The Untrainables

[Hangarshuffle]

Lansley: government has failed over Libyan military training | UK news | The Guardian (http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/nov/04/lansley-criticises-ministry-defence-serious-failure-libyan-military-training)


Grad story about failures by MOD in attempting to train Libyans to be PBI at a place called Bassingbourn.....to be honest my sympathy really lies with anybody within MOD who was collared into trying to train this mob.


Warning.A sorry tale that ends in rape, buggery, Conservative MP's, asylum seeking....not for MOD people..the Libyans that is.


Anyone live near here? Or involved in training them>? Shurley not as bad as this?

[Fox3WheresMyBanana]

It is extremely rich of Lansley, or any politician, to be criticising the MoD. I suspect the Army personnel running the course would have sent a fair number home on Day 1 if they had been allowed to.

[Hangarshuffle]

Yes, bit hard on MOD. In a different capacity entirely I was involved in trying to train some Arabian fellows once, and boy it was hard work, I admit it.
Such a contrast in ideas, outlook, lifestyle, religion of course, diet, rest periods..everything. Must have been mission impossible for the Instructional Staff here. Leading a horse to water and all that....

[ShotOne]

It's all very easy to blame the politico's but the political intent behind training Libyans was surely admirable. But clearly the execution went awry. Perhaps it was always an impossible task but what was done when it became apparent discipline had broken down? And why were they still given the run of the town after the first sexual assault?

[Fox3WheresMyBanana]

the political intent behind training Libyans was surely admirable.


I disagree. The intent was primarily to be seen as doing something, and secondly to avoid boots on the ground. A moment's reflection or inquiry would have told the politico's that this was doomed from the start. Training small numbers of African officer candidates is hard enough, even when they've been cherry-picked. There is a wealth of experience in the British military in training overseas candidates, of which I did a small bit, and I suspect every single one of us said this was a really dumb idea from the start in the current PC environment. So,of course, they weren't asked.

[Pontius Navigator]

And why were they still given the run of the town after the first sexual assault?

According to the news tonight, they were never given the run of the town. They were not allowed out of camp without an escort. These scum broke out, stole bicycles and went out raping whatever.

[Tashengurt]

Now they're starting to claim asylum. Couldn't see that coming.


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[ShotOne]

"...the intent was primarily to be seen as doing something" That surely summarises our whole Libyan adventure?

[Pontius Navigator]

Now they're starting to claim asylum. Couldn't see that coming.


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Because they would be stoned for buggering about, rape and pillage?

[Wyler]

Just another example of how completely out of touch our politicians are. I have been involved in the training of Arabs over many years, including a Loan Service tour in Jordan. My first ever school was just outside Tobruk in Libya.
As has been said, different culture, different ways of doing things.
You have to adapt to their way of doing things or you will fail miserably. It is hard enough with the well connected Officer Corps so all problems magnified by a factor of 20 with the troops. Getting them up at 0600 and beasting them for 12 hours is a total non starter. Demanding the same standards from them as you would your own students is a non starter.
As to the culture? Ours would be totally alien to most of them and, sadly, some have obviously taken our liberal ways as an open invite to 'fill their boots'.
Doomed to fail from the start but politicians believe everyone is the same and that all will be fine and dandy.
A huge publicity stunt that has spectacularly backfired. So utterly predictable. :ugh::rolleyes:

[N707ZS]

Should of given them a few sheep, goats and donkeys to keep em busy!!

[VinRouge]

Or bearing in mind full metal jacket was filmed there, a long fekking code red with some coal tar soap in a sock, preferably around the kidneys...

[Stanwell]

Wyler,
Your post has a certain validity.
There is a parallel. I think it's called 'anthropomorphism'.
Just joking. Good luck.

[Biggus]

BBC News - PM says Libyan soldiers at Cambridgeshire barracks should not get asylum (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cambridgeshire-29918823)

[Tankertrashnav]

We had four Kuwaitis on my OCTU course, and they split them up, one per flight of 9 or 10 cadets. They all did pretty well, mucked in with the rest of us etc. The only thing I noticed was a marked reluctance to crawl out of their pits at 0600 every morning!

