Well done to UK senior officers!
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KBF1
I'm aware of the cost of training an Infantry soldier, just wasn't aware if it was in the public domain...
As regards the IFF thread, it's active again, all suggestions I suspect, are eagerly awaited........
We need something fast, I think that much is understood. Orac makes an emotive, and supportable point
I'm aware of the cost of training an Infantry soldier, just wasn't aware if it was in the public domain...
As regards the IFF thread, it's active again, all suggestions I suspect, are eagerly awaited........
We need something fast, I think that much is understood. Orac makes an emotive, and supportable point
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It is very sad when B on B occurrs, but when you are looking through a sight and taking incomming the human mind selects survival mode, and only later thinks about what has been done, so it will continue!
My feelings are that the American top brass should let the lady at the Pentagon briefings do all the talking and planning, boy has she got hard Balls!!
My feelings are that the American top brass should let the lady at the Pentagon briefings do all the talking and planning, boy has she got hard Balls!!
Speaking a different language - but we've got the Phrasealator
James Meek outside Diwaniya
Monday March 31, 2003
The Guardian
Yesterday afternoon a man in glasses and a large helmet stood by a ditch in Iraq, trying to communicate with a group of farmers. David Cooper's first language is Irish Gaelic. His second and main language is American English. Unfortunately, the only language the farmers spoke was Iraqi Arabic.
The object of discussion was an ancient, dust-clogged, diesel-powered water pump which the farmers wanted to start, with the help of the US marines, who control the roadside area east of the town of Diwaniya where the farmers have their fields.
The pump lies under the very guns of the marines, hunkered down in foxholes behind a high sand wall, scanning the landscape for signs of the elusive, intangible, incomprehensible enemy.
Cooper, a major in the military's civil affairs department, didn't have an interpreter, exactly. He had a handheld black plastic device the size of an eggbox called a Phrasealator.
Users run a stylus down a series of menus on a screen, pick a phrase in English, touch the line, and the Phrasealator squawks the equivalent in Arabic.
The machine lacks elementary social skills. It only covers a handful of situations, such as crowd control, law and order and emergencies. If you want to tell someone to get out of their car slowly or not to be frightened, it's great.
If you have to talk to farmers in rural Iraq about intimate details of their lives, families, crops and horticultural needs, and understand what they say back, it's useless, and while Major Cooper, a reservist who normally works for Sun Microsystems, oozed goodwill, he wasn't taking an active part in the dialogue about the pump.
The marines have brought the whole encyclopaedia of military technology with them to Iraq. From aircraft to x-ray machines, they have a myriad ways to kill, heal wounded, survey, spy, reconnoitre, communicate with each other, shell, defend, attack, enfilade. They have brought all the machines and all the skilled people trained to use them.
The equipment necessary to talk to Iraqis, understand their problems and respond to their needs, however, seems to have been left on the quayside in California.
Maj Cooper and his colleague, Major Mark Stainbrook, are part of a tiny number of civil affairs officers attached to the marines. Neither speaks Arabic, and their interpreter has poor English.
Even before Saturday's suicide bomb attack on US troops, the response of marines towards Iraqi civilians has been characterised by fear, suspicion and mistrust. While there is no sign of ill-treatment of civilians, there has been little attempt to actively make friends in Iraqi communities, to carry out foot patrols in villages to assure locals that the US is providing security, or to systemise the movement of Iraqi civilians across US-held territory.
Any fire on the marines has characteristically been met with overwhelming firepower in return, often involving artillery, air strikes by helicopters and the marines' own F-18 fighters. While there are genuine attacks by Iraqi irregulars on marines' convoys, it is impossible to verify whether all the "attacks" are genuine, and the light casualties and low loss of vehicles strongly suggest that some "ambushes" are simply civilians being shot at by jumpy marines.
Down at the pump yester day, the civil affairs men and the farmers were originally talking at cross purposes. Maj Stainbrook thought they wanted the water to drink. In fact they wanted to pump thousands of litres into irrigation channels to feed their thirsty fields of barley and melons. As ever when cultures clash, the conversation was full of non sequiturs.
