Starship Troopers

Posted on 16 December 2009 by SJPONeill

It is quite scary that there are people out there (apparently lots of them too!) who think that Starship Troopers is only a crap movie from the late 90s with a great shower scene…it would be interesting some day to consider the effects of digital media upon the depth of our society’s knowledge…whereas we once read books, we now wait for the movie; once we read the paper over breakfast or at work and got not only the news but insightful commentary, now we scan the headlines on out iPhones in search of the sensational or titillating…

There is a discussion on The Long War, Counterinsurgency Operations, and the Future of the Armed Forces on Sic Semper Tyrannis. Based upon a short paper of the same name by Adam Silverman, It discusses among other things, the value or not of the draft and of legislative process in going to war (real war with shooting, guns and things, not war on obesity, drugs, poverty or other social ailments). While it is generally accepted that the draft, while nice to talk about, is not a viable option now, it does identify the need for “…A discussion and debate over the nature of service and the nature of what everyone is required to contribute as a citizen in exchange for our rights and responsibilities would be a long overdue public good…” The global “me, me, me” society of today has forgotten that the relationship between the elements of Clausewitz’s Trinity is symbiotic and NOT geared solely for the pleasure and comfort of ‘the people’.

The discussion also touches upon the tiers of citizenship upon which Heinlein’s Starship Troopers‘ society is built: there are citizens and civilians – to become a citizen with its attendant privileges AND responsibilities, a civilian must volunteer to serve. Although interwined with Heinlein’s own philosophies on life, politics and society, it is one of his better, less openly satirical reads and strikes on a number of levels. At face value, it is simply a ripping good scifi war yarn; at another, it delves into the relationships between those who serve and those who opt not to. At yet another level, it provides an aspirational insight into the empty battlefield or distributed operations – IF you have the right combination and level of mobility, situational awareness, firepower and devolved decision-making to avoid simple defeat in detail. I would humbly submit that no military force has attain these goals yet and that those who may be closest are those who we currently face…

So…Starship Troopers…find and read a copy of the book – the whole unabridged version (no cheating with Reader’s Digest)…it is available via Audible so you can ‘read’ while on the commute or cycling/rowing/stepping in the gym…the movie is only good for some lightweight voyeurism, a not bad soundtrack and some cool spaceship designs of which the Rodger Young can be seen being built on Paper Modelers (not 1:1 though…).

Them’s the breaks

One thing that really bugs me about so much contemporary doctrine and writing is the way in which we as the ‘good guys’ are portrayed as inept numpties and the insurgents/criminals/terrorists are painted as unstoppable unbeatable uber-bogeymen. It was so very refreshing, then, to receive this paper by Lincoln Krause on the mistakes that insurgents commonly make and as suggested in the paper, perhaps a gap in FM 3-24 that might be filled in the next go-round? These are the types of things that we need to be teaching in conjunction with the things that an adversary might do well and advantages that they may have over us, especially if we opt to let them maintain those advantages…

The Dark Side of the Information Militia

And probably the one we are the most familiar with…damn hackers…but the penny openly dropped for me this morning reading this Wired article Hackers Brew Self-Destruct Code to Counter Police Forensics which came in through Linked-In. Of course there is a dark to every light and I should have picked up on this way earlier…

Neptunus Lex calls it a travesty and he ain’t wrong. The rise and fall of a military blogger illustrates the difficulties of trying to restrain modern information technologies with rules and regulations designed for bygone days where paper and the typing pool ruled. no wonder the bad guys are all over us in the cybersphere. There is no way to protect our information now other than through education – the more draconian the rules we implement, the more chinks in the armour will be made – and exploited…In a very brief but uber-broad post, The Strategist links to a couple of articles on the whys and why-nots of taking the war to cyberspace – personally I think that the Guardian article on the why-nots is weak and bordering on pitiful – maybe the author was strapped for an idea and just churned it out to meet a deadline? Those same ‘citizens’ who bleat upon civil liberties are also those who bleat loudest when the fascist pig police don’t divert 100% of their resources to lock up the thugs who tagged their mailbox, and are those who would sacrifice the least for the common good…me, me, me…I agree totally with John Arquilla at Foreign Policy on the whys: so long as we cry about the adversaries’ use of information technologies against us and do nothing about it, we are artificially constraining ourselves and that’s a helluva way to run a war – the COIN Review found that mastering the COE will require us to master information fusion from a range and depth of sources the likes of we have never consider before. More so, as we adopt Michael Scheiern’s concept of individual-based tracking, cyberspace is where we must also find the individuals and track them…

I also agree with Peter’s crystal ball comment re the UK – a la Once Was An Empire which is symptomatic of the decay that is now becoming visible…

On the lighter side of the Information Militia, Steven Pressfield discusses the philosophy of Giving It Away – taking the plunge and not holding out for me, me, me direct physical rewards for one’s labours… looking at the big picture and the long game instead…

I wish WordPress had an Unpublish button as I hit Publish by mistake and now have to complete today’s post ‘live’ as it were….

