Acts of Desperation

Posted on 23 January 2010 by SJPONeill

The WordPress Blog Stats page has a web part that displays what search terms have brought visitors to your blog. I couldn’t help but notice this one yesterday: “leadership lessons from chicken run movie“. This can only be an act of true desperation, I thought…the whole idea of gleaning lessons on leadership or much else from movies, especially these over-rated voice-starred animations, is a bit dodgy from the start…even dodgier is the fact that some people think that cartoons like this help develop a sense of reality amongst their children…

Mr Birmingham gets angry

“It’s not often I’d pull on my angry pants and launch a giant boot into the arse of the ABC. I’d be a bit like going an old lady who’d wandered into a cage wrestling death match at an ultimate fighting tournament by accident. But sometimes even old ladies need to feel the pain. And Aunty? I’M BRINGIN’ THE PAIN!“

Over at The Geek JB goes ABC for trying to enslave book reviewing bloggers for free – he lists all the reasons why young bloggers should receive some form of incentive to review books online, and none, understandably in support of ABC. Like Havock in the comments, I also have some minor issues with the age discrimination issue raised although I think this may be a not so subtle attempt by ABC to tap a more naive (in their perception) segment of the blogspace…

If you haven’t tried it, book reviewing is bloody hard work: for me to review a book properly, keep notes and come up with a review more substantial than ‘it’s crap – burn it’, I’m looking at 3-5 days work – and I am a pretty fast reader. While I believe that the power of the Information Militia rests mainly in the unpaid intellectual horsepower that constitutes most of the current blogspace and forumville, I think that it is only right that commercial organisations that wish to tap this resource for their own gain, front up with at least a little of the crinkly stuff. JB also makes a very good point that even if the ‘pay’ is half a pittance, it then constitutes works and opens up a range of other benefits in terms of tax losses and claimable costs…perhaps…ABC, it probably doesn’t pay to aggravate the Information Militia lest they a. turn their attention to you and/or b. transform into that other form of militia – you know the one with guns, pitchforks and torches…

And in the Birmoverse

Battles still rage on Cheeseburger Gothic over the why and how of an Uptimer President in 1952…feel free to climb into the fight…

And now the weather…

While the forecast today is for scattered showers with outbreaks of sun, a storm of another sort approaches…yep, the Twins are back for the weekend so hatch battening begin…

Fixed, determined, inviolable

Posted on 14 January 2010 by SJPONeill

I’ve always had a soft spot for Douglas MacArthur and think, rightly or wrongly, that he is one of history’s most maligned and least understood commanders. Here is a soldier who reached the top of the heap, Chief of Staff of the US Army, before WW2, who retired to his beloved Philippines, and who was recalled back to duty after Pearl Harbor. Together with Dwight Eisenhower and George Marshall, he was a key figure in implementing a style of occupation we can still (and should) be learning from today and halting the postwar advance of communism.

His final address to the cadets at West Point on 12 May 1962 is a classic that provides a focal point for the essence of what the military is:

“… your mission remains fixed, determined, inviolable – it is to win our wars. Everything else in your professional careers is but a corollary to this vital dedication. All other public purposes, all other public projects, all other public needs, great or small, will find others for their accomplishment; but you are the ones who are trained to fight; yours is the profession of arms – the will to win, the sure knowledge that in war there is no substitute for victory; that if you lose, the nation will be destroyed; that the very obsession of your public service must be Duty – Honour – Country…“

This is not an Americanism – it is a universally applicable reminder that, indeed, there is no substitute for victory. It does not say how that victory should be achieved, or under what conditions, or in what environments. Simply, it’s about doing our jobs and not letting the bad guys win. To achieve this, we may have to change our ways and, this is where Douglas MacArthur is commonly held to have failed. Personally, I think that’s debatable given his mandate and mission.

Regardless of nation, the same applies to us in the current environment – it’s a different environment with a different adversary and we have to adapt to the nature of that adversary. That’s the real bitch of being the good guys: we have to adapt to what the bad guys are doing – we can offer them all the MBTs and attack helicopters we like, they are just not going anywhere near our comfort zones. To succeed, to be victorious, we need to get into THEIR comfort zones…and to do that, WE need to change, adapt and evolve or, just like Gunny Highway used to growl, “…improvise, adapt, overcome…”

Desperately Seeking Mayberry

Posted on 11 January 2010 by SJPONeill

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

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

…someplace where…

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

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

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

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

The Coalition Interoperability Warrior Demonstration aka CWID – it’s been running since the mid-90s previously as the Joint Interoperability Warrior Demonstration aka JWID but regardless of the clumsy names, the key word is INTEROPERABILITY – since 911, this DoD-led annual event has been focussing more and more upon information sharing and interoperability issues, not just between the services, or between major allies, but extending these links right down into the nitty-gritty of interaction with and between other government agencies and the myriad of first response agencies in the US, and by implication, for any that might be interested, in other participating nations. Every year, dozens of emerging and developing technologies are thrashed throughout the month of June in connected sites around the world. However, IMHO, one of the biggest payoff for CWID participants comes from the three major week-long planning activities that occur prior to each execution phase where operators, developers and geeks have their respective expectations and perceptions hauled over the coals towards a shared reality.

