There is an excellent bit of reportage in The Guardian by James Meek, covering the experiences of British troops in Southern Afghanistan that gives a good troop’s eye view of things.
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One of the things that struck me, reading the comments on the recent thread about the casualty toll in Iraq, the North Korean bomb test, and the ongoing debate about what to do about Islamist terror, is what are countries doing to defend against missile attacks, including nuclear ones? When George Bush was first elected in 2000 (whatever Michael Moore might claim), he made a great deal of play about missile defence and the ABM Treaty. Now I may have missed something, but anti-missile defence, as a topic, seems to have gone a bit quiet. But surely, if North Korea has the bomb, with Iran not far behind, then anti-missile defence ought to be one of the top priorities for defence planners. Even if you are a paleo-libertarian who thinks defence policy rules out any form of pre-emption, you presumably – unless you are a pacifist – embrace technologies to ward off attacks. So it seems to me to be a bit strange that we have not had more discussion about what countries should be doing in this area, and the pros and cons of the technologies involved. (There may have course have been a lot of discussion, but it has been out of the media spotlight, for various reasons). Some old thoughts of mine about the merits and perils of pre-emption. Here is a book about what a defence policy that is really about self-defence might look like, via the Independent Institute. October 13th, 2006 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
 I love the Science Museum in London, and there is another good reason to go there: it has an exhibition about the Spitfire fighter aircraft. Here is a nice review of it at the Social Affairs Unit blog.  Do not believe the nonsense about how the RAF was not essential to preventing an invasion of Britain in 1940. It was vital, and it seems morally right somehow that the aircraft that helped to nail the Luftwaffe was not just a brilliant piece of engineering, but also drop-dead gorgeous. October 7th, 2006 | 48 comments - (Comments are closed)
Who would not sympathise with injured soldiers, forced to endure poor conditions and MRSA at Selly Oak Hospital in Birmingham. Now one has been threatened by a local Muslim:
Soldiers are concerned about their safety. In such matters, one expects the usual response from government: a statement that refuses to acknowledge the problem and masks neglect:
We know where they would like to end up:
The black humour of the British Tommy! No wonder New Labour hates them. October 2nd, 2006 | 33 comments - (Comments are closed)
UK military authorities are claiming the Taliban in Southern Afghanistan has been ‘tactically defeated’, which can mean quite a variety of different things. Certainly the accounts of what has been going on there indicate bloody hard fighting down to bayonet range on occasion and given the lack of resources at their disposal, any significant victory against the casualty insensitive Taliban reflects rather well on the British Army. Now if only the UK government would get rid of some of the many utterly pointless government departments, say for starters the Department of Trade and Industry and the truly preposterous Department of Culture, Media and Sport), we could spend more on the military and still reduce the level of taxation. Well, one can wish… September 27th, 2006 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
“What was going through your head during that second engagement?” a journalist asks me at a press conference the next day. September 25th, 2006 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
I must admit my heart sank when I heard that a remake of the classic, and creepy UK film, The Wicker Man, was coming out. We seem to have a lot of remakes at the moment, prompting thoughts that Hollywood has run dry on creative ideas. I sympathise up to a point with this. The remake of the old Michael Caine/Noel Coward caper, the Italian Job, was an amusing piece of film but not a patch on the original. Flight of the Phoenix was good, but not as good as the original, etc. And yet and yet….the Thomas Crown Affair, starring Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo and Denis Leary, was excellent, in fact an improvement in certain ways on the original, which starred the great Steve McQueen. I suspect the problem is that when we first see a film, or read a novel, we intend to invest a certain amount emotionally in the experience if is a good one. I can imagine the howls of outrage if someone tries to remake Casablanca, or the African Queen, say. One of the problems of course is that remakes can remove elements deemed politically incorrect. The original Italian Job, for example, took a poke at the older incarnation of the EU, known at the time as the Common Market; it also made fun of Italian crooks and security services, while it also celebrated a sort of camp Britishness and had the wonderful character, Professer Peach, as played by Benny Hill (his character had a penchant for very large women). Even so, I resist the urge if I