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Sometimes people are shown ink blots in the hope of finding clues as to their mental characteristics. If the ink blots remind you of the 'wrong' things then you may have problems.

However, a different form of "ink blot madness" has been doing the rounds for some time: The ink blot strategy.

The ink blot strategy holds that the British won in Malaya (now Malaysia and the independent city state of Singapore) not by killing, capturing or driving out the communists, but by taking bits of Malaya and making life "so good" in these bits that people "did not want to fight the British any more" and then expanding these bits "like ink blots". By copying this strategy we can all win in Iraq - or so it is claimed.

There are various problems with this idea. Firstly it is not what the British army did in Malaya - whatever some people may say they did. In reality the men went out and fought the enemy (in the jungle or elsewhere). Certainly there were 'protected villages' and so on, but Malaya was a fight (it was not a welfare project).

Further the British did not give vast amounts of aid to Malaya. Britain did not have this sort of money to give away in the early 1950's and it would not have really improved economic life anyway (more on that below). In so far as economic life did improve in Malaya during the "Emergency" British aid was not the real reason.

And, of course, the (mostly ethnic Chinese) communists in Malays were not fighting for "better socio-economic conditions" anyway - they were fighting for communism (hint, that is why they were called 'communists'). Try asking someone who knows something about Vietnam how all the welfare statism there did not make the VC or NVA vanish (nor was 'support' for them among civilians based upon poor social or economic conditions, such support was based on terror - you helped the communists or you and your family would be killed)

How can someone be so plain daft as to suppose that the reason someone becomes a suicide bomber in Iraq (whether they are from Iraq or from outside) is because they turned on the light one day and it did not go on. "Oh if only the electricity and the water supply worked better, then I would not strap a lot of explosives to myself and go blow up a bus full of school children".

Also physics teaches us that it is less difficult to destroy that to create. The terrorists left undisturbed (under the ink blot strategy) in 'their' bits of Iraq will find it less difficult to come in and blow things up in 'ink blot land' than the U.S. Army (or anyone else) will find it to build nice services.

The ink blots will not 'spread, they will shrink. Going on the defensive is sign that one has no real will to win - and would mean that soldiers being killed would be dying for nothing (as the poltical choice to give up had already been made - sound familar?).

Then there is the assumption that government can make the lives of people Iraq "so good they will not fight", it is not just that the terrorists are fighting because they would like nicer 'public services' (which is absurd), but the whole idea that the government can make so many millions of people have such happy lives.

One does not have to a libertarian to see the absurdity of this idea. The government can not (for example) make the lives of Compton in greater Los Angeles. "So good they will not want to fight" (after so many decades of welfare schemes and 'urban renewal' schemes) - so how is going to that in Iraq?

Whatever one thinks of the Iraq war, the 'ink blot strategy' is stupid. And whoever the military officers and politicans who are behind may be, it is time they shut up. If the war is justified then fighting should continue (i.e. the enemy, especially the leadership, should be hunted down and killed or caputured), and if the war is not justified then the troops should come home.

But there is no 'socio-economic road' to victory.

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U.S.-based libertarian blogger Jim Henley is none too impressed with the latest story in the Weekly Standard by one of its correspondents, Stephen F. Hayes, to the effect that there are loads of documents proving that Saddam's Iraq trained thousands of Islamic terrorists. Hayes has been mining this particular seam for years. He recently published a book focusing on the alleged terror link to Saddam.

I am not quite as skeptical as Henley is about the credibility of what Hayes says(Jim does a great line in snarkiness). At the very least, if Hayes is half right, then it does rather undermine one of the standard tropes of the opponents of the war: Saddam was not in cahoots with radical Islamic terror, no way, nothing to look at here folks, etc. In any event, it would be good if all the documents that Hayes talks about could be put into the public domain so we can nail down this controversy once and for all.

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This story seems to be making the rounds...

The US military said Wednesday it was investigating a report carried on an Australian television network that claimed American soldiers in Afghanistan burned the bodies of two Taliban fighters and then used the action to taunt other Islamic militants

...and my response is why oh why is this news? Just to state the obvious, the Taliban bodies in question were dead prior to being burned, so who cares?

