Category Archives: War

Green on Blue, Afghan Tribalism and Would Cyberdyne do better? (w/edits)

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One of my favorite websites is StrategyPage it has a text only format news wire covering technical, tactical, strategic, operational, social, political aspects of the military.  An ongoing thread has been the Blue on Green attacks (Afghan  police or army members, killing US, NATO and other Afghans) .  One of the basic issues Strat Page point to is that Afghan society is by modern standards pathologically dangerous.  Most Afghans are probably clinically PTSD by our standards, and they few restraints on killing.  Murder rates are vastly higher than in the west, the main reason we never hear about it is that there is no one to keep the statistics.

This should not come as a surprise, it has a lot to do with their culture and their state of development, particularly the latter.  We used to be a lot more like them, except at the time it was bows and swords, not AK47s.   The murder rate in the west has been decreasing  precipitously for centuries. In feudal and pre-modern times, when the village, clan and tribe were the underpinnings of society, life was harsh anyway,  honor was all a man or family had, and the weapons were knives, clubs and fists (which are often more about hurting than killing and death was a random though not infrequent occurrence)  the killing/murder rate was many times what it is today.  The violence in clan and tribal (familial not trust based) cultures is higher than in the nuclear family/trust based cultures.  In fact I would argue that most of the US murder rate happen in sub cultures that never developed from or devolved back to clan / tribal structures.  Murder in the sense of the gentile English tea garden variety is rare and probably getting ever rarer.

This article What the Western media doesn’t say about green on blue attacks in Afghanistan : goes much further and broadens the aperture:

Recalibrating our perspective
The enemy that we’re fighting in Afghanistan is tribal. Their notion of the nation-state is almost abstract and, outside of the major cities of Kabul and Kandahar, essentially irrelevant to the people of the provinces where the tribe has been the principal social unit since before recorded time. The CIA estimates the literacy rate in Afghanistan at a shockingly low 28.1% of the general population.[ii] The tribe doesn’t recognise international borders when its members have familial ties on both sides that go back for millennia. Nation states may come and go but the tribe remains and nowhere is this more apparent than southwest Asia as a region and Afghanistan in particular. Alexander learned this the hard way after three bloody incursions 329 years BCE. So did Genghis Khan in the 13thcentury, Tamerlane in the 14th, and Babur in the 16thcenturies CE

……..

Tribal alignments are socio-politically complex arrangements that are driven by principles of defence and survival. Tribe and democracy are incompatible constructs, a reality the modern Western militaries would do well to accept and build policy around. Tribal leadership and honour is everything; people do as their chiefs direct. They fight with total commitment the enemy they are told to fight, stop fighting when they are told to stop, vote for whom they are told to vote, plant wheat or opium as directed, and demonstrate a degree of social cohesion that is simply unknown to Western cultures. War and conflict are incredibly personal things to tribal culture and the tribal affiliations transcend any external relationships. This may logically explain how 500 Taliban and Haqqani insurgents escaped from the Kandahar prison in early 2011 without a single ANSF casualty; clearly the ANSF didn’t want to challenge the insurgents or were told not to by their superiors.

In this environment fighting a war in the traditional sense is almost pointless unless you have a clear eyed view of the situation and a long term plan to eradicate the problem not by violence alone but by uprooting the social structure. Of course there are many who would see this as abhorrent on its face…though the lives of those affected would be improved it would not be self determination.  It would also require decades and decades of money, toil and blood.  In our 140 character society with its plethora of supposedly quick changes we lack the ability to see that doing a hard thing like this requires incremental change over time, a million little wins not a handful of big ones.  This is the curse of our Big Bang mentality, and the failure of Westerners to understand that people from low development cultures are not  ‘us; waiting to be released from some shell of dung.   It takes decades of work to infuse the ‘memes’ that would underpin an Afghan society with the arrow of development going up rather than spinning down.

I’m not advocating this, I don’t think that humans have the ability to carry through the ‘plan.’  No society could wage peace-war for decade after decade maintaining the high moral and intellectual honesty as well as financial and material outflows that it would require while suffering the casualties and the continuing hatred of the the rest of the world.  See the fate of the British Empire..

