Warfare, Not Otherwise Specified

The last US convoy leaves Iraq. I was a young child when I saw...

Sun, 18 Dec 2011 14:51:24 +0000

The last US convoy leaves Iraq.

I was a young child when I saw the last Soviet tank leave Hungary. It left behind a country that was robbed, deprived, repressed, but something to look back to to build itself up on. As rocky as its road has been since then, it is now in a relative stability.

I don’t know what Iraqis feel right now - I suppose the same as Hungarians did then, with the previous darlings of the regime being uncertain of their future whereas some perceiving it as liberation. What the US leaves behind is, at best, a complete mess and at worst a civil war/failed state in the making. Going into other countries is not for the weak-stomached. Even Germans have had a complicated relationship with the US Forces in Germany - having grown up in a university town and intellectual hub that at the same time hosts one of the largest US Army installations in Germany, I have seen both sides of this difficult relationship. Whether it is a good choice to give in to the emotional pressure of wanting to be liked is a different thing. The US cannot be sensibly expected to sacrifice its daughters and sons for indefinite eternities until Iraq eventually develops back into a functioning state. What is regrettable is that the fate of Iraq has, indirectly through the withdrawal issue, become a political punchline in America. If there is anything, anything at all, that is colonialistic in American approaches to Iraq, it is not the ‘occupation’ - it is treating another nation’s fate as a punchline against the current President or his predecessor (or in favour of him, for that matter).

The American withdrawal from Vietnam ultimately delivered an entire nation to the butcher’s knife. It is all our hope here at WarfareNOS that if there will be one difference between these two wars, this will be it.

A Revolution, whatever the hell that is!

Sun, 04 Dec 2011 12:40:05 +0000

Slowly, the Arab Spring is sliding into the category of those events that were proclaimed anything short of the Second Coming, but will take up little more than a brief chapter in our children’s history books, and I doubt anyone but the most callous of tutors will force her students to remember it by the time our grandchildren go to college.

In some countries, the Spring petered out as fruits ripened and then wilted, as leaves turned brown and finally fell. In others, it turned into a complete perversion of what it ever was, seeking to replace secular dictatorships with no less dictatorical religious fan

There is a distinct lack of asking questions - mainly because those questions would make a rather large array of people look like total morons. Too bad, because they are total morons, and showing a few up is always a good thing.

I’m not going to go into the debate about interventionism, but rather focus on a single point: why, if all these movements were proclaimed to be great big revolutions, has it all ended in such a lacklustre way?

Not to be rude (oh yes, heck yea to be rude, actually!), but if you’re on tv commenting on foreign affairs, chances are you have no damn idea as to what a revolution is.

You have, for one, never seen one. I doubt that apart from 1989, there had been a real revolution in the First World. And if you seek to go beyond that, I’m afraid the next stop is the Boston Tea Party. Or the Paris Commune. In either case, they’re far, far behind us.

Secondly, the idea of a revolution has become value-laden - undoubtedly with a positive value. How many college kids pull that old chestnut about wanting to “change the world” in their application essays? Unthinking and unquestioning we accept that such change is for the better, whether out of a conviction that this is the Worst of All Possible Worlds or some sort of (rather ill-founded) belief in universal human goodness, whereas there is no guarantee that such change will 1) be meant to make things better, 2) will actually make things better (the latter being much less likely than the former). Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Gaddafi all wanted to change the world - look how well that one turned out in the end.

Thirdly, the Cold War era and Hollywood (and this is not a criticism against them - all fiction tends to center around a conflict and unavoidably one of them has to be the bad guy) have impressed on Western society the idea that anyone who is fighting a dictator actually likes freedom, the First Amendment, Burger King, apple pie ~~and Harry Reid~~. At least after 9/11, we ought to have learned that people fighting the baddies may well fight the baddies because they’re better at being a baddy (got that, Hollywood? Pay attention, there’ll be a quiz later). Just because the Muj’ were fighting the Soviets who hated American democracy doesn’t mean they automatically wished for American democracy. During the entire Afghan mess (the one back in the 1980s), everyone got away without ever asking what motivates the Muj’ and what their beef is with the Russians. Their problem wasn’t the fact that the Soviets operated a fundamentally unjust system, and did even that quite badly. Their problem was that the Soviets operated a bad system that was secular and bad, rather than their preferred option, which is Shariah-based and bad. Had that fact received the attention it deserved back then, it would have been an instance of the bee landing on the nettle - someone would get stung, and you truly didn’t care which one.