I guess is that if they had not burned those bodies, the same people making a big deal of this would be penning articles with the title:

US forces start epidemic in Afghanistan!

As for this being an 'affront to Islam', if the object was to 'smoke out' the enemy by enraging them, again... so what? The job of US forces is to KILL members of the Taliban and I fail to see why it is unacceptable to outrage their sensibilities and perhaps even hurt their feeling prior to punching them full of 5.56mm holes.

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I have no idea how events in Iraq will eventually play out. I fervently hope that this tortured country can move to a more peaceful direction but the current violence and mayhem makes such a prospect seem pretty distant. One thing that has always struck me is how Saddam has never gotten sufficient blame for bringing the current mayhem on to his own country. So it is interesting to read this smart passage by Russell Roberts over at the Cafe Hayek blog:

I don't understand how the failure to find weapons of mass destruction makes the war unjustified. It's not like Bush made up the idea of WMD. Saddam Hussein is the guy you ought to be mad at. Saddam Hussein acted as if he had or was working on nuclear capability. He's the guy who employed nuclear scientists. He's the guy who convinced the UN that he wanted nukes. He's the guy who resisted weapons inspections. He's the guy who said you can look over here but not over there. Why did he do all these things? Either because he actually had nuclear capability or was close to it, or because he wanted to fool people into thinking he was more important than he was. He managed to fool Bill Clinton, the United Nations, George Bush and Israel into thinking he had a desire for WMD. It appears now to have been something of a ruse. Probably. Should Bush have ignored the behavior of Saddam on the grounds that the whole thing was probably a hoax to enhance his self-image? I don't think so. That certainly turned out to be a mistake with Osama. His talk wasn't cheap.

Exactly. 20/20 hindsight is all very well, but it is not much use in making credible foreign policy.

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If the Iraqi local administration in Basra was, as claimed, about to hand over a pair of captured SAS under-cover soldiers that were in their custody to a hostile militia, then it seems that the escalation of tension and violence in Basra should be escalated further... by the British army.

Lesson One of occupying a country has to be to let any local administration know that it is the occupying army that is ultimately in control. The logic is clear: if we are there until Iraq (or whatever comes after the break-up of a unitary Iraq) has been sufficiently stabilised, then we must expect the army to use force to stabilise things, and that is a euphemism for being willing to kill people who oppose that process or interfere with military operations. If the local administration has indeed been infiltrated by enemies with antithetical aims who are cooperating with the enemy, then politics is probably not the answer at this juncture, force is. Unmake the local administration and replace it with another one at bayonet point. Show people in Iraq that some options are simply not on the menu. This is not a normal functioning civil society and should not be treated as one, any more than post-war West Germany was until acceptable institutions were in place to allow it to function as a viable post-totalitarian nation.

If Britain's government ever wants to extract its forces at some point in the future without leaving behind something almost as bad as what was there before, it needs to be ruthless and none too squeamish. If this is a revelation to the UK government, I cannot imagine what it was thinking when this whole process started. When the decision to use force is made, use it effectively and resolutely, giving the Army the resources and support it needs to prevail... or if Tony Blair is not willing to do that, he had no business using force in the first place. What else was he expecting?

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It is splendid news that the trapped Russian submariners have been rescued from the dreadful fate that overtook the Kursk a few years ago. Fortunatly the Russians did not stand on their pride as they did the last time they suffered a subsaquatic disaster. This time they seem to have fairly quickly accepted the help that was offered to them by many navies around the world.

Although the Royal Navy's robotic sub was the prime mover of this rescue, it was really a very international effort with the USA and Japan providing vital assistance in the rescue. Hopefully this more enlightened approach by the Russian government and military authorities admitting they could not effect the rescue themselves is a sign of institutional change at the top, but the cynic in me wonders if it was not just a domestic political calculation that the embarrasment at having to have their submariners rescued by Western naval personnel represented less political damage than another scene on the television of angry family members on the dockside grieving over their dead sons.

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The oldest "mini-aircraft carrier" used by Britain's Royal Navy, HMS Invincible, is being retired from service. The vessel, from which Sea Harrier jets can operate - as well as helicopters - is more than 20 years old and was used in the Falklands War, among other theatres of operation.