We are going to pull out of Afghanistan in the main, given the surrounding hostility we cannot maintain a large force in country without the risk of something bad happening.  In a few years Afghanistan will be a near worthless wilderness patrolled by deadly drones ready to kill anyone who is seen to present a threat.  

And…maybe Cyberdine is the solution. The Terminator…the flying Terminator, the Predator.  With these reapers taking down any would be king Afghanistan might become a new frontier of wild east libertarian-ism. At first a place where the tribes can live if peace, or war, as they feel fit.  But under the unblinking eye will they slowly be brought to heel by the chains of modern life, solar lighting, cell phone commerce, TV, Googlepads, etc.

Maybe this is the plan behind the plan in the Disposition Matrix…..

Free Syrian Army | Counterpoint

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http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/10/15/Guerrilla_Country_Syria_Jebel_Zawiya

 

As a counterpoint to Huriyet Daily’s Point of view this article; Guerrilla Country I linked to in Foreign Policy has a different take.  The article is fascinating in its details but the money item is this:

As a no-holds-barred battle rages to the east in the city of Aleppo, the pulse of the Syrian insurrection can be taken in Jabal al-Zawiya. This complex region of hills covered in olive groves and plains entwined with narrow roads of asphalt or dirt is the homeland of Hussein Harmoush, the first officer to publicly defect in 2011, and of Riad al-Asaad, the leading figure of the Free Syrian Army (FSA). Here, the insurrection is deeply rooted in the social fabric: The war these men are waging is always present, and its path is inseparable from their identities.

The FSA’s lack of formal hierarchy appears to be an asset here, as it allows the citizens of the region to organize the insurgency locally and tailor their military response to their environment. Although the rebels in Jabal al-Zawiya recognize a general leadership above them — and though they place themselves under the FSA’s umbrella — these semiautonomous groups of fighters are organized along village and family lines. That gives them several advantages: They have natural intelligence-gathering networks, and they know the terrain like the palms of their hands, having relied on back roads for supplies and secret meetings for many months. These assets, coupled with basic military skills, have allowed them to drive a far superior foe out of the towns.

Now I am far from the sound of guns and have never had the ill luck to be any closer than in an airliner on the original 9/11 but this piece rings true to me.  That is not to say it’s a good thing or bad thing, it is a reasonable facsimile of a fact on the ground.  What it says is that the FSA is probably a lot more effective than numbers and weaponry might indicate.

The FSA does not need to have its boots on the ground everywhere as it has co-opted the local fighting age inhabitants into a cell based ground holding force.  This ground holding force is self-supporting, motivated and dangerous because of its local knowledge and backing.

The FSA assault groups can stay very lean and relatively disbursed and yet have considerable military effect   They can move through the held ground quickly even if on foot because they will have local guides, support and not need a significant logistics tail or carry a lot of food and ammo.  Of course that means they cannot carry out a stand up fight from the move but that should happen rarely since they have eyes everywhere.

That’s not to say the situation sounds good.  The picture and the description are unsettling.  This is a war very much like those in the Balkans during the partisan wars associated with WWI, WWII and the ColdWar.  A war of sects who until the dogs were loosed had lived interlaced with each other for decades if not centuries (not always at peace mind you.) Now with the emperors (dictators) military police no longer suppress all,  distrust and pent-up hate is unleashed and leads down an ever tighter and more destructive spiral.

This is what the US and others should have been trying to prevent, the fragmentation and violation of the populace to a point where their natural distrust of ‘the other’ will make it all but impossible to put a working multi-cultural society back together again.

Lebanon (Syria’s neighbor and sometime satrap) is another multicultural nation in name only, but it has learned to live with its divisions, hopefully it can teach Syrians how to live with theirs when the dogs of war grow sated.

