Archive for the ‘war’ Category
Nibras Kazimi reports on the sniper propaganda some Iraqi insurgent groups have been putting out recently. The “Islamic Army of Iraq” (i.e. a chapter of NOIA) claims a large number of dead US soldiers, shows its sniper team preparing for action, using a US Marine Corps manual (nice touch), and then shooting various people. Interestingly, they engage with “Juba”, the name US soldiers in Baghdad gave to a sniper back in 2004 – in fact, they claim that the man on screen is Juba and speculate on the name’s origins.
I doubt it. Snipers seem to be a universal meme of warfare, and this sort of mixture of impersonal, long-range, silent death and extremely personal mythology is classic. The targets tend to attribute all sniping to The Sniper, and the other side always plays this up. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if “Juba” is a group identity – some say the Stalingrad hero Zaitsev was a propaganda construct rather than any one man.
The rest of Kazimi’s report rather bears it out. He complains bitterly about newspaper reports that the Islamic Army is negotiating with the Americans and demands to know “how American families who’ve lost soldiers in Iraq through Juba’s crosshairs would feel about that?” Well, there’s no point negotiating with the people who haven’t been shooting at you. (More here.) He also suggests that the sniper, who appears to speak English, might be getting around security checks because he works for the coalition. It’s not impossible by any means, but it does point to “Juba”‘s real role – the generation of paranoia.
Speaking of which, Kazimi quotes in another post a rumour that the Iranians are going to assassinate the Iraqi prime minister. Check out the whole thing for the explanation of why they might want to do something so wildly opposed to their own interests. After all, Nouri al-Maliki is a Dawa Party man leading a government dominated by Dawa and SCIRI, which has permitted the SCIRI and Dawa factions in parliament to pass legislation to permit a pro-Iranian SCIRI state in a state down south.
The story goes that they want to kill him to prevent the Americans from making him disarm the Sadr movement. Of course, were the Americans to remove the Sadrists from the chessboard by..ah..enter handwaving here, the most pro-Iranian force in Iraq, SCIRI, would be greatly strengthened. So why on earth would the Iranians want to weaken their own hand?
The answer is, of course, the Dr Evil theory. Now that’s what I call paranoia.
Update: This post delayed from Saturday due to Blogger outage. Can this be time to move?
And you thought we handed over in Maysan voluntarily. You poor fool!
Comments Dan thinks that Blair will finally be done in by angry army wives after a disastrous overrun somewhere in Afghanistan or Iraq. It’s a testament to the strategic incoherence of the trip to Afghanistan that it’s now getting more dangerous at the operational level than Iraq. Getting out of Iraq is difficult because of the political, strategic-level arrangements it would need. For the British force, the operational problem is simple – drive to Kuwait docks with flank and rear guards. For the Americans it is much harder, which is why it’s strategically difficult for the Brits to get out.
From southern Afghanistan, though, giving up is easier, but getting out in itself is tough. There’s no infrastructure to speak of, and the road and theatre air routes go via Karachi – which doesn’t look the best option any more. And the RAF’s slow crisis with its transport fleet is not helping.
This is very bad news indeed, especially if it turns out to have been shot down. The Nimrod MR-2 fleet has been increasingly in demand in the last few years for very different roles to its primary mission, patrolling the North Atlantic looking for submarines and the shipwrecked, as the Army has become aware of some of its capabilities – a huge range of radio communications, excellent IR and radar surveillance, and more besides. Not only the Nimrod, but also the Royal Navy’s Sea King ASaC-7 early warning helicopters, have been drawn on for overland ISTAR (Intelligence, Surveillance, Target Acquisition and Reconnaissance) tasks – both have the Searchwater 2000 radar, originally developed for spotting ships but also suited to spotting tanks and even aircraft.
This is problematic, as the plane itself is not really suited for this role. The operational pattern is essentially flying around slowly at 500 feet or so, as over the North Atlantic, whilst the electronics team investigate suspicious goats on request from the army. This is not ideal, especially not for an aircraft with a crew of 14, no armament of any use over land, and the performance of the 1950s airliner it is based on. Especially not, either, when the upgraded MRA-4 programme has been such a cash-guzzling disaster flick and only 12 of the planes exist. (The position with the even-fancier electronic intelligence spy ship, the Nimrod R-1, is even tighter – the total fleet is 3.)