As I said a while back, I have no ideological issue one way or the other about the exact composition of our armed forces, which must change with the times and respond to different threats to this country. Coming from a bit of a navy family myself and being an enthusiast over our island's naval history, I am nevertheless the first to realise that sentiment must not trump hard calculation when it comes to manning our defences. But it bothers me that our navy has been reduced to a level that makes independent military action by this country a logistical impossibility. It is probably quite unlikely that we could mount a Falklands-style operation on our own again. The present government wants, so it is reported, to build two new massive carriers but as is usually the case in these matters, the likely date of construction seems to stretch into the horizon, rather like the prospect of England beating Australia at cricket.

In an age when we fret about islamofascist psychos letting off bombs on the Tube, it may be tempting to think that the Senior Service's role is little more than to patrol the coasts and put on commemorations about the Battle of Trafalgar. How complacent that would be. Given that we are an island nation, still reliant on shipping for a huge amount of our economic and physical wellbeing, such an attitude is fraught with danger. We could run the risk of cutting the fleet so hard that we lose the inner core of skilled men and women needed for the service.

With the exception of anarcho-capitalists, even the most hardcore classical liberal realises that defence is a baseline requirement for a proper state. And for an island nation like Britain with a long coastline, that means having a workable navy.

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Piracy in the Straits of Malacca has been a serious problem for many years now and shipping companies have grown tired of waiting for governments in the region to do something effective to stamp it out.

So they are hiring private companies to do it instead. Sounds like an exciting line of work.

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Whilst watching the BBC news' report about the horrific terrorist attacks against Shi'ite civilians in Iraq, I was astonished to hear the following uttered:

Ominously, there are increasing calls for locals to take up arms and defend their communities.

Excuse me? These poor people have just had the centre of their community blown out and many people killed but the desire to defend themselves is denounced by the BBC as... ominous? It might tell you something about what is happening in Iraq but it also tells you quite a lot about the mindset at the BBC.

It seems to me that locals taking up arms to defend themselves against terrorism directly are exactly what the USA should be encouraging whole heartedly. The fact is that people will start doing so regardless of the wishes of the USA if the security situation continues to deteriorate, so not only would it be pointless to try and stop them, why not make a virtue of necessity and show that the occupying powers welcome Iraqis becoming more self-reliant and willing to confront these murdering bastards themselves?

Iraqi territorial para-militaries could be quite an asset fighting the insurgency precisely because they are not going to be centrally directed, at least to some extent. Counter-insurgency by its nature relies on more than just firepower, which the US has in abundance. It also relies on local knowledge and a willingness to be ruthless, something pissed-off locals could certainly provide. The idea that Al Qaeda can only be fought in Iraq 'top down' (i.e. directed from Washington using US and Iraqi government forces) is probably a mistake, so arming the people who are taking the brunt of the attacks seems a pretty sensible way to go.

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USAF personnel in the UK have been told to stay out of London because of the bombings. Sorry but this is not just a propaganda gift to the enemy, it is just plain daft.

Firstly, the US was not the target of these bombs, Londoners were. Secondly, London is always full of American visitors and US military folk do not really stand out from the crowd all that much. In fact Americans are probably more likely to form identifiable 'target clusters' in the rural communities around the US bases in the UK.

It was a terrible atrocity but we have seen it all before in London at the hands of the IRA, so please, telling US service personnel to avoid London is foolish and plays to the often held stereotype of Americans as easily scared by such incidents. I am sure USAF people are made of sterner stuff and more than capable of assessing the risks for themselves.

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Yours truly, my fiancee plus regular Samizdata commenter Julian Taylor, have returned from a fine and patriotic day out in Portsmouth for the "International Festival of the Sea", an event which at its core commemorates the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar. Trafalgar in fact was fought in October, but the organisers are no doubt exploiting what passes for the English summer to put on all manner of events for sailing nuts like myself.

There has already been a fair amount of media coverage of the events linked to the Trafalgar bicentennial, although arguably the BBC has underclubbed its coverage, giving more attention it seems to Wimbledon tennis and the Live8 music event. For anyone who wants to know the human cost of defending this nation's liberties, however, understanding what Lord Nelson and his forces achieved is important. As an island nation, our livelihood is crucially dependent on our peaceable enjoyment of the high seas.