Boundless enthusiasm for just about everything revolutionary ended us up in the mess that was Odyssey Dawn - quite apart from having a conspicuously stripperesque name, it ended with what was by all descriptions a political defeat. Gaddafi got whacked, yes - but Libya remains about as stable as a Soviet nuclear power plant at vodka o’clock, and is well on its way to be the newest addition to the failed state register. It took almost a decade of US military presence in Iraq to mollify and eliminate some of the Shi’a-Sunni grudges built up by Saddam’s preferential treatment of the Sunni - what Harvard-educated idiot thought a few bombing runs are going to end in peace and jolly hockey sticks in a country where people working for a deranged despot’s secret police may share an apartment block with their very own victims? The Libyan bombing run was very politically correct. We didn’t stay. We most certainly didn’t want to impress any unpopular views, like the one that democracy is cool and flogging women isn’t, on them. We sure as heck didn’t touch their oil. With the newsroom of the New York Times pacified, it would have been a good idea to actually figure out what’s next. What came next instead is not doing very much at all and handing over the whole shebang to NATO, which couldn’t wait for the rebel leaders to finally sign some random chit that says Libya is now liberated and they can go home. They did so. Tl;dr: we can’t even properly go into a country and fix things. Odyssey Dawn was the equivalent of reacting to Hitler’s invasion of Poland by flying a few sorties, then, upon a bunch of random Poles signing a letter saying ‘actually, all’s well’, going home.

What has the so-called ‘revolution’ achieved? Well, there’s a National Transitional Council now. It’s chaired by - watch this - Gaddafi’s justice minister. Yes, really. More tellingly, the dude has a zebibah the size of a 50p coin. The vice president is a human rights ambulance chaser. There’s a Senussi in the lot, with a claim to the Throne of Libya (I don’t even know if they have one, seeing as in their entire modern history, they have had all of one single king). Between March and November, they went through three and a half defence minsters. And this whole farce is sponsored overtly by Qatar and some other Arab countries, and not so overtly by God only knows who. Snapping up the displaced and distressed amidst a disaster was always a favoured tactic of Sunni extremists (viz. the radical Sunni madrasas set up in Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan during the Afghan-Russian war, virtually entirely staffed and paid for by Saudi Arabia).

We’ve had the Arab Spring. It got us: a dead Gaddafi, and otherwise a whole lot of nothing. Egypt remains a crisis spot, as does Syria. Libya is on its way from a state run badly by a deranged megalomaniac despot to a state run badly by a set of somewhat less deranged but more cynical petty despots. When history sits in judgment, the Arab Spring will hardly go down as the revolution that changed it all. And that, alone, should temper our love affair with revolutions. The Taliban came to power by way of a revolution, and so did the Bolsheviks. Heck, the archetypical revolution, that of the French in 1789, ended in various assorted collections of psychopaths trying to kill one another in the name of the Revolution, and more absurd stuff. It is substance, not form, that matters. A revolution with all the fortitude it has, mainly made by fired up young people (same goes for war, sadly), is but a hollow shell lest that fortitude is filled by sound principles and a good ideas as to what to do once power is gained. The Libyans fought hard to seize power and get Gaddafi out - perhaps so hard that they spent no time at all figuring out what to do once they did end up winning. And that’s a bad, bad sign.

mygamingconfessions: I always wanted to create my own version...

Sun, 04 Dec 2011 00:04:39 +0000

mygamingconfessions:

I always wanted to create my own version of Call of Duty. To create my own missions and set my own weapons. Use the city I live in to create the story. Perhaps a revolution in America is rising and your character joins the fight. Create your own character and even include a few of my buddies in the story. It’s something I always thought of. I’d love it .

Well, there’s always joining the Marines, becoming CMC and have a live version of the whole shebang… though the ‘your character joins the fight’ sounds very Timothy McVeigh.

"I’ve learned over my long career in both the Regular Army and National Guard, is that, no..."

Sat, 03 Dec 2011 18:44:00 +0000

“

I’ve learned over my long career in both the Regular Army and National Guard, is that, no matter how Billy Badass you are, there are three things that are guaranteed:

Someone is ALWAYS tougher than you, and as much as you may talk down to people whom you think are not as high speed as you are, you’re eating someone else’s dust.
You’re probably overcompensating for something. (I know it’s a big word, look it up.)

and last…

I’ve never met ANYONE who was tougher or more high speed than a random bullet, IED, or shrapnel.

How DOES that kool aide taste?

”

- Power Point Ranger (all typos and spelling mistakes are his - but so is the wisdom and truth of this quote!)

"FIBUA: Fighting In Big, Unpronounceable Acronyms."

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 12:42:06 +0000

“FIBUA: Fighting In Big, Unpronounceable Acronyms.”

- Should be familiar to anyone exposed to that crap. Also FISH (Fighting In Someone’s House).

Fish famously goes well with CHIPS: Creating Havoc In Populated Streets. Usually practised in the jolly fake Bavarian town, or, more recently, in the fake Afghan village, at Copehill Down.

"BOWMAN: Better Off With Map And Nokia."

