Today's News

[da]

First, this story from the Globe and Mail ticks me off. It starts:


British officer blasts U.S. tactics in Iraq

A senior British military officer has lashed out at the U.S. Army's performance in Iraq, accusing it of cultural insensitivity that "amounted to institutional racism" and a predisposition to offensive operations that proved counterproductive when it was faced with a growing insurgency.


In summary, the U.S. Army published the report in their own journal, Military Review, and that led to a lot of military figures unhappy with the report, saying the British officer is an "insufferable snob," and so on. I can understand this; the reaction doesn't surprise me. The article notes how the journal has a history of vigourous self-critiquing, such as in post-Vietnam War days. Which is great.

But at the very bottom of the article (emphasis mine):

Colonel Kevin Benson, commander of the School of Advanced Military Studies and a member of Military Review's editorial board -- who acknowledged being irritated at first by the article, prompting him to call Brig. Aylwin-Foster a snob -- said that as a result of the Iraq experience, the institute he leads no longer teaches about the Cold War and the Soviet army.

Instead, it studies the French experience in Algeria and how the British fought the insurgency in Malaya. "We're at war. We have to figure out how to fight this insurgency better."

Wait- you self-identify as the best military in the world. And you're just making this connection? melted_snowball and I were talking about the French in Algeria in '03 when the U.S. was first going into Iraq '02 when the U.S. was planning to invade Iraq; I believe after articles appeared in The Economist. I certainly hope this is a misquoting, or a mistaken statement by Colonel Benson, that the U.S. Army wasn't mostly teaching about Cold War style fighting for the first two years of the war in Iraq.

---

In other news, it's supposed to go up to 5 or 6 degrees C. today here, for the third day in a row, and there's barely any snow left.

This article suggests an explanation for the disappearance of dozens of tropical frog species, just published in Nature; a frog fungus is killing them because there's more cloud-cover, leading to cooler rain-forests. The fungus was spread world-wide because humans exported a particularly vulnerable species in the '40s to use for pregnancy tests in the West. This is just sad.

Bleh. Maybe I should've stayed in bed.

Comments

[mynatt.livejournal.com]

That is scary. You'd think the Algerian example would be obvious. And we all know how well the French handled that one...

Also, I wonder how one uses a frog for a pregnancy test?

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

Also, I wonder how one uses a frog for a pregnancy test?

It has something to do with causing the frog to ovulate. I don't want to know more, I think...

[melted-snowball.livejournal.com]

Slate's got it: http://www.slate.com/id/2134212/?nav=tap3

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

And, bizarre as it sounds, that article also suggests why the archetypal pose for a chemist is peering into a flask of liquid; of course it's because chemists have been pregnancy testers for hundreds of years... How weird.

The link at the end of it definitely the oddest article I've read in days. (I may submit it to the Annals of Improbable Results; they're good at reporting on these sorts of things).

[melted-snowball.livejournal.com]

Oh, we were talking about Algeria in early '02, even. There's a movie about the civil war that apparently became popular among DoD folks in '03 or so (The Battle of Algiers? I misremember...)

There's an issue of The Atlantic that I think is still with you that talks about the various crummy attempts at figuring out how to train for guerrila war the US has gone through; the basic summary is that 18 months were lost (along with thousands of lives and tons of credibility), with no guarantee that it's remotely recoverable.

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

Were we? At first I thought so, and then I decided it wasn't that early. But you remember these things. ;)

I remember that Atlantic article now. It was sad. I wonder whether the U.S. Army might be able to learn anything from the Canadian military, which seems to have a much less antagonistic approach; but of course that wouldn't be the American Way, would it...

[kraig.livejournal.com]

Less antagonistic? News to me. Granted, I never deployed for a peacekeeping mission, but I was taught that the mission of the infantry was "To close with and destroy the enemy." (There's more, but the full thing sounds like a Post Office advertisement, something about weather, terrain, and day or night.) I don't think things have changed *that* much since I did my QL3 Infantry in 1996.

I think it's a myth that Canadians like to content themselves with: that somehow, our army's less bad than that of the US. I can tell you, we didn't think of ourselves as peacekeepers instead of soldiers! Peacekeeping was just one mission of several types that we could have been deployed for.

[melted-snowball.livejournal.com]

It is clear, from interviews I've read with US field commanders, and from articles in magazines that I respect, that the UK has had a remarkably different attitude in dealings with civilians in Iraq than the US has. But at the same time, they got assigned the easier part of the landscape, too.


