Desperately Seeking Mayberry

Posted on 11 January 2010 by SJPONeill

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

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

…someplace where…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can you hear the bagpipes?

Posted on 9 January 2010 by SJPONeill

piper bill millin The relief column! It’s here at last…!!!

Royal Navy Commander Steve Tatham is the author of Strategic Communication: A Primer that I found in the Staff Collge library when I was in Shrivenham in October last year. At the time I commented that it was “…quite positively the best reference I have found for IO, Influence and Perception Shaping…it should be compulsory reading for anyone in the PR, IO or COIN games…” Well, the good Commander has just released another work which is even more required reading than Strategic Communications…Through the power of Facebook (don’t knock it!), Small Wars Journal advertised the release of Behavioural Conflict – From General to Strategic Corporal: Complexity, Adaptation and Influence The link goes directly to the College library site but, curiously, Small Wars Journal has yet to load the paper onto its main site – this is quite surprising as SWJ is normally very proactive in getting papers like this into circulation. It is interesting that there are currently two significant papers in circulation that have been produced by Major-Generals (the other being MG Flynn’s Fixing Intel) but of the two, I believe that this new paper by Steve Tatham and Major-General Andrew Mackay (the ‘other’ MG) is far more important and far-reaching in its implications – let’s be honest about it: the int world has been FUBARed since some Neanderthal first lined his tribesmen up and called them an army – his wife said he had to give his gammy-legged, drooling brother-in-law a job and that’s how the S2 came into being (nice to have on the orbat but no great loss if someone puts a rock through his head).

My opening lines re the relief column reflect a feeling that finally someone else has stated unequivocally that we need to take this Influence stuff seriously and not keep it as an afterthought on the opord after all the cool blowing stuff up and mandatory ‘hearts and minds’ buzzwords have been massaged to death.

More than that, we MUST change the fundamental mass-focussed industrial age emphasis of our training and start to empower individuals from Day 1 of getting of the bus at initial training institutions – I say training institutions because this is way broader than just the military: this approach must be implemented across government, and, eventually, maybe even into the general education system.

The big problem though is not changing the training – that is simple – but changing the mindsets of of more senior embedded generations to both truly embrace (lip service not accepted here) AND keep up with the shift from a focus on mass to focus on individuals (sounds like that Scheiern guy again…). When this shift reaches its tipping point, the natural flow-on effect will be seen in other functional areas like the much bagged intel sector…

That this paper has come from the UK is gratifying as well – it shows beyond a shadow of doubt that all is not lost in the land of Empire and the paper is open and honest in flagging the issues to be overcome for Influence to be truly implemented in the UK. If for no other reason, professionals should read this paper as a heads-up on the institutional problems that are endemic, not just in UK MOD, but across Western militaries…

I will do some more work on this topic later but it is Saturday today and Carmen comes home for the weekend tonight – so it’s off to tidy the house and grounds so it looks nice for her when she gets in…

Manage is a good word

Posted on 8 January 2010 by SJPONeill

This is a picture of happier slower days.

Those happier slower days have gone now and we need to adjust to a new environment, one in which we must manage more information at far higher levels of resolution than ever before. I use the word ‘manage‘ deliberately – it has had a bit of a thrashing over the last decade or so, especially in the military, where management is a term reserved for stuff that people out of uniform do e.g. ‘…they’re just a manager…‘ Well, girls and boys, if you can’t manage, then it is unlikely that you will ever be much chop at command or operations. Here’s what one source thinks ‘manage’ is:

In 2005, the USMC’s Michael Scheiern posited a shift from platform-based tracking to individual-based tracking and was pretty positive that, in terms of the complex contemporary operating environment, tracking at the individual level was realistically achievable. But, here we are in 2010 already, with knashing and wailing over yet another failure of intelligence. The problem, as I see it, is that we simply don’t want to change: despite the thousands of lives and billions of $$ expended in this war, too many people are still too wedded to the nice safe days of the Fulda Gap and nowhere is this more apparent than in military information management (which, by the way, is NOT the realm of the 6 community any more than it is that of the 2 weenies).

Over on the CAC COIN Blog (which I have been somewhat remiss in not visiting more often), there is an article entitled I Know Something You Don’t Know: Intelligence and COIN which touches on this topic, inspired by the 25 December Undies Bomber. Not only should we ensure “…every civil servant/diplomat/aid worker a collector…” in addition to “…every soldier a collector…”, we should be extending this to ‘every one an analyst‘ as well. This means that everyone out in their respective field must be sufficiently trained and aware of their environment to act, when needs be, upon that information that, so far, we only want them to collect. And, by the way, “…every soldier a collector…” is not a theory as stated on the CAC blog – it is doctrine and as such should, indeed must, be part of the training regime.

