Tag Archives: Countering irregular activity

Keeping above the radar horizon

Posted on by
2

Real life has really been impacting on my post-writing time in the last fortnight or so… definitely not part of the annual plan which is for 3-4 contemporary posts each week…such is life…so this post is really just to keep my profile above the radar horizon…

On the up side I have been accepted into the RNZAF and I have been very pleasantly surprised at how painless this process has been on the Air side…what has been tying up a large proportion of my time is getting out of the Army Reserves in order to join another service…which has not been anything like as simple as you might think…

31 March is also the end of the commercial financial year here and I have been doing the year end accounts for Carmen’s business – this is the first time I have done it all from scratch and getting all the bits and pieces organised into a coherent picture for the accountants has been ‘interesting’ – that’s interesting in the same sense as the Chinese curse…and, yes, I am getting soft: while renovating the study, I’ve had to shift the computer down to the dining table. An upside of this is that I can have TV or a movie on while I am working as I do seem to function better with some background activity; the downside is that the chairs around the dining table are hard wood and not that comfortable on butt or back…any extended periods of work tends to become feats of endurance…like I said, getting soft…

Winter’s first snow 9 June 2010

Winter is quite clearly here now so we’ll also gearing up to run the guest house over the ski season so we’re doing final tidy-up and touch-up projects around the property before the season opens…

I’m off to a workshop on aspects of hybrid war next week (touch wood and so long as the snow doesn’t close the road) and am thinking that the nights, rather than spend them in the bar, might be an opportunity to progress so paper projects like the Kitakami which is a rather unusual looking cruiser with four gun turret and ten quadruple torpedo turrets, designed against the requirements of naval battles like those around Guadalcanal in 1942 and 1943…this can be my night time away project…

…and the big 1/32 Heritage Aviation Vulcan will remain my at-home spare time project…this thing is a real pig…it was my gift to me after Carmen sold a property in 2008…at the time it seemed like a great project and an impressive attention-getter when completed and on display…as one of only 25 models built it cost an arm and a leg and it’s size meant that just getting it to New Zealand from the UK was a major pain..

…but that pain was nothing compared to finding that it only bears the flimsiest resemblance to any version of the actual aircraft and that by the time all the errors are fixed, I might as well build it from scratch…but…due to the cost involved and the lack of a local market to sell it on (especially since it’s reputation as model now precedes it), it has had to become a builder as the domestic issues arising from keeping this level of investment as a hangar queen in the garage are just too great. So, slowly, piece by piece, I’m building it as close as I can get it to an original straight wing Vulcan before they started to do all sorts of ugly things to the wings…with parallel build threads on Large Scale Planes and Paper Modeling – a completed build can be seen on Britmodeller…

Heigh-ho, heigh-ho…it’s not snowing or raining at the moment so it’s off to (outside) work I go…

Getting it right

Posted on by
5

(c) http://www.papermodelers.com/

Just snippets today…

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

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

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

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

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

The Enemy Within

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

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

On the run…

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

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

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

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

Edit: This Just In…

Hawkeye UAV in action

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

The Little Orange Book

Posted on by
2

I visited the Centre for Defence and Security Studies (CDSS)at Massey University a week or so ago. The nice people there loaned me a copy of Roberto J. Gonzalez’ American Counterinsurgency: Human Science and The Human Terrain so that I might gain a better understanding of those who oppose Human Terrain Systems (HTS). Gonzalez (RJG) is one of the main opponents of HTS and the application of social science techniques in counterinsurgency campaigns.

I started to read this book, The Little Orange Book, at Massey while I was waiting for a meeting to wrap up (not one that I was in!). It’s only 130 pages and I managed to chew through 80-odd then. I use the term ‘chew through’ deliberately as some of the first three chapters was pretty difficult to digest. It’s published by Prickly Paradigm Press which claims to give “…serious authors free rein to say what’s right and what’s wrong about their disciplines and about the world, including what’s never been said before…” The result, certainly in this case, is not as the Prickly Paradigm website claims “…intellectuals unbound, writing unconstrained and creative texts about meaningful matters...” This Little Orange Book, is more a soapbox for a rambling rant than a considered exposition of  RJG’s professional or intellectual opinion.

There are many logical disconnects and inconsistencies in the first three chapters and I think that some rigorous external editing could have helped make this flow and read much better. Part of the problem is that RJG does really define his objections to HTS until the last few pages of the book, forcing the increasingly frustrated reader to wonder ‘where’s this guy coming from?’.

