Tag Archives: ISR

The Little Orange Book

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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…

What a crock

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Collapsed dome at Waihopai after nutjob attack

From Stuff today “…Three activists who freely admitted breaking into a government spybase near Blenheim and slashing an inflatable plastic dome covering a satellite dish have walked free. Their defence – that they mounted the attack to prevent others’ suffering – has been successfully used by Iraq-war protesters overseas, but is thought to be a New Zealand first…” I’m off to knock over a bank this afternoon because I think they do harm too…

The New War #2 Fusing Information

Information and intelligence fusion is one of those terms trotted out by the intelligence fraternity around, I think it is safe to say having read the Flynn report, that never really goes any further than being just a soapboxed buzzword. In the preparations for the defence of (or attack upon, I suppose) the Fulda Gap, there was a reasonable expectation that information would be delivered and disseminated in accordance with established processes, in standard, if not altogether common, formats, and between like or similar i.e. military, organisations. Relationships in this world were generally based upon long-standing agreements and history e.g. NATO, SEATO, FPDA, etc.

The beginning of the end for this structured environment was probably the 1990 Iraqi Invasion of Kuwait which resulted in the first major coalition not based on an extant alliance since the Korean War. 32 nations, many of who had not only worked together before but some who had also been active sparring partners with some of the others, contributed to this coalition, bringing with them a range of languages, cultures, doctrine and military philosophies. The trend towards ‘shake’n’bake’ coalitions over extant formal alliances continued through the 90s, through Somalia, Bosnia, and East Timor to culminate (so far) in Afghanistan and Iraq.

At the same time as the pool of likely military partners is expanding, so is the range of potential non-military partners. Some of these may actually have the lead for the campaign, further challenging the accepted structure of ‘how things are done’. These other partners are not solely the ‘other’ government agencies of the OGA acronym, which includes the further complexity and layers of local and regional government. They may also include non-government agencies like aid organisations, political groups, and commercial/corporate entities.

Standards of any sort on how these disparate groups interact are few and far between, is any exist at all. Issues of language and ideology pale in comparison with the mass of information that sits unaccessed simply because there is no common standard for sharing that particular type of data. In many cases, the common denominator is a hard copy print-out that can be rescanned and uploaded into other discrete systems…so much for the multi-directional, intuitive, real-time information nirvana of the ‘Revolution in Military Affairs’ touted by the Net-Centric Warfare groupies…

The challenge today is to be able to fuse information and data from a broad range of allied, military, government, commercial, digital, verbal, virtual and hard copy sources into a pulsing representation of the operating environment.

Many centres and agencies promote the message but as the furore over the Undies Bomber and the Khost suicide bomber attack showed, there is a still a massice chasm between reality and the aspiration:

Since September 11, 2001 and the resulting creation of the Department of Homeland Security, the relationship between federal law enforcement agencies, their state and local colleagues, and private sector security organizations  has changed significantly.  Perhaps nowhere is this change more evident than in the creation of state and regional Information Fusion Centers.  Under the Fusion Center Guidelines developed in 2005 by DHS and DOJ, these entities are intended to be hubs for the collection, analysis and dissemination of information related to terrorism and other criminal activity.  In the area of counterterrorism, they play the critical role of being the place where threat, vulnerability, and locally collected, tactical intelligence meet.

In order to “get the right information to the right people at the right time and ensure that they know what to do with it’ I think that we need to have a fundamental rethink of what the information is, who needs it and how we manage it. At the moment we are still trying to evolve the conventional Fulda Gap intel model to cope with an environment that is far more complex and fluid than anything the Fulda Gap model was ever envisaged to deal with.

On learning

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(c) Peter Hodge @ The Strategist

This amazing photo was on Peter’s latest post @ The Strategist…my only comment is WOW! To learn more, click on the image…

This post also carried a link to a recent Business Day article Unhappy workers the key to corporate culture which states organisations that wish to learn about themselves,  for example, what’s working and what’s not, could do worse things that seek out and listen to “…malcontents and marginalised workers in the firm…” Often these people are marginalised or malcontent because they are frustrated in their efforts to improve or progress their work environment. As I commented on Peter’s post, so often I have “…seen a visiting reviewing, audit, info gathering team sat down with the happy-happy joy-joy people in an organisation when they really need to to be getting together with those who have issues (real or perceived) with how the organisation operates…”

Most organisations have a fundamental expectation that equipment and processes and staff will function as advertised. To be continually told that this is occurring really achieves little except perhaps a warm fuzzy feeling in the executive washroom. What organisations really need to know is what is NOT functioning as it should, or where things could be done smarter…you won’t get this from the mindless clones of the happy-happy joy-joy brigade. This is the foundation of any Lessons Learned or organisational learning process of system: to get over fear of bad news and actually welcome and seek it out. All to often though, the catalyst for this cultural shift is a king-size punch in the nose.