One of the reasons that we are still not getting into this (after EIGHT years of war!!) might be those alluded to here on Coming Anarchy, or more specifically, this Wikipedia page referenced in the CA article. I’d never heard of Baconian method (not that that means much) – I have heard of bacon jam though – but it identifies four obstacles (idols) in considering a problem:

Idols of the Tribe (Idola Tribus): This is humans’ tendency to perceive more order and regularity in systems than truly exists, and is due to people following their preconceived ideas about things.

Idols of the Cave (Idola Specus): This is due to individuals’ personal weaknesses in reasoning due to particular personalities, likes and dislikes.

Idols of the Marketplace (Idola Fori): This is due to confusions in the use of language and taking some words in science to have a different meaning than their common usage.

Idols of the Theatre: This is the following of academic dogma and not asking questions about the world.

Sound familiar? Seen any of these in YOUR work place? Perhaps even subscribed to one or two yourselves…?

This is the problem – we talk up the need for learning organisations, lessons learned, better information and intelligence but here we are – having just bumbled through someone trying to blow up a plane with his undies…

But as much as the intelligence world may be long overdue for a shake-up, we also need to have a good hard look at the rest of the organisation and ask ourselves just why it is that we have to rely on the ‘2’s (sounds a bit like Battlestar Galactica: the 2s versus the 6s….) for analysis instead of applying some common dog common sense ourselves…uh-oh it’s that old Information Militia thing again. The intel weenies and command geeks together need to get out on the streets and see what police officers do and how they do it in thinking things through on the spot…what was it we found in the COIN Review? Oh, yeah…intelligence in the COE may be closer to CRIMINT than that required for conventional high-intensity operations e.g. the Fulda Gap…

Interbella asked the question: What’s in the price of bread? Changing how we look at intelligence may help with the answer…

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…

Accidental Guerrilla Part 2

Posted on 3 December 2009 by SJPONeill

Well, that did get better as it progressed…I found the first two chapters close to interminable, loved Chapter 3 on Iraq and the last Chapter on the way ahead; I didn’t like the chapter of allegedly supporting case studies: nothing annoys me more than someone flogging a dead horse of a model when the evidence in the case studies simply doesn’t supply the model, in this case, that of the Accidental Guerrilla.

I agree that foreign fighters and Rupert Smith’s ‘franchisers of terror‘ are significant forces in the irregular activity world, however I simply do not accept that national guerrillas become such ‘by accident’. Opportunist, reactive or responsive would be better adjectives for national guerrillas in that they react to and/or seize an opportunity presented by the actions of national or international interventions (civil and/or military).

The other major factor that detracts from The Accidental Guerrilla is its over-fixation on Islamic terrorism, instead of upon more general terrorism and insurgency. By labouring the Islamic angle, the author may be going some way to further the rift between Islamic communities and the rest of the world.

Similarly, the whole concept of ‘hybrid warfare’ just grates…war is by definition is a complex activity that resists simple definitions – one which also tends to punish those who fail to respect this fact. To postulate that hybrid war is either new or different from any other form of war is illustrative of a concept inability to consider and learn from history. Another contribution to the global game of buzzword bingo…

David Kilcullen writes very well when recounting his own experiences, and considerably less well when trying to support his theoretical model. To get the most out of The Accidental Guerrilla, read the preface, Chapter 3 The Twenty-First Day, and Chapter 5 Turning an Elephant into a Mouse in conjunction with Jim Molan’s Running the War in Iraq. It’s probably entirely coincidental that both books are written by Australian Army officers – or maybe not – maybe that slight aspect of distance from US and NATO issues provides an subtle but important difference of perspective. These readings will give a reader from most backgrounds a firm grounding in issues and approaches for the complex environment. I have a dozen or so pages of notes and will write a more detailed review in the next week or so…

The bottom line on The Accidental Guerrilla is that it is worth reading – the preface, Chapters 3 and 5 outweigh the slog through the other chapters…having said that, down here we have a beer company called Tui which sponsors a range of topical billboards across the country, using the Tui slogan “yeah right“…here’s some Tui moments from The Accidental Guerrilla (yes, I really do like it but these were too good to pass up):

Buy a crate on the way home tonight…

Seeking New Perspectives

Posted on 18 November 2009 by SJPONeill

We’ve all heard the line “those that do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it”, probably to the point of pain…but it as apt now as it ever has been. This is where William S. Lind and Co fall on their collective butts: in only taking those parts of history that suit their argument, they promote false learning and false learning is not learning. That’s what’s wrong with 4GW and the other models that purport to prove that what is now is new.