A couple of major differences - they didn't have "safety in numbers" and weren't living en masse in a group where they could reinforce each others actions. Also the Middle Eastern/Arab world was totally different then. This whole project looks absolutely bonkers, and doomed to failure.

[olympus]

Should of...

How long have we been allowing abominations like this in PPrune?

Or should I ask 'How long of we been allowing abominations like this in PPrune?'

[Stanwell]

.
Thanks, TTN. You've got it in one.
The problem applies also to our civvy society's huggy-fluffy 'multicultural experiments'.

[Hangarshuffle]

Good luck with this then.
Why 'Sandhurst in the Sand' hasn't worked in Iraq - Telegraph (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iraq/11211172/Why-Sandhurst-in-the-Sand-hasnt-worked-in-Iraq.html)


Army going back and having another crack training in Iraq again. Sighs.....I just cant see it working. In an age of military budgetary cuts, austerity for many, zero hour contracts for many, VAT at 20%, we still stump up money to train other people, races.......good money after bad.
I actually feel sorry for the officers sent here to do this, as well..poor bastards.


I know people wont follow my rant, but the money our Govt.has thrown away in Iraq..I thought the Conservatives were supposed to be the party that actually valued taxpayers money? Does anyone actually on here could tell me how much, since 2003 we have spent in or on Iraq? Is it even calculable, in cash?

[Lonewolf_50]

Hangarshuffle:
Not meaning to trash your rant ... but ... in 2003, your PM was of the Labour Party, was he not?
So who is/was throwing money away?
Looks like your whole Parliament got involved, at least a couple of parties anyway.

You can be thankful you didn't toss as much money into that briar patch as we did .. blood and treasure expended to ... what end? Well, it changed the shape of the Middle East, but is that the change desired / intended? Thinking the answer is "no" to that last question.

[goudie]

The BBC's attempt at gaining a balanced view, has published this mealy mouthed load of rubbish.

BBC News - Libyan cadet in Bassingbourn claims 'poor treatment' (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cambridgeshire-29923770)

They didn't tell us about British law and what's the difference between right and wrong here."

[Coochycool]

Early 90s I spent a sunny summer in Malta, one of the few places readily open to Libyans then and probably now.

After several warnings and final exasperation, our host was forced to exclude all of the Libyans from our shared accommodation for repeated thievery.

Perhaps somebody had forgotten to explain the local law and the difference between right and wrong.

But actually the incumbent interviewed has a point. The cultural differences are so astounding that if we're going to get involved, we really do have to state the obvious to such individuals. I mean, western girls are easy and are NOT ALLOWED to say no, dont you know?

Brought to you courtesy of Thatcher the Baby Eater, well I mean after all she did, didnt she?

Commiserations to all involved

[Lonewolf_50]

The old chief petty officer once told a young lieutenant ...

"You can polish it all you want to, Lieutenant, but that turd will never hold a shine."

That may apply to a few of these trainees ...

[NutLoose]

Ohhhh yes you can :)

Mythbusters Polishing a Turd - YouTube

[ShotOne]

Do you have an underlying party-political gripe behind this, hangarshuff? The reason I ask is all bar one of your posts highlight the word "Conservative" even though on the face of it party politics has no bearing whatever. Our military involvement in Libya was fully supported by Labour and a Labour PM took us into Iraq, as you well know.

[Thelma Viaduct]

Afghanistan campaign whilst expensive in human lives wasted, cost £40billion.

National debt costs the taxpayer £1billion per week in interest alone, the country's 4th largest expenditure.

This makes the Afghanistan endeavour quite good value for money in comparison, I'm surprised the MPs only managed to p1ss away 40 big ones. Not sure what Iraq cost???

One day people will wise up, maybe. Labour and Conservative are one and the same, gravy train riding professional liars & thieves.

[NutLoose]

So are they getting prosecuted or simply shuffled off home to be dealt with.... Or not.

I know the Kuwaitis we had go through the engineering training told us that if they failed the courses ( which included a year prior in the States learning English ) then they would be liable for the total cost of their courses and possibly more retribution..