For more than 100 years after Nelson crushed the Franco-Spanish forces off Cadiz, the Royal Navy dominated the world's oceans, enjoying a naval mastery to an extent not seen until the modern U.S. navy and its vast carrier fleets. Nelson instilled in the Senior Service an esprit de corps, a sense of confidence that was to carry on until the First World War, at which point Germany and Japan began to challenge Britain's mastery.

There are many excellent studies of Nelson's life and achievements, and I would recommend in particular Alan Schom's study of the countdown to Trafalgar, which gives credit not just to Norfolk's most famous son but also many of the other actors of the time, who ensured that the Royal Navy was raised to a high pitch of excellence. Tom Pocock's biography of Nelson is also a rattling good read of this brilliant, occasionally vain and charismatic man.

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Samizdata readers may remember my article about this amazing little battle. It clearly showed what happens when irregulars ambush real soldiers.

With great pleasure I now report a follow up to the story: three members of this fine bunch, Sgt. Leigh Ann Hester, Staff Sgt. Timothy Nein and Spc. Jason Mikhave have been awarded the Silver Star.

Well done and congratulations guys!

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As a young kid I remember all those old war films portraying the various RAF air raids on Nazi-held targets like the Ruhr dams or the Norwegian heavy-water plants. The daring achievements of 617 squadron (The Dambusters, as they became known) are part of the folklore of military aviation history. I wonder how many people, however, have heard of a raid that probably helped save the world, at least temporarily, from a serious nuclear threat? I am talking about the bombing of Saddam's nuclear facility at Osirak in 1981 by the Israeli Air Force.

In a recently published book, Roger W. Claire recounts the tale of how an elite group of pilots trained for the raid that hit the nuclear plant, recording along the way Saddam's massive programme to build a facility able to produce the materials for nukes. Even though the F-16 planes used in the raid are a light-year away in sophistication from the Lancaster or Mosquito bombers employed in WW2 raids, the pilots still endured terrific strains on mind and body in carrying out the missions deep inside hostile territory, knowing they faced a high chance of not returning.

Israel's bombing of the nuclear facility drew worldwide condemnation at the time from governments including that of Ronald Reagan, which seems monumentally ironic now. Indeed vice president Dick Cheney was later to thank the Israeli government during the 1991 Gulf War for the raid.

What does this story say about pre-emption as a doctrine? Strict supporters of international law might argue that what the IAF did was illegal, that a sovereign nation like Iraq was entitled to develop weapons and unless there was demonstrable proof of malign intent, no such action would be justified. It remains a point of debate among libertarians, including scribes for this blog.

But it is clear to me, in my view, from reading this and other accounts, that Saddam, both from his actions and his own rhetoric, intended to use nukes to intimidate his neighbours into surrendering territory and the threat posed to Israel from a man fancying himself as a pan-Arab leader was no myth. It was real.

The actions of the Israeli Air Force have not gotten the praise they deserve, in my view. In considering what might have been, it is worth quoting at length from the following influential book by Kenneth M. Pollack:

Although the alternatives are considerably more costly, deterrence is the riskiest of all the policy options available to the United States. We would be betting that we could deter a man who has proven to be hard (at times impossible) to deter and who seems to believe that if he possessed nuclear weapons, it is the United States that would be deterred... The use of nuclear weapons anywhere in the world would be terrible. Their use on the Persian Gulf oil fields; against Tel Aviv, Ankara, Riyadh, or another regional city; or against U.S. military forces in the region is unimaginable... Beyond this, Saddam Hussein with nuclear weapons has the potential to push the world into a second Great Depression while killing millions of people.
The Threatening Storm, 2002

The above quotation helped turn yours truly, a formerly fairly isolationist type of libertarian, into a reluctant supporter of the pre-emption doctrine embraced by George W. Bush. Although the failure to find WMDs in Iraq has shown that Saddam's threat was not imminent - though possibly inevitable - there can be no doubt that the monster harboured a long desire to get and develop a substantial nuclear weapons programme which would have had incalculable consequences.

