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When I was a boy, soldiers communicated by yelling at each other, and with big boxes which they yelled into and also listened to, carefully. Each bunch of soldiers had one box through which all orders came, and through which they sent all their news back to their superiors. Remember those boxes which malfunctioned in A Bridge Too Far, to the disgust of Sean Connery. Those.
Fast forward. On TV I’m now watching our soldiers, and they all seem to be wearing headsets to talk into, like in a Van Damme SF movie. Every infantryman has become like a fighter pilot. Mostly they seem to observe radio silence. I guess they don’t want to be jabbering all at once.
When did this happen? It’s a big change, and surely a big, big step forward and a big, big difference between our guys in this war and the other poor fellows, who do not have headsets unless I’m much mistaken which is of course only too possible.
That’s it. No links, because if I had a link to something on this I’d probably have the answer. Just questions. When did this change occur? What did it consist of? And what does it mean? A lot, I’m guessing. Commenters please let rip.
Since Samizdata, along with the rest of the Anglosphere, seems to be in us-Brits-great-or-what? mode today, please permit me to mention here that over on my Education Blog, I did a piece about the British Army as a teaching organisation, based on a conversation with a friend who is a captain in it. If what you’re now thinking is: “Wow, those Brits, how do they do it?”, well, I think this little piece goes some way towards answering that question.
At the centre of the piece is an accronym: EDIP. This stands for: Explain, Demonstrate, Immitate, Practice.
The other key principle “embedded” – to use this month’s mot du jour – in British Army practice is that the best way to learn something is to teach it. Quite junior officers start the “high powered” bit of their army careers by instructing at Sandhurst, and Sergeants and Corporals do most of the day-to-day training of the soldiers. At the end of it the soldiers may not be completely in command of what they’re doing, but the men who’ve been teaching them have it ingrained into them. Soldiering can be taught, and so can leadership, and this is how.
The thing I remember most vividly about that conversation was, well, how vivid it was. The question “Education – How about that then? – How does the army go about doing that?” is just about the best way for a civilian like me to get inside the head of a soldier that I could possibly have picked. “So, what’s it like killing people?” is useless by comparison. (a) It’s insulting. It makes it sound like that’s the thing they most like doing. (b) Half of them don’t know. (c) Those that do have no way of really telling you. And above all (d) they don’t want to talk about it. But asking them about how they teach is, as I said in my original piece, like taking the cork out of a shaken champagne bottle.
I want to do a lot more pieces like this one, about actual teachers and how they set about it, for my Education Blog, but so far have only done one more, about my friend Sean Gabb. So if any Samizdata readers are doing any teaching, of any sort, in the London area or near offer, and of a sort they wouldn’t mind me sitting in on and/or writing about (I promise to accentuate the positive – almost all teachers are doing some good things), please get in touch.
Ode to British Armed Forces:
Yesterday, in Basra, we were reminded. Our soldiers conducted themselves with courage, patience, discipline and, when necessary, appropriately directed violence. They were splendid.
[…]
…as they advanced through Basra’s suburbs, our Servicemen had to rely on older attributes: unit cohesiveness, steadiness under fire, controlled aggression, trust in each other. Strip away all the artefacts of modern war and we are left with an undeniable truth: man for man, our soldiers are better, braver and deadlier than theirs.
By yesterday afternoon, American commentators were hailing the pacification of Basra as a model for what should happen in Baghdad. To have occupied a city of 1.2 million people with negligible casualties to the attacker is extraordinary; to have done so without incurring the hatred of the inhabitants is little short of providential.
Britain’s standing in the United States is as high as it has ever been, and with good reason.
As a former prime minister once put it: “Rejoice – just rejoice!”
The latest reports on SkyNews are showing large crowds of ecstatic Iraqi civilians greeting the British mechanised troops deep inside Basra. One clip showed jubilant Iraqi children and young men clambering over a Challenger 2 tank and shaking the hands of the vehicle’s bemused commander and driver.
On a less happy note, one British soldier was killed earlier by a booby trap, so it is too soon to regard the Basra operation as completely ‘done and dusted’ but it seems clear that to all intents and purposes, the city has indeed fallen.
I have no idea – no idea whatever – whether or how much of this is true, or made up, or what. But here it is, for whatever it may be worth – it being from a website run by something called Bikesport, “Michigan’s largest road and triathlon store”. I kid you not.
I’m guessing that not all of the blogosphere has seen this yet. If it has and I was the last to hear about it, apologies. Thanks to Boris Kupershmidt for the link.
[EMBARRASSING UPDATE: It’s fiction, as commenter number two has just pointed out. Oh well. Maybe something approximately like what follows has been happening. Follow this link for the background to all this, which is definitely a story, if not anything like the story I thought it might have been.]