[nutnurse]

I remember it being said by old sweats in the 60s that Libyans could raid your tent and steal your groundsheet from under you without you realising they were there.

[Tashengurt]

You can't polish a turd, but you can roll it in glitter.


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[ShotOne]

On the contrary, tash, the British Military has centuries of experience of winning wars (ok, and losing some!)with unpromising raw material.

When things started to fall apart, why wasn't this course relocated to one of many MOD sites far from distraction and temptation?

[HTB]

ShotOne

Now you're drifting into the Marham Posting thread...:E

Mister B

[Red Line Entry]

which included a year prior in the States learning English

Oh, Nutloose, you make oi larf!

[mantog]

So it's the MOD's fault for not teaching them our version of 'right and wrong' ....and yet I would imagine that if someone had devised a training course that set out to explain to the Libyans that they can't steal, sexually assault men/women/other things, the racism balloon would have gone up quick bloody sharp!

[Herod]

Under Sharia law, the punishment for theft is the loss of a hand? What is cut off as a punishment for sexual assault?

[Consol]

Under Sharia law, the punishment for theft is the loss of a hand? What is cut off as a punishment for sexual assault?


Ask the victims, they seem to be the ones that get punished.

[Basil]

Am I asking the obvious, but why wasn't this training carried out in Libya by British soldiers on detachment?
Yes I know, from hindsight.

[goudie]

Basil Probably because Bassingbourn was a well established Army training camp. I believe the Army no longer used it.

Spent 4 happy years there, in it's OCU days.

[onetrack]

In the late 1960's the West Australian Govt sold a heap of farming equipment such as wheeltractors, seeders, scarifiers, harvesters, etc., to the Libyan Govt for the startup of a large farming arrangement under one of Ghaddafis "green the desert" expansive programmes.

A group of local farmers went to Libya to train up the locals in how to operate and maintain the farming equipment. They mostly came back pretty disgusted with the material they had to work with.

When one posed a question as to how the programme progressed, a typical answer was, "You'd teach them how to drive the tractor, check the fluids, and carry out basic maintenance - then a week later they'd forgotten more than half of what you'd taught them."

"You can't take people who are still 5th century donkey-and-camel-riding peasants with backward ideas, and expect them to move smoothly into the operation of 20th century technology. The whole exercise was a total WOFTAM."

I understand most of the farming equipment supplied was either wrecked or abandoned as the peasants charged with its operation and upkeep failed to keep up even basic maintenance.
Once repairs were required, it was beyond any of them to repair the machines, so they were abandoned as soon as they broke down.

I believe Ghaddafi eventually managed to get large centre-pivot irrigation plots in place, after the expenditure of multiple billions of dollars.
I have no doubt it was all done with imported technology, imported workers, and imported skills (at least on the management side).

It probably would have been a lot cheaper for Ghaddafi to just import the grains and other cereals required from other countries that produce them cheaply and efficiently.

Here's a link (below) to a report on the futile exercises of both the South Australian and West Australian Govts into setting up similar agricultural operations in Iraq. The story reads like a Hollywood script.

You cannot establish stable structures and organisation in amongst permanently unstable people, who inhabit permanently unstable regions, and who ensure that those regions remain permanently unstable.

The only way they gain a semblance of stability is when a ruthless, murderous dictator arises and rules the region with an iron fist.

1980's Australian efforts in the Iraq Agricultural arena (http://www.pir.sa.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0004/57046/AUSTRALIA_AND_IRAQ_AGRICULTURE_-_JCR_-_4-10-07.pdf)

[chopper2004]

Forgot to mention night before the bloke got raped by a pair of those recruits) I had left/meandered/staggered Vodka Revolutions (opposite Cambridge Plaza Hotel where most attendees for the then Helitech Exhibition used to stay when it was held at IWM) looking for a taxi by Drummer Street bus station (by the future crime scene) forgetting taxis are parked by the Not So Grand Arcade shopping mall.

Bearing in mind that said park has become dangerous over the years...even though recently its been more lights then say 20 years ago when we used to stagger back home from good night on the town and funnily enough it was safer. Anyone doing shopping walkign through there in daytime can see the drunks and druggies sat around a bush / copse of trees in that park as well as young students wanting to drink and do substances in broad daylight. Its always been like this over the decades.

