Brits in Afghanistan

MICHAEL YON HAS AN INTERESTING COLLECTION OF PICTURES, well worth a look. He's a former Green Beret, native of Winter Haven, Fl. who has been reporting from Iraq and Afghanistan since December 2004. This report, from July 27-29 is from his experiences with the Welsh Guards. Great pictures, check it out. Top picture (pictures © Michael Yon), Medic Lance Corporal Beth Sparks is on her job, while Rifleman Karl Dresser talks to Ryan Grieves who is on his back. A soldier took Grieves’s weapon and cleaned it spic and span; the barrel got stuffed with mud, which can be a problem out here, and you’ve got to pay close attention, especially at night.  Below: Corporal Lee Edwards with Molly the bomb dog. Everyone loves Molly. First off, she’s a cool dog that likes to swim in the river with the soldiers, and secondly she trots into combat and has found a lot of bombs that could/would have blown people up. Molly can cross ladders spanning deep ditches, or when needed she piggybacks on Corporal Edward’s shoulders. It seems that every working dog in Afghanistan is treated better than the soldiers. Molly is no exception. Corporal Edwards treats Molly like the Queen of Sangin.

The British Unsurge is working

Ian Welsh presents a good point that the presence of coalition troops in Iraq (and quite probably Afghanistan) is actually the disease, not the cure.

A case in point is the reaction of insurgent militias to the British withdrawal from the field in Iraq's Basra province.

The British army says violence in Basra has fallen by 90% since it withdrew from the southern Iraqi city earlier this year.

Around 500 British soldiers left one of Saddam Hussein's palaces in the heart of the city in early September and stopped conducting regular foot patrols.

A spokesman says the Iraqi security forces still come under attack from militants in Basra, but the overall level of violence is down 90% since the British troops left.

Britain is scheduled to return control of Basra province to Iraqi officials next month, officially ending Britain's combat role in Iraq.

This underscores the effect of two completely different strategies in dealing with the violence in Iraq. One being the US method of doing business, (beat them until we all bleed to death), the other being the British solution, (let's just back away and let them sort it out themselves).

The time has long past where we can continue to point fingers at the Bush administration and declare that the conditions in Iraq are a George W. Bush creation of his own making. We already know that and only a total idiot could argue otherwise. Our best hope is that someday, someone has the brass to haul Bush and his cohort into a court of law and charge them with waging aggressive war and all other associated crimes commensurate with the actions of a country attempting to expand beyond its direct control of peoples beyond it borders.

The so-called "Surge" is little more than an escalation. In order for it to be declared a success it requires attrition of insurgent militias on a scale which would leave them unable to regroup, re-man and re-arm. Few resistant insurgencies in history have ever been broken to the degree that they have been rendered totally inert.

The surge operation in Iraq, the concentration of troops intended to break the resistant militias, is faced with a problem the Bush administration is either unable or unwilling to comprehend. Even if General David Petraeus reaches a point where he can declare the operation a success, he must surely know that he can never win. Once the surge operation winds down, the militias will gear-up, unless Petraeus can assure everyone that absolutely none of the prime movers of those militias remain in place. The arithmetic is pretty basic.

The US modus operandi seems to have an associated message. Something along the line of, If you persist, we'll teach you a lesson you'll never forget.

The problem is, the resistant militias are aware of that lesson. They are prepared to continue anyway. Given the method of warfare the resistant militias employ, sending in more troops just enriches their targeting opportunities.

The long and short of it is, regardless of what Bush, Cheney, Gates and Petraeus think they are likely to accomplish, in the end there will still be groups of insurgents prepared to start the whole thing over again. The "Surge" will have the end result of having wasted lives, resources and riches for nothing more than achieving a delay in the inevitable. The factions that feed the insurgency will continue to vie for power.

The British have simply cut out the middle. With a longer history and some bitter lessons sewn onto regimental banners, they recognized that a persistent insurgency in Basra was not only something they could not defeat using typical patrol or cordon and search methods, but that employing those kinds of tactics was probably contributing to the problem. The very presence of the British army was the fuel which resistant groups needed to justify their campaign.

