Rapid Fire

Posted on 26 April 2011 by SJPONeill

3 cups of tea

Literally a storm in a teacup…I doubt there is anyone who ever published a book than was 100% honest in EVERY way and which did not lean towards one agenda or perspective or another in some way…

Greg Mortenson shot to worldwide fame with the book “Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Fight Terrorism and Build Nations … One School at a Time,” which describes his getting lost in an effort to climb K2, the world’s second-highest peak, being rescued by Pakistanis in the village of Korphe and vowing to return there to build a school for local girls.

Now it appears that it wasn’t quite as he says which is causing a little embarrassment around the traps for those who may have supported his initiatives financially or, like the US DoD, who may have extracted insights from Three Cups of Tea for use in COIN doctrine and TTPs…personally I agree with the headline, if not all of the content, of the Wired article on the subject Does It Matter If The Military’s Fave Do-Gooder Sells Three Cups of Snake Oil? When an organisation like the military moves out of its comfort zone, in this case, of large very structured kinetic military operations like Grandad used to do, it has to cast its net wider for ideas…

Let’s not forget that the COIN effort in Iraq got off to a false start as too many people heralded the false zealots of COIN the Malaya way, the US in particular, picking the wrong time to listen to its vocal but fickle ally from the other side of the Atlantic…it was only the efforts of David Petraeus, David Kilcullen et al who turned the tide towards a COIN strategy that would (and did) work in Iraq, this being encapsulated in the December 2006 version of FM 3-24 CounterInsurgency (don’t knock it unless you have actually read it!!). But, however applicable that FM 3-24 might have been in the Iraq of 2006, it was less applicable to the almost-forgotten Afghan war which had been festering away since March 2003 and which, as a problem, bore little resemblance to Iraq.

So, more power to those who cast the net wide in their attempts to get a better handle on the specific of the Afghan problem…Jim Gant with his One Tribe at a Time paper was one; those promoting Three Cups of Tea were others…and so what if Mortenson streamlined his experiences or even made them up? Are we still so template-ridden from the Fulda Gap that we can not think for ourselves and extract the nuggets from the rough…it’s just slipped my mind but one of the tenets that I referred to often in my work in the late 90s came a from a source that I eventually tracked back to one of Don Pendleton’s The Executioner pulp paperbacks…someone that I was working with at the time was mortified that I might draw real world insights from such a ‘disreputable‘ source but so far as I was, and am, concerned, it is not who the source is that is of prime importance but what it is saying…One area in which this has become very apparent and implemented in SOPs is in the Lessons Learned world where collection teams will endeavour to draw observations, issues and lessons (OIL – yes, it’s still all about OIL!!) from as close to the horses mouth as they can get – the trick, of course, being to avoid the equine’s other end…

On failed states

Got the cue on this article from Michael Yon’s Facebook page…always a good source of links to interesting articles…as well written as it is, I think it’s all semantic smoke and mirrors…three decades ago our biggest threats came from established states like France, the Soviet Empire and Maoist China…once again we need to resist the temptation to slap a template on a nation and use that to determine their level of potential threat or risk or not…as above, we should be able to consider each form or threat and risk on its own merits or or lack of thereof and draw our own conclusions…this sort of pseudo-analytical, ‘Eureka!‘ style of writing really leaves me cold…

Kiwi Gunners

On a positive note, I came across this great written snapshot of a Kiwi gunner’s perspective on Vietnam and the New Zealand of the time, again drawing the cue from someone’s (sorry, can’t remember the source) Facebook page….it’s not that well known that our artillery was in Vietnam well before there was any infantry deployment…and especially topical when one remembers that yesterday was ANZAC Day…

And today at the rocket scientists club…

Posted on 11 February 2011 by SJPONeill

…Hamid Karzai says it is time foreign troops left his country because the troops are now “hindering progress.”

It's not a large picture as the vacuum between the ears causes a steady implosion of the head...