"We are going to get a battery to start the pump. Do you have containers?" Maj Stainbrook said.
"We would like to cooperate with you to save us from this tyrant," said Khaled Juwad, one of the farmers.
"We're trying," said Maj Stainbrook, chewing flat bread the farmers had brought. "It may take a while."
US batteries were brought, but they still wouldn't do the job. The civil affairs people sent for a Humvee. As he left, Maj Stainbrook said: "They need to tell everyone never to approach US troops at night, and if they approach in daytime, not to come too close, and try to get someone to come to them, because it's dangerous."
Half an hour later, the American batteries, luck and the engineering skill of the farmers got the pump going with a roar and a puff of black smoke and water from one of the tributaries of the Euphrates gushed into the irrigation system.
If the farmers spoke the truth, and were not simply saying what they thought the marines wanted to hear, the resistance to the US-British invasion is, in this area at least, marginal and largely forced, and a more subtle, less civilian-fearful approach by the military, with less emphasis on firepower and more on getting local people on side, might deliver Saddam loyalists on a plate.
The centre of resistance, according to Juwad, was a paramilitary organisation called the Golden Troop of the Jerusalem Army, made up largely of local people forced to fight at gunpoint by army officers who had come into Diwaniya - a town under Iraqi control - from Baghdad before the invasion.
"They came here three days before you guys arrived and the shooting started," said Juwad, who normally lives in Diwaniya but fled to a small house on his farm when the fighting broke out. His family is still in the town.
Members of the Golden Troop had attacked a US convoy near their farm, Juwad added, but had fled immediately and scattered.
An hour's walk along the irrigation ditches, past the fields of green barley, through the red mud, with plovers flying overhead, led to the tent of Juwad's uncle, Abu Hamid.
Sticking in the ground outside was an old pole with a tattered piece of white sacking lashed to it, the universal Iraqi flag of these parts, the please-don't-shoot flag of "We surrender".
To demonstrate life in Saddam's Iraq, Abu Hamid kneeled down on the ground, as if sleeping, then jumped up again with his eyes and mouth wide open, staring in fright, then kneeled again. He repeated the sequence several times.
"This is how people sleep now," he said. "They are not secure."
Link
James Meek outside Diwaniya
Monday March 31, 2003
The Guardian
Yesterday afternoon a man in glasses and a large helmet stood by a ditch in Iraq, trying to communicate with a group of farmers. David Cooper's first language is Irish Gaelic. His second and main language is American English. Unfortunately, the only language the farmers spoke was Iraqi Arabic.
The object of discussion was an ancient, dust-clogged, diesel-powered water pump which the farmers wanted to start, with the help of the US marines, who control the roadside area east of the town of Diwaniya where the farmers have their fields.
The pump lies under the very guns of the marines, hunkered down in foxholes behind a high sand wall, scanning the landscape for signs of the elusive, intangible, incomprehensible enemy.
Cooper, a major in the military's civil affairs department, didn't have an interpreter, exactly. He had a handheld black plastic device the size of an eggbox called a Phrasealator.
Users run a stylus down a series of menus on a screen, pick a phrase in English, touch the line, and the Phrasealator squawks the equivalent in Arabic.
The machine lacks elementary social skills. It only covers a handful of situations, such as crowd control, law and order and emergencies. If you want to tell someone to get out of their car slowly or not to be frightened, it's great.
If you have to talk to farmers in rural Iraq about intimate details of their lives, families, crops and horticultural needs, and understand what they say back, it's useless, and while Major Cooper, a reservist who normally works for Sun Microsystems, oozed goodwill, he wasn't taking an active part in the dialogue about the pump.
The marines have brought the whole encyclopaedia of military technology with them to Iraq. From aircraft to x-ray machines, they have a myriad ways to kill, heal wounded, survey, spy, reconnoitre, communicate with each other, shell, defend, attack, enfilade. They have brought all the machines and all the skilled people trained to use them.
