Have We Surrendered to the Taliban and Al Qaeda?
 

If this article is remotely true.....we have Surrendered to the Taliban and Al Qaeda! Time to bring all the Lads and Lasses Home....Today!

Counterproductive restraint - Threat Matrix

Its the UK over and over, PC bullsh*t brought about by those that do not have to deal with the consequences or suffer the danger, sometimes one thinks we are fighting the wrong people.

The article is dated July 17th 2011 and the article it quotes is dated 9 days earlier.

Although you use the word 'we' the article is most definitely angled at providing a critique of UK tactics in comparrison to what are perceived as 'superior' US tactics. This would I believe (even though the source is dated) sit well with what seems to be your current favourite sport of "gee, lets point and laugh at the Limeys".

Without wishing to blow too much smoke up the backsides of the Brits (with whom I served) nor criticise the military/policies of the land of my birth too much, I don't think it is too harsh to say that, with regards to COIN operations, the Brits have a track record a little better than the US and for good reason. 'Corageous Restraint' aren't dirty words and 'brassing up' anything that moves can be counter-productive, as I'm sure a Vietnam Vet such as yourself might appreciate.

The helpful stacker

"with regards to COIN operations, the Brits have a track record a little better than the US"


Come on, for the last 5 years or so it has been said the US wrote the book
on the subject :O

The media said about - was it McCrystal or Patraeus ?

I'll go and check.


Edit

It was Patraeus

The helpful stacker

What happened to your post asking me a question ?????????

Stacker.....did you skip Grammar in your schooling?:=

"WE" is inclusive....as compared to say....oh....."YOU".:rolleyes:

Perhaps it is having to use your Belly Button for a Peep Hole that gives you such a limited point of view.:uhoh:

Not shooting someone who is emplacing an IED in plain sight....is flat assed stupid....would you not agree?

The idea is to kill those who are trying to kill you.... before they score is it not?

You certainly do try to stir the Pot when there is no stew.:=

500N - That US book was probably written by an aussie - an ex grunt that I served with David Kilcullen.

No, I don't think we have surrendered to the Taliban and AQ, but we have pretty much surrendered to the Treasury!

I might have agreed with that sentiment at one point back in 2003-5. Now, I would say that we are slowly improving, but still have a way to go compared to the US. From my perspective the period between about 2005 - 2010 were real dark times for our COIN efforts. For far too long the British military rested on its laurels / fell back / became overly reliant on its experiences in NI and other campaigns such as Malaya, Borneo etc. The only problem being that whilst that experience might have been useful as a starting point in Iraq and Afghanistan, constantly falling back on it was a failure to appreciate the complexities of both those campaigns and the fact that they had developed and morphed into something else very quickly, making much of our old NI experience almost irrelevant. And yet we still banged on about how good we were because of it.

There is no denying that the US' efforts at COIN over the period 2001-03 weren't great. Too much willy waving between the top brass and politicians over the role and structure of the military as a whole meant that the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan were as much about the single Services campaigning for their own place in the future ORBAT as much as actually achieving the grand strategic onbjectives. I would argue the decision to disband almost all the Iraqi security infrastruture overnight in 03 is a good example of the failure to grasp what was going on.

But I have to take my hat of to the US. Whilst we were sitting back thinking we knew it all, the US were busy looking at where they were going wrong and actually doing something about it, rather than taking the UK approach of laughing at the lessons process and proudly proclaiming we do lessons identified rather than learned. We seemed to have got over that bout of ignorance now and are trying hard to regain our position. We will never be quiet able to match the US before we pull out of Afghan, but we have made significant improvements from where we were in the mid-noughties.

I don't believe we British can hold any form of COIN high-ground (political, military or moral) following the Basra debacle (particularly 07-09). Aden, Malaya, Borneo and Northern Ireland were all of their time, as have been Iraq and Afghanistan and history may well judge that the British political and military establishments were guilty of lazy assumptions and failure to adapt rapidly enough in the the two big post-9/11 conflicts.

The battle ryhthm of train, deploy, plan big op, execute big op, write citations, RiP and repeat ad infinitum does wonders for the Bde and Bn Comd's DSO and career opportunities but is an unremitting failure at supporting a population-centric COIN campaign. Whilst I've served multiple tours on the ground in both Iraq and Afghanistan I don't claim any great insight or undertanding (indeed as my ICSC(A) DS may have written, " MB's work is both new and thought-provoking; unfortunately that which is new is not thought-provoking and that which is thought-provoking is not new"). I'm misappropriating and misquoting again (this time John Paul Vann) by suggesting that we didn't have six years experience in Iraq. We had six month's experience twelve times over.