The ABCA Coalition Lessons Analysis Workshop aka CLAW, lead by the ABCA Program Office in the Pentagon, that every one or two years assembles an international team of lessons learned professionals and subject matter experts to review and analyse the raw Observations, Issues and Lessons (OIL – yes, it really is all about OIL!!) from the preceding 12-18 months of operations and training within the five member nations and distil these into findings and recommendations. Following an inaugural ABCA lessons conference in Ft Leavonworth in 2004, CLAWs have been conducted in 2005 (Salisbury, UK), 2006 (Kingston, Canada – what a beautiful location!!), 2007 (Hobart, Autsralia) and 2009 (Shrivenham, UK). The CLAW process is exportable and applicable to OILs from any source not just military activities…There is also a link between CWID and the CLAW: analysis to date finds that around 60% of the issues uncovered in the CLAWs are further investigated or resolved on CWID…

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

Thoughts while mowing

Posted on 19 December 2009 by SJPONeill

I was just mowing the lawns – a time when I can just flick on to auto-mow and just cogitate for a while – and a couple of phrases collided in my mind…the first was one by John Birmingham in one of his blog posts on writing, this one on where the idea for a book or story might come from. In this case, Without Warning is the result of JB enduring some fool prattling on about all of America’s failings…

“…he screamed at me the world would be a much better place if we all just woke up one day and they were gone, just gone, every last American in the world. That dumb ass suggestion must have caught like a fish hook in my brain and kept nagging away for years until the idea of turning it into a novel finally occurred to me after a couple of months of frustrating negotiations to settle on the topic for a new trilogy after Axis of Time…“

The quote that rear-ended these lines from JB is one I saw but didn’t really absorb from Neptunus Lex last week on Barack Obama’s acceptance speech in Oslo:

“…I begin with this point because in many countries there is a deep ambivalence about military action today, no matter what the cause. And at times, this is joined by a reflexive suspicion of America, the world’s sole military superpower.

But the world must remember that it was not simply international institutions — not just treaties and declarations — that brought stability to a post-World War II world. Whatever mistakes we have made, the plain fact is this: The United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms. The service and sacrifice of our men and women in uniform has promoted peace and prosperity from Germany to Korea, and enabled democracy to take hold in places like the Balkans. We have borne this burden not because we seek to impose our will. We have done so out of enlightened self-interest — because we seek a better future for our children and grandchildren, and we believe that their lives will be better if others’ children and grandchildren can live in freedom and prosperity…“

It struck me, as I mowed, that sometimes we should be careful what we wish for – it just might happen…I’ve met a lot of Americans and some of them were real dicks BUT in no greater proportion than those I have endured in Australia, New Zealand, Canada or the UK . As much as we might like to take a populist view of America’s ‘failure’ in Vietnam, I was struck by the attitude of the Vietnamese people when I was there some years ago: they despised the French with a true passion (understandable) but considered as America as well-intentioned but misguided “…came to our country with the best intentions but for the wrong reasons…”

We’re all too happy to stand back and let America take the hits…til the Wehrmacht tosses a few warmers across the Channel, or the Imperial Navy steams south; the national daily prayer of France should be ‘Thank you, America’; as it should be in many ingrate European countries – can you say ‘Marshall Plan’?’ Can you say ‘thank God, someone else was able to sort Yugoslavia out’?. Even in our backyard, INTERFET may have been Aussie-led with a Kiwi 2IC but lets NOT forget Peleliu and her sister were there as well – just in case.

When has it ever hurt to simply say “thank you“?

PS. It’s worth reading the whole of the Neptunus Lex post on what it means to be a nation at war – we might need to know one day…

Muzzling the Unmuzzlable

Posted on 17 December 2009 by SJPONeill

Yes, unmuzzlable is really a word, I say so…

Neptunus Lex is making a stand today and so are a number of other Blogs, including this one…you read all about it over at Lexville but the issue is simply one of management of modern information technologies and, what is now considered contemporary, information and communication cultures.