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The British Army is making a new regiment operational with a dedicated anti-terrorist mission in mind, called the Special Reconnaissance Regiment. Much of the manpower will come from 2 Para bn and 14 Intelligence coy:

CGS statement 1st April

The SRR will draw personnel from existing capabilities and recruit new volunteers, both male and female, from serving members of the Armed Forces where necessary. Officers are keen to recruit those of Middle Eastern or Mediterranean appearance, as well as Muslims and members of ethnic minorities. Priority at recruitment must be given to those able to infiltrate or blend in with Islamic terror groups, rather than to their fitness or fighting capabilities.

There has been chatter about the unit from irrepressible insiders since the middle of last year (the name Reconnaissance and Surveillance Regiment was mooted) but the firm news is hitting the mainstream media now that the unit is going operational.

The badge seems to me to be referencing the Artists' Rifles insignia, which seems appropriate give the Artists' Rifles special forces lineage.

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It is late but I simply must share this tale with you.

The MP's crossed the kill zone and then turned up an access road at a right angle to the ASR and next to the field full of enemy fighters. The three vehicles, carrying nine MPs and one medic, stopped in a line on the dirt access road and flanked the enemy positions with plunging fire from the .50 cal and the SAW machinegun (Squad Automatic Weapon). In front of them, was a line of seven sedans, with all their doors and trunk lids open, the getaway cars and the lone two story house off on their left.

The battle results are described later:

Those seven Americans (with the three wounded) killed in total 24 heavily armed enemy, wounded 6 (two later died), and captured one unwounded, who feigned injury to escape the fight. They seized 22 AK-47s, 6x RPG launchers w/ 16 rockets, 13x RPK machineguns, 3x PKM machineguns, 40 hand grenades, 123 fully loaded 30-rd AK magazines, 52 empty mags, and 10 belts of 2500 rds of PK ammo.

The story has probably been covered in the US. We all know how knowledgeable most journalists are about military matters... so read a real battle report. It is really quite an awesome little vignette. It shows just how good our military folk are at their job.

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One of the current controversies around the war on terror is how to treat the prisoners. Dale Franks at the excellent Questions and Observations blog gets it pretty much right, I think.

My preferred method of dealing with these terror prisoners would be to get two captains and a major together as a tribunal, declare them to be unlawful combatants, and put them in front of a firing squad. Now, maybe, because we're nice guys, we could let them know that if any of them give us verifiable, useful information, then we'll commute their sentences, and won't shoot them. Otherwise, however, it's a blindfold and a last cigarette for the lot of 'em.

The difference of course, is that doing so would be legal. It would be part of the accepted customs of warfare that have been generally agreed upon for over a century. Torturing or beating them to death, without even the convenient fiction of legality, is not.

I found very little to quibble with in his excellent essay on the subject.

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This story does not inspire a lot of confidence in the current Coalition effectiveness of dealing with islamists and sundry Baathist dead-enders in Iraq.

Some 22 people have been killed and many more wounded after a rocket attack on a U.S. military base in the northern town of Mosul. A grim day. Now, call me a pajama strategist, but I wonder whether it ought to be possible to make some use of the tremendous technological advantages of America's modern army in defending soldiers against such attacks on their own military encampments. No, I am not going to make the mistake of supposing that we can create the 'perfect' military. I am aware that all organisations, even relatively well-run ones, have their weak spots, and that includes the armed forces of the West. But it does stick in the craw that a group of servicemen having a meal can end up being killed by a bunch of insurgents running around with a few rocket launchers a few thousand yards off.

I have been looking around a few websites for possible enlightenment on what can be done. DefenceTech blog gives some insight into how ordinary servicemen and women are improvising their own techniques, including piecemeal bits of engineering, to make their vehicles and equipment less vulnerable to attack. It goes to show that crushing the insurgents is not just about the fancy stuff like flying an Apache helicopter. Improvisation has its part to play.

As an aside, it makes me wonder how those critics beating up Donald Rumsfeld at the moment would have written about the calibre of F. D. Roosevelt's defence chiefs 50 years ago, during the Battle of the Ardennes, better known as the Battle of the Bulge. Andrew Sullivan might have been calling for Eishenhower's head on a stick by now.

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December 7, 1941, Pearl Harbour attack.

The image says it all.