It was a week later that I took a deep breath and dove into the second half of the book. Chapter 4 is certainly a step up from the previous chapters, possibly because I found myself in broad agreement that the US DoD is in cloud-cuckoo-wonderland in its desire for a technologically brilliant system that will take in all the relevant information and punch out all the answers for the complex environment. Maybe it will – someday – but only once a person gets off their butt, gets their boots dirty and figures out what the questions are.

Such a system might have been possible in the heyday of the Cold War when the moving parts were mainly based on platforms with easily quantifiable measurables – had the necessary computing power been available. In fact, had this system been available to Cold Warriors, it probably would have foreseen the Soviet invasion of Iceland that so surprised Pentagon planners when Tom Clancy and Larry Bond released Red Storm Rising in 1986. But the Cold War is over and, as Michael Scheiern identified in 2005, we have now shifted from platform-based tracking to tracking individuals. Not only has the number of trackable entities increased by a factor of hundreds but the individual ‘measurability’ of each entity has increased by a similar amount, and the entities lack the centralised direction inherent in platform-based conflict.

This is not to say, though, the social sciences, anthropology and HTS’ don’t have a role to play in the complex contemporary environment – anything but. What it does mean is that we will have to accept and take risk, develop and rely upon judgement to employ and apply this information. It also means that we need to evolve away from thinking of complex intelligence as being predictive in nature as it may have been around the Fulda Gap. In their place we must develop more responsive intelligence systems support responses to the largely unpredictable activities that erupt across the operating environment.

Organisations like the FBI’s Behavioural Analysis Unit are founded upon a blend of the principles and practices of social sciences and this responsive philosophy. Rarely if ever will the BAU predict the first in a series of attacks, although once on the trail of a specific adversary will often very rapidly develop accurate profiles of that adversary, be it an individual or group. Yes, I watch Bones too and am well aware of the timeless struggle between the forces of anthropology and psychology to prove which isn’t merely pseudo-science. This is a false distinction and both disciplines must work together, focusing on individuals AND groups in order to provide a commander with employable insights.

Herein lies the problem with This Little Orange Book. RJG is so intent on ring-fencing social sciences that he can not see that no science or discipline can usually function in isolation. He is so fixated on HTS in Iraq and Afghanistan that he forgets that social sciences are subject to (potential) abuse across society every day: as I remarked at Massey after reading the first half of this book, it would be interesting to compare the outputs of the schools of marketing, politics and anthropology at Massey and see whether they are more alike than different.

RJG states again and again that the deployment of HTS to support military operations breaches various understood ‘contracts’ in that social science should do no harm. He totally misses the point that, regardless of how or why these wars started, HTS might actually be doing more good than harm in adding elements of precision, if not perfection, to campaigns where blunt force may be one of the few viable options.

It is not until the Chapter Five that the readers finds the real reasons for this. RJG is making a standing on moral principle – he’s up on a political soapbox to attack the American Empire which he sees as an evil bent on taking over the world. If the evilly bad American Empire was not involved in its evil wars in the Middle East , RJG would be quite happy for social sciences to feed the same predictive machine he denounced in Chapter Four – which would of course only be used for good.

It’s ironic that an ardent proponent of social science is intent upon suborning these tools that focus upon ‘the people’ to the same technological philosophy that drove the platform focussed Cold War. Conceptually this evolved into the Powell doctrine that built upon the false lessons of the 1991 Gulf War and culminated in the ‘shock and awe’ campaigns that failed to produce the goods in Kosovo, Serbia or Iraq. RJG’s campaigns against HTS has driven the Government to seek more technical solutions towards understanding the contemporary environment and to steer away from the blindingly obvious truth.

That truth is that it’s all about people and that includes people doing (at least some of) the collection and people applying judgement to that information, raw and processed, to develop useful (timely, relevant) information. An example is the enhanced Video Text & Audio Processing (eViTAP) tool that was successfully trialed on CWID in 2007. Evitap is a very sharp tool that processes video, audio and digital files for predetermined cues that have been identified (by a person) as potential indicators of an impending incident. When those cues are identified, a person is notified in order to make a decision on actions that may or may not be taken.

