Sven writes the definitive post on Multiple Rocket Launchers (MRLs). As someone who was taught to fear the BM-21 like kids are taught to be afraid of the boogy man during my initial training back in 1987, I found it quite interesting.
The best weapon of our enemies? Cheap double cheeseburgers apparently,
75 percent of the nation’s 17- to 24-year-olds are ineligible for service for a variety of reasons…In 1987, according to the CDC, a mere 6 percent of 18- to 34-year-olds, or about 1 out of 20, were obese. In 2008, 22 years later, 23 percent of that age group — almost 1 out of 4 — was considered to be obese.
The Armchair Generalist continues to whittle away at my support for the war in Afghanistan.
Applebee’s is doing something really nice for Veterans Day this year. Any veteran or active duty member of the military will be entitled to one of six free entrees. Pretty nice…
But allow me to take a good long look in that gift horses mouth…
All of the dishes involve beef or chicken. While I will be the first to admit that us warrior vegetarians are an extremely rare breed, it is possible that someone might want some fish or no meat at all.
Still, my criticism is rather petty. It’s a great gesture…
According to a report filed by Captain Bengt Nitz of the Amf 1 amphibious regiment, based in Hårsfjärden outside of Stockholm, the boots issued to the unit’s soldiers were of such poor quality that one commander considered ordering soldiers under his command to refrain from participating in training assessments.
“The soldiers’ boots lacked soles and in some cases had been previously issued to other soldiers up to eight times,” Nitz writes in his report.
It’s not like Sweden has a huge army, facing huge deployments that eat through supplies at a rapid rate or is fielding tons of new equipment which is causing hiccups in the supply system. This is basic issue equipment. Uniforms and boots.
First, boots should be a disposable item, meaning once they’re issued to the soldier they become his property. None of this turn them in so some other shlep can wear that worn out shit.
Second, how do you only issue soldiers one uniform? I mean practically, what if one gets ripped? What are you supposed to wear while you’re cleaning it? What about for parades, formation or other times when you’re supposed to wear something clean (or at least not caked in mud)?
I think I’d blow a freakin’ gasket if these were my troops.
A whole bunch of people should get fired over this. But it’s Sweden so don’t hold your breath.
Sven’s very good post about the characteristics that make the difference between success and failure of units in battle that appear to be qualified while in garrison.
Another modder is planning to release a Left 4 Dead campaign on Halloween. Might as well wait for L4D2 to get all the bugs worked out and go on sale before buying it.
Check out this focus group report about conservative perceptions. Yes, it’s by a democratic consulting group but it’s got some very interesting insights. I only wish it looked at other (i.e. younger) age groups.
But still, you have to admit this is pretty great.
I remember reading that Frederick William I of Prussia was obsessed with finding really tall men to fill out one of his special guards battalion in the hopes that they’d be really impressive and intimidating. I’m thinking he should have devoted that energy to go for a different type of impressive.
Wow…talk about the coming anarchy. Sweden seems besieged lately.
First, the Taliban took offense that the Swedes and Finns responded when ambushed, killing 2 insurgents and wounding three others (no friendly casualties).
The Finnish army command said in its statement that a Swedish patrol had come under surprise rifle and rocket propelled grenade fire when travelling from Sheberghan to Mazar-i-Sharif, adding that the Swedes had then called in reinforcements, including six Finnish troops.
A regional Taliban commander has warned that Swedes serving in Afghanistan will be the target of reprisals following the killing of three of the guerrilla group’s fighters by Swedish troops last week.
Is this some sort of tautology? The commander is threatening to attack Swedish soldiers in response to his attack on Swedish soldiers?
But hey, maybe this guy isn’t the most logical guy out there but that doesn’t mean he’s unreasonable:
He added, however, that Swedes and other foreigners would be welcomed by the Taliban under certain conditions.“If you come without weapons to rebuild our poor, warn-torn country, you will be welcomed,” he told TT.
“If you are Muslims.”
Great.
Then, in even more bizarre news, it was reported that a Finnish ship was briefly hijacked in Swedish waters last week. There are a lot of suspicious elements to this story so I have no idea what to make of it. Consider the following:
The hijackers spoke english (it’s not clear fromreports how well)
The hijackers were dressed as Swedish police and claimed to be searching for drugs
Despite several of the crew sustaining (minor) injuries and being in Swedish waters, the ship continued on its way and didn’t report the incident for several days (WTF?)