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I hear the term "Anglosphere" as meaning that there is some community of the English-speaking nations on either side of the Atlantic Ocean. But when I come across this site, I feel like I am living in a foreign country to Americans.

Trying to list all the reasons why Adopt a Sniper is definitely not an English website would take hours. And that is a shame.

[via Instapundit]

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In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row by row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard among the guns below.

We are the dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe;
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If yea break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

- John McCrae

In my office today in the City, at 11 o'clock, on the 11th of November, hundreds of us switched off our phones, stilled our keyboards, took our eyes off our spreadsheets, and marked two minutes' silence for the men and women killed in defence of this country.

A lot is written about what Poppy Day ought to mean, but for me, the son of a former RAF aircraft navigator, cousin-in-law of a fine member of the US Air Force and descendant of two Royal Navy commanders, the meaning is very clear. I would not now be able to blog my inconsequential libertarian thoughts without the sacrifices made by others. It is as simple as that.

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The long delayed assault on Fallujah is underway. Our troops have spent many months supplying the enemy with a target rich environment and it is about time we ended it.

There is some silver lining to the cloud. The months gave the new Iraqi government a chance to build its image within Iraq. It bought time for civilians in the town to get out or hunker down. It gave loads of time for every fruitcake from the Atlantic to the Pacific to make their way to Iraq and infiltrate Fallujah. They think they can win a great battle there, and I hope they keep believing it all the way until their very last breath.

You know these people are insane: noone but the terminally mentally deficient would want to be a part of an amateur effort to hold ground against the Marines.

I wonder if there might be a bit of Darwinian selection at work here.

PS: If we have any of the troops from that part of the world dropping by... good luck and good hunting.

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Today is the 150th anniversary of that glorious cock-up known as The Charge of the Light Brigade.

The charge, which was part of the Battle of Balaklava, was one of those iconic moments in British military history due more to the works of Alfred Tennyson than the actual importance of the incident itself, which was really little more than a footnote in the overall conduct of the Crimean War. Yet at the time many newspapers accorded the charge of the Light Brigade far more significance than it was really due (and they also tended to gloss over the rather more successful actions of both the Heavy Brigade under Lord Lucan and the magnificent Chasseurs D'Afrique under General D'Allonville).

The charge was regarded as a great military blunder, and certainly it was not what Lord Raglan actually intended to happen when he issued the orders, nor what Lord Cardigan, the Light Brigade's commander, wanted to execute (he is alleged to have quipped "Here goes the last of the Brudenells", his family name, upon receiving the order), but in point of fact, the charge largely disrupted the astonished Russian forces at the end of the valley. As military blunders go, it was a fairly effective one and the overall battle was more or less a draw (though Russian attempts to take Balaklava failed, so it could be argued that it was a net allied victory).

Also in the news is the redeployment of the Black Watch mechanised battlegroup into the American zone of operations in Iraq. The fact this unremarkable operational movement of forces within Iraq has caused apoplexy in media and political circles shows that 150 years on, the pundits back home are just as clueless about military affairs as they ever were.

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I was paging through the new issue of American Rifleman, the monthly magazine of the National Rifle Association, when I came across an interview with General Tommy Franks, who led the brilliant assault on Baghdad last year. (Sorry, no link available).

In the interview, the retired General is asked a couple of questions about his preferences in guns, and I found his answers surprising.

First, he said he prefers the current Beretta 9mm handgun to the .45 he carried in Vietnam. He couldn't really point to anything concrete, just a generalized (so to speak) preference. He did note that it had to be shooting the right loads to be an adequate combat weapon, but that was the only concession he made.

Second, he said he considered the M-16 to be a superior battlefield weapon to the AK-47 in every way. Period. Based on his comments about the M-16 earlier (he was in basic training when they were first issued), I think there is an unspoken assumption here that that it is a better weapon in the hands of well-trained troops who know how to maintain it.

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...about my manhood have just been reinforced. And how:

Perez, 21, lost his leg to a roadside bomb in Iraq more than a year ago, but despite the phantom pains that haunt him, he says he is determined to prove to the Army that he is no less of a man - and no less of a soldier.

"I'm not ready to get out yet," he says. "I'm not going to let this little injury stop me from what I want to do."