A broader point is that there has been a lot of faith in the last few years that “platforms are irrelevant” and only capabilities count. Hence it’s fine, indeed very wise, to use a maritime patrol aircraft over a hostile land battle at low altitude because it has the sensors you want. It’s cheap, after all. This only works, however, if the enemy are clueless enough not to shoot at the big grey bird chugging about in the weeds. Perhaps they were five years ago, but learning in wartime is Darwinian.
Another point is that wars strain non-obvious capabilities. The Government has always been keen on cutting “nice to have” or “non-core” activities in favour of “the front line” – perhaps more so in the last few years with the advent of the consultant raj and their obsession with the core business. But this only makes sense if you know what “the front line” is. The Nimrod crews – the Kipper Fleet – and the RAF air transport fleet have been the hardest-worked and most-risked segment of the force, whilst the fighter/bomber force mostly defends the Norfolk coast. The photo-reconnaissance force has been under even greater pressure, and has seen its aircraft (the Canberra PR-9) withdrawn in favour of an as-yet undelivered converted business jet for its pains.
It’s late, but this snark attack on Niall Ferguson must not be missed. Click through and read Rob Farley’s review of Colossus, too.
After suffering through some of his earlier writing, I’ve always imagined Niall Ferguson sneaking into the Imperial War Museum in the dark of night. Certain that the coast is clear, he rips off his black track suit to reveal a replica of the uniform that Lord Raglan wore during the Crimean War. Ferguson stands behind a cannon, raises his faux marshal’s baton, and exclaims, “Lads, let’s send these blighters back to the Seven Hells from whence they came!”
Heh. I actually studied the history of the British Empire at one point, and I recall that Niall Ferguson, despite his recent fame, was astonishingly insignificant in the historiography. You just didn’t encounter very much of him. Compared to John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, David Cannadine, Ronald Hyam et al he was non-existent. Perhaps we were just weird, but I suspect this reflects a deeper truth.
Now it’s all over, what was all the shooting about?
To answer that question, we’d first need to know something of each side’s aims. Hezbollah’s were reasonably clear, at least as far as the decision to take the two soldiers prisoner went: put pressure on the Israelis to release their remaining Lebanese prisoners, and not incidentally demonstrate they were still Gangster Number One. After all, Hamas had managed to pull off the capture of Gideon Shalit and the destruction of a tank only days before, so something needed doing to maintain respect.
What they didn’t reckon with, basing their perceptual framework on Ariel Sharon’s 2004 decision to exchange prisoners, was the Israeli freakout that followed. Once that began, Hezbollah’s aims were to hold on to as much as possible whilst keeping their army in being, and score prestige triumphs like rocketing Haifa harbour and flying drones into Israel. Simple enough.
What were the Israeli aims, though? Just get the soldiers back? Negotiation would have done that. And, in the end, it doesn’t seem to have worried them very much. The Israelis seem remarkably unconcerned that two of their soldiers are left in Hezbollah hands – still! Demolish Hezbollah? Well, they seem to have liked the idea. But, if you look at the situation maps, their actions do not correspond to such grandiose goals. Quite simply, they did not go very far into Lebanon, ever – despite the talk of going to the Litani, they only went there as a token presence. Secure the north from rockets? This would have meant going well beyond the Litani, perhaps to the Awali river line, which would have put the great bulk of the rockets out of range for as long as they stayed. But they spent so much time talking of a two mile deep security zone – which would help not a jot.
There are a couple of explanations. One is that they would have marched to the Litani but Hezbollah (and the Shia Amal, and the Communists) beat them. I’m not sure. They certainly put up an impressive defence, but whether they could have prevented Tsahal from breaking through if it had been bent on doing so is another matter. In all, four Israeli divisions were employed, and at no time was a manoeuvre bigger than brigade strength launched except perhaps at the very end. Another is that the Israelis were trying to avoid the 1978 scenario, where Hezbollah just retires behind the Litani in an affair of outposts, by trying to draw them on to their positions in the south. Another is that they were conflicted and unsure of aims, and that there was effectively no overall strategy. If 1982 was a war for psychotics, with its obsessive blitz ever further north and climatic massacre, this was one for neurotics.
