Archive for February, 2005

John Cleese for Democratic National Chairman

This is an “I wish I had thought of that” link. Jay Tea at Wizbang summarizes my take on recent political debate. Please note that I don’t think that 100% of Republican vs. Democrat debate goes like this. 96-97% tops.

It’s enough to make me hold my head and go “Waaahhh!”

Computer Security – A Visual Lesson

A.E. Brain makes a point. Actually, it could apply to a lot more than just computer security. Go look.

I had not seen it until today, but Phil Carter noted the same story that I did on the militias in Iraq. He writes:

Thus far, our efforts to train Iraqi security forces have not followed this FID ["foreign internal defense"] model — and they have floundered. We have attempted to transform a group of average citizens in Iraq into soldiers capable of going toe-to-toe with some very bad guys, and ultimately, being able to kill their fellow citizens. It takes a lot to create that kind of a force; it takes years to inculcate that kind of skill, professionalism and warrior ethos. We may be able to impart the basics to the Iraqi security force personnel — such as how to shoot and maintain their weapons, conduct a squad patrol, etc. But it’s a giant leap from that baseline of proficiency to what these “pop up” units have: a fighting spirit.

I wrote last October:

You can’t just snap your fingers and deploy a trained army. Even if the Iraqi military had been 100% loyal to the interim government, they would not have had the capability to deal with the things that they are going to have to deal with. Vetting, training, and equipping a capable force takes time.

If these militia-type units can be “deputized” and enlisted for the short-to-medium term, they could make a very significant contribution to the stabilization of the new Iraq. It won’t be easy, of course, and close tabs need to be kept on them. But as the Iraqi army grows and matures, the need for these groups will lessen considerably even as the capability to put them down becomes available if it’s needed. Again, negotiations in good faith could make a great deal of difference.

One other thing I meant to mention in my earlier post is that perhaps these groups, if they play ball, could be considered Iraq’s true “minutemen”.

Talking with the Enemy

ACE notes a Time Magazine article that covers some negotiations between the US military and the leaders of some insurgent groups:

Hard-line Islamist fighters like Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi’s al-Qaeda group will not compromise in their campaign to create an Islamic state. But in interviews with TIME, senior Iraqi insurgent commanders said several “nationalist” rebel groups–composed predominantly of ex–military officers and what the Pentagon dubs “former regime elements”–have moved toward a strategy of “fight and negotiate.” Although they have no immediate plans to halt attacks on U.S. troops, they say their aim is to establish a political identity that can represent disenfranchised Sunnis and eventually negotiate an end to the U.S. military’s offensive in the Sunni triangle. Their model is Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Irish Republican Army, which ultimately earned the I.R.A. a role in the Northern Ireland peace process. “That’s what we’re working for, to have a political face appear from the battlefield, to unify the groups, to resist the aggressor and put our views to the people,” says a battle commander in the upper tiers of the insurgency who asked to be identified by his nom de guerre, Abu Marwan. Another negotiator, called Abu Mohammed, told TIME, “Despite what has happened, the possibility for negotiation is still open.”

Although I’d sure like to get unconditional surrender from each and every group that opposes us and the new Iraqi government, as a realist I know that that will take many, many years. If it can even be achieved at all.

Negotiation and compromise with groups that are willing to play ball shouldn’t be out of the question. A new Iraq is being formed, and a new era is dawning in the Middle East. It’s going to be important that some folks are willing to “start over”. The inability to do so on both sides of the Israel/Palestinian fence is why I have no optimism about that particular quagmire.

We can get to that point from where we are in Iraq. And we don’t want to.

What do the insurgents want? Top insurgent field commanders and negotiators informed TIME that the rebels have told diplomats and military officers that they support a secular democracy in Iraq but resent the prospect of a government run by exiles who fled to Iran and the West during Saddam’s regime. The insurgents also seek a guaranteed timetable for U.S. troop withdrawal, a demand the U.S. refuses. But there are some hints of compromise: insurgent negotiators have told their U.S. counterparts they would accept a U.N. peacekeeping force as the U.S. troop presence recedes. Insurgent representative Abu Mohammed says the nationalists would even tolerate U.S. bases on Iraqi soil. “We don’t mind if the invader becomes a guest,” he says, suggesting a situation akin to the U.S. military presence in Germany and Japan.

The Germany/Japan model for our military presence is what I’ve been predicting all along.

Negotiating a compromise means giving up something that you want. If we give a little, some of these groups will have a way to back out of the fight while retaining their honor. Without a way to maintain their dignity, many will carry on the struggle if for no other reason than to avoid the shame of surrender.