The equipment necessary to talk to Iraqis, understand their problems and respond to their needs, however, seems to have been left on the quayside in California.
Maj Cooper and his colleague, Major Mark Stainbrook, are part of a tiny number of civil affairs officers attached to the marines. Neither speaks Arabic, and their interpreter has poor English.
Even before Saturday's suicide bomb attack on US troops, the response of marines towards Iraqi civilians has been characterised by fear, suspicion and mistrust. While there is no sign of ill-treatment of civilians, there has been little attempt to actively make friends in Iraqi communities, to carry out foot patrols in villages to assure locals that the US is providing security, or to systemise the movement of Iraqi civilians across US-held territory.
Any fire on the marines has characteristically been met with overwhelming firepower in return, often involving artillery, air strikes by helicopters and the marines' own F-18 fighters. While there are genuine attacks by Iraqi irregulars on marines' convoys, it is impossible to verify whether all the "attacks" are genuine, and the light casualties and low loss of vehicles strongly suggest that some "ambushes" are simply civilians being shot at by jumpy marines.
Down at the pump yester day, the civil affairs men and the farmers were originally talking at cross purposes. Maj Stainbrook thought they wanted the water to drink. In fact they wanted to pump thousands of litres into irrigation channels to feed their thirsty fields of barley and melons. As ever when cultures clash, the conversation was full of non sequiturs.
"We are going to get a battery to start the pump. Do you have containers?" Maj Stainbrook said.
"We would like to cooperate with you to save us from this tyrant," said Khaled Juwad, one of the farmers.
"We're trying," said Maj Stainbrook, chewing flat bread the farmers had brought. "It may take a while."
US batteries were brought, but they still wouldn't do the job. The civil affairs people sent for a Humvee. As he left, Maj Stainbrook said: "They need to tell everyone never to approach US troops at night, and if they approach in daytime, not to come too close, and try to get someone to come to them, because it's dangerous."
Half an hour later, the American batteries, luck and the engineering skill of the farmers got the pump going with a roar and a puff of black smoke and water from one of the tributaries of the Euphrates gushed into the irrigation system.
If the farmers spoke the truth, and were not simply saying what they thought the marines wanted to hear, the resistance to the US-British invasion is, in this area at least, marginal and largely forced, and a more subtle, less civilian-fearful approach by the military, with less emphasis on firepower and more on getting local people on side, might deliver Saddam loyalists on a plate.
The centre of resistance, according to Juwad, was a paramilitary organisation called the Golden Troop of the Jerusalem Army, made up largely of local people forced to fight at gunpoint by army officers who had come into Diwaniya - a town under Iraqi control - from Baghdad before the invasion.
"They came here three days before you guys arrived and the shooting started," said Juwad, who normally lives in Diwaniya but fled to a small house on his farm when the fighting broke out. His family is still in the town.
Members of the Golden Troop had attacked a US convoy near their farm, Juwad added, but had fled immediately and scattered.
An hour's walk along the irrigation ditches, past the fields of green barley, through the red mud, with plovers flying overhead, led to the tent of Juwad's uncle, Abu Hamid.
Sticking in the ground outside was an old pole with a tattered piece of white sacking lashed to it, the universal Iraqi flag of these parts, the please-don't-shoot flag of "We surrender".
To demonstrate life in Saddam's Iraq, Abu Hamid kneeled down on the ground, as if sleeping, then jumped up again with his eyes and mouth wide open, staring in fright, then kneeled again. He repeated the sequence several times.
"This is how people sleep now," he said. "They are not secure."
Link
Ecce Homo! Loquitur...
Jane's:
"The UK is said so far to have been unique in pursuing the Battlefield Target Identification Device (BTID) in a fast-jet air-ground operations context. A preliminary study conducted by TME in 2000-01 concluded there would be no 'show-stoppers' preventing the incorporation of a BTID interrogator in an airborne targeting pod.