Where is all goes wrong is that we have become so fixated on the technology providing the answers that we have stopped teaching people to think critically, to apply professional judgement, make a decision and run with it. By using This Little Orange Book as a soapbox for a raving rant (or ranting rave) instead of coherent consideration of the issues, RJG has actually scored more points for the technocrats and undermined his beloved social science…

More snakes than ladders

Posted on by
Reply

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

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

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

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

You think?

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

Oh, no!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michael. Seems like you take this too far.

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

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

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

On target

Smart guy that GEN Mattis…

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

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

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

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

Wow! Way cool…

Into the ether!!

Posted on by
2

I don’t monitor the release of these publications on a daily basis as I used to do when doctrine was my job and only became aware of this one when the link arrived in an email last night. I haven’t read it in full yet as I need to first finish Roberto Rodrigez’ little orange book (I don’t think Chairman Mao need worry about the competition) American Counterinsurgency: Human Science and the Human Terrain, and Amanda Lennon’s Fourth Generation Valkyries. However I do have some initial thoughts based upon the foreword…

The  assessment  indicates  that  the  Army’s  current  vocabulary,  including  terms  such  as computer network operations (CNO), electronic warfare (EW), and information operations (IO) will  become  increasingly  inadequate.    To  address  these  challenges,  there  are  three  interrelated dimensions  of  full  spectrum  operations  (FSO),  each  with  its  own  set  of  causal  logic,  and requiring focused development of solutions:

•   The  first  dimension  is  the  psychological  contest  of  wills  against  implacable  foes, warring factions, criminal groups, and potential adversaries.

•   The  second  dimension  is  strategic  engagement,  which  involves  keeping  friends  at home, gaining allies abroad, and generating support or empathy for the mission.

•   The  third  dimension  is  the  cyber-electromagnetic  contest,  which  involves  gaining, maintaining, and exploiting a technological advantage.

My first thought is why has this been produced as a single service publication when information cuts across service and other organisational boundaries and barriers – can one safely assume that the other services and JFCOM will be producing its own slant on challenges and conflict in cyberspace?

Thought #2 is that the first two dimensions above are really nothing more than the day-to-day rhythm of the contemporary environment, and have been for decades. The third dimension strikes me as being a new environment much 90-100 years ago as the military came to grips with operations in the air. It’s about much much more than mere technological advantages – it’s about strategy and tactics, training and equipment, and, above all, an open-minded approach a la that of Guderian, Fuller, Mitchell and de Gaulle…

Deserts are good

Territorial Force Annual Camp, January 84, Tekapo Training Area

…even the little ones we have down here…and so I’m a little aggrieved at the information in this editorial at Get Frank – although the picture in the article is rather inaccurate – the MacKenzie Country really is brown…good solid Kiwi tussock country and also home to a training area of which I have many fond memories (time dulls the pain of blistered feet, sunburned faces and fingers cracked and dried digging in the rock-filled ground). The last thing it needs is to be ‘developed’ so a few more investors can make a quick buck and shufty it offshore…

Shaken not Stirred

Not happy to hear that the next Daniel Craig 007 has been put on hold due to troubles aboard the MGM mothership…

High Adventure

Having a crack at chili sardines tonight – aptly enough it’s Masterchef night – if there aren’t any updates for a while, then the experiment didn’t go well…

Ethos of a rat

That was a search that got someone here yesterday…”Oh“, I thought, “someone else doing a search on Michael Yon…” Follow his Facebook page…the guy just gets better and better…and is better entertainment than Shortland Street…

…he’s now decided that GEN McCrystal is mounting an information war against him – if so, he should remember who fired the first shots…

McChrystal’s crew has declared an information war on me. No complaints here. McChrystal’s attention is welcome. It indicates that my posts have hit steel further underlines that McChrystal is over his head. If McChrystal knew what he was doing, he would not be drawing attention to his staff. Will provide compelling evidence in due course. Some of the officers on McChrystal’s staff are my biggest helpers….

…he continues his vendetta against Canadian BGEN Daniel Menard for watching hockey, allegedly letting a key bridge be attacked, and now after BGEN Menard had an accidental discharge from his rifle at KAH…word on the street is he may have been trying to resolve Yon in a more direct manner! In typical Yon fashion, though, his accusations are riddled with errors: the incident did not occur aboard a US (or anyone else’s) helicopter nor was there any risk to VIPs who may or may not have been in the group…

A couple of interesting Canadians told me that Brigadier General Daniel Menard accidentally fired his rifle inside of an American helicopter. Sources said he nearly shot with automatic fire a high Canadian official at point-blank and hit the American helicopter while it was preparing to take off. The claim sounded wild, but I live on instincts and it sounded like it might have basis in fact. And so I began checking about a day ago.