At the same club meeting, Oxfam said it is time the PRT’s got out because it is putting aid workers at risk as they are too often linked to the military. Yes, I am sure that is why they are being attacked and certainly not because they are soft unarmed targets from whom decent ransoms can be earned…or because the decreased military component of reconstruction teams means there is less of a local deterrent to errant bandits…news flash!! Afghanistan has been a dangerous place to visit or work for the last 31 years…

Mr Karzai’s comments are not the first time he has called for foreign troops to exit. He is under pressure at home from locals who want to control their own country. Now, there’s a surprise…surely not because they tire of a foreign force propping up what many Afghans consider a puppet government attempting to inflict central control over cultures that have always (well, since before Alexander’s Afghanistan Tour) been quite happy thank you very to do their own thing without so much as a nod towards any notions of central government…

There's the door...go on...leave!! I dare you, I DOUBLE-dare you...

“Afghanistan wants control of its own affairs by all means in the security sector. Whether Afghanistan is ready or not must not be a reason,” Karzai said. “The Afghans don’t want a European government, the Afghans don’t want an American government. . . . Afghans want an Afghan government.”

What is even more amazing than Karzai’s latest is that every contributing nation didn’t seize this exit strategy golden egg by the horns and fill the Afghan night with ripples of pops as as the vacuum left by each exiting force was filled by something else…

The spin on the exit strategy goes round and round, round and round...

Regardless, though, of when and how, ISAF depart Afghanistan, each contributing nation (yes, that include you EU folk too!) needs to ante up and accept responsibility for the cultural and social changes that it has supported in Afghanistan. Even assuming that the Karzai government or its ISAF-backed successor lasts beyond the first night of independence, it’s unlikely that it will last much past when the money runs out which will more likely be when the last suitcase packed full of dollars goes through the luggage check-in at Kabul International than when it is expended on running the country…and when the darkness comes, those nations and agencies that thought it was so ‘right’ to introduce democracy and free speech and equal rights and all that other good Western ideology need to step up to the plate and do right by the vulnerable people they left behind…

GEN Petraeus also looks to be gearing up for that day when the last helicopter lifts off the roof of an embassy…from the Financial Times via Michael Yon:

Petraeus defends plan to arm villagers

By Matthew Green in Kabul

Published: February 7 2011 18:42 | Last updated: February 7 2011 18:42

General David Petraeus, the top US and Nato commander in Afghanistan, plans to triple a scheme that has armed thousands of village recruits, dismissing fears that the strategy could nurture a new generation of warlords. [Comment: the current warlords don’t seem to have a shortage of weapons now…]

With violence in Afghanistan rising and Nato allies anxious to hand over to Afghan forces in 2014, Gen Petraeus wants to bolster security, in part by sending 12-man teams of US special forces to train locals. [Comment: that’s 2014 THIS century or in three years time; like, only one third of the time that we haven’t been able to sort Afghanisatn out in since November 2001]

Human rights groups and aid agencies have called for the plan to be scrapped, fearing it threatens to fuel conflicts and empower the kind of militia commanders who ravaged Afghanistan during years of civil war in the 1990s. The government of Hamid Karzai, the president, has also been wary of similar initiatives. [Comment: damn right it’s ‘wary’ – last thing Uncle Hamid wants is more people able to resist central government – it’s a bit of an ask to consider it ‘governance’.]

But Gen Petraeus said the scheme was vital in enlisting the support of locals.

“The idea is that these actually mobilise not just individuals, but communities,” he told the Financial Times. “Elders support it. The elders also police it to a degree.”

The plan has echoes of the approach Gen Petraeus adopted while commanding the 2007 troop surge in Iraq, where he encouraged the Awakening movement of Sunni tribes that helped curb violence.

But he said the Afghan Local Police – as the plan is known – would be a very different exercise. It aims to work with the government to reach often isolated areas where people wanted help to resist the Taliban.

To critics, the scheme represents a quick-fix solution adopted to meet political pressures for withdrawal in western capitals.

Since Gen Petraeus took command of international forces in Afghanistan in July, the programme has been started in 17 sites, with a total of more than 3,100 paid recruits, he said. The Nato-led force is awaiting Afghan government approval for more than 40 additional sites, and hopes to add another 4,500 men by spring, a US military official said.

The recruits, whose biometric data is recorded, are given a salary, registered weapons and khaki uniforms. Their primary role is to man checkpoints or patrol their home areas.

General Petraeus says the training is being conducted with the oversight of Afghan authorities, local government, police and elders. “They work for the district chief of police, not a local warlord or elder or power-broker,” he said.