In my experience the US military (and the Army and Marines in particular) in these environments have very much been learning organisations and we could ourselves learn a lot from them. Learning both in terms of COIN operations as well as the ability not just to jump through the post-operational hoop of identifying lessons but to put them into practice pre, during and post deployment. How many times have you heard someone in a British uniform describing something as "an iterative process"? If you actually challenged them to explain what they meant by that they'd quite often have trouble doing so. Too often in the British army the ability to speak with authority, parrot doctrine and point at things in the Brecon manner masks a veneer-thin intellectual base which can all too easily be exposed when it encountering anything slightly off-piste.

Well, even if nobody else does I feel better for having got that off my chest. Goodnight all.

MB

Mk 1

"500N - That US book was probably written by an aussie - an ex grunt that I served with David Kilcullen."

+ 1

Which is one of the reasons he is held in such high regard.

Pity we lose people like that to the US.

Mahogany Bomber, a very good post.

The UK has been involved in COIN for many years, but that doesn't mean that we practise it well. We have been particularly poor at passing on lessons, not greatly helped by the regimental system where knowledge has, in the past, been power. The only way we passed on lessons was by the occasional pamphlet and by personal experience with the likes of Kitson. The rest was re-learning the old mistakes in the next theatre.

Iraq was a wake up for the UK, along with the publication of FM 3-24 by the US; happily, we have improved significantly and realise the benefit of sharing the experience through education and doctrine. No matter what those doctrine-haters on here like to think (and say more!), doctrine has its place and its absence from COIN in the past has done us no favours.

SASLess - I think that you might have missed the point. You said:

Not shooting someone who is emplacing an IED in plain sight....is flat assed stupid....would you not agree?

The idea is to kill those who are trying to kill you.... before they score is it not?

In answer to the first question - why would you want to kill this person. Are you 100% certain that he is digging an IED not a drain? if you are 100% certain (really?) why do you need to kill him? Is he digging IEDs because the enemy have his family at home? Why not get ISR to follow him and arrest him? If we kill someone, their extended family will hate us for generations - is that a measure of success?

On your second question - No. The idea is to create sufficient security to enable Governance to develop across the country. We won't win this war by killing Taliban - we may have to kill some Taliban on route (and that's OK) but it would be better if we kept the number to the absolute minimum. It would also be better to let 10 Taliban live than to kill one innocent civilian.

I read somewhere that a large part of the Taliban/ AlQaida / terrorists/ evil do'ers are indeed on a mission to restore family pride/ take revenge for a brother/ father/ nephew killed by the invaders.

Every kill has a good chance of a moderate family member hanging out with his family / playing soccer make the decision to join the AK47s to balance the score / restore pride.

IMO desk research and doctrines make "we" take the smarter decisions, limit our losses and take care not every family deeply hates us.

MB,
Always a good start to the day when someone paraphrases JPV...an exemplar, if ever there was one, of the 'tall poppy syndrome' within all militaries.

I don't think history will be kind when casting her gaze upon the UK attempts at COIN 03-10; We displayed arrogance approaching hubris over past campaigns (Malaya/Borneo) and demonstrated classic 'last war' syndrome by trying to make our comfort zone (NI) 'fit the map' in Iraq/Afg. The moment the COIN campaigns became properly kinetic it was time to adapt or switch doctrines, but, like a drowing man with a lifebuoy, we clung on to our old COIN mantra for as long as we could. To misquote Liddel-Hart, 'the only thing harder to do than get a new idea into a military mind is to get an old idea out...' and, IMHO, we were guilty of this.

The biggest 'take away' from these wars is to nip in the bud the 'last war' syndrome again - we cannot go forward, particularly in the air domain, thinking that all our future wars will be in hot/high dusty conditions with few obstructions and only a low tech threat. My worst nightmare would be trying to send our crews into a poor weather, heavily obstructed area (think Yugoslavia) against a credible Air/EW threat. I'm sure MG et al are all over it though......

Doctrine can all too quickly become dogma and the dogmatic system is unlikely to prevail in purely military terms. The killing of innocents acting as a recruiting sergeant isn't a 21st century, non-western phenomenon.

Before debating the doctrine and tactics of any campaign we should establish why we (ie the politicians) wish to undertake an operation and what success will look like. Once that has been done (selection and maintenance of the aim) we can decide on the appropriate TTPs to meet that aim. If we can't articulate or define what success will be, how can we then select the appropriate methodology to achieve success?

MB

Quite correct and the secret is in understanding that doctrine is a foundation from which to proceed, not a set of rules. That assumes that doctrine is written correctly, using the right sources. Think of doctrine as your handover notes that you refer to in the first few weeks of a new job; you then find your feet and take the job to the next step.

Unfortunately, there are too many people who use the above quote as a reason to ignore doctrine. We take a perverse pride in not wanting to follow past learning and then we find ourselves back in Basrah in 2004.