On fri and sat nights over the years, the Redcaps have accompanied the locals from Parkside Police Station to look out for the guys and girls from the then Waterbeach, Bassingbourn, and further afield. They have de camped outside Boots in the centre of town. Even the skycops/SFS from Alconbury/Lakenheath/Mildenhall have accompanied the local constabularly on their patrols in case any airmen/soldier/sailor/contractor gets into hot water!

I'm not overly sure if any Redcaps were present on the night of the incident though tbh, if they allowed leave / night out for the Libyan recruits it could be on the basis of been shadowed/escorted/mothered by say an RSM or WO2/3?

Cheers

[Fox3WheresMyBanana]

people who are still 5th century donkey-and-camel-riding peasants with backward ideas

7th century. Don't be unfair ;)

[CdoGunner]

7th century. Don't be unfair, its 1435 in the Middle East, as ex OC of a BMAAT team I worked out that the difference between a Arab and a slice of toast was you could make soldiers out of the toast.

[Wander00]

In my Senior Term at the Towers, I had to try and teach Saudis drill - what a no-hoper that was. Twenty years later as an IOT flt cdr I had a "poor" Omani (his Dad was a sgt in the Omani army) in my flight and he was brilliant. Never seen eyes so wide open as when we took him into Halton House.

[Hangarshuffle]

Shot one, well spotted. Probably true. For balance then, both Labour and Conservative MPs have indeed made some, could we say errors, in the last few years? Do they equally share the blame? The blame-game scorecard may look like this:
Are we saying Labour=Iraq. Labour=Afghan. Conservative=End of afghan./ Conservative=Libya. Conservative=Syria (rejected).Conservative=ISIS (partial military action).
I used to think, long ago, that the Conservatives probably tipped the balance their way in having enough knowledge and experience to take the responsibility of controlling the military- I no longer think this at all. If I've raised a hackle about this with then......The Conservative Party is trying to carry on under a legacy of having former soldiers turning into politicians and ministers who can carry out the act that they still know what they are talking about, and in a way they were good at that illusion. But not now.
For what its worth anyway (and that's zero same as everyone's on here) I don't think we as a nation are actually up for training anybody, anymore.
We have neither the military budget, available skilled instructional staff manpower on the payroll and now, no longer have the credibility to manage the medium to large scale training programmes of other countries soldiers (most especially the Arabs). Might have been different a few years back, but post-Iraq we sure as hell lost the plot on this, and it isn't coming back soon.
Continuing failure of this recent nature has now brought derision in the press.
(We haven't the credibility because any smart Alec young chap being trained by the UK Armed Forces can simply stand in class and say we were finally beaten, twice- by irregulars, insurgents... this is what people are actually saying.
We in the UK, at least our political leaders, still cannot seem to acknowledge this in public. And that is why we seemed doomed to keep rolling along on this treadmill of continuous war-fighting involving UK personnel, and failing. Stand to be corrected, which no doubt I will be, but I've got to log off.

[FODPlod]

It's all a question of the basic human material with which you have to work; at what level (English language, moral, cultural, educational, etc.) do you need to start?

I'll never forget the howls of protest from the specially selected, supposedly technically literate students of a prominent middle-eastern country on a sonar maintenance course at HMS Collingwood when an exam question included the use of Ohm's Law in the format I=V/R. They'd only been taught that V=IR.

[goudie]

The Nepalese culture is a million miles away from ours but we've never had a problem training Gurkhas to be, probably the finest soldiers in the British Army.

Perhaps these Libyan guys were reluctant recruits in the first place.

[Rosevidney1]

Johnnie Gurkha has been told since birth that soldiering is a fine and honourable profession and that he should aspire to enlist.

[onetrack]

The basic material of a Ghurka soldier is a far cry from Libyan or Iraqi soldier material.
The Ghurkas are fully conversant with the principle of discipline - self and externally-applied.
The Libyans, Iraqis, et al, have never grasped the principle, and probably never will.

[mmitch]

Wouldn't it have been simpler and cheaper to train them in Libya?
mmitch.