The hijackers searched the ship and then left several hours later. There’s no reporting about them making (or receiving) any sort of ransom demand
Completely uninformed potential hypotheses:
The ‘hijacking’ was instead a warning to someone (the shipping line, insurers, etc.) as part of an extortion scheme
The hijackers could have been looking for some specific (illicit) cargo (the old ripping off the drug dealer scam) which makes me think way too much of Keyser Soze
There was no hijacking and the crew (Russians) decided to skim some illicit cargo off for themselves and concoct this hijacking story to keep the mobsters who put it there from killing them
It was a dry run for another hijacking to occur in the future
Anyone got any more?
If that wasn’t enough, the Swedish intelligence service is saying that the espionage threat against Sweden is as high as it was during the Cold War. According to an agency spokesman:
Several countries, include those in our immediate surroundings, conduct surveillance against Sweden.
Clearly Russia is one of those countries but who are the others? Norway (the Texans of Scandinavia)? Denmark? Finland? The Baltic nations?
Why are people spying on Sweden?
There is significant interest in the Armed Forces’ advanced weapons systems, the MUST report claims.
While this may be true and I will forever assert that Sweden consistantly makes the coolest looking fighter planes, I’m not sure they’re always banging with all cylinders in the advanced weapon system department.
…the new Gripens aren’t equipped to receive communications from Sweden’s encryption system, leaving open communications as the only way for Swedish commanders on the ground to give orders to pilots in the air… the military won’t be able to upgrade the new Gripen’s communications capability until 2015 because of cutbacks on defense spending.
A disagreement between two bus drivers and a motorist in Uppsala in central Sweden resulted in the motorist seeking hospital treatment after one of the bus drivers bit him in the face.
I suspect the bus driver’s only statement was ‘Braaaaains’.
I’ve seen this essay from the Armed Forces Journal linked on Tom Ricks’ site a couple of days ago and BoingBoing today. The author T.X. Hammes is an attack of Microsoft PowerPoint and the culture which has sprung up around it. Now, I’m no fan of Mr. Gates’ monster but I think Mr. Hammes may be misidentifying the symptom with the disease. PowerPoint has merely allowed a number of incorrect assumptions about decision making to dominate the military decision making process and reinforcing tendencies that are otherwise prevalant in our culture.
Coincidentally, I happen to be enjoying Michael Roberto’s course on critical decision making from the Teaching Company. Reading the essay through the lens of Roberto’s lectures adds an interesting perspective both to the subject of Hammes’ essay and how Hammes thinks decision making in the military should go.
From Hammes: “…today, a decision-maker sits through a 20-minute PowerPoint presentation followed by five minutes of discussion and then is expected to make a decision. Compounding the problem, often his staff will have received only a five-minute briefing from the action officer on the way to the presentation and thus will not be well-prepared to discuss the issues. This entire process clearly has a toxic effect on staff work and decision-making.”
What Hammes seems to be recommending (or getting nostalgic for) are the days when: “…staffs prepared succinct two- or three-page summaries of key issues. The decision-maker would read a paper, have time to think it over and then convene a meeting with either the full staff or just the experts involved to discuss the key points of the paper. Of course, the staff involved in the discussion would also have read the paper and had time to prepare to discuss the issues.”
This sounds a lot like Roberto’s refutation of one of his myths about decision making:
Myth #2: Decisions are made in the room. Reality: Much of the real work occurs “off-line,” in one-on-one conversations or small subgroups, not around a conference table.The purpose of formal staff meetings is often simply to ratify decisions that have already been made. [italics mine]
I’m not sure outlawing PowerPoint would actually do much to address the problems Hammes is highlighting. It’s cliched to say that we’ve got access to more information than ever before but most of us have become slaves to that information. Everyone needs to be connected, all the time. Keep track of how many times the people at your next meeting check their cell phones, blackberries or email. Most people can’t shut down that flow of information for 30 minutes. And how often is that call, message, whatever so critical it couldn’t wait? That flow of information only increases outside of the meeting environment so the likelihood that a decision makers will carve out enough time to digest a short decision paper and then devote time to think about it seriously and discuss it among sub-groups seems a bit far fetched.
Hammes does make the recommendation of pushing authority for decisions down to their lowest possible level which it completely sensible but (I believe) he misidentifies PowerPoint as the driver behind pushing decisions up the chain rather than down.
The problem is we’ve created this idea that decision makers need to have their finger in every pie in the bakery. Access to information (breadth) is seen as much more valuable than understanding of information (depth). When I mobilized, for example, every officer in our unit decided they needed to have access to the SCIF facility on base. It didn’t matter that the vast majority of them had no practical use for the information there, the fact was access to this new information stream was seen as a goal in and of itself. Whether it’s a compulsion of type A personalities to micro-manage, fear of being caught flat footed in a game of ‘gotcha’ or just a reflection of our culture today, people are going to continue to believe that the answer to everything is more information received faster.