This blog caught my eye in the WordPress ‘Latest Updates’ list: a young (12 in ’89 so, yes, still young) lady, Damiella, is publishing excerpts from her 80s diary, and offering a perspective from 20 years on in The Diary Project. Reading it, I was immediately taken back to my own Form 2 year and all the trials and tribulations of a 12 year old – that alone made the journey to this blog well worthwhile. On another level, it is interesting to see, through Damiella’s commentary, how those issues that seemed so mega then just raise a wry smile now.

Perhaps we might want to conduct this activity ourselves on both personal and historical levels to help give us a better handle on who we are now and the world we live in…how many would be prepared, even with a bit of judicious editing and pruning, to reveal their teen joys, angsts and trials to the world? Something to think about – it is possible that we learning from history can also apply at the personal level, that we can perhaps see that our issues were not ours alone and that, in fact, we might actually have been quite normal teens…

On a similar vein, we can not learn from history if we have no knowledge of history. UK commentator, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, has some thoughts on the apparent reinvigoration of history curriculums in the UK. Not only do we have to do it, we have to do it properly without bias and partiality. We need to be able to discuss the dark with the good, the heights and the troughs of human activity so that new generations will be armed to make better, more informed decisions and resist the myopic me, me, me siren call of the 21st Century.

A long day…

Posted on 9 November 2009 by SJPONeill

…and probably one thing I won’t miss…a quick day trip dash to Wellington for the Lessons Steering Group today. The LSG went very well, showing the continuous improvement in discussion and results since we kicked them off again in September last year. It’s great to get the international participation that we’ve had at all the LSGs this year and this adds a while extra layer of richness to the discussion…it would be nice, one day, to get the Canadians and Brits along as well, just to get the set…Certainly now it seems we have the buy-in and consensus from around the table for the 2010 Action Plan and can now really hook into the detail of actioning that plan…but, as above, from here to Wellington and back in a day, + LSG engagement and LMS discussion in between and , makes for a long day so it’s off to nigh-nighs now…

Things that go well together…

Posted on 24 October 2009 by SJPONeill

Bert and Ernie…

Fred and Ginger…

Fish and Filo

I’ve been hanging out to try a fish and filo package for a while and thought that I would surprise Carmen with dinner when she got home last night. Lessons Learned:

Where it says use three sheets of filo, use three sheets of filo. Otherwise your herbed cheese filling will melt through the pastry and require an urgent transfer from flat oven tray to over dish to prevent spillover into the depths of the oven.

When folding filo packages, fold the ends in first and THEN roll. This tidily secures the ends and is less likely to crack the filo. Place the filling on one edge not in the middle of the sheet – this makes it easier to roll.

When making a leek sauce to be served under the filo packages, go over on the leek – what looks like heaps on the chopping board becomes barely enough for two once cooked up with herbs, pine nuts and cream. More is less, way more is enough…

The parsnip/turnip/carrot/kumara puree served in a scooped out potato half was a good idea but execution needs work. Baking these in tinfoil seemed like a good idea at the time but I can’t remember why now – it probably would have worked if I had literally spiced it up a bit – a better way would have been a straight bake sans foil. This would also have meant the spud cooking time would = filo cooking time.

Presentation needed work but it tasted primo.

Score:

Fish and filo 6/10

Leek and pine nuts 7/10

Potato halves with vegetable puree 4/10

Total: 17/30 which is still more than half!!!!

Afghanistan and TET

I’ve really bitten over this comment on Steven Pressfield’s One Tribe At A Time thread. [PDF: The “How” of Tribal Engagment – Steven Pressfield] My first reaction to Jim Gant’s Tribal Engagement Teams (TET – possibly an unfortunate acronym, remembering another COIN war) was ‘…yep, here we go again – more taking lessons from other wars and blindly hammering them into the round hole of the current war in Afghanistan…‘ Right up to the point, where the stated aim for the Afghan campaign was reaffirmed as creating an environment that could not be reoccupied by Al-Qaeda and its ilk. Against that objective in an essentially tribal culture like Afghanistan, the TET concept makes way more sense than free fire zones, big guns and high tech:

It is debatable whether the ‘clear zones of fire’ (free fire zones from another war?) or technological advantages are major contributors to a successful conclusion to this campaign (an Afghanistan that can not be reoccupied by AQ or its like?) At best the technology is an enabler for the initiatives that may lead to success; free fire zones, IMHO, are a legacy from conventional (Fulda Gap) mindsets and do not meet the spirit of proportionality, discrimination and precision required for countering irregular threats in a complex environment. It is these that may be more suited for “..low conflict area which is in relatively pro-government hands…” and NOT for an environment like Afghanistan where ‘everyone’ (outside the cities) has traditionally been armed – the only real way to discriminate between good guys, bad guys, fence-sitters and genuine non-combatants (who may still be armed) is up close and personal. This why, over the last week or so, I have gone from mild opposition to the TET concept to a firm advocate. After eight years of high-tech and big guns (which have proven of limited utility in other low level wars), it is time to get back to first principles:

ditch any coalition partners are can’t/won’t step up to the plate, and/or won’t comply with the theatre strategy. This is not peacekeeping where the number of different flags waving in the wind outside the theatre HQ is a reportable metric: this is war fighting with no time for passengers or social members.