The most notable example of such cultural change is the US Army in the year from the end of the official war-fighting phase in May 2003 until the true scope of the insurgency was grasped in 2004. In no more than a year, this organisation of 500,000 plus was transformed from one where it was not cool to advertise screw-ups in your area of responsibility to one where it was no longer acceptable NOT to share what went wrong on your patch in order that others might learn and lives be saved…if the pie-in-the-sky plans of Rumsfeld, Cheney et al had actually worked and Iraq had snapped into a functioning democracy as soon as Saddam was toppled, I don’t think that even a quarter of the issues identified in the various post-Phase One AARs would have been addressed, and certainly any cultural shifts arising from those issues would have been incremental at best.

The first step in any Lessons Learned system is to consistently and continuously and honestly capture what’s not working and what could be done better. We found that the format for this is:

What happened? A simple statement that defines the problem or issue, e.g. boot laces keep snapping.

What does it mean? I.e. the ‘so what?’ factor…you can not assume that everyone else will perceive the same or any issues arising from the ‘what happened’ so this needs to be explained. e.g. affects soldier’s mobility as boots don’t fit properly until such time as laces are replaced or repaired – this is not always immediately possible i.e. at night (light discipline) or if spare laces are not available/accessible.

What do you think should be done about it? This is the originator’s recommendation from their perspective and may often serve only as a start point for investigation and bear no resemblance to the final solution e.g. replace the current crap boots with a new brand.

This was an OIL that we came across through direct contact with some of the afore-mentioned malcontents and marginalised who expressed their frustration that this problem was prevalent and nothing seemed to be happening about it. When we pulled on a few threads, we found that higher levels were prone to removing such low-level ‘trivia’ as reports drifted up the hierarchy, based on a misperception that high-level issues should be disseminated up to high levels. The response back down was more than often the good old ‘harden up!’

Investigating the actual issue was very frustrating because there was a continual stream of ‘no fault found’ with every test conducted on the laces held in stock. It was only in examining the boots that it was found that the fault was not in the laces but in a batch of lace eyelets that had an exceptionally sharp inner edge – the action of pulling a lace tight also pulled the lace over this edge which cut into the fibres of the lace. Murphy’s Law of laces states that they will always give way at the least convenient time, typically 0300 on a frosty no-moon night on a patrol in the tussock.

The solutions that were put in place were to:

Withdraw the affected boots and have them repaired by the manufacturer.

Review Quality Assurance processes for future boot shipments.

Review the defect reporting process.

Discuss with headquarters staffs the importance of NOT attenuating reports as they rose through the chain of command, including those issues that perhaps they could actually resolve at their own levels. By keeping these to themselves they constrain the ability of others to learn from them.

Man’s Best Friend

Neptunus Lex has a touching story about a boy and his dog…things you wouldn’t see your cat doing for you…

Bridgegate

Still waiting on Michael Yon’s Dispatch in which he winds up the Tarnak Bridge drama AND apologises to Canadian general Daniel Menard…

Getting out of the square

Travels with Shiloh discusses the need for intelligence operators to have training in snapping out of conventional squares to consider problems in the complex environment. I agree and think that his 2007 suggestion of using movies like John Carpenter’s The Thing as the basis for scenarios to achieve this has considerable merit. I had a similar idea in the early 90s when i was just getting into PC gaming that young officers could be given certain games to play that would broaden their problem-solving thought processes…TacOps springs to mind immediately but for some reason Megafortress springs to mind – will have to see if I can find my old notes on this…to add a pain/risk factor, it was suggested that they play for places (or not) on the monthly duty/orderly officer lists…

I also agree with Dean’s comments re using tactical decision-making games (TDG) – the Marines have been using them for years – I think they still publish one at the back of each issue of the Marine Corps Gazette? – but everyone else seems a little slow on the uptake. The zero defects people seem very cool on the idea unless each TDG comes with a 17 page ‘white’ sheet that details all the possible permutations and variations of solutions so that the supervising staff would be put on the spot and find their own knowledge and or capabilities challenged. I think this is a fundamental lack of understanding of what TDGs are for which is to allow students and instructors to explore the application of principles and considerations in different environments and scenarios and to totally NOT focus on any perceived need for the solution to be a thing that Norman Schwarzkopf would be proud of…

The double standard of nice war

Coming Anarchy discusses the drone ‘war’ in Pakistan. The acceptance of civilian casualties in this campaign against the Taliban seems to be in stark contrast with ISAF’s squeamishness in engaging Taliban hiding behind civilians in Marjah. Maybe it’s only OK to kill civilians in a war zone by accident where you (and the media) can’t see the bodies…? It’s probably all the same to the dead…

