The long war.

[Al R]

We've seen the madness that greeted Bhutto's arrival back home, and I have not doubt that not only were events anticipated, but orchestrated. Thats how things 'work'. Gen Petraeus talks about a 'long war' lasting decades, and Centcom appears to be planning for one lasting upwards of 50 years.

Stop.

I have got to the point now, where I don't CARE if these people want to blow themselves and each other up. I don't CARE anymore that they make women stay at home or not able to drive cars.. it might be the time of day but I just DON'T CARE anymore. Rather than prancing around the world trying to make everyone think we're still the uber power, I just want the UK military to concentrate on ensuring that MY childrn are safe, HERE and their children too and their children. If that means stocking up on nukes, expanding the Navy to 5 times its current state to patrol our waters, then so be it. Let them do what the f#ck they like.. nothing we do any more will make the blindest bit of difference.

I am aware of the principles of war, and how important 'maintenance of the aim' is, but they're just words. What about 'honesty'.. with oneself as much as anything? I accept too, that WW2 was about projecting power to snuff out tyranny, but that was different. Then, we weren't fighting a mindset, this time we are. They're not going to change.. and this is just an exercise in employing power for god knows what reason.

I have nothing at all against any of our deployments, or the reasons behind them.. we did the right thing, and I despise the gimps who have undermined our troops. But. Enough. Afghans, Arabs, Syrians, Jordanians, Sunni.. let them kill each other if they want to, I have had it up to my ing eyeballs. I don't want to see this kind of **** anymore, I want to see our military employed properly and commanded properly, realistically and effectively, and not running around like blue arsed flies because we have no one of acumen, wisdom, insight and intelligence running things or employing 'us' properly.

Not everyone is like us in the West, lets accept that and lets spend time and money on looking after ourselves.. projecting defence outwards as we are doing, isn't going to do that. This is how I feel now. The coffee is bubbling away, its dark outside and N24 has made depressing viewing. I'm sure that in time, when I've had scrambled eggs with Duchy of Cornwall sozzies lightly sprinkled with pepper, I'll feel differently, but I feel so frustrated and pissed off. That those at the helm haven't got a feckin' clue. They're making it up as they go along and as long as they're in the seat now, they're happy and they don't give a flying k about what our children and grand children have to live with.

[Jack Aubrey]

Have you seen the price of oil and the state of the US dollar?
How much worse might it have been if we had not gone to war twice against Iraq?
Foot - meet Mr Browning.

[effortless]

Just thinking out loud really but I was fairly involved in NI for a few years and this argument was trotted out many times about that place. I did indeed wonder what we were doing there but the result was the best trained army in urban warfare, perhaps. This was, I was reliably informed, going to be the war of the future - population control after major conflict. If you reckon that our future conflicts will be against chaps from sandy places looking for virgins, then our forces are getting the experience they need. I have even heard red stripey types argue that, if we didn't gain so much real training then we may have ended nasty campaigns sooner. If nowt else, our brave boys are giving the nasties something to chew on and keep the worst of it over there and not here. They are in fact protecting your children, cheaply
all this said, I have serious doubts as to our current strategy as I had about NI and, in the end, if we achieve some kind of peace it will be done politically.

[South Bound]

Trouble is I do care. I care about the women and children raped and murdered en mass daily in the darkest parts of Africa, I care that extremism in all its forms can threaten my children no matter how many borders I put up to stop it, I care that there is such inequality and poverty in the world that people kill with impunity and more than anything I care that the 'civilised world' stands by and does little.

We could pull back and let the world fight it out, but that only works until they develop weapons we don't want them to have that could threaten our safety. We must get involved in eradicating poverty and violence against innocents, no matter how a specific region affects (or doesn't) our way of living.

That we (as a global community) are toothless and unwilling to address the issues that are painful and difficult because of a blinkered 'not my war' attitude is an absolute crime and the blood of those that continue to be butchered is on all of our hands as a result.

There are those that will say it is too risky to get involved, but we cannot wait for these states to get more powerful with the proliferation of improved weaponry. It must be sorted out now. We all know it won't be because of the vast majority of politicians with hands over their eyes unwilling to commit their nations to any kind of conflict, but all we are doing is leaving this for our children and grandchildren to sort out.

Rant over.

[Airborne Aircrew]

There are those that will say it is too risky to get involved, but we cannot wait for these states to get more powerful with the proliferation of improved weaponry. It must be sorted out now.

That's called strategy. Strategy is a long term "thing". Politicians no longer care about strategy, no matter how beneficial it may be to the country, because their life is dependent entirely upon the next election which brings everything into the realm of "tactical".

The problem is that when you deal with strategic issues using tactical means you condemn yourself to failure.

[beardy]

Frankly I think the present strategy is doomed to long term failure. We are using brawn and not brains. The rise of fundamentalism, of any religious flavour, is not inevitable, it could have been prevented and can still be reversed.