It’s a big night for Mike. He’s at work tonight. As I mentioned his clothing is wet, partially from dew, partially from perspiration. He and his four co-workers, Dan, Larry, Pete and Maurice are working on a rooftop at the corner of Jamia St. and Khulafa St. across from Omar Bin Yasir.
Mike is looking through the viewfinder of a British made Pilkington LF25 laser designator. The crosshairs are centered on a ventilation shaft. The shaft is on the roof of The Republican Guard Palace in downtown Baghdad across the Tigris River
Saddam Hussein is inside, seven floors below, three floors below ground level, attending a crisis meeting.
Mike’s co-worker Pete (also an Ironman finisher, Lake Placid, 2000) keys some information into a small laptop computer and hits “burst transmit”. The DMDG (Digital Message Device Group) uplinks data to another of Mike’s co-workers (this time a man he’s never met, but they both work for their Uncle, “Sam”) and a fellow athlete, at 21’500 feet above Iraq 15 miles from downtown Baghdad. This man’s office is the cockpit of an F-117 stealth fighter. When Mike and Pete’s signal is received the man in the airplane leaves his orbit outside Baghdad, turns left, and heads downtown.
Mike has 40 seconds to complete his work for tonight, then he can go for a run.
→ Continue reading: Hell’s athletes
British forces have overrun Basra, with 16 Air Assault Brigade taking the north of the city, 7 Armoured Brigade taking Central Basra and 3 (Royal Marine) Commando Brigade taking Southern Basra.
Although the British military authorities are studiously avoiding actually saying that ‘Basra has fallen’, it seems clear from all the reports I have seen from the journalists inside the city itself that this is indeed the case, bar the inevitable mopping up of isolated die-hard elements. Fedayeen Saddam resistance is being described as sporadic and uncoordinated and at one point a reporter with SkyNews said several thousand jubilant people mobbed the British as they pushed deep into the city.
Although fighting is continuing, it seems clear that Ba’athist Socialism is dying with a frightened whimper rather than a defiant roar. The Fedayeen are discovering that two decades of murdering civilians has not prepared them for fighting some of the most fierce and professional troops in the world.
Or in this case, the Shatt Al Arab waterway. The ever flexible and innovative Royal Marines have taken to small fast boats to show it dominates even the waterways right around Basra, at one point helping out an astonished local fishermen who was having engine troubles.
This and other tactics show a couple centuries of colonial experience are serving the British military well, illustrating the way to ‘hearts and minds’ is a mixture of well armed ferocity when challenged and common helpfulness otherwise. Keeping the focus on the fact this is an anti-Ba’athist war, not a war against Iraq, UK forces in Basra are reacting cleverly to propaganda targets of opportunity, as reported in the Washington Times:
In another incident, when an Iraqi colonel was fatally shot in his vehicle, British troops found a thick wad of local currency. Instead of handing it in to officers, the troops decided to dole the cash out to wide-eyed local youngsters, a monetary variant of candy handouts.
Nice one!
Update: British mechanised forces are now reported as fighting Fedayeen irregulars 7 km inside Basra!
Pentagon planners must have been grinding their teeth with irritation when the Turkish parliament refused to allow a US division to unload in a Turkish port and move into Northern Iraq. Clearly having major US assets approach from an entirely different strategic direction would have enormously complicated the Iraqi military’s defensive dilemmas. In the event, the Iraqi army has been able to concentrate its the majority of its efforts against the allied moves in the south. Although it seems that allied special forces have run riot in the west of the country, that is really just desert of little real strategic importance to Iraq’s national cohesion. So far so good for the bad guys (well, sort of).
And yet…
The army which has attacked Iraq is much smaller than the one which ejected Saddam from Kuwait in 1991. The thinking here was clearly that the advances in technology and war fighting generally meant that a much smaller but ‘smarter’ force was all that was required to defeat Saddam’s armies in the field. The down side to this is that the sheer size of Iraq means that lines of communications are far longer than was the case in 1991 and in addition are running through enemy territory almost entirely… and there are far less troops to keep them secure.
If the allies have made any miscalculations, it is not with regard to the Iraqi army or Republican Guard: although both have resisted, they have been signally unable to prevent the overrunning of nearly half of Iraq and in every major battle so far against US and UK forces, their formations have been smashed and the survivors thrown back.
No, the unknown and more importantly, the unplanned for factor is the Fedayeen Saddam and sundry Ba’athist militias. These irregular forces, like all, irregular forces, have little real combat power but are able to disrupt logistics, cause irritation out of all proportion to their numbers and equipment, and most importantly for Saddam’s cause, maintain Ba’athist authority and political presence in areas nominally under the control of the allies. I lost track of how many times the allies reported that “The US Marines have taken Umm Qasr” day after day. What, again?