Islam’s First Heretics

A brief by interesting article on Coming Anarchy

COIN, Training and Education

Small War Journal has a couple of good discussions going on: Counterinsurgency and Professional Military Education; Integrating COIN into Army Professional Education; The Army Capstone Concept: the Army wants your comments Feel free to leap in and value add…

Circles, triangles and squares…

Posted on 15 December 2009 by SJPONeill

It’s all about understanding…yesterday, we worked with the grand-twins and understanding circles, triangles and squares…lots of fun in the sun…I wish understanding COIN, CIT and CIA could be as easy and as much fun…

I seem to have mildly upset some people…in the case of Patrick Lang’s entry on COIN as a failed strategy, I think that we both actually agree – our issue is more other the semantics of COIN than whether COIN has worked in Afghanistan or not; neither of us believe that it has but my stance is that because the current campaign in Afghanistan is not the same campaign as the original OEF that went into deal to Al-Qaeda training bases and cadres. Somewhere along the way OEF evolved from a Direct Action on a large-scale to a pseudo-COIN campaign. I say ‘pseudo’ because there never was an insurgency to counter until the end of the direct action phase of OEF, say, from the end of 2002 onwards. That insurgency was directed primarily against US/NATO forces that had, in the eyes of Afghans, invaded their nation. Thus the ‘logical’ way to neutralise that insurgency would be to remove the cause. Once the Al-Qaeda training camps and cadres in Afghanistan had been neutralised by the end of 2002, anti-terrorism efforts should have continued to pursue Rupert Smith’s ‘franchisers of terror’ wherever they may have gone, to apply those resources that have essentially been wasted in Afghanistan against the real threat.

A COIN strategy has been (mis)applied in Afghanistan: it’s not about a struggle for the people, it’s not about hearts and minds and it’s certainly NOT about trying to inflict our culture and values on another society – is that one of the reasons that WE have gone to war to fight against? That bit of unpleasantness 1939-45 springs to mind…for two millennia and more, Afghanistan has been a loose confederation of tribes with a vaguely ineffective central government – the government leaves the tribes alone and vice versa; the only time there is anything remotely resembling a unified Afghanistan is when there is the perception of an invader and no occupation of this country has succeeded in 2000 years.

It all comes down to the same issue in the end: what are the strategic objectives for the campaign in Afghanistan? What are the troops there to do? Those are the two questions that needed to be asked in late 2002. The current campaign will not address historical issues with the border with Pakistan and the tribal areas(next to religion, the most common cause of war in the last century must be British imperial surveyors!!); it will not change the power bases in Pakistan; and it certainly is not going to address issues of Pakistan’s membership of the nuke club. If the aim is to develop a stable governance structure (possibly in lieu of a government) then the Taliban must be engaged with more than small arms and JDAMs: as the force that will (and is) filling the vacuum of control in Afghanistan, they must be encouraged to come to the table. What do we want? An Al-Qaeda-free Afghanistan under a Taliban-controlled/led alliance or another decade of what we’ve got now? The ‘secure the cities’ Cursed Earth approach may be sustainable but it brings us no closer to resolution.

So the problem that Patrick Lang identifies is not the failure of COIN as a means of statecraft but the application of the wrong tool for the job. In his post on the historical failure of COIN he uses a number of examples. Malaya and Kenya are written off as failures because of the resources in terms of time, blood and treasure applied for little return, more so since the UK let both nations go at the end of the respective campaigns. He misses the point that both Malaysia and Kenya have, since their independence, been islands of relative stability for the succeeding four decades. From the Malayan Emergency came the establishment of the state of Singapore as a separate home for dissenting Chinese from Malaysia – Singapore is now a prime source of economic, political and security stability across the ASEAN region with strong relationships around the globe. Similarly the 70s campaign in Oman, which led to a number of reforms in that nation, also left an island of regional stability. That there are still ripples in the Cyrean pond are not due to the failure of the British COIN campaign there but to periodic posturing between the ethnic Greek and Turkish populations – but Cyprus has been pretty stable for decades. Northern Ireland is a classic example with few of the advantages that Commonwealth forces had in Malaya like ethnic differences between ‘the people’ and the insurgents, lack of offshore support, etc; others include Belize; East Timor, Solomon Islands and Bougainville; and Hungary and Czechoslovakia (you do not have to like the Soviet methods but you can not deny their effectiveness).

Did the COIN campaign in Vietnam fail? Only in that, like in Afghanistan, the campaign did not take into account the key issue: in the end, it was not about defending the South against the North: it was about reunification. Perhaps if the reunification of Vietnam had been the primary objective from the first advisor to set foot in that country, it may have worked out so differently. Let’s not forget that Ho Chi Minh originally wanted to align with the US to expel the French (the nation that is REALLY despised in Vietnam) but was screwed over in favour of bolstering the tottering remnants of French Empire. That was when the Communists (franchisers of terror?) stepped into the void. So long as reunification was not on the table as an objective, Vietnam was probably never winnable – what are we really here for? – but is the failure to clearly identify the issues and the eventual erosion of political and domestic support a failure of COIN? We can and will argue about it for years but I am on the side of not – a good workman never blames his tools – and here, as in Afghanistan, the workman is not so much the soldier ( as I inadvertently applied on Sic Semper Tyrannis) but the political arm that decides such adventures are or are not a good idea…the biggest war amongst ‘the people’ is always at home….

This is one of the reasons the COIN Review adopted the USMC term Countering Irregular Threats (CIT) over COIN as a descriptor for the Contemporary Operating Environment: COIN is a subset of CIT. One of the main reasons for this decision was that as soon as COIN is mentioned the two immediate response are “Malaya” and “Winning hearts and minds” and we are off down the slippery slopes of assumptions and misapplied lessons. Exploring the CIT concept further brought us to the British (and they do have some experience in this area, overseas and at home) term Countering Irregular Activity (CIA). This works on the premise that we should be thinking in terms of countering irregularity before it becomes a threat let alone a war and by starting to consider an irregularity before it becomes a threat, we are much more likely to NOT discount non-kinetic courses of action to address that irregularity. When you consider that there are only really two types of operation: stability (what else might you call operations to counter destabilising activities – counter-destability?) and warfighting. Perhaps stability operations should be led by ‘not the military’ in order to be able to consider other options, just as warfighting operations, by definition, should be military-led – both, of course, in support of clearly defined national objectives.

