Hurrah, you’ve made it!

Graduating from the War Zone

Yesterday I had the great pleasure of seeing the first batch of graduates from our on-line MA War in the Modern World receive their degrees. The remarkable thing about this completely non-residential programme is that it is designed to be delivered anywhere in the world. In this instance our graduates included a number of serving officers who have combined their studies with operational deployments in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo, and just about every other place the British Army sends its troops. It was wonderful to actually meet face-to-face these students with whom I have developed very close relationships over the last few years. Well done all!

What does it take to get sacked around here?

Last week we learned that the MOD had lost more than a hundred USB memory sticks, some containing secret information, since 2004. Also more than 650 laptops had nicked over the same period of time. The Liberal Democrats called it ’shocking incompetence’ (and the Lib Dems know a thing or two about that). But the MOD insisted its policies were ‘generally fit for purpose‘. Ummm, yeah right. I could hardly believe my ears when I heard this report.

Now it appears that an aide to PM Gordon Brown while he was on a visit to China was a  victim of honeytrap operation by Chinese agents

A top aide to Gordon Brown has been a suspected victim of a “honeytrap” operation by Chinese intelligence agents.

The aide, a senior Downing Street adviser who was with the prime minister on a trip to China earlier this year, had his BlackBerry phone stolen after being picked up by a Chinese woman who had approached him in a Shanghai hotel disco.

The aide agreed to return to his hotel with the woman. He reported the BlackBerry missing the next morning.

The aide, whose identity is known to The Sunday Times, immediately reported the theft to the prime minister’s Special Branch protection team and was informally reprimanded.

Informally reprimanded? As one of my student writes ‘Why can’t we have a policy that involves people not taking Security Service laptops on the train to Birmingham, or carrying half GCHQ’s databases home on a memory stick, or flouncing around town with sensitive information hanging out of their back pockets? Am I missing something here? Because to the untrained eye it looks to me like some of the people running the shop couldn’t find their arse with both hands.’

War and Video Games

Thought control: it’s the computer world’s latest game plan - Times Online

First came the joystick. Then came the motion-sensing Wii remote. Now get ready for another radical and rather unsettling leap in video games technology: thought control.

The ways in which computer ‘games’ and war are converging are multitudinous and endlessly fascinating on a number of levels. As a training tool, as a recruiting device, as a weapons control system… the list goes on. It used to be that military technology produced ’spin-offs’ which entered the civilian commercial sector in the form of consumer products; nowadays the process is as likely to work the other way with ’spin-on’ from civilian technologies in the commercial sector finding significant military use (for eg., a laptop with connection to the WWW, Google Earth, and mobile phones gives you a pretty decent C4ISR capability for a few hundred pounds). One can easily imagine the military uses of a system like the one described above which allows the control of devices by thought.

Leave aside the obvious thought-controlled airplanes, vehicles, missiles and so on. This part I found very interesting, even if I’m not sure exactly what it means:

Last month the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), an arm of the US Defence Department, said it had awarded a $6.7 million contract to Northrop Grumman to develop “brainwave binoculars”. The binoculars use scalp-mounted sensors to detect objects the user might have seen but not noticed - in other words, the computer is used as a kind of brain-aid, giving the user superhuman vision.

Explaining the technology, Dr Robert Shin, an assistant professor of neurology and ophthalmology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, said: “There is a level where the brain can identify things before it ever makes it to the conscious level. Your brain says, ‘it may be something’, but it might not realise that it is something that should rise to the conscious level.”

If I translate this correctly what they’re saying is that a soldier wearing such a device might act as a sensor  in a grid (this is already somewhat the case–it’s a question of the growth in sensititity and velocity of information flow). I can imagine all sorts of interesting effects of such a grid. For instance a sniper fires from cover at an infantry section on patrol. No individual soldier sees the shot’s exact origin but they all from their individual perspectives orient their attention to its general vicinity. Result: triangulation. Put a ’shoot here’ icon on a head-up-display. Hey presto a counter-sniper system with a organic sensing capability.