Yes, there is massive risk that soldiers, sailors, airpeople and Marines (of all ranks) could do serious damage to current operations and capabilities through misuse of social media and there will always be a few out of frustration, malice or simple ignorance who will. But implementing another kazillion rules and regulations ISN’T going to help, mitigate or fix this in any way. That is a fact. Short of confining everyone on-base forever and severing all communications links, it’s just not possible and I would suggest that such measures, outside of an operational facility, would do even greater damage to recruiting and retention.

A zero defects i.e. no crap on my watch, approach has never worked and only ever serves to conceal the things that are really broken. When that happens we discover those breaks the old-fashioned way when we cross the start line (not the best time!). Leaders and commanders at all levels should not just accept but actively seek out those things that are not working, even those that are perceived as not working (which could just be issues of perceptional, training or education), and do something about them…it’s leadership and command 101…

In my comments on Lex’s post, I listed four steps that would mitigate the dilemma caused by social media to operations and capabilities. Tomorrow I might list them here but in the mean time, get ye off to Neptunus Lex and read what he has to say…

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…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…

Once was an Empire

Posted on 4 December 2009 by SJPONeill

The sand of the desert is sodden red

Red with the blood of a square that broke

The Gatling’s jammed and the Colonel’s dead

And the Regiment blind with dust and smoke

The river of death has brimmed his banks

And England’s far, and Honour and name

But the voice of a school boy rallies the ranks:

“Play up! Play up! And play the game!”

Vitai Lampada (They Pass On The Torch of Life), Sir Henry Newbolt (1862-1938)

I’m on the road again today with an early start so here’s another quote from my little notebook to keep things alive…the full text can be read here. I like how this article on the University of St Andrew’s site describes Vitai Lampada:

Henry Newbolt’s Vitai Lampada was typical of the war poem of the 1890’s, aping the heroic images of Tennyson: “The Gatling’s jammed and the Colonel dead/ And the regiment blind with dust and smoke;/ The river of death has brimmed his banks,/ And England’s far, and Honour a name;/ But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks:/ ‘Play up! play up! and play the game!’” The intention of this kind of poetry was to stir the heart of the reader with pride and fill the head with awe at the magnificent bravery that separated the Englishman from his rivals on the battlefield. It allowed people from any social class to feel that they were part of something precious. Certainly, Vitai Lampada was hugely popular with soldiers and public alike upon its publication in 1898, but by this time a new kind of war poem was coming to prominence, one whose roots lay in the growth of radical thought and humanitarian opposition to war.

In looking up Vitai Lampada, I came across this opening paragraph of a review of a book [Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 751 pp.]:

In my far-off, happy, schooldays there was always one thing above all of which you had not to stand guilty. This was lack of moral fiber. Intelligence and learning were a bonus, but moral fiber was an essential. It produced regular, strenuous boys ready to meet the kinds of ideal celebrated by our school poet, Sir Henry Newbolt. When the Gatling was jammed and the colonel dead, and the sands of the desert were sodden red, the voice of the schoolboy would be heard, calling on everyone to play up, play up, and play the game, so very like Tony Blair and George Bush do today, albeit keeping themselves at a safer distance from the sodden desert.

So very right, when it all unravels, all you can do is stand up and play the game – or activate your exit strategy and bail to leave someone else holding the baby…

Hmmmm….

Not sure why yesterday’s post didn’t go out as scheduled – most likely operator error at this end! Still, I had a great visit to the Air Power Development Centre yesterday morning, and spent the afternoon with a Kiwi entrepreneur working on a very cool development project…hopefully more to follow on that one in the New Year…

My Creative MP3 player has now finally gone completely toes up – it has had a very hard life – and I need to find an inexpensive (see comment re very hard life) replacement that it is hopefully Audible-compatible as I miss my talking books when on the road.

It was nice to visit civilisation for a day but good to get home last night except that IT WAS STILL BLOODY RAINING here – how is anyone meant to dry grass for hay when it keeps BLOODY RAINING…?

The mist and rain…

Posted on 29 November 2009 by SJPONeill

…disappeared this morning and it has been that glorious day the Mountain is famous for. Last week I cleared away a lot of the self-seeded bush that was shading the vege garden and got all that mulched up today so that it can further contribute to future vege gardens. It’s been a while since I’ve mowed the lawns, leading to Carmen’s comment last weekend “Growing hay again, are we?” so that was the other project this afternoon, although I did use the scrub bar instead of the mower so as to do exactly that: make some hay for the chicken run and the coop for the chickens when they hatch. I was just about done and just finishing off around the water tank when I bumped the storm water pipe and cracked the damn thing – to add insult to injury, the forecast for tomorrow afternoon is crappy so it really needs to get fixed first thing tomorrow…just goes to show that nothing is simple…