Confirm the campaign objectives; identify the lines of operation to achieve those objectives; and then implement the tactical operations necessary to progress those lines. This isn’t COIN/CIT-specific – it must be 101 material from just about any military school in the Western world.

Implement the best Information Operations campaign on the planet to seize the new high ground – Al-Jazeera will fight you for it.

It’s all very easy to pick holes in concepts like Tribal Engagement Teams and that’s how I started. BUT it is even easier to pick holes in the current strategy where we once again seem to be winning all the battles and losing the two wars (in-theatre and home front).”

The crux of a successful lessons is analysing and validating observations, issues and lessons (OIL – yes, it really is all about OIL) against your current context – not trying to hammer a square peg into a round hole with your forehead. We saw this when the ‘experts’ all trumpeted the absolute need to implement a Malayan Emergency-style COIN campaign in Iraq. The fact this campaign’ success was due to a number of unique demographic and geographic factors that definitely are not duplicated in Iraq was lost on the ‘experts’. They also overlooked that while the official end of the Emergency was in 1960, it was not until 1988 that the last of the Communist Terrorists (CT) surrendered to Malaysian authorities.

In my ever so humble opinion, I think that Jim Gant has analysed the current situation and campaign objectives in Afghanistan, developed a model and then validated it against that analysis. I doubt there are many other who could same that they have done the same, certainly not those from the big guns and high tech schools of thought…what was that about lessons from other wars…?

Well, it’s sad to say…

Posted on 3 October 2009 by SJPONeill

…I’m on my way….

Yep, the great homeward bound rubber band is starting to kick in now. The CLAW is over, another job well done by the lessons team, with the final report due for release in a week or so…have the weekend to finalise and also have a bit of a look around this corner of England…I’m not really that organised for touring though as did no homework at all scouting out any places of interest so will see where I end up…

It has been a brilliant week and possibly the last time that the veterans of CLAW 1 will be together so there is an element of sadness today as well. But it has also been very rewarding and I will depart the UK with a head full of ideas for when I get home (just hope they are still all there when I get there!) Certainly we have totally validated the CLAW concept and what we need to focus on now is working more on the next stage of the process…

In all honesty I am no longer that fussed about being away for this long as so I will be more comfortable once the big silver bird departs Heathrow on Monday night heading for home…

London calling….

Posted on 26 September 2009 by SJPONeill

…obviously made it safely to the other side of the world with a painless passage through London Heathrow at 0555 this morning…first thing I need to do is address my my bad from last night and post the link to Josh’s Interbella brief from the other night….and here be the original Interbella paper published in Colloquium in June…[note: in its infinite wisdom, the US Army has taken down the excellent website that was the COIN Center and its journal Colloquium – a great body of work lost…]

Have already developed a healthy dislike for UK roundabouts but other than that have settled into new digs for the next 10 days or so – is quite nice but not a stellar room; the mess is good and the bar looks promising. I expect things will start to warm up once the other contingents arrive tomorrow and Sunday – will be good to catch up with oppos from Aussie and Canada again.

What am I doing here again? It’s this thing called the CLAW which stands for Coalition Lessons Analysis Workshop. What does a CLAW do? Over the next week, reps from the ABCA network review and analyse interoperability-related observations, issues and lessons (aka OIL – yes, it’s all about OIL!) from the last twelve months to identify trends, themes and insights for further work…It’s a pretty good process and has been running since 2005 – it is still the only robust and consistent lessons analysis process which I think really works in evolving OIL into actions required…

Plan A to actually do some real Top Two Inches work in my spare time here is looking pretty good and even having coffee after lunch found a couple of good cues in a couple of magazines for The Thursday-Friday War – they reinforce the idea that success is about being in for the long haul and also of the dangers of allowing old wounds to fester.

In the UK papers today, there is a new spin on the UK MP Troughgate scandal as it has now been linked to the UK Government’s unwillingness to invest in decent kit for its soldiers in Afghanistan – even more embarrassing when it comes out that soldiers have been moonlighting as security guards in the very office responsible for censoring the files on MPs’ accounts and it was apparently their comments over smoko that led to the original leak. This topic takes up the first five pages in one of today’s papers and is in stark contrast to the big front page write up in the DomPost last week or the week before on all the new personal soldier equipment our Government has just invested in…