“No fool-proof means exist to prevent the misidentification of units in a highly complex and stressful battle environment and every system must rely on human judgment, training and procedures.” Statement from the ministry of Defence.
Well, that would be the case, wouldn't it? Always has been since time immemorial. Banners, uniforms, pennants, insignia, signals in all forms and colours - very beautiful they all look too on the battle sets of the past; and efficient.
But not in modern warfare; in modern warfare soldiers are dependent as always on their own courage, their companions' loyalty, their officers' command, their allies meeting the plan, but they are at the mercy of their political leaders' provision of longterm funding and its proper investment and administration.
Identification in battle takes consistent research and expenditure regardless of peacetime or wartime, and a level of technological production skills available in a limited number of economies; it requires long term co-operation with allies in stable alliances if air cover is to be provided by another force.
If aircover cannot be self provided, (and to rely on an ally for such crucial warfare inputs already puts into question any army's fighting capacities), if identification technology has not been even agreed, developed, produced, let alone provided, then an army is not under-equipped - it is not fit for battle as our military commanders have been saying, at first privately and , increasingly, publicly.
Courage is not enough and its squander is unbearable.
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'I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free'
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Fallen Angels
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14 comments:
Well said, HG, and I agree with every word. My sympathies to the families of latest victims of so-called "friendly fire", of wehich there have been far too many incidences. Brave young men died needlessly.
But given the cash and personnel cuts, cheese-paring, deceit and general incompetence of the governing parties over the past 20 years or so, I really cannot understand why young men and women still want to join up. I would do everything possible to dissuade my son/daughter from doing so in present conditions.
Anyone with the slightest acquaintance with the aircraft and shipbuilding industries and, presumably the electronics industry, must wonder about the UK's capacity to equip a modern force for a sustained campaign, Nomad. We don't do ships and planes any more, we haven't for decades. That being so, aggressive, expeditionary wars are no longer within or capacities.
Those who know more of military uses can discuss it better, but our army has suffered a decade of deliberate cuts in funding, particularly the long term investment and building of production skills and workforces, that warfare demands.
Labour is committed to policies inimical to fighting wars, it always has been. Labour is committed to peaceful and co-operative development of our relations with others; Labour treats the armed forces as a fall-back source in time of externally posed threat. But this regime has refused the means and demanded the warfare that is sustainable only by a wholly different politics and economic management.
Brown when Chancellor thought they could fight wars without having a war economy by using privatised defence acquisition, nice and off-budget too.
He thought it so clever: have the regime's war and cash in on US primitive accumulation gains at low cost, leave the political Labour base untroubled by not requisitioning resources and directing production into utterly unacceptable channels (for any Labour supporter), and please the arms industry with purchases of current stocks of inadequate weaponry.
War is a process, not an event. And the capacity to wage it was lost; as are the lives of those young men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Really HG seems to me that we won the war and are still more capable than pretty much anyone ..well the majority of causing mayhem at a distance . I see no problem with buying weapons from abroad but we of course have a thriving arms industry. Funding for the miliatary is still very high and has been cut a lot less than others in Europe .
I `m indifferent .My vision for the future is a smaller more mobile England seprate both from the UK and the EU.Some residual Imperial pretensions would have to be dropped and our defence smaller meaner and more focussed on just that.
The excuse for our posturing as a world power is the extent of foreign connections, inward and outward investment but these benefit only a few and I do not , in any case a connection between soldiers and trade any more .
Save money , be smaller and deadlier. People in the Public sector think it would be aswful to be smaller . They confuse turnover and profit
thank you for making so explicit the inconsistnecy and hypocrisy of the nulabour position on military intervention - would that this argument were more widely discussed and recognised.
Agree again, HG. Once those precious skills acquired over the centuries are lost - as they now seem to have been - they cannot be relearned, and if the likes of John Nott, who as Defence Minister did nothing to strengthen the armed forces from the Conservative side, are returned to power it is unlikely that much change in policy or resource allocation would be forthcoming.
Perhaps it is time for the self-aggrandising, but deluded, politicians of the UK to stop pretending the country is a world power "punching above its weight", and settle down to being what it really is, a group of very small islands off the coast of Europe.
That said, small numbers of well equipped service personnel can still play useful support roles where necessary.
N, imagining what we should work towards is essential isn't it, so we can put in something that helps whenever the opportunity comes up. Imagining can be fruitful because it's so adjustable too; at first the US style constitution and government appealed most but because of sheer size it's not applicable here. The Swiss are my current favourites for having in mind when getting things re-set up. I like their relationships with bigger neighbours, I like their clear constitution and its accessibility to individuals, I like their army and the people involvement in it, and I like their outwardlookingness but self determination; England within a western isles archipelago loose federation (for common policies on transport mostly) with Swiss style governance would be my best choice, but others may know drawbacks I don't (well, apart from the yodelling and the clothes).
Why ever should we want to cause mayhem from a distance, even if we could, which we can't because we haven't got any planes N. though Brown has arranged for lots of billions of your money to be spent in his Scottish constituency for the next 10 years pretending to build an aircraft carrier or two. '..defence smaller meaner and more focussed on just that...' you've said it yourself.