Those two brave little sparrows from the other day have decided that they are in luff with any and all shiny things inside the house and will exploit any door, window or other opening left unguarded to get inside and rattattatat against the stainless kettle, rubbish bin, and benchtop, mirrors and windows. It might be OK except they aren’t really house trained and, of course, my two big helpers get all angsty and excited when there are birds inside…

It’s been interesting listening to all the squawking from the Brits about how poorly the Americans treated them in Iraq. Of course, when you are making stunning statements like ‘..the top British commander in the country, Major General Andrew Stewart, told how he spent “a significant amount of my time” “evading” and “refusing” orders from his US superiors...’, and you cut and run from the theatre of war before the job is done, you can hardly wonder that your national credibility is questioned…Yes, the American military are different; yes, they are less than receptive sometimes to other ways of doing things; yes, they do tend to focus on their way of doing things BUT…BUT maybe that is because they are so damn good at what they do in the application of combat power. What other nation in Iraq not only admitted that it had got it wrong in the post-transition phase of OIF, but implemented a complete cultural shift to address the issues, restructuring its development and acquisitions programmes (killing some sacred cows along the way), AND aligning its doctrine for the complex environment not just across the DoD, but also across and into the rest of government too. What other nation sat on its moral high horse, resting on its withered old laurels and former glories, and sniped at those who were doing the business?

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?

Jacks

Posted on 15 November 2009 by SJPONeill

A ‘jack’ is someone who makes sure that they are OK over anyone else. I believe the linkage originally comes from the 1959 Peter Sellers movie “I’m All Right, Jack“. This is one example of a jack:

Kirk the Jack 003

This is big dog Kirk. There are two bean bags because there are two dogs. Our other big dog, Lulu, likes to rest on a bean bag because she has a sore hip (hopefully not the dreaded displasia!!). Kirk knows this. Does he care? No, he’s alright. Kirk is a jack big dog.

Here’s another example of a jack: LIND ON 4GW AND THE FORT HOOD KILLINGS. I mean, it’s nice that William Lind shares with us on his visits to this planet but this time he really just needs to get a grip! The reason that I posted a link to John Birmingham’s commentary on the Ft Hood shootings, and probably the reason that JB’s commentary quoted in full the earlier commentary by Stephen Murphy, (sorry if that’s a bit cumbersome), is that the Murphy commentary is as insightful a one that you will find on this tragedy – AND that it cuts directly to the chase on the core issue.

MAJ Nidal Malik Hasan was simply an individual struggling within himself. An individual no different really than any of those other individuals who faced similar struggles and ultimately directed their frustrations on those around them. I don’t know if there is a single nation on this Earth that has not had at least one such incident. Even here in quiet little New Zealand, we have had at least five in the past twenty years : Aramoana, Masterton, Pukekohe, Raurimu and Dunedin. It is something that happens, regardless of the best or the worst mental health, intelligence and law enforcement systems. Any system so efficient as to keep such people at risk off our streets would be so draconian as to sacrifice the freedoms our societies hold dear.

The reason that Mr Lind is a jack is that he is making sure that HE is alright by capitalising on the Ft Hood tragedy so further justify and validate his own 4th (would $th be more accurate perhaps?) Generation Warfare, aka 4GW, model. Mr Lind would have us believe that what happened in Ft Hood was a result of 4GW and the harbinger of waves of similar attacks across the US, and that the only way to prevent such attacks is for America to shed its ‘Give us your poor, your tired, your huddled masses longing to be free…’ heritage in favour of becoming a WASP state living by the moral minority’s own sharia law…

Not so, Mr Lind, not so, at all…if there is one thing we HAVE learned since 911, it is that our adversaries, individually and collectively, in this war are very bit as intelligent, as skilled and as capable as we are: a gaping hole in the New York City skyline, hundreds of casualties in Madrid and Bali, and 4000 flag-draped coffins out of Iraq are proof of that. Only in the UK have these forces been stymied to date – the one nation with decades of experience successfully facing a dedicated, vicious and evolving internal adversary. If MAJ Hasan’s attack in (not on) Ft Hood was what Mr Lind paints it as:

Would his tradecraft been so loose as to already be on the FBI’s and the military risk radar?

Would he really be overtly trying to contact known Al-Qaeda supporters?

Might he not have made better use of his access to Ft Hood to employ more lethal forces than a couple of pistols?

Would there not have been at least one simultaneous event somewhere else in the US, even one frustrated by circumstance or law enforcement?

Think about these things before blindly calling for the restriction or even expulsion of those with different belief structures. Remember what ‘Give us your poor, your tired, your huddled masses longing to be free…” once meant. Do not under-estimate an enemy who is smarter than this. Be a leader, not a follower.

Because if we follow jacks like Mr Lind and his cronies, we become no better than those who preach a litany of hate from the safety of their religious status….