Nato allies have launched a sucession of similar schemes with scant success, but US officials believe extra resources and closer collaboration with the government will deliver results. A similar programme, the Local Defence Initiative, ran into problems last year when it donated $1m to the Shinwari tribe in the eastern Nangahar Province, which became embroiled in a land dispute last year instead of fighting the Taliban, according to Oxfam.

ca. 1850 --- Afghan Soldier --- Image by © Christel Gerstenberg/CORBIS

Probably too little, too late…even though Jim Gant’s plane got diverted from Iraq to Afghanistan after Steven Pressfield published his excellent One Tribe At A Time paper, tribal engagement is s campaign that needed to have been continued and expanded from 2001 after the Northern ‘Alliance’ was used to gain an initial upper hand on Terry Taliban…

Getting it right

Posted on 3 June 2010 by SJPONeill

Japanese tank Type 2 Ka-Mi 1:25 by mrafalsk

Just snippets today…

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

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

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

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

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

The Enemy Within

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

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

On the run…

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

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

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

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

Edit: This Just In…

Hawkeye UAV in action

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

Seven Days in May

Posted on 29 May 2010 by SJPONeill

I’ve been on a recreational reading blitz over the last month or so…mainly to daily purge the professional reading I have been reviewing…sort of getting a literary life, I guess…

I started with old favourites from Steven Coonts (The Intruders, America), Clive Cussler (Raise the Titanic, Night Probe) and Dale Brown (Wings of Fire and Fatal Terrain). I overnighted at Carmen’s flat in Otorohanga a couple of weekends ago and, having forgotten to bring a book with me, grabbed Michael Connelly’s Echo Park for my pre-lights out read. This was followed by my two wins from Get Frank, Jonathan Kellerman’s Deception and Stephen Leather’s Nightfall.

Two nights ago, I felt the need to reread another favourite and grabbed Larry Bond’s Cauldron but while walking down the hallway, found I had picked out his Days of Wrath instead which was not really what I was in the mood for. As I was replacing it on the shelf in the study, I noticed Fletcher Knebel’s Seven Days in May beside it. I’d only ever read this as a teenager in the Reader’s Digest Condensed version and so opted to read it next.

What a great read!! Published in 1962, before Cuba, Dallas and Vietnam, it is set in the early 70s after a Cold War conflict that leaves Iran divided into Communist North and democratic South – logical for the time considering the Koreas, Vietnam and Germanys. A nuclear disarmament treat has been signed with the Soviet Union but elements of the US military have littler faith in either the Treaty or the President that signed it…to find out what happens you need to read the book (recommended) or see the movie (on my to-do list but it has Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster so I have high expectations).

In addition to being a damn fine read, delivering a gripping storyline without needing the prop of a high body count as perhaps a contemporary equivalent would, Seven Days in May has a couple of lines that I felt are relevant to our contemporary environment…

Cleaning up the “sad debris of surrender”, as Todd called it, took time

The sad debris of surrender – a good phrase…someone said to me earlier this week that the US is not good at nation-building and I had to bite back quite sharply…this is one of those myths that has appeared since the end of the OIF warfighting phase in 2003, a result of moral high-horsing from the UN and sniping from the UK when post-war Iraq didn’t snap nicely into a nice shining example of Middle Eastern democracy (now there’s an oxymoron for you)…my response included three names…Douglas MacArthur, Dwight Eisenhower, and George C. Marshall…three generals who, between them, rebuilt Europe and Japan from the ashes of WW2. If there was any failure of nation-building in post-war Iraq, it was down to three factors:

The failure of the UN to get over itself and not step to the plate to take the lead in rebuilding Iraq. Regardless of the nature of the disaster that struck Iraq in 2003, the sad human debris of its surrender was left to suffer and endure after the UN’s half-hearted attempt at a presence in Iraq. The few casualties suffered by the UN in Iraq are but a drop in the bucket compared to the casualties suffered by the people of Iraq and those nations that did step forward…

The decision by the US to allow the bulk of development and reconstruction work to be let to US-based mega-corps that only had an eye out for the quick big bucks instead of perhaps applying a fraction of those billions to developing those construction capabilities in Iraq itself, thus contributing to the development and stability of the Iraqi economy. This was a point made by COL Dransfield in his presentation at Massey yesterday on his recent experience in Afghanistan: he admitted some confusion as to how these contracts could cost so much when the daily rate for labour is about US$5 and all the raw materials like sand and gravel are there for the taking. He was surprised to learn that his PRT was one of the few forces in-theatre that purchased a lot of its support e.g. fresh food, minor mechanical repairs, etc from local resources.