The New Reality in Iraq - WSJ.com

The New Reality in Iraq - WSJ.com

Apropos of Pat’s cautionary injunction not to count chickens before they’re hatched I note the Wall Street Journal is declaring not victory in Iraq but a ‘fleeting opportunity’:

All of the most important objectives of the surge have been accomplished in Iraq. The sectarian civil war is ended; al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) has been dealt a devastating blow; and the Sadrist militia and other Iranian-backed militant groups have been disrupted.

Meanwhile, the Iraqi government has accomplished almost all of the legislative benchmarks set by the U.S. Congress and the Bush administration. More important, it is gaining wider legitimacy among the population. The attention of Iraqis across the country is focused on the upcoming provincial elections, which will be a pivotal moment in Iraq’s development.

The result is that we have an extraordinary — but fleeting — opportunity to advance America’s security and the stability of a vital region of the world.

I take this to mean that things are looking rather better in Iraq so let’s not screw it up now which seems to me wise counsel. I noted this article in the Times today ‘Welcome to Iraq, the hot new holiday destination‘ . A snippet:

It has some of the finest archaeological sites in the world and some of the holiest places in Islam - but persuading tourists to visit Iraq has to be one of the toughest jobs around.

Hamood Massam al-Yakoubi, the head of the Iraqi Tourism Board, is confident that as the violence begins to recede, the brave and curious may be enticed to the country. “I would like tourists from around the world to visit because there is a lot to see,” he says.

The title of the article is clearly an expression of an aspiration not a reality; yet when you think about how awful Iraq has been the existence of the aspiration at all is rather inspiring. Getting back to the Wall Street Journal, the authors reckon that the surest way of screwing up would be to pull out troops precipitately.

Recent suggestions in Washington that reductions could begin sooner or proceed more rapidly are premature. The current force levels will be needed through the Iraqi provincial elections later this year, and consideration of force reductions makes sense only after those elections are over and the incoming commander in Iraq, Gen. Ray Odierno, has evaluated the new situation.

The benefits to the U.S. from seeing the fight through to the end far outweigh the likely costs. For one thing, Iraqis have shown their determination to increase their oil output, currently averaging 2.5 million barrels a day, as fast as they can – something that can only happen if their country is secure.

Far more important is the opportunity in our hands today to work with a Muslim country in the heart of the Arab world to inflict the most visible and humiliating defeat possible on al Qaeda. Success in Iraq also makes it possible to establish a strategic partnership with a legitimate, democratic majority-Shia state that is aligned with the U.S. against Iran.

Recent comments by some Iraqi leaders about the current negotiations for a status-of-force agreement – made in the context of an increasingly heated election season in Iraq, and with the desire to improve Iraqs bargaining position in the negotiations – do not call the U.S. partnership into question. As we recently found in Baghdad, even the most outspoken advocates of rapid American force reductions strongly insist on a strategic partnership with America that helps Iraq stand up to Iran. Most of Iraqs military leaders are unequivocal about the need for a continued U.S. force presence.

I also tend to agree with this though this goal ‘a strategic partnership with a legitimate, democratic majority-Shia state that is aligned with the U.S. against Iran’ seems to me also rather hopeful. I’d be happy with an Iraqi government that acted in its own interests–at present it’s a toss-up I think whether it’s Washington or Tehran that holds more sway in Baghdad.

It ain’t over

This from Michael Yon seems rather premature:

‘The war continues to abate in Iraq. Violence is still present, but, of course, Iraq was a relatively violent place long before Coalition forces moved in. I would go so far as to say that barring any major and unexpected developments (like an Israeli air strike on Iran and the retaliations that would follow), a fair-minded person could say with reasonable certainty that the war has ended. A new and better nation is growing legs. What’s left is messy politics that likely will be punctuated by low-level violence and the occasional spectacular attack. Yet, the will of the Iraqi people has changed, and the Iraqi military has dramatically improved, so those spectacular attacks are diminishing along with the regular violence. Now it’s time to rebuild the country, and create a pluralistic, stable and peaceful Iraq. That will be long, hard work. But by my estimation, the Iraq War is over. We won. Which means the Iraqi people won.’