Patrick asked me if I thought that this was just a game played by academics in journals. My first response was denial but it is exactly that. What greater endorsement for a comprehensive approach to the problems of the COE than to be able to have such discussions outside of in-house military think-tanks; to be able to put one’s opinions and thoughts to the world without fear of formal censure (some harsh words perhaps at worst between differers of opinion); and perhaps by virtue of that openness to be able to contribute in some small way to the intellectual horsepower assembled to address those problems. Hence the Information Militia concept: loosely organised; often fractured and factionalised; following a general direction but often only through the sum of a number of tangents – but still useful to have around. There was a post recently on the Small Wars Council Blog entitled Where is Our Kilcullen? that was critical of the Marines for not having developed its own Kilcullen – as a number of posters have pointed out, the US has its fair share of COIN thinkers and one of David Kilcullen’s big advantages was that, as an outsider, he probably had greater freedom to say the unpalatable. But there is no denying that many of these thinkers both exist and exist outside the formal structures of the Army (or Marine Corps, if you have one). It is this rich and robust discussion, that we encourage, foster and nurture that maybe gives us an edge over the takfiri who strive to suppress any and all who don’t agree, conform or comply…how else would our Gants and Wineeras ever get a word in otherwise…?

I mentioned a couple of days ago that I am reviewing the RAAF’s Friends in High Places publication and one of the themes emerging from this an awareness of retaining, because we can, the old single service stovepipes and continuing to do what we do in isolation from other operators in the same environment…becoming dumber as we become smarter. The two posts by MattF and MikeF in the Kilcullen thread proposing that field-grade officers be posted on tours outside their service or the military as part of broadening cultural horizons are good ideas – and again examples of where we may have had a good thing in place once and allowed it to lapse…we don’t know what we don’t know and often the only way to find out is to get out and find out. So as military professionals perhaps we need to be getting out and getting our boots dirty, not in the field where we lead, but in areas of commerce, politics, diplomacy, aid, etc where we do not lead…and by doing so make ourselves better stronger and faster for dealing with irregular activities.

Police and COIN

The other person I have upset a little is one of the chaps from Coming Anarchy – in this case, that was my intention as I think that he had leapt a little before thinking – the whole concept behind COIN (still in a misuse of the term) is that it is solely not a military operation and often, the military might not even have the lead in what is more correctly a CIA (no, not that CIA!!!) campaign in Salinas. Thus the COIN doctrine being employed in Salinas might quite plausibly include no military courses of action at all – and rightly so for a domestic policing campaign. That campaign will probably include a strong element of law enforcement (and regardless of how some might dress, there are not the military), civil aid, political action at the town and possibly state levels, support initiatives from commercial and corporate entities e.g. jobs, etc etc. All these are approaches that can be find in most contemporary Western COIN doctrine – the adoption does not bring the advent of martial law any closer. If anything, the Salinas initiative is an indication that some traditional barriers have been eroded to allow the adoption and implementation of someone else’s good ideas…Equally, there is much that we can, should and are learning from how police operate in some situations…

If there is one major issue arising from the Salinas initiative, it is the one identified last month as “..a tradition of police officers who “love the chase. They get into this business to kick ass and take names, by and large. We’re at odds with ourselves because of the people we hire...” So before we get into any discussion of the rights or wrongs of what doctrine is used, we need to seriously consider who we recruit to apply it…I don’t know but I would be interested to learn how much ethos and values training is included in both formal police entry (recruit) training and also post-graduation on the job…

Up, up and away

I visited Palmerston North the Friday before last and caught up with a mate who is using flight simulation technologies in his work…he took me for a ‘flight’ out of RNZAF Ohakea in a Vulcan B.2, thundering through the valleys around home…only minor thing wrong was that a Vulcan coming out of Ohakea should look like this:

Avro Vulcan B.2, 75 Sqn RNZAF, 1972

So what if…

Posted on 12 December 2009 by SJPONeill

…we all got together as a planet and deliberately decided to make it worse…?

At Blunty the other day John Birmingham offers comment on the Swiss’ totally mindblowingly stupid decision to ban minarets on buildings…”Switzerland’s Muslims, for instance, are reported to be mostly refugees from the Balkans who had already been thoroughly Europeanized over many centuries and who would have been almost perfectly suited to demonstrating that Islam and Western, secular modernity can live in harmony.” Hands-up any person who wouldn’t be offended and feel victimised and discriminated against after this dumbness…Across Europe, Muslim communities that are decades, sometimes centuries, old are being isolated and driven into the arms of the jihadists and takfirists – those whose other passion is hate…

I’ve commented before on the Islamic Brotherhood’s stark and blatant reluctance to get involved and sort out problems in its own backyard – if they could get up off their diamond-encrusted backsides to do so – if only 1% of all the aid that Saudi poured into the various Palestinian liberation movements over the decades was invested into modern day Palestine, it would be, per capita, one of the wealthiest nations on the planet. Spread the wealth around carefully and the unemployment, unrest and lack of hope that feeds the jihadists would blink out of existence overnight – Palestine might even become the reborn centre of Islamic study, learning and science as Islam once lead the world before the takfir nutjobs took over.