And we won the War but lost an Empire.
All the left of centre should be building a proper, pluralist mass party, G, and abandon the rotted hulk that is being sailed by state authoritarians and corporatist memberships. They've given labour a bad name, which makes me angriest of all, because it was an honourable party whose members and supporters used to be decent people. There still are decent people in there but they're just used for window-dressing - not even trusted to vote for their own party's leader, which shows it's not their own party of course.
But who is the Amato of the situation, the theoretician, the dottor Sottile, and who is the Cofferati who will persuade the old structures of labour power to break up their political blocs and let individual membership reign in political afairs, and unions organise as unions in economic and working life?
There was a good posting yesterday by english democrat on Hitch's blog under the heading "New Labour same old etc" which could well be cut and pasted to fit in with this discussion. (Just in case you may have missed it)
Once we split the UK and have to give up our UN seat we will be much better placed to take better judgement on our ability to engage in foreign wars.
The issue in Afg. is that with about 1/3rd of the troop numbers that we need is that we are so reliant on airpower, even at close quarters which is obvioulsy very dangerous.
We need to commit more troops urgently or pull out.
C.U., the UN should be laid to rest; global governance needs a better set of institutions than the clapped out remnants of 60 years ago. But I wrote a post on 'why I despise the UN' earlier so I won't again.
No air cover capacity? No effective battle force. Relying on an ally for an indispensible part of the ability to make war is a reliance no soldier should have to accept. And more troops doesn't solve technical and equipment inadequacy, no matter how brave they are.
Bush raised Vietnam comparisons; we should consider the only reply to having no air cover that was used by the victorious Viet Cong. They dug tunnels, in staggering numbers of kilometres, from one part of the country to another. Not a response to the problem that our army can make.
Relying on an ally for an indispensible part of the ability to make war is a reliance no soldier should have to accept
Can't agree with you there, HG. Read Band of Brothers: in their fight across Holland our heroes, the soldiers of the US 101st Airborne, depended for day-to-day artillery support on a British Artillery brigade. The Americans expressed themselves well satisfied by the reliability of the service they received. No-one suggests this represented a deficiency on the part of the US Army.
Good close artillery cover was vital in those engagements. (I might also add that, although it is never mentioned in the book, it would not be the least surprising if Brit 'friendly fire' didn't claim some US lives in that case: it is taken for granted: the gunners are not known as the Drop-shorts for their mooning activities)
Close coordination and inter-dependency between allies - as in any close partnership - is inevitable and indeed essential. The first Gulf War was a magnificant exposition of NATO doctrine on this, and the coordination / inter-operability aspect impressed the hell out of the Russians, BTW: they'd believed it couldn't work in practice)
Please take as read my agreement on the other sound points you make.
Soldiering is yours to explain to me ND, and a world that most of us know little about.
It seemed the army was fighting without the immediately required equipment and vehicles and personnel but fighting, too, without the political will and economic system needed to go to war. And their allies were publicly denouncing their efforts in Basra and the surrounding area as mistaken, ill-founded if not inadequate.
Remembering the Falklands the most vivid impression was the shock at the requisitioning of all and any resources the army needed and the regular reports to us all on what was happening. Like it or not, we were at war and the government told us what was happening and diverted resources to what was needed. But of course that was a Conservative government not ideologically opposed to warmaking and trying to hide what it was doing from its supporters.
The military was denied what is needed to act effectively by Labour, and specifically by Brown, in all the years of this regime; and the research and development, the production capacity, the workforce, was lost too.
Essentially pacifist and co-operative parties cannot ask for military forays of any kind. And many have died because of this grossest of disjunctions between political power and its base and policy choices that belong with another ideology and support base altogether.
Our country was tricked and frogmarched into an aggressive war of primitive accumulation with the army unsupported in every way.
The determined pursuit and implementation of a political agenda wholly at odds with the beliefs of the majority that voted a regime into power is unpleasant in many policy areas; in military and foreign policy and practice, it is lethal.
Here here.
I couldn't agree more with you HG.
The capacity for our troops to 'cause mayhem at a distance' is tribute to their skill and bravery DESPITE Government incompetence and underfunding. Alas the figures for resignations show that the troops aren't happy with their lot at home or abroad and the casualty rate is 5 injured to every 1 dead. Alas, for all their ability to impact upon foe one senses that both wars verge on tokenism - certainly from the British point of view.
We have yet to withdraw from Basra. As wars go the casualty rates are mercifully light - let's hope it remains so, and hope that the nation is never taken to war again for the vanity of one man.
'We have yet to withdraw from Basra'
Blair, Brown, Straw, and Reed at the very least should be brought to book for their conjoined responsibility in reaching this endpoint for these soldiers. The military commanders are stripped of means and authority but left with life and death duty to their men and women.
The relations between the military and the government executive are another area of governance that rests on mutual trust, commonality of interests and general aims in our society and draws heavily on past practices and decisions made together. Only that state of affairs doesn't exist any more. We're going to have to write it all down and organise a way of enforcing what we agree to write. All trust and sense of history is gone.
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