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 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 is 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…

Drill and Colours and things…

Posted on 6 December 2009 by SJPONeill

Why do we need drill? Surely there are better more effective ways of instilling teamwork and leadership and discipline into soldiers? Why should the government invest such considerable quantities of public monies on the maintenance of Colours and banners when Defence is allegedly so under-funded? Surely these things are anachronisms, relics of bygone glories that have no place in a modern army?

“He remembered the battle: the noise, loneliness, fear: the shame of running, the terror when you didn’t. Running was a decision of the moment, but not running away went on and on. A rational army would run away.”

A rational army would run away. And it would. To stand and fight, to endure the unendurable, to achieve the impossible – to be involved in actions emblazoned throughout history – requires a special type of person, a properly trained soldier. And probably not so much trained in some areas as conditioned.

Camerone. The Alamo. Bastogne. Gallipoli. Rorke’s Drift. Hill 834. Chosin. Agincourt. Wake. Maleme. Monte Cassino. Little Round Top. Long Tan. Kapyong. Waterloo. Minquar Quim.

I have stacks to do but all this rain has been sapping my motivation – or maybe I am just going through a bit of computer rejection syndrome…I am quite excited that the second batch of chickens might actually survive – a design error saw batch 1 unable to hop back into the nest after they hopped out so the cold got them – there are two hopping and chirping around the coop at the moment with another hatching last time I checked them…

Anyway the opening paragraphs above are from a paper I started to write 10+ years ago, the subject of which is as topical now as it was back then in pre-war days…I think that the quote in the middle is from Jerry Pournelle’s Lucifer’s Hammer…

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?

Under the wide and starry sky

Posted on 26 November 2009 by SJPONeill

Under the wide and starry sky

Dig the grave and let me lie

Gladly did I live and gladly die

And I lay me down with a will

This be the verse you grave for me

Here he lies where he longed to be

Home is the sailor, home from the sea

And the hunter, home from the hill

This is Robert Louis Stevenson’s epitaph, his own words, and engraved on his tombstone in Samoa.

The closing lines are also the last lines in Leon Uris’ Battle Cry, a semi-autobiographical novel that tells the tale of a group of signallers from the Second Marine Division in WW2. I don’t think that I was aged even ten when I first finished this book and I reread that copy so many times that it eventually fell apart. It was this novel that taught me what being a Marine was all about, that and the sections on the Marine pilots in Miracle at Midway (Reader’s Digest version) that I also read many times at the same time.

Of course, we don’t have Marines here and if we did, I probably wouldn’t have been a very good one, but those words remain with me today – the power of a legend…

I’ve categorised this under The Thursday/Friday War because it is becoming so apparent that ethos and values are the key enablers for operation in the complex environment. If we can’t get this right, we can never hope to even attract let alone win the hearts and the minds of ‘the people‘…

And now I see with eye serene

Posted on 25 November 2009 by SJPONeill

While fossicking around in the library last night, I found an old notebook in which a much younger me had recorded quotes of note (to me anyway). I’m away the next couple of nights so I thought that I would schedule blog updates for my away days to keep things ticking over. So here goes…

And now I see with eye serene

The very pulse of the machine;

A being breathing thoughtful breath,

A traveller between life and death;

The reason firm, the temperate will,

Endurance, foresight, strength, and skill…

A perfect thing, nobly planned,
To warm, to comfort, and command;
And yet a Spirit still, and bright…

– William Wordsworth; ‘She was a Phantom of delight‘, l.21^8 (published 1807)

On googling this today I found that the long-forgotten source from which I drew this quote has in fact shifted the focus from a woman to a machine; possibly this has been drawn from one of the Bolo series’ that illustrate how an artificial intelligence can become in time truly aware.

I was quite fascinated with this series when I first discovered it – I was only 9 or 10 when I got my first exposure to the Bolo story…I had invested my pocket money in the Tales of Time and Space anthology…and there it was, Keith Laumer’s The Last Command and the Mark 28 Bolo LNE (Lenny)…many years later, I discovered the Bolo anthologies and theme enduring theme that ethos and values are more important warrior attributes than flesh or metal.

Rattatattatat…

Posted on 24 November 2009 by SJPONeill

The thud of my fingers (all both of them) on the keyboard is accompanied by the staccato of two sparrows tapping away at their reflections in the stainless rubbish bin in the kitchen. Both the big bi-folds are open so these two have quite happily hopped into the house, oblivious of the two very large dogs stretched on the floor following their every move…obviously the two little sparrows are keener on challenging their reflections in the stainless steel than the potential consequences of their action – quite brave really…

Courage is something I have been thinking about recently; not so much the Victoria Cross/Medal of Honor kind of courage but the simple courage to stand by your beliefs when the going gets tough and to do the right thing. In Lucifer’s Hammer, Jerry Pournelle says “…it was the right thing to do – in any ethical situation, the thing you want least to do is probably the right action…” What brought this on was a post on The Strategist quoting another blog proposing that COIN techniques could be successfully employed to counter urban crime…I tend to agree because the bottom line in COIN is still to address, one way or another, the core issues behind the problem. What really caught my eye in this post was the quote from the Naval Postgraduate School study regarding the mindset of the local law enforcement “..But Fetherolf, who took office this year, also blamed 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...”