BAE Systems has since been awarded a feasibility study contract, addressing matters such as antenna integration and Doppler effects, as a potential enhancement to the multinational ASTRID (Airborne System for Target Recognition, Identification and Designation) pod development program, which in the UK's case is intended to lead to a replacement for the in-service TIALD system. In 2001 the UK allocated £91 million to cover the ASTRID concept phase through to integration into service of up to 40 systems from 2010."
So don't worry chaps, if ASTRID ever gets the go ahead, and enters service on time, and the upgrade is added to the baseline contract and not as a subsequent modification you only have 7 years to wait. I'm sure nothing will happen between now and then.
Won't help with A-10s of course since, as stated, the UK is unique in going down this path.
"The UK is said so far to have been unique in pursuing the Battlefield Target Identification Device (BTID) in a fast-jet air-ground operations context. A preliminary study conducted by TME in 2000-01 concluded there would be no 'show-stoppers' preventing the incorporation of a BTID interrogator in an airborne targeting pod.
BAE Systems has since been awarded a feasibility study contract, addressing matters such as antenna integration and Doppler effects, as a potential enhancement to the multinational ASTRID (Airborne System for Target Recognition, Identification and Designation) pod development program, which in the UK's case is intended to lead to a replacement for the in-service TIALD system. In 2001 the UK allocated £91 million to cover the ASTRID concept phase through to integration into service of up to 40 systems from 2010."
So don't worry chaps, if ASTRID ever gets the go ahead, and enters service on time, and the upgrade is added to the baseline contract and not as a subsequent modification you only have 7 years to wait. I'm sure nothing will happen between now and then.
Won't help with A-10s of course since, as stated, the UK is unique in going down this path.
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Have just read this thread. I'm astronished at the meretricious claptrap which has been assembled by those sensitive souls whose life has been blighted by the reaction of a few American soldiers to a local tactical success. This seems to illustrate a firm grasp of the inessential.
We're at war,for God's sake. These folk are our allies, facing the same threat and fighting for the same cause and we should be rooting for them - not beefing about their psyche differing from our own.
Jackonicko, you say that you find "some of what you see of Americans as being very foreign." This is a thoroughly patronising observation. What on earth do you expect?
Of course they're foreign and it's one of their strengths. To believe otherwise is to identify yourself with that popular British misconception that Americans are really renegade Englishmen who have somehow gone wrong. The media are doing a splendid job in denigrating the coalition forces. They can manage very well without help from here.
We're at war,for God's sake. These folk are our allies, facing the same threat and fighting for the same cause and we should be rooting for them - not beefing about their psyche differing from our own.
Jackonicko, you say that you find "some of what you see of Americans as being very foreign." This is a thoroughly patronising observation. What on earth do you expect?
Of course they're foreign and it's one of their strengths. To believe otherwise is to identify yourself with that popular British misconception that Americans are really renegade Englishmen who have somehow gone wrong. The media are doing a splendid job in denigrating the coalition forces. They can manage very well without help from here.
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On a more positive note, I would like to praise the US Colonel, in the vicinity of the Shiite tomb in Najaf yesterday. By his leadership skills he was able to prevent a difficult and ugly situation from getting very violent and potentially damaging the 'Hearts and Mind' strategy of the coalition.
It takes a brave man to back off like he did, especially in front of the parasitic newshounds.
It takes a brave man to back off like he did, especially in front of the parasitic newshounds.
Last edited by Boy_From_Brazil; 5th Apr 2003 at 02:32.
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Apologies if this is the wrong place to ask, but which do you think will fall first, Basra or Baghdad? Is it true the US has ordered UK to hold back on Basra - possibly until Baghdad falls?
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Jackonicko,
Normally you talk a lot of sense on these forums and I have respect for that you say, but on this one, I have to disagree with you!
I can tell you, that I’d be cheering like hell if I was there on the front line when that building was taken out! Not because I’m some gun ho America, but because I’d have been bl**dy relieved! The people in there were trying to kill the US troops (obviously, it’s a war!) I think they are allowed to show a bit of emotion at times like that! As for not being very PC… This isn’t parliament’s question time… It’s a war. You can’t expect them to watch what they say, just because it’s not very PC. Let them say what they want, if that helps to troops, and gets the job done, then I don’t have a problem with it!