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 16:36:05 +0000

“BOWMAN: Better Off With Map And Nokia.”

- UK Signals wisdom. BOWMAN is the notoriously shite platoon to division level comms platform that suffered from every single possible failure initially. Like the SA80. Or Ptarmigan. Or… detect a theme there?

Fuck yeah Air Cav.

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 12:42:05 +0000

Fuck yeah Air Cav.

recklessbelieving: A small puppy wandered up to U.S. Marines...

Mon, 28 Nov 2011 16:30:05 +0000

recklessbelieving:

A small puppy wandered up to U.S. Marines from Alpha Company, 1st Battalion 6th Marines, in Marjah, Afghanistan. After following the Marines numerous miles, a soft hearted Marine picked the puppy up and carried the puppy in his drop pocket.

Ok people, have some cute.

p0litical: M249 with all Improvements by PEOSoldier on...

Mon, 28 Nov 2011 12:43:06 +0000

p0litical:

M249 with all Improvements by PEOSoldier on Flickr.

The camo ammo pouch is *cute*. And coming from me, that’s not necessarily a compliment. As far as I can see, that’s a zipper fastening. As any male who at least once caught his tackle in one would gladly tell you, they’re not exactly the best thing on the market for reliability. Especially not in hot climes and sandy lands of the strange and foreign, where we happen to fight most of our wars. So yeah, uh, no.

soldierporn: The view through the eyes of a sheepdog.

Sun, 27 Nov 2011 16:28:05 +0000

soldierporn:

The view through the eyes of a sheepdog.

Like our shit on Facebook!

Sun, 27 Nov 2011 14:21:41 +0000

Like our shit on Facebook!:

This way, you’ll see all our updates from Facebook. Because between the sluttily dressed teen girls you added back in the day and the former classmate who now styles himself ‘managing director’ of his own business but is really unemployed, you need something actually sensible on your tweet. (hint: this won’t be it.)

militaryheroes: SPC John Dever of Chicago, IL, with Blackfoot...

Sun, 27 Nov 2011 12:40:06 +0000

militaryheroes:

SPC John Dever of Chicago, IL, with Blackfoot Company 1st Battalion 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment has Thanksgiving dinner while standing watch in a guard tower November 26, 2009 in Matakhan, Afghanistan. Photographer: Scott Olson/Getty Images

Fuck me, that food tray brings back some memories… I swear, there must be people all over the world who got PTSD not from war but from the crap they were fed in the meantime.

South of the bloody Durand Line

Sat, 26 Nov 2011 23:09:00 +0000

…lies a country we really don’t know shit about. And that’s a scary fact when we consider the immense strategic importance of Pakistan - and how little we know about how they work.

I don’t claim or pretend to know any more - we’re all lost in this together. What has always intrigued me is the sheer amount of double-talk that comes out of that country. An odd fact, because as individuals, Pakistanis are probably some of the most honest, honourable and dependable people I know. So how, and why, do we get the sheer madness that comes out of Pakistan?

Take the current craze. Some photos show three aircraft at Shamsi airbase, from which professional, highly trained geospatial analysts (read: Wikileaks readers with an outdated copy of Jane’s) deduced they’re Predators. No, wait, they’re Reapers! I remember when that photo came out, people actually debated whether an almost perfectly orthogonal satellite photo showed a Reaper or a Predator (for the ungeospatialintelligentially inclined: the Reaper is about 9ft longer and has an 18ft longer wingspan - unless you have several objects nearby on ground of which you exactly know the length and a very high resolution image (no, not talking Google Maps), it’s impossible to precisely distinguish between the two), and immediately concluded there’s a CIA black op going on. Black ops, even. Plurals make things scarier.

Then Sen. Feinstein declared that there are Predators in Pakistan, she saw it on National Geographic, mountain lions and lynxes and shit, all scary stuff. Pakistan generally reacted to this by ~~shitting bricks~~ doing not very much at all.

Then a couple of years later, 24 poor Pakistani soldiers get gunned down by a NATO joint fuckup, and the Islamabad government kicks the US out of… Shamsi airbase.

What the fuck?

They don’t kick them out altogether from everywhere, or strike back or something. No, they pull a file out of the Grudge Drawer and start pissing about something that happened eternities ago and they refused to give an ordinary shit about back then. Quite probably because they don’t have enough evidence that substantiates it was NATO forces that killed the Pakistani soldiers.