can to get snooty about remakes. Peter Jackson, the maestro behind Lord of the Rings, is planning to bring out a new version of the classic war movie, The Dambusters, using modern computer technology to portray how 617 Squadron breached a number of German dams during the war. Jackson is no PC bore and seems determined to pay his respects to the heroisim of the RAF. I am definitely looking forward to the film when it comes out. In the original movie, the RAF leader Guy Gibson has a black labrador, called Nigger. I will be interested to know if that rather un-PC fact is airbrushed out. Also, it being the 1940s, most of the aircrew should smoke cigarettes like chimneys. Will they be forced to stub out the habit to preserve the sensibilities of 21st Century viewers? Well shall see. September 1st, 2006 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
Report here stating that Israel’s response to Hizbollah’s kidnapping of Israeli soldiers took Hizbollah by surprise, particularly the extent and ferocity of the IDF action, according to a Hiz deputy leader. Given the determination of Israel’s armed forces to defend the tiny Jewish state over the years against a host of enemies, why some terrorist organisation like Hizbollah should be surprised is, frankly, surprising. In any event, this interview may suggest that Israel’s campaign to hammer Hizobollah may not be quite the debacle that some commentators have supposed. The jury is still out on the future of the current Israel administration, however. August 26th, 2006 | 35 comments - (Comments are closed)
If Israel really does accept and implement a ceasefire on Monday, it will have accepted the worst of all possible worlds. If it agrees to an end to the fighting which does not disarm Hezbollah, or even push it behind the Litani River, and does not get a third party force capable of fighting Hezbollah into Southern Lebanon, it would be fair to say Israel has achieved none of its war aims whatsoever. In short, Hezbollah will have won and we will soon be seeing celebrations in the streets across the Islamic world to that effect. The primary Israeli method of attack, a series of destructive operational level1 air strikes against Lebanon’s infrastructure, only made sense if it was intended to isolate the enemy and dislocate its logistics as an adjunct to a massive and robust attack on the ground with a significant portion of its formidable army, with the intention at crushing Hezbollah as military force. Otherwise, what was the point of the non-tactical strikes? As Hezbollah already had large numbers of artillery rockets deployed as organic supply with its front line units (demonstrably so), the air interdiction only made sense if Israel was planning an extended campaign for as long as it took to destroy Hezbollah, which means preventing Hezbollah’s resupply. Why else blow power-stations, fuel depots, bridges, roads and runways deep into the country rather than just strike tactical targets where Hezbollah is deployed? Bringing the Lebanese transportation system to a standstill was surely done to stop movement of supply so that as Hezbollah formations expended their munitions (a process that would increase as more units were engaged directly by the Israeli army), they would quickly become much less effective due to logistic dislocation. This is ‘Air Interdiction 101’, the sort of thing military planners have understood since ‘Operation Strangle’ in Italy in 1944. But what Israel has done so far is a robust air offensive in support of little more than a series of limited objective raids with only a small fraction of the army. This has not only failed (unsurprisingly) to destroy Hezbollah, it has failed to even displace them far enough back onto Lebanon to prevent them firing rockets into Haifa on an almost daily basis throughout this campaign. And now, having killed a great many people but still leaving a large number of Hezbollah fighters very much alive and still in possession of both their Katyushas and the positions from which to fire them, the Israeli government plans to stop? Having weathered what Israel threw at them (but not what the Israelis inexplicably failed to throw at them), Hezbollah can, quite justifiably, claim victory and greatly enhance their stature simply by virtue of Israel failed to gain any of its publicly stated war aim. Can anyone tell me what the hell the Israeli government is thinking? 1 = I would argue that the attacks against Lebanon’s infrastructure were ‘operational’ (i.e. above tactical but below strategic). A ‘strategic’ attack would need to be against the supply terminals, which is to say targets in Syria or Iran. I realise this is an arcane issue of military semantics August 13th, 2006 | 36 comments - (Comments are closed)
