society that we have become somewhat blase and have forgotten what actual War really is. While the generation that sacrificed 5000 of its members in Afghanistan and Iraq may lead the way in remembering what War really is, it’s influence has yet to be felt…War is not nice, War is not safe…War is not a game…War is not something where we can artificially pick and choose based on what is convenient or suits at the time…

To artificially deny the utility of science like anthropology in winning the Wars we are in, to discard tools that save lives on BOTH sides, to dignify self-centred egotists like Gonzales is an insult to every one of those 5000…

http://www.stuff.co.nz/world/middle-east/3555243/US-military-can-t-find-its-copy-of-Iraq-killing-video