Police officers operate as individuals and are a great example of the Strategic Private, that one individual who by a single callous or careless word or action can inflame an environment, who in the space of seconds, can undo years of relationship building. Michael Scheiern’s shift from platform-based tracking to tracking individuals works both ways; in the good old days of the Fulda Gap, we were interested in creating effect with mass: brigades, battalions, squadrons and fleets. In these massed forces, one or two bad eggs would really do little or no damage in the big scheme of this. In today’s complex conflict, amongst ‘the people’, just ONE individual who fails to uphold generally accepted ethos and values can lose the war…and the only way to ensure that those ethos and values will be there on the day, is to live by and apply them EVERY day…

“If a Marine fails to uphold our standards and dishonours oneself or the Corps in peacetime, by failing to do his or her best to accomplish the task at hand, or by failing to follow ethical standards in daily life, how can we expect that same Marine to uphold these critical foundations of our Corps in the searing cauldron of combat?” – FMFM 1-0

Ratbags

Posted on 10 November 2009 by SJPONeill

Well the ratbags award for this week must go to those two spannerhead MPs who’ve been caught abusing their Parliamentary privileges. While these two clowns go swanning around the planet with their significant others, their cronies back in NZ are plotting to wind back benefits because they were incapable of appointing competent senior staff into ACC…

Personally, I don’t have a problem with Hone Harawira taking a day off during an official visit IF he had already completed the business planned for that day – I do have a mega-problem with the tone and content of the email he send to his mate, Buddy, to justify his jaunt to Paris. Then again, ‘good mate’ Buddy probably isn’t clear of the firing line either – the email he was sent was a personal one and I think he has some nerve trying cling to the moral high ground after releasing his mate’s inopportune email to the media…should Hone Harawira be fired as an MP? Nah, only if you want to make rank dumbness an offence in which case you would probably have to get rid of the lot of them and start over…

Rodney Hide, on the other hand, should seriously consider handing in his ministerial platinum card and returning to Dancing with the Stars (except it just got axed) – clearly he is a better tapdancer than he is an minister…for someone who has made his name as a perk-buster to be perk-busted himself and then to whine about not being a martyr when everyone else is doing it, clearly invalidates any credibility he might once have had. But as has already come out, so long as he can at least keep the (easily-led) people of Epsom happy, he is pretty safe…

Not a ratbag…

Well not this time anyway, porn king, Steve Crow was fronted on Close Up over his apparent bullying of some defenceless veterans at the New Plymouth RSA – interesting what comes out when the ‘bully’ has a chance to rebut the allegations – he’s actually the guy putting the money INTO the RSA and dragging it out of debt – but with that comes change, and a couple of grumpy old buggers don’t want to. Mark Sainsbury would have had a bit more credibility himself tonight if he had admitted he might have got it wrong and focused a little more on the FACTs. Mark, maybe YOU should be on this week’s ratbag list for not getting your FACTS right…

Many of these RSA’s and similar clubs are run like little fiefdoms instead of the businesses that they really are and need to be in order to sustain themselves…yes, I mourned as well when the Invercargill Garrison Club had to increase its prices from a dollar a jug but some things have to be done in order to survive. I’m a strong supporter of RSAs and the role they play although I’m not sure whether we are better or worse off in that they are not the powerful political beast that Aussie’s RSL is…

The Week In Review

It’s been quite a week or so hence the lack of daily posts…I spent a couple of great days in Wellington last week and caught up with some people I hadn’t seen for a awhile and gained some valuable insights into how things in this system do or do not work; got introduced to an interesting business plan that I think has some real potential; and got to spend an unproductive but very satisfying half an hour at Modelcrafts and Hobbies – one of the things that I do really miss not being in Wellington. Mr Regan was unable to tempt me with the inbound Airfix 1/24 Mosquito but if he had had the Trumpeter Swordfish on the shelf I would probably been in trouble when I got home. I did invest in yet another jar of German Grey for Dora and some Vallejo Russian Green for the B-4…

Arrived home to find we had the twins for the weekend – always lots of fun and enjoyment but it means that nothing else is going to happen while they are here…took them to the Taumarunui Guy Fawkes display on Saturday night which was all lots of fun until the fireworks started and then we had to beat a hasty retreat because all the noise was just a little too much…dropped them back at home just as their Dad was coming back from a quick excursion down the river with a couple of trout. I took a pic to send to the US CALL guys so they have something to look forward to if they get down to Australia and NZ next year…the twin’s dad made it his mission in life to show fishermen from the Northern Hemisphere (where he believes there are no ‘real’ trout), what a real trout is, so I think they’ll have a guaranteed guide when they come down under…

Trout 002 And last but definitely not least, the vege garden has passed its first milestone and various heads and shoots are starting to come out of the ground. We were a bit worried as it has been pretty dry for the last week or so and when you rely on tank water, you sometimes tends to get a bit stingy with the watering at this time of years – 20,000 litres sounds like heaps but…

Planning for summer projects is already under way and the vege garden is already down for a lift so that when we put in the front deck, the height above the ground from any point along the edges will be less than a metre. If we get that done this summer, coupled with more tidying up and new gardens it will have been a good summer…