That Saudi is not interested in helping the Palestinians and is in fact quite happy keeping them marginalised as third class global citizens is quite clear in this article from Coming Anarchy “…As many as a quarter of a million Palestinians live in Saudi Arabia, but they are prohibited to hold or even apply for Saudi citizenship because of Arab League instructions barring Arab states from granting them citizenship in order “to avoid dissolution of their identity and protect their right to return to their homeland.” Yeah, right…The palestinians have been used and abuser by their Arab and muslim ‘brothers’ for decades and they have the balls to refer to the US as ‘The Great Satan”? You really have to wonder if it occurs to OBL and his ilk that if they want the US to butt out of Middle Eastern affairs, the way to do it is to promote STABILITY in the region. They are quite right when they say that Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan are Arab/Muslim problems…jolly good, but when it’s time to step up to the plate and do something about it, everybody remembers they had something else to do in their gold-plated swimming pools…of course, when the Saudi water table finally dies, and the gold-plated swimming pool is full of sand, it’ll probably be too late…

Last month The Strategist made comment, as did I in Rattatattatat… on the Salinas Police Department’s request for assistance from the US Navy Postgraduate School in Monterey to assist in countering its gang problem (7 murders in 11 days!!). Coming Anarchy has just picked up on Washington Post article on the same story but instead of recognising the initiative for what it is, Coming Anarchy has disappointingly misused it to leap on its own little bandwagon of police militancy…it’s not hard to see why the planet might be going to hell in a hand basket when simple innovative initiatives like those in Salinas are used as just another excuse to beat the police. The simple fact is that COIN doctrine (from the top to the lowest TTPs) is eminently employable in law enforcement and that not only should that concept be fostered and nurtured but we should be encouraging the military to pass on its lessons from expeditionary COIN campaigns – who knows they might even learn something in return…? How might Jim Gant’s tribal strategy be employed to counter the gang culture? It’s all about stability in the end…perhaps this is an idea for a paper to complement Josh’s one on fighting P in New Zealand? I don’t have a copy of this on hand but will see if I can upload it next week…

Falklands ’47

The actual idea for the title of today’s post came from Paper Modelers…I looked at this aircraft, an indigenous Argentinian redesign of the Mosquito and wondered…what-if the Falklands War had taken place some three or four decades earlier – might we have seen Argentinian Calquins forcing strikes against a small British fleet armed with the latest in naval aviation, the Supermarine Attacker; Sikorsky R-4s conducting early airmobiles; and the Black Buck missions conducted by the original Vulcans (before they did all those horrible things to the leading edge!)…I had thought that this might fit into the Axis of Time Birmoverse model but couldn’t get it to fly with the high tech edge that Allies had at the end of that WW2…

The 2 Ds…

I really like this post on children at play from The Strategist – Peter I think has turned off the commenting option but I think that the underlying theme in his humour is important enough to offer my own thoughts here: the two D’s of developing children: dirt and danger…if they don’t know it’s OK to get dirty and take risks as children, then they won’t as adults and will always want the nanny-state to be there for them… Yes, yes, yes to all the mindless nanny-statist chorusing the need for supervision…it’s not like we’re proposing that all newborns be left out in the wild to see if they can survive on their own – if we did that, we’d never get a National Caucus together – but let children figure things out for themselves instead of pushing the panic button every time they try to add a bit of dirt and dead bug to their diets…I remember, many many years ago, when Guy Fawkes was still fun, the rich kid up the road made his own nebelwerfer using a milk crate with (holding 5×5?=)25 bottles, each with a skyrocket linked to a central fuse – ABSOLUTELY spectacular when launched at a 30 degree angle!!! We used to make our own cluster bombs by attaching strings of crackers to skyrockets so they would scatter and explode after the rocket burst…all good clean Kiwi fun…and we turned out OK…

Reality

Posted on 8 December 2009 by SJPONeill

According to Phillip K. Dick, Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.

My reality today is that the sun is finally out, things are drying out and I can finally dig down and fix the storm water feed into the water tank – realities of rural life are than it is not cool to run out of water in summer…happy reality is that we now have four chicks that have survived at least one night in the unshelled world and were last seen stepping out of their coop with mum to enjoy some sun as well…

When I visited on Friday, the Air Power Development Centre loaned me some reading in the form of a collection of recent RAAF papers and my mission when the sun goes down (that’s me, the doctrinal vampire that only comes out after dark or when it is raining…) is to devour the first paper and start to form some thoughts on air power, COIN/CIT/CIA and the COE…I think that it is very interesting that the aircraft shown is not an F/A-18, F-111 or even the F-35O but the trusty Herc; similarly the ground vehicle is not an M-1 or ASLAV but the less glamorous Bushmaster…is this a deliberate statement? If so it is a very powerful one when evolving to meet the realities of the complex environment…

Should I stay or should I go now?

Posted on 7 December 2009 by SJPONeill

Should I stay or should i go now?
if I go there will be trouble
and if I stay it will be double
so come on and let me know
The indecisions bugging me

~ The Clash

I’ve been busy with other matters the last week or so and a bit lax in monitoring the blogspace…John Birmingham’s Blunty had an article last week on Australia’s commitment to Afghanistan and, in the comments, refers readers to “…a great piece by my old boss, Gen. Jim Molan…” Interesting to get some more local opinions on the global debate on Afghanistan and the way ahead. I googled for the lyrics from The Clash and was amused to see this comment on the web site – although posted years ago, it’s still pretty pertinent to today’s discussion:

Mr. Peabody	08/03/2006 07:59:18
Really getting sick of this overplayed tune. Should you stay or should you go? Here’s a clue: If you have to ask, get off your knees, salvage what little you have left of your dignity, and GO!