By removing themselves from the field, the British have reduced the opportunity for insurgent militias to strike and eliminated at least one vital reason for the existence of such groups. The British have employed a firefighting technique which always works. In the absence of overwhelming force (a principle which has never been applied in either the Iraq or Afghanistan occupations), find a way to eliminate one element of the tetrahedron which allows a fire to continue burning and the fire will go out.

While I hold no hope that the minds in the Bush administration can see anything beyond a misplaced belief that merely possessing the means to turn an entire country into a glass parking lot will cause them to eventually achieve dominion over Iraq, it's worth noting that they have yet to even try another method. While it is easily recognized that diplomacy and negotiation are beyond the intellectual and academic reach of the current US administration, at some point the realization that their current limited approach is only exacerbating the problem has to eventually hit home.

Having created the vacuum which allowed a resistant insurgency to flourish, they are now feeding it while, at the same time, attempting to quash it.

Of course, that methodology crawls up from the likes of vile Bush admin insiders like Michael Ledeen whose words are repeated as some form of holy mantra by the profoundly stupid.

The British method may not be perfect, but it is considerably more successful than the Bush method. So, why won't the US even attempt the British strategy? Easy. With depraved and penetratingly ignorant people in possession of an unearned and bequeathed journalistic platform saying things like this:

There is nothing we want to see happen in the Middle East that can be accomplished through talking around long tables festooned with bottled water and fresh fruit at Swiss hotels, that cannot be accomplished faster and more permanently through war. But there is plenty that cannot be achieved by such gabfests that can only be achieved through war.

There is little hope that the Bush administration, the prime audience of such remarkably hebetudinous thought, can see anything at the table beyond the water bottles and the fruit. Because they view all other persons at the table as culturally and militarily inferior. War works for the Bushs and the Goldbergs of this world because it requires a minimal expenditure of mental energy. And since they have very little to begin with, they can't afford to waste it on anything beyond the examination of their own navels.

British General says "Bring the boys back home"

Not to step on Dave's toes - he's the expert around here when it come to things military- but even a confirmed civilian like me can see that when the commander of the army says it's time to pull the troops out, it's time to pull the troops out. And he's been saying so for nearly a year now:

General Dannatt, speaking on a visit to Afghanistan, did not repeat the statement he made in October last year that Britain should "get out [of Iraq] sometime soon", but the thrust of British military thinking is clear enough - the key campaign is now in Afghanistan, and anything that can reduce and even eliminate the British commitment in Iraq can help in that task.
"The army is certainly stretched. And when I say that we can't deploy any more battle groups at the present moment, that's because we're trying to get a reasonable balance of life for our people" he told the BBC.

Further down in the story is a choice anecdote that goes a long way to explaining why the British are leaving and the country is sliding further into the crapper:

The Sunday Telegraph reported that the senior British officer in Basra, General Jonathan Shaw, got short shift when he started lecturing American officers on counter-insurgency.
"It's insufferable, for Christ's sake," was the reported reaction of one senior figure closely involved in US military planning.
"He comes on and he lectures everybody in the room about how to do a counter-insurgency. The guys were just rolling their eyeballs. The notorious Northern Ireland came up again."'

Ahh, yes Northern Ireland, where the British Army found out that torture is counter-productive to defeating an insurgency and that negotiation works in the long run. I can see why the American officers would roll their eyes, after all the British have decades of experience fighting insurgents in Kenya, Ireland, Malaysia, Oman, and other assorted corners of the globe over the years, while the U.S. Army's experience with counter insurgency since World War II has been limited to the howling success of Vietnam and training and arming death squads in Central America (and CIA assistance to their friends the Taliban, but let's not bring that up) What could Tommy possible have to teach GI Joe?
As we used to say back in the Sault, "You can always tell an American, but you can't tell him much."
The British are right to pull out and redirect their efforts to Afghanistan. The U.S. will be trapped in Iraq for as long as they think they can still have "peace with honor" when fighting a native insurgency and will be stuck in the middle of a sectarian civil war. There are ways to win before the end of the 2012 election cycle, but they are brutal and will ensure the "terrorists follow us home" -- There is no happy ending for Iraq at this point. Even if the U.S. forces could go out tomorrow and by noon unerringly and without any collateral damage, put a bullet between the eyes of every single person in Iraq who has engaged in violence against the U.S. forces or other Iraqis -- basically the neo-con wet dream -- the insurgency would not be over. Because every brother, father, son, cousin, brother-in-law and friend of those now dead insurgents would be looking for pay back.
That is what is happening now as the U.S. forces go around kicking in doors, roughing up or arresting innocent Iraqis out of frustration or in error, calling in airstrikes that kill civilians, being there to be the target of car bombs that kill Iraqis. They are creating a nation of "martyred heroes" for Al-Quaida to put on their recruiting posters.
Partitioning the country might be a long range solution, but is likely to be a bloody disaster. I'd love to see the U.S. clean up its mess in Iraq, I just don't know how they will ever do it. I don't think that bell can be unrung. And the British are well advised to get out while the getting is good.