The UK perception that it was on top of both conventional state versus state conflict AND low-level conflict and that it had nothing to learn from the US. The corollarative effect of this was that it also contributed little back into the Iraqi nation-building process at either the national level (after all, the UK was the other primary collaborator in the WMD ‘justification for the war in Iraq) or within it’s own AO which ultimately had to be ‘pacified’ by a US force as the UK was packing its bags to go home, it’s job not done…

At the Australian Army COIN Seminar in 2008, the comment was made that no one ordered Dwight Eisenhower to conduct reconstruction and nation-building tasks as he advanced across France and into Germany – they didn’t have to because it was such a logical and common sense method of pacificying the region. Similarly, Douglas MacArthur was expected to inflict draconian Versaille-like measures against the Japanese after Japan surrendered in August 1945 and many would have believed that he had a major axe to grind with Japan over the way it had treated his beloved Philippines. No doubt he did but, again, this senior US general determined that this would be counter-productive in the bigger picture. As a result, Germany and Japan sixty years on are still two economic powerhouses and one has to wonder what the Army of that day got right in training its senior officers.

Or possibly, as I’m not sure that the US has too much wrong with how it develops its generals today, what was so different sixty years ago that the governments and civil staff trusted those officers to just get on and do the job…?

“…the trouble is that democracy works only when a good majority of citizens are willing to give thoughts and time and effort to their government…”

And that remains the single biggest issue with the current campaign in Afghanistan: at the tribal and provincial levels the majority of citizens may be willing to contribute to government and leadership, there is simply no interest in a strong central government regardless of its composition or ethical philosophies. No matter how much you flog a dead horse it still isn’t going to get up and haul the cart any further…The McCrystal ‘Cursed Earth’ plan essentially abandons the centre of Afghanistan to whoever wants and only maintain a Maginot-like ring around the outer edges of the country – which might be useful if Afghanistan faced any credible conventional external threat. But it doesn’t, and ISAF’s failure to adopt a provincial/tribal based campaign along the lines of that proposed by Jim Gant that might, over time, allow the ink blots of success to spread and merge only means that more lives and money will be wasted in ineffective and pointless kinetic operations.

MacArthur in particular achieved his success in reconstructing Japan not, by through kinetics or arbitrarily inflicting Western culture on the Japanese but by working within their own culture, evolving an his approach for that situation and no relying on templates from previous successes…what it it so hard to learn…?

Colour Me Scared…

Posted on 23 April 2010 by SJPONeill

Aaaaah…the words of the great Sledge Hammer…in response to Mike Yon accusing me “…Simon — the writings on your website have been dishonest. You seem like a basically dishonest person…” I’m flattered to now be in the elite group as GEN McCrystal and others who have tired of the whining of a 19-year-old PFC who never grew up…here’s a guy who spent a whole four years in the Army in the mid-80s accusing professional soldiers of dishonesty and incompetence but who has yet to actually offer any positive alternatives to the current strategies…

I’m not a big believer in GEN McCrystal’s Cursed Earth approach and think that Jim Gant’s Tribal Engagement stratagem would be more suited to both the physical and human terrain of Afghanistan but I’m not on the ground in-theatre and GEN McCrystal is…if Mike Yon really cared – or had anything worthwhile to say – he would have joined the ranks of the COIN information militia to rub conceptual shoulders with the likes of Jim Gant, Josh Wineera, John Nagl and David Kilcullen in fora like the CAC COIN Center and the Small Wars Council…

This did scare me…

While I’m not working we’ve tightened the budget a bit and I’m working through ‘dead stock’ in the pantry to clear the shelves…my experiment on Wednesday night was Chili Sardines…yep, sounds scary alright and didn’t smell too hot while I was preparing it – thought I might have to cook via waldo for a while – but the result was worth the initial discomfort…

Ingredients

2 tins of sardines in tomato sauce

1 big onion, finely chopped

2 tablespoons of vinegar (preferably malt vinegar)

50g of peanuts

1 tablespoon brown sugar

A bird’s-eye chilli or teaspoon of dried chilli flakes ( I used this much but next time will increase by 50-100% as the chili flavour was a bit inconsistent)

2 tablespoons of frying oil or peanut oil.