Although anyone who is genuinely interested should read the original articles, there’s couple of extracts I considered worthy of quoting direct. Firstly from Blunty:

Mr Flinthart’s comment bears a stand alone response. The definition of war aims has never been settled in Afghanistan, and from that has flowed much waste and tragedy, including a new and wholly unnecessary war in Iraq, a war which has crippled our ability to win this first conflict, and to deal with the Iranian regime’s pursuit of WMDs.

So what are the aims?

To destroy the Taiban and AQ? If so, FAIL. As long as the Pakistani Interservices Intelligence Agency is using Omah and bin Laden as their glove puppets, there will always be a competitor for the Afghan government, such as it is.

To contain them, denying Fascist Islam a state from which to plot and launch more attacks? More reasonable and defensible as a strategy, and yet it also rides the Fail Whale because the Bearded Enemy already controls a number of significant state actors, some of which are pursuing WMD capabilities quite openly. Why do they get a free pass when Afghanistan doesn’t. It’s best if war aims are internally consistent.

As for the ‘Afghan’ people, Mr Flinthart is correct. This conflict, or rather this element of the wider conflict, is lost without them. But rather than asking what do they want, a precursor question is probably ‘Who the hell are they, anyway’. Desk Jockey, I think, made the telling point about long standing and often hyper local ethnic and religious enmities underlying the greater geo-strategic architecture. Afghanistan does not have ‘a people’ it has an atomised, massively riven enclave of tribes, families, ethnic groups, war lords, state sponsored criminal gangs, foreign jihadi and so on. Is it even possible to speak of enough of them wanting enough in common to begin building a coalition from which a rough patchwork state might be fashioned? Probably, but it’d be a helluva job.

And in the end, pointless, because we’re not willing to fight.

JB | Outer Angrystan. – December 03, 2009, 9:40AM

And from Gen Molan’s piece in The Australian:

Australia is assisting Afghanistan for any number of reasons: as part of our alliance responsibilities; for our own self-interest in combating terror; for humanitarian and moral reasons, and because we are there and it is harder to withdraw than to not commit initially…If we think that we have a special relationship with the US, and every aspect of our defence and security policy is based on this assumption, then now is not the time to hang back, hoping not to be noticed.

The crux of the matter remains what are we there for? I have to agree with JB “…The definition of war aims has never been settled in Afghanistan, and from that has flowed much waste and tragedy…” Operation Enduring Freedom achieved its aims in dealing to Al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan by the end of 2002 – sadly it seems that more people hung their hats on the name of the operation and not it’s objectives. The most common justification for maintaining commitments to ISAF is now the difficulty of extraction although it is a fairly safe call that many will learn from the US drawdown in 18 months as the pressure starts to come on to those nations that have been dragging the chain…did someone say Europe and the Islamic states?

The absolute #1 rule of warfare is to have a clear and visible mandate…no one ever said it better than Princess Leia “When you broke in here, did you have a plan for getting out?” The #1 rule of COIN/CIT/CIA is to address the underlying causes of the conflict. The #1 rule of COIN is NOT to promote the rule of government! That is but one of many means to the end of addressing the core issues and creating governance as an absolute leads directly to the mess that Afghanistan has become – how do you promote the rule of something that simply does not exist? One of the comments to the Blunty article asks “…why not Balkanise this so-called nation? There are minority groups who would probably be delighted with that outcome. Maybe it would be easier to define and defend the aspirations and rights of, say, the Hazara and allow the Incredibly Medieval Bearded Nutters to concentrate in one place? Surrounding and relatively enlightened statelets might provide a refuge for the perpetually oppressed (women, gays, atheists etc)…” Not quite as polished perhaps, but certainly a similar theme to that of Jim Gant’s One Tribe at a Time proposal: instead of building something new that is not working, why not build on what is already there?

Even though, 18 months is not nearly long enough to develop anything sustainable which brings us back to the original question: Should I stay or should I go now?

FFS!

And under the FFS heading this morning, there has just been an article on Breakfast that the NZ Army is adopting a crocodile from the aquarium in Napier as it’s new mascot…google a little more and it’s actually all of the Army, not even all of Linton Army Camp…in fact, just one little movements company..see Stuff here…

Accidental Guerrilla Part 2

Posted on 3 December 2009 by SJPONeill

Well, that did get better as it progressed…I found the first two chapters close to interminable, loved Chapter 3 on Iraq and the last Chapter on the way ahead; I didn’t like the chapter of allegedly supporting case studies: nothing annoys me more than someone flogging a dead horse of a model when the evidence in the case studies simply doesn’t supply the model, in this case, that of the Accidental Guerrilla.

I agree that foreign fighters and Rupert Smith’s ‘franchisers of terror‘ are significant forces in the irregular activity world, however I simply do not accept that national guerrillas become such ‘by accident’. Opportunist, reactive or responsive would be better adjectives for national guerrillas in that they react to and/or seize an opportunity presented by the actions of national or international interventions (civil and/or military).

The other major factor that detracts from The Accidental Guerrilla is its over-fixation on Islamic terrorism, instead of upon more general terrorism and insurgency. By labouring the Islamic angle, the author may be going some way to further the rift between Islamic communities and the rest of the world.