I am intensely uncomfortable with this dishonest, incompetent general leading U.S. combat troops in a hot war. That Menard happens to be Canadian complicates matters. This is business for Secretary Gates. Today, I will write a letter to Secretary Gates and another to General Petraeus expressing my concerns as an American citizen.

…joining the anti-Yon conspiracy cabal is the milbloggers community none of whom have the credibility, knowledge or experience of Michael Yon…

Bottom line questions: How many milbloggers who were not on active duty (hence sent to the war as a troop) have spent more than a year in the wars? I know of zero. Does one exist? The milblogging community is largely a hurricane of hot air.

There are some good and responsible writers working milblogs but most of them are less accurate than the MSM they oppose.

Please name the top five milblogs — and one person from each — who has spent a year (less than 15% of the war) as a civilian journalist/writer inIraq/Afghanistan. Start with http://www.longwarjournal.org/ and Blackfive. People who are seriously tracking the war seriously don’t track these guys.

He also challenges The Guardian’s Alison Banville for daring to state “…the boast of “greater reality” attached to embedding is a falsehood which actually clouds the vision of anyone attempting to make sense of a conflict…” in Embedded war reporting cannot escape its own bias. It’s an interesting and on-target article and well worth reading…which is more than can be said for Yon’s latest series of diatribes against anyone who dares questions his Yonness…really, Mike, you make the information militia look soooo bad…

Really, I only bother with this guy because the shallowness and selfishness of his comments reminds me of me as a young lippy soldier with too much too say but then I grew up…although it was what one might call an ‘assisted’ growing up phase with a goodly chunk of the ‘assisting’ coming from the top soldiers of 8 Platoon, Charlie Company, 2/1 RNZIR in 1985…just realised that was a whole quarter of a century ago…I feel old now…

Heading Home – HEREKINO SAFARI – April 1985

On Curzon

Posted on by
Reply

I started Leonard Mosley’s Curzon in January and only finished it early this morning. It’s not a big book, only some 300 or so pages, but it is a very good book and I have been savouring it as one might a fine wine or one of our butterscotch puddings. Even the paper in was printed on in 1960 is of a quality far removed from the recycled egg-crate material used in publishing today.

I found Curzon an interesting read, more so against the current backdrop of more former colonies descending back into anarchy and chaos. As untrendy or politically palatable that colonialism may be perceived today, there is a certain inescapable logic in his belief that “… that Englishmen, let alone Scotsmen, Welsh, Indians and other lesser breeds, had [not] earned the right to equality with those who had spent their lives and their brains in learning to rule them…” as I commented in January. Funnily enough, as  speak, it is just being announced on Breakfast that New Zealand is signing up to the UN declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples…

Curzon covers a period of British history, the early 20s, that is not well-known nor particularly well covered in popular media. Whether Curzon himself would have been a better Prime Minister than Baldwin, Law or Lloyd-George whom he despised, is debatable but his biography offers a fascinating insight into some of the other key players and events of this time. Mosley is scathing about the (lack of) ability of A.J. Balfour, of Balfour Declaration notoriety “…for rarely in the history of British statesmanship can there have been a man who cared less about the eventual results of the aims and objects of the policies he espoused…” So very right as we still reap the results of Balfour’s ambivalence in the Middle East…

I see in the search results in the blog stats page that someone today was searching for “…curzon by leonard mosley…“. If that person revisits this blog, I’d love to learn more of their interest in Curzon…

Afghanistan’s new owners?

In the inbox last night was an update from Sicuro Group covering Iran’s call for NATO and ISAF to withdraw from Afghanistan in favour of a regionally based force. Normally I take articles from this source with a pinch of salt, more because their ‘assessment’ is usually a statement of the blindingly obvious stated with the pretension of original thought. But I thought that this call from Iran was interesting…

The Iranian president has called on the US to withdraw its troops from the Gulf region and Afghanistan.

“The region has no need for alien troops and they should return home and let the regional states take care of their own affairs,” President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said in a speech marking the country’s annual Army Day on Sunday.

“They must leave the region and this is not a request but an order and the will of the regional nations,” he said.

The president said the deployment of US and NATO troops in Iraq and Afghanistan under the pretext of fighting terrorism had not only failed but also increased insecurity in both countries.