1 teaspoon of coriander seeds

Method

Heat the oil and fry the onion, coriander seeds and chilli together until the onion is golden, then add the vinegar, sugar and sardines all at the same time. Continue cooking for another 3 or 4 minutes and then throw in the peanuts and cook for a further minute until the peanuts are warm. Serve with rice.

Eyjafjallajokul

Amid much bleating and moaning from the airlines, air services across Europe are returning to normal – what’s the next show-stopper , Iceland, first the banks, now the airlines…maybe this?. I’m fascinated that the same airlines that are clamouring for compensation to cover the effects of the grounding are probably those that would have continued to fly until there were more safety incidents or a crash.

An insight already emerging from the chaos in Europe in the last week is the reminder that destabilising (irregular?) activities are not necessarily man-made: even only a week of the no-fly ban has placed even more strain on the tottering economies of Greece, Portugal and Spain, and further weakened the EU and the euro…Germany must be wondering why it just doesn’t ‘unify’ Europe the old-fashioned way and have done with it this time…

More disruptive than Osama Bin Laden

From these things we draw strength

Posted on 11 March 2010 by SJPONeill

This is Kirk, the “…55kg of concerned canine citizen…” I referred to in Lex’s Angel post the other day. Kirk and his half-sister Lulu live with us. Kirk is concerned that readers understand that he is not responsible for the mess in the background and is really a gentle giant…Kirk and Lulu are a bit miffed with me tonight as their dinner was an hour later as I had a catch-up call from a friend that covered an awful lot of ground.

We bemoaned, as are a growing number in the US, that officer training especially seems to have been dumbed down in favour of operational deployments. The inevitable result is that we have a great many officers experienced in operations, many of whom would rather go on more operations and avoid ‘boring’ activities like tertiary study or staff appointments, and who are losing their ability to think and articulate outside operational scenarios.

Apart from the value of just having a general catch-up, one of the outcomes of this chat was a link to a paper in the Fort Leavenworth Combined Arms Research Library (CARL) written by a Kiwi officer, MAJ ‘TJ’ Johanson, Changes in Maori warfare between the period prior to first European contact and the end of the New Zealand Wars. It’s an interesting read, although I am only half way through it at the moment. My thoughts so far are that I would extend the period of the New Zealand Wars out by another four years to 1872 to include the COIN campaign (does anyone still really think COIN was invented by the Brits in Malaya?) against Te Kooti; and that this paper begs for someone to overlay it with Jim Gant’s Tribal Engagement Concept and David Kilcullen’s Accidental Guerrilla model.

While not essential, surviving a domestic COIN campaign is certainly a valuable keystone in developing not so much the tactics but the ethos of a capable COIN force, and, as per my comment a couple of days ago, this is one reason why I think that the Australian LWD 3-0-1 CounterInsurgency has trouble getting off the ground. It’s unfortunate that more Kiwis officers aren’t producing contemporarily-relevant material like this.

Another important outcome of this chat was that it reminded of the value of mates. Yes, Kirk, you’re my mate too but this is different. I find myself incredibly lucky to have friends that go out of their way to keep in touch, especially since I think they know that I’m not the greatest at reciprocating and have a tendency to allow the op tempo to distract me away from things that are truly important.

Much as we love where we live, it is a bit isolated and more so while Carmen is working away from home. I’m not that impressed about being out of work and even less so by how this circumstance came to pass – but that’s another story that will probably keep for the memoirs – and so appreciate even more that contact with the wider world. Today I’ve made a conscious effort to re-establish comms with old friends and been rewarded by renewed contact with a guy I first met on an RNZAF 727 bound for Singapore in August 1987, when he and his wife were struggling with three very small and very unhappy toddlers, and a friend in the USAF who I am absolutely rapt to find is now a Brigadier-General – and still flying fast jets…!