Mind you with the religious profile of the only superpower's major blocks of voters it is going to be an uphill struggle, but does not need use of arms.

[TheStrawMan]

You know what I think Al R has a point there.

[tornadoken]

Chamberlain: (Sudeten Teutons) "a quarrel among faraway peoples about whom we know nothing". Bismark: the Balkans are "not worth the bones of a single...grenadier." Yet their Nations fought sanguinarily over both, though many said "not in my name".
.
So: we spend on defence to secure (before, water; now) energy. So: Africa, sadly if you will, is not worth the bones of one of you. Honky AT support, but boots on ground must be neighbourly. Oilfields are not "far away, know nothing", and they are worth Britbones - try blogging without electricity. If we wring hands and bleat as nutters takeover, we will soon starve and/or freeze. Asymmetric warfare is a challenge to which we are trying to rise. Be patient.

[VinRouge]

No we wont. we will win by doing what we always did. Sit back, and play one backward nation against another. Vis a vis IRan IRaq. Side with the winner. Its jingly blood, so who cares? Its only since airy fairy liberal "my heart bleeds" losers have got into power that we have intervened directly.

Because as far as I have seen with the time I have spent in the sandpit, life is very very cheap over there.

Oil is not a problem. Annex off iraq into 3 nations. If those in the south dont want to play its simple. Drill from kuwait. Our current policy of massive uncontrolled government expenditure will sink this nation long before oil contagion does. Just wait and see what happens next If the pound is devalued. Have you ever thought that oil is not in fact becoming more expensive(scarce), its just the dollar is becoming more worthless? Look at Zim for this example. Uncontrollable inflation. The credit crunch I believe was the start of something far, far more serious than it appears on the surface.

[Compressorstall]

The only sensible words that have been spoken here are identifying the principle of war - ie 'selection and maintenance of the aim' and 'strategy'. War is not cheap and sometimes it goes on for ages. Have you thought what WW2 would have been like if Churchill spent his time worrying about opinion polls and Paxman? It may be a bloody business, but for those of us who are actually in the military on these pages, it is our duty. I would like to think that the Government had the spine to say that they are going to see things through to the finish, but they just spend their time worrying that they might not be elected again and believing that we are all too stupid to know what is best. If they said that we had to fight to ensure we all had a future then at least they would be truthful for once. It's a nightmare fighting knowing that the work you are doing may be turned off if it is all a bit unpopular or if it all gets a bit too expensive. I get to work all summer and the politicians spend all summer getting pissed in someone's Caribean villa, then they tell us to save money...grr!
It's war, it's not nice, but we have had quite a few lessons in history about getting it wrong the first time...

[R J Kinloch]

I can't remember where I heard this but: The Middle East. 5 minutes after the nukes have finished exploding the Fg Cockroaches will be fighting!
Applies to a lot of other areas as well.

[Saintsman]

Just thinking out loud really but I was fairly involved in NI for a few years and this argument was trotted out many times about that place. I did indeed wonder what we were doing there but the result was the best trained army in urban warfare, perhaps. This was, I was reliably informed, going to be the war of the future - population control after major conflict. If you reckon that our future conflicts will be against chaps from sandy places looking for virgins, then our forces are getting the experience they need.

Nice theory but our forces are getting so thin that it won't be much use. They might be good but they won't be big enough to make a real difference if its us on our own.

[Wiley]

Easy to say we should hang in when I'm no longer one of those who have to bear the burden, but it's interesting to look back at history and see if today's war and Joe Public's attitude to it after the first heady year or so is any different to previous wars.

American Civil War:
In his excellent 'The Last Full Measure', Jeff Shaara goes into some detail to explain the huge pressures Lincoln was under from a wide section of the press and Northern public to end the war again the South by negotiation. He recognised that a negotiated peace, with Lee's army still intact, would result in two separate USAs (or, to be more exact, a CSA and a USA). He hung in, suffering daily jibes in the press and in the drawing rooms of the Washington elite incredibly similar to what many today say about GWB.

WW2
Many will have seen Clint Eastwood's recent twin films about Iwo Jima. As he made very clear in the first movie, the lionizing of the US Marines who raised the flag on Mt Suribachi had far more to do with rallying a flagging US public to maintain support for a by then very unpopular war than any perceived bravery on the part of the men.

Closer to home, look what the British public did to Churchill and his government the moment the threat of Germany had been removed - kicked him out poste haste, and by a relatively wide margin.

The Vietnam Conflict
Quite possibly the first war in modern history where an army won virtually every major battle against the enemy, but lost the war, in large part because of a thoroughly disillusioned and eventually openly hostile home front.

NI
I got the impression that most people in the UK didn't care a toss either way as long as the IRA didn't bomb London or Manchester shopping centres.


The Iraq War
Still to be decided, but the end game is looking increasingly like the Vietnam conflict, at least in the home front's influence on its outcome.