Into the Blue

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Yes, it’s cool; yes, it was in Die Hard 4.0; but it just has way too many dangly bits to do the business. Image (c) http://www.telegraph.co.uk

“We are shackled by the past and never has the future been more difficult to divine. What we must do is to quite ruthlessly discard ideas, traditions, and methods which have not stood the test…each of the fighting services must go for speed, mobility and economy, and develop the whole time with an eye on the other two members of the team in co-operation, not in competition.” This 1947 quote from Marshal of the RAF the Lord Tedder opens an article by the new UK Chief of Air Staff, The Future of British Air and Space Power: A Personal Perspective, in the Autumn 2009 Air Power Review. He follows this with a quote from Darwin on the second page of the article “It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the most adaptable.” I did comment briefly in this article in Resuming Normal Services last month but have only really considered the issues more fully today…

It is indeed good to see a newly-appointed service chief (appointed on 31 July 2009) publicly stating his opinions and intentions. Certainly, as a general rule across government, this is not something that we do well in New Zealand – tons of internal marketing and engagement but not too much with the poor old public or our friends and allies…I actually think that it should be mandatory for CEOs and chiefs within government and its ministries and agencies to release a public stance on where they think they will go during their tenure as ‘boss’.

The new CAS will most likely achieve much of what he sets out in this paper. He has steered clear of the ‘boots on the ground’ versus ‘ships at sea’ spat between the Chiefs of Army and Navy and it is only in late January this year that he issued a cautionary note regarding the risks involved in focusing Defence acquisitions too much on ‘the’ war and not enough on ‘a’ war “…the point is to have those discussions in the context of a proper review so we don’t end up making short-term decisions on the financial (question) of the availability of money in the current environment or the short term rationale. We need a long-term view…” This is somewhat of a contrast to the previous CAS who, only a month or so before handing over the role, predicted that the RAF would take over Royal Navy jet operations. While this may be the current situation through the establishment of the Joint Harrier Force, it certainly created waves as the Royal Navy anticipates the introduction into service of two new ‘real’ aircraft carriers equipped with brand spanking F-35 Lightning IIs. Lightning is the US name for the F-35 which the RAF has adopted although nothing published as yet defines whether they see it as the successor to the Lockheed Lightning ‘I’ which the RAF wasn’t that impressed with; or  as a possible successor to the English Electric Lightning ‘I’ which is and will always be one of the all-time grunter fighter aircraft.

I have my own reservations regarding the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, all versions; it seems reminiscent of the McNamarist one-size-fits-all-roles aircraft in the F-111 debacle and comes across as an attempt to (ap)please everyone and will end up pleasing no one. Even though the RAF has stood fast in its procurement of the Eurofighter which lies in capability somewhere between the F-35 and the now-cancelled F-22, it has already shrunk its fleet from the 232 originally needed to only 123  aircraft. This seems scarcely enough for the RAF’s primary mission,as described by CAS’ article,  of controlling and protecting British airspace, let alone to support any but the most benign expeditionary operations. Even though the Typhoon will eventually be joined by the F-35, reading between the lines of the UK MOD’s current financial stresses, it is likely that its numbers will also be dramatically reduced from the 150 originally planned. This number has already been whittled down to 138 and there is speculation that this number will be reduced again.

While the Air Power Review article  sees the F-35 Lightning II as “…primarily an ISTAR asset…with hugely effective built-in Attack and Control of the Air capabilities...”, it does caution against the risks of “…putting all our investment into a small number of highly capable platforms…that we will field a ‘middle-weight’ force structure which is too sophisticated to fight low technology insurgencies in a cost effective manner but equally, is unable to be completely effective against the high technology equipment that future state adversaries…are likely to deploy…” Unfortunately, as costs spiral upwards passing budgets spiraling the other way, it does not seem like that the RAF as it is currently being structured will be able to meet its obligations to “…capitalise on air power’s ability to acquire and process intelligence, and to strike with proportion and precision…” The article concludes by listing ten key propositions for the future of British air and space power:

  1. Air and space power is all about creating influence.
  2. Control of the Air and Space remains the paramount air and space role.
  3. Air and space power is about the provision of capability, not the generation of platforms.
  4. Time is a weapon: air and space power offers the mean to dominate it.
  5. Combat ISTAR will lie at the heart of the RAF’s future capability.
  6. Unmanned Air Systems are here to stay. UAS are an integral part of the UK’s air power capability.
  7. Space and cyber are joint domains but the air component is best-placed to lead in coordinating the defence effort in these areas.
  8. Technology and air and space power are synergistically related.
  9. Agility and adaptability are the key to the delivery of capable, relevant and affordable air and space power in a complex and uncetain world.
  10. Network Enabled Capability is critical to unlocking air and space power’s potential.