In reality it was only in the last two days that the Fedayeen and Ba’athist infrastructure in Umm Qasr had been sufficiently crushed by Royal Marines doing painstaking house to house clearances that Iraqi civilians felt safe enough to openly apply for jobs with the allied forces in the port city.
Similarly, the roads north to the bulk of the US forces are being called ‘ambush ally’ by the rear echelon troops tasked with the essential logistic task of keeping the heavy divisions rolling and shooting around Karabala and Nasiriyah.
And so if the tank, artillery and AFV heavy Iraqi units around Baghdad are not really what is causing the allies difficulties, then the fact irregular forces are able to attack overstretched supply lines is the thing that should be worrying us, give the lack of absolute numbers of infantry the attacking allied armies.
Well, the forces that would have moved into Northern Iraq are about to arrive in Southern Iraq. If my guestimates are correct, their ships should be reaching the appropriate Gulf ports any time now.
In Northern Iraq, they would have faced much the same problems as their colleagues in the south… but deployed in the south, they will increase the feet-on-the-ground per square mile considerably, which can only be very bad news indeed for the Fedayeen.
Perhaps this cloud has a silver lining.
During my search for breaking news for fast & furious warblogging on the Command Post, I came across this precious announcement:
The fledgling Euro-army launched its first military operation yesterday, picking the Balkan state of Macedonia as a trial run for future missions in Bosnia, Africa and the Caucasus.
A force of 320 soldiers wearing “Eufor” badges with the European Union’s blue and gold stars on their right shoulders took over peacekeeping duties at a ceremony in Skopje, replacing Nato troops who have already done the hard work of pacifying Macedonia over the past two years.
EU officials cite the mission as proof that joint defence plans agreed by France and Britain in 1998, and further honed by the EU a year later, remain on track despite the bitter differences over Iraq. While volleys of insults go back and forth across the Channel, British and French officials are meeting twice a week to lay the groundwork for a joint aircraft carrier battle group designed to project EU power around the world.
“You might not believe it, but Franco-British defence is going great guns”, said a senior diplomat. The general assumption in Brussels is that Tony Blair will commit Britain deeper to EU defence once the Iraq conflict is over.
Somebody please tell me that this is a joke…
Also posted on the Command Post
Ten days onto the offensive, it is clear that the Wehrmacht is exactly where the French want them, as evidenced by their pause to refuel their tanks and rearm with more ammunition.
We are told by various reporters that the war is bogging down. that casualties are ‘heavy’, that Iraqi resistance is ‘stiff’. We hear that thing are going badly and the allied military leaders have miscalculated.
Yet although the allied forces have taken loses, for sure, and each of those is a tragedy, the cold facts are that in military and historical terms, UK and US casualties have been insignificant, trivial in fact.
The allies have overrun a huge chunk of Iraq, killing thousands of Iraqi soldiers and paramilitary militia, smashing the Ba’athist Socialist infrastructure of repression and hammering targets of military importance at will. The fact that not everything has gone the way UK and US planners expected will not be an earth shattering surprise to them as there is a well known military axiom that they will all be very familar with: “no plan ever survives contact with the enemy”.
It seems that any war which does not result in single figure losses and which is not over in time to not interfere with the screening of the Oscars is going to be deemed a ‘catastrophe’ by a media which knows nothing about either military affairs or history. The British took 58,000 casualties (one third of them killed) on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, 1 July 1916. That is what ‘heavy casualties’ means.
British forces are continuing their aggressive incursions into Basra, capturing some senior Iraqi Army Officers and killing a Republican Guard colonel in the process.
My guess is that the object of this is keeping the Iraqi forces off-balance and probably trying to demonstrate to the population of Basra that Ba’athist control is decaying daily… hence the day before yesterday’s foray into the city by British Challenger Tanks for the decidedly non-military objective of blowing up a statue of Saddam Hussain in a public square with the tank’s 120mm gun!
There has been some speculation about why the Australian military contribution to the war in Iraq has not received anything like the coverage that the American (obviously) and British forces have.
Well the reasons are twofold: firstly, the size of the force is a great deal smaller as it is made up of the elite Australian Special Air Service (which is operating in conjunction with their British SAS and American Delta Force & SEAL counterparts)… and secondly the fact they are special forces means operational security is paramount. The Aussies are famous in Special Forces circles for their ability to survive without resupply for long periods of time, something very useful when operating behind enemy lines. Just how they do this is a closely guarded secret.
However there is another more… puzzling… aspect to the lack of news, considering the Australians are the only group to invite the Al-Jazeera TV channel to embed journalists with them. A recently broadcast signal from a Australian SAS unit ‘somewhere in Iraq’ made mention that they had run out of embedded journalists and could they send a couple more out, preferably less stringy ones this time. It is unclear what the significance of that last remark was.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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