[I dunno from Canada...]

[kraig.livejournal.com]

Fair enough. It's funny you should make that comparison; a weblog I read regularly just approached the same subject (http://warhistorian.org/blog/index.php?entry=entry060112-231405).

I dunno, I just find that Canadians (you and da_lj get to count here :) ) seem to think that our military, and the Army in particular, are somehow worlds apart from anybody else and especially the US in terms of attitude and so forth. We think of our army as peacekeepers rather than peacemakers; if the attitude in the militaries are different, it's not on account of that, as our Army certainly doesn't think of itself as peacekeepers first, certainly not at the man on the ground with a rifle level.

[melted-snowball.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but it's not true of me that i think that the military is nicer or anything like that. Indeed, I know absolutely nothing about Canada's military, other than that it uses too much obsolete hardware, and that it's gotta be one of the tiniest in the world on a people/square mile basis.

There are historic reasons why the UK is in better shape in Iraq than the US. For example, they have a lot more Arabic speakers, and they train their soldiers to the point where they can at least vaguely understand a tiny bit of the language.

[kraig.livejournal.com]

I'm no expert, but I believe that traditionally, Canadian troops tend to come off quite well compared to US troops of similar experience (ie, time in service) when joint exercises are run.

I've heard it said that this is likely due to the fact that the US has so much manpower, they have specialists for everything. For instance, I was a corporal with 3 years in, and I was trained to the point that I could reasonably be expected to be a common rifleman, a light machine gunner at the section level, a member of the weapons detachment (60mm mortar, 84mm Carl Gustaf rocket launcher, 7.62mm general purpose machine gun), or a signaller (radioman) at any level from section right up to company. A company signaller generally coordinates signals for the company commander from the 3 platoons for which he is responsible, as well as signals upwards, say regimental. I got out just before I did my driver's course, but that could have had me driving basically anything with 4 wheels for any purpose that could be fulfilled by such a vehicle. As a corporal, I was expected to regularly be second in command of a section (8 troops) and, in a pinch, fill in as section commander, not that I think I could have done that job terribly effectively for very long, unless my section was very well trained.

I'm not terribly familiar with US organization, but I understand that their riflemen generally aren't cross-trained to that extent. They might get trained as a driver, at which point they do nothing but drive, for instance. Or as a machine gunner, but at that point they'd not be expected to know radio stuff very well. And so on.

I believe the British Army trains in a similar manner, which likely isn't surprising.

Perhaps it's just a recognition that a rifleman needs to know more than just how to shoot and clean his rifle, and participate in a patrol or roadblock or whatever that leads to our troops generally being better prepared for different situations - we were more likely to (and were encouraged to) think about the picture at not just our level, but also at least one level above where we were at. Maybe American soldiers aren't encouraged to do a whole lot more than get their job done.

Who nose. Maybe I'm full of crap, but that's the feeling I got while serving, anyway.

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

One thing's for certain, I would love to hear a response to this from a U.S. soldier.

Interestingly, gmail just gave this conversation a "related page" for a news item out of upstate NY; 6,000 infantry from Fort Drum (near the Canadian border and near my parents) are headed to Afghanistan starting today.

Some of their families are in the UU church with my parents; I'm sure it's not an easy time for any of them.

[kraig.livejournal.com]

I'd be interested too, actually. I never had a chance to talk to US soldiers much, although we saw plenty of them when I was at CFB Gagetown in the summers for training. They have funny uniforms. :)

[bats22.livejournal.com]

I thought I remember reading an article (might have been the Atlantic, or the New York Times) that the Army has, by doctrine, de-emphasized counterinsurgency warfare. They were severely burned by the whole Vietnam War experience, and they said, institutionally, "Let's not do that again." I can somewhat understand the logic of intentionally not preparing for the kind of war that you want to avoid, but to some degree, it is a bit like sticking your fingers in your ears and going "LALALALALALA!"

Also, emphasizing counterinsurgency warfare as the Army's mission takes away missions and funding from the 'big army' portions of the force (armor and artillery); my understanding is that those portions of the army have traditionally had a lot of power. It's not uncommon to hear about army patrols of such and such artillery or combat engineering unit; I think it's a reflection of the re-tasking required due to this change in emphasis.