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Which Is Worse: To Help the Syrian Rebels or to Do Nothing? | WALTER RUSSELL MEAD

From the Huriyet Daily News:

There are more than 30 different rebel groups, including the most prominent rebel group, the “Free Syrian Army” (FSA), fighting in Syria, according to officials from the most prominent Syrian opposition group, the Syrian National Council (SNC).
The Jihadists, Islamists, pro-al-Qaida and secular groups that are not under the control of the FSA and which are fighting in different areas of Syria against the Syrian regime forces prove how fragmented and disorganized the Syrian rebel groups were in Syria.
According to the SNC media officer, Ahmad al-Halabi, there are more than 30 opposition groups fighting in Syria – of whom only 15 could be identified by Hürriyet Daily News research. “Fifty armed men come together and they form a rebel group. They generally give their groups names from the Quran or the names the towns and areas they are coming from,” Ahmad al-Halabi told the Daily News.
According to SNC officials, there were between 70,000 and 100,000 rebels fighting against the Syrian regime in Syria. The most prominent rebel group, the “Free Syrian Army” (FSA) – who listed its main base as in the southern Turkish city of Hatay on its website – is the best connected with the SNC.

Click to go to PDF of the article (In English)

From WRM’s Via Meadia Post:

Syria is a lot like Lebanon’s bigger, uglier, and meaner brother. The ethnic and religious tensions that produced decades of civil war in Lebanon are also present in Syria. The Assad dictatorship imposed a rigid order on Syria, but as the dictatorship crumbles the divisions are coming back into public view. Unless we were willing to put tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of troops in Syria and keep them there for a long time, often fighting bad guys and getting attacked by suicide bombers, we don’t stand much chance of building and orderly and stable society there, much less an open and free one.

And:

Aiding the less ugly, less bad guys in the Syrian resistance, and even finding a few actual good guys to support, isn’t about installing a pro-American government in post civil war Syria. It’s about minimizing the prospects for a worst-case scenario—by shortening the era of conflict and so, hopefully, reducing the radicalization of the population and limiting the prospects that Syrian society – – – will descend into all-out chaotic massacres and civil conflict.

Understand and agree with this next with a big but…

If the United States hadn’t gotten itself distracted by the ill-considered intervention in Libya, we might have acted in Syria at an earlier stage, when there were some better options on the table. But we are past that now; the White House humanitarians did what humanitarians often do—inadvertently promoting a worse disaster in one place (in this case, Syria) by failing to integrate their humanitarian impulses (in Libya) with strategic reflection. This kind of strategic incompetence is the greatest single flaw in the humanitarian approach to foreign policy. It has led to untold misery in the past and will likely lead to many more bloodbaths in the future. Unfortunately, warm hearted fuzzy brained humanitarianism is one of the world’s greatest killers.

BUT:  There is really no reason we could not have done something earlier and more aggressively in Syria except that it is Silly Time (otherwise known as Presidential Election Quarter) in America.

One hopes that this is not the future for all of Syria, which has already succeeded in bombing its economy and infrastructure back decades.  Somehow when the dogs of war are unleashed the destruction seems immaterial.  Someday the dogs are impounded again and then the red haze recedes leaving behind only tears.

Some thoughts on a tangential topic to truth in a ‘Statesman’s’ world

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The famous rant by Colonel Jessep (Nicholson) from A Few Good Men:

You can’t handle the truth! Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who’s gonna do it? You? You, Lt. Weinburg? I have a greater responsibility than you could possibly fathom. You weep for Santiago, and you curse the marines. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know. That Santiago’s death, while tragic, probably saved lives. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives. You don’t want the truth because deep down in places you don’t talk about at parties, you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall. We use words like honor, code, loyalty. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide, and then questions the manner in which I provide it. I would rather you just said thank you, and went on your way, Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a weapon, and stand a post. Either way, I don’t give a damn what you think you are entitled to.

Nicholson is able project a charismatic mix of steely conviction with righteousness and psychotic tendencies. He’s homely in a rather attractive sense but his rubber play mask of a face often seems on the brink of either maniacal rage or maniacal laughter…with the understanding that the differences are tiny.

That whole movie left me cold, there was something trite about it and the casting of the oh so cute JAG’s and the oh so over wrought marines was perhaps clever, the setting clever, the words….clever, but what was it all about?

