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.

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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

[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.