Training and education

@ Small Wars Journal yesterday there is a thread headed up “Army Learning Concept for 2015 – Thinking Soldiers – Learning Army!!” The aim is to “…augment the most effective aspects of our current learning system while ensuring relevant and rigorous training and education is available and accessible…” While I support the aim, I am not yet convinced that “…in order to prevail in future conflict we must first win in the competitive learning environment…” nor that the Army has “…a future characterized by its persistent learning environment...” While the future may be characterised by many things, outside the minds of a few chalkies, a ‘persistent learning environment‘ is unlikely to be one of them. The learning environment is what may characterise the Army, for better or worse…whether or not it prepares it for the future is another story entirely.

For over a week I have been working on an item based upon two commentaries, one of which I quoted in The Plot Thickens. Speaking at an event hosted by the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) last week, GEN James Mattis, Commander US JFCOM, cautioned that “…the only thing worse than obsolete weapons in war is obsolete thinking…” and advocated a broader more contemporary approach to education, especially for the officer corps. While clearly directed at the US military, his comments could apply with equal weight to the other members of the Anglosphere. He “…bemoaned that senior-ranking military members aren’t allowed ample time to reflect critically on important issues…” GEN Mattis’ comments cover an 80-page study released by CNAS at the same time, entitled Keeping The Edge: Revitalizing America’s Military Officer Corps.

The same week, William J. Astore criticises what he perceives as the US military’s ‘German fetish’ at TomDispatch.com. He attributes America’s poor performance in recent conflicts to its fascination with the operational art of war which he links directly to “…a flourishing “Cult of Clausewitz…” The strength of his argument seems to be that “… the German Blitzkrieg of World War II ended with Germany’s “third empire” thoroughly thrashed by opponents who continued to fight even when the odds seemed longest…” Applying the same logic one would wonder why we don’t all follow the French who, apparently, ‘won’ two world wars in the 20th Century… While his discussion goes on to bemoan the apparent loss of America’s citizen soldiers, this essay does imply some significant gaps in training and preparing for the contemporary environment.

Astore is correct when he points out flaws in the technology-dominated ‘shock and awe‘ philosophy that arose from the coalition ‘victory’ over Iraq in 1991; and that operational philosophies succumbed to the lure of ‘templatisation’ in the last decade of the 20th Century. Coupled with these flaws, was the distortion of the philosophies of directive control and mission command, allowing weak commanders an ‘out’ in lieu of intervention when subordinates head off the path of truth, light and their commanders’ intent.

The simple fact is that we have still to really make the philosophical shift from the familiar and more comfortable doctrine of the Cold War. Too many personnel are still lining up at the Fulda Gap Railway Station. In the past, I have referred to the Cold War as ‘easier’ than our contemporary environment…that’s not correct and I shouldn’t do it. Halting the Soviet juggernaut as it steamrolled across Europe was never going to be an easy task but it is a different task from those faced today. I’m also very conscious of the rapid rate of change in the contemporary world and the subjective nature of terms like ‘today’.

The nature of the differences between Cold War and contemporary is key to the issues identified by GEN Mattis and William Astore, for which the Army Learning Concept 2015 MAY be a solution. That these significant differences exist was also the first significant finding of New Zealand’s COIN doctrine review. At that time, late 2007, we considered it crucial that these differences be incorporated as a key element in the training and education foundation for operating in the contemporary environment. Soon after, these findings were independently validated by Josh Wineera’s early work on Interbella, challenging extant methods of considering the missionspace in the IPB process.

Tomorrow, I’ll start to work through the differences that fell out of the review…

Bridgegate

The reason that I have rather abruptly postponed the remainder of the previous item is that Michael Yon has just, in the past hour, released his Dispatch on the Tarnak Bridge bombing and subsequent drama vis-a-vis who was/is actually responsible for the security of this important link out of Kandahar. Regardless of his propensity for shooting from the lip sometimes, I have to admit that the guy can write and has made excellent use of graphics to illustrate the cloud cuckoo wunderland of coalition warfare in the 21st Century. One might even go so far as to wonder ‘how could this bridge NOT have been attacked?’ when you see the incredibly complex command and control arrangements in place around KAF.