It was all about the delivery of that one monologue and its delivery by someone who was clearly, if only slightly, over the edge, in a place that should not exist.

The movie provided depth to the speech that twists the highest meanings of honor and service into dark and dangerous threats curdled in a place and circumstance that are wholly unnecessary.

And this was long before Guantanamo took on its current gray mantle.

This can be seen as the most powerful anti war movie (without any action) that has ever been created because it says that the things a person has to take on to become a combatant are manipulations and most likely the rational behind it is a lie and the urge to protect, more about power and privilege than caring.

And yet…and yet…I came away with the weird sense, I think intentionally  that Jessep was more hero than villain and the JAGs more (minor) villains than heroes though they were heroes and he was a villain who needed stopping.

In ghostly profile behind Jessep, I see Patton, Stonewall Jackson, Sherman and others, who were in their ways just as nuts,  In an alternate to his fictional world Jessep could have been a great hero and the JAGS might have been slimy villains.

Was any of this the original intent?  Probably and if so its probably great art, in the sense of great playwright’s work and great casting, not so much cinematography or  directing or  acting on anyone’s part other than Nicholson’s.

A Few Good Men and the strange mirrors it casts are more apropos today than they could conceivably have been when it was made.  This movie made today, set in Iraq, Afghanistan or any one of a hundred other places, would not work as well and would create a firestorm of debate but then vanish.

It has been left alone because it says more, more subtly the way it is than it could possibly say if redone in a contemporary venue.  And anyone who tried to remake it would be unable to create the remarkably fine balance that it drew between hero and villain on both sides.

Ship to Shore Connector… Landing Craft Air Cushion, only the Gov’t could make something this cool boooring

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 These are the final stage of the powerful conveyor that is the Navy’s Gator Fleet, the numerous, rather ugly, remarkably capable ships that carry the Marines to the far ends of the world and deliver them on the beach when needed.  While this fleet has been mainly a humanitarian instrument for many years now it is one of the principal reasons for the US Navy to be as big and capable as it is.  The US Navy has many tasks the most obvious ones are to keep the sea lanes open for merchant traffic.  While air freight is important these days it is the vast cargo ships carrying oil, ore, containers, and vehicles that really undergird the world merchant economy.  The US Navy also provides our most secure strategic weapon the strategic missile submarine.  The US Navy and the Marines hold at risk every trouble maker with a maritime coast, providing the implicit or explicit threat that major combat boots (and tracks) can be on their ground if they provide the right (or is that wrong) stimulus.

Things to Think About Before Israel Attacks Iran | Defense Media Network

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An excelent piece by Larry Bond wargame Designer and author :

For several years, Israel has publicly and explicitly stated that if Iran attempts to develop a nuclear weapon, Israel will attack to prevent the program from succeeding or to destroy Iran’s nuclear capability. This is the most important security threat of the new century.

via Things to Think About Before Israel Attacks Iran | Defense Media Network.

DefenseTech calls it a Bomb Truck

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20120311-204543.jpg
DefenseTech has some Chinese eye candy regarding the large and apparently powerful J-20 in development / trials. They call the aircraft a bomb truck and that seems likely, the analogy to th 70’s vintage FB-111 seems apt.

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These aircraft are the conceptual descendants of WWII aircraft like the Mosquito.

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The thing I find peculiar is how open the Chinese are about the testing of the J-20 it’s like a reality TV show. One part of me wants to say the Chinese know everyone will be spying anyway, to reduce the tension, just go ahead and let the pictures be taken, bask in the glow of self righteousness, and the fact you’re saving money. And at the end of the day why does one care, the real secret sauce is deeply buried in the materials and internal details and is not readily apparent on the surface anyway…The other part wonders what’s really going on in some distant corner of the country.

The Army really needs to ‘cool it’s jets'(calm down in the lingo of the ‘Gray Lensman’)

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In the NDIA’s National Defense magazine’s blog there is a post: Don’t Rush to Buy New Vehicles, Army and Marine Corps Warned

The traditional approach to updating U.S. military hardware — spending years and billions of dollars on next-generation designs — is no longer working for the Army and the Marine Corps as they seek replacements for their combat vehicles.