…of the Bush administration’s war on terror by Bill Quick. I find very little to disagree with. A few excerpts, below the break, for those who need to be convinced to Read the Whole Thing. Mr. Quick reflects my frustration that we have not been serious with fighting this war. I am not quite sure I can agree with him that we are worse off for having pursued this war because we have done so in a weak-kneed, half-assed way, but we certainly have not done what we could to exterminate the Islamofascist threat, and we are rapidly approaching the day when we will be worse off because it will be a nuclear-armed Islamofascist threat. I vividly remember on the afternoon of 9/11, I told one of my law partners that I had no doubt that we would see nuclear weapons used before this thing was done. Sadly, five years on, I see no reason to withdraw that prediction. As succinct and comprehensible a statement as I have seen of why military intervention in Iraq (and elsewhere) is essential to exterminating militant Islamofascism:
His verdict on Bush:
August 11th, 2006 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
A number of bookshops in Britain seem to be selling reproductions of the advisory books that were given to Allied servicemen readying for D-Day in 1944 and for U.S. Army Air Force personnel arriving in Britain in 1942. I bought a copy of the latter and it is, in its way, a wonderful snapshot of how Britain was viewed by Americans more than 60 years ago and makes me wonder if many of the descriptions could still apply. The book is called Instructions for American Servicemen in Britain. Here’s a couple of paragraphs:
The book is printed from the original typescript that was used by the War Department in the States. Some of the descriptions now may strike us as a sort of cozy, simplified portrayal, but actually I was rather impressed by the strenuous efforts of the author(s) to describe the privations of a nation at war, its habits, differences and qualities (I love its descriptions of attitudes to sport). It also struck me that the US authorities clearly felt it was necessary to take steps to educate servicemen and women a bit about the people they would be meeting as allies in the war against Hitler. While those who have reprinted the book may think they are making some sort of clever-dick post-modernist point by re-issuing these things, I find them rather moving. By coincidence, on the same day that I bought the book, I drove up to see friends in Cambridgeshire. About a few miles away from the house of my friends, I passed by a rather neat row of hedges, screening a rather fine little white-washed building. The Stars and Stripes were flying from a masthead. I slowed down and realised that it was one of the cemeteries to commemorate the U.S. aircrews who flew hundreds of missions from the flatlands of East Anglia in aircraft such as B-17 Flying Fortresses or P-51 Mustangs. There were hundreds of such airbases, some of which are now either just strips of busted concrete in a wheatfield, although a few preserved airfields remain, complete with the old control towers and huts. On my father’s farm in Suffolk we used to find the odd .50 shell case that had been ejected from a passing aircraft. Chuck Yeager, the legendary U.S. Mustang fighter jock and test pilot, flew from Leiston, a few miles away from my old home. Some of the men who lie in the soil of Cambridgeshire probably had read that guidebook and wondered about the country they were operating from all those years ago. At a time when cheap anti-American bromides fill up the airwaves and newsprint, it is no bad thing to reflect on the debt we ‘Britishers’ owe to those who came over to this island in 1942. May they all rest in peace. August 7th, 2006 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
Here is a link to a Getty image with the following information:
Take a look and tell me what you think and although I do not claim to be an ‘artillery expert’, my interpretation of what that image shows is outgoing rockets (i.e. Hezbollah firing at Israel) rather than incoming rockets (i.e. Israel firing on Tyre). My reasoning is as follows… firstly the rockets are burning, suggesting launch rather than impact, secondly the back-blast is visible slightly behind the location of what I take to be the launcher rather than an impact area. Alternative explanation: the rockets were fired by an Israeli aircraft just out-of-shot (hence rockets are still burning) and are indeed incoming fire. The reason I doubt that is the rockets seem to be producing a large signature suggesting they are long range artillery rockets (i.e. Katyusha) rather than free flight aircraft rockets (which are much smaller, do not produce such impressive flames and whose rockets burn out very quickly) Why am I interested? Because presumably the stringer, Samuel Aranda, saw this incident (i.e. could clearly see in which direction the rockets were flying) and presumably also created the caption. Is it in fact the truth? I wrote to Getty images asking for clarification but have received no reply yet. If there are any artillery experts out there I would be keen to hear what they think. As I have said, I am not an expert on the subject but I am sure there must be some folks out there who can confirm either that the caption is most likely correct and I am mistaken, or my interpretation is the more plausible one. Update 1: Take a look at this image of outgoing Katyusha rockets. Update 2: Getty have corrected the caption and now admit it was outgoing Hezbollah fire. August 7th, 2006 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
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