Cheers,
Grob Driver
Normally you talk a lot of sense on these forums and I have respect for that you say, but on this one, I have to disagree with you!
I can tell you, that I’d be cheering like hell if I was there on the front line when that building was taken out! Not because I’m some gun ho America, but because I’d have been bl**dy relieved! The people in there were trying to kill the US troops (obviously, it’s a war!) I think they are allowed to show a bit of emotion at times like that! As for not being very PC… This isn’t parliament’s question time… It’s a war. You can’t expect them to watch what they say, just because it’s not very PC. Let them say what they want, if that helps to troops, and gets the job done, then I don’t have a problem with it!
Cheers,
Grob Driver
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Boy_From_Brazil
Have to agree with you 100%. If the decision not to respond to the fire coming from the tomb was the Colonel's then he has made one of the most significant decisions that will lead to the eventual success of this war.
My understanding that his actions led to the release of the senior Imam for the Shia in Iraq and this has led to a fatwa calling on all Shia to stay at home and not oppose the coalition advance.
Given that the Shia are the majority sect in Iraq, that fatwa will have far-reaching consequences.
Have to agree with you 100%. If the decision not to respond to the fire coming from the tomb was the Colonel's then he has made one of the most significant decisions that will lead to the eventual success of this war.
My understanding that his actions led to the release of the senior Imam for the Shia in Iraq and this has led to a fatwa calling on all Shia to stay at home and not oppose the coalition advance.
Given that the Shia are the majority sect in Iraq, that fatwa will have far-reaching consequences.
Smoke too much....better check the content of yer ciggies my man....shades of WWII.... and Montgomery coming to the fore. Why yes chaps, the original plan was for us to hold off investing Antwerp until Berlin fell so that we could make our colonial cousins look good!
The British troops have a tough fight going on....with lots of potential negative feedback politically if they go at it hammer and tongs. Let's see how long it takes for the US troops to gain full control of Baghdad before we start this discussion. After Baghdad, we then have Tikrit to deal with too.
The British troops have a tough fight going on....with lots of potential negative feedback politically if they go at it hammer and tongs. Let's see how long it takes for the US troops to gain full control of Baghdad before we start this discussion. After Baghdad, we then have Tikrit to deal with too.
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Well done UK Officers...
As a colonial who lived 15 years in UK, and has been in US some 13 years, a couple of observations:
Brits are well known for understatement, and it's appreciated everywhere. It's merely a slight cultural diff. Also, not all Americans are 'loud'. It really is a big country, and there's a hell of a difference between folks from , say, Idaho and New York- just as I imagine there will be a difference in style between, say , a scouser and someone from 'the home counties'. I.e. - all this tuff about whooping it up is total bulls**t-one incidence of euphoric (understandable)reaction. .
It's real sad that a couple of clueless folks always get into US bashing, when most Americans have a very positive view of Brits. Prime Minister Blair scored a 72% approval rating amongst american public this week, above President Bush.
To all the sad sacks : Leave it out/Rotate on this !! (no need for the phrasealator).
F.I.D.O
Brits are well known for understatement, and it's appreciated everywhere. It's merely a slight cultural diff. Also, not all Americans are 'loud'. It really is a big country, and there's a hell of a difference between folks from , say, Idaho and New York- just as I imagine there will be a difference in style between, say , a scouser and someone from 'the home counties'. I.e. - all this tuff about whooping it up is total bulls**t-one incidence of euphoric (understandable)reaction. .
It's real sad that a couple of clueless folks always get into US bashing, when most Americans have a very positive view of Brits. Prime Minister Blair scored a 72% approval rating amongst american public this week, above President Bush.
To all the sad sacks : Leave it out/Rotate on this !! (no need for the phrasealator).
F.I.D.O