Similarly, the whole concept of ‘hybrid warfare’ just grates…war is by definition is a complex activity that resists simple definitions – one which also tends to punish those who fail to respect this fact. To postulate that hybrid war is either new or different from any other form of war is illustrative of a concept inability to consider and learn from history. Another contribution to the global game of buzzword bingo…

David Kilcullen writes very well when recounting his own experiences, and considerably less well when trying to support his theoretical model. To get the most out of The Accidental Guerrilla, read the preface, Chapter 3 The Twenty-First Day, and Chapter 5 Turning an Elephant into a Mouse in conjunction with Jim Molan’s Running the War in Iraq. It’s probably entirely coincidental that both books are written by Australian Army officers – or maybe not – maybe that slight aspect of distance from US and NATO issues provides an subtle but important difference of perspective. These readings will give a reader from most backgrounds a firm grounding in issues and approaches for the complex environment. I have a dozen or so pages of notes and will write a more detailed review in the next week or so…

The bottom line on The Accidental Guerrilla is that it is worth reading – the preface, Chapters 3 and 5 outweigh the slog through the other chapters…having said that, down here we have a beer company called Tui which sponsors a range of topical billboards across the country, using the Tui slogan “yeah right“…here’s some Tui moments from The Accidental Guerrilla (yes, I really do like it but these were too good to pass up):

Buy a crate on the way home tonight…

We call it COUNTERING IRREGULAR ACTIVITY

Posted on 2 December 2009 by SJPONeill

And it starts at home…

…it has the unfortunate acronym of CIA, no matter where you put a hyphen e.g. CI-A, C-IA, -CIA, CIA-, whatever, etc…CIA is CIA is CIA wherever you are…so what? Just don’t have your CIA handbook in your back pocket when backpacking through countries ending in -stan…

Some call it COIN, the Marines called it Countering Irregular Threats (CIT), and the Brits call it Countering Irregular Activity (CI-A, note the hyphen, apparently it is important, like anyone cares – who is going to say CI Hyphen A? It’s CIA, get over it!). CIT and CIA take a broader focus than focusing purely on insurgency. The essence of CIA is that any activity that affects the regularity and stability of our normality is irregular. The key to countering irregular activity is the Comprehensive Approach – identifying the appropriate mix of measures from all of those available from across Clausewitz’s Trinity:

Government/leadership. Government agencies and ministries, incentives for programmes, supporting legislation.

‘The People‘. The community, including the business community, aid and welfare organisations, churches and agencies, the media.

The action arm. Military or police involvement, the threat or application of force and occupation.

I was just over at Crimestoppers and read this blog piece about a BMX park in Papakura being abandoned by the community. The community was unable to manage criminal activity there by a group of 8-11 year olds. 8-11 years old? Why not? In other parts of the world, they’d probably have their own AK-47s by now…So what?

Well, here’s the so what: this type of activity destabilises our communities. If unchecked, these little thugs just go on to become bigger thugs. Without intervention, this is NOT something that they will grow out of. The Trinity in and around Papakura needs to get together, decide what the underlying real issues are and do something about it. And here’s a heads-up, the solution is unlikely to be one that can be enforced by the Police…curfews etc only cover the symptoms…what this requires is a comprehensive approach within the community otherwise it might as well withdraw into its walled compounds and abandon Papakura to the Cursed Earth…

The Accidental Guerrilla

Posted on 1 December 2009 by SJPONeill

The nice people in G7 loaned me a copy of David Kilcullen’s Accidental Guerrilla to read on the promise that I would give them a book review in return – fair trade, I think, and one which provides me an opportunity to assess the actual time required to review and read a book for future jobs. I missed David Kilcullen’s briefs when he visited in October, having been required to save the free world at the CLAW in the UK that week. While I enjoyed that professionally and personally, I would much rather have had the afternoon listening to him talk…

First impressions of Accidental Guerrilla are that the author has not been well served by his editor…the sections where he talks about his own experiences flow very well; where he launches into more academic discourse, he becomes verbose and complex – if in doubt, use short sentences and don’t be shy to bullet lists – some parts so far (have just finished Chapter 1) are like playing literary Where’s Wally? when trying to filter out key points and themes. I’ve noticed the same in the other book I am struggling with at the moment, Brain Taafe’s The Gatekeepers of Galatas, a great story that deserves to be told – but told better than Taafe does…I track a number of writing blogs and I think it was John Birmingham who couldn’t emphasise enough not only the importance of a top editor but also the need for writers to retract their egos and take aboard the value an editor provides to a successful product…

I have no problem with the concept of the accidental guerrilla but do debate that it is anything new – almost by definition most guerrillas are accidental, born when the outside world, usually brutally, intrudes into their lives….the little people = the little war…Nor is the concept of global terrorist/guerrilla networks that new either…as far back as the American Revolution, global communications have been adequate to support international networks and the Great Game of international espionage and intelligence has been played across the known globe since that time. I agree with Rupert Smith that there are those who might be best described as the ‘franchisers of terrorism’ who target the disaffected and essentially sell their brand of terrorism, with commensurate training, networks and support. These are the people who need to be tracked and targeted a la Michael Scheiern’s ‘individual-based tracking’ concept – manage them and you open up a range of alternate approaches to mitigate potentially accidental guerrillas.

One of the problems I have with The Accidental Guerrilla to date is that it describes Al-Qaeda as an aberration, an exception, to the rules of guerrillas and terrorism, but keeps drawing upon AQ-based examples to support arguments in the book. While it is true that Islamic terrorism has a firm base in the tribes of Afghanistan and Pakistan that includes strong family links as well and that this extends back over a number of generations, I think it is a big leap to state this as standard practice for these type of organisations. This weakens the Infection, Contagion, Intervention, Rejection cycle that Kilcullen proposes, again relying on an AQ example. I agree with the takfiri model and think this would be a better one to promote over specific groups like Al-Qaeda – more so since his definition of takfir lends itself to causes beyond those based upon an interpretation of Islam…takfir holds that those whose beliefs differ from the takfiri’s are infidels who must be killed. Takfir might apply to ANY hate-based xenophobic cause around the planet and if The Accidental Guerrilla achieves nothing else beyond bringing this phrase into more common usage, it will have achieved something.