Now, lets get a few things clear: General Petraeus should be richly decorated for his work in Northern Iraq; Al Qaeda in Iraq has been battered, discredited itself and alienated old allies and many Muslims, the shape of things to come; people who are invested emotionally and politically in the certainty of defeat in Iraq need to pay attention to what is happening; and the new Iraqi state is showing signs of great strengthening in its capacity to keep order, a process tied to us getting out. This is about more than one’s opinion of Bush and the wicked ‘neocons’, its about a vital cause, and folk who would rather Iraq go up in flames than America succeed need to take a more reflective view.

But can we stop the continual, round-the-clock declarations of victory and defeat? Because of a momentary realignment of forces in the Sunni triangle, the restraint of Sadr and the lull in violence, we should resist the urge to announce finality of any kind. There are too many unknowns: various Shia groups may simply be waiting out the savaging of Al Qaeda and the departure of the US. The new US allies, a coalition of gangsters, tribal leaders and opportunists, as well as a widespread revolt by former Sunni supremacists, may not see this phase as the last battle before the new federal democracy springs into life. They may see it as the latest tactical phase in which the US funds and arms them to battle AQ before they turn their violent attention elsewhere. And if we have ‘won’ overall, and a new Iraq can be salvaged, that is an extraordinary achievement by the US military, but it still tastes of ashes. Iraq has been a tragedy.

Secondly, notice how Afghanistan is now being redefined as the ‘hard’ war and Iraq as the ‘doable war’:

‘ I wish I could say the same for Afghanistan. But that war we clearly are losing: I am preparing to go there and see the situation for myself. My friends and contacts who have a good understanding of Afghanistan are, to a man, pessimistic about the current situation. Interestingly, however, every one of them believes that Afghanistan can be turned into a success. They all say we need to change our approach, but in the long-term Afghanistan can stand on its own. The sources range from four-stars to civilians from the United States, Great Britain and other places. A couple years ago, some of these sources believed that defeat was imminent in Iraq. They were nearly right about Iraq, although some of them knew far less about Iraq than they do about Afghanistan. But it’s clear that hard days are ahead in Afghanistan. We just lost nine of our soldiers in a single firefight, where the enemy entered a base and nearly overran it.’

One of the problems with fighting two wars in tandem is that we are drawn to evaluate each via a spurious comparison. When Iraq was collapsing into horrific communal violence, Afghanistan was touted as the ‘winnable’ war, despite the profound and wildly unfavourable conditions in which it is being fought. An unwieldy coalition, many of whom have little stomach for the effort, fighting in difficult terrain to prop up a weak and corrupt central state against insurgents who have sanctuary over the frontier and can regenerate themselves, amongst survivalist Afghans who know that the turbaned jihadists will always return. How was that ever conceived as the realistic war? Because Iraq looked worse.

My money is still on a cruder skepticism: This isn’t World War Two. The surge is not Okinawa. It ain’t over.

Taking stock of the British Army

Here are two articles that I meant to comment on earlier but have been distracted by the writing of a research grant bid (from which I am now skiving). For some time now I (and no doubt many others) have been of the opinion that Britain when it comes to strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan, in general in fact, Britain has no one in the driver’s seat. The magnificent bravery, dedication , sacrifice, and professional skill of the Army is not in question. But other things decidedly are. For instance, what is the long-term plan for Afghanistan?  What are the troops there to do exactly? Deny sanctuary to Al Qaeda there? Done. They’ve moved to Pakistan.  ‘Stabilize’ and ‘democratize’ the place, build a viable economy there based on something other than narcotics? OK… but if so have we the patience and resources to take on this multi-decades effort? Not at present and it doesn’t look to me as though the government is seriously considering the imbalance between its declared aims and its existing means. Is it worth it? One thing which is becoming clear in the UK is the tension between the expeditionary campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan and the domestic campaign to stem the rising tide of radicalization of Muslim youth which the Home Office thus far has made a hash of.

It seems clear to me that the wheels are going to come off at some point. The two Times articles linked below suggests how wobbly the armed forces are getting . In Fighting two separate wars takes Army close to breaking point Michael Evans writes:

The sense of foreboding within the Armed Forces is spreading. As one senior defence source told The Times, the bottom line is that “if these two campaigns continue on this scale, it could break the Army”.