Assessment : The US–NATO campaign in Afghanistan receives brickbats and laurels at the same time. While some countries are opposed to the US withdrawal beginning next year, Iran mounts attacks on the US, urging it to withdraw immediately from Afghanistan and the Gulf region. Turkey also threatens to disassociate with NATO forces if more civilian casualties occur in military offensives.

Maybe Iran is doing a France and looking for a colony in which to test its new nukes…? Could be a win-win situation for everyone…

The New War #5 the new intelligences

Posted on by
Reply

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

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

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

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

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

or

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

or

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…focussed on conventional platforms and groupings, and

…driven largely by predictive philosophies.

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

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

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

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

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

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

A busy chap

Posted on by
1

…that’s how I’d describe Curzon @ Coming Anarchy this week…in fact, I wonder if he was late getting his spring break leave app in and the other members of the team have bailed on him for a few weeks…? In Anyone Care For  A Burger?, he flags the decreasing public confidence and interest in global warming after a number of Climategate incidents that have called into question the science and method behind so much of the global warming literature and ‘studies’. I guess that ‘Be First With The Truth’ applies as much in the scientific community as it does elsewhere…

I saw the same STRATFOR article on Mexico as a failed state that Curzon comments in STRATFOR GOES CLINTONIAN ON MEXICO and had intended to make similar comments today (great minds…?). Like democracy and normalcy, failure is also in the eye of the beholder and totally subject to local conditions, expectations and cultures. One can actually sympathise with and even appreciate the Mexican Government’s pragmatic approach to a problem totally beyond its capacity to oppose, and one in which it is really on a way station between source and market. If the US is really that committed to the w(W)ar on drugs, then maybe it needs to look at turning off the tap at its end i.e. kill the market and thus the demand. Then the domestic and international distribution networks lose their raison d’etre – drugs is a business like any other and when the profits drop, the business dies…

If the US really is waging a War on drugs, then maybe someone in the Pentagon needs to reread Tom Clancy’s Clear and Present Danger for some tips on military means to stifle the flow of drugs. If we have little compunction about Predator and Reaper raids into various Middle East nations with varying levels of apparently acceptable collateral damage, then slipping a few extra lines into the ATO might give the cartels some food for thought…

And on the topic of ‘Truth’…

I stumbled across a link to the official report into the ‘accidental’ deaths of two Reuters reporters and a number of civilians in the Apache gunship attack discussed in Be First With The Truth the other day…it is an interesting read but one which ultimately reeks of whitewash. It notes that “…details that are readily apparent when viewed on a large video monitor are not necessarily apparent to the Apache pilots during a  live-fire engagement.  First of all, the pilots are viewing the scene on a much smaller screen…Secondly, a pilot’s primary concern is with flying his helicopter and the safety of his aircraft. Third, the pilots are continuously tracking the movements of friendly forces in order to prevent fratricide. Fourth, since Bravo Company had been in continuous contact since dawn, the pilots were looking primarily for armed insurgents. Lastly, there was no information leading anyone to believe or even suspect that non-combatants were in the area…” Taking each of those points in sequence…

Yes, the pilots were viewing the sensor imagery on a much smaller monitor in the Apache cockpit…but…the report also states that they were able to identify at least two other members of the group armed with AKMs and a RPG – detail that is not that discernible or obvious when the footage is viewed on a much larger monitor. Nitpicking but how does one discern between a AK-47 and AKM through graining gun camera footage?

Correct, a pilot’s primary concern is with flying his helicopter – that’s why the Apache and most other helicopter gunships since the damn things were invented carry a personality known as a gunner, or copilot/gunner (CPG), whose primary tasks is to manage the sensors, targeting and weapon systems.

OK, so the Apache crew is continuously tracking the movements of friendly forces. So what? That’s has nothing to do with the manner in which this incident played out other than in the avoid of fratricide which never seems to have been an issue here.

If the Apache crew was primarily looking for armed insurgents, then maybe they were only seeing what they expected and/or wanted to see – not what actually was there.

Why, after four years of fighting insurgency in Iraq would anyone not suspect let alone EXPECT the presence of non-combatants e.g. civilians, media, NGOs, etc in a large urban area. According to Chief of Operations at the time, MAJGEN Jim Molan in Running The War in Iraq, even during the final battle for Fallujah in 2005, US forces went out of their way to confirm the combatancy of targets before engaging them.