I, for one, am comfortable with the apology to BGEN Menard…”In apology to BG Menard, I should not have demanded that he be fired so early in the process, despite that my assertion that he was responsible has proven true. I should never have mentioned hockey, as that created room for a diversion from the central importance. Brigadier General Menard clearly was not the only responsible party for this strategic bridge that his soldiers depend upon. To single out BG Menard was a mistake, despite that he was ultimately responsible for the ANP…”

This is an article well worth reading (both pages!!), if only to see how, not satisfied with the natural complexity of the contemporary environment, we have entangled ourselves in even greater complexity regarding the C2 arrangements under which a War is meant to be conducted… if I was heading to Afghanistan any item soon (I’m not, just in case anyone was wondering), I’d be wanting to read this Dispatch if for no other reason than to get a feeling for the command relationships in this theatre…

Don’t make me angry

Posted on 25 January 2010 by SJPONeill

You wouldn't like me when I'm angry...

The Willy Apaiata story has received quite a bit of coverage since the NZ Herald’s publishing faux pas last week:

there is now a Facebook page Boycott NZ Herald for publishing Photos of SAS in Action

My old mate, Dusty, from 2/1 RNZIR Sigs Platoon days, back when Reagan was in charge and someone else was getting their rocks in Afghanistan, discusses some of the implications in Those Photos! Dusty concludes “Time for the country to wake up & grow up.“

Neptunus Lex in the US has picked up on the story in VC Willie and makes a comparison with Prince Harry’s abrupt withdrawal from Afghanistan after a similar action by UK media.

The Strategist, unusually, loses the plot and misses the point entirely: there is little connection between a tactical action in Afghanistan and the strategic defence of New Zealand and its environs, certainly not the way it is written here.

On Facebook, some loser wannabe mouths off “…Lets be clear on this Apiata’s NZVC is just that an NZVC not a VC his was the first ever issued the last ever Victoria Cross ever issued to a Kiwi was at the end of WW2. He served with me in 6 Hau i didnt think much of him then and it doesnt sound like he has changed much since then. Just because he has been awarded this honor everyone thinks he’s a saint well a lepord doesnt change his spots because he gets an award. He did a brave act, But just read his citation and then compare it to Beharry VC or any other VC for that matter it just doesnt stack up. To me it was an political award look at how the Army media swang into action, Reluctant hero? my god he has a DVD, Kids book, Adults book and was and is highly publisised it just doesnt stack up does it? just my opinion tho...”

I would love to know John Birmingham’s thoughts on the subject but Cheeseburger Gothic has blown its bandwidth cap and is down for the moment – too much action in the Birmoverse over the weekend…? Oh no….

The latter two bullet points did get me thinking though…on the deeper issues surrounding the award of honours like the Victoria Cross and Medal of Honor…I think we must take it at a given that not all acts of comparable gallantry will be recognised in the same way, much as we might like to thinks so. This would have the effect of either diluting the recognition to the point where it becomes meaningless…or…we end up with the perception, faced by UK special forces in 2002, where only posthumous awards might be considered: anything else reflects, in some warped way, a lesser bravery…

That there may be political factors surrounding awards is neither new nor unusual…11 VCs were awarded to the defenders of Rorke’s Drift following the disastrous (for British forces) engagement at Isandhlwana – this in no ways takes anything from the valour of those men on that day; two Delta Force snipers, Master Sergeant Gary I. Gordon and Sergeant First Class Randall D. Shughart, were awarded the Medal of Honor for their parts in the action in Mogadishu in october 1993, captured in the book and movie Blackhawk Down – any spin attached to their posthumous awards takes nothing away from their sacrifices that day.

In thinking about Willie Apaita’s VC award, there is a bigger picture to be considered on a number of fronts…Kiwis are known and great tall poppy slayers, when we punch above our weight, we tend to get all shy about it and play the issue down, to and past the point of rudeness at times. We are not good at recognising those of us who do well and exceed expectations. From Vietnam until East Timor the New Zealand had not been involved in combat operations – operations, yes; combat operations, no. In East Timor, NZ troops were again active, although not a great scale, in the two-way range. The NZSAS deployed to Afghanistan until an opsec veil for good reasons – in some ways, however, it is unfortunate as it obstructs the public of New Zealand from any great awareness of the feats that these troops are capable of. The contact with Taliban forces that resulted in New Zealand’s first VC since WW2 was one such feat. The description of the action in the citation reads as well any of those from WW2, WW1 and the Boer War, and is on a par with similar citations from our friends and allies.