In all fairness, I am only at the end of Chapter 1 and should suppress of any feelings of ‘old brass for new‘ and ‘publish or perish‘ til I get into the meat of it…onwards into Chapter Two…

Get over it!

Posted on 19 November 2009 by SJPONeill

I’m pretty picky when I subscribe to Facebook pages – last thing I really need is a constant stream of trivia through my Live Feed. I prefer to use Facebook as a situational awareness tool and so my limited number of subscribed pages includes Steven Pressfield, my favourite bach and the Small Wars Journal (note: you need to be a Facebook member to see these pages). Last night, there was a post headed Afghan Corruption Concerns US Policy Planners linking to this Voice of America ‘news’ item about which I thought Please!!! Get over it!! Some places they do things different to how we would like – is the war on terror or to inflict the moral high ground on another nation’s culture and mores?.

The responses were pretty scary (names have been removed to protect the stupid):

On the contrary – the international community’s insistence that government leaders adhere to some basic level of anti-corruption standards is because terrorism is less likely to be a course of action undertaken. It’s not that “they” do differently than “we” would like; corruption is not a part of any culture’s mores, it’s pretty well established in every culture that stealing from one’s people never turns out well. What? Have you ever been anywhere in the world? Across the non-Western world, ‘wheel greasing’ in some shape mor formed is not just tolerated by accepted.
I’m also pretty convinced that the “moral high ground” offers as much tactical advantage as the physical terrain’s high ground. Yeah, perhaps, but not if you bring your own high ground from home…
Remember, when some Afghan cop steals $ 2.00, he’s taken someone’s wages for a day. And the Karzai family steal millions. You’re wrong, Simon, we’re not trying to ‘inflict’ our culture on them, as you so incorrectly phrased it, we’re trying to keep them from stealing every dollar the West sends them. Then stop sending money and do something useful instead – the same thing would happen in the US, UK and Europe if all of a sudden somebody began handing out great dollops of cash.

OK, so it’s only three responses (but that’s a lot for the SWJ Facebook page) but they are fairly consistent with the self-righteous tone of the original article on VOA. There’s also an interesting article on a similar theme on Coming Anarchy, questioning why corrupt officials from Equatorial Guinea are allowed to live in palatial estates – in Malibu. Apparently US law forbids the granting of visas to ‘corrupt’ officials. My question is: Whose corruption laws/values do you apply? Outside of the First World, such practices are pretty accepted – to any extent that argues that they are at least as successful and sustainable than the squeaky-clean-green moral high ground philosophy.

Do these people just not ‘get it’? You cannot go to someone else’s country, say we’re going to make everything better but you’re going to have to do things our way from now on? Isn’t that what we are (apparently) fighting the Taliban to prevent. Haven’t we gone to war over this very principle? In fact, it would not be unfair to say that a goodly lot of the wars we have engaged in have been in opposition to someone throwing their weught around and trying to enforce ‘their’ ways on someone else…?

The simple sad fact is that most of the world, including a sizable chunk of western societies, thrive on ‘wheel-greasing’. When I was in the UK in October, the Attorney-General was being pressured to press corruption charges against BAe for ‘greasing the wheels’ in order to secure international contracts. As BAe pointed out in its defence, ‘…this is how the world spins: if we don’t do it someone else from France, Israel, Eastern Europe etc etc etc, will wing-in in our place; if we don’t do it, then we will be forced to shut down a number of UK plants due to lack of work – and, if you smack us with a £1billion fine, we will just be forced to shut down more…‘ When you think about it, if the UK was really into this moral high ground thing, it wouldn’t be letting BAe sell weapons across the Middle East, Asia and Africa. Would they…?

COIN doctrine tells us a successful campaign needs to address the core issues behind the insurgency, ultimately giving the insurgents some or all of what they want but under controlled conditions.

5GW?

Meanwhile, back at the Real World Ranch, The Strategist has developed his alternate generations of war model:

1GW: the mercenaries
Early 16th century to late 18th century.
Powerful monarchies, supported by increasingly efficient state bureaucracies, field “hybrid” armies of elite professional troops, mercenary contingents and transnational military specialists (such as siege engineers and artillerymen). In the 18th century, hybrid armies evolve into more homogeneous forces of cavalry, artillery, and infantry regiments of the line, recruited from the aristocracy and the rural poor within a state’s territory. These forces owe allegiance to the sovereign, not society.

2GW: the conscripts
1790s to 1970s.

Nation-states fight each other with large armies of conscripted citizen soldiers. The nation becomes synonymous with the army – “the people-in-arms”, as Clausewitz described it. Universal conscription is a rite of passage for generations of young Europeans, who are animated to serve by patriotism, national and racial identity, and warrior myths. The apogee of the nation-in-arms occurs in the two world wars of the 20th century, when nations mobilize all their resources – human and material – for total war.

3GW: the volunteers
1980s to early 21st century.

Armies become all volunteer and professional forces of career soldiers who are relatively well-educated and highly trained. These forces recruit people from ethic minorities, immigrant groups, decaying industrial cities and hardscrabble rural regions. These people enlist because they see the army as a route to advancement and acceptance in society, not out of patriotism. Meanwhile, the scions of the wealthy elite and the prosperous middle class shun military service.