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One reason for the military to hold off on buying new vehicles is that there are no technological silver bullets to make military trucks, tanks and personnel carriers less vulnerable to enemy weapons, …. Adversaries can acquire and deploy antitank weapons and roadside bombs much faster and at far less cost than the U.S. military can build countermeasures and survivable vehicles,

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It’s not clear that the Army or the Marine Corps can “get out of this box,” Outspending the enemy in this case is a losing battle. … “Adversaries’ use of guided weapons, relatively cheap and rapidly fielded anti-armor weapons … threatens to increase significantly the costs incurred by U.S. ground troops in accomplishing their assigned missions,”

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The Army’s procurement bureaucracy is still reeling from the failure of its $200 Future Combat Systems. Although the follow-on program, the Ground Combat Vehicle, is far more modest, it is not clear that it (will) offer a substantial technological boost compared to existing vehicles

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Army buyers might still be somewhat (IMO are totally) deluded by the thinking that doomed the Future Combat Systems. At the time, FCS officials touted the program for its advanced information network, which would give commanders an instant view of the battlefield and allow them to see the enemy without being detected.

After the termination of FCS, the Army continued the push for an advanced communications network, which is now billed as the services number-one modernization priority. The problem, … is that the Army still assumes it can deploy a network at will. “The assumption is that we are operating in a permissive environment … that once we set up the network, nobody is going to tear it down,”

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We have operated in a permissive environment, electronically and even threat wise for the past decade at least. We have also operated in a nation building civil war environment in urban, suburban environment. Even in the ‘Stan the military faces an enemy with limited access to weapons beyond RPGs and IEDs but these have proven the Bradley is no longer viable and driven us to develop armored modestly off road vehicles like the Stryker DVH, MATV, and MAXPRO MRAP.

These vehicles use existing technology and are enough over designed to allow for evolution. They are too heavy for the Army and USMC but the effort put into the ‘light weight’ replacement the JLTV Family has already cost huge amounts and the only way the Army/USMC kept the program was mandating a weight(26,000lb), cost ($250,000 ea) and protection (MAXPRO equivalent) and letting everything else float or be a special kit. The program has been a feeding trough for the Mil-Ind-Bandit-complex for several years not for truck builders supported by the Army funding some high end components. In fact the truck builders and high end suppliers have been funding their own pragmatic tech programs based on industrial/commercial insights that in the end the Army and USMC have bought.

Recently a couple of high ups in the acquisition corps said they’ve been meeting the soldiers needs and all the grief about Comanche, Crusader, JLTV EDM, EFV, FCS, etc is all noise. Bull-crap!

Once it might have had some truth, the Army/USMC did projects to build tech and keep design experience honed. Much of the money went to top grade suppliers of engines, suspensions, transmissions, the primes never intended the vehicles to go to production, everyone learnt and had tech on the shelf. Those days are gone.

These days the programs are too tightly focused and the programs are ‘mapped’ to lead to production. So the top tier suppliers go for them, often get more than one ‘team’ funded and develop futuristic Advanced Development Models, designed to highly refined specs that require essentially custom components. To keep their engineering teams fed they keep most of the work in house and over-ride input from the lower tier suppliers they do use. The specifications are too specific and often contradictory, open to interpretation, and all too often evolving. Money swirls down the toilet by the bushel. New management comes in, new ‘baselines’ established more money flushed and eventually the program collapses. Little of the technology is of use elsewhere.

The world class suppliers all largely ignore Army programs because they have spent too much money on programs that are ill conceived and almost bound to fail. Where the automotive industry does work on gov’t programs they try to focus on programs with clear near term needs, like the highly successful, Stryker, MATV, and later MRAPS.

At the end of the day we’ll be better off letting things settle out while we fund evolutionary and component technologies. The thousands of bright young officers coming back from Iraq and the ‘Stan need to settle in, study the world, history and the potential for tightly-constrained battlespaces, they’ll be the ones to figure out what comes next, not the old guard who claim they’re ‘just fine…’