The source, who was intimately involved in planning the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, added: “The original design was to draw down in Iraq in order to build up in Afghanistan. This was at the heart of the strategy but it simply hasnt happened, which is why the Forces are overstretched, not so much on the bayonets [combat troops] side but in all the support areas, such as engineers and signals and logistics.”

This rings true with stories I am hearing from students and acquaintances who are struggling with an unprecedented tempo of operations which is compounded by a sense that while the Army is very much at war and fully engaged, society as a whole holds much more ambivalent and contradictory opinions about the war, its conduct and aims. Therefore, not surprising to read in Half of all British servicemen say they want to quit that:

The first survey to assess attitudes across the Armed Forces reveals unprecedented levels of concern over equipment, morale and pay.

The research was conducted by the Ministry of Defence and involved more than 24,000 military personnel.

It found that the sense of overcommitment means that 47 per cent of soldiers and army officers think regularly of handing in their resignations.

Interestingly, the levels of dissatisfaction are higher in the RAF and RN than they are in the Army which seems counterintuitive. There is also a distinction between individual morale (which is high) and perception of morale in their service (which is very low) which I find intriguing.

On a tangentially-related note, the biggest story in the UK this summer is not about the war it’s about a perceived burgeoning of Knife Crime. An interesting part of the hand-wringing ‘what to do about it’ debate is the theme of the return of national service of some type. The idea here being that a bit of discipline, training, socialization in the military might be a better use of the time and outlet of energy of some young people than the current regime of petty criminality, marathon Nintendo-playing, and recreational stabbings. Actually, I approve of the idea for lots of good social reasons but as a solution to the problems of the Army described above it’s a non-starter.

UK Ministry of Defence ‘Unfit for Purpose’

(Via Small Wars Journal) I’ve just been reading this blistering denunciation of the MOD ‘The MOD - Unfit For Purpose | Standpoint.Online’ written by an anonymous uniformed staffer.

I am often asked why the MOD makes so many strange decisions and seems to care so little about the welfare of its personnel. People are surprised to read about expensive computer systems that fail to pay service members their proper salaries — or pay them late. Some are shocked by the apparent dumping of severely wounded personnel from Afghanistan and Iraq into civilian hospital wards, remote from their regiments and families, or the massive contracts for systems that are delivered late and don’t work properly, or the strange failure to publicise genuine successes and minor victories achieved “against the odds” in Afghanistan and Iraq.

None of these scandals — or many others less well known — would surprise anyone who knows the MOD and what it has become.

Most people still believe that the MOD is essentially a military organisation. It is not. It is an organisation dominated numerically, culturally and structurally by civil servants and consultants, many of whom are unsympathetic to its underlying purpose or even hostile to the military and its ethos. You just have to spend a few days at the MOD before you realise that the culture there is not just non-military, but anti-military.

I’ve had relatively limited contact with the bureaucracy of the MOD myself so I’d not put myself forward as an expert witness. But the account squares with similar stories/gripes I’ve heard recently and I’m inclined to believe that the situation really is as bad as it is described.

I wonder, however, if there is a larger point here: it’s not just the MOD which is ‘unfit for purpose’ it’s the whole bureaucracy of government which is out of step with reality. Across the spectrum from education and health through defence and policing the state provides services which deliver minimal satisfaction at phenomenal expense. I think this is because state capacity and activity is still primarily generated and delivered through institutions designed for and operating under the cultural imperatives of another age. This is perhaps more obvious in the security sector than it is in others because war is the ultimate ‘reality check’. Highly-capable, transnational irregular adversaries increasingly operating in the cyber or ‘virtual’ environment have a vastly superior bang-for-buck ratio.

Doctrine and Jargon

Does jargon kill? Disturbingly, a recent Fort Leavenworth study of the 2006 July War found that Israel’s SOD doctrine (Systemic Operational Design) was cutting edge, complex…and almost impossible to understand:

‘The language and style incorporated in the doctrine proved nearly incomprehensible to many officers within the IDF…The core of SOD may not be without merit, but it is useless if it cannot be understood by officers attempting to carry out operation orders using SOD terminology and methodology.’