First things first: the UK does not have a space capability – it got out of that game in the 60s.  Any interdiction and control of space will be reserved for those nations that can get into the operating environment: the US, Russia and maybe China and India one day. Even the EU is not a real player in the 21st Century space game which is a shame because there is not reason that it should not be, other than general apathy and too great an interest in keeping the here and now nice and comfortable…

ISTAR and cyber are and MUST be a Joint, Interagency, Multinational and Public (Bring out the JIMP!) responsibilities. As soon as any one player declares it is ‘their’ role and grabs for primacy in either role, it only demonstrates a total failure to grasp this fact. Both ISTAR and cyber relate to facets of information; attempts to cram them into legacy single service stovepipes only cripples the wider effort. There is not one single whit of evidence to suggest that any service is better or worse in these domains than any other. If our children are to be believed, it is the unkempt, Gen Z-ers with their trousers habitually halfway to their knees who rule in the information domains…

Technology and air and space power may be synergistically related but possibly not in the way intended in the article. I am a big fan of Alfred Thayer Mahan; in fact, The Influence of Seapower Upon History is one of only two books that I have as both Audible files and hard copy publications – the other being William Manchester‘s American Caesar. I first read The Influence of Seapower in the mid-90s when the third frigate debate raged across Defence. Although Mahan was oft-quoted by the frigate lobby, I always suspected that those doing the quoting hadn’t actually read the book as one of the key points I took away from it was that, in order to control the seas, you must actually be capable of doing so. Thus, the French and Spanish talked it (seapower) up but we never able to quite deliver whereas the Dutch and most definitely the Royal Navy were very much able to enforce their will on and dominate the waves. If the RAF seeks to control the Britain’s air space or the air space of an operational theatre, then perhaps it simply can not afford these high tech platforms like Typhoon and F-35. More importantly, it might not be able to afford to replace them should an opponent adopt an attritive strategy. Even if an adversary lacks its own air power capability, conflicts in Zimbabwe, Vietnam and the Falkland Islands have demonstrated how small groups of soldiers can apply their own counter-air campaigns on aircraft on the ground. Similarly, an over-dependence on UAS will come a cropper as an adversary targets the links between the UAV, its controllers and its ‘clients’.

In defining the way ahead for the RAF, I am not at all sure that the CAS has fully considered where it has been. Scene-setting early paragraphs in the paper cite the air policing of no-fly zones over Iraq from 1991-2003 as a relatively cost-effective (no loss of coalition lives and $1 billion annually) method of neutering Saddam compared to the 4000 US KIA and $12.5 billion monthly cost of OIF. This is very much a chalk and cheese comparison: the no-fly zone campaign was at the bottom end of a containment strategy that did little to curbs Saddam’s aspirations, power or depredations against his own people. OIF, on the other hand, was very much a high intensity state on state conflict that, rightly or wrongly, deposed Saddam’s regime and heralded significant change and consequences for all Iraqis. While I could by no means be accused of land-centricity, the simple fact is that there are few campaigns where the employment of air power in isolation has been a deciding factor in a conflict. The bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the Berlin Airlift, and Operation EL DORADO CANYON are three rare examples where this has occurred.

Immediately following this example, the article states that “…even where a significant presence is required on the ground as part of a joint campaign, air power is able to act as a force multiplier to dramatically reduce exposure. Ideally, the ‘boots on the ground’ required in a counterinsurgency operation will eventually be provided by indigenous forces after suitable training...” It cites no example to support this statement and it is unlikely that many examples exist. These two statements overlook two fundamentals of COIN (as opposed to Countering Irregular Activity as Op ELDORADO CANYON did) , namely the need to close with and engage (not necessarily ‘strike‘ or ‘attack‘) the people in the campaign theatre, and that, for the purposes of shaping UK forces for the future, the ‘long war‘ nature of COIN requires a long term commitment of land forces. It is only in the very late stages of a successful COIN campaign that air power might become the primary form of aid to the host nation.

Like Friends in High Places, this article only pays the barest lip service to the less kinetic aspects of air power. Instead of ‘engage‘ it still displays the archaic mindset of  ‘attack‘. The force multiplying value of RAF fixed and rotary wing transport capabilities is only skimmed over and does not earn so much as a mention in the ten key propositions for the future of British air and space power listed above. Relationships with the other services receive little mention, and even less is awarded to allies and coalition partners.  The RAF has yet to fully consider the final part of Lord Tedder’s advice that opens the article “…and develop the whole time with an eye on the other two members of the team in co-operation, not in competition...” In the frantic scrambling for the remnants of the British Defence budget, the RAF may have been a little too quick to “…ruthlessly discard ideas, traditions, and methods…” without fully considering the nature of the test that each should have withstood.