crossposted from the Woodshed

The broken back of the British army.

The peacetime maintenance of military and naval forces by a country has little to do with sustained war-fighting. That reality seems to have been lost on the current crop of political leaders from George W. Bush through Britain's Tony Blair and extends to Canada's Stephen Harper.

None of them understand that once a fixed-asset, manning-capped military force is committed to combat it will begin to wear out. Unless it is constantly replenished, with both equipment and personnel, it will eventually collapse. The Rumsfeld doctrine of "More technology; fewer troops" has been proven a failure. If a country's military is committed to war, intent on complete victory, it needs to begin expanding its ranks immediately and the industrial sector of that country needs to be commandeered to such a degree that a constant flow of materiel and equipment is being made available to the expanding military body.

Bush and Blair didn't do that. They went to war, confident that they were technologically superior to their enemies, with their peacetime military services. And, while the Pentagon continues to proclaim the US armed forces' health in both personnel and equipment, the British are telling a different story.

Gen Sir Richard Dannatt has told senior commanders that reinforcements for emergencies or for operations in Iraq or Afghanistan are "now almost non-existent".

In the memorandum to fellow defence leaders, the Chief of the General Staff (CGS) confessed that "we now have almost no capability to react to the unexpected". The "undermanned" Army now has all its units committed to either training for war in Iraq and Afghanistan, on leave or on operations.

One of the primary reasons for keeping a peacetime army is to maintain a national ability to react quickly to unexpected situations and provide a cadre of professionals able to build a larger force. It is a "force in being" intended to provide a visible demonstration of a nation's resolve to defend itself. In modern times, it is a contingency force able to operate within a specific set of limits. Given the expense of maintaining and equipping armed forces, most governments keep the absolute minimum necessary to deal with short term emergencies and, if to be committed to combat, expeditions of limited duration.

There is just one battalion of 500 troops, called the Spearhead Lead Element, available to be used in an emergency, such as a major domestic terrorist attack or a rapid deployment overseas.

One battalion. Britain is, quite literally, defenceless.

Britain's retaking of the Falkland Islands in 1982 underscores the limits imposed on peacetime armed forces. Britain committed a huge portion of its armed forces to the Falklands War. Had the Cold War with the Soviet Union not been in full swing at that time, there is a distinct possibility that Britain might not have been able to pull it off. NATO headquarters got a bad case of nerves when Margaret Thatcher tossed the 28,000 of Britain's armed forces into the South Atlantic expedition.

What is rarely discussed however, is that Britain was on the brink of losing. Had the Argentinian forces managed to hold out for another week the British would likely have had to withdraw. Having been fully engaged for three months, casualties had weakened the British forces, equipment was desperately in need of static maintenance and, food and ammunition were at critically low levels. When the Argentinians surrendered on 15 June, 1982 the British had suffered 258 personnel killed and 777 wounded. 34 British aircraft were lost and the navy had lost 2 destroyers, 2 frigates, 1 landing ship, 1 landing craft and 1 large container ship. Additionally, there was extensive damage to several surviving warships, serviceable aircraft were becoming maintenance nightmares and ground vehicles were in desperate need of parts and repair.

The whole thing had lasted 74 days, including the 8000 mile transit of the British task force. While Britain emerged victorious, it placed enormous strain on the armed forces and a long period of rebuilding had to be undertaken.

The current crop of conflicts has been going on for over five years. The British government had expected that involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq would steadily decline after initial military victories. However, the Bush administration, distracted by the desire to topple Saddam in Iraq, failed to complete the job in Afghanistan and did not consolidate the mission. Iraq, indisputably a war of choice on the part of the US and Britain, has degenerated into a war of proportions neither government had examined as a possibility. Both Afghanistan and Iraq are now faced with wars of "resistance".

The document said that Britain's second back-up unit, called the Airborne Task Force formed around the Parachute Regiment, was unavailable. It was unable to fully deploy "due to shortages in manpower, equipment and stocks".

Most of the Paras' vehicles and weapons have stayed in Afghanistan with other units using them in intense battles against the Taliban.

Parachute Regiment officers are deeply concerned that with nearly all their equipment abroad they are unable to train properly for future operations.

The Paras also no longer have the ability to parachute as a 600-strong battalion because no RAF planes were available to drop then en-masse, the document said. The situation was unlikely to be resolved until late August.

With the Army significantly under-strength by 3,500 troops – many disillusioned with being constantly on dangerous operations and away from their families – it is now struggling to plug the gaps on the frontline.

"The enduring nature and scale of current operations continues to stretch people," Gen Dannatt wrote.

The Army now needed to "augment" 2,500 troops from other units onto operations in Iraq and Afghanistan to bring up the total force to 13,000 required. This remained "far higher than we ever assumed," the CGS said.

"When this is combined with the effects of under-manning (principally in the infantry and Royal Artillery) and the pace of training support needed to prepare units for operations, the tempo of life in the Field Army is intense."

The Army has also been forced to call up almost 1,000 Territorial Army soldiers for overseas operations. The general's concerns came after three RAF personnel were killed in a mortar or rocket attack on the main British headquarters five miles outside Basra bringing the total dead in Iraq to 162.

With the main force pulling out of Basra city to the air station in the coming months there is concern of increased attacks on the large base where some troops are forced to live in tented accommodation.

A lack of vehicles meant that "training is significantly constrained".

Gen Dannatt was also "concerned" that some equipment, particularly Scimitar light tanks that are vital to fighting in Afghanistan but are 40 years old, "may be at the edge of their sustainability".

More needed to be done on housing and pay in order to retained troops because "people are more likely to stay if we look after them properly".

The pressure on numbers was partially being alleviated by bringing in civilian firms to train soldiers and guard bases and by "adopting a pragmatic approach to risk where possible".

While the current situation was "manageable" Gen Dannatt was "very concerned about the longer term implications of the impact of this level of operations on our people, equipment and future operational capability".

It is not the first time Gen Dannatt has raised concerns on Britain's fighting ability. A few weeks into his job last year, Sir Richard said the military was "running hot" and urged for a national debate on defence.

The plain-speaking officer later suggested that the British presence in Iraq was "exacerbating the security problems" and warned that the Army would "break" if it was kept there too long.

Gen Dannatt, who said manning was "critical" in the Army, called for extra infantry units earlier this month following the devastating cuts inflicted by his predecessor Gen Sir Mike Jackson which saw four battalions axed.

"General Dannatt's appraisal means that we are unable to intervene if there is an emergency in Britain or elsewhere, that's self-evident," a senior officer said.

"But this is a direct result of the decision to go into Afghanistan on the assumption that Iraq would diminish simultaneously. We are now reaping the reward of that assumption."

If you don't take your gear home with you, you can't train with it. If you can't train with your gear, you're not ready to use it when you arrive in theatre. The training that is done is preparatory for rotation into Iraq or Afghanistan, not the broader scope of skills required by a field army. With manpower shortages comes a shortage of trainers. And the whole thing becomes a death spiral.

Britain's situation could actually have been understated by Dannatt. The US, UK and Canada are all using their territorial militias to augment expeditionary forces. That means that should a contingency operation be required, even a domestic one, there will be a lack of troops available. The US has already experienced the effects of their "missing" National Guard which, instead of being available for emergencies, has in effect become an active-service force which is being stretched beyond its reserve-status limits. If Britain is digging into its Territorial Army for troops the condition is critical.