And there are signs that this problem of language, confusing complexity with obscurity, infects Western militaries more broadly. Brian Linn argues in his excellent new study of American strategic culture that while we lack a coherent concept of the nature of the current war, we are left with technocratic gibberish, the Pentagon-speak of ‘capabilities organised cross-enterprise, adapting dynamically to uncertainty and turbulence in a multi-dimensional, nonlinear, competitive environment.’

Given that military doctrine is simply the principles that guide action, it should be clear and quickly understood. Once it becomes too elaborate by trying to replicate the complexity of the world, once it uses language that makes it too indigestible, then it stops being doctrine.

This may also reflect one broader difficulty: we are dealing here not just with doctrine, but with codified doctrine. Doctrine can exist as an unwritten, remembered operational code rather than as a formally written, official text. In collective memory, wisdom and principles can be vague and contradictory, but they are passed down in the vernacular and in a way that can be understood and transmitted.

By contrast, doctrine that is endlessly rewritten and supplemented by talented theoretical minds can quickly lose the strengths of an ‘oral’ tradition, becoming an elite manual for specialist insiders rather than a shared and effective code. Worse, it can become something folk don’t want to read in the first place.

Clearly, this isn’t always the case. But it’s a danger to be wary of.

Sensitivity Training

Apropos of an ongoing discussion on KOW:

Buzzwords amongst the people

This is an ongoing debate on KOW, but it sort of matters. I agree with David (in the comments below) that this century could be a very bloody one. But I was drawn to the provocative article David linked to, which complains:

‘our militaries are still structured to fight an industrial battle against a nonexistent Soviet enemy, and the political-military way of thinking about using force is still based on models of industrial war.’

The Soviet enemy may not exist. But states wielding military force aggressively, even irrationally, will continue to exist for some time, or will return sooner or later. Being prepared to deter and respond to conventional agressors did not become an eccentric or redundant task in 1989. In the time between then and now, Iraq invaded Kuwait, Ethiopia invaded Somalia, NATO attacked Serbia, America attacked Afghanistan and Iraq. In the final decade of the Cold War, Argentina invaded the Falklands and Iraq invaded Iran. These kinds of conflicts may be receding, but the dangers in even one are sufficiently serious to bear preparing for and, if possible, preventing.

To be sure, nuclear weapons, costs, the memory of past interstate wars and other things mean that it remains an activity bound to make many nervous. But part of the task of the US as hegemon should be to keep it that way, rather than falling prey to the delusion of ‘full spectrum dominance’ and the trap of endless, unwinnable expeditionary wars.

Moreover, things might change. To assume the obsolescence of state threats from a recent tendency for fewer, less decisive interstate wars in the past twenty years would be an unfortunate case of ‘presentism.’

So personally, I’m still not convinced that we should overhaul our militaries or states fundamentally away from their core task. Clearly we need to avoid dichotomous thinking - peacekeeping, liberal intervention, or the sheer unpredictability of war make flexibility imperative. But we should resist the logic that because the strategic environment will make ‘asymmetric methods’ more attractive, therefore we have no choice but to prepare to commit our forces to expeditions to deal with them.

We have choices, and a strictly limited view of when and where military force is appropriate is a more prudent response. Grand strategy is about the avoidance of war as much as the preparation for it, and as well as sharpening our military instrument, we need to keep thinking very carefully about how it is used.

In terms of the July War, the conflict used by Ilana Bet-El to plea for a post-industrial military posture, an alternative approach is possible. That war wasn’t profoundly new, other than in the particular sophistication of Hezballa. It has never been a great idea to attack a population indiscriminately, stir up shared religious-nationalist opposition, alienate world opinion and weaken your military mystique (ask Napoleon, ask Brezhnev). Israel had the right to use some force against Hezballa’s persistent rocketing and kidnapping, but surely the wrong reaction to that war is to conclude, ‘let’s reform ourselves to fight it better next time.’ The strategic lesson should be, ‘try not to do it.’

Finally, we should avoid declaring certain forms of war ‘dead.’ We have had quite enough of this shallow, overconfident kind of futurology. As William Pitt found after 1792, and Norman Angell after 1912, this can look a bit embarrassing in hindsite.