Indications of this are evident in the article in that there is not one single mention of control of the sea lanes upon which Britain relies so much. Although Mahan wrote of naval control of the sea, it is not difficult to extrapolate his principles to include control of the sea from the air as well, regardless of who, RAF or RN, might own that air power. The US Navy integration of air power into control of the sea is probably the most powerful example of Mahan’s work being put into action. From its earliest days, the RAF has played a key role in control of Britain’s sea lane’s; although it could be argued that this might fall under one of the ISTAR principles listed above, that does not include any capability (apart from F-35?) to actually inflict control on those areas i.e. the roles filled by the Hudson and Liberators of Coastal Command and now assumed by Nimrod today. The sea is the other ‘space’ the RAF should be seeking to control both as one of its core traditional roles and also as one directly linked to the prosperity and growth of Mother England.

The RAF has some tough decisions ahead of it, as do the Royal Navy and British Army. The simple fact is that Britain is no longer the world power that she once was and has not been for decades: the Falklands Islands campaign almost 30 years ago could easily be regarded as the last gasp of an Empire. Sometime less = less and more = more: maybe the RAF needs to be less swayed by the attractions of technologies it can no longer afford e.g. Typhoon and F-35 – who exactly might be the threat against which such capabilities maybe required? It may well be that such high-tech platforms are now solely in the bailiwick of those that can afford to operate them like the US and Singapore (sorry, Australia). In their place, perhaps the RAF should be considering adoption of  greater quantities of the 21st Century equivalents of the Hawker Hunter,  Douglas A-4 Skyhawk and Northrop F-5…?

[PDF version]

In other news

Peter @ The Strategist has released Part 2 of the Doomsday Device.

Paper Modelers has now been down for almost two days and I am most definitely missing my fix. Apparently the ISP lost (how careless!) a drive in its RAID array and is having trouble restoring the site – as the twins would say, uh-oh…what makes this double or triply frustrating is that I have news to share and no one to share it with: where it was thought that the Kalinin K-12 released a couple of weeks ago might be some seven inches short in wing span, I have now measured the relevant parts and the span, less skin thickness, in my opinion, is 606mm which is close enough to the correct 635mm span. Of course, that meant absolutely nothing to anyone but at least I have it off my chest now…

Neptunus Lex has a thought-provoking item on the “…moral continuum between killing our terrorist adversaries where we find them, detaining them as unlawful combatants and giving them the same constitutional rights as any US citizen…“

Eye in the Sky

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Over the last few months, I have been keeping reporting developments in a local company gearing up to conduct commercial UAV/UAS operations (depending which school you went to) domestically and offshore. Just a quick note to report that all is still on track, and that the website has been further developed. Of particular interest to ISR types may be the two publications now available that offer more information on both operations and capability.

On the modelling front, a tres way cool find last night, reported via Paper Modelers, and available for download from the designer’s site in Russia…you do have to register to download but even with a dial-up download of the two 43Mb files, the wait is well worth it – can’t see Revell or Trumpeter knocking out something as cool as this any time soon…

That’s the update for today – it’s been a long day as we shot over to Turangi to catch up with the twins while Carmen had  a job interview; after we got home and survived the heat of the day (is this summer finally?), we decided to attack the jungle that had erupted around the spa deck – very stiff back now – had a late dinner of corn on the cob and rezapped lasagne before watching Will Smith in Seven Pounds: very heavy duty but highly recommended…

Friends in High Places – review

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The cover raised such expectations

Friends in High Places – Air Power in Irregular Warfare was published in July 2009 by the RAAF Air Power Development Centre. It has been edited by Dr Sanu Kainikara, a former Indian Air Force pilot who is now the Air Power Strategist at the Air Power Development Centre in Canberra. Including the preface and glossary, the book has 267 pages divided into nine sections:

  • Foreword. Group Captain Rick Keir, AM, CSC. July 2009.
  • Introduction. Dr Sanu KainiKara. July 2009.
  • The War of the Running Dogs: The Malayan Emergency. Air Commodore Mark Lax, CSM (rtd). An edited version of the paper originally presented at the RAAF History Conference in Canberra, 1 April 2008.
  • Offensive Air Power In Counterinsurgency Operations: Putting Theory Into Practice. Wing Commander Glen Beck. An edited version of Air Power Development Centre Paper #26 published in August 2008.
  • Air Power and Special Forces: A Symbiotic Relationship. Wing Commander David Jeffcoat. An edited version of Air Power Development Centre Paper #14 published in February 2004.
  • Taking It To The Streets: Exploding Urban Myths About Australian Air Power. Wing Commander Gareth B.S. Neilsen. An edited version of Air Power Development Centre Paper #23 published in October 2007.
  • Air Power and Transnational Terrorism: The Possibilities, Advantages and Limits to using Australian Air Power in the ‘War on Terror’. Mr Sam Gray-Murphy. An edited version of Air Power Development Centre Paper #20 published in October 2005.
  • The Role of Air Power in Irregular Warfare: An Overview of the Israeli Experience. Dr Sanu Kainikari.
  • Conclusion. Dr Sanu Kainikari.