The drawing-on tactic is possible, I suppose, but for an army as tank-oriented as the Israelis against an enemy made up of small mobile ATGW teams, very unfavourable. It would have amounted to parking a lot of tanks in southern Lebanon as targets. It might have had some appeal to a command torn between the will to wound and the fear to strike, though, unwilling to plunge north but under pressure to confront the enemy. It might also have appealed to the airpower theorist, Halutz, as a way of flushing Hezbollah fighters so his aircraft could attack them – but three-man rocket teams are not good targets, and the decision not to charge north meant that they wouldn’t collect at the bridges like good little sheep. (This may be the result of learning the wrong lesson from Kosovo.)
That the IDF simply didn’t have a strategy is perhaps supported by the fact a key commander, the head of the northern command, was sacked. Everyone will now draw whatever conclusions they want from the war – the 4th Generation Warfare crowd will point to the rocketing of the Haifa port and the village reserve groups with their rockets as more evidence for their side, the neo-cons will cry Iran, the Quai d’Orsay will positively purr, and the Lebanese will in all probability conclude that the more tank-hunters between them and the Israelis, the better.
I prefer the Colonel’s analysis, which is that Hezbollah is just at the turning point from a guerrilla force to an army in Maoist revolutionary war theory. They are known to have studied Vietnam extensively, after all. For the laughs, meanwhile, Col. Lang described the Hezbollah first line of defence as the Tabouleh Line, with the next being the Shawarma Line. I disagree. I think the talk of bunkers and tunnel complexes is overrated – every front-line account I’ve seen speaks of small groups of tank hunters shooting and moving, hiding out in the open, and practically all the Israeli losses came from them. It’s more accurate to say that Hezbollah drew the Israelis into a hoummus.
I sincerely hope this is a final situation map. Sorry about the last one going missing.
Is here.
A fuller analysis post will follow, as will much more from this week’s blogqueue.
Is here.
A fuller analysis post will follow, as will much more from this week’s blogqueue.
Today’s updated Google Earth overlay is here. It seems that the right flank march, long predicted here, is now underway. A new Israeli armoured division has appeared in the north and is moving north through Khiam (yup, where the UNTSO guys were until that unfortunate contretemps with the six-hour artillery barrage) and Marjayoun. This is the fourth division to be employed, therefore a one-third increase in force. However, note that it’s not (at the moment) heading west down the Litani Valley to envelop the Hezbollah force in the south – it’s going north, into the upper Litani valley.
There are two possible explanations for this. One is that the Israelis have decided to go down the river on the north bank as well as the south, and they are seizing the start-line for this movement, perhaps also doing the rumoured move towards Nabatiyeh to get rid of rocket teams said to be firing from this area. The other is that they are going much further into Lebanon, either up the river into the Beka’a or else over the Druze Chouf mountains towards Beirut. Either of these would require more than one division, and the other in the Kiryat Shmona area will be needed in part as a flank guard in the Litani bend (note that the Golani brigade has been pulled out to rest).
The first would make more sense, but then, nothing in this war makes much sense.
Today’s updated Google Earth overlay is here. It seems that the right flank march, long predicted here, is now underway. A new Israeli armoured division has appeared in the north and is moving north through Khiam (yup, where the UNTSO guys were until that unfortunate contretemps with the six-hour artillery barrage) and Marjayoun. This is the fourth division to be employed, therefore a one-third increase in force. However, note that it’s not (at the moment) heading west down the Litani Valley to envelop the Hezbollah force in the south – it’s going north, into the upper Litani valley.
There are two possible explanations for this. One is that the Israelis have decided to go down the river on the north bank as well as the south, and they are seizing the start-line for this movement, perhaps also doing the rumoured move towards Nabatiyeh to get rid of rocket teams said to be firing from this area. The other is that they are going much further into Lebanon, either up the river into the Beka’a or else over the Druze Chouf mountains towards Beirut. Either of these would require more than one division, and the other in the Kiryat Shmona area will be needed in part as a flank guard in the Litani bend (note that the Golani brigade has been pulled out to rest).
The first would make more sense, but then, nothing in this war makes much sense.
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