Or, worse: no evidence that the Pakistani soldiers were innocent about the whole shebang. The Pakistani-Afghan border is the closest this world currently comes to the Wild West. There are no laws. Islamabad is far away, and as a general rule, not much of a crap is given about central authority. Law usually comes from the barrel of a gun. Pakistan always had a problem with centralising control, and by ‘always’, I mean for-frickin’-ever. We’re talking the country whose intelligence agency, the ISI, was basically entirely run by Taliban/AQ sympathisers up until the big reshuffle post-9/11. Without disrespect to the dead, the chance that those armed gentlemen were in fact the soldiers of a slightly different army is pretty high. We’re good at friendly fire, but the Pakistanis also know that if you give the slightest indication that you’re up for a dance, you’ll get Reapered. Or Hellfired. Or whatever the proper verb is, I am sure Sen. Feinstein knows. I’ll let you know once I finished digging up her underwear drawer.

So Pakistan does things in a strange way. I don’t envy them - they have a difficult balance to keep up. After 9/11, Dubya asked them whether they preferred cleaning up their act to being visited by the Marine Corps. They chose cleanup - but no Pakistani government could really talk as harshly with Muslim extremists as the US wanted them to. And so this is the name of the game: Islamabad will have to appease two opposites. Right now, we’re ‘down’. Tomorrow, we may well be up. Heck, well before the 15 days given to pack up their stuff expire. NATO forces may well receive an invitation back to Shamsi.

Bottom line: when Pakistan says something, have a Gimlet. And another. And a good nap. See what they’re saying when you wake. If it’s still unfavourable, well, at least you had some booze and sleep, which will stand you in good stead for the next five days of packing up all that ~~Predator~~ Reaper kit.

Right now, though, I wouldn’t start packing.

Veterans make great vintners

Sat, 26 Nov 2011 16:28:05 +0000

Veterans make great vintners:

In case you remember your SATs, here’s a solution for you: MARINES:BOOZE = TODDLER:CAR KEYS AND VODKA.

Dagestan and the missed narrative (BBC)

Sat, 26 Nov 2011 12:40:05 +0000

Dagestan and the missed narrative (BBC):

Slightly overhyped BBC article on Dagestan, but yeah. It’s a ‘place of historical meeting of cultures’. Which means the Russian military’s presence meets Muslim fanaticism from Chechnya, bizarre secessionism from Ingushetia and, well, it’s close enough for the usual Eastern European suspects to run the show. Islamic protection rackets (and I mean to emphasise they have fuck all to do with Islam but the fact that those who perpetrate it claim to be soldiers of Allah) are basically the local equivalent to the Basque ETA’s ‘revolutionary tax’ aka pay or we blow the fuck out of you. It’s how terrorist organisations finance themselves, and it’s a much ignored face of the Big, Long War. How many COIN experts know anything, and I do mean anything, about organised crime and combatting it? Very few, and the result is that when a bunch of guys with turbans blow up a cafe, the standard narrative will be “Islamic insurgents blow up cafe, what can we do to stop that?” rather than “cafe owner didn’t pay, so wankers blew up his cafe, how can we track down people running a protection racket and nail their asses”?

That’s because LAWNS ARE SERIOUS BUSINESS. Okay?

Fri, 25 Nov 2011 16:25:06 +0000

That’s because LAWNS ARE SERIOUS BUSINESS. Okay?

This is what bad, bad shit looks like: Lithuanians pull a...

Fri, 25 Nov 2011 12:40:05 +0000

This is what bad, bad shit looks like: Lithuanians pull a Corzine, hilarity doth not ensue.

Anyone in a thanksgiving mood can thank the reasonably stable banking system for good systemic regulation. Systemic risk is the new hot word that makes all the little regulators go wet downstairs, and probably rightly so. Individual risk is getting less and less relevant, and systemic risk may well end up being one of the better ‘lessons learned’ from the whole global bond-dealing brouhaha.

The Graffiti of War Project never ceases to amaze me. It uses...

Thu, 24 Nov 2011 17:45:19 +0000

The Graffiti of War Project never ceases to amaze me. It uses visual experiences created by soldiers (graffiti) to deal with visual experiences that maybe made them feel powerless (what they saw in war). Matters of dealing with the effete of war are quite close to my heart, for personal reasons as well. War is an absurd, yea obscene experience, and it changes people. Processing that change can be difficult, and thank God for people like the Graffiti of War folks who create opportunities for that.n

urabus: Ah, the electric strawberry! :) I wondered for the...

Thu, 24 Nov 2011 16:25:05 +0000

urabus:

Ah, the electric strawberry! :) I wondered for the longest time where the insignia of 25 ID came from. Turns out the electric strawb’ is actually a taro leaf, a reference to the unit’s Hawaiian origins shared with 24 ID, both of which were created from the Hawaiian Division.

"Egyptians shocked- shocked- to discover tear gas grenades are made in America. Ummm…have they..."

Thu, 24 Nov 2011 12:40:05 +0000

“Egyptians shocked- shocked- to discover tear gas grenades are made in America. Ummm…have they tripped over the 200+ F-16s we sold ‘em yet?”

- @drunkenpredator