My initial visual impression of this book was “Yes! the Aussies have ‘got it’!”: the cover very positively shows a C-130 at low level over a Bushmaster Infantry Mobility Vehicle and not the F/A-18 and M-1/ASLAV combination that might be indicative of a conventionally focused publication. Unfortunately this warm buzz did not last beyond the second page of the foreword which notes the ‘…predilection towards precision strike…‘ in the collected papers as ‘…one of our key asymmetric capabilities against a typically asymmetric foe…(1)’

These comments set the scene for the remainder of the book. While various CIA(2) truisms appear through the papers, they are not supported by the text which largely drives towards supporting the maintenance and further development of current air power capabilities with continuing focus upon kinetic operations. Although it makes a case of a balanced spread of air power capabilities, the truth today is that only a very small number of nations can actually do this – the rest of us have to make some tough decisions about what capabilities we need to maintain nationally and what we may have to give up to do so.

Friends In High Places does not consider the lessons of allies and partners in coalition operations since WW2. Its conclusions focus on what was i.e. offensive kinetic air power and not upon what is and will be: a blended mission-specific capability mix drawn from national and coalition military, government and civilian sources – to use an obsolescent but appropriate term: Joint, Inter-agency, Multi-national and Public (JIMP)(3).

This publication has been written around a pre-assumed conclusion: that traditional kinetic air power will remain as the premier ADF air power output. While this may or may not be the case, by approaching this publication with that belief as a given, all the content is badly skewed from the reality of the COE. A more effective approach would have been to consider the COE and what makes it different from  the more comfortable traditional forms of warfare and then apply these findings to the employment of air power. Applying an open mind to the complexities and nuances of the COE may have produced a volume that lives up to the promise of its cover.

Although the foreword notes the minimal consideration of air power in contemporary COIN doctrine like FM 3-24 and LWD 3-0-1, there does not seem to have been any attempt to engage the COIN/CIA(2) community of interest (COI) in Australia or offshore. This is doubly disappointing as agencies like Force Development Group in Puckapunyal, the NZ Army’s Interbella Group, or the COIN Center at Ft Leavenworth could have added considerable value to relevant aspects of this book without detracting from its air-centric theme. As a result, both the land and CIA aspects of this book are very weak. Similar comment can be made regarding the Special Operations and Urban Operations chapters.

The editorial staff has not included any discussion of maritime considerations, from general or air-specific perspectives which is a significant omission for a nation surrounded by water, which is reliant upon the sea ways for trade and industry, and whose major military operations are far more likely to be expeditionary than domestic.

In considering how air power can best operate in a CIA environment, there has also been no mention of the aviation branches of either the Australian Army or RAN apart from a couple of inaccurate paragraphs on ARH (the Eurocopter Tiger Attack Recon Helicopter adopted by the Australian Army). There is also no mention of integration with other government or civilian air assets or those of likely operational partners like New Zealand or Singapore; nor any acknowledgement of the vital role of all sources fusion when discussing aspects of ISR.

The papers included in this collection do not have a good nor consistent grasp of the irregular environment and thus any conclusions they may draw are developed on a somewhat shaky foundation. By the time that the original portions of this book were drafted i.e. those that are not rehashed staff papers, vast quantities of analysis, comment and intellectual horsepower had been expended on defining the COE. Had these resources been tapped, Friends in High Places would be a must-read. As it stands at the moment, its most effective message is the cover photo.

(1) Page xii
(2) The UK term Countering Irregular Activity (CIA) is used instead of the more popular but less accurate term Counterinsurgency (COIN) to describe the complex Contemporary Operating Environment (COE).
(3) I think that I may have inadvertently helped kill off this term a few years back when I made a number of public comments along the lines of ‘Bring out the JIMP‘ from Pulp Fiction.