I’m sorry but this report reads as one where the objective from the start was clearly to butt-cover the Apache crew and not, in fact anything but, be first with the truth…

What was it all for?

Neptunus Lex provokes thought in Losing It…maybe America should just batten down and let the world go to hell in the proverbial hand-basket…? Somewhere down the track we need to objectively look at Iraq and Afghanistan, specifically the conduct of the wars there and LEARN for the next round – has anything really been achieved with these two long drawn-out campaigns or should the approach have more simplistically been “…just as soon as the invasion was done, we should have killed Hussein (and his sons), hand the reins over to the next guy, then said ‘don’t make us come back’….“?

Zombies Rule

I keep forgetting to post this link to a great show that Dean @ Travels with Shiloh put me onto…We’re Alive…that he has been following and that I have been downloading as my next big listen once I get through A Just Determination in a week or so…there’s at least twelve chapters to We’re Alive, each in three parts @20-30Mb, so you can only imagine fun I am having getting the parts – over the last fortnight I have so far managed to squeeze the first six parts through the dial-up straw…

So do Zulus…

Peter @ The Strategist has a top review of Washing of the Spears, one of the best tellings of the Anglo-Zulu Wars of the late 19th Century that is well worth reading. One of the points that comes out in the comments regards the value of popular movies on historical events – regardless of the accuracy or even quality of the movie, it can often serve a useful secondary purpose in encouraging viewers to find out more about the back story. One example of this would be the 1969 movie Mosquito Squadron, a blatant rip-off of 633 Squadron (without even a rousing theme track), and not a good movie at all but one which has inspired many people, myself included to find out more about the real exploits of the Kiwi Mosquito squadrons in WW2 that pulled off precision strikes like the Amiens prison raid…

 

Target Amiens Prison (c) Robert Taylor

…and here’s a list of links to the first six parts of Peter’s novel, The Doomsday Machine…

Be First With The Truth

Posted on by
Reply

Who hasn’t seen these 38 minute long gun camera clip that this still was taken from? Released by Wikileaks this week, the clip graphically displays the killing of two journalist by a US Army Apache gunship crew in Iraq in 2007. The first thing to note is that these people were killed by the helicopter’s crew, the gunship is just the tool and without EDI-like artificial intelligence, the crew is the decision-making engine that decides to pull the trigger or not…in this case they opted to fire, based on what appears to be the flimsiest of ‘evidence’…

Wikileaks has established a specific site for this topic, named appropriately Collateral Murder, that has links to the full and abbreviated clips and the transcript of communications between the two crew members and US troops on the ground in the vicinity. It is certainly worth a look to draw your own conclusions.

While I don’t think that the smugness of Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange, (see wiki on Wikileaks) did anything to enhance his own credibility nor add anything to the story, I have to agree that, in this case, he is in the right to be blowing the whistle on this incident. It appears that the DoD was well aware of the incident at the time and cleared the gunship crew in an internal review process at the time. If that is the case, then there is clearly more to this story than meets the eye as they is nothing in the footage nor the transcript to support the this use of force.

No one denies that operations in any environment are challenging and often tough decisions have to made in a  split-second but this doesn’t seem to be one of those times. This is the warzone that Iraq was in 2004 and 2005 – this incident occurred post-surge in 2007 when, theoretically, the US had a good handle on both TTPs for the contemporary environment AND in training its people for that environment.

That the DoD chose to sit on this incident after conducting an internal whitewash is a clear indication that many of its staff still don’t ‘get it’ so far as this new and complex environment that we operate in. At the very least, this incident should have been reported as one of those things that happen in war, with apologies, condolences and reparations where applicable. However it is not unreasonable, noting the cavalier attitude of the gunship crew, that there is a case for willful negligence in these deaths – one definitely gets the feeling that both men were just looking for any excuse (not reason) to squeeze the trigger and nowhere is this made clearer than in the comment passed when ground troops reported that children had been injured “…Roger. Ah damn. Oh well…Well it’s their fault for bringing their kids into a battle…” With friendly troops on the ground, there appears no reason that other courses of action could not have been adopted to at the very least confirm the targets before engaging them…

While the use of force is a legitimate tool in Countering Irregular Activity, and ISAF’s squeamishness about directly engaging targets in the vicinity of hostile forces is another example of not ‘getting it’, this incident violates everything we try to teach about getting ahead in the contemporary environment….

Afterthought: how come the Marines never seem to have these kind of problems…?