The AP ran this story today about the corruption within the Afghan police force and how that erodes progress in the fight there.
Afghans across the country complain bitterly about the country’s police, whose junior ranks earn only about $150 a month. Police pad their salaries by demanding bribes at checkpoints or kickbacks to investigate complaints, and police in opium poppy-growing regions turn a blind eye to drug smuggling for a cut of the profits, many Afghans complain.
Reuters reports along a similar theme with the added twist:
He pointed to two compounds of neighbors where pre-teen children had been abducted by police to be used for the local practice of “bachabazi,” or sex with pre-pubescent boys.
Why is it that stories like this take eight years to make it into the mainstream? It’s not like there’s anything new here. Police were corrupt in 2003, resorting to extortion (they called it ‘tolls’) from drivers in order to supplement their meager incomes (which often times were not paid for months on end). Training was minimal to non-existent and to say the police were inadequately supplied would be generous. I met many Afghan police who would plead for water, have no communication equipment (relying on relaying messages to passing motorists or having to fire their weapons to get the attention of fellow police in the next village) and be left to fend for themselves without hope of back up in criminal/insurgent areas.
This sort of truth-telling should have been reported back in 2002. I wonder how much of the lack of reporting on the realities of the challange of Afghanistan was due to the fact that it was ‘the good war’. After all, it can be hard to sell a noble fight to bring democracy, women’s rights and reconstruction to a war torn land and at the same time acknowledge that some of your nominal allies are spending their time shaking down innocent villagers and raping children.
Now, however, the narrative is changing to ‘Afghanistan is unwinnable’ and it seems these stories are more about reinforcing that narrative than describing the operating environment.
Check out these google trends to see what I’m talking about. From the beginning of the war until December of 2005, there was never a month that had more than 3 stories discussing corruption in the Afghan National Police. The numbers pick up and by 2008 there is no month with fewer than 6 stories about the same subject. Are we to believe that the ANP suffered some sort of moral crisis in 2006 and degenerated to their current sorry state? I don’t even think you could argue that the increase in stories is the result of declining news coming from Iraq since 2006 was a very bad year in Iraq (remember the great ‘Is it a civil war or isn’t it’ debate?).
I’m not saying these stories shouldn’t be told. I would prefer they were told years ago. If we’re going to send soldiers off to war it seems to me that, at a minimum, we should have a clear picture of what we’re facing and in what environment we’re asking soldiers to serve. Strip away the PR bullshit and just have an honest discussion about the reasons we’re there, the consequences of failure. It just seems amazing to me that we’re 8 years into a war (EIGHT freakin’ years) and it seems like most people still couldn’t find Afghanistan on a map let alone understand any of the big issues involved with the conflict.
Freedom isn’t free. Everyone knows that those of us who wear our nation’s uniform have to make incredible sacrifices in order to keep the rest of America safe and free. Today, I suited up like a medieval knight and yet again, put my country ahead of my own personal interest.
I don’t ask for praise. I don’t ask for awards. I do it because it’s my duty.
Ok…I was at the homecoming ceremony for the 50th IBCT after their tour in Iraq. Among a host of performers were cheerleaders from the NY Jets and some other team. I was a bit taken aback when I saw them since I first thought they were a high school cheerleading team. I could take that as evidence that I’ve finally gone ‘over the hill’ but I’ll choose to believe that they have just lowered their recruiting age. In fact, they looked so young it felt a bit creepy.
Much more attractive (and charming) were the USO ‘LibertyBelles‘. I’m a total sucker for women in outfits. In fact, I suspect they are my kryptonite along with cute accents.
Abu Maqawama has the response of Sen. Inhofe to the Obama defense budget.
James Inhofe should be ashamed of himself — not for saying the new budget is “gutting” our military and “disarming America” but for traveling all the way to Afghanistan on the tax-payer’s dime and failing to discover that the kinds of weapons systems and skillsets needed for Afghanistan are exactly the kinds of weapons systems and skillsets privileged in the budget. Don’t use the war in Afghanistan a cheap prop, Senator, if you’re not even going to study the nature of the war itself.
I never liked Inhofe since his misleading and inflammatory work on the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act which was really just a way to suppress that pesky first amendment (after all, remember this should be America’s first freedom) and equate vandals with Osama bin Laden. His superficial understanding of political extremism as well as strategies to counter it were really quite shocking.
I’m sorry, I’ve always been skeptical of congressional ‘fact finding’ missions to our war zones. I’m sure there are some exceptions but in my (admittedly limited) experience they were highly scripted events (with lots of pictures to put in the congressional newletter to show the constituants how much everyone supports the troops!) which didn’t have many opportunities to delve deep and find many facts.