Resuming normal services

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I, even if no one else has, have enjoyed my three days dedicated to the Birmoverse…however now it’s back to this time line, which does have as many cool toys but nor has it been liberally sprinkled with anthrax and radioactive dust…

Lay the old divisions to rest…

I got some more homework from my visit to the Air Power Development Centre last week…a copy of the latest RAF Air Power Review (Autumn 2009)…I see that each issue back to 2000 is available online so will have to add them to the library when I next visit broadband land. I’ve just read the first paper on the Future of British Air and Space Power by the current Chief of Air Staff, Air Chief Marshall Sir Stephen Dalton and am looking forward to working through the remaining six items…I do like the way Sir Stephen thinks (I’m sure that he is very relieved to hear this!) but his views are still very air-centric and I believe that this is a lesson that has yet to be learned…just as we need to cast off any perception that there is such a thing as a solely military option to a problem and embrace this  Comprehensive  Approach  concept, we also MUST forget about any one service (or branch of service if you want to take it down a level) that has primacy over the others – there is just military power as a blend of capabilities from air, land, maritime, SF, etc operating under a broader Whole of Government/Comprehensive Approach construct. It’s easy to talk the talk and adopt the doctrine but less easy to shake off the blankie of the Fulda Gap and decades of interservice sparring and competition. This message is further borne out in this article from the UK (courtesy of The Strategist) as Defence chiefs square up for a bit of biffo over who needs the best toys

The thing that the Brits (especially) need to realise is that playing in the big kids world costs real money e.g. as per the example yesterday about the evacuation chain for a British casualty from Afghanistan. They bleated, cried and sniped at the US all through the Iraq War – til they bailed rather ignominiously – and realised that perhaps instead of dumping on the Yanks, they should have been following them around, notebooks at the ready, hanging off every word and taking copious notes…because…the Americans have it together…like it or not…warts and all…they have it together. and in comparing their treatment by the US to that of Portugal, they only insult the Portugese…I’m not specifically Brit-bashing as these lessons apply to some degree to all of us…the world has changed, certainly since 911, probably way earlier but we just didn’t really notice…

Clean your room!

Neptunus Lex discusses obstacles to true democracy in Iraq – I think that it is high time that ALL of the Coalition of the Willing stand up and accept responsibility for the mess they created in Iraq. As I commented there, it was a decade before Germany and Japan were allowed to take off their democratic training wheels after World War 2 and that was without the internal divisions that tear at Iraq AND, in both cases, where THEY started ‘it’. ‘We’ started ‘it’ in Iraq and thus have a responsibility to see the clean-up through. Ironically Iraq under Saddam was less a threat to the world that Iraq as it is now post-intervention. Even more frustrating is that the US wrote the book(s) on COIN in FM 3-24 and then JP 3-24 but does not seem to have spent much time reading them:

Counterinsurgents Should Prepare for a Long-Term Commitment. Insurgencies    are    protracted    by    nature,    and    history demonstrates  that  they  often  last  for  years  or  even  decades. Thus, COIN normally demands considerable expenditures of time  and  resources,  especially  if  they  must  be  conducted simultaneously  with  conventional  operations  in  a  protracted war combining traditional and IW.

For some reason the WeRead app on Facebook keeps resetting my status on Accidental Guerrilla from ‘Read It’ to “Reading It’. In trying again to fix it once and for all (yes, I do tear my hair over minutiae, don’t I?), I noticed a review by ‘Sharif’, in particular, these words:

“…Fits well into the perspective of Sir Edmund Hillary: “slowly and painfully we are seeing worldwide acceptance of the fact that the wealthier and more technologically advanced countries have a responsibility to help the underdeveloped ones, not only through a sense of charity, bu also because only in this way can we ever hope to see any permanent peace and security for ourselves.” Detail oriented, thorough and succinct. A must read to gain perspective of the challenges ahead…“

Ultimately it’s all about stability. Countering Irregular Activities is a bit of a mouthful and Countering Destabilising Activities strays into double negativity – what they are is fact and in essence are stability operations conducted under the broad umbrella of the Comprehensive Approach. If you truly want stability, then go clean up your mess. If you truly want stability, follow the humanitarian assistance and disaster relief in Haiti with a stability programme to address the real problems there – you could probably start by kicking out, or at least reining in, the cargo cult do-gooder NGOs. Even encourage Bill Clinton to run for President (of Haiti!!).

On NOT profiling

An interesting comment last night on the failing of profiling as a technique and discussing methods of identifying people at risk and potential threat – there is some food for thought on the Aggression Management website and I would be most interested to hear supporting and dissenting comments…

Flying fingers (all both of them!)