[PTT]

people in the UK didn't care a toss either way as long as the IRA didn't bomb London or Manchester shopping centres.

And there's the crux of it. People don't give a toss what happens in the rest of the world so long as it doesn't affect them too badly at home.
They don't mind seeing Palestinians and Israelis killing each other, or slaughter in Darfur, but they do mind seeing British troops dying, and they mind even more seeing British troops actually killing.

It was Churchill, I think, who said "The best argument against democracy is a five minute chat with the average voter". And he's right, because people, me included, are stupid, selfish and short sighted. We want our little lives to be painless and enjoyable, and if you don't like the news you turn it off - once the news starts actually affecting you then you get all worked up about it.

The problem is that if we do what the "average voter" wants we'd be out of Iraq and Afghanistan in a week and we'd be happy for about a year. Then we'd be in the sh!t, because it's not a nation or a small group of people we are fighting against, it's an ideology, a twisting of a religion, a way of thinking which is entirely alien to and wants to end our way of thinking. They won't give up because we leave their countries - they'll come to ours, just as they did on 9 Sept 2001.

Fortunately we live in a Constitutional Monarchy, not a democracy. Not giving the average voter what he wants is akin to not giving a child too many sweets - it's for our own good.

[Airborne Aircrew]

The problem is that if we do what the "average voter" wants we'd be out of Iraq and Afghanistan in a week and we'd be happy for about a year. Then we'd be in the sh!t, because it's not a nation or a small group of people we are fighting against, it's an ideology, a twisting of a religion, a way of thinking which is entirely alien to and wants to end our way of thinking. They won't give up because we leave their countries - they'll come to ours, just as they did on 9 Sept 2001.

I couldn't have put it better... That is entirely the issue today. No-one did anyone any particular harm prior to 1992 when the first WTC attack took place. Yeah, yeah... So they don't like our culture... as an aside, they don't seem to have much problem coming to the west when they want things though... But nothing was ever done that needed to have anyone killed over. Christianity, (and therefore, the West), has always been the bugbear of the Muslims - most have learned to live with it... Others not... and those are the ones that are intent on the destruction of us and our way of life.

Unfortunately, they don't really care how they do it and how much it hurts them to do it. There are some that would be very happy to be the only remaining human alive in a nuclear winter simply so he can say "We won - Allah is great"... It is for that very reason that those who think like that have to be stopped before they have weapons that kill vast numbers of people - because they will use them in the belief that they are doing "gods will"... and we can't fight an invisible entity.

[Mike7777777]

A quick review of the last 200 years indicates that Western nations have to project power to fight and keep "the enemy" at a distance. We can't walk away from Afghanistan for the 3rd time, if we do I think the bugg*rs might chase us back to the UK.

Iraq always was about the oil, unfortunately our colonial friends where under the misapprehension that something approaching democracy could be achieved. Hah! The Brits knew otherwise in the 1920s.

[maxter]

PTT
...............because it's not a nation or a small group of people we are fighting against, it's an ideology, a twisting of a religion, a way of thinking which is entirely alien to and wants to end our way of thinking. They won't give up because we leave their countries - they'll come to ours, just as they did on 9 Sept 2001..................

So PTT if what you say is right, and I am sort of in agreement with you, what does victory look like? Will hearts and mind and 'democracy' really work? Ideology is very hard to target even with with 'smart bombs'.

To me it is a scary thought as I don't believe we can never win reacting as we conventionaly have against traditional enemies. We will just keep expending 'resources' until we are 'bled dry'. A new approach will be needed but I don't hear any of our leaders offer anything other than 'more of the same' which inevitably results in 'more of the same', ie a lot of dead people on our side and theirs so more 'pissed off' radicals.

[Blacksheep]

Then, we weren't fighting a mindset, this time we are. They're not going to change... ...Enough. Afghans, Arabs, Syrians, Jordanians, Sunni.. let them kill each other if they want to...

For centuries these primitive tribal, religious revisionist nutcases have indeed been slaughtering each other. But recently they've branched out into the civilised world and begun driving truck bombs into embassies and hotels, flying aeroplanes into tall buildings and exploding themselves in crowded metropolitan transport systems.

The mindset is certainly the root of the problem and sending soldiers into their homelands only firms up their mindset, so what can be done? There are those who believe that their entire misbegotten countries ought to be vapourised in a massive nuclear assault - the west has thousands of megaton sized thermo nukes at its disposal, which is more than enough for the job. Unfortunately Friends of the Earth would object to the pollution.

As for myself, I'm not sure which pollution is the worst - the nuclear kind or the so-called Taliban kind.

Perhaps we might send Islamic Missionaries over there to convert them to the one true faith?

[effortless]

Makes you wonder why we ever armed them in the fisrst place dunnit?


I for one have seen " No-one did anyone any particular harm prior to 1992 " first hand over the last thirty eight to forty years and I am glad it never happened to me.