Good on Chief of Defence Force (at the time) Bruce Ferguson for recognising Willy Apiata’s actions for what they were and taking the original recommendation a lot further. Were there political considerations? Undoubtably but this award could not have been used to help popularise an unpopular deployment to Afghanistan for the simple reason that this deployment was that unpopular, if at all, with Joe New Zealander (apart from the Minto nutjob minority out on the fringes of reality).

Was there a strategic effect from the action or the award? Obviously a massive national pride in a local lad doing well and if those actions can be used as role models and inspiration for ordinary New Zealanders, then great! But what of impact in the geopolitical arena? Not really – because Willy Apiata acted as he did – but just think for a couple of seconds on what the implications may have been had he NOT acted as he did…What effect might one or more combat casualties, and from our most elite special troops, had upon the Government, its commitment to overseas alliance and coalitions, the people of New Zealand and the NZDF? Maybe this guy actually did more than ‘just’ run across 70 metres of bullet-swept ground with his mate his back, see him OK, and then get back into the fight…? By acting as he did, although it is most unlikely such considerations ever crossed his mind that night, Willy Apiata’s actions introduced the people New Zealand to combat operations again without the trauma of flag-draped coffins…

But these remain side issues to the one of the moment i.e. the ‘right’ of the media to print/say what they want, regardless of potential consequences – for others. As MaxDamage points out on Neptunus Lex:

Not too long ago, during the Great Concealed Carry Battle, newspapers found it newsworthy to publish the name and address of concealed carry permit holders in several states, it being public information.

That it might place these folks at risk was side-stepped. Public information, freedom of the press, they’re simply reporting.

Name and addresses of the editorial board were stapled to lamp posts shortly thereafter. A matter of public record, you know.

That shut them up.

I’d suggest the same with reporters embedded — their pic goes out on every submission, and if they want to send directly they wear the same uniform everybody else does. If they want to send uncensored they wear their civvies. If they want the protections of being a civilian they dress as such and military gets censorship privs over the transmission if that is too harsh an occupational hazard.

I’ve nothing against the press reporting a story, I simply refuse to place others at risk for their supposed right to tell the tale.

I guess it’s a different story when the boot is on the OTHER foot…NZ Herald editorial staff take note…

Holy Lessons Learned, Batman!

Steven Pressfield introduces a new series this week with Tribal Engagement Tutorial which will focus on providing soldiers and Marines practical, battle-tested information, which can help them on the ground. Sound familiar? Full kudos to Mr Pressfield, Maj Jim Gant, William S. “MAC” McCallister and Chief Ajmal Khan Zazai for sharing their knowledge and doing what mainstream militaries seem to STILL be struggling with…getting the right information to the right people at the right time – and ensuring that they know what to do with it….blending the knowledge (lessons, intl, doctrine) with the training and command system instead of treating the information as an entity in its own right.

Would WE recognise them?

Like, you know, if a military fleet from 80 years in the future just popped out of a wormhole, helped us out with an immediate problem e.g. takfiri jihadists of all sorts, and then started to throw their moral and cultural weight around the place…wanting to have the same rights that we have in our timeline? Or would we draw a line in the sand somewhere? The battle for the Birmoverse, specifically the post-WW2 Presidency, continues – personally I think that Sweet Jane Says hits the nail right on the head with her stance on “No Sky People!” No people from the future of a different timeline should have any influence on our timeline.”

Direct from a dank dark cave near you

Osama Bin Laden claims credit (finally) for the Undies Bomber…sorry, dude, it’s old news now – next time use a faster camel…

Circles, triangles and squares…

Posted on 15 December 2009 by SJPONeill

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Police and COIN

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

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

Up, up and away

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

Avro Vulcan B.2, 75 Sqn RNZAF, 1972

So what if…

Posted on 12 December 2009 by SJPONeill

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

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

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

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

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

Falklands ’47

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

The 2 Ds…

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

Should I stay or should I go now?

Posted on 7 December 2009 by SJPONeill

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

~ The Clash

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

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

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

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

So what are the aims?

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

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

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

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

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

And from Gen Molan’s piece in The Australian:

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

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

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

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

FFS!

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