I have decided that it is well past time that I taught myself to touch type as even though fingers can rely fly now, then just don’t go fast enough and when I’m on a roll I tend to lose ideas because I can’t get them down fast enough. I’m dead keen on exploring open source software at the moment and so I am starting off with TypeFaster. Today is Day One and so far I can type words only using ‘f’ and ‘j’ at 28.6 words per minute…I’m also becoming quite partial to PDF XChange Viewer as a faster more powerful alternative to Adobe’s Reader: the free version allows commenting and comment export on PDF files without (so far as I can see) any watermarking or other promotional material to ‘encourage’ an upgrade to the Pro version.

It’s Only Paper

On Paper Modelers today there is a note that noted Hollywood special effects artist, Hilber Graf, has just died aged 54. He worked on The Abyss, and was also an author, screenwriter, paranormal investigator, Halloween haunted house creator and noted plastic/resin model builder. Some years ago he published an article on Paper Modelling “It’s Only Paper” that is a good intro to anyone considering having  a crack at this art form – and having seen some of the Paper Replika free-to-download models in Playing with Knives the other day, who wouldn’t want to try it in the privacy of their own home…?

Desperately Seeking Mayberry

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120703024628-andy-griffith-tv-show-story-top

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

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

…someplace where…

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

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

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

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

  • The Coalition Interoperability Warrior Demonstration aka CWID – it’s been running since the mid-90s previously as the Joint Interoperability Warrior Demonstration aka JWID but regardless of the clumsy names, the key word is INTEROPERABILITY – since 911, this DoD-led annual event has been focussing more and more upon information sharing and interoperability issues, not just between the services, or between major allies, but extending these links right down into the nitty-gritty of interaction with and between other government agencies and the myriad of first response agencies in the US, and by implication, for any that might be interested, in other participating nations. Every year, dozens of emerging and developing technologies are thrashed throughout the month of June in connected sites around the world. However, IMHO, one of the biggest payoff for CWID participants comes from the three major week-long planning activities that occur prior to each execution phase where operators, developers and geeks have their respective expectations and perceptions hauled over the coals towards a shared reality.
  • The ABCA Coalition Lessons Analysis Workshop aka CLAW, lead by the ABCA Program Office in the Pentagon, that every one or two years assembles an international team of lessons learned professionals and subject matter experts to review and analyse the raw Observations, Issues and Lessons (OIL – yes, it really is all about OIL!!) from the preceding 12-18 months of operations and training within the five member nations and distil these into findings and recommendations. Following an inaugural ABCA lessons conference in Ft Leavonworth in 2004, CLAWs have been conducted in 2005 (Salisbury, UK), 2006 (Kingston, Canada – what a beautiful location!!), 2007 (Hobart, Autsralia) and 2009 (Shrivenham, UK). The CLAW process is exportable and applicable to OILs from any source not just military activities…There is also a link between CWID and the CLAW: analysis to date finds that around 60% of the issues uncovered in the CLAWs are further investigated or resolved on CWID…

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

Gyrating

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gyrate eagle

Auto Gyro MT-03 Eagle @gyrate.co.nz

We got home from down South – without a container load of loot this time!! – on the 28th and shot over to Taupo a couple of days later for an RV at McDs to pick up the twins from the other grandies…I missed it when we came in to town – when we could have stopped for a look – but parked on the water front of our way out was the purtiest  little autogyro (see above). the girls’ McD fix was staring to wear off so we were definitely homeward bound before they did the two year old Hulk thing in the car. At the time I remember thinking that this owuld be a great little tool for a bunch of imagery and surveillance roles, especially where UAS like Hawkeye might not be able to operate and/or possible where you might be wanting a pair of Mk.1 eyeballs in the air as well…

We visited Mustard Seed in Turangi for lunch a few days later when we returned the twins to Mum and Dad – Mustard Seed (just opposite the BP in Turangi) is a great spot for sitting out under the trees with a a good magazine, fine coffee and a plate of snacks – and found an ad for Gyrate in the new 2010 Tourism magazine covering Bay of Plenty and the Mountain region – checked out the site this morning, as the first day back at ‘work’ and was really impressed with its combination of fun stuff and cool toys – if you’re into Kiwi aviation, microflying and/or just cool stuff, it’s well worth a look…when things slow down a bit here, I’d love to get them over for a spin around our bit of scenic beauty here – maybe even think about setting something up for the area…the closest fixed-wing runway is over by the Chateau but I’m sure that there would be a suitable piece of land closer to National Park for gyro ops…hmmm, things to think about…

Kiwi entrepreneur takes another step forwards

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That Kiwi entrepreneur I mentioned at the beginning of this month has now gone live with his website so obviously his project is developing well – more power to him and his idea…this is genuine true blue Kiwi ingenuity in the air so have a look and maybe think about what Hawkeye could do for you – I’d love to see Hawkeye operating in support of the great Southern musters (as brought to you by the Great Southern beer), working by night to locate stock for the next day’s muster…