Perez is one of at least four amputees from the 82nd Airborne Division to re-enlist. With a new carbon-fiber prosthetic leg, Perez intends to show a medical board he can run an eight-minute mile, jump out of airplanes and pass all the other paratrooper tests that will allow him to go with his regiment to Afghanistan next year

When he arrived at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., for his rehabilitation, Perez asked a pair of generals who visited his bedside if it was possible for him to stay in the Army.

"They told me, 'It's all up to you, how much you want it'," he says. "If I could do everything like a regular soldier, I could stay in."

He wasted little time getting started. At one point, a visitor found him doing push-ups in bed. He trained himself to walk normally with his new leg, and then run with it.

Perez has to rise at least an hour earlier than his fellow soldiers to allow swelling from the previous day's training to subside enough for his stump to fit into the prosthetic.

I am glad he is on my side.

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A British muslim in the Royal Air Force has been successfully prosecuted for going AWOL after claiming he did not want to help kill fellow muslims in Iraq.

It seems to me that an excellent reason for refusing to join a nation's military is the simple desire to not shoot at, or facilitate shooting at, people that you might not feel should not be shot at. If you have a goodly distrust for the wisdom of the state to begin with, taking the view that you are not going to kill someone just because the government wants you to is a very reasonable default position to adopt.

Now of course all states and their militaries are not the same. If you voluntarily contract to do the bidding of the government of Sweden or the Vatican or Switzerland or Costa Rica or Swaziland or Belize or Luxembourg... nations who are certainly not 'military extroverts'... then the range of things you could reasonably expect to be asked to do will generally not include going to far off places you had never previously heard of and dropping bombs on the locals.

However...

If you do elect to join a military in circumstances other than fighting off the clear and present danger of an invasion, it seems to me that you are offering to allow the state make the decision for you of when it is appropriate to shoot and at which particular people. Moreover, if you join a military of some place like Britain, France or the USA, i.e. states who frequently sent their soldiers off to kill folks in far off lands for all manner of reasons other than the direct self-defence of the homeland, then it seems a bit rich to take the state's pay checks for several years but then act surprised if you get asked to, well, help kill folks in far off lands.

Read the damn job description before you take the shilling.

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Austin Bay is right up there with Wretchard when it comes to good analysis, hard common sense, and good info on the current war. He's back from the front in Iraq with a column on how the current war really is a fight for freedom.

If there is one mistake I think we've made in fighting this war, it's been the way we've soft-pedaled the ideological dimensions. This really is a fight for the future, between our free, open political system and the unholy alliance of despots and Islamo-fascists whose very existence depends on denying liberty.

Our enemies are the enemies of freedom within their spheres of influence. In the modern world of jumbo jets and international networks of all kinds, they have already succeeded in reducing our freedom, and seek to do so even more. Because they have chosen to attack us with violence, we are in a war of self-defense with the enemies of freedom. Fighting this war is, in my view, entirely consistent with a libertarian world-view.

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There were two articles on the Rittenhouse Review which rather interested me:

Firstly the blog's author, James Capozzola, displays what I can only describe as a very healthy disdain for democracy (which I certainly share) by applauding the fact that people in Pennsylvania will not be allowed to vote for Ralph Nader for President of the USA. I have commented on this subject before on Samizdata.net.

Now if only Kerry and Bush could also be disqualified...

Secondly, there is an article which mentions that the 427th Transportation Company (based in Pennsylvania, hence being of particular interest to Philadelphia based Rittenhouse Review) was deployed to Iraq with insufficient body armour and GPS sets. He approvingly notes that after he reported on this, one of his readers privately purchased a GPS set and intends to mail it out to Iraq for the unit to use. I too heartily approve of this and would love to see a significant proportion of the military's funding gradually replaced with voluntary subscriptions, something I would happily contribute to myself. However I must take issue with the phrase:

Imagine it: The U.S. military, notably reservists, relying on family, friends, neighbors, and perfect strangers to fill gaping holes in the Pentagon supply chain.

I would prefer to think of it as 'members of society with a vested interest in survival and an affinity for the people defending them', rather than the more pejorative 'perfect strangers', filling the spaces left in the Pentagon's supply chain which are theirs to rightly fill.