4GW: the champions

Emerging in the early 21st century.

Armies become caste-based – an increasingly distinct and detached element within society. They comprise highly skilled “champions”, specialists in esoteric skills such as counterinsurgency, special operations, and cyber-war, who owe primary allegiance to their castes and combat leaders. The distinction between armies and civilian agencies blurs. The state outsources military responsibilities to private military companies. These also safeguard the interests of powerful corporations and wealthy elites.

Peter, in a week, has probably applied more real intellectual effort to the GW construct than did the originator! I really like it although I would offer that his 4GW is actually 5GW with 1GW being the Braveheart style, every tribesman for himself, hope-it-all-works-out-on-the-day form of warfare that kept the trade alive for millenia before it all got organised.

In terms of applying the generational model across history and societies, it DOES work if you apply to individual societies/cultures instead of taking a global macro approach e.g. while the Romans make have been at 3GW, many of their adversaries may only have be 1 GW. The model works even better if you remove the time frame from under each heading.

The Judge Dredd approach to COIN

So it’s out. The super-uber COIN strategy for Afghanistan. If you blinked, you may have missed it. Don’t worry, you didn’t miss much – kinda like finding you’ve fallen asleep in the car (as a passenger!) and missed Hamilton…we’re going to fortify the urban areas where the insurgents AREN’T, and only engage selectively in the rural areas where the insurgants ARE. I have visions of Afghanistan becoming a real word escapee from 2000AD: a few isolated Mega-Cities surrounded by the feral hordes of the Cursed Earth. Sylvester Stallone has already filmed in both locations: with some clever editing of Rambo 3 and Judge Dredd, we could have the movie out for Christmas…

…John Dredd or Judge Rambo?

Thinking

Posted on 17 November 2009 by SJPONeill

President Obama is visiting China. Among the issues under discussion, he also plans to press China to agree to sanctions or other measures to punish Iran if it does not capitulate to an agreement to export its uranium for processing abroad. I really wonder sometimes if anyone in the US is actually reading their COIN doctrine (FM 3-24, JP 3-24, the State Department Guide to COIN, A Tentative Guide to Countering Irregular Threats etc etc) or not? We still seem to be so quick to reach for the big stick instead of perhaps considering other options. Many, incorrectly, called it COIN. The Marines call it Countering Irregular Threats (CIT), the Brits call it Countering Irregular Activity which is a more accurate term albeit with the unfortunate acronym of CIA and, regardless of where the hyphen might be, who would want to be picked up with a CIA manual in their back pocket?

Regardless of what we call it, what we are really doing is Countering Destabilising Activities which we could call CDA, or reverse engineer and simply call it Stability Operations: those operations which promote stability. Because when you really get down to it, this is what we are really interested in: the maintenance of stability. Sometimes when stability operations are not enough, we have to get out the big stick and apply force with the intention of doing harm to promote good. That force may be military; it may equally be diplomatic, economic, or social…but before we get to this point, as in the case of Iran, maybe we should read our doctrine, cut to the core issues at the root of a problem and seek to address them. Perhaps, instead of being treated as the rabid dog of the Islamic world (let’s face it , we’re all pretty tired of being tarred as varying flavours of ‘The Great Satan‘), perhaps Iran would respond more to incentives, to be treated as an equal on the Central Asian stage, perhaps even to being a party to discussion regarding what is certainly an associated issue: the non-sanctioned ownership by Israel of a substantial nuclear capability? Let’s start thinking BEFORE we wave that big stick…

That's Lulu in the front and Kirk at the rear.

And on the topic of thinking, I’ve been considering today on much dogs think. Our second biggest dog, Lulu, is not well: for the last couple of months she has been favouring her rear right leg and the vets aren’t sure what the problem is. X-rays showed nothing unusual and there doesn’t seem to be any obvious injury. She’s on a course of weekly injections and I took her in this morning. She was very brave and only flinched a little at the needle – she doesn’t like them at all and is certainly big enough to make her dislike known.

Afterwards, the vet gave her a chew snack for being so brave and we both commented on her behaviour when she got it. Instead of just chomping it down, she just held it in her mouth as if to save it for later – much like, as we noted, a small child might do. She held it in her mouth the whole way home (about 40km), stubby little tail going a million miles an hour, until she got inside and on her mat; only then did she start to work on it but very slowly as if really savouring it and trying to make it last as long as possible. She growled Kirk any time he so much as looked in her direction and looked so forlorn when he finally managed to score a piece of her treat. She made it last twelve hours – and there is a still a section left for tomorrow.

I know that all the ‘experts’ say we shouldn’t attempt to transpose human actions on to what are meant to be just ‘dumb’ animals (can you get dumb experts too?) but both the vet and I wondering just how true that it really is…man’s best friend might be brighter than we think. And also on the canine theme, here’s a cute but very sad story I found tonight while researching what might be wrong with Lulu.

The twins say “that’s amaaazing“. If they’d been interested in the News at 6, they would have chorused that line at the story on the bikers protest against the Accident Compensation Corporation’s over-hiked levies in Wellington today (see Tapdancing post. Amazing the confirmed increases in the levies have today become only proposals that “…the Government has yet to decide on…” Nothing like 5000 bikers descending upon their place of work to get the ACC minister and Prime Minster doing a Fred and Ginger act (aptly this link goes to a number called Too Hot To Handle!)…perhaps Nick and John should have done some thinking as well: