Thoughtful gifts for your sniper

For the sniper who has everything, a rifle-mounted cupholder:

The spare-time chainsaw-style mount (last slide) looks very much like a weapon from Doom or Quake . . .

The next step towards a robot-centric army

Stepping out of the Matrix back-story and moving to replace the human soldier, the EATR:

A Maryland company under contract to the Pentagon is working on a steam-powered robot that would fuel itself by gobbling up whatever organic material it can find — grass, wood, old furniture, even dead bodies.

Robotic Technology Inc.'s Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot — that's right, "EATR" — "can find, ingest, and extract energy from biomass in the environment (and other organically-based energy sources), as well as use conventional and alternative fuels (such as gasoline, heavy fuel, kerosene, diesel, propane, coal, cooking oil, and solar) when suitable," reads the company's Web site.

That "biomass" and "other organically-based energy sources" wouldn't necessarily be limited to plant material — animal and human corpses contain plenty of energy, and they'd be plentiful in a war zone.

Just a tad creepy . . .

H/T to Alex Haropulos for the link.

The headline really does say it all

Hard to come up with a better title than this one:

Once an empire, Britain faces big military cuts:
Afghanistan operations in the future could be affected.

[. . .] at a time of overwhelming public support for its service men and women, the global recession is causing Britain to face hard choices about its future military role in the world — putting at risk plans to build new aircraft carriers and heralding consequences for everything from operations alongside the US in Afghanistan to whether the UK remains nuclear-armed.

The start of the first full-scale official review of Britain's defense forces in more than 10 years was announced on Tuesday. It came within days of three of Britain's most influential independent research institutes forecasting that the £34 billion (about $54 billion) defense budget will be seriously cut.

The question of whether to support a £76 billion ($124 billion) program to replace Britain's aging Trident nuclear weapons system also looms large.

The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), warned that the UK cannot afford much of the defense equipment it plans to buy, questioned the value of renewing the submarine-launched Trident nuclear deterrent, and said it was "delusional" to think the UK could act alone without closer European defense cooperation.

Actually, the "delusion" is that there is any will in Western Europe for any kind of military action, under any circumstances.

Sunken 1812 vessel may be HMS Wolfe

An interesting article in the Ottawa Citizen about a recently discovered wreck near Kingston, which may be the remains of HMS Wolfe:

A team of divers is set to plunge into Lake Ontario near Kingston, Ont., next week in a bid to confirm the discovery of a legendary Canadian-built ship from the War of 1812, the HMS Wolfe.

In collaboration with marine archeologists from Parks Canada, the divers plan to take detailed measurements, drawings and photographs of a sunken wooden sailing vessel that appears to match the size and last known location of the famous 32-metre sloop: the flagship of British naval commander James Yeo and star of a dramatic 1813 battle west of Toronto that helped thwart the U.S. invasion of Canada.

The suspected discovery comes just three years before the 200th anniversary of the war, adding urgency to the efforts to identify a possible new showcase relic for bi-national commemoration activities.

The evolution of anti-antitank defences

If being cloth-eared is a term of abuse for someone who's not listening to you, what's cloth-armoured? Better protected against RPG attacks:

Cunning new UK technology will see British troops' vehicles in Afghanistan protected from armour-piercing rocket warheads — by cloth.

The MoD was pleased yesterday to unveil its new TARIAN "textile based" vehicle protection system, which will see lightweight cloth attached to the sides of military vehicles in Afghan combat. TARIAN is expected to resist strikes from RPGs, shoulder-fired antitank rockets in common use among the Taliban.

That might seem to be impossible, as an RPG warhead can blast a hole through thick armour plate. But in fact TARIAN, already on trial in Afghanistan, apparently works well.

Japan considers pre-emptive strike?

According to a report by Sachiko Sakamaki and Takashi Hirokawa, Japan's government may be seriously considering dumping their post-WW2 pacifist constitution in order to attack North Korea:

"North Korea poses a serious and realistic threat to Japan," former defense chief Gen Nakatani said today in Tokyo at a meeting of Liberal Democratic Party officials. "We must look at active missile defense such as attacking an enemy's territory and bases."

One option would be to equip navy ships with cruise missiles, Nakatani said.

Japan should change its policy and permit attacks on hostile areas, an LDP panel proposed last week following North Korea's April 5 ballistic missile test. Under Japan's pacifist constitution, drafted by the U.S. after World War II, the country is forbidden to use force to settle global disputes.

North Korea said yesterday it conducted its second nuclear explosion since 2006 and fired three short-range missiles. The Stalinist country last month said it would strengthen its nuclear deterrence after the United Nations Security Council criticized North Korea’s April missile launch.

If any nation could be said to be fully aware of the dangers of nuclear weapons, it is Japan. While it is scary to other nations that a rogue state has demonstrated the ability to use atomic bombs, Japan is the only country that has been the target of nuclear warfare.

Gurkhas can stay . . . officially

Bowing to the inevitable (and the fearsomely effective Joanna Lumley), the British government has now officially stated that the Gurkha veterans and their families can stay in Britain:

All Gurkha veterans who retired before 1997 with at least four years' service will be allowed to settle in the UK, Home Secretary Jacqui Smith has said.

Ms Smith told MPs she was "proud to offer this country's welcome to all who have served in the brigade of Gurkhas".

It comes after a high-profile campaign by Joanna Lumley and other supporters of Gurkha rights — and an embarrassing Commons defeat for the government.

Some 36,000 Gurkhas who left before 1997 had been denied UK residency.

Ms Lumley, the actress who has been the public face of the campaign on behalf of the Gurkhas, said: "This is the welcome we have always longed to give."

It's amazing how hard the British government was willing to fight against plain justice, decency, and common sense. But that's one of the things governments do. Ms. Lumley must be allowed her occasional flight of hyperbole:

She called Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who she had met earlier, a "brave man who has made today a brave decision on behalf of the bravest of the brave".

Brave? The man had to be winkled out of his bunker. He was fearless in pursuit of a bad policy — as long as nobody noticed. Which, of course, is what politicians also do.

British government still trying to exclude Gurkha veterans

In spite of the recent parliamentary embarrassment over their cack-handed efforts to exclude Gurkha veterans, the British government continues to show that they haven't given up:

The government's policy towards the Gurkhas descended into a potentially hugely expensive shambles yesterday after the actor Joanna Lumley extracted fresh concessions in an extraordinary live television confrontation with the home office minister Phil Woolas.

The actor, who has been a powerful champion for the Gurkhas as they have fought through the courts and parliament, exploited Home Office heavy-handedness to demand assurances from a sheepish Woolas after five former Gurkhas received letters from the home office apparently telling them they did not qualify to settle in Britain.

The letters arrived only a day after Gordon Brown at prime minister's questions and in a private meeting with Lumley had promised their cases would be reviewed, and insisted he was taking personal charge of the issue.

Hurrah for Ms. Lumley, and jeers for the Gordon Brown government. Full article here.

How not to win hearts and minds

So it turns out that the overblown rhetoric of certain Imams is actually true — the "crusaders" really are trying to convert Afghan civilians to Christianity:

US Army chaplains in Afghanistan have called on American soldiers to spread the word of Jesus to Afghanistan. They're distributing Bibles printed in local languages, too — though the Army subsequently confiscated a bunch of the Bibles and reprimanded some of the soldiers involved.

If there's anything more likely to rile up the undecided and provide great recruiting material for the Taliban than this — except, of course, burning the top cash crop in the country — I can't think of it.

Dump support of Pakistan?

Ralph Peters is advocating a volte face in US relations in the subcontinent:

WHAT Washington calls "strategy" is usually just inertia: We can't imagine not supporting Pakistan because we've "always" supported Pakistan.

No matter how shamelessly Pakistan's leaders looted their own country, protected the Taliban, sponsored terror attacks on India, demanded aid and told us to kiss off when we asked for help, we had to back the Paks.

Because that's just the way things are.

Well, now that Islamist marauders are sweeping the country with violence as the generals in Rawalpindi mull "To be or not to be" and President Ali Asif Zardari knocks back another scotch behind closed doors, perhaps we should consider an alternative approach to this splintering, renegade state.

A better strategy's obvious. But Washington has trouble with the obvious. At our pathetic State Department, habit trumps innovation every time. And the Pentagon can't seem to see beyond the immediate battlefield.

What should we do? Dump Pakistan. Back India.

Given the state Pakistan is in, it's hard to imagine a positive outcome to the current situation: the Taliban and their ilk are taking over larger and larger areas, the military is at odds with the government, and everything seems to be moving towards greater instability. India, for all the problems they face, is significantly more stable politically and is a much more democratic and economically free country now than Pakistan.

The big reason for not switching to supporting India is the Pakistani nuclear arsenal, and the fear that it — or the technology to replicate it — will fall into the wrong hands. Given the states that Pakistan has already aided with nuclear weapon technology, it's hard to imagine how things could get worse.

There are other geo-political issues to consider:

Of course, there's also the issue of the Pentagon's bewildering incompetence in placing 50,000 of our troops at the end of a 1,500-mile supply line through Pakistan, rendering our forces virtual hostages of Islamabad.

The answer's another dose of common sense: Instead of increasing our troop numbers in Afghanistan, cut them. Instead of embracing the hopeless task of building a modern nation where no nation of any kind has ever existed, concentrate exclusively on killing al Qaeda terrorists and the hard-line Taliban elements who help them.

If Washington pays attention to Peters' advice, this is the last call for the current Afghan mission.

An innovative approach to overseas military basing

A constant concern for the US armed forces is how to support military action in areas where you do not already have an effective base. For anything larger than a company action, success depends on ready access to food, fuel, and ammunition supplies, and this is impossible without an organized, effective support organization. A proposed solution to this problem is called "seabasing", which would use temporary lash-ups of either ships or specially designed platforms to provide ongoing support to military operations from offshore. The Economist has more:

The original approach to seabasing was extremely Legolike. Modular rafts — platforms mounted on pontoons — would be linked together by hinges to create large, flattish surfaces that could nevertheless bend with the waves. Such a system was tested in a peacetime operation off the coast of Liberia in spring 2008. Instead of armaments, hospital supplies and the materials to build a school were unloaded from a ship to the platform, and thence to landing craft which disgorged them onto a beach.

The experiment worked, but there are doubts about taking it any further. One question is how such a raft of rafts would stand up to severe weather. There is also scepticism about whether the original goal, a surface large enough to create a floating runway that could accommodate transport aircraft, is either financially or physically feasible. It would be far larger than the largest aircraft-carrier now afloat, and thus expensive to build, and it would have to be both rigid and stable enough to act as a runway and flexible enough to withstand rough seas. The difficulty of squaring these requirements has led designers to abandon the idea of strict modularity in favour of a system that uses an array of more conventional but still specially designed ships. According to Robert Button, a seabasing expert at the RAND Corporation, a think-tank, America's navy plans to build 35 ships designed for seabasing over the next decade.

The core of such a ship-based seabase would be something known, in the strangulated jargon beloved of military men, as the Maritime Pre-Positioning Force (Future). America's marines already use pre-positioning supply ships as floating warehouses. The 14 ships in the new replacement class will continue to store supplies in this way. But, in addition, they will have room to berth 2,000 servicemen, or between 20 and 30 vertical-take-off aircraft, or hundreds of ground vehicles. More impressively, each ship will carry a folding bridge, about 30 metres long, to connect it to its neighbour. These bridges — regarded as the linchpins of seabasing — will remain stable in swells of up to 2 metres. They will allow vehicles the size of lorries to drive from one ship to another.

I wonder how the Chinese PLAN design bureau is going to approach this problem . . . as they're likely watching the American efforts with some interest.

Update: Gurkhas rout Labour government

A report from The Daily Mirror on the British government's defeat over rules restricting retired Gurkha soldiers from living in Britain:

The Government suffered an embarrassing defeat today when MPs voted to give all Gurkha soldiers equal right of residence in Britain.

The Liberal Democrat motion to scrap new settlement rules for Gurkha veterans was supported by 267 to 246 MPs, a majority of 21.

Actress and pro-Gurkha rights campaigner Joanna Lumley, who was watching from the Commons public gallery as this afternoon's result was announced, said she was "elated" by the outcome.

"Just before this vote was taken our spirits were nearly at zero," she said.

"When it came through we saw it on the screen and I can't tell you the sense of elation, the sense of pride - pride in our country, pride in the democratic system and pride in our Parliament."

It was the first major reverse for Gordon Brown since he became Prime Minister but has no legally binding effect on Government policy.

Hurrah for the Liberal Democrat and Conservative MPs who voted this government measure down. It's not a confidence motion, so the government survives the defeat in the house, but I certainly hope the prime minister changes course on this issue.

Bloody typical government action

The British government is doing a fine job of portraying themselves as ingrates, as their latest move to "help" the Gurkha veterans illustrates:

With a treacherous swing of the political axe the Government ruled that only those awarded for bravery or at death's door would be allowed to settle in Britain.

Campaigners condemned new rules supposed to give more former Gurkhas the right to live in the UK as a "disgrace". Immigration Minister Phil Woolas said the changes — ordered by Home Secretary Jacqui Smith — would allow 4,300 more Gurkhas to settle here out of the 36,000 who served in the British Army before July 1997.

But supporters of the soldiers’ campaign attacked the criteria as "unattainable", with actress Joanna Lumley describing the Government's actions as “despicable”.

Critics argue that fewer than 100 people will meet the new requirements and campaigners have vowed to return to the courts. David Enwright, a solicitor representing the Gurkhas, said: "This Government should hang its head in shame".

It's typical that (as was reported last year, but denied by the government) the Royal Navy can't take captured pirates aboard one of Her Majesty's ships for fear that the pirates will be legally entitled to claim refugee status in Britain, yet Gurkha soldiers who volunteered to serve in Britain's army are being actively denied permission to live there after their service is completed.

Update, 29 April: Government defeated in the house over the Gurkha issue. Details linked from here.

Paul Hellyer's American student

Paul Kane has written a New York Times op-ed which sounds disturbingly like something cooked up by former Canadian Defence Minister Paul Hellyer. The modern Canadian Armed Forces were formed by amalgamating the formerly separate Canadian Army, Royal Canadian Navy, and the Royal Canadian Air Force. The arguments for this highly disruptive move were primarily economic and bureaucratic, not military in nature. It's to the credit of the members of the separate services that things worked out as well as they did, but many careers were cut short and much bitterness still exists from that re-organization so many years ago.

Hellyer claimed that "the amalgamation . . . will provide the flexibility to enable Canada to meet in the most effective manner the military requirements of the future. It will also establish Canada as an unquestionable leader in the field of military organization." In one sense this was true: Canada was the first nation to completely amalgamate the military services. But to be a "leader" requires that someone else "follow". That part never happened. The hoped-for cost savings may or may not have been achieved, but the economies all seemed to reduce the combat effectiveness, morale, and equipment inventories of the combat arms. A unified armed forces was no better able to resist militarily ignorant political moves than the separate services had been.

Kane doesn't go quite "full Hellyer" here, but you can see the same sort of thinking:

First, the Air Force should be eliminated, and its personnel and equipment integrated into the Army, Navy and Marine Corps. [. . .]

Yes, air power is a critical component of America’s arsenal. But the Army, Navy and Marines already maintain air wings within their expeditionary units. The Air Force is increasingly a redundancy in structure and spending.

It's quite possible that the current division of responsibilities between the USAF and the other branches of service need to be re-adjusted. The USAF is notoriously uninterested in ground-support missions, which is of very high importance to ground troops. Allowing the Army to run its own attack helicopters was the compromise arrived at — the Air Force still had to maintain some ground-attack aircraft, but the Army's helicopter forces took on most of the close-support duties.

The second part of Kane's proposal is actually pretty good:

Second, the archaic “up or out” military promotion system should be scrapped in favor of a plan that treats service members as real assets. [. . .]

Treating service members like so many widgets — in particular, the enlisted men and women who make up 85 percent of the ranks — is arbitrary and bad management. I have seen many fit, experienced officers and enlisted Marines arbitrarily forced out because there were only so many slots into which they could be promoted.

The military should develop a new accounting and personnel system that tracks the cost of developing its human capital and tallies each service member as an investment with a fixed value based on his education, training, experience and performance. This would reflect the departure of a valued service member as an asset lost, not a cost cut. Why are fit men and women who have served in combat, a human experience that a million dollars can’t buy, being pushed out instead of retained for 15, 20, 30 years?

But after the solid part of his proposal, he quickly dives into the worst solution available:

Third, the United States needs a national service program for all young men and women, without any deferments, to increase the quality and size of the pool from which troops are drawn.

Because, as we all know, a well-trained, loyal, and dependable armed service can be created by dragooning free individuals against their will. Calling it "conscription" does not make it any less repulsive. Forcing people to "serve" at gunpoint makes a mockery of the whole notion of being a free country.

The "denizens" at Castle Argghhh! also weigh in on Kane's proposals.

Plumbing problems in U-boats

Wired's Tony Long recounts the story of how a misbehaving toilet caused the loss of U-1206 in 1945:

U-1206, sailing out of Kristiansand, Norway as part of the 11th Flotilla, was cruising at a depth of roughly 200 feet when the commander, Kapitänleutnant Karl-Adolf Schlitt, decided to answer the call of nature. The submarine was a late-war Type VIIC, commissioned in March 1944. It carried a new type of toilet designed for use at greater depths.

Like a lot of new technology, the toilet was just a little buggy. Schlitt had trouble operating it. When he called an engineer for help, the man opened the wrong valve, allowing seawater to enter the boat.

When the water reached the batteries located beneath the toilet, the boat began filling with chlorine gas, forcing Schlitt to order U-1206 surfaced. Unfortunately for the Germans, the boat was only 10 miles off the Scottish coast, and it was quickly spotted by the British.

The crew was still blowing clean air into their U-boat when an aircraft appeared and attacked, killing four men on deck and damaging the boat so badly that it was unable to dive. Schlitt, seeing the game was up, gave the order to abandon and scuttle.

Perpetuating a military myth

Tony Long rounds up the technological advances which made the American Civil War so different from preceding wars. In the process, he continues perpetrating a modern myth about a genuine military problem:

Although disease killed more men than actual fighting, technological advances in small-arms weaponry and artillery resulted in casualty figures disproportionately high for the numbers of troops engaged.

The introduction of the Henry and Spencer repeating rifles, which allowed sustained, rapid and accurate fire from much farther distances than before, reduced the classic infantry charge to a virtual suicide attack. Pickett's desperate charge at Gettysburg is probably the most memorable example, but the futility continued to the end of the war.

A few problems with this section: the Henry and Spencer rifles, innovative and deadly though they were, had little to do with the example given: they were primarily used by the Union cavalry, and Pickett's Charge was emphatically not a cavalry action. The horrific casualties in that action were inflicted by artillery and regular infantry rifles. The intended point is valid, however, that infantry weapons were becoming much more dependably deadly, yet infantry tactics were still quite similar to those used in the War of 1812 and earlier.

(It's telling of the hidebound nature of the military mindset that a half-century later, the major combatants in World War I were still hurling infantry across open fields into the teeth of even more devastating firepower.)

It's hard to deny that generals are often wedded to "the old way of fighting", but in this case, there's a damned good reason for it: They. Had. No. Alternative.

Wars from the Crimea to the Spanish Civil War generated mind-boggling casualty figures for an insurmountable technological reason: command and control deficiencies that were not (and could not be) addressed until 1939. Let's step back a few centuries and walk through how the problem developed.

Armies are unwieldy things to manoeuvre in the field, even without the presence of complicating factors like hills, valleys, streams, and woods. The limiting factor has always been the ability of the commander(s) to get their orders to the troops. In pre-gunpowder battles, the army commander would generally give his orders before battle was joined, face-to-face with his subordinate commanders, because issuing orders once battle had been joined was difficult-to-impossible. As soon as the armies came into contact, the only thing the army commander had to change the course of events was his reserve formation (if any).

Troops in close physical contact with the enemy are too busy trying to kill-and-not-be-killed to pay any attention to shouted orders from behind, and anyone close enough to be heard by the front line was also close enough to be killed himself (in fact, shouting orders was a time-honoured way of drawing the enemy's attention on to you personally). Even if you could communicate orders successfully, getting them obeyed was unlikely — the quickest way of starting a rout was for troops to start backing away from the point of contact. Human self-preservation instincts quickly overwhelm obedience to orders and panic is contagious. Most battle casualties were actually inflicted after the battle line broke . . . and most of the casualties would be trying to get away from the enemy (see Keegan's The Face of Battle or Hanson's The Western Way of War for examples).

Ancient and medieval battles tended to be head-on affairs because it was too difficult to arrange any sophisticated manoeuvering, except the reserve. It was a common adage that the commander who committed his reserve last would win the battle. Battles would follow a fairly standard timeline (please pardon the vast over-generalization here):

1. The preliminaries — projectile troops engage their opposite numbers (slingers, archers, and javelin men), both sides trying to sweep away the enemy's light forces in order to reach the enemy's main body.

2. The meeting engagement — the forward troops come into contact with the enemy (infantry or dismounted cavalry in the centre, light troops and mounted cavalry on the wings).
3. The battle continues until one side or the other starts to suffer greater casualties and the line wavers.
4. The weakening side breaks, and troops start to fall back from the battle line.
5. The remaining front-line infantry either die or surrender, and the pursuit begins.

Exceptions to this general timeline were when one side had a disproportional number of troops, or where a detached formation entered the battle after it had begun. In almost all cases, the army commanders had little to do with the eventual outcome after the armies were engaged.

Gunpowder was a huge game-changer. Armies no longer needed to get into close physical contact with the enemy to cause casualties. This allowed subordinate commanders to actually exercise control of their troops during the battle. It was now possible — but risky — to move units even after they had engaged the enemy. But technological limitations still ruled what was possible: early firearms were inaccurate and very slow to load. You still needed masses of soldiers to provide enough firepower. The human voice is still the only way to convey orders, so unit size was practically bounded by the need to be large enough for maximum firepower, but small enough to be under command of a single leader.

As firearms improved, it became possible to get the same effective firepower from smaller groups of men, allowing finer control of the battle, but still limiting the range over which a unit of troops could be spread to the range of the human voice.

The arquebus was replaced by the musket, muskets by rifles, rifles by repeating rifles, but the range of the human voice hadn't changed at all. By the time of the American Civil War, a dozen men could be as militarily effective as a hundred men using older firearms . . . but the range of communication was still limited to the same as it had always been.

In the ACW, armies became larger and larger, but the ability to directly command soldiers remained limited, which meant that even though the weapons were becoming far more deadly, the number of soldiers in a given area remained high (higher density of soldiers means more targets for the enemy to hit). By WW1, armies were now hundreds of thousands of men, but command-and-control still had the same limits. Artillery had become orders of magnitude more effective and deadly . . . and the densely packed infantry paid the price. Machine guns, mortars, and grenades also gave greater benefit to the defender, so that every attack was guaranteed to be a bloodbath for the attacking troops — win or lose.

Until wireless communication became militarily practical, command and control of troops in the field had the same practical limit. Even in WW2, the physical properties of radio sets limited them to higher levels (in the French army of 1940, for example, only one radio was typically provided to a tank squadron, which seriously limited the ability of the squadron commander to use his tanks).

I've obviously skipped a lot of detail here, and there's probably lots of points that real historians would argue over, but I think the main point is valid. It's said not to attribute to malice what can be attributed to stupidity, but it's also true that one can easily attribute to stupidity what is really a historical limitation. This is one of those cases.

Update, 10 April: Darrell Markewitz commented:

One military aspect to the Civil War — fighting from semi-prepared field positions. With increased weapon accuracy, effective contact ranges had increased. Now simple positions like kneeling behind a rail fence (a situation unthinkable to commanders in the early 1800's) suddenly gave a huge advantage to the survival and effectiveness of those troops. Actually *aiming* your weapon was suddenly important, if not critical, and accuracy greatly increases in a crouch!

It would be interesting to have some idea how many of the individual soldiers were rural rather than urban — with the implication of increased skill in effective aiming.

Your point about command and control is well stated. If anything, I would almost expect REDUCED ability for the small unit commander as improvements in firearms created more and more raw noise — being generated by increased firing rates ('fire at will' over 'volley').

Is there a matching development of the 'squad' over the 'platoon' as the basic infantry unit?

I don't have any information directly addressing the development of smaller tactical units/sub-units. It seems to make sense that actual "command" duties would be delegated to non-coms as the relative firepower of individual soldiers increased, but I haven't seen anything directly stating that this is how it occurred.

F-22 orders to be reduced, F-35 increased in defense budget

Updating a post from back in February (for which Chris Taylor was kind enough to provide the core material), the plans will change for USAF fighter planes in the latest Defense plans. Defense Secretary Gates makes it official — he's hoping to cut off the F-22 production run after four more planes are built (making it 187 in total, well short of the USAF's plan for 300), but increasing F-35 orders to 2,443 (which implies a worldwide production run of around 4,500):

The budget rolled out Monday for Congress to consider looks remarkably different from the budget Gates authored while working for former President George W. Bush; so does the economy.

North Texas congressional delegation members said ending the F-22 program was a bad call that could hurt local employment.

"The world remains a dangerous place, and this vital program is integral to maintaining a strong national defense," said Rep. Michael Burgess, R-Lewisville. "Now is not the time to impose policy decisions that will only add more workers to the ranks of the unemployed."

Other congressional leaders applauded the Pentagon's new direction.

How to derail a train

A military film the OSS sponsored in 1944 shows that derailing a train isn't as easy as you'd think.

Compare how difficult it was to deliberately derail a train in 1944 with how readily the trains come off the tracks in 1974.

H/T to Ken Olson.

North Korea's next launch

DigitalGlobe, a satellite imaging firm, has released a photo of what appears to be the next North Korean rocket:

The Register says:

The image, released by commercial satellite Earth-imaging firm DigitalGlobe, shows the North Korean launch gantry at Musudan-ri, where the country's larger missiles and rockets are test fired. In commercial satellite images produced in recent months, the gantry has stood empty: but in the DigitalGlobe image — taken yesterday — a large multistage rocket is clearly visible.

[. . .]

Both the US and Japan have deployed warships equipped with SM-3 ballistic missile interceptors to the area. However, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has said there are no plans to interfere with a North Korean launch; this suggests that the warships will only shoot if the rocket's trajectory appears to offer a threat to Japan. North Korea has previously test-fired a shorter ranged missile across Japan into the Pacific.

Pat Condell on the anti-Anglian Regiment protest

PLAN plays silly buggers at sea

The Chinese navy (formally called the People’s Liberation Army Navy) appears to be stepping up their program of harassment:

The incident happened on Sunday as the USNS Impeccable was on routine operations in international waters 75 miles (120km) south of Hainan island, a US statement said.

The ships had "aggressively manoeuvred" around the Impeccable "in an apparent co-ordinated effort to harass the US ocean surveillance ship while it was conducting routine operations in international waters", according to the Pentagon.

[. . .]

When the Impeccable radioed requesting a safe path to leave the area, two Chinese vessels dropped pieces of wood in its path, forcing the US ship to make an emergency stop, the Pentagon said.

"The unprofessional manoeuvres by Chinese vessels violated the requirement under international law to operate with due regard for the rights and safety of other lawful users of the ocean," said Pentagon spokesman Marine Maj Stewart Upton.

Whole thing here.

Update: Longer CNN version of the incident here.

The 281.5-foot Impeccable is one of six surveillance ships that perform military survey operations, according to the Navy. It is an oceanographic ship that gathers underwater acoustic data, using sonar.

It has a maximum speed of 13 knots — or about 15 mph — but it travels 3 knots, or 3.5 mph, when towing its array of monitoring equipment. It carries a crew of 20 mariners, five technicians and as many as 20 Navy personnel.

The Chinese ships involved were a Navy intelligence collection ship, a Bureau of Maritime Fisheries Patrol Vessel, a State Oceanographic Administration patrol vessel and two small Chinese-flagged trawlers, the statement said.

USMC expands recruiting guidelines

The United States Marine Corps may have quietly changed their guidelines for recruiting to allow older recruits to join . . . or they've had some database normalization issues lately:

Still a couple of weeks away from retirement, Opal Blackwell Walker already has received another job offer.

The 79-year-old Crestview woman says the Marines has expressed interest.

Last Monday, recruiters from New Jersey sent a letter to Walker by Federal Express.

"I had to sign for it. It was sent priority overnight," she said.

The letter from the Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps Recruiting Command asked Walker if she thought she had the stuff to be a Marine.

"It says 'Dear Opal, Do you think you have what it takes to be a Marine? Are you prepared for one of the most demanding challenges you will ever face?' " said Walker.

"The fact is, if you have the fortitude, confidence and will to improve yourself, then the Marine Corps may be right for you," she continued.

"This just floored me," Walker said. "I thought, ‘well it's some kind of joke. Somebody's trying to play a joke on me.' "

The Crestview resident hasn't contacted local recruiters yet.

Elizabethan gunnery development

Contrary to what many of us had thought, the Elizabethan navy was surprisingly advanced in their armaments, according to this BBC report:

Tests on cannon recovered from an Elizabethan warship suggest it carried powerful cast iron guns, of uniform size, firing standard ammunition.

"This marked the beginning of a kind of mechanisation of war," says naval historian Professor Eric Grove of Salford University.

"The ship is now a gun platform in a way that it wasn't before."

Marine archaeologist Mensun Bound from Oxford University adds: "Elizabeth's navy created the first ever set of uniform cannon, capable of firing the same size shot in a deadly barrage.

"[Her] navy made a giant leap forward in the way men fought at sea, years ahead of England's enemies, and which was still being used to devastating effect by Nelson 200 years later."

Deadly artillery

Until now, it was thought Queen Elizabeth was using the same cannon technology as her father, Henry VIII. His flagship, the Mary Rose, was ultra-modern for its day.

However, it carried a bewildering variety of cannon — many designed for land warfare. They were all of different shapes and sizes, fired different shot at different rates with different killing power.

It is known that during Elizabeth's reign, English sailors and gunners became greatly feared. For example, at the beginning of Henry VIII's reign, the English fleet was forced to retreat from heavily armed French galleys.

By the time of Elizabeth, even Phillip of Spain was warning of the deadly English artillery. But no-one has ever been able to clearly show why this was.

H/T to Elizabeth for the link.

French WWI battleship discovered

The French battleship Danton, sunk by a German submarine in 1917, has been rediscovered off the coast of Sardinia:

The Danton, with many of its gun turrets still intact, is sitting upright in over 1,000m of water.

It was found by the Fugro geosciences company during a survey for a gas pipeline between Algeria and Italy.

The Danton, which sank with 296 sailors still onboard, lies 35km southwest of the island of Sardinia.

Naval historians record that the Danton's Captain Delage stood on the bridge with his officers and made no attempt to leave the ship as it went down.

[. . .]

The ship, named after the French revolutionary Georges Danton, was less than 10 years old at the time of its loss, but already outclassed by the newer HMS Dreadnought design being introduced by the British.

The 19,000-tonne, 150m-long vessel was carrying over 1,000 men when it was attacked by Germany's U-64 submarine at 1317 on 18 March, 1917. Patrol boats and a destroyer managed to save most of those onboard.

The Danton was travelling between Toulon and Corfu, where it was due to meet up with other vessels in the French fleet. Many of those making the trip were actually crewmembers for the other ships at Corfu.

F-22 versus F-35

In Gregg Easterbrook's "Bad Predictions" column (linked in the previous entry), he has a few paragraphs about the US Air Force and its F-22 and F-35 aircraft. Knowing almost nothing about modern combat aircraft, I thought it'd be both entertaining and informative to pass the link along to someone who had more than a few clues about the subject. Chris Taylor takes it from there:

All planes do the same job all the time
Or: They do if you're a "journalist".

ESPN's Gregg Easterbrook takes the time to lambaste the F-22 and its supporters in his annual TMQ Bad Predictions Review. Makes for a funny read, but it's absolutely, factually incorrect on almost everything it mentions about the embattled fighter.

. . . "Vega 31" is proof that even the vaunted F-117 could be tracked and bagged by modern-day air defence systems, yet we are supposed to believe that no other adversary the US will face off against in the next 30-40 years will bother to upgrade their air defences, because... well just because.

. . . The F-35 has benefited from F-22 development and production, notably in integration of mission systems and avionics. Lockheed Martin, prime contractor for both aircraft, is on record as trying to commonize the complex electronic systems aboard each aircraft [. . .] F-35 technologies are cheaper because they were first developed for the F-22. Innovations in the F-35 will be back-fitted to the F-22 fleet, as time and funding priorities allow. The Air Force does plan for its assets to be upgraded over the course of their lifetimes. That's why there are still Eisenhower-vintage KC-135s and Kennedy-vintage B-52s still flying today.

The F-35 is purpose-built to be a cheaper multi-role (but primarily ground attack) fighter, a replacement for the F-16 and F/A-18. I am sure it will be a stellar combat system, like its predecessors. But it is not built to tackle the same challenges as the F-22, any more than a Formula One car and a World Rally Car are built to tackle the same course. The F-35 is a good compromise between stealth, air dominance, ground attack and ELINT — but it will never be as capable in any single role as an aircraft excusively designed to fulfil that role. That is the tradeoff inherent in multi-role birds; always has been, always will be.

To be fair, the original article is not primarily about the US Air Force . . . this is a short segment in a column that's theoretically about football (but his other topics are often at least as interesting as the NFL-stuff).

Update, 7 April: Defense Secretary Gates makes it official — he's hoping to cut off the F-22 production run after four more planes are built (making it 187 in total, well short of the USAF's plan for 300), but increasing F-35 orders to 2,443 (which implies a worldwide production run of around 4,500). Details here.

The budget rolled out Monday for Congress to consider looks remarkably different from the budget Gates authored while working for former President George W. Bush; so does the economy.

North Texas congressional delegation members said ending the F-22 program was a bad call that could hurt local employment.

"The world remains a dangerous place, and this vital program is integral to maintaining a strong national defense," said Rep. Michael Burgess, R-Lewisville. "Now is not the time to impose policy decisions that will only add more workers to the ranks of the unemployed."

Other congressional leaders applauded the Pentagon's new direction.

The trials of a military musician

A friend of mine, formerly in the Canadian Forces, recounted some of the fun and games of being a musician in the military:

There were a couple of times where the powers that be wanted us to play outside in the cold. Like -15 to -20 C. So we took all took our horns with us /in/ the bus and made sure they were very warm. As soon as you get out into the sub-sub temps, the warm air in the horn condenses and the horn the freezes solid instantly. No more playing outside.

At those temperatures (much colder than it was in Washington for the inauguration) brass mouth pieces will suck the warmth out of your lips very quickly. Lots of us had mouthpieces with plastic rims. Much easier to play in the winter. Small brass instruments weren't too much of a problem in the cold cause the players' hands would be warm enough to keep the valves from freezing. "Hot Shots" or some other such hand warmers as hunters use could be wrapped around the valves to keep them from freezing as well. Trombone slides were brutal, because they act just like the cooling tubes in a radiator. We used to use rubbing alcohol generously to aid in keeping slides moving.

In the military we couldn't keep our mouthpieces in our pockets because there was no prescribed movement for "pocketing mouthpieces". Fiddling with pockets wasn't one of the approved stances (such as "attention" or "at ease").

We were doing a Change of Command Parade for the Airborne Regiment. Outside, in January at -20C. Horns were all frozen solid before we even got to the parade square. Even split a drum head or two.

When we arrived at the parade, we all had our greatcoats on and were all bundled up as toasty as can be. Then the boss saw that the Airborne weren't wearing greatcoats, so he had us take ours off. Of course, none of us were wearing warmer clothes under our uniforms. The Airborne were prepared, and of course, had several layers of warmer clothes under their dress uniforms. So our boss, who was not the most confident guy in the world, had us move off the parade square into the lobby of a barracks facing the parade square, and had us play from in there with the doors propped open. Not professional, and very embarrassing for the band. We were standing behind a row of Cougars when they did a "feu de joie" where they basically do a 21-gun salute with their cannons. Very loud in the frigid air. Concussion from the guns made the doors to the lobby close. The boss was outside the doors trying desperately to get into the building, but he was wearing his leather oxfords and slipping and sliding all over the place while the guns kept going off...

Ok, well, perhaps you had to be there. But seriously think about it. Freezing cold. The boss was flapping wildly around on the ice outside of the building...

Well, you get the idea.

The British Army under strain

A lengthy piece in the current Economist discusses the current state of the British army after lengthy deployments to both Iraq and Afghanistan:

[S]ince 2006 Britain has run two protracted and often intensely violent operations. Units routinely breach guidelines designed to give them time to minimise battle stress. The strain on soldiers, says General Sir Richard Dannatt, the army chief, is "unacceptable". Britain has struggled to maintain two long supply routes, dividing scarce helicopters, engineers and medics. Aircraft are wearing out faster than planned. "The British army is like an engine running without oil. It is still going, but it could seize up at any moment," argues Michael Clarke, director of the Royal United Services Institute, a think-tank.

These troubles are made worse by a chronic shortage of manpower. On October 1st the trained strength of the British armed forces was 173,270. This is 3.2% below the official requirement, but it understates large gaps in some areas — especially infantry units. Most battalions are 10-20% short of their required numbers; if those deemed unfit to deploy (due to, say, battle injuries) are factored out, they are as much as 42% under strength. So when battalions are preparing for war, they often regroup soldiers from their four scrawny companies into three, and then bolt on a fourth from another unit. To support current operations, the army has cut back training and lowered readiness; instead of having roughly a brigade at high readiness to deal with a crisis, sources say, there is "less than a battle-group" (a 1,500-strong formation).

This is disturbing: Canada, with a much smaller base to draw upon, is still able to maintain a battle-group in Afghanistan. Britain's other commitments are clearly overstretching what remains of the army's capabilities. Of course, that's not to say that Canadian troops can be maintained there indefinitely (and the government has been pretty clear that there will be a full withdrawal at the end of the current commitment).

Withdrawing from Iraq will relieve some of the strain. But operations in Afghanistan alone, involving some 8,000 British troops, arguably are already more demanding than the structure permits — and many expect Britain to send another battle-group to support the American reinforcement there. Generals want the army to grow. Yet it struggles to recruit, train and keep enough soldiers to fill its existing quota. An acute problem is the large "wastage" of recruits. Last year 38% of those in training either gave up or were thrown out — a bigger share than in the American army. Britain gets by in part thanks to foreigners: Commonwealth citizens (who made up more than 6% of soldiers in 2007), Irish recruits and Gurkhas. The top brass hopes the recession will encourage more to join and fewer to leave. But more soldiers cost more money, and that will be in even shorter supply in a downturn.

Plainly, Britain's military resources do not match its commitments. Three ex-generals have said that Britain's "unusable" nuclear weapons should be scrapped. But Sir Jock reckons that any money saved would almost certainly go back to the Treasury, not the conventional forces.

That's an even more disturbing thought: the nuclear arsenal is almost the only thing left keeping Britain at "the head table", internationally speaking. To scrap it (whether the savings go to conventional forces or not) really would mark the final decline of Britain from the most powerful nation on the planet 100 years ago to (at best) a middleweight, unable to project power beyond its own coastline.

This, however, is perhaps the worst long-term indicator:

On December 11th the government announced a delay of one or two years in building big new aircraft carriers, and the deferral of a new family of armoured vehicles. Even so, insiders say there is still a £3.7 billion ($5.2 billion) hole in the budget for military equipment over the next four years and procurement costs are still rising. The bill for the 20 biggest weapons projects is now £28 billion, or 12%, over budget.

The carriers are the last gasp of the Royal Navy: without them, there's almost nothing left. The government has already pared back the surface fleet to the point that even calling it a "fleet" is incredibly misleading. The carriers — should they ever be launched — can't operate without sufficient support, and based on current trends, that support will not be available either.

I should run a pool on when the British government announces a further delay, and then when they announce the cancellation altogether. On current trends, it's no longer an "if".

Damian's patrol experience, part 2

Damian "Babbling" Brooks records the next stage of the patrol he's tagging along with:

The Centre was bigger than I had imagined it to be. A big plot of mud, enclosed by a high concrete wall topped with razor-wire and cornered by guard towers, with two decent-sized buildings in the middle. One was an ANP building, and one was the administrative building for the local government. Both were enclosed by a shrapnel-pockmarked wall that had served to protect a much smaller compound before the new perimeter had been constructed. Short months ago, a suicide bomber had somehow made it past the ANP guarding the outer wall, and detonated near the inner gate. I was told that the blast shattered windows in the admin building. Looking up at the distance from the gate to the windows, I got a sense of just how powerful the explosion must have been. The self-immolating zealot/idiot didn't have nuts and bolts or ball-bearings or any such shrapnel-enhancing paraphernalia in his vest, but as you can see in the photos below, he still made quite the impression on the surrounding infrastructure.

A reminder: Damian is out-of-pocket for this trip, not being sponsored by a media organization. If you can afford to help out, please do hit the ChipIn tip jar at the site.

Summer, 1979

Well, it is true: you can run, but you can't hide. Paul Tomblin was a member of the Lorne Scots (Peel, Dufferin, and Halton Regiment) and took part in the summer training program. This wouldn't be too noteworthy, except he's posted incriminating information — including a photo — on his site.

Prizes will not be awarded for locating me in the front row of the photo (I'm the geek at the right end of the row).

Paul includes a key to the photo, identifying the troops, and there's a short "what happened to him/her" summary in the comments from Alex McKelvey.

The cryptic "loses breech blocks" note after my name needs a bit of explanation. I was the storesman for the course, responsible for issuing and receiving equipment the troops needed on a daily basis. One of the primary items of issue were the individual weapons (in those days, the venerable FN C1A1).

Because we were training in a suburban armoury, there was rarely any need for ammunition . . . and given that most of the troops were just starting to master the basics of drill (and the fine points of hating their drill instructors), they were already dangerous enough with unloaded weapons. For security, the weapons were stored separately from their breech blocks.

One fine morning, ten breech blocks turned up missing. As the course storesman, I had some 'splaining to do. To the best of my knowledge, they never did turn up, but it was sufficiently damning to derail what little military future I may have had. I wasn't formally disciplined for the loss (as I didn't have physical control over the building from which they went missing), but it became quickly apparent that I'd never need to worry about achieving higher rank or responsibility in the regiment. I lasted another four months before leaving the unit.

Damian joins a patrol to "Double K"

Damian "Babbling" Brooks posts about a patrol he was able to join, visiting a village with an unpronounceable name:

The format was reassuringly familiar, but with wall-sized maps on the table and walls, and a huge whiteboard filled with information, it was far more detailed than the Field Message Pad scrawlings I remembered, huddled around a red light on one knee. Of course, my memories were of a bunch of Officer Cadets training in the woods on exercise. This was The Real Fucking Thing, with experienced, hardened, professional soldiers who knew all too well the reality that they were headed into, so the plan was the best they could devise.

I found it a bit odd that the Sergeant was going to be leading a patrol with three Warrant Officers and a Major on it, but it was explained to me that Maj Vance White the PAffO was just there to babysit us journos (spit), WO Barry Bastow was CIMIC (Civil-Military Cooperation), and WO Eric Dagenais was SET (Specialist Engineering Team). It seems the third Warrant, WO Keith Dubé from the Force Protection Company (mostly from Golf Coy of 2RCR, but with a healthy sprinkling of reservists) was giving the Sergeant a leadership opportunity. That was quite the reminder for me of just how professional our military is: the CF never stops developing leaders, even in he middle of a war zone.

The mission had two main objectives. The first was to do a village assessment at Double K, a collection of mud walls and muddier fields whose unpronounceable name was, as you might expect, made up of two words that started with a K. While other forces may have entered the tiny hamlet before the CF arrived in Kandahar, this would be the first visit by Canadian troops. The second part of the mission would be to attend the weekly shura at Dand District Centre, a fortified administrative compound that served as the seat of government for the district. And then, of course, to get home in one piece — that's a given.

Damian, should you not remember, is my friend who is visiting Afghanistan (details reported here) on his own resources as an embedded blogger. If you can afford to help out with his expenses, please do hit the ChipIn jar . . .

Belated link to his first post from Kandahar:

I've got stacks of stuff to talk to you about. What I don't have is the time to write about it right now. I've resigned myself to the fact that I'll run out of time here long before I run out of stories to tell.

But one more thing I must mention before I sign off and hit the rack: I need to thank each and every one of you who have hit that "Chip In" button in the sidebar. I took a financial leap of faith taking this on, and your help is most appreciated.

The Royal Navy's historical love affair with grog

In a hand-wringing article about alcoholism in the RN, a potted history of the deeply intertwined history of the Navy and grog:

From as early as 1590, a sailor's daily rations included a gallon of beer — and the further from home, the stronger the brew.

As the Navy ventured even further afield, easier-to-preserve spirits such as brandy or arrack — an Arabic spirit — became a common substitute.

After 1655, when Jamaica was captured, rum became popular, and it was officially issued from 1731, when a half a pint was deemed equal to a gallon of beer.

Men were traditionally given a double ration after the strenuous task of repairing the mainbrace — a heavy part of a ship's rigging — and the order 'Splice the mainbrace' ultimately became a euphemism for any issue of extra drink.

Double rations were often served before battles.

In 1850, the Admiralty's Grog Committee found, unsurprisingly, that rum was linked to discipline problems, and in the following year decreased the ration to one eighth of a pint — still potent, given that the official proof of Navy rum was set at 94.5 per cent soon afterwards.

To combat drunkenness, the Admiralty also directed that no officer was to partake of liquor until the sun was over the fore yardarm.

Rum rations were abolished on July 31, 1970, known as 'Black Tot Day'.

Latest deployment to Afghanistan

Congratulations to my friend Damian "Babbling" Brooks, who will be the first embedded blogger with the Canadian Forces in Afghanistan:

This has been in the works for awhile. Years, in fact. Memos went up the chain of command, and back down again. Never any luck. And then, just recently, approval.

I'm going to Afghanistan.

I can't say when, but it will be shortly. I can't say exactly where, nor how long I'll be gone for. DND is understandably picky about that sort of thing. But if the creek don't rise, I'll be posting from over there at some point in the fairly near future, so watch this space.

This is a first for a Canadian blogger. A fairly narrow first, but a first nonetheless: bloggers have served, but not really written about it; American bloggers have embedded with Canadian troops; Canadian bloggers have gone over unilaterally. But to the best of my knowledge, a Canadian blogger has never before been invited on a CF-sponsored visit.

He'll be out-of-pocket a few thousand dollars (he doesn't work for a media firm that might pick up his expenses), so if you can afford it, please make a donation to help defray his costs.

The Norwegian Army's old computer demolition program

Not, perhaps, the safest range in Europe . . . but they clearly had a "blast" doing the job.

H/T to Dave Slater for the link.

RAF starts round three of inter-service war

It didn't work the first time, or even the second time, but the RAF is again trying to take over — or abolish — the Royal Navy's Fleet Air Arm:

The Sunday Times reported on the new RAF takeover push yesterday, which is apparently operating under the unofficial slogan "one nation, one air force". It appears that Air Marshals Glenn Torpy and Jock Stirrup, heads of the RAF and of all three services respectively, would like to shut down the joint RN/RAF Harrier jumpjet force, which would put an end to fixed-wing aviation in the Navy.

When the two planned new aircraft carriers finally arrive — it is an open secret that there are plans to delay the ships — their air groups would naturally be furnished by the RAF, which would by that point be the only British service set up to fly jets.

We've been here before, more than once.

In the dark days of the 1920s and 30s, against the background of the General Strike and the Jarrow March, the cry for economies placed the Fleet Air Arm under RAF ownership in just the sort of plan now developing. There was one nation, and one air force. As one would expect, the Fleet Air Arm was the Cinderella of the RAF, neglected in favour of the strategic deep bombers which the air service institutionally loved (and continues to love) more than anything else.

In 1939, on the eve of war, when the Royal Navy finally regained control of its own aircraft, it was left with pitifully weak air cover. The fleet's main strike plane — the famous Swordfish, aka "the Stringbag" — was an aged biplane, almost a flying antique. The service never acquired a proper carrier fighter through the whole war, as the pre-war RAF had seen no need for such a thing — indeed, had felt little enough need for landbased fighters in some quarters. The fact that carriers had served since World War I as bases for the RAF rather than as warships had led the navy to buy too few of them and to hope wistfully that big-gun battleships might retain their old dominance.

Given the current British government's economic straits, the third time might yet be the charm for the expansionist RAF, to the severe detriment of the Navy.

Also, linked from the above article, a site about the never-built Queen Elizabeth class of aircraft carriers.

Real AFV's learn from toy tanks

One of the biggest problems for soldiers riding inside armoured vehicles is that the quality of the ride is far from optimal: it's so physically tiring that two hours of riding can reduce the combat effectiveness of the troops dramatically. This is about to change:

Rattling along in the "washing-machine environment" of an armoured personnel-carrier (APC) on steel tracks can shake the soldiers inside to the point of exhaustion, according to Dan Goure, a military analyst at the Lexington Institute, a think-tank in Arlington, Virginia. And J.G. Brunbech, an APC expert at the Danish Army Material Command in Oksboel, observes that the crew's limbs are prone to becoming prickly and numb, and their hands get tired, because they must grip the vehicle's safety handles tightly. The vehicle itself suffers, too. The vibrations cause rapid wear and tear — not to mention outright damage, especially to electronics.

In the past, engineers have tried to reduce these vibrations by fixing rubber pads to the treads. The pads wear out quickly, however, and often get torn or even melted. But now tough, new rubbers have come to the rescue. Moreover, these rubbers are not being used just as pads. Instead, they are crafted into enormous rubber bands that replace the steel tracks completely. The Danes are converting their entire APC fleet to rubber tracks. This will increase the amount of time a soldier can safely spend on board from just one and a half hours to ten hours.

Details of how the new super-rubbers are made are still classified, but the results are not, and they are impressive. Rubber tracks weigh less than half as much as their steel counterparts. That, in turn, allows the weight of the suspension system to be reduced by 25%. All this can cut fuel consumption by as much as 30%, says TACOM, the American army's Tank-Automotive and Armaments Command.

There's also a Canadian tie-in:

As a result of all this, Soucy International of Drummondville, Quebec, one of the firms that makes the tracks, reports booming business. The armed forces of both Canada and Norway have converted almost all their APCs to tracks made by Soucy. Those of several other countries, including Britain, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Singapore and Sweden, are following suit or are in the advanced stages of testing the tracks. France plans to start tests next year. And although America has not sent APCs with rubber tracks into action, they form part of Future Combat Systems, the Department of Defence's main modernisation programme.

At the moment, rubber tracks can support only vehicles weighing less than 20 tonnes. They are not strong enough for 50-tonne battle tanks. But this is changing. The MGV, for example, will weigh 30 tonnes, and Canada recently began a trial of rubber tracks on the Mobile Tactical Vehicle Light (MTVL), a 22-tonne APC. If the MTVL passes muster it will join Canada's rubber-tracked 20-tonne M113 APCs in Afghanistan. Soucy, meanwhile, is developing rubber tracks for full-sized tanks. Warfare, it seems, is about to get quieter.

In memorium

A simple recognition of some of our family members who served in the First and Second World Wars:

The Great War

• Private William Penman, Scots Guards, died 1915 at Le Touret, age 25
  (Elizabeth's great uncle)
• Private David Buller, Highland Light Infantry, died 1915 at Loos, age 35
  (Elizabeth's great grandfather)
• Private Walter Porteous, Northumberland Fusiliers, died 1917 at Passchendaele, age 18
  (my great uncle)
• Corporal John Mulholland, Royal Tank Corps, died 1918 at Harbonnieres, age 24
  (Elizabeth's great uncle)

The Second World War

• Flying Officer Richard Porteous, RAF, survived the defeat in Malaya and lived through the war
  (my uncle)
• Able Seaman John Penman, RN, served in the "Destroyer Equipped Merchant" fleet on the Murmansk Run (and other convoy routes), lived through the war
  (Elizabeth's father)
• Private Archie Black (commissioned after the war and retired as a Major), Gordon Highlanders, captured at Singapore (aged 15) and survived a Japanese POW camp
  (Elizabeth's uncle)

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, MD (1872-1918)

Remembering Vimy Ridge

Tim Cook describes the preparation and the actual battle of Vimy Ridge:

Vimy is often portrayed as an artillery battle, with the guns shredding the enemy defences as the infantry simply advanced to victory. The counter-battery fire was equally devastating: Of the 89 enemy guns, only 17 remained active at the end of April 9. The artillery shellfire was, without a doubt, essential in allowing the infantry to advance. Indeed, as William Antliff of the No. 9 Canadian Field Ambulance put it, "The boys can't praise our barrage too much and every inch of the ground is chewed up." One Canadian infantry staff officer even went so far as to write in his diary, "It is no wonder the Germans couldn't hold us, for our artillery work had been terrible, everything smashed to pieces. We had broken their hearts first and there was no fight left in them."

While this was true along parts of the front, and more than 4,000 prisoners were captured, the battle the Canadians faced at the sharp end was in most sectors nothing short of brutal, and there was a lot of fight left in the defenders. Though success could not have been achieved without the guns, the firepower did not translate to victory on its own. German troops survived the barrage in every sector of the front. It fell to the Canadian infantry to pin the enemy down with machine-gun fire, snipe him with rifles, tear him apart with grenades, and spear him with bayonets.

The Canadians' intense training and pre-battle preparation had paid dividends. Driver Cyril Brown, from Port Hope, Ont., felt that the prebattle training had so well prepared him for the front that he felt he knew every trench and crater he might encounter, as well as "a lot of rats by their first names".

Co-incidentally, I just finished reading the author's At the Sharp End, the first of two volumes on the Canadian Expeditionary Force (the Canadian Corps) on the Western Front in 1914-1918. Highly recommended . . . I'm looking forward to Shock Troops, the second volume.

The Afghan balance sheet

Damian "Babbling" Brooks has an excellent post up at The Torch:

Kudos to Mike Blanchfield for breaking the number down to a figure Canadian taxpayers could digest — what it means to them. I assume that since he started breaking it down, he won't mind if I take it a bit further...

$1,500 per household over a decade works out to $150 per household per year. Assuming three people per household, that's $50 per Canadian per year. That works out to about 13.7¢ per Canadian per day to run the Afghan mission.

Just to give you a bit of perspective, World Vision — certainly a noble-minded and worthwhile charity — asks for about ten times that daily amount to sponsor a single child.

Damian goes beyond the costs and tallies up some benefits:

• more than 1,500 wells dug, 600 roadway culverts built, and more than 3,000 kms of canals rehabilitated
• humanitarian food assistance to more than half a million Afghans in 2007 alone
• more than 530 Community Development Councils elected in 9 districts, which facilitated more than 700 community projects completed, including improvements to transportation, water supply and sanitation, irrigation, power supply, education, health, and agriculture
• maternal health care professionals being trained in emergency obstetric care and monitoring
• approximately 350,000 children being vaccinated against polio
• measles and tetanus vaccination program reached more than 76,000 children and 63,000 women
• non-food kits (teapots, soap, gas stoves, towels, buckets, kitchen sets, blankets, floor mats, sweaters and health kits) supplied to 1,500 families
• more than 30,000 Afghans received functional literacy training and more than 4,000 received vocational training throughthe World Food Programme in 2007 alone
• More than 5,000 people (the majority of them women) have received literacy training through UNICEF

...and that's just in Kandahar province, folks.

Perhaps a name change is in order?

Instead of the dreadfully militaristic "Royal Navy", perhaps something less likely to distress those who look forward to a world free of British interference . . . maybe the "Royal Civil Service, Maritime Branch"? How about the "Royal We'll Stay Out Of Your Way Service"? Maybe the "Royal 'Don't Mind Us, We're Just Passing Through Your International Waterways' Service"?

Nick Packwood finds it all too absurd:

Directly related: Admirals now outnumber warships in what I will laughingly describe as the Royal Navy, 78% of the UK electorate (i.e. the British) believes Britain's Armed Forces are "dangerously over-stretched" while Daniel Hannan states the blindingly obvious (and it needs to be said): Rebuild the Navy or risk another Falklands war.

Blindingly obvious, that is, to everyone including not only our enemies at home and abroad but to the treasonous swine charged with the defence of the realm and whose only passion is the will to decline. One imagines some feeble Götterdämmerung on permanent loop at Downing Street and in all the smart places the left congregates, praying for an opportunity to surrender to the men with the scimitars and relishing the thought of their enemies — us — paying for our temerity to think we could delay the inevitable.

Slightly related . . . a report from back in April that the RN were enjoined from engaging the enemy for fear that any prisoners would be allowed to claim refugee status in Britain.

Britain's changing attitude toward their soldiers

This is just plain lunatic:

A hotel that refused a wounded soldier a room, forcing him to spend the night in his car, was backed into a "grovelling" apology yesterday after receiving a barrage of abusive phone calls.

Metro Hotel, in Woking, Surrey, had to call in the police as their lines were flooded with angry, abusive and threatening calls from members of the public.

The attack on the switchboards came after it emerged that Corporal Tomos Stringer, 24, had been told by hotel staff that it was company policy not to accept members of the Armed Forces as guests.

A soldier since the age of 16 and veteran of multiple tours in Northern Ireland, Iraq and Afghanistan, Cpl Stringer had travelled to Surrey to help with funeral preparations for a friend killed in action.

It may not have been the hotel chain's policy, but it probably accurately indicates the management's attitudes. Disgusting, just flat-out disgusting.

I will be very careful to avoid doing business with this hotel, should I ever need a hotel in Surrey.

At this rate . . .

. . . we'll be selling them our old ships:

The government is planning further big cuts to the Royal Navy after deciding that terrorism is the only serious threat to Britain. Annual accounts from the Ministry of Defence (MoD) show that it is to cut funding for new ships and equipment by more than 20%, from about £1.8 billion a year to a maximum of £1.4 billion.

The cuts come as the MoD tries to fill a £2 billion shortfall in its budget over the next three years. Overspending has left funding even for this year uncertain. They will force the navy to shrink its commitments around the globe, further limiting Britain's ability to play a role in world events at a time when the perceived threat from both Russia and China is increasing.

The Royal Navy has not sent any ships to join a Nato force in the Black Sea since the Georgia crisis began, in contrast to poorer countries such as Poland and Spain.

It really has been the death of a thousand cuts for the RN . . . from being the mightiest fleet to ever sail through the 19th century, to a "fleet" of literally coastal defence level (except for those two monster aircraft carriers on order). I thought that the slow death of the Royal Canadian Navy had been a disaster, but the fate of the Royal Navy appears to be even worse. Those two carriers may be the last straw . . . if the government is only willing to fund the ships themselves, but not the necessary escort ships and aircraft, they'll be the two largest white elephants ever launched.

The navy has secured its most important project — two giant aircraft carriers to replace three smaller ones. But the destroyer fleet will be cut from nine to six — half the number deemed necessary by the 1998 Strategic Defence Review.

Attack submarines will be reduced from 11 to seven and many of Britain's 17 frigates will go. When Labour came to power the fleet had 35 destroyers and frigates. The defence review said it needed 32. There are now only 26 — and that figure could drop to as low as 15. The MoD cannot say how many frigates it will buy but the government has already indicated that large numbers are not needed.

The military economics are stark, for naval operations. To maintain a ship at sea on a full-time basis actually requires three, because each ship can only stay fully combat-ready and seaworthy for about 2/3 of the time, and it takes time to get to and from where it is needed. So, for each vessel in service, there's another one in the dockyard being maintained, and a third one in harbour or in transit to or from its duty station. You can get by with just two ships, but you're shortening the effective life of each vessel and increasing the strain on the crew by maximizing deployment time and shorting major maintenance.

The rest of the sad story is here.

Camouflage moves into the digital age

A useful introduction to modern military camouflage at The Economist:

Even the most common form of camouflage — the coloured patterns printed onto combat fatigues — is being given a high-tech twist, as designers work with new software that incorporates neuroscientists' understanding of human vision. Pattern-generation software analyses a large number of photographs of a given theatre of operations. By crunching meteorological data on typical lighting and visibility conditions, combined with information about the colours and predominance of shapes visible in cities, fields and wilderness areas, the software proposes new, improved patterns. "It really does get technical," says Réjean Duchesneau, a lieutenant-colonel with NATO in Casteau, Belgium, who helped design a Canadian camouflage pattern called CADPAT.

Some camouflage designers, including those at America's Army Research Laboratory, also study the reflective and light-absorbing properties of materials common to an area, such as sand, cement and foliage. As well as being used by the camouflage-generation software, this information is used to manufacture fabric inks with the desired optical properties. Similar software optimises colours and patterns for vehicles and aircraft. The ability to customise camouflage for particular theatres has increased the use of temporary camouflage, which is painted on hardware before missions and washed off afterwards.

For decades most fatigues, now referred to as battledress uniforms, incorporated wiggly patterns of solid colours known as tiger stripes. But research in the field of "clutter metrics" — the study of how well observers locate and identify objects — has recently discredited tiger stripes. With the help of eye-tracking devices that follow iris movements to determine where subjects are looking, researchers have determined that fabrics with small squares of colour, known as pixels, are harder to see. These new pixel patterns are now worn by many Western armies, including those of the United States, Britain, Canada, France and Germany. Canada has improved its camouflage so much in recent years that to spot soldiers in some conditions, observers must be 40% closer than they would have to have been in 2000.

<Old grognard mode>In my day, we didn't have no fancy printed camo . . . we used natural materials to camouflage ourselves and our equipment.</Old grognard mode> — and we've have been shot to pieces at long range by today's troops out of positions we probably had no chance of seeing before we were in their range . . . Actually, aside from the Canadian Airborne Regiment's jump smocks, the combat uniform of my day was just drab green, with no disruptive pattern at all (our helmet covers were in a camo pattern, and — of course — we had white winter shells).

QotD: What is said . . . and what is reported

Yesterday in the British Press, much was made of the Soviet, sorry, Russian threat to nuke Poland if it hosted American, sorry, NATO defensive missile systems.

THREAT TO NUKE POLAND . . . well, really? What the Ruskies are saying is not "if you allow these systems on your soil, we will nuke you", but rather "in the event of a war between NATO and Russia, we will attack military targets in Poland, which is a NATO member".

Well no shit? This is hardly a revelation. Yet to read many of the article headlines you would think it was a clear and present danger, which it clearly ain't. Move along, not much to see here.

That said, clearly what the Russian general said is a crude attempt to intimidate Poland, albeit politically and not actually by making a threat of imminent action. Also predictably it has stiffened already deep hostility to Russia across Central Europe. Good, it is probably exactly what Europe needed.

Perry de Havilland, "Threats to nuke Poland . . . and crap journalism in action", Samizdata, 2008-08-17

Praiseworthy, indeed

As reported at Taylor & Company, Royal Navy Commander Jeremy Woods has finally been properly rewarded:

T&C readers will be pleased to know that on July 28th, 2008, the Royal Navy removed Commander Jeremy Woods, ex-Cornwall, from his post. Cdr. Woods previously achieved notoriety when 15 of his sailors and Royal Marines were kidnapped by Iranian gunboats while conducting MIO inspections. According to the Ministry, the commander will keep his rank but has been moved "to a post where his talents and experience can be used to best effect". Regrettably not at the end of a yardarm, though.

Commander Woods could have had a more historically appropriate reward, under only slightly different circumstances.

Putin's successful entrapment of Georgia

Cathy Young provides more background on the Russian-Georgian conflict:

. . . this is not a situation with two equally valid opposing views of reality, or with roughly balanced rights and wrongs on both sides. True, on a political level, there are no real good guys in this conflict; the only true innocents are the ordinary people caught in the crossfire. But there are bad guys — and, at least in the short term, they seem to be the likely winners.

Mikheil Saakashvili — the pro-Western, pro-U.S. president of Georgia who was swept to power in 2003 in one of the peaceful, grassroots "color revolutions" that so rattled the Kremlin — is no liberal hero. Since 2007, he has moved to squelch the opposition and shut down the independent media, depicting his critics as puppets of Moscow in much the same way Putin has depicted his opponents as hirelings of the West. Saakashvili's decision to send troops to take control of South Ossetia and shell its capital Tskhinvali, though undertaken in response to a series of Russian provocations, was not only a major strategic blunder but also an assault on an area heavily populated by civilians.

Russia's military response, which most likely inflicted further damage on the South Ossetian population while repelling Georgian troops, quickly turned into an all-out assault on Georgia itself — a clear-cut punitive strike against a recalcitrant former colony that has been a major irritant to the ruling clique in the Kremlin, and to Putin himself.

I'm still of the opinion that Georgia is less the direct target of Russia's overall policy than just being the unlucky subject of an object lesson to other former Soviet states (Ukraine, this one's for you). There's absolutely no doubt that Russia could easily crush Georgia's military forces and conquer the country. The Americans can offer nothing but token aid to Georgia and would be extremely foolhardy to go beyond the medical supplies already dispatched.

In the short term, Russia has almost certainly secured permanent eviction of the Georgians from Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and demonstrated that any attempt — military or diplomatic — to reverse the process will be met with immediate escalation beyond what Georgia can sustain.

As for Georgia's request to join NATO, Russia's immediate goal of proving NATO to be too far away to help (and too timorous to try) has been achieved. Ukraine's attention is being directed to the same lesson.

Georgia's mistakes

Michael Moynihan looks at how Georgia may have been trapped by their own mistakes:

The bumbling of Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili is a stunning sight to behold. This much seems clear: Putin and his surrogates in South Ossetia set a trap and the Georgians ambled into it, naively expecting his allies in the West to come to his rescue. And it is too early to tell just where the blame lies, though convincing arguments can be made for both camps. Georgia argues that it was responding to an attempted annexation of South Ossetia and consistent provocations from the Russian military; Russia claims it is merely defending the Russian passport holders of Ossetia from Georgia's all-out attack on Tshkhinvali, the regional capital. Both sides are engaged in heated, overblown rhetoric; both are making shocking and unverifiable claims. Georgia says that Russia is engaged in a campaign of "ethnic cleansing." Russian President Dmitri Medvedev told reporters that Georgia is engaged in "genocide." Both of these statements are to be treated with circumspection, of course, just as it is impossible to determine if the civilian casualty figures reported are accurate.

". . . all we asked for was six."

From today's Globe and Mail, what may be the unofficial death knell of the NATO alliance. This is sad:

So, Canada has worked out a way to provide our troops with medium-lift helicopters in southern Afghanistan: a one-year lease for six Russian-made helicopters that will cover us until we can purchase six used Chinooks from the U.S government next year. Total cost? More than $300-million.

This simple but telling example is, in my mind, the final nail in NATO's coffin.

The Atlantic Alliance was a successful bulwark against the Soviet Union from 1949 until the early 1990s and the end of the Cold War, but in today's more complex world, it's time for it to "rest in peace."

There are more than 3,000 medium-lift helicopters sitting safely on the ground far, far away from Afghanistan, at airbases located in NATO's 26 member countries. Three thousand, and Canada is stuck with providing helicopter support, not just for its own troops, but for all the other national contingents in Region South.

Lewis Mackenzie is probably right: if all of NATO's military couldn't scare up half a dozen helicopters for use in a NATO operation, the alliance is not just dead, but the corpse is starting to rot.

There is no doubt the Canadian Forces need medium-lift helicopters for any number of tasks at home and abroad. However, the responsibility to provide them in a NATO operational theatre — the alliance's first — is not Canada's. It's time to check around to see who our real friends are. Three thousand helicopters in NATO — and all we asked for was six. Go figure.

Russia versus Georgia? That's a hockey game, right?

James Lileks wonders at the lack of attention paid to the war that has broken out between Russia and Georgia:

The Georgian situation is complicated, granted, but you'd think someone would be planning a protest. After all, it's war. War is bad. Something must be done. Well, the World Socialists have thought long and deep and hard, and concluded the enemy is the United States:

Underlying the military confrontation is US imperialism's drive to isolate Russia and establish American hegemony over the energy resources of Central Asia and their transit routes through the Caucasus, utilizing the Saakashvili regime as its cat's paw. The Russian ruling elite, for its part, is seeking to reassert its control over a region that was ruled by Moscow for two centuries before the break-up of the USSR.

No protests, no marches in the street, then; Moscow has dibs.

Exactly. From the point of view of the folks who protest against every sneeze by the various military forces of the west, this isn't an issue of concern.

Russia gets a pass. People are scared of Russia. Besides, you have to consider this in the context of history's historical context. And if Russia reabsorbs Georgia, and takes control of its energy resources, well, it has less to do with resurgent fascistic opportunism or oil, and more to do with the rich, complicated history of the region that goes back to the time of Tsars and long beards and black-and-white photos. So! Nevermind. Next item on the agenda: Israel's threats to knock out the military equipment Russia sold to Iran. Let us craft a statement that uses "Danzig" and "blitzkrieg," but not in the same sentence. Draw out the implication over several paragraphs.

So what if it's a classic confrontation between a former superpower and a country with a population about the same size as the GTA, and a military that — just based on Russian forces in the immediate area — is outnumbered by more than 3:1.

Fighters and bombers and tanks, oh my!

Courtesy of "JtMc", a visit to the Planes of Fame Air Show in Chimo CA, including a demonstration by the California History Group. For those of you not excited by the mention of air exotica like TBm-3E, F4U, P-38, P-47, P-51, A6M, and D3A, might find the ground-pounding toys of more interest, like M4 Sherman, Pzkfw 38(t) Hetzer, Sd.Kfz.251, and Type 95 Ha-Go.

Unlike a lot of photoblog entries, this one has something for just about every WWII fan, except you naval folks who believe a gun isn't a gun until it's over 15" . . .

A cross-party defence caucus?

J.L. Granatstein calls for a new approach to parliament's consideration of Canadian defence policies:

Another way to improve traffic on the intersection between politics and the military is to have more MPs acquire the expertise they need to comment intelligently on defence.

To be blunt, the NDP's defence critic, Dawn Black, and the Liberal's former critic, Denis Coderre, wouldn't know an entrenching tool from a LAV III. Such ignorance helps no one and no party.

But what if there were an informal "defence caucus" that brought together Members from all parties on a regular basis to hear from knowledgeable military figures, scholars, and industrialists?

The Bloc's Claude Bachand from Saint-Jean knows his stuff; so too do the NDP's Bill Blaikie from Manitoba, unfortunately not running again, and Peter Stoffer from Nova Scotia. Add in Senators Colin Kenny and Hugh Segal and MPs from ridings with large military bases or major defence industries, and it would be possible over time to create a group of knowledgeable parliamentarians who could improve defence expertise in the House of Commons and Senate in a fashion that can benefit all Canadians and the Canadian Forces.

Given that the Canadian Forces are a significant part of the government's budget, they seem to get little understanding and less consideration from MPs than just about any other area of government. This idea might help to improve the situation for parliament and for the CF. It's certainly better than what we have now.

H/T to The Torch.

The Economist profiles General Rick Hillier

An unexpected combination of publication and choice of subject, here. Canada barely ever registers on The Economist's radar, and the selection of Canada's former Chief of the Defence Staff (CDS) is highly unusual in and of itself:

"We are not the public service of Canada," General Rick Hillier once told journalists. "We are the Canadian Forces and our job is to be able to kill people." Such a robust view of military power was unusual when General Hillier was appointed chief of the defence staff. In the three years he spent in the post before stepping down earlier this month, he almost succeeded in making it mainstream.

Canadians have often seemed more comfortable with an army that puts up tents and dishes out aid than with one that actually shoots people. The reasons for this are partly historical: the Liberal Party, which ruled Canada for most of the second half of the 20th century, drew much of its support from Quebec, where a dislike of military adventures dates back to the days of the British empire. Defence spending was frozen in the 1970s and 1980s, and then cut back in the 1990s.

Bucking this history, Canada announced in 2005 that it would assume NATO responsibility for providing security in Afghanistan’s Kandahar province and sent 2,000 soldiers to do the job. The task of selling the deployment of these troops fell to the plain-speaking general. The Taliban and Osama bin Laden were, he explained, "detestable murderers and scumbags" who should be hunted down.

General Hillier was an extremely effective communicator, and in a most unusual way (for a Canadian soldier): he talked like a soldier. Most of his predecessors had absorbed the language of bureaucracy by the time they were appointed as the CDS, and their public statements were (literally) indistinguishable from those of civil servants — woolly, non-commital, bland, boring. Hillier was so obviously not cut from the same cloth as the bureaucrats and politicians that it was a source of constant surprise that he was appointed at all, and then that he was able to not only stay in the job, but that he put on such a bang-up performance.

It's hard not to say that he was the first "rock star" Canadian general. He'll be a very difficult act to follow.

Don't keep "Don't Ask, Don't Tell"

Mike Riggs reports from the "DA,DT" hearing:

The hearing went better than I expected, insofar as the Democratic witnesses, Navy Capt. Joan Darrah, retired Army Maj. Gen. Vance Coleman, and Marine Staff Serg. Eric Alva utterly outspoke Army Sgt. Maj. Brian Jones and Elaine Donnelly of the Center for Military Readiness, both of whom testitified (poorly, and in some places, damn near incoherently) on behalf of Republicans.

Donnelly managed, somehow, to answer every question from both the right and the left with, "Sexual urges would prevent unit cohesion." Jones, when asked whether or not he thought homoesexuality was immoral, replied, "No, but if I'm 6'8" and I want to be a fighter pilot, I can't." Both think a gay-friendly military would bring on the end of the world.

As this hearing evidenced, the social conservative arguments for preserving DADT, letting the Department of Defense write its own policy, or banning gay service, range from paper-thin to non-existent. The only obstacle I see to passage of the Military Readiness Enhancement Act — the bill that would repeal DADT and implement a non-discrimination policy — is good ole' fashion homophobia.

As a recruiting policy, DADT is just plain dumb. As a "retention" policy, DADT is worse: gay and lesbian soldiers are pretty clearly determined to serve — in spite of the widespread anti-gay mentality pervasive in some units — and are being dismissed from the service for being honest. This, at a time when all branches of the US armed forces are struggling to maintain troop levels. It's a stupid, dishonest policy and should be discarded ASAP.

QotD: Buh-bye!

American army deserter Robin Long could be headed home as early as today after his bid to delay his deportation order was rejected yesterday by [. . .] Canada's Federal Court. In her ruling, Justice Anne Mactavish said Mr. Long did not provide clear and convincing evidence that he will suffer irreparable harm if he is deported. Mr. Long, 25, is the first of an estimated 200 American army deserters who have sought refuge in Canada to be deported. Bob Ages, chairman of the Vancouver chapter of War Resisters Support Campaign, said he fears the decision will set a new precedent. Mr. Ages said he suspects the deportation is in reaction to his group's recent successes — last week, Canadian courts granted deserter Corey Glass a stay of removal and, in a separate case, ordered the Immigration and Refugee Board to reconsider the failed refugee claim of Joshua Key. Mr. Long, who had been living in Nelson, B.C., since moving from Ontario, needed the Federal Court to grant a stay of his deportation order in order to have his appeal heard.

Uncredited report in the The Ottawa Citizen, 2008-07-15

Further fallout from Guantanamo

Steve Chapman points out that the "sky is falling" rhetoric about the Guantanamo inmates is seriously overdone:

"Islamic terrorists have constitutional rights," lamented one conservative blog when the Supreme Court said Guantanamo inmates can challenge their detention in court. "These are enemy combatants," railed John McCain. The court, charged former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy of National Review, sided with foreigners "whose only connection with our body politic is their bloody jihad against Americans."

The operating assumption here is that the prisoners are terrorists who were captured while fighting a vicious war against the United States. But can the critics be sure? All they really know about the Guantanamo detainees is that they are Guantanamo detainees. To conclude that they are all bloodthirsty jihadists requires believing that the U.S. government is infallible.

But how sensible is that approach? Judging from a little-noticed federal appeals court decision that came down after the Supreme Court ruling, not very.

It's mighty convenient to have a place where normal laws don't run and where you can dump prisoners, suspects, and those unfortunates who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Mere convenience is no where near enough justification for ignoring the legal framework under which you're supposed to operate . . . and that's exactly what the US military has been doing right up until the recent Supreme Court decision.

Even if the highest public estimates are correct (that is, that 73% of the detainees represent a real threat) the rest — against whom the government may have no more than a verbal assurance from an Afghan warlord that they are enemies — should never have been detained and should be set free as soon as possible. Basic western standards of justice demand no less

"Don't Ask" policy in US military

According to this article, women are discharged from the military at a disproportionally high rate:

Lesbians could very well outnumber gay men in the military, according to Gary Gates, a senior research fellow at the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.

"The percentage of lesbians that serve in the military is really quite high," Gates said. "It's possible that there are more lesbians than gay men serving in the military."

Gates' interpretation could explain why such a disproportionate percentage of servicewomen relative to men are discharged under the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy.

It's truly mind-boggling that the US military can still justify this stupid policy: being gay isn't a crime, and is becoming "normal" across the country, yet it still counts as a reason to drum someone out of the military. This, at a time when the armed forces are finding their demands for personnel outstripping the supply.

A gay man or a lesbian woman is no more a threat to the efficient functioning of a military unit than anyone else — all things being equal — and may well be more motivated to succeed because they've volunteered to serve in spite of the idiotic "Don't ask, don't tell" policy.

Doubling the navy: nice idea, never happen

J. L. Granatstein outlines the challenges facing the Canadian Forces at sea, and calls for a significant increase in navy shipping:

To get it right this time, the government needs to consider the future strategic environment. Trade has shifted massively from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans; already the volume in the Pacific is 3.5 times that of the Atlantic. There are rising naval powers on the Pacific — Russia, China, India, Japan — and there are rapidly growing numbers of submarines operated there by a number of nations, not all friendly.

To protect our national interests, Canada needs a bigger navy than its present 30-ship fleet and 8,000 sailors. Senators Hugh Segel and Colin Kenny, one a Conservative, the other a Liberal, have recently called for Canada to have a 60-ship navy. They are surely correct. The nation must have a strong presence in the Pacific (and an expanded base at Esquimalt, B. C.) and the Atlantic. Twelve to 15 of the planned Surface Combatant Ships on each coast would meet the need for 2025 and beyond. Then Canada needs a credible naval and Coast Guard presence in the melting Arctic where the international scramble for resources is likely to be fierce and where the Northwest Passage has the potential to alter traditional trade routes and pose huge environmental and security challenges. The Conservative government's Canada First policy is the right one, but it needs more ships and more sailors to adequately protect the homeland.

But Canada First also means protecting national interests abroad. Our sailors must be able to transport and support Canadian troops operating overseas, sometimes perhaps on a hostile shore. The presently planned three Joint Support Ships can't do this; four might be able to manage, but six would be better, along with what General Rick Hillier called "a big honking ship" that could transport four to six helicopters and a battalion-sized expeditionary force. Such ships can also do humanitarian work — in tsunami-hit Indonesia, for example — that we can scarcely tackle today.

While a strong case can be made (and, above, has), the government won't go there. Even if the current government was enjoying a majority in the house, they wouldn't spend their political capital on military equipment. For all that the Canadian Forces have much higher visibility and consequently much higher public respect, they're still considered a luxury, not a necessity. Canadians may talk about rebuilding the CF's equipment inventory, but they're not willing to forego social spending or bear higher taxes in order to do so. Nobody will cast their vote because they favour adding ships to the navy, but many might withhold their votes on the same issue.

Canadians still fondly imagine that they inhabit a world where "soft power" is capable of doing things without the implicit backing of "hard power". Where UN resolutions matter, and the bad guys back down before the concentrated glower of the UN General Assembly. It's not likely they'll willingly leave that pleasant dream world and come back to planet Earth.

Canadian military penury is exactly like the weather . . . people can talk about it all day, but nobody will (or can) do anything about it.

Habeus too important to be set aside

Steve Chapman provides more information on the recent US Supreme Court decision on the habeus corpus rights of Guantanamo detainees:

From the beginning of the war on terror, the Bush administration has had two central objectives. The first is protecting the nation against its enemies. The second is asserting the president's near-absolute authority to wage this war. That approach involved a crucial error: It couldn't advance the second goal without undermining the first.

That's because ours is not a system designed to unleash the power of the government. It's a system designed to control it. By conceiving the president as a virtual monarch in national security matters, George W. Bush and his subordinates have provoked active resistance from both Congress and the courts — which might have been avoided with a more cooperative and pragmatic approach.

The latest illustration came Thursday, when the Supreme Court ruled by a 5-4 vote that the administration overstepped lawful bounds in its treatment of the detainees at Guantanamo. For the first time, the justices said foreign enemy combatants held outside our borders may appeal to the federal courts.

This is a welcome development because it upholds certain basic rights and safeguards that are due even to suspected terrorists. It's a worrisome development, on the other hand, because it requires the judiciary to assume grave responsibilities in a realm where it has no special competence.

The ideal is not for the courts to step into these matters. The ideal is for the elected branches to act with enough respect for constitutional values that the courts would see no need to step in.

Update: Radley Balko has an eye-opener:

So the really alarming thing about this is not that John McCain objects to the Supreme Court's decision in Boumediene. It’s not even that he breathlessly (and rather shamefully) lumps the decision in with cases like Dred Scott or Plessy v. Ferguson.

No, the truly frightening thing about McCain's response to Boumediene is that the Republican nominee for president doesn’t know what "habeas corpus" means.

Good God, man.

228-year-old warship discovered at the bottom of Lake Ontario

An amazing underwater discovery has been announced: HMS Ontario:

A British warship that sank in Lake Ontario 228 years ago during the War of Independence has been found almost intact by two shipwreck hunters.

"This is the Holy Grail of Great Lakes wrecks," says Jim Kennard who, with his partner Dan Scoville, discovered the 22-gun brig-sloop HMS Ontario in deep water "somewhere" between Niagara and Rochester. "There's nothing more significant than this one."

"It's the oldest confirmed shipwreck in the lakes," Scoville adds. "And very few warships went down. The Ontario is so complete, the two masts are in place and there's still glass in some of its windows."

The ship was a few hours into a voyage from Fort Niagara on Oct. 31, 1780, when it foundered in a sudden, violent storm. There were no survivors. Built at Carleton Island, where Lake Ontario meets the St. Lawrence, it was launched the previous May and may never have fired its guns in anger. It spent the summer ferrying troops and supplies around the lake. Its captain, James Andrews, was also commodore of the lake squadron of ships.

The ship appears to be in amazingly good shape, but will probably be designated as a war grave site, as up to 120 people died when the ship went down (88 including the crew and known passengers, but there are letters from Fort Niagara indicating that there were 30 or more American prisoners on board as well). This would mean it is unlikely that the ship would ever be raised, regardless of the amazingly good condition of the hull.

Update: More historical details and a selection of photos are online at Shipwreck World.

A victory for military bloggers

In a surprisingly liberal development, the US Army is now encouraging serving troops to write blogs:

Lt. Gen. William Caldwell, who heads the Combined Arms Center [CAC] and Ft. Leavenworth, told his soldiers in a recent memo that "faculty and students will begin blogging as part of their curriculum and writing requirements both within the .mil and public environments. In addition CAC subordinate organizations will begin to engage in the blogosphere in an effort to communicate the myriad of activities that CAC is accomplishing and help assist telling the Army's story to a wide and diverse audience."

Lt. Gen. Caldwell, the former commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, is a blogger himself, contributing to Small Wars Journal. He made waves in January when he wrote that "we must encourage our Soldiers to . . . get onto blogs and to send their YouTube videos to their friends and family."

On the downside, of course, this is still not official policy for the entire army.

Canadian Military WHATegy?

Paul Wells has a bit of fun at the Conservative government's expense:

We tease Le Devoir because we love it. You had to read that paper's Alec Castonguay this morning to begin to understand the true extent of the Harper government's clapped-together, carefully-obscured, clumsily-exercised plan to rebuild the Roman legions on Canadian soil. I refer, of course, to the 20-year, $30-billion defence plan, which the Globe is calling a $50-billion defence plan and which Le Devoir explains — I believe credibly — is actually a $96-billion defence plan.

"The 'Canada First' strategy of the Department of National Defence calls for new spending of $96 billion over 20 years, which is three times what Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced on Monday in Halifax. The five largest military procurement projects alone will incur costs reaching $45 to $50 billion," Alec writes.

Note the Globe's peculiar choice this morning to total only capital costs in their accounting of a plan that will also include increases to operating budgets. It's like reporting that your housing costs for the next 20 years will include kitchen renovations but not mortgage payments or rent. But then, I wasn't at the briefing yesterday and I'm willing to believe it was simply incomprehensible. Because as far as anyone can tell, that's the Harper government's strategy.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but weren't the nice folks in Toryland all keen to address the many failings of previous Liberal governments, especially the multi-decade neglect to which the Canadian Forces had been subjected? Why, then, after two years in office, has the current Conservative government not come up with something a bit more finished than a verbal outline of a spending plan?

Is it me? Am I expecting too much, too soon?

QotD: Invading Burma?

Now in all probability if the "good old U.S. military" actually does invade Burma it will incinerate every vestige of armed opposition in its path. Burmese Army units will stand about as much chance as ants before a kid's homemade flamethrower. And then all of a sudden the assumptions will collapse in reverse order. People are going to say, 'we didn't realize invasions meant killing people'; 'we didn't realize we wouldn't have allies'; and finally 'we did not think it would be so expensive'. And then we will hear that classic line: "I was for it before I was against it."

"Wretchard", " Invasion Burma", The Belmont Club, 2008-05-10

Honouring the fallen

For most Canadians, most of the time, the kind of in-your-face, flag-waving displays of patriotism common to American patriotic events are seen as being rather uncouth. That is why these patriotic displays are so much more meaningful.

From the air base in Trenton, Ontario, the funeral cortege passes along motorways lined with scores of people holding Canadian flags, some with a hand on their heart, carrying banners emblazoned with the words "we support our troops."

All 50 of the motorway bridges on the journey into Toronto were said to have been packed with the general public.

As the cortege passes fire engines and police cars, officers and emergency workers solemnly salute as children wave flags.

But the solemn gesture is a far cry from Britain, where Our Boys are turned away from public places and told not to wear their uniforms following sickening insults.

The saddest drive, and the witnesses

There is a post at The Torch you really should read.

QotD: The Afghan mission

[. . .] We recognize the conflict in Afghanistan as a liberation struggle, waged by the Afghan people and their allies, against oppression, against obscurantism, illiteracy, and the most brutal forms of misogyny. It is a fight for democracy, and for peace, order, and good government. It is also a struggle waged by the sovereign Government of Afghanistan, a member state of the United Nations, against illegal armed groups that seek to overturn the democratic will of the Afghan people.

In Afghanistan, the great global struggle for the recognition and protection of basic human rights — universal rights — is being waged with a particular and necessary ferocity. We cannot and must not retreat from that struggle.

The objective of extending and securing the sovereignty of the Government of Afghanistan to all corners of that great country cannot be achieved without a robust international military presence. Canada is one the richest countries on earth, and as such we have absolutely no excuse to shirk from our duty to make a proper and effective contribution to that military engagement.

Canada-Afghanistan Solidarity Committee, "Submission to the Independent Panel on Canada's Future Role in Afghanistan", 2007-11-28

You want to invade where? Are you mad?

Unlike a lot of bloggers, I don't spend too much time taking potshots at the current leader of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition . . . but this just cries out for comment. Stephane Dion has been pushing for a definite end to Canada's commitment to the mission in Afghanistan, but now is talking about somehow invading a nuclear-armed nation to make that mission more likely to succeed:

Any attempt to counter terrorists war-torn Afghanistan will not succeed without an intervention in neighbouring Pakistan, Liberal Leader Stephane Dion said Wednesday.

Mr. Dion hinted NATO could take action in Pakistan, which has a porous border with Afghanistan, if the Pakistani government doesn't move to track terrorists.

"We are going to have to discuss that very actively if they (the Pakistanis) are not able to deal with it on their own. We could consider that option with the NATO forces in order to help Pakistan help us pacify Afghanistan," said Mr. Dion in Quebec City, commenting after his two-day trip to Afghanistan last weekend. "As long as we don't solve the problem in Pakistan, I don't see how we can solve it in Afghanistan."

That's not just ill-advised . . . that's absolutely batshit-crazy.

Sea Kings: "You can only stretch that rubber band so far"

To no great surprise, given the sordid history of the entire saga of the Sea King replacement helicopters, there's another hitch in delivery:

The delivery of new military helicopters to replace Canada's aging fleet of Sea Kings will likely be delayed by 30 months and Ottawa is threatening to deeply penalize the U.S. contractor "thousands of dollars" for each day the choppers are late, The Canadian Press has learned.

A senior government source, speaking on background, said late Wednesday that department officials told Public Works Minister Michael Fortier on Monday that Sikorsky Aircraft Corp. would be late with the long-awaited delivery of new CH-148 Cyclones.

The Cyclones were scheduled for delivery later this year, and the delay means the breakdown-prone Sea King fleet will have to be maintained until the new helicopters arrive.

For Canadian air crew, it's not at all surprising to find that the senior member of the crew is younger than the airframe of the chopper they're flying, but at this rate, it'll become common for the airframe to be older than the crew's parents, too.

For all the great technology that went into the helicopters (and they were top-of-the-line birds when we first go them), there is a definite limit to how long they can be safely kept operational. Most other nations flying Sea Kings decided that they'd passed that point about a decade ago. Our military flight crews deserve far better than that from Canada.

QotD: Final wishes

I do ask (not that I'm in a position to enforce this) that no one try to use my death to further their political purposes. I went to Iraq and did what I did for my reasons, not yours. My life isn't a chit to be used to bludgeon people to silence on either side. If you think the U.S. should stay in Iraq, don't drag me into it by claiming that somehow my death demands us staying in Iraq. If you think the U.S. ought to get out tomorrow, don't cite my name as an example of someone's life who was wasted by our mission in Iraq. I have my own opinions about what we should do about Iraq, but since I'm not around to expound on them I'd prefer others not try and use me as some kind of moral capital to support a position I probably didn't support. Further, this is tough enough on my family without their having to see my picture being used in some rally or my name being cited for some political purpose. You can fight political battles without hurting my family, and I'd prefer that you did so.

On a similar note, while you're free to think whatever you like about my life and death, if you think I wasted my life, I'll tell you you're wrong. We're all going to die of something. I died doing a job I loved. When your time comes, I hope you are as fortunate as I was.

Andrew Olmstead, posted on his blog by "hilzoy" after his death, "Final Post", Andrew Olmstead, 2008-01-04

QotD: The shame of the British army

Having belatedly agreed to pay Gurkhas the same pension benefits as any other men taking the Queen's shilling, the Ministry of Defence has decided to start firing Gurkhas three years short of earning their pension entitlements. I have often been asked why I left England to return to Canada and there are several answers (all true) I usually give. But the real reason was exposure to exactly this sort of short con as government. Everyone responsible for this shitty little trick at the Ministry of Defence should be subject to criminal charges for fraud, the Minister should be tarred and feathered and every free Englishman should hang his head in shame.

This is an England not worth fighting for. The Gurkhas deserve better; we do not deserve them.

Nick Packwood, "For Shame", Ghost of a Flea, 2007-12-18

QotD: Military Kangaroo Justice

No American would accept the proposition that one of our citizens, having been cleared of wrongdoing by American courts, could be abducted by a foreign power and imprisoned for years, only to have his fate determined by a kangaroo court that flouted the most elementary procedural rights. The Supreme Court should not accept it from our government either. If a legitimate hearing finds that Boumediene and his fellow detainees are guilty of aiding America's enemies, so be it. But we should not be satisfied to leave them to languish until the military decides whether the witches will float.

Julian Sanchez, "Restoring Habeas: Why old 'enemy combatmant' rules can't apply to a global battlefield.", Reason Online, 2007-12-12

Paging Keith Laumer

According to this report, we are getting close to the science fiction world of Keith Laumer (who wrote the Bolo series of books):

A certain amount of the award will go toward significantly improving the Crusher, a 6.5-ton unmanned support vehicle Carnegie engineers developed in 2006 in conjunction with DARPA. Since its introduction, the Crusher has demonstrated unparalleled toughness and mobility during extensive field trials in extremely rugged terrain, according to Carnegie Mellon.

The next generation Autonomous Platform Demonstrator (APD) ill make use of the latest suspension, vehicle frame, and hybrid-electric drive technologies to improve upon its predecessor's performance. Enhanced mobility capabilities will push the envelope for autonomous and semi-autonomous operation, the engineers said. The engineers will develop a comprehensive control architecture that makes use of hardware and software components as well.

Ultimately unmanned ground vehicles would be outfitted with anti-tank or anti-aircraft missiles and anti-personnel weapons to make them lethal. Part of the new award budget is also slated to help the university prove that autonomous ground vehicles are feasible in future combat situations.

Of course, there are always concerns about putting the decision-making power into the "hands" of self-directed machines. The worry is well founded: just think about how you have to struggle with Microsoft Word sometimes . . .

On the other hand, if they develop a model armed with Tasers, the RCMP may need to start worrying about their long-term future.

RN to re-learn skills they pioneered

By way of a post at Ghost of a Flea, some interesting information on the Royal Navy's need to learn how to operate aircraft carriers again:

Because the ship no longer operates with a dedicated air wing — Britain’s joint Royal-Navy-Royal Air Force Harrier force has shrunk, and four squadrons are fully committed to operations in Afghanistan — the head of the Royal Navy asked the commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps for help.

After months of elaborate planning and a few days of high-tempo carrier-qualification ops, 16 U.S. Marine AV-8B Harriers and 200 support Marines settled aboard Illustrious, the largest Marine-aviation detachment ever to fly from a foreign warship.

The Harriers joined two Navy search-and-rescue and two airborne surveillance and control Sea King helicopters, and together the two-nation air wing set off on high-tempo air operations to test men and procedures at a record-setting pace.

Illustrious also became the first foreign warship to welcome aboard the Marines' newest aircraft, the V-22 Osprey. The landings demonstrated the feasibility of operating the 23-ton tiltrotor, but also pointed up the difficulty of flying an aircraft with an 84-foot rotorspan from a small deck. That shouldn't be a problem on the new carriers, whose 4-acre flight decks are more than twice the size of Illustrious' and only half an acre smaller than those on America's Nimitz-class supercarriers.

The sad note in the article is the information that the RN no longer has enough Harriers of its own to fully arm the two remaining carriers in the fleet (although at least in part because of operational demands), but the inter-operability aspects are quite interesting.

Update: Links are working now. Thanks to Jon for pointing out that I'd been an idiot and neglected to insert them properly the first time around.

Captain Blackadder's real-life inspiration?

An article at The Register talks about the recently published wartime memoirs of Captain Alexander Stewart, of the Cameronians:

"I am very much annoyed by memos sent round from Headquarters that come in at all hours of the day and night; they stop me getting a full night's rest and some of them are very silly and quite unnecessary.

"When I am very tired and just getting off to sleep with cold feet, in comes an orderly with a chit asking how many pairs of socks my company had a week ago; I reply 141 and a half. I then go to sleep; back comes a memo: 'please explain at once how you come to be deficient of one sock'. I reply 'man lost his leg'. That's how we make the Huns sit up."

Stewart's grimly black humour amid the carnage of WWI forms the highlight of his newly-published diary which lay forgotten until his grandson Jaime Cameron Stewart decided to make the book available online. He writes: "Ninety years ago my grandfather wrote a very personal and graphic account of his time on the Somme in the Great War. He typed three copies and called it The Experiences of a Very Unimportant Officer in France and Flanders during 1916 - 1917.

"Until now it has only been read by one or two members of my family and close friends. But now, as his grandson, I would like to share this amazing piece of personal history of his time in the trenches as an officer serving with the Scottish regiment The Cameronians. This account brings to life the reality and horror of what happened to him in those war-torn fields and the loss of life at Mametz Wood.

I hope you will find it equally fascinating."

I rather hope the book is eventually published in hardcopy, but it's currently available for download for £9.95. Five percent of the purchase price goes to the Royal British Legion's Poppy Appeal.

Remembrance Day

National Steel Car has a very well-done, very respectful, and very appropriate Remembrance Day clip. (Enter the main site, then click the "In Memoriam" link and the Remembrance Day, 2007 links.

Well done, NSC!

Update: John Donovan posts his recognition of Canada's military heritage.

In memoriam

A simple recognition of some of our family members who served in the First and Second World Wars:

The Great War

• Private William Penman, Scots Guards, died 1915 at Le Touret, age 25
  (Elizabeth's great uncle)
• Private David Buller, Highland Light Infantry, died 1915 at Loos, age 35
  (Elizabeth's great grandfather)
• Private Walter Porteous, Northumberland Fusiliers, died 1917 at Passchendaele, age 18
  (my great uncle)
• Corporal John Mulholland, Royal Tank Corps, died 1918 at Harbonnieres, age 24
  (Elizabeth's great uncle)

The Second World War

• Flying Officer Richard Porteous, RAF, survived the defeat in Malaya and lived through the war
  (my uncle)
• Able Seaman John Penman, RN, served in the "Destroyer Equipped Merchant" fleet on the Murmansk Run (and other convoy routes), lived through the war
  (Elizabeth's father)
• Private Archie Black (commissioned after the war and retired as a Major), Gordon Highlanders, captured at Singapore (aged 15) and survived a Japanese POW camp
  (Elizabeth's uncle)

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, MD (1872-1918)

15 Days

I'm not yet finished reading Christie Blatchford's latest book, but on the whole, I agree with Lewis MacKenzie's review:

Blatchford has the rare ability to make her descriptions of combat, particularly those involving loss of life or serious injury, almost embarrassing to the reader. You feel that you are eavesdropping on very private matters. Her extensive research and her own recollections as she was caught up in the thick of some of the heaviest fighting are compelling, gut-wrenching and, unfortunately, real. Her admission that on one occasion during a firefight her bowels turned to water and got the best of her is ample proof that that she walked the walk. Her description, witnessed up close and under fire, of the evacuation of fatally wounded Corporal Anthony Joseph Boneca, shot in the throat and bleeding on the dirt under her feet, exposes the reader to the gut-wrenching reality of close combat.

During three extensive stays with the Canadians in Afghanistan, Blatchford was able to penetrate the macho façade presented by soldiers in combat, and to see the cohesion and affection born of an obligation to those vets who have gone before them, and of an intense dedication to their fellow soldiers. Contrary to popular myth, soldiers don't risk their lives — and in some cases die — for God, Queen, country or even the regiment. They do so for their fellow soldiers, their buddies, frequently only a few meters away due to the tunnel vision generated by the rush of adrenalin when someone is trying to kill you.

So far, my only complaint is that she takes some discredited research about combat as a proven issue: US Brigadier General S.L.A. Marshall's Men Under Fire, with its contention that only a tiny minority of soldiers ever fire their weapons in combat situations. She doesn't reference Marshall by name, but talks about this factoid in one of the early chapters.

Russian boomer, up close

By way of Ghost of a Flea, a look at a Typhoon-class ballistic missile submarine:

This'll turn out well, I'm sure

New technology always seems to have impact outside the area its' inventors or popularizers envisage. This one, for example, is being introduced as a tool for quickly and remotely telling "whether someone is dead or alive on the battlefield." It also has other potentialities:

Figuring out whether detected heart rates give a reasonable cop excuse for coming in shooting is one of those legal and strategic conundrums we'll be sweating over in the magically transparent world of tomorrow.

Oh yeah, this is gonna go just great . . .

An excellent question

Perry de Havilland boils down the big question about Iraq (and Afghanistan):

In both the USA and UK, much of the debate about how to react to the military situation in Iraq really strikes me as really odd. If a person thinks the available facts indicate we are not doing well against the insurgents, surely the choices should be either:

1. Conclude the enemy will inevitably win and no military and political victory is feasible, therefore accept being defeated and get out completely as soon as possible
2. Conclude the enemy can be beaten, but not at an acceptable cost, so accept being defeated and get out completely as soon as possible
3. Conclude the enemy can be beaten and therefore reinforce to improve the military force levels (i.e. the 'Surge') in order to actually win

What does not make any sense to me is any talk of reducing force levels by a person who does not think we have either already won or already been irretrievably defeated . . . and the stated position of most politicos on both sides of the Atlantic is neither of those things.

It's only a quagmire if you choose to make it one. Sending enough forces to do the job (however you define "the job") is the only sensible way to operate. Sending insufficient forces just means that success must be defined down to fit what is possible with the forces you sent. Demanding that they accomplish more than is possible is just plain delusional.

Arctic Patrol Vessels: now with less sonar

The not-yet-fully designed Arctic patrol vessels may have a lot of capabilities, but sonar isn't going to be one of them:

Canada's new Arctic patrol ships will likely lack sonar capability, forcing them to use other methods to detect submarine threats in northern waters, a project official said yesterday.

"They will not have the ability to detect submarines," Captain Ron Lloyd, a senior navy planner, said in an interview with The Canadian Press.

Both the operation and even the installation of sonar equipment on the new warships may prove to be impractical, he said.

"You're talking about a ship that's going to run up onto ice and all of the noise that ice makes and still be able to detect submarines," said Capt. Lloyd, who is the former commander of the frigate HMCS Charlottetown.

"From our perspective we have not examined that as a potential [capability] for this platform."

"What?" I pretend to hear you ask. "How are our not-yet-built Arctic superships supposed to deter eeeeevil Yankee and Ruskie nuclear subs if they can't even detect 'em?" A good question. Professor Dan Middlemiss is quoted in the article and he says that helicopters can be used (when the weather allows), and that would give some anti-submarine capability. Moreover, actually hunting submarines is primarily a job for other submarines in the modern era.

Still, you can't help but feel that the new boats won't have quite the same effect without the ability to "ping" the heck out of intruding subs.

Cool camouflage, WWII style

A post at Ghost of a Flea linked to this very cool pictorial of how the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers hid this aircraft factory:

Cool new airlift capability in use

Chris Taylor discusses why the newest military transport aircraft in the Canadian Forces is a good thing to have:

Each Herc carries a crew of five — 2 pilots, 1 navigator, 1 flight engineer, and 1 loadmaster. That's fifteen people to move these pallets, or a week of duty days for a single aircrew. The Herc would make each 1,568nm trip in 6 hours — that's 12 hours including the return trip. So for a single CC-130H aircraft to move these 13 pallets, it would require three 12-hour trips, or three aircraft making a single 12-hour return flight. Not including ground handling, offload and refueling times.

In contrast, a single CC-177 can fly all 13 pallets to Jamaica in 3 hours, 49 minutes, using a single aircrew of three (2 pilots, 1 loadmaster). And it can carry sufficient fuel for the entire journey. Tack on the return trip and you have the entire mission completed in just under 8 hours, not including ground handling and offload times.

Remind me why the CC-177 isn't the best choice in this scenario?

I do find the formal military designation to be a bit odd: CC-177, rather than the American designation C-17. Even the defence minister calls it a C-17 in public. It looks like somebody stuttered while typing up the original name.

And what else would you expect them to do?

This was the headline on the Rogers news portal a couple of minutes ago:

And media types wonder why they don't get treated with seriousness . . . how unserious do you have to be to write that headline?

Of course the Van Doos will carry on: they're soldiers. That's what soldiers do. The loss of comrades will sadden them, but they'll continue to do the job . . . because that is what soldiers DO.

Frickin' idiot media. The article is here if you want to read it.

LOLsoldiers

Jon sent a link to the Military Motivators site, which is worth a quick look. He especially liked this one.

Tories invade the Arctic

At least partially fulfilling an election promise, Stephen Harper has announced a new military training base and a deep-water port in Nanisivik and Resolute Bay:

Canada will build two new military facilities within contested Arctic waters to bolster its sovereign claim over the fabled Northwest Passage, Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced Friday.

He said the Canadian Forces will install a new army training centre and a deepwater port at distant points of the Arctic archipelago that has been coveted for centuries as a possible trade route to Asia.

"Protecting national sovereignty, the integrity of our borders, is the first and foremost responsibility of a national government, a responsibility which has too often been neglected," Harper said, citing what he called the "first principle of Arctic sovereignty: use it or lose it."

For those of you who've never heard of Nanisivik (which would include me), it's roughly here:

Not the most convincing anti-Taliban vehicle

The British Army is introducing a new vehicle for travelling through Helmand province in Afghanistan (notable for a lack of paved roads): the Mad Maxmobile:

Photo from the Daily Mail article

Some rather good lines from the Fark.com thread:

Isotope ok, so I see I'm not the only one concerned that the vehicle will survive better than the crew...

Prank Call of Cthulhu The vehicle is missing something....hmmmm...what could it be? Oh, I know. It needs the Lord Humungous (The Warrior of the Wasteland! The Ayatollah of Rock and Rolla!) driving it. That'd be sweet!

Cormee I'd like to see the design brief.
'Design a vehicle - suitable for hunting Basset Hounds.'

A Shambling Mound Armored?
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

reverend_alex Wow, you can almost feel the fevered patriotic drool dripping from the author's lips as he pops a Daily Mail boner over a new *BRITISH MADE* vehicle for exterminating those filthy towelheads. Anyone else notice the barely-restrained glee with which this guy spells out exactly how awesome and powerful the almighty British Army is? Maybe because they're usually sent out into the desert with just some sunscreen and a cap gun. Not that that thing looks any more likely to protect them than Piz Buin factor 15.

Good luck to our boys and all, but the Americans called us 'The Borrowers' during Gulf War I for a reason.

Arnollia invaded by Royal Marines

Breaking news of a seaborne invasion by Royal Marines:

All next week a worldwide virtual war is being fought. Soldiers, warships, jets, and unmanned drones from the US, UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand are combining in cyberspace to form "Task Force BISON," which will join NATO's "Task Force ATLANTICA" to mount massive amphibious landings in a conflict-stricken West African warzone.

In the simulated world, however, the western USA takes the place of Africa. California becomes the fictional country "Arnollia," bounded to the north by the "Wassegon Republic" and to the east by the expanionist, aggressive nation of "Nevatan".

In the wargame, evil Nevatan plans to destabilise neighbouring governments and seize control of "Terrizona" are thwarted in all-out war by the hard-charging Task Force BISON. British marines storm the beachhead at San Diego, capturing the vital harbour so heavy armoured units can move ashore.

Sounds like fun: in my day we only ever got to wargame against the "Fantasian People's Republic", usually against a random-numbered "Motorized Rifle Division". Of course, back then, our theoretical battalion barely mustered enough troops and equipment to make a light infantry company (on a very good day), so active defence was pretty much all we could realistically practice.

RETRACTION: It wasn't the French Navy . . .

Yesterday, I linked to a story which claimed that a French naval vessel had allowed a Danish merchant ship to be taken by pirates. The ship was indeed taken by pirates, but the French navy had nothing to do with the situation:

Hold the presses and belay my last! Don't blame France (sorry buds), but this is a all USA show. Despite the multiple source reporting earlier - word now is that it was a US warship, USS Carter Hall (LSD-50) [Wikipedia entry here . . .]

We are enabling pirates. The nation that fought the Barbary Wars has a 10 SEP 01 attitude towards pirates. Because the do not "regularly kill" their hostages (often you will hear "do not kill" — which is true of Western Hostages) we will allow them to have a fair run at any ship they can reach? What? Is that really it? Is that were the US Navy and the International Community stands? The Somalia gov'munt cannot police their waters — I will say that again — cannot. We will not. Therefore you have de-facto pirate territory that they are using as a safe base to hold hostages for ransom. What happens when you do that? ECON101 tells you the value of all ships to pirates is greater — and the risk premium is minimal.

We are appeasing the pirates. Yes, I know the "we can do non-compliant boardings — someone might be killed" argument. OK then, never deploy a SWAT team against kidnappers until they kill someone. Next time someone takes a hostage, give them a helicopter and let them escape to Mexico. Just make sure they get their money as well.

My apologies for the slur on the honour of the French Navy.

When bureaucrats put to sea

CDR Salamander has a distressing report from Somalia:

The Danish merchant "DANICA WHITE" was seized by pirates off of Somalia.

A small Danish-owned and, we understand, Danish-crewed general cargo vessel, has been captured by pirates in the latest series of ships and fishing vessels being boarded and taken over, with their crews held to ransom, off the Somalia coast.

What's worse . . . the piracy took place almost under the nose of a French warship:

A French warship reportedly looked on as the event unfolded, and refused to enter Somali waters as the mv DANICA WHITE was taken into the region.

Piracy is bad enough, but piracy enabled by illogical and inhumane standing orders? The French navy is looking particularly bad in this episode, but it's the crew of the Danica White who'll suffer the most.

H/T to The Armorer for the link.

Update, 8 June: See the following post for a clarification and a retraction . . . it wasn't a French ship which allowed the pirates to escape into Somalian waters.

New-ish tanks now double original cost estimates

Unusually, the government did not merge the capital costs and the support costs of the 100 Dutch Leopard 2 tanks when the original announcement was made. Now the total package is estimated to cost C$1.3 billion, not C$650 million. It's not clear from the article why this acquisition was handled differently than other recent military purchases.

Canada's purchase and long-term support of 100 slightly used Leopard 2A6 battle tanks will be $1.3 billion — roughly double the Conservative government's initial public estimate last month.

As he detailed a laundry list of military hardware the Conservative government plans to buy over the next few years, Defence Minister Gordon O'Connor surprised the Commons by announcing there will be a 20-year, $650-million service contract attached to the tank deal.

"The capital acquistion is $650 million and the support for 20 years is about $650 million; about the same range," he said in reply to an opposition question during debate over Defence Department estimates.

Of course, even at the higher price, it's still a bargain for top-drawer military hardware.

US troops may have been exposed to nerve gas

A scary report in The Register about some 100,000 American troops who may have been exposed to low levels of Sarin nerve gas after the 1991 Gulf War:

It is believed that US soldiers occupying an Iraqi munitions depot at Khamisiyah mistakenly blew up a stockpile of gas rockets in March 1991, believing them to be ordinary explosive munitions. Nobody noticed any ill effects at the time.

It was only two months later, when Iraqi chemical weapons facilities were inspected by the UN as part of the ceasefire agreement, that the US began to realise that nerve gases might have been released into the atmosphere. [. . .]

It's perhaps also worth noting that declassified CIA reports suggest that some or all the sarin rounds blown up at Khamisiyah were of binary construction, meaning that they contained not sarin but two precursor chemicals which would be mixed to form sarin when the weapons were fired. Blowing up kit like this wouldn't release large amounts of nerve agent into the atmosphere; just precursors.

If the rockets weren't binaries, there would be an excellent chance of their sarin payload having decomposed to uselessness. This was a major problem for the pre-1991 Iraqi chemical weapons industry.

Why have an army at all?

Joe Jacobs, in a letter to the Toronto Star asks the question,

Realistically, why do we need a military at all? It's not like we need to be able to protect ourselves from the Americans. If President George W. Bush wanted to invade Canada and take all of our water and other resources, he could do it tomorrow. How would we possibly stop him? And if any other country invaded or attacked Canada, the United States would respond because we are in its "sphere of influence."

Given this, it is absurd that we should spend some $15 billion annually simply to be an adjunct to the U.S. military. Just imagine what we could do with that money if it was invested in education, the environment, taking care of seniors or building a national child-care system.

If we didn't have an army, what would prevent the Americans, the Russians, or even the Danes from taking over part or all of the country? Well, not much, clearly: the primary purpose of any military is to defend the homeland. Without an army (even as small a one as Canada's), why would anyone even pretend to pay attention to what Canadians claim to be their territory?

Mr. Jacobs is correct that President Bush could order troops into Canada tomorrow, and there would be little or nothing we could do to stop him. Why not? What benefit is it to his government to leave a loose cannon (no, not a cannon; perhaps a loose bong?) like a totally defenceless Canada on the northern border.

Does Mr. Jacobs actually think that we can live as literal freeloaders on the American military (as several Republican politicians have already accused us of, over the last 20 years or so)? What price does he think we would pay in exchange for giving up one of the primary determinants of nationhood? Would our largest trading partner just let us carry on as if nothing had changed?

I strongly doubt it. Canada is constrained by the need to maintain our peaceful trading relationship with the huge US market we serve. A month-long interdiction of the US-Canadian border would shatter our economy, throwing hundreds of thousands of workers on to the streets. It probably wouldn't even take a month for the economic pain to strike very deeply: we are disproportionally dependent on selling our raw materials to US customers . . . and if they stopped buying from us, we'd have damned few options open in the short term. Even dumping everything on the open market would require transportation that we're not set up to organize overnight.

Mr. Jacobs may be sanguine at the notion of Canada becoming a literal "frozen banana" republic, but it's not a future most of us would be happy with. At least, I hope that most Canadians feel somewhat the same way. Recent polls do not leave me too hopeful, in the long run.

German tanks, Dutch tanks, Canadian tanks

To my surprise, this news just got reported over at The Torch:

Here's what I've heard from sources within the defence community, what I was waiting for the official announcement to confirm:

• The 20 Leopard 2A6M's we'll be acquiring from the Germans aren't a lease, they're a loan. That is to say, while we're going to have to give them back in the condition we got them, and while there may be some incremental costs to their transport, operation, et cetera, we're not paying the Germans for the use of their tanks. A big, hearty thank-you needs to go out to Germany for this gesture of friendship and allied solidarity. We're going to try to get them into theatre this summer, for the worst of the heat, but meeting those timings will be tight.
• We're going to be buying a total of 100 used Leos from the Netherlands, for delivery sometime this fall. These tanks have apparently been properly stored and maintained to keep them in top shape. Of those 100 tanks, 40 will be 2A4's for two training squadrons in Canada (one in Gagetown, one in Wainwright), 40 will be two squadrons of 2A6's that after some Canadianization and upgrades (especially to the armour) will be deployable anywhere we need them, and 20 will be specialist tanks (bridge-layers, ARV's, dozers, etc).

For the troops in Afghanistan (and potential future deployments), this is excellent news.

Belated thanks, Helmut

By way of a post at The Torch, I found out something of which I had previously been unaware: that Canada nearly gave up its armoured warfare capability in 1976. Of all people, it was German chancellor Helmut Schmidt who saved the day:

After the Second World War, the need for armour on the future battlefield was self-evident to all who had served in the army. As a result, Canada's army was equipped with the then latest Centurion tanks. In the late '60s and early '70s, the Centurions became obsolete and the Canadian government announced it would end its tank capability by 1976.

However, talks between Germany's Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and then prime minister Pierre Trudeau resulted in Canada acquiring German-built Leopard tanks to resolve the imbalance of trade between the two countries. Resolving the imbalance in trade, not the government's need to maintain an armoured fighting capability, resulted in this necessary capability being reinvigorated.

Thanks, Helmut.

QotD: The purpose of the military

The Army is complete and utter totalitarianism. When you enter, you're stripped of all individuality, then built back up into a proper, orders-taking, unquestioning drone. Dissent is punished. At the onset of your career, all facets of your life are dictated to you. Whatever the state orders of you — even if it orders you to your death — you're trained to comply willingly and with vigor, and to never question the validity or morality of the order. [. . .]

I'm not an anti-military libertarian. I think it's necessary, and I think there are times when it's necessary that we use it. When used properly — to kill people and destroy infrastructure — it's marvelously good at what it does (it's not so good at building liberal societies from sand, rubble, and ethnic strife, but that's another discussion). But that is what the military is for. It's for destroying things, including large quantities of life. The values Wright so admires — and the procedures the military uses to instill those values — are emphasized because time and experience has shown that those are the values most conducive to the military's mission. Which — at risk of repeating myself — is killing people and destroying their countries.

Radley Balko, "We're All in the Army Now", Hit and Run, 2007-04-05

Pessimistic report on Britain's military

Nick Packwood rounds up all the depressing news from Britain, confirming that things are getting worse on several fronts:

I can only hope the anemic reaction of the British public to the last five years is because the British public does not understand the scope of the problem.* This LA Times (?) opinion piece explained the problem to the American public over a month ago. It has been born out by events.

The linked LA Times editorial has nice things to say about both British and Canadian military personnel, but correctly points out that both governments have been trying to do too much with too little:

Royal Navy, which is at its smallest size since the 1500s. Now, British newspapers report, of the remaining 44 warships, at least 13 and possibly as many as 19 will be mothballed. If these cuts go through, Britain's fleet will be about the same size as those of Indonesia and Turkey and smaller than that of its age-old rival, France.

Britain is hardly alone in its unilateral disarmament. A similar trend can be discerned among virtually all of the major U.S. allies, aside from Japan. Canada is a particularly poignant case in point. At the end of World War II, Canada had more than a million men under arms and operated the world's third-biggest navy (behind the U.S. and Britain), with more than 400 ships. Today, it has all of 62,000 personnel on active duty, and its navy has just 19 warships and 23 support vessels, making it one-fourth the size of the U.S. Coast Guard.

Of course, numbers aren't the entire story. Both Britain and Canada have top-notch soldiers, allowing them to punch above their weight class in military affairs. But there is only so much that a handful of super-soldiers can accomplish if their numbers are grossly inadequate. Quality can't entirely make up for lack of quantity.

In Canada's case, decades of neglect cannot be made up quickly: equipment takes time to order, build, and deploy, but it takes even longer to rebuild the units themselves. Soldiers do not wander in off civvie street today and become militarily effective tomorrow; it takes years to re-create effective battalions. Canada's military may not have years . . . the current minority government has no guarantee that it will see out the next session of parliament, never mind win a majority in a subsequent election (and it will take years of uninterrupted efforts to get the Canadian Forces back into shape).

QotD: Afghanistan

Afghanistan, for example, is officially a NATO mission to which most NATO members are contributing. But they're not contributing troops, not if by troops you mean fellows with guns who are prepared to fire them at the other side. The Continentals mostly have very circumscribed rules of engagement, which prevent them from participating in combat operations, or going out in the snow, or even after dark. So they're confined to "securing" a handful of selected sites — i.e., they're glorified night watchmen in fancier livery. When it comes to hunting down and killing the enemy, it's pretty much down to the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia (which isn't even in NATO). So much for multiculturalism. That quartet's about as unicultural as you can get, not to say, given that three of them share the same head of state, uniregal.

Mark Steyn, "Harmed Forces: In the homefront battle between militant pacifists in the East and passive militants in the West, Canada is the big loser", Western Standard, 2007-03-26

Imperial War Museum's Camouflage exhibit

From a story in The Register, the Imperial War Museum is opening a new exhibition on the story of military camouflage:

The expo website is full of references to the Cubist artists behind the French camouflage efforts of World War One, Vorticist dazzle-camo used by the Royal Navy to confuse Boche U-boat skippers, and so on. What with all the poetry that was also going on at the time, apparently World War One was quite culturally uplifting. Assuming you managed to avoid getting killed, crippled, or sent insane (and then possibly accused of cowardice and shot).

World War Two, in addition to being an even bigger global slaughterhouse, was another big opportunity for arty types. More craftily, psychological colour schemes were developed by "a large community of creative people including the architect Hugh Casson, advertising designer Ashley Havinden and Surrealist painter Roland Penrose".

Very disturbing development

Wired News has a report on a very troubling case:

As they carried out the killing of an Iraqi civilian, seven Marines and a Navy medic used their understanding of the military's airborne surveillance technology to spoof their own systems, military hearing testimony charges.

"These are people who every day deal with such things and understand how the images are gathered, as much as understand other tactical and weapons issues," says defense attorney David Brahms, who represents a Marine who's pleaded guilty to conspiracy and kidnapping in the case. "They are warriors and this is what warriors do."

Ahem. ". . . this is what warriors do". Well, no. This is what many anti-military types believe warriors do. These guys are not exemplars of "warriors". They're parties to conspiracy and murder. That is not what soldiers do. The distinction may be a bit subtle for those raised on anti-war protests and anti-military propaganda, however.

The case is remarkable for the fact that the killers nearly got away with their alleged crime right under the eye of the military's sophisticated surveillance systems. According to testimony, at least three times the warriors took deliberate, and apparently effective, measures to trick the unmanned aerial vehicles — UAVs in military parlance — that watch the ground with heat-sensitive imaging by night, and high-resolution video by day.

Technology can — and will — be abused for illegal purposes. The technology itself merely does the job . . . the morality of the action is determined by the human operators. Even the highest of high-tech devices is still subject to deliberate attempts to counteract or twist the evidence the tools can provide. This is merely the first time this has come to public attention . . . it's almost certainly not the first time it has happened.

A Red Ensign call to battle!

This is a cause I fully support:

It's the flag the Canadians carried into battle when they captured Vimy Ridge in 1917. And it's the flag that should be flying when thousands assemble at the Canadian National Vimy Memorial next month for the unveiling of the restored monument to mark the 90th anniversary of the battle, say members of a campaign to get the Red Ensign to Vimy Ridge for the ceremony.

The Red Ensign was there in 1936 when the monument was unveiled for the first time.

Ottawa resident John Heyes, a retired public servant, has been lobbying to have a version of the historic flag taken to France for the April 9 ceremony.

Mr. Heyes and Bill Bishop, a maintenance worker in Maple Ridge, B.C., who has written hundreds of letters advocating a stronger presence for the old flag, don't expect the Maple Leaf, which Canada adopted as its flag 42 years ago, to take a back seat to the Red Ensign — they think both should be flown.

Call me naive, but I'd always assumed that the Red Ensign would be flown at the ceremony . . . but respect for history has never been a strong point for Canadian governments before.

H/T to Damian for bringing it to my attention.

Update 22 March: Thank you, Stephen Harper.

Truly offensive weapons

The Register reports on the U.S. Navy's vomit ray project:

The new technology has been given an acronym, EPIC, for Electromagnetic Personnel Interdiction Control. The idea is that intense radio-frequency emissions — capable of passing through walls — would be used to temporarily disrupt the balance and coordination functions of targets' inner ears, knocking them down relatively harmlessly.

The Navy notes that "second order effects would be extreme motion sickness," suggesting that in fact the order given by future Captain Kirks may be "set phasers on 'puke'".

Oh, barf!

Accounting and the military

Jack Granatstein reveals some of the real data behind the mind-bogglingly big numbers of military contracts:

The first is something called the accrual system of accounting. In the past, Canadian governments bought a truck for $25,000 and charged that sum to a department's budget. The costs of gas, oil, and maintenance five, 10, and 20 years down the road were charged to future budgets. In accrual accounting, perhaps more reasonably, the costs of operating the truck 20 years into the future are charged to today's budget. That $25,000 truck now becomes a $125,000 charge on this year's budget funding.

This matters. Consider the four C-17s the Harper government has agreed to buy. Each of the huge transports costs about $250-million. The accrual cost, again in round numbers, is $4-billion. Many Canadians remain unaware of the change in accounting methodology, and government rules (or practice) do not appear to permit explanation. So a $1-billion purchase of necessary equipment appears to many as a $4-billion boondoggle. It's not, but it's a hard sell for all of us whose eyes glaze over at the mention of accountants' rules. The answer, of course, is to explain defence purchases (and purchases in every other government department, as well) by making it clear that the total lifetime package is included in the announced sum.

Part of the difficulty in grasping this is that most of us, in our private lives, do not do anything of the sort in our own household budgets . . . we think of the sticker price of your car as "the cost", ignoring the finance costs of a car loan, the regular maintenance, the insurance, the license stickers, and all the other sundry other costs of car ownership. If we did think in this way, we'd all be much more careful in how we spent our money!

The other part of the problem is that the information is presented in the media as if a line of Brinks trucks were taking money from all the "good" areas the government also funds and physically moving all those loonies in through the gates of CFB Boondoggle and handing them over to General Simon Legree.

Royal Navy still plumping for Windows

As reported here back in 2004, the Royal Navy's next generation of destroyers, the Type 45 class, will run a customized version of Microsoft Windows, dubbed Windows for Warships:

Those acquainted with the more foam-lipped Linux fanciers will also be familiar with the position that Windows use is morally corrupt, indicative of sexual perversion, and causes cancer.

A lot of customers keep buying from Microsoft, however. One may want to deploy a particular kind of hardware, perhaps used only by a few organisations. It may well be that you can only get the associated software from the hardware maker, and the vendor in question doesn't provide anything other than Windows-based machines.

One type of hardware where this is happening more and more is warships.

I still think Jon's comment from 2004 is appropriate: "It kind of makes sense, you know. Some wanker at the ministry fired up a Windows box, found the Minesweeper game and realized they could get rid of all those pesky real ships."

Canadians in Afghanistan, via The Economist

A positive — one might even say warm-fuzzy — post on the Canadian contribution to the fight against the Taliban, from The Economist:

The deployment in Afghanistan is a much bigger deal for Canada than it is for the Americans or the Brits. The Canadians stormed the beaches of Normandy on D-Day, but for most of the past 50 years they turned themselves into the ultimate "soft" power, deploying their soldiers mainly for peacekeeping.

In Kandahar they have gone back to being a fighting force, and have lost more than 40 lives in the process.

If the Brits have been having a hard time in Helmand, it is the Canadians in Kandahar province who fought the decisive battle of Nato's war so far, leading a brigade-sized assault on Taliban positions in the Panjwayi valley last autumn.

The Canadians are the first contingent to bring main battle tanks to Afghanistan. The French-speaking men of the Vandoos regiment in Panjwayi look even bigger and meaner than the Royal Marines in Kajaki.

The operation is hugely controversial at home. A Canadian Senate report this month said: "Anyone expecting to see the emergence in Afghanistan within the next several decades of a recognisable modern democracy capable of delivering justice and amenities to its people is dreaming in Technicolor."

Yet among the soldiers there is a sense of relief at getting rid of the blue helmets and white paint from their armoured vehicles. There is even some macho mocking of the Dutch in the neighbouring province of Uruzgan: "Wooden shoes, wouldn't shoot," they quip.

HMS Intrepid to be scrapped (again)

The assault ship HMS Intrepid, one of the Royal Navy veterans of the Falklands war is being consigned to the scrapyard for the second time:

One of the Falklands war's doughtiest fighters, HMS Intrepid, is to be dismantled, 25 years after she was first saved from the scrapheap and four months from the 25th anniversary of the islands' liberation.

HMS Intrepid, which was launched in 1964, should have been taken out of service in 1982, but was reprieved in the nick of time to join the Royal Navy Task Force ordered to liberate the islands from Argentine invaders. The assault ship played a significant role in the conflict and served another 17 years in Her Majesty's Fleet before being decommissioned in 1999.

The Ministry of Defence announced yesterday that HMS Intrepid would be "recycled", the modern, environmentally friendly term for scrapping a ship. Leavesley International, a British company, has been chosen to cut up the ship, and those components that can be recycled, such as the anchor chain and the steel hull, will be reused. Some items will be sold as souvenirs.

To be honest, I'm astonished that the ship stayed in service as long as she did: I'd rather assumed that she'd been scrapped years ago. More information at the MOD website.

Terminator in the air

This link was posted at Samizdata: a Sukhoi SU-37 Terminator in flight. Very impressive indeed.

QotD: The next Foreign Legion?

The prestige of soldiering in the United States is being annihilated by American virtues: high social mobility, low unemployment and infinite possibilities for the young. Because of the same virtues, hundreds risk their lives every day just to physically enter the bounds of the U.S. If they were asked to face similar hazards on behalf of the American cause, in exchange for English-language instruction and access to genuine American citizenship, the queue would girdle the globe.

Some find the idea of recruiting "American" soldiers in Mexico or India distasteful. The concept has already inspired talk of "blood money" and "coercion" of the world's poor. And foreign military recruitment is dangerous to national security in the long run, as the Romans (and the French) discovered. But for the U.S., there is no other way out of the immediate dilemma. Sooner or later, under one name or another, there will be an American Foreign Legion.

Colby Cosh, "Does America need a Foreign Legion?", National Post, 2006-12-29

How not to land your expensive plane

Some interesting photos from the recovery efforts after a wheels-up landing of a B-1B "Lancer" from the highly idiosyncratic website of the Provisional Peoples' Democratic Republic of Diego Garcia:

H/T to "John the Mc".

A French "crotch rocket"

Craig Zeni sent along a URL which might interest the Armorer or others with odd tastes in things military: a post-WW2 French military vehicle.

Praise for Canadian military equipment

While it's rare for Canadian troops abroad to attract much in the way of media attention — even from Canadian media outlets — here is an article discussing how well the Canadian troops are doing, equipment-wise, compared to British troops:

On the other hand, yesterday, we read reports of yet another Royal Marine being killed (the 42nd British servicemen to die in Afghanistan) and one injured, but this time in what amounts to a conventional attack. The casualties arose when UK troops mounted an offensive on a Taliban-held valley, attacking the village of Garmser. Despite being elite troops, however, backed by airstrikes and artillery fire during the 10-hour battle, they were forced to withdraw after the Taliban launched a ferocious counter-attack with heavy weapons and tried to outflank the British troops.

Here, though, the Canadians — who have scored so well by using RG-31 blast protected vehicles for their patrols — are again ahead of the game. Having been fully committed to offensive operations throughout the summer, they have learnt from their experiences and introduced Leopard tanks into the equation. On the other hand, the British — with theoretically a more experienced, elite cadre of troops — are committing what is in fact light infantry to a conventional attack, without armoured support. They are perhaps forgetting that the tank, in its original inception, was an infantry support weapon.

What emerges from this is that, effectively, we need two armies — one capable of fighting an entirely conventional war and the other specifically equipped to fight insurgents in a mainly urban environment.

H/T to Johnathan Pearce at Samizdata.

Non-trivial, indeed

Damian "Babbling" Brooks asked me to call attention to this post at The Torch:

Why don't ordinary Canadians know much about this intensely valuable and important work? Well, partly because the government has done a lacklustre job telling the public about it, as the MND recently admitted. Luckily, they're now working to correct that course of action.

But you can't put it all on the government, either. Here's a stat that might surprise you as well: since January 16th of this year, 175 journalists from 37 different media outlets have embedded with the CF in Afghanistan. How many stories have you seen about the KPRT — other than from the BBC? Now, how many ramp ceremonies have you seen?

Mourning the deaths of our soldiers is important, let there be no doubt. But even a couple of folks within the media think that the balance of coverage has swung too far in that particular direction.

Please do read the whole post.

Casualty rates

Jon sent me a link to this article at TCS Daily, discussing the long term casuaty rates the American military has sustained in various conflicts:

In the full sweep of U.S history, from the commencement of the Revolution on Lexington Green in April 1775, until the sunny morning of September 11, 2001, our average daily sacrifice [during major wars] has been between 14 and 15 military fatalities (1,217,000 fatalities/83,461 days = 14.6/day). Since 9/11, the average daily sacrifice has been 1.7 per day (3200/1900=1.68).

From the Revolutionary War until the American entry into World War I, the average daily rate was about 11 per day (578,000/52,231=11.07). From World War I through the break up of the Soviet Union, the rate was over 16 per day (636,000/38,811=16.39). Or in our long running confrontation with Soviet communism following World War II until the collapse of the Soviet empire, the rate was over between 6 and 7 per day (112,400/16,892=6.65).

As things stand, the conflict with Islamic radicalism involves the lowest average daily military fatality rate of any long run national security era. It may worsen, it may improve. If Congress had been asked on September 12, 2001, to endorse a national defense posture against Islamic radicalism that traded up to 2 military fatalities per day over the subsequent five years in return for no additional homeland attacks, the deposing of terror friendly regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, the ending of Libya's nuclear program, what would they have done? Would Congress accept that bargain today?

It's particularly gruesome to discuss any such thing as an "acceptable" casualty rate, but that is, as Philip O'Connor's article titles it, "The Human Calculus of National Security". Even in peacetime, there are military casualties, although they rarely are considered "newsworthy". Serving in the armed forces — of any nation — increases your chance of injury or death, whether in peacetime or wartime. Pretending that this isn't so does not make it true.

SF Mil-Tech now

Committees of Correspondence has a linkulacious post up about chameleonic camouflage technology (or, for the more SF-oriented, a personal cloaking device). If something like that works, it'll be a huge advance for the PBI. But some things that work brilliantly in the lab or on the testing range never pan out on the field of battle.

In memorium

A simple recognition of some of our family members who served in the First and Second World Wars:

The Great War

• Private William Penman, Scots Guards, died 1915 at Le Touret, age 25
  (Elizabeth's great uncle)
• Private David Buller, Highland Light Infantry, died 1915 at Loos, age 35
  (Elizabeth's great grandfather)
• Private Walter Porteous, Northumberland Fusiliers, died 1917 at Passchendaele, age 18
  (my great uncle)
• Corporal John Mulholland, Royal Tank Corps, died 1918 at Harbonnieres, age 24
  (Elizabeth's great uncle)

The Second World War

• Flying Officer Richard Porteous, RAF, survived the defeat in Malaya and lived through the war
  (my uncle)
• Able Seaman John Penman, RN, served in the "Destroyer Equipped Merchant" fleet on the Murmansk Run (and other convoy routes), lived through the war
  (Elizabeth's father)
• Private Archie Black (commissioned after the war and retired as a Major), Gordon Highlanders, captured at Singapore (aged 15) and survived a Japanese POW camp
  (Elizabeth's uncle)

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, MD (1872-1918)

Castle Argghhh remembers the Charge of the Light Brigade

The Armorer has a good post up about the Charge of the Light Brigade, which took place on this date in 1854. For a more irreverant view of the battle, you can't beat George Macdonald Fraser's Flashman at the Charge, which does a great job of illustrating just how amateurish and incompetent the British leadership was . . . and how even with all of that, it still took a great deal of inter-personal blundering to make the Charge happen.

Update: Good God! There's even a Wikipedia entry for Flashman at the Charge!

Army overstretch

As is already fairly well known, the army is having trouble handling all the work the government has handed it. The Afghanistan commitment, in particular, could use more troops . . . but there aren't enough to send more. Casualties are mounting (always a shock to people outside the military), and the Taliban refuse to roll over and blow away.

Sound familiar? It should, as Canada's much-shrunken armed forces try to shoulder a vastly increased overseas workload. Except this is about the British army (subscriber-only link, I'm afraid):

Over the past seven years, the government has given the armed forces less while asking them to do more. After a decade of stinging cuts, defence spending has stayed fairly steady since 2004 at around £32 billion ($60 billion), or 2.5% of GDP. Given the heavy burden of operations, and the fact that the Treasury never quite reimburses the armed services for the men and machinery they wear out, this amounts to dwindling resources.

According to the latest deep strategic think, which was carried out in 2003, British forces should be able to conduct two medium (or brigade-sized) operations, only one of which involves significant combat, as well as one smaller operation. Instead they are fighting wars in Afghanistan and in Iraq, where Britain has over 7,000 troops, including a divisional headquarters. They are also keeping peace in Kosovo, with 900 soldiers, and in Northern Ireland. And when short-term needs arise, such as the evacuation of British citizens from Lebanon last month, the armed services have to meet them. "Can we cope?" asked the new army chief, General Sir Richard Dannatt, in an interview with the Guardian newspaper this month. "I pause. I say 'just'."

Without emergency measures — which might include cancelling training, leave and retirements — the armed forces, and especially the army, could make no telling contribution to another mission — for the United Nations in Lebanon, for example, or in Darfur. Indeed, the army would struggle to fill the breach during a hearty firemen's strike. As for the badly-needed reserve for Afghanistan, even if sufficient British infantrymen could be found (maybe from Northern Ireland), helicopters, intelligence experts, engineers and logisticians would still be lacking.

QotD: Celtic Military History

Speaking as a Celt, the dominating theme in Celtic military tradition is that on our own we lose, unless the other side are also Celts or from some group kept isolated from the main stream of human civilization for thousands of years (It's not so much the tech gap as the lack of immunity). This goes back to the Pre-Christian era, when an ambitious Celtic war leader could successfully get more of his own side killed in one battle than died in Hiroshima. The reasons why we lose are twofold: as a group, we totally suck at organised warfare and as a group, we sure don't like to learn from experience. The glorification of losers in Celtic folklore doesn't work to our advantage and neither does our delusion that we have any kind of military genius*, despite two thousand years of evidence pointing the other way. In my opinion, Celts should stick to engineering and economics (Or singing and dancing if they are no good at math).

* MacArthur is a good example: even with ample warning, he got surprised by the Japanese in the Philippines. Later in Korea, he managed to get China to intervene. He is considered a great Celtic officer mainly because his head never ended up on the end of a stick and I'm sure Truman considered it.

James Nicoll, posting to the Lois McMaster Bujold mailing list, 2006-09-06

How not to treat your new $135m airplane

A software glitch is reported to be the cause of this expensive little time waster:

Trapped F-22 Pilot Cut Free

Raptor canopy stuck in down and locked position sawn open by fire crew after 5h.

A fire crew had to cut open the canopy of a US Air Force Lockheed Martin F-22A Raptor fighter with chainsaws on 10 April to free the pilot, who had been trapped inside for 5h.

Final flight of the US Navy's F-14 Tomcat

A narrated slideshow on the last flight of the iconic US Navy fighter.

Real nape-of-the-earth flying

A very interesting video clip of South African Mirage fighters flying low to the ground, at OPFOR.

Graf Zeppelin wreck located

The Polish navy believes they have located the wreck of the World War II German aircraft carrier Graf Zeppelin:

"We are 99 percent sure — even 99.9 percent — that these details point unambiguously to the Graf Zeppelin," said Dariusz Beczek, the Navy commander of the vessel, the ORP Arctowski, said soon after returning to port Thursday morning after the two-day expedition.

During their time at sea, naval experts used a remote-controlled underwater robot and sonar photographic and video equipment to gather digital images of the 850-foot-long ship, Zajda said.

"The analyses of the sonar pictures and the comparison to historical documents show that it is the Graf Zeppelin," Zajda told The Associated Press. [. . .]

The Graf Zeppelin was Germany's only aircraft carrier during World War II. It was launched on Dec. 8, 1938, but never saw action. After Germany's defeat in 1945, the Soviet Union took control of the ship, but it was last seen in 1947 and since then the ship's fate has been shrouded in mystery.

So who is being gamed here?

The Register has some interesting Google Earth images to share:

Chinese black helicopters circle Google Earth
Those among you who like your skies darkened by black helicopters are invited to mosey on down to the remote Chinese village of Huangyangtan which hosts what must be the strangest military installation ever spotted by the Google Earth Community . . .

QotD: Limits to military power

Suffice it to say that I think [the Green Lantern's power ring] makes an okay premise for a comic book. But a lot of people seem to think that American military might is like one of these power rings. They seem to think that, roughly speaking, we can accomplish absolutely anything in the world through the application of sufficient military force. The only thing limiting us is a lack of willpower.

What's more, this theory can't be empirically demonstrated to be wrong. Things that you or I might take as demonstrating the limited utility of military power to accomplish certain kinds of things are, instead, taken as evidence of lack of will. Thus we see that problems in Iraq and Afghanistan aren't reasons to avoid new military ventures, but reasons why we must embark upon them: "Add a failure in Iran to a failure in Iraq to a failure in Afghanistan, and we could supercharge Islamic radicalism in a way never before seen. The widespread and lethal impression of American weakness under the Clinton administration, which did so much to energize bin Ladenism in the 1990s, could look like the glory years of American power compared to what the Bush administration may leave in its wake."

Matthew Yglesias, "The Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics", TPMCafe, 2006-07-10

Religious discrimination or bureaucracy as usual

Jon sent a couple of links on this story: a US soldier was killed on active service, but the Veteran's Administration refuses to allow his grave marker to carry his religious affiliation. The Washington Post sums it up here:

At the Veterans Memorial Cemetery in the small town of Fernley, Nev., there is a wall of brass plaques for local heroes. But one space is blank. There is no memorial for Sgt. Patrick D. Stewart.

That's because Stewart was a Wiccan, and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs has refused to allow a symbol of the Wicca religion — a five-pointed star within a circle, called a pentacle — to be inscribed on U.S. military memorials or grave markers.

The department has approved the symbols of 38 other faiths; about half of are versions of the Christian cross. It also allows the Jewish Star of David, the Muslim crescent, the Buddhist wheel, the Mormon angel, the nine-pointed star of Bahai and something that looks like an atomic symbol for atheists.

While it's quite likely that there would be some resistance to putting a Wiccan symbol on a grave marker or official memorial, I think the real reason for this is sheer bureaucratic inertia and/or incompetence. If the US Army can list the name of the faith on the soldier's dogtags, they can accept the use of the religious symbol on the grave or monument. I think the VA is just doing what massive bureaucracies do all the time . . . delaying making a decision until there is no risk of them being blamed.

QotD: First Day of the Somme

The casualties sustained on the opening day of the Battle of the Somme totalled 57,470, of which 19,240 were fatal. The Newfoundland Regiment Battalion ration strength on June 30, 1916, was 1044 all ranks, including administrative staff and attached personnel. Actual fighting strength was about 929 all ranks, of whom twenty six officers and 772 other ranks deployed into the trenches. A further officer and 33 other ranks were attached to the Brigade Mortar and Machine Gun Companies while 14 officers and 83 other ranks were held back as reserve and for special duties.

So far as can be ascertained, 22 officers and 758 other ranks were directly involved in the advance. Of these, all the officers and slightly under 658 other ranks became casualties, but exact figures are not available as casualties were reported for the day as a whole. Of the 780 men who went forward only about 110 survived unscathed, of whom only sixty eight were available for roll call the following day. The Battalion's War Diary on July 7 states that on July 1 the overall casualties for the Battalion were 14 officers and 296 other ranks killed, died of wounds or missing believed killed, and that 12 officers and 362 other ranks were wounded, a total of 684 all ranks out of a fighting strength of about 929. About 14 of the wounded subsequently died from their wounds. Afterward, the Divisional Commander was to write of the Newfoundlanders effort: "It was a magnificent display of trained and disciplined valour, and its assault failed of success because dead men can advance no further."

"Beaumont-Hamel Newfoundland Memorial", Veteran's Affairs Canada

Canadian navy to get supply ships

The Canadian government is going to go ahead with the purchase of three new support ships to replace HMCS Protecteur and HMCS Preserver, the 1960's era steamships:

The federal government will proceed with a $2.1-billion plan to acquire three naval supply ships, Defence Minister Gordon O'Connor announced Monday.

He made the announcement on the hangar deck of one of the navy's frigates — HMCS St. John's.

Four consortiums are bidding on the program, which was started under the previous Liberal government.

Irving Shipbuilding, ThyssenKrupp Marine Systems AG, BAE Systems Ltd. and SNC Lavalin ProFac Inc. all expressed interest in building the 28,000-tonne vessels, which are meant to replace the navy's 1960s vintage support ships.

The winning bidder will also receive an $800-million contract to provide support and maintenance throughout the life of the ships.

This will be very welcome news to the navy: the glamour vessels may be the ones that fire the armament, but the real workhorses of the navy are the ones that replenish, refuel, and rearm the fighting ships. If you can't do that, your navy is less than half as effective as it could be.

JTF 2 awarded Presidential Citation

A link from Castle Argghhh! alerted me to the news that the JTF 2, Canada's special forces/counter-terrorism unit, has been awarded a Presidential Citation for work in Afghanistan:

The Canadian Forces unit (CF) Joint Task Force Two (JTF 2) was presented with the United States Presidential Unit Citation from the United States Ambassador to Canada in a ceremony today. JTF 2 received the citation for its outstanding contribution to the multi-national Special Operations Forces task force in Afghanistan in 2002.

"This presentation of the United States Presidential Unit Citation serves to recognize the outstanding work and contribution of all members of JTF 2," said Minister of National Defence, Gordon O'Connor. "This unit continues to play a pivotal role in the safety and security of Canadians at home and abroad through its efforts in the campaign against terrorism."

"JTF 2 has proven to be a significant enhancement to our combat forces in the campaign against terrorism," said Chief of the Defence Staff, General Rick Hillier. "This recognition, one of few publicly recognized events we've had due to the unit's counter-terrorism role, serves to highlight the significant impact that JTF 2 continues to have on behalf of all Canadians and our allies."

More on the Haditha massacre

Jon sent along a link to this Hot Air round-up of information on the investigation into the murders in Haditha:

The Times says three or four Marines are suspected of carrying out the killings with several more facing charges of having covered it up or done nothing while the shooting was going on.

The rest of today's coverage follows two tracks. One is devoted to showing how tough the Marines have had it in Haditha. This AP story paints it as the equal of any snakepit in Iraq; Zarqawi is rumored to have lived there, and voter turnout for last year's constitutional referendum was estimated at 150 out of a city of 90,000. So hard is it, in fact, that Knight-Ridder's Iraq correspondent reported last August — three months before the alleged massacre — that some of the Marine officers stationed there worried that their men might crack. Editor & Publisher reprinted the article today.

Canadian military hardware wish-list

There's a good round-up of the Canadian Forces' hardware wish list posted at Daimnation. It includes a link to this Chris Wattie article:

Defence sources say Gordon O'Connor, the Defence Minister, will make a pitch to a Cabinet committee tomorrow for six major projects worth more than $8-billion.

[. . .] At the top of Mr. O'Connor's list will be four new C-17 Globemaster cargo jets, which the sources said would be bought directly from the U.S. manufacturer, Boeing, in a "sole source" acquisition.

Long overdue. Not necessarily these particular planes, but creating a long-range, heavy-lift "organic" component. This sort of thing can be supplemented by rentals of foreign aircraft as needed, but for the kind of missions Canada has taken on over the last few years, it's incredible that it's taken this long just to get to the formal proposal stage.

The government will also be asked to approve the purchase of 17 tactical transports — smaller, propeller-driven aircraft that can land troops or cargo in remote, rough airstrips. The likely winner of that contract will be the C-130J, the latest model of the venerable Hercules now in service with the Canadian air force.

These will probably be coming on line just as the oldest of the current Herc fleet are ready to be retired. If the tender goes to the current most likely winner, the air force will be happy. However, the competing manufacturer's agents are very busy trying to sell their alternative solution by dangling a fair bit of domestic off-sets (especially in Quebec). Let's all just hope that (if the politically expedient option is chosen instead) the Airbus A400M will be a capable aircraft. When it gets airborne.

Mr. O'Connor is also proposing to buy as many as 20 new heavy-lift helicopters for the army and a total of 18 new search-and-rescue planes.

It must be galling for the current Canadian deployment to Afghanistan . . . they're depending on the Dutch for use of Chinook heavy-lift helicopter support. Chinooks which used to belong to the Canadian Forces.

The army is to get a replacement for its 24-year-old logistics trucks, while the navy will get approval for its three new joint-support ships, a combination troopship and resupply vessel due to be built over the next five years, the sources said.

The new ships for the navy will be an interesting development. As Mark C. points out in his post at Daimnation:

I smell a fix here. In return for the JSS (at least most of them) being built in Canada (hang the added expense and delays, politics is politics), when the government gets around to the amphibious assault ship it may consider an off-shore purchase. The Dutch have a nifty example but there are several other possible sources (France, UK, US, Italy — the last is the un-Canadian "hybrid" aircraft carrier that the Liberals so misleadingly and viciously attacked in the 2004 election).

It will be fascinating to see whether the Defence Minister can get cabinet to go ahead with this plan.

Captain Goddard to be buried at the National Memorial Cemetary

Captain Nichola Goddard, who died in action in Afghanistan last week, is to be buried in Ottawa's National Memorial Cemetary, according to this report in the Globe and Mail:

The cemetery, within sight of the Parliament buildings, was established in 2001 at the urging of Gen. Romeo Dallaire, now a senator, who believed that Canada needed something equivalent to the American military burial grounds at Arlington, Va.

To date few soldiers killed in combat have been buried there, military historian Jack Granatstein said Tuesday.

"I think this is where people who are killed in action, killed overseas, should be buried," said Mr. Granatstein, former director of the Canadian War Museum.

Capt. Goddard, 26, died May 17 near Kandahar in a Taliban ambush. She was the 16th Canadian soldier to be killed in Afghanistan. All the others have been buried in their hometowns.

Her funeral will be held Friday at St. Barnabas Anglican Church in Calgary, where she married Jason Beam in 2002.

Hat tip to NealeNews.

Uniform humour

Damian "Babbling" Brooks has some good-natured fun with the US Air Force's proposed new uniform:

I'm not sure the USAF wants its full-dress uniform to be a carbon-copy of a First-Year Canadian Officer Cadet's semi-dress uniform. But hey, if they do, at least it will give me something else to razz them about.

I'll even send a few of them chinstraps for their wedges. Nothing says dominant world airpower like a chinstrap.

A possible answer . . .

. . . to the question of why we have troops in Afghanistan:

"Then he turned to me and said, 'Please excuse their staring. They are just very surprised that you are a woman working with all of these men. I have told them that you climbed over the mountain with us with your heavy bag and that you had no problems. They think that you must be very strong. I explained to them that you are just like the men, and that you can do everything that they can do the same as them.' "

Goddard added: "It was perhaps the greatest statement of equality that I have ever heard — and it was given by a Pakistani-raised, Afghan male in the middle of an Afghan village that is only accessible by a five km walk up a mountain. It just goes to show that anything is possible and that stereotypes are often completely wrong."

Captain Nichola Goddard, 1st Royal Canadian Horse Artillery, was killed in action earlier this week, the first Canadian woman to die in combat:

Although Canadian women lost their lives in action in both the First and Second World Wars, Goddard was the first to do so in a combat role.

"I believe it's safe to say she was the first woman in a combat-arms military occupation (such as artillery, infantry, or armoured) killed in front-line combat," said Lieut. Morgan Bailey, a media liaison officer in Ottawa.

Goddard was serving as a forward artillery observer, helping to target the artillery guns by observing where the shells fell.

Combat roles were first opened to Canadian women in 1990.

Canadian forces were acting in support of the Afghan National Police and the Afghan National Army, who had received information a large number of Taliban fighters were massing in the Panjwai district, about 24 kilometres west of Kandahar, an area that has seen off-on fighting for weeks, said Fraser.

Sea Kings again

The Sea King helicopters get another media pasting:

Our soldiers are as brave, disciplined and deadly as any in the world. But they are often equipped with old, inappropriate and overpriced kit.

There is some consternation in the ranks about the likely deployment in Afghanistan of 30-year-old Sea King helicopters. The craft were serviceable enough in their day, but they are slow, lack manoeuvrability and are especially bad in the heat.

That the MoD may be obliged to blow the cobwebs off their rotor-blades will not, however, surprise anyone familiar with the dire record of that department.

The only difference is that this report is from the Daily Telegraph.

The Canadian Special Operations Regiment

A post at Castle Argghhh! linked to this National Post article on the new Canadian Special Operations Regiment:

Canada's newest special forces unit began training its first soldiers this week, gearing up at a breakneck pace to prepare for a first mission that could come as early as August and send the Canadian Special Operations Regiment to a hot spot anywhere in the world with only a few hours' notice.

The National Post was given an exclusive look at the first soldiers of this elite unit, the first new regiment formed by the Canadian army since the ill-fated Airborne Regiment was created in the 1960s.

But Lieutenant-Colonel Jamie Hammond, the regiment's first commander and a former Airborne officer himself, says the new unit will not be anything like the Airborne Regiment, which was disbanded in 1995 in the wake of the Somalia scandal.

"We don't want Rambos here," he says during a break in the demanding training regimen this week. "In fact, we're looking to weed out the Rambos. We want quiet professionals."

Lt.-Col. Hammond insists that his new unit is much more than just a battalion of paratroopers. The regiment will all be trained to parachute into action, but he says with a shrug: "That's just another way to get to work."

John, the Castellan of Argghhh!, points out the potential for problems if the regiment's missions are not clearly defined and carefully planned:

There's a reason we keep the Rangers and the SOF as separate elements, aside from the obvious reality of we can afford to. One would hope, however, if they are going to train them up as thoroughly and expensively as SOF personnel, they don't get used a lot as conventional high quality infantry — not just a less-than-optimum use of resources (if you need the infantry, you probably also need the SOF) but if you get 'em killed doing grunt work, they aren't there to do SOF work.

Of course, most Canadians are still in that little dream world where soldiers are only there for peacekeeping and never actually fire their weapons or are in the firing line when others are firing. The idea of the JTF2 and the new CSOR getting involved in combat operations is still an unwelcome, foreign notion. Canadian public opinion took a nice long vacation from diplomatic and military reality between 1991 and 2005.

HMCS Chicoutimi information site

Jon sent me a link to the HMCS Chicoutimi site maintained by the Department of National Defence:

This website has been established for information on the events surrounding HMCS CHICOUTIMI. The Website includes news updates, photos and transcripts of past news conferences. The site will be updated as more information becomes available, so please feel free to visit regularly.

For those of you tuning in late, HMCS Chicoutimi is the former Royal Navy submarine HMS Upholder. She was leased by the Canadian government to replace several outdated diesel-electric submarines in Canadian service. HMS Upholder and her sister ships had been mothballed for several years, as the Royal Navy had moved to an all nuclear-powered fleet of submarines. Upholder was the last of four ships in the class to be brought back into service and had been laid up the longest.

The newly renamed Chicoutimi had a serious onboard accident during her transfer to Canada which involved "a fire in an oxygen generator, nine casualties, and the tragic death of Lieutenant(N) Chris Saunders." This website includes the Board of Inquiry files for the investigation into the accident.

Update: The DND will delay repairing Chicoutimi until a scheduled refit in the year 2010:

The department said delaying repairs to HMCS Chicoutimi for another four years will save millions of dollars that can be spent elsewhere, including two other subs in the fleet.

"This will improve our ability to get Victoria and Corner Brook back into service and better position the navy to have two boats fully operational in 2009," the department said in a one-page statement released late Thursday.

Victoria and Corner Brook are also currently out of commission.

A defence analyst said the decision isn't surprising since Ottawa has been trying to trim costs and consolidate spending in the lead up to the federal budget Tuesday.

Peter Haydon of the Centre for Policy Studies in Halifax said Friday the extensive repairs to Chicoutimi will be done at the same time as a scheduled two-year refit, which Defence says could save the department millions.

British officer sentenced to 8 months in jail

A Royal Air Force officer has been sentenced to eight months in jail for refusing to obey five separate orders to go to Iraq:

Australian-born Flight-Lieutenant Malcolm Kendall-Smith, 37, was convicted by a five-member panel of officers of what the judge called "calculated and deliberate disobedience" of five orders to train, prepare and deploy to Iraq last year.

Kendall-Smith said he viewed the war as a crime and could not participate in any form.

But judge Jack Bayliss ruled British troops were in Iraq in 2005 with the permission of the United Nations, and that Kendall-Smith's view of the war's legality was no defense.

"Obedience to orders is at the heart of any disciplined force. Refusal to obey orders means that force is not a disciplined force but a rabble," he said.

"Those who wear the queen's uniform cannot pick and choose the orders they follow."

If Kendall-Smith felt that the war was so wrong, he always had the option of resigning his commission. If he felt that way, then doing any of his normal military duties could be construed as furthering the war, so his philosophical objections lack consistency. Disobeying direct orders is merely grandstanding, not following one's conscience. He was lucky to get off with such a light sentence.

A salute to the fallen

John of Argghhh has a thoughtful post on the death of Private Robert Costall, 1 PPCLI:

For those who may be muttering "Big deal, one troop dead, so what, given our casualties?"

For Canada, it *is* a big deal. And that's good enough for me.

QotD: War Reporting

[P]erhaps the time has come to send sports reporters to war zones. It seems to be one of the last refuges of journalism in which a) reporters have basic knowledge of the subject matter they're assigned to, and b) they're expected to report the details and outcome of the race, even if a contestant is injured or dies during competition.

It's astonishing that the same country that still celebrates the envelope pushing performances (and near-death experiences) of the "Crazy Canucks" downhill ski team, hasn't figured out that covering a war in the context of body counts is the sports journalism equivalent of limiting Olympic coverage to the daily injury reports of the various countries in competition.

Kate McMillan, "Killed In Action", Small Dead Animals, 2006-03-29

QotD: Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan

[Interviewer]: What is being done to ensure your safety?

[Captain Dave]: Before I answer that question, I must make it clear that what we will be doing there is not what you expect. This is not a peacekeeping tour. We have a very clear mission in Afghanistan, and it will almost certainly involve combat — not occasional, desultory, 'odd angry shot' kind of fighting, but the real thing. It is very likely that many Canadian soldiers will be injured or killed. Although the organization of which I am a part — a small part of the complete Canadian force — has a peaceful-sounding title, you must remember that the enemy does not recognize such distinctions, or rather recognizes them enough to pick the easy target. A big part of my job will be to coordinate security. You may rest assured that if I see the enemy, then I or my soldiers will capture him, or we will kill him. We are not playing games.

My comrades and I are well trained; we are equipped, at the soldier level, as well as money can buy and certainly better than any other modern military; we have been given the legal authority to use the tools at our disposal; and we are, for the moment at least, backed by a population that supports us.

My only fear is that once we start to suffer casualties — and, again, we will suffer casualties — that support will begin to erode, and well-meaning but nevertheless terribly misguided Canadians will start to demand our return home. I am making no comment whatsoever on governmental decisions that may or may not be made in the future — but make no mistake, a public that does not support the fight does not support the troops. Period. And this war will have to be prosecuted over a generation for our sacrifices to mean anything at all.

Captain "Virtual Dave", Provincial Reconstruction Team, "More on the PRT", Farfromcanadahar, 2006-01-20

QotD: Peacekeeping

. . . the word "peacekeeping" triggers a series of powerful memories and positive images in the Canadian mind: Lester Pearson's Nobel Peace Prize; a Canadian soldier in a blue helmet interposed between warring factions; the peacekeeping monument in Ottawa, and the widely believed mantra that, while Americans make war, we Canadians keep the peace.

Canadians are fixated on peacekeeping. We believe that Mike Pearson invented it, that Canadians are the best in the world at it, and that if we do peacekeeping, ideally for the United Nations, then we will not need large numbers of troops or much expensive equipment. The idea of peacekeeping as our métier has certainly shaped Canadian defence policy, and not for the better. The billions of dollars that Liberals and Conservatives have belatedly pledged to rebuild the Canadian Forces will take years to make a difference and to undo four decades of neglect . . .

By J.L. Granatstein, "Wake up! This is our war, too", Globe and Mail, 2006-02-28

Refuted by one who knows

Farfromcanadahar is a Canadian soldier, serving in Afghanistan. I don't think he's read my blog, but he might as well have done:

Every time anything happens to Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan, everyone with a beef against the current federal government seems to feel the need to ratchet-jaw on about the poor, wretchedly equipped Canadian military. As someone who's been issued all the kit, and who has had access to the stuff other countries are using, I find this tendency extremely irritating.

Canada doesn't have a big navy. We don't have guided missile cruisers, (working) submarines, or aircraft carriers. Our air force is suffering from decades of neglect, and we are stretched mighty thin just sustaining our forces in Afghanistan with our brace of C-130s. We are mothballing our tanks. It's safe to say that as far as the big-ticket stuff goes, we pretty much suck.

But the soldier stuff, the vehicles and the clothing and the protection and (sorry, Gen Hillier) the gizmos . . . now there, we have another story.

He specifically praises the G-wagon, the LAV-III, the C7A2 rifle "which has so many useful and innovative improvements that I despair of listing them without putting my civilian readers to sleep", the new camouflage pattern, CADPAT, night vision equipment, communications equipment, etc.

Is it perfect? Hell no. Combat uniforms, designed to be worn under fragmentation vests, that have chest pockets? And no arm pockets? WTF!? And seriously, mate, what genius came up with a "modular" tactical vest that doesn't allow the user to carry more than 4 magazines? After every other fighting force in the world, not to mention your own soldiers, has come to the conclusion that soldiers require up to 10 or more magazines in modern battle? By the way, great job in making grenade pouches that the grenades you give us don't fit into. That's especially useful. I put my Garmin in one of mine. Maybe I can use another for an MP3 player. And don't even get me started about the absurd, almost criminally negligent administrative system under which we suffer. I really didn't enjoy not getting paid for over two months this fall.

But for the love of God, I think back to the Army I joined in 1987, and the 1950's pattern webbing and 1950's vintage equipment I was originally issued with. I think back to the vehicles we used to drive, the clothing we used to wear, and frankly the attitudes we used to have, and I don't even recognize us.

Clearly, based on that last paragraph, this isn't the army I belonged to, either. In my company's armoury, we still had a WWII-era American rocket launcher (bazooka, to the comic-book crowd), a Bren gun, and lots of other stuff that was older than the company commander. I'm delighted to hear that at least some of that has changed.

Falklands, part two?

The Scotsman reports on Argentinian military build-up near the Falkland Islands:

Several planes are believed to have overflown island airspace in a bid to test RAF defences. A number of Falkland vessels have been seized in waters close to Argentina.

The already tense situation has been further exacerbated by the Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, a Kirchner ally, who responded to criticism from Blair this month by telling him to "return the Malvinas to Argentina".

[. . .] a Foreign Office source last night conceded that Tony Blair now faced having to reinforce Britain's commitment to the islands — perhaps by sending more troops to the South Atlantic.

"There have been a number of incidents, and even if they weren't all connected, they might suggest that the government in Buenos Aires is feeling a bit bullish," the source said. "No one is saying they are about to invade but you have to maintain your position. We all remember that, after the original conflict, Britain was accused of giving the junta the impression that their invasion would not be opposed.

"We would, of course, prefer them to get the message, but maybe — sometimes — we just have to underline it ourselves."

Steve Janke takes a look at the ongoing tensions:

In 1982, Argentinian territory was never attacked (the Falklands don't count, of course). That was both a strategic decision to avoid escalating the conflict, as well as a tactical nod to the limits of British power projection. This time around, things might play out very differently on that front. If Britain is faced with having to fight the same war twice, they might decide that this will be not only the second time but also the last time. Argentina might be faced with some serious threats to its strategic military and economic assets over . . . what? . . . some wind-swept rocks and sheep?

With stand-off weapons of the kind that wreaked havoc inside Iraq launched from hundreds of miles away by submerged submarines, the Argentinians might discover that the explosion they trigger by stepping on the Falklands tripwire is far worse than they imagined.

New Canadian Military blog

The Torch is a group blog for posts on Canadian military matters.

Old films, now available online

Google now has some fascinating historical films available for viewing. Among the first releases are some NASA films, WW2 newsreels, and US Department of the Interior shorts.

I had a quick look at the newsreels, and I certainly found this one from May, 1945 extremely interesting. It includes footage of the 1945 May Day parade in Moscow, footage of Vidkun Quisling, Karl Doenitz, Alfred Jodl, and the remains of Heinrich Himmler, and U.S. President Harry Truman giving a brief speech about the war against Japan. Fascinating stuff.

Austin Bay on the bombing of the Askariya Shrine

Austin Bay has a post up including some informed commentary from one of his military buddies:

"Sapper"is a long time friend. He is a Vietnam vet (combat engineers). He also served in the US Army Reserves for over thirty years. He is a civil engineer, by trade.

The following is his analysis of the terror bomb attack on the Askariya Shrine in Samarra. Understand that his analysis is informed speculation, but speculation by a man who knows how to build buildings as well as destroy them.

[. . .] My best guess from the review of the photos and with some help from an OSHA Inspector with experience in Accident investigation/reconstruction is that the explosion took place about 1/2 up the dome. The bricks in this area may have been only one or two thick. Without a view of the interior of the Shrine there is a lot left to conjecture. The amount of explosive required at any one point to do the damage would not be that great about ten pounds as an off hand guess based upon a quick glance at Junior Woodchuck Manual (FM 5-34), the demolitions section. Placed around the circumference at say twenty separate points would add up to a total of 200 pounds of TNT. Using C4 or an equivalent would decrease this by a factor 1.34. A question posed is, was this a quick in and out job or would it have taken some time to plant the charges. My guess is that it probably took some time to plant the charges. The charges would have to be taken into the building placed at a point some distance up in the structure of the dome itself. With only people power to move the stuff up there, place the charges and rig the ignition circuits I would tend to believe this was an operation covering three to five hours, not just a quick in and out raid.

Babbler on defence priorities

Damian has a good post up on priorities for the new defence minister:

I like his first priority, because it deals with the trickiest issue facing our CF today: training and personnel problems. Undermanning hurts our present-force capabilities, but it also hurts our future-force capabilities as a consequence. For example, a specialist PO2 who jetty-jumps to fill a slot on two different ships on back-to-back deployments isn't available to train new specialists in his trade. He's also a lot more likely to burn out - family problems, depresssion, etc - and deprive the CF of a fully trained operator. Reinvesting our 'human capital', if you will, in the training system requires some short-term sacrifices, but will pay dividends in the long-run.

I like his third priority, because it deals with a huge gap in the CF's primary mission: to defend Canadian sovereignty on our Arctic borders. Yes, there are some serious roadblocks to putting artic-ice-capable warships into action, especially if they are to be Canadian-built. We're creating a military competency from scratch, for heaven's sake - it's not going to be a walk in the park. But when the alternative is to continue to cede everything but the moral high ground to those nations who don't recognize our sovereignty, I think we have to bite the bullet and fight our way through the difficulties to make our presence felt. Will there be some mistakes made along the way? Almost certainly. Should that stop us from proceeding? Absolutely not.

O'Connor's second priority is more problematic. Perhaps he's on the right track, and perhaps he simply understands his political purview a little better than I do, but his phrasing leaves me concerned: simplifying the procurement process so it's fair and transparent.

Damian thinks a lot about this sort of thing, and he's very persuasive, but as discussed recently, the way the Canadian government has gone about making their military equipment decisions in the past is ludicrous: capabilities are watered down, numbers are cut, and much seedy politicking goes on (and probably much more that we don't see), ending up in a smaller, less capable, more expensive purchase. Doing some or all of the construction in Canada (or, perhaps more to the point, in the right part of Canada) always seems to take priority over both economic reality and the very real needs of the military.

If O'Connor's move to transparency reduces or eliminates these problems, then I fully support the change.

QotD: Military Equipment Purchases

For sake of comparison, the US-built Milverados cost $65,000 each, the Austrian-built G-wagon $150,000 each. In the early 1980s, the Candian Forces wanted to buy German-built Iltis at a cost of $26,500 apiece. But, purchasing policies intended to support Canadian industry resulted in German tools being moved to a Bombardier plant in Quebec instead. Each licence-built Bombardier Iltis ended up costing DND $84,000.

Stephen Priestley, "Canadian Forces Light Utility Vehicle — the milCOTS 'Milverado'", DND 101, 2006

Putting Canadian troops at risk?

A short news item on the CP wires says that Canadian troops are at risk because the Western Standard is re-publishing the cartoons:

A Muslim group warns that the publication of controversial cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in a Western magazine may cause harm to Canadian troops in Afghanistan.

Riad Saloojee with the Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations says reprinting the drawings could put Canada's soldiers in danger. Violent protests erupted after the images were printed in a Danish newspaper.

As opposed, one must guess, to the utterly risk-free and peaceful job they're currently enjoying in Afghanistan? Or do we need to read this as a threat, rather than just a note of concern?

Note for the overly literal reader: "utterly risk free" and "peaceful" are used in an ironic sense in the preceding paragraph.

Another myth . . . busted

I first encountered this basic axiom when I was a teenaged army cadet, and it struck me as total rubbish:

In an average experienced infantry company in an average day's action, the number engaging with any and all weapons was approximately 15 per cent of the total strength. In the most aggressive companies, under the most intense local pressure, the figure rarely rose above 25 percent of the total strength from the opening to the close of the action.

The writer was US Brigadier General S.L.A. Marshall, and he was writing in a book called Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command in Future War. I've never read the book — although I've read several other books by Marshall — but I've seen this "fact" quoted dozens of times in various military history books and articles. I never found it credible, based on discussions with WW2 veterans of the British and Canadian armies, but at the time I was pretty much brainwashed by the then-current anti-American bias in Canada.

I had to assume, as Marshall's work was constantly being praised by (mostly) American writers, that even if it wasn't true for Canadian, British, German, Russian, or even French soldiers, it must be true of American soldiers. Which dovetailed nicely with my early anti-American feelings. So, a big-name American general says that Yankee soldiers are too timid to fire their weapons in combat 75% of the time? No wonder they're losing in Vietnam.

A link from Hit and Run took me to this interesting little article:

[. . .] This calculation assumes, however, that of all the questions Marshall might ask the soldiers of a rifle company during his interviews, he would unfailingly want to know who had fired his weapon and who had not. Such a question, posed interview after interview, would have signalled that Marshall was on a particular line of inquiry, and that regardless of the other information Marshall might discover, he was devoted to investigating this facet of combat performance. John Westover, usually in attendance during Marshall's sessions with the troops, does not recall Marshall's ever asking this question. Nor does Westover recall Marshall ever talking about ratios of weapons usage in their many private conversations. Marshall's own personal correspondence leaves no hint that he was ever collecting statistics. His surviving field notebooks show no signs of statistical compilations that would have been necessary to deduce a ratio as precise as Marshall reported later in Men Against Fire. The "systematic collection of data" that made Marshall's ratio of fire so authoritative appears to have been an invention.

Bingo!

QotD: The Subaltern

How to not completely fail as [a second lieutenant] (or, how to not be in the .5% that fail to be promoted to Captain):

If you think it is a good idea and your Platoon Sergeant thinks it is a bad idea, do the common sense check — ask a specialist. If the specialist agrees with the Platoon Sergeant, you were wrong. If the specialist agrees with you, you were definitely wrong and quite possibly were about to do something illegal.

"MP" at Fast Bunnies, 2006-01-29

More on body armour

A brief post on facial armour is summed up by a comment from Joe Katzman, of Winds of Change:

Obviously, these guys have NOT read the manual re: "The Top 100 Things I'd Do If I Ever Became An Evil Overlord."

Item #1: "My Legions of Terror will have helmets with clear plexiglass visors, not face-concealing ones."

RTFM, guys, RTFM . . .

The discussion in the extended comments thread is, by turns, interesting, amusing, and occasionally informative.

Replacing the Browning High Power?

An article in the Regina Leader Post implies that yet another piece of equipment in current use by the Canadian troops in Afghanistan needs to be replaced:

Canadian soldiers embarked on the country's largest combat mission since the Korean War are using handguns that date back even further — to the Second World War.

The nine-millimetre Browning High Power, which serves as the soldiers' "weapon of last resort" in southern Afghanistan, has been in service with the Canadian military since 1937 and the average Browning — commonly known as the "nine-mill" — now being used by the troops is 63 years old, according to Canadian Forces small-arms experts.

Major Gary Vassbotn, the army's section head for small arms, said the Browning was adopted as a sidearm in 1937 and the last pistol was produced by John Inglis & Co. in 1944. But while the handguns may be old, he said they are in excellent condition.

Jon sent me this link and asked for my comments. I can hardly call myself an expert on handguns, although I had some experience with the Browning, and didn't think it was that bad a weapon . . . of course, that was nearly thirty years ago.

In typical range conditions, I didn't find the weapon prone to jamming, but the range conditions I encountered were significantly less dusty than the environment the troops are dealing with now. I'd suspect an ammunition issue before I'd look to the design of the weapon itself, given the long service life the Browning has had in the Canadian Forces. To be fair, I never fired the weapon outside the range, so I can't say whether it was a good or bad combat piece: we always used to joke about throwing the pistol after firing off all the rounds in the magazine (because the enemy would be close enough to hit by then). American commentators have often dismissed the 9mm cartridge as being too light for the job (most preferring the .45 ACP instead).

I did find the Browning to be less accurate (okay, I was less accurate firing the weapon), but I haven't fired enough handguns to determine if that's typical of the Browning or not. The most accurate handgun I ever played with was a Smith & Wesson .357 revolver. That was a sweet, sweet target piece.

Update: Jon also sent a link to an older post by Kim du Toit, who also liked the Browning.

Exploring the innards of a Luger

I've always loved the look of the German Luger P08 pistol. I've never fired one, and only handled one real one, so this post at Castle Argghhh was very interesting indeed.

The Luger is one of the most distinctive and widely-recognized pistols the world over. You can thank WWI, WWII, and war movies for that. Well, that, and perhaps because the Luger Navy Model of 1904 introduced the world to the 9mm Euroweenie pellet, as Kim du Toit is want to call that round. Regardless of what I or Kim think, however, it is the most common pistol and sub-machine gun round, and the Luger Navy Model of 1904 introduced it to the world. Georg Luger was the designer of that bullet, building on his design of the 7.65 Luger round, which he developed after recognizing the need to make shorter, yet reasonably powerful rounds if automatic pistols were going to get down to a useful size.

The impetus for the development of the Luger pistol gathered steam in the period of 1890-1900. The gunmakers in Europe and the US were angling to land large military orders as the 1st rank armies of Europe were looking to modernize, and the US Army had discovered weaknesses in it’s arms in the Spanish American War. In Germany it was DWM, Mauser, and Bergmann; in England Webley & Scott, to name some of the major players. US interest came on the heels of the success of the European efforts.

What most people I’ve talked to don't know is that the Luger has an sorta-American connection. Georg Luger, the primary engineer, collaborated with the Hugo Borchardt to develop the first Luger pistol, improving on Borchardt's initial design by removing the balance and handling-destroying rear overhang and replacing it with a recoil link and spring in the butt of the pistol, vastly improving the handling of the pistol.

Gen. Hillier on board for massive recruiting effort

CP is reporting that Chief of the Defence Staff, General Rick Hillier thinks the Canadian Forces could absorb the rush of new recruits promised by the incoming Conservative government:

Canada's top soldier says the military can absorb the thousands of new troops promised in the Conservative campaign platform if the new government also comes up with the money to train and equip them.

Gen. Rick Hillier, the chief of the defence staff, says it wouldn't be easy enlisting and training the 13,000 regulars and 10,000 reservists promised by the Tories, but it can be done if the money is there.

He says it would mean short-term pain as people are pulled off other duties to train the newcomers, but the benefits in the long run would be worth the effort.

You can't blame the man for feeling that he has to jump on this almost unprecedented opportunity to bring in a vast number of new recruits . . . the moment may pass quicker than he imagines, leaving the Canadian Forces with the illusion of augmented strength, the reality of greater expectations, and little in the way of real improvement in funding, staffing, or equipment.

Austin Bay on the Canadian Forces

Austin Bay has some thoughts on revitalizing the Canadian military:

The term "Canadian military" should never be an oxymoron, but after a decade of reduction and decline, what was once one of the world's most able and elite combat organizations is now a hollow force.

The slide in defense funding that began in the mid-1990s is one cause. The current Canadian defense budget buys about 25 percent less bang and less peacekeeping than it did 10 years ago.

With the end of the Cold War, some reduction in force structure was understandable.

Actually, the Canadian government was cashing in the "peace dividend" long before anyone else in the west . . . even before it could be said to exist. The peak of Canadian involvement in NATO was probably the mid-1960s to mid-1970s. From the second Trudeau government onwards, every change in military policy seemed to be a step back from front-line commitment, a weakening of the numbers of fighting troops, a reduction in the quantity of equipment to be provided. They say there's a lot of ruin in a country, and after the last 30 years, you'd have to say the same about the military: it's amazing that there still are Canadian Armed Forces left.

Post-Cold War, North American geography played a role. Here's that presumption: The United States would always be there to defend Canada, so why bother maintaining military forces?

Canadian governments consciously decided to become parasitical on the American military. Is it any wonder that Americans view us as military freeloaders? We no longer have the "lift" to get our troops to where they're needed without help. We don't need to build a miniature of the entire US arsenal, but we do need to invest in replacing obsolete equipment and re-acquiring transport, supply, and support capabilities we used to have.

I have yet to meet or serve with a Canadian soldier who failed to impress me with his professionalism and discipline. In my experience — in terms of individual, quality personnel — only Australian troops match Canadians on a one-for-one basis.

Two years ago, I had the privilege of serving with Australian troops in Iraq. The Aussies are crack.[. . .]

Today, Canada has too few of these fine troops, and the superior troops Canada does field are not supplied with the modern, first-rate weapons and equipment they deserve — at least, not in sufficient numbers.

There is so much that needs to be done just to properly support our existing troops in current commitments in the way of equipment that it risks sounding totally unrealistic to talk about new equipment for future roles; but that is exactly what the new minister needs to tackle ASAP. The troops on deployment right now will (unfortunately) see very little direct improvement in their situation . . . military equipment is usually a long-term purchase, but there are undoubtedly small things we can do in the short-term to make their jobs easier and less risky.

One aspect of the rhetorical differences between Canada and the United States may have been (unintentionally) of significant assistance to US policy:

In many ways, the Canadian rhetorical and political game of "We Aren't America" is a reasonable, if semi-hypocritical posture. The game has actually benefited the great cause of freedom. In Cold War situations where American troops or observers might have escalated tensions, Canadians could provide security, stability and democratic presence. Canada could be the United States without Washington's alleged baggage. Those of us who understood the stakes were thankful.

History: "Best brigade . . . in the world"

Austin Bay has some kind words about the Canadian army of yesteryear:

The Canadians launched a sneaky infantry attack — on foot — that preceded our armor attack. The ground attack cracked the Blue Force, sent them reeling, and blew open a hole for Canadian and US tanks.

The judges had to stop the exercise. Take a mulligan, Blue Force.

In my opinion, the Canadian brigade was the best brigade in NATO, which probably meant it was the best brigade man for man in the world.

Unfortunately, he's talking about 1976. Not 2006.

We may still have some of the best individual soldiers wearing the Canadian uniform, but we no longer have the capabilities that our NATO troops had . . .

"That's a fact"

Via Political Staples, a link to a Rick Mercer rant on attack ads, and the Canadian Forces.

Conventional warheads on SLBMs?

As reported in William Arkin's Washington Post blog, the US Navy is going to be developing a conventional (that is, non-nuclear) warhead for the Trident ballistic missile submarine fleet:

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has given the Navy go ahead to develop a conventionally armed Trident missile. Two dozen existing nuclear-armed submarine-launched missiles will be converted to carry conventional warheads. The missiles will then be assigned "global strike" missions to allow quicker preemptive attacks.

For the first time since intercontinental ballistic missiles were "captured" in arms control treaties 40 years ago as unique and potentially destabilizing weapons, the United States will muddy the waters by modifying an existing nuclear weapon for use in day-to-day warfare.

The conversion of Trident missiles abandons the strict segregation of nuclear from conventional weapons.

As a few folks have already pointed out, this would be a very quick way of inducing organizational colonic spasms in the high commands of the Chinese and Russian defence forces, with potentially cataclysmic results. Launching a ballistic missile is a particularly bad idea in an already trigger-happy area of the world.

On a cost-basis, it doesn't make a lot of sense either, as sending an F/A-18 on a strike mission would be cheaper and less likely to result in "accidental" launches from Russian or Chinese subs/silos.

Arkin thinks that the reason for the development is less military and more military-industrial complex:

So isn't it ironic that Donald Rumsfeld, the prophet of military transformation and the booster of an effects based approach is releasing a half a billion dollars to develop a provocative weapon that falls back on the old paradigm?

The reason is that Donald Rumsfeld is a weakling. For all his huffing and puffing, he can't say no to either the military or the defense contractors.

Searching for descendents of RCAF crew

Jon sent me a link to a Toronto Star article about a planned monument to the (mostly Canadian) crew of a bomber which crashed on Ilkley Moor in Yorkshire in 1944:

The Canadians on the plane were:

— Pilot Donald George (Mac) McLeod, pilot officer RCAF. Service number J/87657. Age 21. Son of John and Agnes McLeod of Waterford, Ont.

— Air Bomber Robert Henry (Bob) Rahn, sergeant RCAF. Service number R/155420. Age 22. Son of Jacob B. and Edith G. Rahn of Waterloo, Ont. Service record shows his address before recruitment as RR 4 Kitchener, Ont.

— Navigator Lewis (Lew) Riggs, WO11 RCAF. Service number R/148524. Age 20. Son of Walter and Maude M. Riggs of Toronto. Service record shows his address before recruitment as 308 Wellesley Street, Toronto.

— Wireless Operator/Air Gunner William George (Bill) King, WO1 RCAF. Service number R/93560. Age 27. Son of John and Margaret King of Teepee Creek, Alta.

— Air Gunner (Tail) George Ed Martin, sergeant RCAF. Service number R/163413. Age 21. Son of George G. and Nesta E. Martin of Spanish, Ont. Service record shows his address before recruitment as 116 Atlas Avenue, Toronto.

— Air Gunner (Mid-upper) Albert Lorne Mullen, sergeant RCAF. Service number R/192035. Age 19. Son of John Leslie and Ether Brown Mullen of Burnaby, B.C.

All are buried in Stonefall Cemetery in Harrogate, England, where there are 665 graves dedicated to Canadian airmen.

Reilly is in the final stages of completing the monument at the crash site in Yorkshire. An unveiling ceremony is planned for Jan. 31, the anniversary of the crash. The monument will include parts from the aircraft excavated from the site.

[. . .]

"I'd love to be able to contact any surviving relatives of the remainder of the crew," said Paul Reilly (email: preilly@blueyonder.co.uk).

"All my efforts so far have drawn a blank other than finding Lorne's brother. It would be fantastic if any of the relatives in Canada, if traced, could be there for the dedication."

The Halifax aircraft, serial number DK185, crashed on Ilkley Moor, West Yorkshire, England, around 5:30 p.m. on Jan. 31, 1944.

Update, 18 November, 2008: There's a post at Peak Wreck Hunters with the correct co-ordinates and a photo of the memorial.

Celestial Junk surveys the Canadian Armed Forces

Celestial Junk ran a series of articles on the Canadian military earlier this month, which I only just discovered. If you have no idea what the Canadian Forces look like or what they're currently equipped with, these short articles are a good overview (and I'm so far past my active military days that this was useful to me, too):

• Land
• Air
• Sea

The NDP skewers Martin's anti-military ad

The New Democratic Party has a very good response to the recently released-then-withdrawn anti-military ad on their website:

"We're Not Making This Up"

While the Liberals are mired in controversy about their ad that claims the Conservatives will send "soldiers with guns" into Canadian cities, one fact has been overlooked.

Soldiers will soon be in the streets of Winnipeg. And that's a good thing.

"More than 500 army troops, backed by helicopters, armoured vehicles and artillery will turn Winnipeg into an Armed camp..."

"Exercise 'Charging Bison' will unfold for seven days and nights beginning April 30 ...."
- Winnipeg Free Press (December 27, 2005, page A1)

"Charging Bison" is a Canadian Forces training exercise to help our soldiers prepare for the tough, complex and dangerous jobs they will be facing in places like Afghanistan.

But if other parties were like the Liberals, there would be ominous ads threatening that a Liberal victory would mean "soldiers in the streets of Winnipeg. With guns."

But we're not Liberals, so we don't manipulate the truth to scare Canadians — or insult the brave men and women in our armed forces.

And one final point — the last time we saw large numbers of soldiers in the streets of Winnipeg, it was another election year — 1997. They were helping to save the city from flooding.

Wow. Is there anyone outside the PM's inner circle who thought that ad would be a vote-winner?

Update: Whoops. I forgot to hat-tip Damian "Babbling" Brooks (who found the link at Angry in the Great White North).

Harper to strengthen northern defences

Conservative leader Stephen Harper made some strong commitments to defending Canada's north in a speech in Winnipeg today:

Stephen Harper says that if he's prime minister, any foreign vessels bold enough to trespass in Canada's Arctic would get a frosty reception from brand new icebreakers bristling with firepower.

The Tory tough talk is part of multibillion-dollar plan to protect the country's sovereignty in the wake of reports that American submarines cruise Canadian waters at their leisure undetected. Harper said he'd put an end to that by establishing a national sensor system for northern air and water.

He promised to commission three Canadian-built military icebreakers and create a military-civilian deepwater docking facility in the Iqaluit region.

And he said he would set up an Arctic army training centre in the Far North and station new search-rescue aircraft in Yellowknife.

At least 500 sailors, soldiers and airmen would operate the icebreakers and the docking station, which would cost about $2 billion over eight or nine years.

Although I find the mention of icebreaking ships "bristling with firepower" to be highly amusing — none of the rest of the fleet could be accurately described that way — it's the first hint of seriousness about the northern frontier in many years.

Of course, to properly patrol the ice-packed coastline, you need (whisper it) nuclear-powered submarines. The sort of vessel that has only once ever appeared on the Canadian military shopping list (during the first Mulroney government, if I remember correctly).

Don't hold your breath waiting for them to appear in the Canadian order of battle any time real soon . . .

Book on modern warfare

The Economist (reg. req'd) reviews a new book by retired British General Sir Rupert Smith:

The emphasis on making war has shifted, for most western nations, from "organising our forces to defend our territory" to "using them to secure our people and our way of life". General Sir Rupert Smith, the British officer who commanded the UN forces in Bosnia a decade ago, the British armoured division in the first Gulf war and, later, all the troops in Northern Ireland, has a long and varied experience of the new warfare. His first book, "The Utility of Force", ought to be read, marked and inwardly digested by anyone responsible for committing armed forces to military operations.

[. . .]

General Smith believes that the old style of warfare ended with the flash of the atomic bomb above Hiroshima, though the advent of the cold war meant that the West did not appreciate this at the time. While the principal protagonists, America and the Soviet Union, developed the technology they hoped would give them tactical as well as strategic advantage, around the world conflict was taking a new turn. Revolutionary movements and groups of terrorists took to hiding within the civilian population, making traditional military operations difficult, if not impossible, without causing large numbers of civilian casualties. Intelligence-gathering began to assume far greater importance than before. Interestingly, General Smith suggests that America is the country that will find it hardest to change because of the long-held view that it was technical and industrial superiority, above all, that enabled the North to triumph in the civil war.

Analysing the adjustment that western forces need to make is the most interesting part of this book. The author has trawled every conflict since the second world war for examples that support his argument, but he also draws from his own experiences.

It sounds like an interesting book, although it's difficult to judge an author's actual analysis from a reviewer's reading of the work. The idea that western — and particularly American — armies need to widen their view of intelligence from primarily ELINT (electronic intelligence) to a more balanced (and more expensive) ELINT/HUMINT (human intelligence: spies) model has been widely discussed lately. It sounds like the right thing to do, but I'm hardly well-informed on military intelligence of either flavour.

Iraq/Afghanistan lessons drive US Army training changes

The Economist has a good article on how the US Army is adapting their training from the real-world lessons learned in Afghanistan and Iraq (behind the subscriber wall, unfortunately):

Car bombs are not the only bit of Iraqi-Afghan verisimilitude the brigade experienced at Fort Polk's Joint Readiness Training Centre (JRTC) last month. Attacks with simulated roadside bombs (known as improvised explosive devices, or IEDs), rockets, mortars, rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) and small arms, using special effects and lasers, are unrelenting.

The assailants — 160 American soldiers dedicated to the task, and dressed accordingly — come in two forms: al-Qaeda terrorists, based in an off-limits bit of the wood called Pakistan, and Taliban insurgents living in 18 mock villages. Another 800 role-players live with them, acting as western aid workers, journalists, peacekeepers, Afghan mayors, mullahs, policemen, doctors and opium farmers, all with fake names, histories and characters. Some 200 bored-looking Afghan-Americans are augmented by local Louisianans in Afghan garb. A clutch of Vietnam-veterans with missing limbs, splashed with fake blood, make terrific bomb victims.

Fort Polk has seen huge changes in the past two years. Designed for light infantry and special-forces troops, it has always dealt with some parts of guerrilla warfare, such as booby-traps and RPG attacks. But in the past the "insurgents" wore blue armbands to distinguish themselves, a tactic strangely shunned by America's enemies in Iraq and Afghanistan. There also used to be no more than 50 civilian role-players on the battlefield.

The changes are expensive — the basic cost per brigade of a month at the JRTC has gone up from $2m to $9m. And similar changes are under way at the army's two other Combat Training Centres (CTCs), where the army simulates battalion- and brigade-sized battles. Fort Irwin, California, used to be dedicated to tank battles. Two years ago, not a single building dotted its 600,000 acres of desert. Now there are a dozen mock villages and plans for a $50m mock city. Two Hollywood companies have been hired to improve the army's flashes and bangs, and to give acting classes to the role-players.

Of course, The Economist being a British publication, they can't help but include some "helpful" contrasts:

In their routine planning and training, the British expected to find civilians on their battlefield; the Americans did not. The British taught the virtue of restraint, to limit civilian casualties and the strategic damage they cause. American soldiers were trained to wipe the enemy out. British soldiers were trained in crowd control and basic forensic skills; American soldiers rarely were. In April 2003, nervous American soldiers fired into a crowd of protesters in Fallujah, killing and maiming scores. Within weeks, the Iraqi town had risen against the occupation, culminating in two terrible battles last year.

In more peaceable southern Iraq, meanwhile, the British acted on their training. Their first aim was to win the civilian population's trust. One way was through information operations (IO), which means, at the crudest level, generating good public relations for the army. "The Brits do this as a matter of course; they had a much finer appreciation of the culture in Iraq," says Lieutenant-Colonel Chuck Eassa, deputy-chief of IO at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas, the home of the army staff college and other cerebral institutions. For the American army in Iraq, he says, IO was a "low-density skill set". Each division of 19,000 soldiers had only two IO officers.

Harper promises to resurrect Canadian paratroop battalion

CBC News is reporting that Conservative leader Stephen Harper, on a campaign stop in Trenton, promised to raise a new paratroop battalion:

Military spending over the next five years would increase by more than $5 billion compared to the plan set out by the Liberal government, Harper said. By 2010, he said, a Conservative government would be spending $1.8 billion more per year than the Liberals.

"The Canadian Forces deserve better than the neglect that they have seen for the past 12 years," he said.

Asked about his plan to create a new airborne battalion of 650 troops stationed in Trenton, Harper said he doesn't believe there's a stigma attached to the idea of airborne troops.

Even more to the point, the article also mentions:

The Airborne Regiment, which was based in Petawawa, was disbanded in 1995 following a 1993 deployment as peacekeepers to Somalia, during which Canadian soldiers beat a Somali teenager to death.

Harper said, "The government of the day disbanded the Airborne Regiment to avoid getting to the bottom of a particular incident."

Hat tip to Nealenews.

Aircraft designation politics

Murdoc Online has a few thoughts about the re-designation of the F/A-22 "Raptor":

I noted a couple of weeks ago that so many additional roles were being shoehorned onto the Raptor that it was becoming the F/A/R/C/E-22. Not because it's a poor-performing plane (it isn't) or because these additional capabilities are useless (they aren't), but because so many non-fighter capabilities were being hyped so loudly on this very expensive project that it was beginning to look more than a little silly.

If a 150-million-plus dollar fifth-generation air superiority fighter cannot justify itself based solely upon its ability to defeat enemy aircraft when all the chips are down, no add-on capability to destroy IEDs along convoy routes is going to help sell anyone on it. And make no mistake. The Raptor is a 'when all the chips are down' aircraft. Between the limited numbers the Air Force will be getting and the significant expense of each plane, expect them to attend only the most important parties.

Supporting the Canadian troops overseas

Neil Peterson sent the following URLs to a mailing list I monitor:

• Donations to Deployed Members of the Canadian Forces: "Companies, groups and individuals wishing to encourage our Canadian Soldiers serving in foreign countries can send donations through CFPSA. [. . .] Once received, your submission will be evaluated and someone from CFPSA will contact you to make delivery arrangements."
• Write to the troops: "The men and women of the Canadian Forces have demonstrated time and again that they will rise to any challenge. Let your Canadian Forces members know you appreciate their service by sending a message using this monitored message board."
• [Neil writes:] "Operation Santa Claus is the overall name. As a general rule http://www.cfpsa.com/en/ is a good place to go if you want to offer our troops (where they are deployed in any given year) some support."

QotD: Torture

It is a shocking sign of the times that we are having a debate about the appropriateness of torture. Some would say that it's a sign of our democracy's moral decline; others, of the desperate times that have driven us to desperate measures. Either way, those of us who do not want the free world to lose its soul to terrorism must stand up and be counted.

Cathy Young, "How much torture is OK?", Reason Online, 2005-12-06

This is an idea that will only work . . .

. . . if you have complete air superiority. In other words, it's something only the USAF can actively consider:

The U.S. Air Force is now thinking about turning its C-17 transport into a bomber. In the last few years, the JDAM (satellite guided smart bomb) has made aerial bombing far more effective. Because of the satellite guidance (GPS), aircraft can drop the bomb from any altitude, and still get the same accuracy. Thus bombers can stay high, out of range of ground fire. That got people, inside and outside the air force, thinking about using transports, like the C-17, as bombers. Transports are equipped to drop heavy equipment, mounted on pallets, by parachute. It would be a simple matter to have smart bombs, on small pallets, shoved out the rear of C-17s (or C-130s, Etc.) This proposal upset the air force generals, most of whom are combat pilots. So the idea never went far, until now.

If you're in the unique position of the USAF, where air superiority is pretty much a default condition, this is a potentially brilliant notion. For less dominant air forces, it's just not remotely feasible to use slow, heavy transport planes for any kind of combat role.

Hat tip to Dennis Huff for posting a summary to the TacOps list.

The "Christmas Truce" passes out of living memory

Alfred Anderson's death was announced earlier today. The 109-year-old was the last known survivor of the British and German troops who stopped the war on Christmas Day, 1914:

His death leaves fewer than 10 veterans of the First World War alive in Britain.

Anderson died in his sleep at a nursing home in Newtyle, Scotland, said Rev. Neil Gardner of Alyth Parish Church.

Born June 25, 1896, Anderson was an 18-year-old soldier in the Black Watch regiment when British and German troops cautiously emerged from their trenches on Dec. 25, 1914. The enemies swapped cigarettes and tunic buttons, sang carols and even played soccer amid the mud and shell-holes of no man's land.

The informal truce spread along much of the Western Front, in some cases lasting for days.

"I remember the silence, the eerie sound of silence," Anderson told the Observer newspaper last year.

"All I'd heard for two months in the trenches was the hissing, cracking and whining of bullets in flight, machine-gun fire and distant German voices," said Anderson, who was billeted in a farmhouse behind the front lines.

"But there was a dead silence that morning, right across the land as far as you could see. We shouted 'Merry Christmas,' even though nobody felt merry. The silence ended early in the afternoon and the killing started again. It was a short peace in a terrible war."

Update, 22 November: A few news outlets have made a slight change to their reports, so that they're now referring to the last Allied survivor. This is interesting, as in the First World War, the "Allies" were the Germans and Austro-Hungarians: the French and British were the Entente. There have been no indications that there are any German participants in the Christmas Truce still alive.

Naval forts of WW2

A link from Castle Argghhh! led to this fascinating tour of the Maunsell Towers, anti-aircraft positions built on artificial islands to protect the Thames Estuary:

The Thames Estuary Army Forts were constructed in 1942 to a design by Guy Maunsell, following the successful construction and deployment of the Naval Sea Forts. Their purpose was to provide anti-aircraft fire within the Thames Estuary area. Each fort consisted of a group of seven towers with a walkway connecting them all to the central control tower. The fort, when viewed as a whole, comprised one Bofors tower, a control tower, four gun towers and a searchlight tower. They were arranged in a very specific way, with the control tower at the centre, the Bofors and gun towers arranged in a semi-circular fashion around it and the searchlight tower positioned further away, but still linked directly to the control tower via a walkway. All the forts followed this plan and, in order of grounding, were called the Nore Army Fort, the Red Sands Army Fort and finally the Shivering Sands Army Fort. All three forts were in place by late 1943, but Nore is no longer standing. Construction of the towers was relatively quick, and they were easily floated out to sea and grounded in water no more than 30m (100ft) deep.

There was also a link to a page on the Navy version:

Together the 7 forts that were placed in the Thames destroyed 1 E-boat, 22 aircraft & 31 V1 flying bombs.

Of the 7 forts that were built & placed in the Thames only 4 remain standing today. Bearing in mind that the forts were constructed of only reinforced concrete & plate steel. This in itself is not a bad feat in engineering terms as the forts have been standing for some 55 years. No consideration was made for the disposal of the forts after the war as it was considered at the time by the Ministry of Defence that the combination of weather conditions in the Thames & tidal action would destroy the forts in a relatively short period of time.

What a surprise . . . if you don't pay attention

In what should be no surprise to anyone with any familiarity about the Canadian government's long-standing habits on the purchase of military equipment, the feds have decided to delay the decision on nearly C$12 billion of aircraft:

The federal government has delayed a $12-billion purchase of military aircraft until after the next election, deferring political fallout over buying foreign products, The Canadian Press has learned.

Key cabinet ministers and the defence chief faced "passionate" aerospace industry representatives Monday night. They had to deflect claims they were tailoring the purchase of planes and helicopters to eliminate Canadian competition in favour of specific foreign-built craft they want.

"It's unanimous — we're not moving with it now," a government official said on condition of anonymity.

"We're not moving with this before an election.

"It's all on the basis of the ferocious lobbying by industry. It's all Toronto-Montreal-Bombardier politics."

Defence Minister Bill Graham said Tuesday that an election would "inevitably delay the capacity of the government to make major procurements."

"We don't make major procurements during elections," he said.

Hat tip to SOMNIA.

Thermobaric weaponry

David Hambling talks about a new USMC urban combat tool:

War is hell. But it's worse when the Marines bring out their new urban combat weapon, the SMAW-NE. Which may be why they're not talking about it, much.

This is a version of the standard USMC Shoulder Mounted Assault Weapon but with a new warhead. Described as NE — "Novel Explosive" — it is a thermobaric mixture which ignites the air, producing a shockwave of unparalleled destructive power, especially against buildings.

A post-action report from Iraq describes the effect of the new weapon: "One unit disintegrated a large one-storey masonry type building with one round from 100 meters. They were extremely impressed." Elsewhere it is described by one Marine as "an awesome piece of ordnance."

The article has a five-image thumbnail sketch of what an NE warhead did to an example of the kind of structure to be found throughout the Middle East. He also mentions the possibility of re-arming the existing stockpile of obsolete M-72 LAW tubes with thermobaric warheads, as a cheap and relatively effective upgrade.

Hat tip to Chaim Krause for the URL.

Recon UAV

Another link from the Tacops list, this one on the Dragon Eye unmanned aerial vehicle:

"The Dragon Eye is a good tool if used properly. It's excellent for short range reconnaissance and can easily be taken on a patrol to further increase a squads abilities," said U.S. Marine Corps Sgt. Henry M. White Jr., infantryman, from Grady, Ark. "It's great for taking a picture of suspected improvised explosive devices found on roads."

The Dragon Eye is basically a small remote controlled airplane with two real-time video cameras. The Dragon Eye gives the Marines and sailors a tool that allows them to see farther over rough terrain, fits in a backpack and is easy to carry with them. Marines and sailors in enemy territory can face danger from unexpected directions, but with the Dragon Eye they can easily launch a system that will give them up-to-date reconnaissance over a vast area giving them a distinct advantage.

"I can get more intelligence in five minutes than a squad of Marines can get in two hours," said U.S. Marine Corps Cpl. Joshua L. Britner, mortarman, from Freemont, Ohio. "It's also a lot safer than sending a squad. During testing of the Dragon Eye they had an entire company shoot at it in flight for two days; it only took four hits and was never shot down."

The article also has a small photo of the Dragon Eye being launched . . . looking like a very casual effort indeed.

Second-hand tanks for the Iraqi Army

Major Holdridge posted a link to the MNSTC-I Advisor article on new Nato countries' contributions to the new Iraqi army:

The arrival of dozens of T-72 tanks from Hungary this week infused "new blood" into the Iraqi Army's 9th Mechanized Division, its top leader said.

"This is a great day for our division," said Iraqi Gen. Bashar, division commander. "We are building our division and these are the base. We are pinning the strength and power of our division on our tanks."

The 77 tanks arrived over three days, culminating Nov. 11. The delivery also included 36 BMP personnel carriers, four recovery vehicles and several containers of parts and weaponry. It's the largest equipment donation to the Iraqi Army from NATO allies to date, officials said.

A cynic might point out that this is both an improvement and a safety measure: it's better equipment than "regular" Iraqi troops had before the fall of Saddam (T-72's instead of T-55's), but they are still vulnerable to US Abrams tanks. As long as the Iraqi army is facing Iranian or Syrian troops, they will at least have armoured parity, but if they try to turn on the Americans, the Abrams is still a superior weapon system.

In Memorium

A simple recognition of some of our family members who served in the First and Second World Wars:

The Great War

• Private William Penman, Scots Guards, died 1915 at Le Touret, age 25
  (Elizabeth's great uncle)
• Private David Buller, Highland Light Infantry, died 1915 at Loos, age 35
  (Elizabeth's great grandfather)
• Private Walter Porteous, Northumberland Fusiliers, died 1917 at Passchendaele, age 18
  (my great uncle)
• Corporal John Mulholland, Royal Tank Corps, died 1918 at Harbonnieres, age 24
  (Elizabeth's great uncle)

The Second World War

• Flying Officer Richard Porteous, RAF, survived the defeat in Malaya and lived through the war
  (my uncle)
• Able Seaman John Penman, RN, served in the "Destroyer Equipped Merchant" fleet on the Murmansk Run (and other convoy routes), lived through the war
  (Elizabeth's father)
• Private Archie Black (commissioned after the war and retired as a Major), Gordon Highlanders, captured at Singapore (aged 15) and survived a Japanese POW camp
  (Elizabeth's uncle)

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, MD (1872-1918)

QotD: Remembrance Day ^(TM)

This week, Bourque has made the unpleasant discovery that the red poppy traditionally worn in early November is no longer a popular symbol of respect for the veteran, but a brand that somehow became the aggressively defended intellectual property of the Canadian Legion. (As far as I know, the Legion has never objected to the politicians who don the poppy increasingly early, every year, for what can safely be described as "other purposes".)

The Legion's legal pestering of Bourque enrages me, in the same way and for the same reasons as it would if some private organization tried to trademark the image of the Christ child. I never thought I was helping to remove a piece of our cultural heritage from the public domain by buying Remembrance Day poppies. And I am certainly surprised to learn that "Remembrance" itself has become anyone's formal property. I won't pay for or wear one ever again. And neither should you.

Colby Cosh, "It's official: nothing is sacred", colbycosh.com, 2005-11-07

Update: Let It Bleed explains why the Legion isn't the bad guy in this situation.

Happy Birthday, USMC!

November 10 is the anniversary of the founding of the United States Marine Corps:

A MESSAGE FROM THE COMMANDANT OF THE MARINE CORPS
10 November 2005

On November 10th, 1775, the Second Continental Congress resolved to raise two battalions of Continental Marines marking the birth of our United States Marine Corps. As Major General Lejeune¹s message reminds us, the ensuing generations of Marines would come to signify all that is highest in warfighting excellence and military virtue. Each November as Marines the world over celebrate the birth of our Corps, we pay tribute to that long line of "Soldiers of the Sea" and the illustrious legacy they have handed down to us.

This past year has been one of continuous combat operations overseas and distinguished service here at home — a year of challenges that have brought out the very best in our Corps. In Iraq and Afghanistan, Marine courage and mastery of complex and chaotic environments have truly made a difference in the lives of millions. Marine compassion and flexibility provided humanitarian assistance to thousands in the wake of the South East Asian Tsunami, and here at home, Marines with AAVs, helicopters, and sometimes with their bare hands saved hundreds of our own fellow Americans in the wake of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

Across the full spectrum of operations, you have showcased that Marines create stability in an unstable world, and have reinforced our Corps' reputation for setting the standard of excellence.

The sense of honor, courage, and patriotism that epitomized those who answered that first call to arms 230 years ago is still indelibly imprinted on our ranks today. In commemorating our anniversary, let us strengthen our ties to the past by paying homage to those who have gone before us. As we honor the sacrifices of our wounded and fallen comrades, our commitment to one another remains unshakable. We take special pride in the actions of the Marines now serving in harm's way, and rededicate ourselves to the service of our Nation and our Corps.

Happy Birthday Marines, Semper Fidelis, and Keep Attacking!

M. W. Hagee
General, U.S. Marine Corps

Hat tip to Major Holdridge, USMC (Ret'd), creator of the TacOps simulation.

TacOps

Major Holdridge has been doing some great one-person-programming for years now. His TacOps tactical simulation game is one of the very best I've ever found: it doesn't rely on gosh-wow-cool graphics or unrealistic-but-spectacular effects. It's a remarkably good simulation of a battalion-to-brigade level military operation:

I.L. Holdridge didn't intend to design a tactical simulation used by the armies of four nations. He just got tired of playing with tiny tanks. "I wanted to play armor miniatures without a footlocker full of manuals, dice, tapes, terrain boards and painted vehicles," he said.

Frustrated by lack of time, space and opponents, many war-gaming hobbyists have switched from board games and miniatures to computer games. Holdridge did one better and designed his own computer game. A decade later, "TacOps" is played by thousands of hobbyists. It's also an official training simulation used by the U.S. Army and Marine Corps, as well as the Canadian, Australian and New Zealand armies.

This was more than serendipity. Holdridge is a retired Marine Corps major who started as a private, worked his way up to become an infantry officer, and finally spent a dozen years as an intelligence officer. In an era when militaries are increasingly using entertainment games, "TacOps" is one of a handful of hobby games/defense simulations designed by active or former officers.

"TacOps" is a platoon-level simulation that looks like a CPX map exercise. It pits American (or Canadian or Anzac) forces against opposing force units that tend to resemble the armies of the former Soviet Union, China and North Korea. Map scale is 10 meters per screen pixel. Icons represent one to 15 vehicles, squads, teams or individuals.

John Keegan on the Dresden Raid

John Keegan discusses the most notorious non-nuclear bombing raid of World War Two:

Until the raid, Dresden remained almost the last of Germany's large cities not to have been laid waste. By the time the raids finished, much of historic and modern Dresden had been flattened and 35,000 people, mostly civilians, had been killed.

As a result, Dresden became a catchword for all that the opponents of the strategic bombing campaign most detested. In the controversy that ensued, the casualty figure was inflated; a number as large as 200,000 was widely cited while the name of Dresden was used to brand Air Marshall Harris, head of RAF Bomber Command, a war criminal.

As the event receded into history, attempts were made to establish an objective account and above all to explain why so late in the war an undamaged German city, often described as a civilian target, was subjected to an all-out attack. The official explanation was that Dresden was a major communications centre, close behind Germany's eastern frontier which the Red Army was about to cross in its final offensive from Poland towards Berlin.

Historic British bomber in Trenton

According to a report in the Trentonian, CFB Trenton will host the unveiling of the only Handley Page Halifax bomber in the world:

After 10 years of meticulous work by hundreds of volunteers, the only restored Handley Page Halifax bomber in existence will be unveiled to the world this Saturday.

In a ceremony at the RCAF Memorial Museum at CFB Trenton, 1,500 invited guests will witness a spectacular show when army green curtains will be pulled back to reveal the finished aircraft.

The Halifax was shot down by German anti-aircraft fire in the closing days of World War 2. Five members of the British crew died and were buried at the Nordre Cemetery in Lillehamer. [. . .]

Of close to 40,000 sorties by the Halifax bomber over Europe, 27,000 or about 70 per cent were flown by Canadians. Ten thousand of the 50,000 RCAF crew members assigned to British Bomber Command lost their lives.

"This is a wonderful pieces of heritage that is being left to all Canadians. It's been a very humbling experience to display our work to honour all those who flew in the Halifax and died," said Jeffrey.

Hat tip to SOMNIA.

RN ship names

Natalie Solent has some thoughts on the historical naming practices of the Royal Navy:

My husband points out that after the development of iron hulls, rifled guns and explosive shells ships usually were sunk rather than boarded. However, he says, if the chivalrous customs of Napoleon's time had continued, an HMS Bismark, HMS Graf Spee or HMS Emden would still have been possible even though these ships were sunk. Both sides in the Napoleonic wars sometimes named new ships after a worthy adversary that had been sent to the bottom of the sea, as well as merely keeping the names of prizes.

In case anyone is worried, even in that alternative world there would have been no danger of the Royal Navy ever getting itself landed with a ship called the HMS Adolf Hitler. Hitler was happy have SS Divisions named after him but he was aware enough of the all-or-nothing nature of modern naval warfare to refrain from extending any such practice to ships. After the loss of the Graf Spee, Hitler ordered the Deutschland to be renamed the Lützow. If the ship went down he did not want to see headlines saying "Germany sunk."

It always struck me as a charming notion that sailing navy ships would acquire non-native names . . . usually as a result of capture at the end of a sea battle. I would imagine, in a less sensitive age, it would have been quite the political message for the Royal Navy to send a squadron of ships, all bearing the former names of enemy vessels.

I was a big fan of "age of fighting sail" books as a boy, with Hornblower and co. and the imitations (Bolitho, Ramage, etc.), so I was quite aware that historically RN ships might carry foreign names. So ingrained was this knowledge of how some British ships were named, that when I first saw the "Airfix" ship model of the Rommel, back in the early 1970's, I assumed that it was a very odd-looking RN ship!

Offensive Driving lessons

By way of Autoblog, here's a link to a brief look at the kind of new driving techniques you'd need to drive in Baghdad:

Are the anti-terrorist driving tactics employed after Baghdad fell one reason America is having a hard time winning the peace? Did we lose friends and make enemies with our driving? Still, the U.S. men and women over there were just trying to stay alive and protect those they were transporting. I would have done the same thing.

At an anti-terrorist driving school, I learned how to ram out of the way a vehicle being used as a roadblock. Clearing a blocking car isn't difficult (more later). Instead, the challenge is to distinguish between poor driving and a terrorist attack.

"Iraqis are terrible drivers," the instructor said (sensitivity was not his specialty). "It's extremely difficult to tell a bad driver from a terrorist." The instructor also said that after Baghdad fell, a lot of bad Iraqi drivers were wrecked. These were simple, innocent Iraqis — just bad drivers whose actions were misconstrued as threatening.

I'm now wondering if returning troops from deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan have even more trouble adapting to normal life, even on the road. Has the need to drive hyper-defensively in Iraq translated to even more dangerous driving in the United States?

British 1st Para Bn becoming the JSFSG

Another Economist report (reg. req'd) discusses the changes to the First battalion of the Parachute Regiment:

Although a fourth SBS squadron is being raised from the toughest marine commandos, recruiting many more men would entail easing the entry requirements. Better to train and dedicate high-grade infantrymen to support SF operations, freeing the best soldiers for the most demanding tasks. Hence the Joint Special Forces Support Group (JSFSG), an outfit modelled on America's army rangers, and whose first members, from the parachute regiment, are enjoying a preliminary outing with the SAS in Baghdad.

One of several army reforms announced in December, the JSFSG will become partially operational next April and ready by 2008. At its heart will be the Parachute Regiment's 1st battalion, which will be cut to 476 soldiers — in effect, losing a company of 70 men. It will also have a company of marine commandos and a similar number of experts from the air force, including forward air-controllers. The support group is to be led by the paras' commanding officer and dedicated to its new role; the battalion has already been removed from the infantry order of battle.

The army is cockahoop. Before the recent shake-up, it faced losing four infantry battalions. Thanks to its canny boss, the JSFSG's architect, General Sir Mike Jackson, it has, in effect, lost only three. That the general himself commanded "1 para" suggests a spot of backroom manoeuvring; he describes the group's formation as "a very good result for the army".

I find it hard to believe that the army was seriously considering disbanding one of the battalions of the Paras: unlike Canada's Airborne Regiment, the Paras were more than carrying their weight, both militarily and on the public-relations front (the Airborne Regiment signally failed on the PR side, resulting in the decision to disband the unit).

The new mercenary armies

The Economist (reg. req'd.) has a brief look at a recruiting challenge for some of the elite forces of the world:

If soldiering was for the money, the Special Air Service (SAS) and the Special Boat Service (SBS) would have disintegrated in recent years. Such has been the explosion in private military companies (PMCs) that they employ an estimated 30,000 in Iraq alone — and no government can match their fat salaries. A young SAS trooper earns about £2,000 ($3,500) a month; on the "circuit", as soldiers call the private world, he could get £15,000. Why would he not?

For reasons both warm-hearted and cool-headed. First, for love of regiment and comrades, bonds that tend to be tightest in the most select units. Second, for the operational support, notably field medicine, and the security, including life assurance and pension, that come with the queen's paltry shilling.

I had no idea that private mercenary companies could afford to pay so much for their troops: that's getting to be big bucks. Of course, the risks are much higher in that environment, but still . . .

Trafalgar, 200 years on

This is the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar, one of the most important battles in British history. The Register shows their irreverent side in their report:

Britain is today marking the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar with a series of events around the country and a wreath-laying ceremony off Cape Trafalgar itself. Her Maj will take luncheon aboard HMS Victory on Portsmouth and later light the first of a series of 1,000 beacons around the country to honour those who royally thrashed a combined French and Spanish fleet back in 1805.

Naturally, the BBC is giving the whole thing plenty of coverage, and offers a timetable of events which kicked off this morning when Second Sea Lord Sir James Burnell-Nugent laid two wreaths aboard Victory — one on the deck and one where Nelson is reckoned to have popped his clogs after rather ill-advisedly getting shot by a French sniper as Victory tangled with the Redoubtable.

While Trafalgar was a critical battle for Britain, it was much less important to the French and Spanish: a loss for Britain would probably have led to an invasion of the British Isles. The Napoleonic wars continued for another ten years after the battle, so the battle can be said to have been a turning point, it was not as significant to the struggle on land.

Military rations, in pictures

asiapundit links to a visual primer on military rations. The current Canadian military rations look even less appetizing than they did back in my day . . .

Rifle Grenades

Rifle grenades were eventually replaced by small rocket launchers (like the American M-72 LAW) and/or small mortars after WW2, and I'd never seen any details about 'em, so this page on the Garand and Carbine grenade launcher attachments were of interest to me. There was also a device to convert a normal hand grenade to a rifle-launched grenade.

Kludgy, but certainly better than nothing, I imagine.

Hat tip to Thomas Russ, from the TacOps mailing list.

What kind of general? The failed kind, of course

Foolishly, I took the Which Historic General Are You Test, prompted by Chris "Genghis" Taylor. This test is too accurate, as my results clearly show:

George McClellan You scored 62 Wisdom, 91 Tactics, 45 Guts, and 39 Ruthlessness!

Like General McClellan, you're smart enough to know what tactical decisions to make. However, the problem with McClellan is that he could never sprout the balls to act on his information, and in the end, that's why Geoge McClellan is only a sidenote in the history books. After graduating from West Point, he served with distinction in the Mexican War and later worked on various engineering projects, notably on the survey (1853-54) for a Northern Pacific RR route across the Cascade Range. Resigning from the army in 1857, he was a railroad official until the outbreak of the Civil War. In May, 1861, McClellan was made commander of the Dept. of the Ohio and a major general in the regular army. He cleared the western part of Virginia of Confederates (June-July, 1861) and consequently, after the Union defeat in the first battle of Bull Run, was given command of the troops in and around Washington. In November he became general in chief. The administration, reflecting public opinion, pressed for an early offensive, but McClellan insisted on adequate training and equipment for his army. In Mar., 1862, he was relieved of his supreme command, but he retained command of the Army of the Potomac, with which in Apr., 1862, he initiated the Peninsular campaign . The collapse of this campaign after the Seven Days battles was charged by many to his overcaution. In Aug., 1862, most of McClellan's troops were reassigned to the Army of Virginia under John Pope . After Pope's defeat at the second battle of Bull Run, McClellan again reorganized the Union forces, and in the Antietam campaign he checked Robert E. Lee's first invasion of the North. He was slow, however, to follow Lee across the Potomac and in Nov., 1862, was removed from his command.

Field-Improvised Weapons

For a military which too often gets stuck with the cheapest possible equipment that might just be able to do the job, if lovingly maintained, Canadian soldiers have a well-deserved reputation for coming up with field expedients to get the job done. Castle Argghhh! shows that the German army of World War 2 had similar capabilities.

British troops storm Iraqi police station

This is a confusing situation:

Two British soldiers whose imprisonment prompted UK troops to storm a Basra police station were later rescued from militia, the Ministry of Defence says.

Brigadier John Lorimer said it was of "deep concern" the men detained by police ended up held by Shia militia.

Basra governor Mohammed al-Waili said the men — possibly working undercover — were arrested for allegedly shooting dead a policeman and wounding another.

The arrests sparked unrest in which Army vehicles were attacked.

Both the BBC and Reuters reports showed a Warrior AFV aflame, and one of the crew of the vehicle escaping with his uniform on fire. I don't know what else to call this but a clusterf*ck. It certainly sounds as though the situation in Basra is more tenuous than we've been led to believe.

There has been some (uninformed) speculation that the two soldiers who were imprisoned were SAS, which would certainly explain why the British commander would use extraordinary means to release the men. If the two were SAS troopers, then they may have been operating undercover . . . and if they were targeting Iraqi police officers, then things may get very ugly in Basra.

Canadian military medical research?

Not that I'm objecting to the goal, but I was surprised to hear that bird flu research is being done for the Canadian military, as reported by Canadian Press:

Military scientists working for the Canadian government have developed a number of innovative drugs they believe could target avian influenza, potentially helping to shore up the world's meagre defences against the threat of pandemic flu.

The federal government is now seeking scientists who could test the drugs outside North America, issuing a call for tenders for the work.

[. . .]

DRDC is the research arm of the Canadian military. The work was done at the agency's high-level biosecurity laboratory housed at CFB Suffield in Alberta.

The need for new flu drugs is acute. Currently there are only four produced commercially, two of which are not effective against the H5N1 avian flu subtype that experts fear is poised to trigger the first pandemic since the Hong Kong flu of 1968.

A leading Canadian antiviral expert Dr. Fred Aoki called the work "very Star Wars-like ideas (that) nonetheless deserve to be looked at."

Given that a flu pandemic is this year's science panic story on slow news days, it's good to hear that some weapons against the most likely variants are being developed.

Canadian Military History group blog

There's a new group blog, concentrating on Canadian military history, called Never Forget. Among the contributors are Publius (from Gods of the Copybook Headings), Damian "Babbling" Brooks, and Andrew Anderson (from Bound By Gravity). They're starting off by reposting a few of their individual blog posts on the topic. Go have a look.

Welcome to "Never Forget", a group blog dedicated to the proud history of the Canadian Armed Forces and, more importantly, the men and women who have so bravely stood up for our country in times of need.

Every day Canadians lose something precious, something that cannot be replaced. With each new day more and more of our veterans pass away, and with them the go the memories of where they have been, what they have done, and why they have done it.

Canadian schools do not teach our children about our military history.... at least not in any meaningful way. Personally, I managed to graduate highschool with absolutely no knowledge of the amazing accomplishments of the Canadian military over the years — it simply was not taught. It has only been through private research have I been able to start to learn about all of the impressive feats that Canadian soldiers have accomplished. Vimy Ridge and Juno Beach leap immediately to mind — but we have been so many other places, and done so much more.

Canada's naval flotilla

To my amazement, I just read that among the Canadian vessels being sent to support the Katrina recovery is the icebreaker Sir William Alexander:

Since its diesel engines are designed to use the frigid waters of the Far North to keep cool, the ship will have to reduce speed the further south it travels to avoid overheating.

That's why the ship will take seven to 10 days to arrive in the Gulf of Mexico — about four days behind the navy's humanitarian convoy, led by the destroyer HMCS Athabaskan.

"It is extremely unusual and it's absolutely unheard of," Capt. Robert Gray said in a ship-to-shore interview with The Canadian Press. "I think vessels like this have transited the area, going east to west through Panama, but for sustained operations in the Gulf of Mexico, I believe we're the first."

The 83-metre ship is making the trip partly because of its specialized abilities, but also because the navy's nearly 40-year-old East Coast supply ship is tied to a Halifax pier with mechanical problems.

HMCS Preserver, sent to Florida in 1992 to provide relief from hurricane Andrew, was unable to make the trip south because it is having kinks worked out after an almost year-long, $36-million refit.

The Babbler beats me to the draw

I was going to post about the Canadian naval contribution to the Hurricane Katrina recovery efforts, but Damian "Babbling" Brooks beat me to it:

In a place where dry land is at a premium, it's good to bring your own floating base. In a place where violent anarchy reigns, it's good to bring folks who know how to protect themselves and others. In a place where airborne rescues are ongoing because roads remain submerged, where pallets of relief supplies need to be put down very precisely on the scraps of land available, it's good to bring helos (yes, even Sea Slugs - I've been hoisted out of the Atlantic by one, and they'll get the job done). In a place where expertise is badly needed, it's good to bring engineers, medics, and divers. In a place where the essentials of life are in short supply, it's good to bring water, food, blankets, and shelter.

In a place where hard work is required, it's damned good to bring 1,000 of the most dedicated individuals you'll ever meet.

In short, it's good to bring the Canadian Armed Forces.

In other military matters, Damian also covers the attempt to replace some of our oldest transport and SAR aircraft and eviscerates a critic of the plan.

Military code names and national character

Last year, I posted a brief thought about how different armies name their major operations. Apparently, there has been much made of this in previous wars, as the Imperial Armorer reflects:

The whole naming thing started out as a security measure. It gave a shorthand way to refer to something in messages, whether a weapon system, troop movement, location, operation, intel asset, etc , so people in the know would understand what you meant, without larding up messages with a lot of text, as well as revealing info to interested eavesdroppers. Jargon for security.

Like the Manhattan Project for the atomic bomb. Operation Overlord for the invasion of Europe. Utah Beach, Operations Olympic and Coronet for the planned invasion of Japan. "Tank" for the Tank (crates with the first tanks in them were marked "Water Tank" — the name stuck). Infinite Justice Enduring Freedom — the take-down of Afghanistan. The military aren't the only ones, either; e.g., Microsoft's "Longhorn" which is now officially "Windows Vista."

QotD: Armchair Generals

Why, it appears that we appointed all of our worst generals to command the armies and we appointed all of our best generals to edit the newspapers. I mean, I found by reading a newspaper that these editor generals saw all of the defects plainly from the start but didn't tell me until it was too late. I'm willing to yield my place to these best generals and I'll do my best for the cause by editing a newspaper.

Robert E. Lee, quoted at American Digest, but sounding like he'd written it last week.

QotD: Method Acting

Fortunately, pop Wonka is played by Christopher Lee — or, as one of my kids exclaimed, "It's Count Dooku!", that being the name of his splendid turn in Star Wars. Lee is having a grand old time at the moment, doing ten minutes in every blockbuster around. My favourite moment in the Lord of the Rings movies isn't actually in any of the movies, but in one of those 'the making of' documentaries that appears on the DVD. It's the scene where Saruman gets stabbed by Grima Wormtongue, and Lee explains to director Peter Jackson that the backstabbing sound isn't quite right, because in his days with British Intelligence during the war he used to sneak up and stab a lot of Germans in the back and it was more of a small gasp they made. Jackson backs away cautiously.

Mark Steyn, "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory", The Spectator, 2005-07-30

Kim du Toit solves the British Army's small arms problems

Jon also passed along a pair of links to Kim du Toit's blog, discussing the looming problems the British army will have when the get around to replacing the current SA80 rifle:

I would have thought that making your country self-sufficient in terms of its basic weaponry would be somewhere in Chapter One, Page One in "Strategy For Dummies". I can understand if you don't have the technology skills to make, say, radar-guidance systems. But small arms? Good grief. [. . .]

After WWII was over, the socialist Brit government of Clement Attlee didn't return those rifles to their American owners. In an act of spite and ingratitude which has never been forgotten by Americans, Attlee ordered those guns simply taken out to sea and dumped overboard. Lost were untold thousands of P-14s (which had been made by American companies to help you fight the Huns in the First World War) and other fine rifles.

The replacement Kim recommends? The standard weapon of insurgencies, rebellions, and third-world dictatorships, the AK-47:

Here are the advantages to my suggestion:

1. This is called "war on the cheap": cheap rifles, cheap (and possibly even free) ammo. As your rulers seem to think that defence budget cuts are limitless in depth, this is no small point.

2. You have to buy your rifles and ammo somewhere, and the Russkis need real (non-ruble) cash badly, so they're not going to go all Belgian on you and refuse to supply the rifles, just because you're invading some far-off country filled with brown people. Recent events seem to indicate that they're not that fond of brown people, either.

QotD: Canadian Soldiers

In the field in summer, [Canadian] soldiers wore bush clothes, which were adequate enough, though multi-hued depending on how often they had been washed. There were no winter field uniforms, and soldiers wore U.S. Army field jackets. On exercises, black coveralls were the usual dress, the sloppiest uniform in any army at the time. Until the army introduced combat clothing in the mid-1960s, Canadian soldiers looked as though they had been kitted out by a second-hand clothing store.

J.L. Granatstein, Canada's Army, 2002

Jack Knox beats the war drum

Just in case you still think of Canada as the 98-pound weakling of North America (and let's face it, who doesn't?), Jack Knox thinks the upcoming war with Denmark is a slam-dunk:

The problem with going nose to nose with Greenland is the Inuit think it's foreplay.

Which is why we're going to fight Denmark instead, dropping the gloves in a border war.

This will come as a shock to those who were unaware we even share a border with Denmark, which we don't, really.

Our actual neighbour is the aforementioned, quasi-independent Greenland — the Danish Factory Outlet Store, as it were, way out on the edge of town beside Ellesmere Island and Costco.

Greenland, Denmark, whatever — bring it on, we're going to war.

Hat tip to SOMNIA.

Smoky Smith, VC, 1914-2005

The last surviving Canadian soldier to be awarded the Victoria Cross has died:

Although his comrades called him "a soldier's soldier," Smith's relationship with the army was stormy.

He built a reputation as an independent-minded man suspicious of authorities. They made him a corporal nine times and busted him back to private nine times. That was his rank when he was awarded his VC, the only Canadian private to win the medal in the Second World War.

Irreverant, sharp-witted and something of a trouble-maker, Smoky Smith and his deeds that night are the stuff of legend.

Already wounded once in Sicily, he had returned to cross the Savio River with his Seaforth Highlanders, the spearhead of an attack aimed at establishing a bridgehead in the push to liberate Cesena and ultimately break through the Germans' Gothic Line.

Smith was far from being the ideal soldier:

Smith heard he'd won the Victoria Cross about seven weeks after the fight. His reputation as a party animal preceded him. Military police were sent to take him to the ceremony with King George VI in London.

"They picked me up in Naples or somewhere and they put me in jail," Smith recalled with his trademark grin.

"'Don't let him loose in this town. Don't let him loose. He's a dangerous fellow.'

"I liked to party. I'd have a big goddamn party and they'd say: 'Where is he now? Oh, he's drunk downtown."'

Royal Navy retires HMS Invincible

Johnathan Pearce links to information on the Royal Navy's impending retirement of the Falklands War veteran carrier HMS Invincible:

The oldest "mini-aircraft carrier" used by Britain's Royal Navy, HMS Invincible, is being retired from service. The vessel, from which Sea Harrier jets can operate — as well as helicopters — is more than 20 years old and was used in the Falklands War, among other theatres of operation.

As I said a while back, I have no ideological issue one way or the other about the exact composition of our armed forces, which must change with the times and respond to different threats to this country. Coming from a bit of a navy family myself and being an enthusiast over our island's naval history, I am nevertheless the first to realise that sentiment must not trump hard calculation when it comes to manning our defences. But it bothers me that our navy has been reduced to a level that makes independent military action by this country a logistical impossibility. It is probably quite unlikely that we could mount a Falklands-style operation on our own again.

I moan on about the state of Canada's remaining armed forces, but clearly the continued shrinkage isn't restricted to this country. The current British government is talking about building some new fleet carriers (bigger and more capable than Invincible), but no contracts have been awarded and there is no prospect of the new vessels joining the fleet for years yet.

British Army to reduce Northern Ireland presence

The British army has responded quickly to yesterday's announcement by the IRA:

Soldiers started to dismantle or withdraw from three positions in South Armagh, a rebellious borderland nicknamed "bandit country," where soldiers still travel by helicopter because of the risk of IRA dissidents' roadside bombs.

The move came a day after IRA commanders promised to disarm fully, and directed their units to dump their weapons and use "exclusively peaceful means" from now on.

The breakthrough was the product of a two-year diplomatic showdown between the IRA and its allied Sinn Fein party on one side, and the British, Irish and U.S. governments, which demanded the IRA's full disarmament and disbanding.

I've talked to soldiers who were posted to some of those positions, and I must say that I'm pleasantly surprised that the army has such high confidence that they feel safe in withdrawing from them. Those were extremely high-risk locations, but they had to be manned pretty much continuously to keep tabs on IRA activity in those areas. The army must have a high level of trust in the IRA declaration.

HMCS Preserver out of action until November

HMCS Preserver, one of Canada's two fleet replenishment ships, has been taken out of active service until November to rectify electrical problems:

Navy spokeswoman, Lt. Marie-Claude Gagne, says technicians still haven't pinpointed the cause of the problem that forced HMCS Preserver back to Halifax two weeks ago.

But she confirmed the problems are not related to a recent $40 million upgrade to the 35-year-old vessel's structure and propulsion system.

The ship had been at sea to begin tests of those upgrades when its commander decided to return to port.

More on the Diane Schroer case

I've written briefly on this issue before. To recap, a former US Army colonel applied for a position with the Library of Congress as a terrorism analyst. He was given the job, but the offer was rescinded when the LOC was made aware that the colonel would be reporting to work as "Diane", not as "Dave". Reason's Julian Sanchez has more:

"Initially my reaction was to walk away from it," says Schroer. "If they didn't want me working there, it was probably not a good place to be working. But the more I thought about it, the more it just seemed not right. I had invested 26 years of my life in government service, fairly arduous at some points, and at the same time in those 26 years the government had invested an awful lot in me." In June, with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union, Schroer filed a sex discrimination suit against the Library.

ACLU attorney Sharon McGowan explains that they plan to make a two-pronged argument: One hinges on the Title VII federal ban on sex discrimination. In 1989, in Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins, the Supreme Court ruled that discrimination according to gender stereotype — in that case, the refusal to promote a woman who didn't act "feminine enough" — fell within the scope of sex discrimination. The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals last year built on that ruling in Smith v. City of Salem to cover a transgendered firefighter who had been suspended after announcing his intention to become a woman.

It would seem, especially in a government position, that the apparent gender of the employee should matter not at all. I'm not surprised that the ACLU has had to get involved . . . sometimes governments are the last employers to "get it" with social change.

If Schroer's account of events is accurate, her case should be a slam dunk: If Dave was good enough for the government, so should Diane be. If her supervisor wouldn't have caviled at an employee born a woman presenting herself as one on the job, that ought not to change just because Diane had the misfortune to be born with the wrong set of biological equipment. But, as Post observes, courts are ingenious at finding ways to circumvent the radical implications of gender equality when it means overturning traditional notions of femininity and masculinity.

Schroer, for her part, says she'd still like the job. A wise court would give it to her. As renewed attacks raise the stakes in the war on terror, the government could badly use a few good ex-men.

Couldn't have said it better myself.

World War II as an online game

This got posted to a mailing list I belong to, but it had originated (without attribution) somewhere else. If I manage to find out who to credit, I'll do so. . .

If WWII were an online RTS game
-------------------------------

*Hitler[AoE] has joined the game.*
*Eisenhower has joined the game.*
*paTTon has joined the game.*
*Churchill has joined the game.*
*benny-tow has joined the game.*
*T0J0 has joined the game.*
*Roosevelt has joined the game.*
*Stalin has joined the game.*
*deGaulle has joined the game.*
Roosevelt: hey sup
T0J0: y0
Stalin: hi
Churchill: hi
Hitler[AoE]: cool, i start with panzer tanks!
paTTon: lol more like panzy tanks
T0JO: lol
Roosevelt: o this fockin sucks i got a depression!
benny-tow: haha america sux
Stalin: hey hitler you dont fight me i dont fight u, cool?
Hitler[AoE]; sure whatever
Stalin: cool
deGaulle: **** Hitler rushed some1 help
Hitler[AoE]: lol byebye frenchy
Roosevelt: i dont got **** to help, sry
Churchill: wtf the luftwaffle is attacking me
Roosevelt: get antiair guns
Churchill: i cant afford them
benny-tow: u n00bs know what team talk is?
paTTon: stfu
Roosevelt: o yah hit the navajo button guys
deGaulle: eisenhower ur worthless come help me quick
Eisenhower: i cant do **** til rosevelt gives me an army
paTTon: yah hurry the fock up
Churchill: d00d im gettin pounded
deGaulle: this is fockin weak u guys suck
*deGaulle has left the game.*
Roosevelt: im gonna attack the axis k?
benny-tow: with what? ur wheelchair?
benny-tow: lol did u mess up ur legs AND ur head?
Hitler[AoE]: ROFLMAO
T0J0: lol o no america im comin 4 u
Roosevelt: wtf! thats bullsh1t u fags im gunna kick ur asses
T0JO: not without ur harbors u wont! lol
Roosevelt: u little biotch ill get u
Hitler[AoE]: wtf
Hitler[AoE]: america hax, u had depression and now u got a huge fockin army
Hitler[AoE]: thats bullsh1t u hacker
Churchill: lol no more france for u hitler
Hitler[AoE]: tojo help me!
T0J0: wtf u want me to do, im on the other side of the world retard
Hitler[AoE]: fine ill clear you a path
Stalin: WTF u arsshoel! WE HAD A FoCKIN TRUCE
Hitler[AoE]: i changed my mind lol
benny-tow: haha
benny-tow: hey ur losing ur guys in africa im gonna need help in italy soon sum1
T0J0: o **** i cant help u i got my hands full
Hitler[AoE]: im 2 busy 2 help
Roosevelt: yah thats right ***** im comin for ya
Stalin: church help me
Churchill: like u helped me before? sure ill just sit here
Stalin: dont be an arss
Churchill: dont be a commie. oops too late
Eisenhower: LOL
benny-tow: hahahh oh sh1t help
Hitler: o man ur focked
paTTon: oh what now biotch
Roosevelt: whos the cripple now lol
*benny-tow has been eliminated.*
benny-tow: lame
Roosevelt: gj patton
paTTon: thnx
Hitler[AoE]: WTF eisenhower hax hes killing all my sh1t
Hitler[AoE]: quit u hacker so u dont ruin my record
Eisenhower: Nuts!
benny~tow: wtf that mean?
Eisenhower: meant to say nutsack lol finger slipped
paTTon: coming to get u hitler u paper hanging hun cocksocker
Stalin: rofl
T0J0: HAHAHHAA
Hitler[AoE]: u guys are fockin gay
Hitler[AoE]: ur never getting in my city
*Hitler[AoE] has been eliminated.*
benny~tow: OMG u noob you killed yourself
Eisenhower: ROFLOLOLOL
Stalin: OMG LMAO!
Hitler[AoE]: WTF i didnt click there omg this game blows
*Hitler[AoE] has left the game*
paTTon: hahahhah
T0J0: WTF my teammates are n00bs
benny~tow: shut up noob
Roosevelt: haha wut a moron
paTTon: wtf am i gunna do now?
Eisenhower: yah me too
T0J0: why dont u attack me o thats right u dont got no ships lololol
Eisenhower: fock u
paTTon: lemme go thru ur base commie
Stalin: go to hell lol
paTTon: fock this sh1t im goin afk
Eisenhower: yah this is gay
*Roosevelt has left the game.*
Eisenhower: sh1t now we need some1 to join
*tru_m4n has joined the game.*
tru_m4n: hi all
T0J0: hey
Stalin: sup
Churchill: hi
tru_m4n: OMG OMG OMG i got all his stuff!
tru_m4n: NUKES! HOLY **** I GOT NUKES
Stalin: d00d gimmie some plz
tru_m4n: no way i only got like a couple
Stalin: omg dont be gay gimmie nuculer secrets
T0J0: wtf is nukes?
T0J0: holy ****holy****hoyl****!
*T0J0 has been eliminated.*
*The Allied team has won the game!*
Eisenhower: awesome!
Churchill: gg noobs no re
T0J0: thats bull**** u fockin suck
*T0J0 has left the game.*
*Eisenhower has left the game.*
Stalin: next game im not going to be on ur team, u guys didnt help me for ****
Churchill: wutever, we didnt need ur help neway dumbarss
tru_m4n: l8r all
benny~tow: bye
Churchill: l8r
Stalin: fock u all
tru_m4n: shut up commie lol
*tru_m4n has left the game.*
benny~tow: lololol u commie
Churchill: ROFL
Churchill: bye commie
*Churchill has left the game.*
*benny~tow has left the game.*
Stalin: i hate u all fags
*Stalin has left the game.*
paTTon: lol no1 is left
paTTon: weeeee i got a jeep
*paTTon has been eliminated.*
paTTon: o sh1t!
*paTTon has left the game.*

Hat tip to Martin Cracauer.

QotD: The Draft

What frightened me was not going to Vietnam. What frightened me was going in the Army. The haircut, the uniform, the discipline: If I'd been allowed to go to Vietnam in my old clothes. . . The minute the draft disappeared, the whole hippie-dippy thing just went up in smoke.

P.J. O'Rourke, interviewed by Scott Walter, "The 60's Return", American Enterprise, May/June 1997

Common sense prevails, for once

In a sweeping victory for that rare commodity, common sense, the Chief of the Defence Staff, General Rick Hillier, has announced that the Sea King helicopter will not be deployed to Afghanistan:

Canada's geriatric helicopter fleet won't be making the trek to Afghanistan, Canada's top soldier said Friday.

"We have no intention at this point in time to deploy the Sea Kings," said Gen. Rick Hillier.

"If it could do the job there, in that hot climate at very high altitude, and be able to lift enough of a load, would I deploy it there? Absolutely. But I do not believe it can do the job there."

Reports had suggested that the decades-old fleet would be refitted for use by the 250 soldiers who will be in Afghanistan as of next week. Forty-four personnel are already in Afghanistan as part of Canada's reconstruction mission that will swell to 1,500 by February.

While I dread to think what the government will require the military to do next, at least they won't be trying to put the flying equivalent of the Model-T into more dangerous spaces.

Transformation or grand PR exercise?

Another good post at Castle Argghhh! discusses the new transformation initiatives for the Canadian Army:

Given how the Canadians have been using their forces, and see their forces being used in the future, what they are doing right now makes perfect sense. It is more deployable, cheaper to acquire and maintain — and makes more of their force available for use. The Canadians maintained a heavy armored force to support the Canadian Mechanized Brigade Group, Canada's NATO contribution — which is no longer needed as a heavy punch in Europe. And let's face it — the US isn't going to allow (if it's even *truly* possible at this point in history) someone *else* to invade Canada (heck, we've never been successful, we aren't about to let someone else do it and embarass us, right?). So, given the way the Canadians see their forces, this transformation makes sense, and actually *expands* the spectrum of effort they can involve themselves in. Which, when they come to think about it — may cause some Canadians some angst.

While I'm still hopeful that this process will improve the situation for the army, I'm not alone in being concerned with the possible outcomes:

The Armorer at Castle Argghhh!!! has posted a tidbit on the Canadian Forces' attempt at restructuring, and as usual, he is being quite a gentleman about it. By that, I mean he expresses some polite enthusiasm for the effort, whether or not he actually agrees with the specific actions being taken. As a Red Ensigner, John has come to understand that the Canadians who actually read his site are already a little touchy about the problems plaguing the CF, and don't need any salt ground into their wounds.

Tank and AFV combat performance analysis

There's a fascinating post up at Castle Argghhh! with excerpts from a Russian combat analysis of US Abrams tanks and Bradley IFVs in the Iraq campaign:

The examples above show that the Abrams M1 tank, on the whole, failed to live up to its full potential in combat, while the Iraqi resistance was able on several occasions to exploit faults in the vehicle's design. Nevertheless, the Abrams tank proved itself to be a formidable fighting machine with no serious competitor on the battlefield, while losses resulting from combat or technical causes remained within reasonable limits. Accounting for variations in national design, it is likely that other modern MBTs would have performed more or less the same under similar circumstances. [. . .]

The Bradley Fighting Machine on the whole performed rather well, though the destruction of several vehicles by anti-tank RPG suggests that in spite of the significant resources devoted to the development of additional anti-hollow charge defences, U.S. engineers have not yet solved the problem of 360-degree protection even from older generations of light anti-tank weapons. The installation of slat armor on the Stryker APC marks a real breakthrough in this regard. This extremely simple design reduced the effectiveness of the older types of light anti-tank weapons by some 200% or more. Several firms, including the Russian Scientific Research Institute of Steel, have developed similar grilles. We can only voice regret over the tardy introduction of such grilles for use in active combat in Chechnya. The Stryker fighting vehicle performed somewhat better than predicted, and undoubtedly confirmed the relevance of wheeled armor. Nevertheless, the incredibly high cost of such vehicles (over 2 million dollars for the basic model) is not matched by military utility. That said, the development of this type of vehicle for Russian procurement and export seems justified.

I'm not the only one who noticed this

Nick Packwood points out that the only two countries specifically listed as al Qaeda targets — and have not yet been directly attacked — are Italy and Canada:

Canada and Italy are named as targets by Al Qaida. The other targets have already been hit. People can continue to blame every problem in the world on the Americans but this belief, no matter how fervantly held, does nothing to change the stated aims of those would do us harm.

[. . .]

Carleton University security expert, Martin Rudner's assertion that Canada is relatively safe because "An attack on Toronto will get a minor mention in U.S. papers. The Arab world wouldn't even report it." merits special mention as the single most asinine thing I have read since yesterday's attack.

In some ways, the terrorists have already hit the hardest targets on their formal list: the United States, Australia, and Britain. Italy, Spain, and Canada are much softer (read thas as easier) targets for them to strike. I take no joy in pointing this out, but you don't have to be a strategic genius to figure it out.

A modern cavalry charge

Kate linked to a fascinating first-person account of being on the fringe of a police-versus-protesting-anarchists battle:

As the reinforcements arrived, the foot-based riot line opened to let them in, let the cavalry withdraw behind, and then re-formed into an even tighter set of double ranks. Isn't this interesting. Something's coming. Rotten fruit and garbage, looted from adjacent dumpters, began to fly from the crowd toward the ranks. I dashed in front of the anarchist lines to get a shot of the police formation. A full sack of garbage landed between us as I got my shot; and then the policeman in the center raised his right arm. The anarchists surged forward. I fought my way back and into an adjoining alley. The police charged.

It was a fearsome sight, seeing the lines clash. The outcome was never in doubt: some of the kids were trampled, some thrown bodily back a surprising distance, some fled in pure fear. All deserved it. As swiftly as it began, the police line halted just shy of my alley, having cleared perhaps a hundred feet of Rose Street. The foot soldiers resumed the stalwart stance, and the cavalry trotted up in a line behind. The anarchists were in disarray, with most of the girls screaming, and most of the men assiduously not helping them.

And then, after one of the protestors was dragged into the alley where the writer was observing the drama,

Two anarchist women, clad in black but with orange crosses pinned to their shirts, moved forward to render first aid. As they did, the second charge descended.

The rush came in two waves. First, the foot police line split neatly in two and swung in a manner to make Schlieffen proud. They neatly sealed off my alley and the alley across the way; and the cavalry moved up from behind to maintain the ground gained on the main thoroughfare. The crowd began shrieking again — and then the cavalry charged. I have never seen a mounted charge before, but I certainly hope to again: the sight was profoundly more amazing than the foot charge witnessed mere minutes before. At once I understood the age-old truth of the power of the horseman over the man on foot: a lesson that those of us whose military service was in the modern era have precious little opportunity to grasp. Again the anarchists lost ground as fast as their fleeing feet could take them, and I was sure that the entirety of Rose Street would shortly be seized in the name of the Lothian and Borders Police. But no: passing the alleyways and arriving at a point at which their flanks were secured by solid walls, the cavalry stopped dead.

The foot police sealing me and a platoon of anarchists into our alley opened ranks, and two cops, in full armor but without shields or batons, strode confidently among us. Ignoring threats and curses, they walked to the old woman in seizure, knelt down, and began to render aid. In a flash it became clear why the cavalry had charged as it did: with their flanks and rear secure, the police could render aid. Having been among them long enough to get a sense of their nature, I have no doubt that lone policemen amongst the crowd would have been assaulted mercilessly even in their mission of mercy; now, though, they could do good work unhindered.

The pro-DD(X), anti-BB arguments

The son of Admiral Zumwalt takes issue with the faction who want to scrap the planned DD(X) class of ships and in their place re-activate the Iowa-class battleships:

A comprehensive systems analysis approach to this issue involves weighing numerous cost factors — hidden as well as directly related to hard costs of a battleship's modernization.

The defense budget's costliest element is manpower. An Iowa Class battleship requires a 1,500-member crew. That many sailors could man 10 DD(X) destroyers. No one on active duty in the Navy is trained to operate a battleship's steam plant, weapons and fire-control systems. Training personnel to do so would involve a costly expansion of the Navy's school system.

There are limited shipyard facilities capable of handling larger warships like battleships and carriers. Reactivating the former would greatly impair maintenance support of the latter absent additional funds for expanding the facilities.

The battleship is a single-mission ship, with no viable anti-air or antisubmarine capability. Unlike the DD(X), which has a multiple mission capability and can operate independently, battleships require escort ships to defend them against those threats.

Hat tip to SOMNIA.

Red beats Blue at Trafalgar re-enactment . . . or is it the other way around?

Yesterday's celebration of the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar (where some guys beat some other guys, but we're not supposed to mention the war):

A spectacular fireworks display last night over the Solent followed by the illumination of the Fleet, brought the curtain down on a day commemorating the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar.

The 10,000 fireworks launched from 35 pontoons and six barges could be seen five miles away.

On shore, 250,000 spectators had lined vantage points in and around Portsmouth to witness the event and remember a battle which had been fought at walking pace over nearly half a day rather than hours.

Earlier, as night fell, bursts of orange flame meant to simulate cannon blast illuminated the sky during a mock battle which included a replica 18th century frigate portraying HMS Victory — the flagship which Admiral Nelson had commanded in 1805.

A fleet of ships from all over the world lined up for Royal inspection in a celebration which also marked the death of Britain's greatest naval hero, Admiral Lord Nelson.

To avoid upsetting anyone, the re-enactment was carefully staged between equal sized forces of "Red" and "Blue", with no winners or losers, and all got a prize. Some participants were less happy with the entire proceedings:

The irony of commemorating their defeat with their former enemies did not go unrecognised by all those on board.

"A lot of seamen on the Charles De Gaulle found it bizarre to celebrate with the English a battle that we have lost — it was provocative," said Stephane Lombardo, a pilot with the French Navy.

"If they have had a chance, half of the sailors would not have come," he added.

To be fair, the impact of the loss on the French was less than the value of the victory to the English: Napoleon could continue to fight on land, while England could not have kept fighting if the outcome of Trafalgar had been reversed.

Roman Invasion a PR stunt?

According to some new evidence (or reinterpretation of old evidence), some historians are making a case for the famous Roman invasion of Britain in 43 AD being little more than a public relations gambit to raise the popularity of Claudius Caesar:

Britain was home to Roman citizens some 50 years before the AD43 "invasion" date that generations of schoolchildren have been taught, new research has revealed.

The previously accepted version of the Roman invasion has its origins in the work of ancient spin-doctors trying to boost the reputation of the Emperor Claudius.

Archaeologists believe that a series of military artefacts unearthed in Chichester, Sussex, and dated decades before the AD43 date will turn conventional Roman history on its head.

The experts also believe that when the Romans arrived in Chichester they were welcomed as liberators by ancient Britons who were delighted when the "invaders" overthrew a series of brutal tribal kings guilty of terrorising southern England.

I probably won't get a chance to see the TV presentation until it makes its way over to Canadian TV (in a year or so, based on average times), so I can't comment directly about the show or its claims. It does strike me that this will only strengthen the segment of the population who already think that many historical events were "staged" (the 1969 Apollo moon landings being only the most widespread such notion).

Hat tip to Elizabeth.

USMC purchasing anti-IED vehicles

According to a news release on the USMC News website, the Marines are investing in some new vehicles developed in South Africa specifically for their ability to survive IED explosions with greater protection for personnel onboard:

With its flat bottom and soft-skin plastic doors, if a humvee is directly hit by a land mine or IED, most likely the passengers inside will lose their life and the vehicle will be destroyed beyond repair, said Maj. Gert de Wet, Central Command plans officer.

"In 1968, South Africans in conjunction with Rhodesians started developing the technology to create new vehicles that would counter the land mine threat introduced in the Bush War in Southern Africa. They developed the technology that created a new modular design for their military vehicles. For example, the vehicle’s wheels could be blown off in a mine/IED blast, but the passengers and the rest of the vehicle survived," said de Wet.

Here are a few officially released photos of the new vehicles:

Front view of the Cougar	Side view of the new vehicle.

The Marine Corps recognized these vehicles' successful track record and became interested in incorporating them into the fleet.

The Corps decided to do business with Force Protection, located in South Carolina, which is the company that developed a version of a Mine Resistant Ambush protected vehicle named the Cougar.

"These vehicles are all designed from the ground up specifically built to survive IEDs and ambushes. The v-shaped hull assists deflection of a mine or IED blast away from the vehicle’s capsule keeping the passengers safe and the vehicle intact. The vehicle is also built to rollover and is equipped with multi-point, racing style harnesses, so if the vehicle rolled 360 degrees the passengers inside would avoid injury," said de Wet.

Hat tip to Dennis Huff, who posted the link to the TacOps mailing list.

Protesting is all very well . . .

. . . but this is disgusting. Protest the politicians, fine, but leave the bereaved families to bury their dead in peace and dignity.

Hat tip to Jon for the link.

Monument to the 1st Canadian Armoured Carrier Regiment

A memorial to a unique unit of the Canadian army will be unveiled in the Netherlands this month:

[. . .] the regiment with the motto Armatos Fundit ("Protecting Soldiers") sprang from an idea — the idea of Canadian general Guy Simmonds, who desperately needed a way to protect soldiers. For as part of British Gen. Montgomery's plan for the battle of Normandy, the Canadian infantry was tied up for weeks in meat-grinder battles on the left flank of the allied armies against powerful German armoured forces under Field Marshal Rommel.

Eventually, Rommel was wounded and fate took a hand. Hitler ordered a bold western thrust against the allies, aimed at Avranches, through a gap between Caen and Falaise. If the Allies could cut off this pocket jammed with SS panzergrenadiers, 400 Tiger and Panther tanks and hundreds of 88-millimetre cannons, the battle for France would be won.

Simmonds needed a way to move his infantry at high speed at night across rough terrain right through the heart of the Germans to seal the mouth of the bag behind them. It would be the kind of stunt invented by the Germans themselves — by such men as Rommel and Guderian. It was called blitzkrieg — "lightning war."

Simmonds found 76 "Priests" — American self-propelled artillery pieces that were being replaced by a new type of Canadian-made piece. Priests were like a tank but were open at the top and didn't have a turret. Simmonds had the guns taken out and extra armoured plate were welded across the gaps.

The "defrocked priests" thus became the first serious armoured personnel carriers. They could carry 20 men and their battle kit at 26 miles an hour with a thick wall of steel around them and a heavy machine gun to protect them.

The operation was a success. Allied fighters blasted the trapped German armour with rockets and all the firepower was brought to bear on them. The rout was complete. It was only a dispute between British and American generals about how to proceed that allowed many of the Germans to escape towards Paris. But it was the beginning of the end for the Germans.

Hat tip to SOMNIA.

Argghhh's History Post for Today

The lead item in today's "what happened in military history" post at Castle Argghhh! is of interest both to Canadians and also to those Americans who still think the way to solve US-Canadian differences is by invading:

1745 American colonials capture Louisbourg, Cape Breton Island, from the French. Why is this significant? 1. It's the first time we Southrons (from a Canadian perspective) successfully invaded what is now Canada, and, (grump) the only times we've ever been truly successful is under Brit leadership engaging in French-bashing. 2. It set the stage for 1755, which marks the start of Cajun Cooking in what would become the US. The Brits expelled the Acadians (french colonists) from Port Royal... resettling them, among other places, in what is now Louisiana... "Cajun" is derived from Acadian (say it fast and drunk... ducking thrown crawdad heads).

Of course, Jon would still encourage you all to "Invade us! Invade us now!", but he's just a tiny minority voice up here in Soviet Canuckistan. And as soon as the authorities track him down, he'll be a very quiet voice indeed.

French carrier group departs from Halifax

The French navy's nuclear-powered aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle and its escorting vessels left Halifax after an uneventful stay. The Halifax Daily News reported:

Au revoir, mes amis. Bon voyage. Through a thick blanket of fog, the 3,000 sailors of a French aircraft carrier's battle group slid out of Halifax Harbour yesterday.

The whirlwind four-day visit by the French and British sailors was everything local businesses — and police — were hoping for. Euros flowed into local coffers, and sailors stayed out of local jails.

Paul MacKinnon, executive director of the Downtown Halifax Business Commission, said yesterday that while bars and restaurants did well, so too did retailers.

Hat tip to SOMNIA.

Boring, geeky army stuff

There's a fascinating post up at the Castle, talking about the next-generation of military vehicles the US has on the drawing board . . . and more importantly the command-and-control systems required to take full advantage of the new toys:

As I've mentioned before, a couple of years ago I worked ABCA exercises (the America-Britain-Canada-Australia Alliance). One thing about the Brit Army — they were far more comfortable working with the Marines than they were with the US Army — and while some of that was driven by cultural issues — the Brits are organized and used a lot like we do the Marines, and, well, they have some aspects of seeing themselves as peers to the Marines while the Army are slighty retarded younger brothers striving to show that we are too grown up (heh, let the snarks begin) . . . but the real issue is one of the US Army is so automated vice the Marines. The Brits are frankly just more comfortable hooking into Marines than they are the Army. They are (justly) concerned that the Army is so wired and used to being wired that, in effect, we are actually possibly *more* likely to engage a Brit formation in the wrong place at the wrong time because we are so used to the situational awareness we have from our systems they are concerned we will shoot first and ask questions later.

A couple of good points there, especially about the fundamental differences between the British Army and the US Army's typical deployment: the USMC are organized more like the Brits — and for totally functional reasons. The British army has been sealifted and dropped on foreign shores for centuries. It's how they expect to arrive at the point where they get to expend ammunition.

The idea is also mooted about opening the FCS to Britain and Australia (and possibly even Soviet Canuckistan), for economic and practical military reasons: it was already difficult enough to co-ordinate with their allies in the first Gulf War of 1991. Today, there are very few nations who can even pretend to have the technological parity to inter-operate with the US military, and all of them will be left in the dust when the new systems start to come into full production and distribution. And even the American military would appreciate design and development resources being contributed by their allies to offset the huge costs of these new systems.

I'm afraid I have to take the mention of Canadian participation as a friendly well-meaning red herring: who in their right mind would trust the current Canadian government to have any respect for other nations' military secrets?

US Army's last farrier retires

A link in Spotlight on Military News led me to this article on the last farrier in the US Army:

For 35 years, as the official farrier at Arlington's Fort Myer, Cote tapped special shoes onto the hooves of horses that rode in nine presidential inaugurations, the funeral processions of presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Ronald Reagan, and thousands of military burials.

Cote's horses rode in funerals for famous people as diverse as World War II Gen. Omar Bradley and the astronauts who perished when the space shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986. His small farrier shop on the grounds of Fort Myer's nearly century-old stables became an attraction all its own, visited by celebrities including actor Tom Selleck and model Christie Brinkley.

But the years of swinging the special horseshoe hammer took their toll. Cote recently had rotator cuff surgery on both shoulders and over the years broke his nose, jaw and ribs. He even suffered a collapsed lung. "Sometimes the horses will kick you, or fall on you, or run you over," he said.

As a result, Cote — the U.S. Army's only farrier — retired last week. Army officials say he will be sorely missed.

This is interesting to me, as two of Elizabeth's cousins have been farriers, and both of them were in the British military, although not in that capacity.

French carrier arrives in Halifax

The French nuclear-powered aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle arrived in Halifax harbour yesterday:

About 3,000 sailors who pulled into port Wednesday with a fleet of French naval vessels won't be at a loss for things to do during their stopover in Halifax.

"We're hosting our friends and allies from France — part of the task group we've been exercising with over the last few weeks," said Mike Bonin, a public affairs officer at Maritime Forces Atlantic in Halifax.

Six vessels from that task group are paying a visit to the home of Canada's East Coast navy, led by the French navy's flagship, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, Charles de Gaulle.

French frigates Tourville and Jean-Bart, nuclear submarine Rubis and supply ship Meuse also arrived Wednesday morning, along with the British destroyer HMS Nottingham, another vessel that took part in the naval exercises.

D-Day, if it had been reported by today's media

Murdoc Online got an Instalanche for the comments on this post. Some of the more amusing ones:

Roosevelt, with only his poodle Churchill backing him up, escalates total war in Europe; rather than finding work for them Roosevelt sends thousands of underprivileged Americans to their certain deaths. Civilian casualties expected to be in the unacceptable range. This is too heavy a price to pay; bring the troops home now!
Charles

"Mistakes and miscalculations lead to hundreds of unnecessary American deaths on Omaha beach."
"Risky airborne operation ordered by Eisenhower"
"Thousands of paratroopers missing and feared dead after disorganized jumps"
"Allied troops untrained and unprepared for combat is Hedgerow country"
"Ike ignores advice of de Gaulle and orders risky invasion of France anyway"
Bram

US Soldiers Desecrate French Church by Killing Sniper in Tower
D-Day Protesters in New York: No Blood for Brie!
Sanctions Would Have Worked, Says League of Nations
Brainster

Unified Europe faces threat from US-led Assault
Eco-Disaster: The Normandy Coastline. Will it ever recover?
Bumperstickerist

Yes, media bias was alive in 1944, but between military censorship and a greater awareness among newspaper and magazine reporters, even bad news was presented very differently than it is today.

QotD: US Military against journalists

On a May 13 panel at the National Conference for Media Reform in St. Louis, Linda Foley, the national president of the Newspaper Guild, said that the U.S. military deliberately targets journalists, "not just U.S. journalists either, by the way. They target and kill journalists from other countries, particularly Arab countries, at news services like al Jazeera, for example. They actually target them and blow up their studios with impunity." We have heard this before. Eason Jordan, then a CNN executive, said something similar on a panel at Davos, the annual economic conference in Switzerland, setting off an enormous furor. Foley's comment was almost universally ignored by the news media. Thomas Lipscomb of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote a column about it. More than two weeks later, Jack Kelly, national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Blade of Toledo, Ohio, said the Sun-Times (Lipscomb's column) was the only newspaper in the country to report what Foley said.

A column in the St. Paul Pioneer Press mentioned it, and so did an editorial in the Washington Times. Bloggers and The O'Reilly Factor brought important national attention. But a Nexis database search last week failed to turn up a straight news report on Foley's remark anywhere in America since Foley spoke on the panel. Remember, she is president of the union representing 35,000 reporters, editors, and other journalism workers. "Where is the professionalism and the authority that is our main claim to writing the indispensable 'first draft of history'?" Lipscomb asked in a follow-up piece in Editor & Publisher. He wrote, "The mainstream media couldn't be bothered to cover 'Easongate: the sequel.' " Foley sent a letter to the White House calling on it to pursue the "worldwide speculation that the U.S. military targets journalists and the media." In other words, she doesn't have to back up her charge, but the White House should start trying to prove that what she said is false.

John Leo, "Stories Not Told", US News, 2005-06-13

Posted by Nicholas at 08:04 AM | Comments (0)

The Babbler bares his soul

Damian Brooks marks the anniversary of the D-Day landings with some personal insights:

I went to school and came away different, but they went to war. I lost classmates to training accidents, to car accidents, to suicide. They lost comrades to bullets, bombs, and shrapnel, in terrible numbers, day in and day out, for months on end. The stresses my classmates and I endured engendered a lasting camaraderie. How much greater the stresses placed on our veterans, and how much deeper the currents of uncommon experience that draw them together, even now.

After 13 weeks of recruit training, I cried when I saw my family again. Our Normandy veterans left family, country, and safety behind for years; they crossed an ocean; they killed and faced death. They liberated a continent, and in so doing, they changed the course of history. One wonders how they adjusted to some of the inescapably mundane elements of civilian life so shortly after engaging in such a momentous military undertaking.

When you've been forced to decide what is worth dying for at age 21, how does that affect what you believe is worth living for at age 22, or 42, or 82? We are rapidly losing the ability to ask that question of our Normandy veterans, as the natural ends of their lives loom closer with each passing day. Very shortly now, all we will have left is their legacy, an unmatched record of public service in both war and peace.

My brief military service was all spent in Canada, in the Militia. The unit I belonged to had few battle honours from the Second World War, as they had been chosen to provide headquarter guard detachments of platoon and company size to Canadian divisions. We envied the recruits of other units in our brigade which had more glorious recent histories, but the costs of gaining that glory was rarely in our minds. Canada provided a disproportional share of the military effort on D-Day — one of the two best-known battles Canadians took a leading role in — and they paid the costs in blood.

Re-organize the Armed Forces

Angry has some interesting things to say about the impending re-organization of the Canadian Armed Forces.

The problem is, of course, that in just about any military, it is the army that, in the end, matters most. Boots on the ground and all that. The navy and especially the air force exist to enhance the army. Of course, navy and air force guys will vehemently deny this. In the US, of course, the navy can do with its marines a lot that the army does, but then that just goes to show that landed forces, regardless of what you call them and who commands them, are what matters most.

So it's no surprise that our Chief of Defence staff, General Rick Hillier, is army. Prior to his appointment as CDS, he as chief of the land staff, which is Canada's uninspiring name for head of the army. His immediate predecessor, Ray Henault, was a fighter pilot.

Okay, you flyboys and seagoing lubbers, Angry's tossed down the gauntlet. Refute him if you can!

Gender bias at the Library of Congress

A fascinating case of either gender bias or homophobia involves a former special forces colonel and the US Library of Congress:

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a discrimination suit against the Library of Congress on behalf of a transgender woman whose job offer was withdrawn after she informed the library she was transitioning from male to female.

Diane Schroer, 49, a decorated veteran with 25 years of military service, recently accepted a job at the Library of Congress as a senior terrorism research analyst. After taking her future boss to lunch and explaining that she would present at work as a woman, she said the boss called the next day to say she was not a "good fit" for the library.

"After risking my life for more than 25 years for my country, I've been told I'm not worthy of the freedoms I worked so hard to protect," Schroer said. "All I'm asking is to be judged by my abilities rather than my gender.

Surely, even the government can recognize that a person's ability to do the job will not be changed by whether they wear male or female clothing?

Ajax to honour surviving crewmen of "their" ship

The Lake Ontario town of Ajax, named after the British light cruiser HMS Ajax (one of the three cruisers which harried the Graf Spee into internment and eventual scuttling), will be honouring 20 of the surviving crewmen later this month:

The town started life in 1940 as a Second World War munitions plant, Defence Industries Ltd. (DIL), and was named after the battleship HMS Ajax by a contest-winning plant employee. On Jan. 1, 1955, what had been called an "Improvement District," made up of 5,689 souls, became a self-governing entity.

This green scene — surely the envy of many people several dozen concrete kilometres to the west — is the result of a 1958 decision to keep the 6.5 kilometres of Ajax waterfront open, protected parkland for a width of 400 feet. With each tree planted, the memory of the town's most important players becomes rooted ever stronger, not only in soil but in the minds of current residents.

Ajax is nothing if not committed to its history. As early as 1958, the town hosted HMS Ajax Day, which included a presentation of artifacts from the ship along with a scale model. In 1963, the town council began the process of naming streets in new developments after crew members of the victorious battleship, which, along with HMS Exeter and Achilles, defeated the German "pocket battleship" Graf Spee during the 1939 Battle of the River Plate off the South American coast.

Except for their lamentable habit of calling every armed vessel larger than a tugboat a "battleship", this was an interesting article. (Sorry, a minor pet peeve of mine.)

Hat tip to Spotlight on Military News.

French Fighters grounded in New Jersey

WNBC reports:

Nine French fighter jets and a radar plane stayed overnight at Atlantic City International Airport after one suffered a mechanical problem and bad weather prevented them from returning to their aircraft carrier off the Virginia coast, authorities said Friday.

The U.S. State Department was contacted by French officials after one of the pilots tried to buy fuel Thursday and couldn't because he didn't have the available funds on his credit card, a Philadelphia television station reported.

I mentioned the story to Jon and he responded "Must have maxxed out his card at the casino. Or at the escort service."

Chinese submarine accident reported

The Japanese media are reporting on a Chinese diesel-electric submarine which appears to have suffered some disabling damage near the Spratly Islands:

A Chinese Navy submarine stalled apparently after a fire broke out aboard the vessel while it was submerged in the South China Sea, sources close to the Japanese and U.S. defense authorities said Monday. As of Monday afternoon, the submarine was being towed above the water in the direction of Hainan Island. The Japanese and U.S. governments have been monitoring the vessel, and it is unknown whether there were any casualties, the sources said.

The warship in question is a Chinese Navy Ming-class diesel-powered hunter-killer submarine, the sources added.

According to the sources, the accident occurred in international waters about halfway between Taiwan and Hainan Island on Thursday, and the submarine was being towed by a Chinese vessel apparently in the direction of Yulin Naval Port on the island. It is not known whether the submarine surfaced on its own, the sources added.

Memorial Day

The American Memorial Day holiday is upon us . . . or at least upon our friends down there below the 49th parallel. John, of Castle Argghhh, posts a very personal memory to mark the day:

With the permission of my old Army buddy Tony Cerri, and his daughter Sarah, who had to bury her essentially brand new husband, 2LT Leonard Cowherd.

*This* is what Memorial Day is about. Especially as long as my email inbox pings with casualty notifications. Remember — this was written last year.

If you would like a round-up of Memorial Day posts, another Castle Argghhh post should do the trick.

Converting semi-auto to full-auto

In a somewhat unusual post, Kate at Small Dead Animals provides information on the weapon used in the Mayerthorpe ambush of four RCMP officers:

Capt John Heinrichs sends along this info on the Hechler & Koch used in the Mayerthorpe RCMP murders, in response to comments.

1. Military rifles can be semi-automatic (one round per trigger pull) or select-fire (semi-auto and automatic fire). The latter are illegal in Canada, except for owners of such weapons prior to the Firearms Act of c.1965. The ban also covers the parts which can convert a semi-auto to select-fire.

2. Previous to our current weapons, the C7 (rifle) and C9 (light machine gun), the Canadian Army used the FN C1 (rifle- semi-auto) and FN C2 (light machine gun- select-fire). While there were cosmetic differences between the two, functionally they were the same. Except for one part in the trigger mechanism: by exchanging the part installed in the C1 for the part installed in the C2, the C1 became a select-fire weapon. Your commentators in the HK91 post were referring to this type of part switching. It was possible because the FN rifle was designed originally as a select-fire weapon. The Canadian Army decided the automatic function was useless in a rifle as the soldier would have difficulty controlling the FN on full auto. FN then redesigned the relevant part for the C1, making it semi-auto only.

I recall this little field modification being tried about every third time my unit went to the ranges for target practice . . . it almost seemed to be a rite of passage for certain kinds of infantry recruits. The FN C1 was a fine weapon — I wish they were legal for private ownership now without all the paperwork and licensing — I actually preferred the FN to the Lee Enfield or the M-16. Captain Heinrichs' comment about being difficult to control in full-auto mode is more applicable to the almost-raw recruit than a trained infantryman.

One of my few live fire "no shit, there I was" moments was on a range at CFB Borden, where I was supervising recruits — and one slightly-more-senior NCO — in firing the Stirling SMG at 200 yard targets. The current relay (the soldiers on the firing line) had just finished their first magazine of controlled fire — three-round bursts — and swapped to their second mags. All up and down the line, they were having some fun firing at pop-up targets, except for the aforementioned Master Corporal at the right end of the line. I'd just finished helping a recruit clear a jammed bolt, and stood up as I heard "Corporal Russon, I . . ." and a three-round burst went off about a yard to my right . . . pointed back up-range. The bullets kicked up clods of dirt which hit my leg and bounced off the back of the recruit I'd just assisted.

The idiot M/Cpl had had a hangfire, turned away from the target, started to move toward me, and then the damn round in his chamber had fired. He, of course, still had the trigger pulled back, so the first round was followed by the next two before he let go of the trigger. I was still in shock as the CSM came running down the line and took charge of the situation. I don't think he castrated the M/Cpl on the spot, but I wasn't quite taking notes at that point . . .

Interestingly, the M/Cpl wasn't out on the range with us for the rest of that training session. I heard a rumour about a year later that he'd nearly managed to blow himself and an instructor up on the grenade range, but that was merely hearsay.

Canada selling former British submarines!

It's true: a report in today's Halifax Herald reports that they're going for almost literally scrap metal prices:

Got a few thousand bucks to spare?

For the price of a luxury car or a fraction of the cost of a house or condominium, you could buy a submarine to park in your driveway or hang your hat in.

But if you want to take it out for a spin, well, you might need to invest a bit more.

I know for some of you this will come as a huge relief: the subs have been a huge millstone around the neck of the navy . . . except we're not talking about those subs. These are the old Oberon class subs:

The Canadian navy's four mothballed Oberon-class subs, tied up just north of the Angus L. Macdonald Bridge on the Dartmouth side of Halifax Harbour, should be up for bids by summer or fall.

"We are anxious to get rid of them," Defence Department disposal co-ordinator Pat MacDonald said from Ottawa on Tuesday. "We have been for some time."

HMCS Onondaga was the last of the subs to be taken out of service in 2000. That boat and its sisters Ojibwa and Okanagan were all acquired between 1965 and '68. Olympus, which was only used for training in the harbour, was purchased later as a used vessel.

Hat tip to Spotlight on Military News and International Affairs.

In the rice paddies of CFB Gagetown

In a staggering revelation, the Canadian government is finally coming clean on a tragic decision taken in 1966 to allow the US government to test Agent Orange at CFB Gagetown. No formal notice was ever given to the soldiers who operated on the base, and the government has spent the intervening years denying that it had ever allowed Agent Orange to be used in Canada. The Toronto Sun editorial tells more:

How can our federal Liberal government continue to ignore the plight of hundreds and perhaps thousands of Canadian soldiers who were poisoned by Agent Orange in the 1960s?

As reported on Sunday by Greg Weston, Sun Media's national affairs columnist, soldiers stationed at CFB Gagetown, N.B, were exposed to the dangerous chemical defoliant for years.

Our government secretly gave permission to the U.S. military to test Agent Orange for use in Vietnam at Gagetown, while Canadian soldiers continued to live, work and train there.

Incredibly, for decades after that, even as a growing body of medical evidence linked Agent Orange to cancer, diabetes, respiratory diseases, blindness and birth defects in the children of Vietnam vets, successive Canadian governments hid the truth.

What is most puzzling about this is not the coverup — that's been typical government behaviour since Confederation — it's the fact that the Canadian government of Lester Pearson would allow US chemical weapons testing at all. Canada was not involved in the Vietnam war, and had no interest in furthering US military plans.

The end of traditional peacekeeping?

An article in the National Post punctures some illusions about how much peacekeeping Canada has been doing recently:

Will the last Canadian peacekeeper out the door please turn out the lights?

Captain Dan Zegarac is the lone Canadian left with the UN mission in Cyprus, the last of more than 35,000 peacekeepers to wear the Maple Leaf on the divided Mediterranean island nation.

"Yeah, I'm the last one," the Ottawa-born staff officer said in a telephone interview from Nicosia, the Cypriot capital. "I'm the only reason the Canadian flag is still flying around here."

Cyprus is one of the longest-lasting UN peacekeeping missions, and many Canadians have served there. A friend of mine was wounded in a firefight there in the late 1970's. It's odd that there is only a token presence there now.

But Cyprus has been divided for more than three decades and the UN force, now made up of South American, British, Hungarian and Slovakian troops, could be there for decades more.

And partly as a result of such long-running UN missions, Canada is increasingly getting out of the peacekeeping business.

Despite the government's professed support for the idea of peacekeeping, Canada has been quietly closing up shop in UN missions around the world. The last Canadian battle group left Bosnia last year and this fall our last major UN contingent in the Middle East will be reduced to a handful of support soldiers.

In spite of relatively broad public support for peacekeeping missions among Canadians, there just aren't enough soldiers left to be as involved as we think we are. One major mission (a reinforced infantry battalion) and a few minor missions (company or platoon-sized) are just about all that is sustainable for the Canadian Forces now.

The Department of National Defence appears to have reached the same conclusion. Ottawa will scale back its 30-year commitment to the UN force separating the Israeli and Syrian armies mission on the Golan Heights in northern Israel.

The nearly 200 Canadians with the UN Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) will be withdrawn by the end of the summer, leaving only 40 troops in the Golan, which was Canada's last major "blue hat" contingent, so named for the powder blue berets and helmets worn by soldiers serving as UN peacekeepers.

The pull-out from the Golan Heights follows last year's withdrawal from Bosnia, where the last Canadian battle group left the Balkans — dropping the Canadian presence from more than 1,000 troops to just over 80.

And yesterday, Canada announced it will send more troops to Afghanistan, a total of 1,250 by next February, to join a U.S.-led counter-insurgency mission to hunt down terrorists.

That is our major contribution to the war on terrorism: working (with as little press attention as possible) with the Americans in Afghanistan. It's almost as if we are ashamed of sending our troops to do battle there. On second thought, strike the "as if" from that last sentence.

The new home of the Canadian War Museum

The Phantom Observer gives us a quick photo tour of the new digs the Canadian War Museum now occupies. Last time I was in Ottawa, I visited the old site: it was just as cramped and crowded as he describes. The new facility looks much better. The vehicles were stored at a separate scrapyard facility, but have now been incorporated into the main museum building . . . and given some strenuous clean-up, by the look of things.

The Observer had visited the museum earlier to get some exterior-only opening day photos. Shame on me for not having noticed before now!

Stephen Green vivisects a Nazi Apologist

Pat Buchanan jumped the shark quite some time ago, and thus does not deserve much (if any) of the attention he gets now. His most recent column, however, deserves to be ripped, shredded and fed to him rectally. Failing that, Stephen Green has done a wonderful job of fisking the column:

[Buchanan] If the West went to war to stop Hitler from dominating Eastern and Central Europe, and Eastern and Central Europe ended up under a tyranny even more odious, as Bush implies, did Western Civilization win the war?

[Green] Well, yes. What has become of National Socialism? Where is Soviet Civilization? One was beaten utterly in 1945; the other took a while longer. But both are on the ash heap of history. Compare either "civilization" with where the US is today — or even where France is! — and you'll know Buchanan is playing you for a dupe.

Worse than a dupe, in fact. Buchanan is trying to play you like that Nazi sympathizer from "The Best Days of Our Lives." If you've never seen the movie (and I can't find it on Amazon or IMDB), it starred a real WWII veteran who lost his hands in the war. In a famous scene, he's confronted by an American Nazi who tries to convince him we fought "the wrong guys" in the war.

Tell me: How is Pat different from the American Nazi in that 1946 movie? I mean, other than his oddly close relationship with his sister?

Hat tip to Jon, my virtual landlord, for calling my attention to Stephen's post.

Halifax to host nuclear-powered aircraft carrier

Halifax, Nova Scotia, will be the focal point of anti-nuclear protestors from across Canada when the French carrier Charles de Gaulle visits port next month:

A 30,000-tonne nuclear-powered aircraft carrier is expected to drop anchor in Halifax Harbour for six days in June.

Michel Freymuth, the French consul general in Canada, said the Charles de Gaulle will be among six ships visiting Halifax between June 8 and 13.

"This is not an ordinary visit," Mr. Freymuth said. "There will be around 3,000 sailors coming."

Four French vessels are slated to accompany the Charles de Gaulle, including the frigates Jean Bart and Tourville, the nuclear attack submarine Rubis and the support ship Meuse.

I'm not quite sure how to interpret M. Freymuth's comment there . . . does that mean that the squadron doesn't normally carry that many sailors? Is this a subtle hint that they're actually an invasion force?

"Because of how navies conduct operation, it's too early to comment," said Lt.-Cmdr. Denise LaViolette, a spokeswoman for the Canadian Forces. "When it's closer to the event, we'll have more information."

Ah, I see. If it's clearly a peaceful visit, we can let off some fireworks. If it's less peaceful, we can give it the Rainbow Warrior treatment.

Rehashing the MGS debate

Another report published in the Ottawa Citizen airs the dispute over the Canadian army's pending purchase of the Mobile Gun System, a potential replacement for Canada's main battle tanks:

Two key projects of the Liberal government's plan to transform the Canadian Forces into a high-technology military aren't needed and the money for at least one of the programs could be put to better use elsewhere, according to a newly released Defence Department report.

The report questions whether the much-vaunted Stryker Mobile Gun System, as well as a vehicle-mounted anti-tank missile system, will contribute to the army's high-tech transformation. The two programs combined will cost taxpayers more than $1 billion.

In particular, the Mobile Gun System, or MGS, a wheeled light-armoured vehicle to replace the army's tanks, has been touted by various Liberal defence ministers as an example of how the government is revamping the military into a futuristic force.

But the report, obtained under the Access to Information law, notes that while such equipment improves the army's capability, that doesn't necessarily mean they are needed for the service's transformation. The study, however, concludes that little can be done about the $700-million MGS program, since it has the full endorsement of the Canadian Forces leadership.

In a way, I'm surprised that this debate is still being argued in the press: my impression was that the pointy-haired-bosses-at-NDHQ powers-that-be had already spent their share of the kickbacks for acquiring the MGS, so there was no possibility of the decision being revisited. Call me naive, I guess.

First SSF's Canadian members to receive CIB

The unique heritage of the combined US-Canadian First Special Service Force of the second world war is being recognized by the US Army. The Canadian veterans of the unit will be granted the right to the US Combat Infantryman's Badge, according to a Canadian Press report:

On Friday, U.S. embassy officials will announce in Ottawa that the United States Army is presenting the Combat Infantryman's Badge to Canadian members of the Second World War commando unit.

"We have been trying for years and years," Morris, 82, said from his home in Wilsonville, Ore.

"We're one outfit. This was a close-knit outfit. It's very, very gratifying because these are our guys."

Morris and other U.S. members of the unit immortalized in a 1968 Hollywood movie starring William Holden and Cliff Robertson received the badge during the war but the award was not originally authorized for foreign soldiers.

Established in 1943, the Combat Infantryman's Badge is awarded to infantrymen who "satisfactorily perform infantry duties" in ground combat against an armed enemy.

Unless, of course, the Canadian government gets yet another case of the awkwards (remember the fiasco about the snipers not being allowed to accept Bronze Stars from the US). I certainly hope that they stay the heck out of the way in this case.

Damian dissects the military aspects of the IPS

Damian Brooks has taken the time to read through the government's recent International Policy Statement, focusing on the portions dealing with defence. He's not overwhelmed:

Beyond the shoulder-dislocating attempts to pat itself on the back, however, this policy paper is nothing more than a series of half-hearted compromises and contradictions. I think I'm doubly disappointed because the Overview was good enough to raise my hopes for the Defence policy to unrealistic levels. I should have known better.

The "new" first priority of the CF will be the defence of Canada and North America. If you're shaking your head in surprise that this wasn't always the first priority of our military, let me assure you, you're not alone.

This is merely the acknowledgement that Canada has been taking full advantage of the fact that the Americans would never allow a foreign threat to Canada to go unopposed — allowing irresponsible Canadian governments to both cut defence and to engage in "feelgood" operations that generate good press. Pathetic, and morally reprehensible, but actually a fascinating exercise of one aspect of realpolitik.

As the policy paper notes, activity in the North continues to rise: diamond mining, oil pipeline construction, increased air traffic, and the possibility of commercial vessel traffic if warming trends continue. The area of land and sea Canada claims is enormous — almost 3.7 million square kilometres in our three Northern territories. Just as a point of comparison, the entire country of India is only 3.3 million square kilometres. Where is the commitment to preposition significant land and air assests closer to the Arctic than Edmonton?

I'd bet a month's wages that at least three foreign navies operate submarines in Canadian arctic waters. Where is even an acknowledgement of this hole in our sovereignty, let alone a discussion of how to develop a crucial under-ice naval capability to counter it?

I'm not the first military-watcher to say this, but we should OWN Arctic op's. This policy statement pays only lip service to Arctic sovereignty.

I was perhaps the worst cold-weather soldier in Canadian history, so I'm on shaky ground when I agree with Damian here: we should be the world's best at arctic operations. I doubt very much whether we're even in the top five.

I don't like the fact that we've formally given up on the idea of Canadian heavy armour in favour of a light- and medium-weight replacement (LAV's, Mobile Gun System, and Multi-Mission Effects Vehicle), though. While this is probably the most justifiable compromise in the policy paper, the proven effectiveness of tanks in an urban environment and the widespread availability of RPG's to 'insurgents' in failed and failing states around the world give me pause.

I'm not happy with it, but I recognize that this fight was lost ten years ago: there's almost no hope of having it reversed. We're specializing, by default, in light infantry work: it requires less equipment — but more training and mobile support — which plays well in the Finance minister's office.

To restore some hope to the poor bastards currently serving in the Canadian Forces, we have to concentrate on things that can be achieved with the resources the government is willing to provide. This means we can no longer pretend to be capable of fighting full-scale conventional battles (without allies, that is, and "allies" is really code for "the Americans"). For the army, the tanks are just the first to go. The artillery will be next on the block: SP guns are too expensive, and towed artillery is too immobile . . . and our allies will always have plenty, right?

The aviators have already had to mothball a significant portion of the CF-18 fleet to provide spare parts to keep the rest of them flying. I haven't heard anyone seriously address either mid-life updates to the CF-18s or long-term replacements. New Zealand might not be the only former British colony to give up on having an air force.

The navy is discovering just how expensive their submarines can be: the rest of the fleet was already suffering from insufficient resources before the subs came in to gobble down far more than their proportional share of the budget. They might be able to plan for new ships, but at an exchange ratio of about 2:1 (get a new vessel into commission for every two that are decommissioned). That'd give us, what? Enough ships to barely cover operational requirements on one coast?

The one area we can be sure won't be cut back in any serious way is National Defence Headquarters (NDHQ). That way, we'll always have somewhere to welcome the visiting American officers whose units will end up doing most of the work that used to be performed by Canadians.

Keegan on VE Day

Sir John Keegan writes about the end of the Second World War in Europe, VE day:

At the far end of Whitehall in Trafalgar Square and at Piccadilly Circus, the crowd was dancing and singing. American soldiers were exulting with British and Commonwealth servicemen, and the ordinary people of London, to celebrate what five years earlier had seemed an unattainable outcome. Then, with the German armies bursting into France and driving the defenders before them into rout, Churchill had stated his aim to the House of Commons, as: "Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be."

The road had been harder than even he had feared. Fifty million people had died, much of Europe had been destroyed, millions had been driven from their homes and were wandering the highways of Europe, displaced and starving.

Europe, the liberated portion that stayed liberated after 1945 did recover, although that recovery was already well started before the Marshall Plan got fully underway (the liberalization of the German economy under Adenauer was a huge change for the better). Even the nominally victorious nations were suffering:

In Britain the immediate post-war years were materially harsher than the war itself had been. Rationing remained and grew stricter. The country was bankrupt, surviving only on an American loan. The Army, still fighting the Japanese in the Far East, was to remain large even after VJ Day — Victory over Japan — in August, as it coped with post-imperial revolts in Burma and Palestine.

The Soviet Union, of course, was in even worse state, but took as much as it could of what the Nazis had left unlooted from the new satellite states of eastern Europe.

The country that was seen to have suffered worst as the war drew to a close was Germany. Its 50 largest cities lay in ruins, 600,000 of the inhabitants killed by Allied bombing, the majority women and children. Four million German men had died in battle, of whom 800,000 had been killed fighting the British and Americans in the battle for Germany. Seventeen million Germans had fled from the East, including places that had been German-inhabited for centuries.

German industry, once the powerhouse of the world's second-largest economy was at a standstill. The country's institutions had been destroyed and its government extinguished. Worst of all, Germany had become an outcast nation, held guilty of the worst crimes and excesses ever to have been committed by a civilised country.

VE Day was an occasion for rejoicing. But even among the victors there were many who wondered if such a victory deserved celebration.

USS Kennedy retirement deferred

As mentioned earlier, the conventional-powered aircraft carrier USS John F. Kennedy has been slated for decommissioning after a life-extension plan (at $350 million) was removed from the US Navy budget. Congressional maneuvres have delayed the decision:

The House of Representatives is expected to approve a plan today to postpone a decision on retiring the aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy until February.

House and Senate budget negotiators struck a deal late Tuesday that requires the Navy to delay a decision on the 37-year-old carrier until the Quadrennial Defense Review is submitted to Congress early next year.

The move would stall a potential domino effect that could result in a nuclear-powered carrier being relocated from Norfolk to Mayport, Fla., the Kennedy’s home port.

While I'm happy with the concept of civilian control over the military, this degree of control always seems to be more about local politics than it ever is about genuine concerns over national defence or the good of the particular service involved.

Navy budget stretched to breaking point

The repairs and damage assessment for the HMCS Chicoutimi are making a bad financial situation even worse for the Canadian navy:

The four boats, acquired from the British navy for $850 million, have been docked since the incident.

Chicoutimi is in Halifax Shipyard, still undergoing a damage assessment. The insides have been stripped and cleaned, and officials are reviewing the structural damage, said Henderson.

Repairs will take at least a year, depending on what replacement parts are required, he said.

In his internal report, prepared in December, MacLean cites $419 million in total funding shortfalls across the navy. He says the unplanned expense for Chicoutimi will compound an already strained maintenance program.

Given that the rest of the navy's vessels were already running on what is politely termed "deferred maintenance" even before the subs were obtained, you can imagine how bad the situation will be after all the bills come in. But, given the federal situation, there's literally no hope of any extra funding going to the navy in the short term.

Update: The report of the inquiry into the fatal fire on board Chicoutimi has been issued, clearing the captain and crew of any risk of charges.

QotD: Western Teenagers

Pessimists see in the lethargic teenagers of the affluent American suburbs seeds of decay. But I am not so sure we are yet at the point of collapse. As long as Europe and America retain their adherance to the structures of constitutional government, capitalism, freedom of religious and political association, free speech, and intellectual tolerance, then history teaches us that Westerners can still field in their hour of need brave, disciplined and well-equipped soldiers who shall kill like none other on the planet. Our institutions, I think, if they do not erode entirely and are not overthrown, can survive periods of decadence brought on by our material success, eras when the entire critical notion of civic militarism seems bothersome to the enjoyment of material surfeit, and an age in which free speech is used to focus on our own imperfections without concern for the ghastly nature of our enemies. Not all elements of the Western approach to warfare were always present in Europe. The fumes of Roman republicanism kept the empire going long after the ideal of a citizen soldier sometimes gave way to a mercenary army.

Victor Davis Hanson, Carnage and Culture

QotD: European Military Superiority

Many scholars have been