You always give your enemy a way out, an avenue of escape. Unless you mean from the start to annihilate him totally and completely. In some (maybe even many) cases, that’s justified and warranted. But in many other cases it’s not necessary, and most of the time it will be counter-productive. Our strategy in the Iraq campaign is not to wipe out the country and own every square mile of territory. We want the fighting to stop, because our long-term victory in Iraq won’t be achieved through force of arms. We need that force to get there, but it’s a means and not an end. This sort of deal-making is how things are done, especially in that part of the world. We can bring our values and ideas into their game, which is what we need to do to succeed in the long-term anyway.

We must obviously be very careful about who we deal with and what we give in on. And the new Iraqi government must be part of what’s going down or we run the risk of our deal not being honored in the future, which will not only undo that deal but jeopardize others.

This development tells me that not only are we attempting to conduct this campaign in a reasonable, logical, wise manner, but that some of our enemies are on the verge of defeat. This is a huge development. If we’re firm but fair in our dealings, it could potentially start an avalanche of cease-fire agreements.

Many Sunnis want in on the new Iraq. We need to give them the opportunity to get there.

As promised, here are more snapshots of the Stryker on display at the Chicago Auto Show. Click on any of them for a better look.

The US Army display was constantly surrounded by show-goers curious about the Big Green machine.

And I think I saw more people taking pics of the Stryker than I did of any other vehicle. Of course, Murdoc nudged the average upwards a bit. What a nut.

Obviously, the Stryker on display wasn’t fitted with the anti-RPG slat armor. And the hull was free of the other various things tossed onboard by soldiers in the combat zone.

And the Michelin 1200R20 XML tires had been Armor Alled. My guess is that that isn’t a priority in Iraq.

There was always a line to get inside the Stryker.

The model on display was a Commander’s Vehicle variant. The commander would be sitting inside this hatch, or standing with his head out the hatch overhead of this position. You can see the open hatch on top.

Inside, there was barely room for troops with all the electronic gear and cables all over the place. (This pic is intentionally fuzzy to maintain OPSEC. Or because I had the camera on the wrong mode.)

Here’s the commander’s screen. As mentioned previously on MO, HUD goggles allow the commander to access this information while standing in the hatch. I don’t know if this is the same equipment available for the vehicle commander on variants other than the Commander’s variant or not. Below the display you can see the driver’s position. The back of the driver’s seat is folded back; that’s to allow him to squeeze into position.

The main destination inside the Stryker was the gunner’s position. A soldier with an 82nd Airborne combat patch was helping visitors play with the Remote Weapons Station. The screen is black-and-white, but the clarity is pretty good as you can see.

Another shot of the RWS. The girl with the pony tail kept aiming for the ceiling, so the soldier is reaching across to help her get back on track. Perhaps the fact that the RWS isn’t motion-stabilized contributed to her trouble. Anyway, the RWS is pretty responsive and I imagine that with a little practice one could be pretty good. I tried tracking show-goers and did just fine. I could have spent an hour playing with the controls and the zooms, but more kids were waiting for their turn. I wanted to pull a “don’t you know who I am?” on them, but I would have been totally crushed when they didn’t.

On my way out I stuck my head out one of the rear top hatches and snapped this pic of the top deck. The RWS mount with fake weapon and empty smoke grenade launchers is clearly visible, along with the open commander’s top hatch.

Here’s a view of the weapon mount from outside. The lenses of the video system are clearly visible. It was constantly tracking around as visitors inside tried it out.

Here’s the driver’s position from outside. His overhead hatch is open a bit, and you can barely make out the periscopes that the driver would use if the hatch was closed and his video system failed. He has a screen similar to that of the commander and the gunner.

Lastly, this article from Soldier Magazine was taped up on the Stryker. The image used in the article is one of my favorites, and I had it as the desktop on one of my machines for quite a while. Since I apparently didn’t post it on MO at the time, I’ll link to it now.

That’s all I’ve got. It was pretty cool for a civie like me to be able to check the vehicle out.

The Army personnel manning the display were mostly (if not all) recruiters. That makes sense, as this sort of interaction with the public is a great opportunity to pick up a few folks interested in serving. But they didn’t really seem to have much real knowledge about the Stryker, and I would have really enjoyed a chance to have a conversation with a Stryker expert. A lot of the questions asked (by me and others) were answered with a “I’m not really sure…”

So I hope that the Army has more displays like this in the future, and I hope they have some answer guys available for the equipment being shown.

And the Army or GDLS or whoever is welcome to invite me out for a test drive any time.

Capsized in the canal

Michael Gilbert, of whom MO is a major fan, writes in depth about the two Strykers that flipped into a water-filled canal at the start of the first Stryker combat mission in December, 2003. Three soldiers were killed.

Talking up the tanker

The first KC-767 tanker will soon roll off the assembly line. The first of four for the Italian Air Force, it will be hailed by Boeing CEO Harry Stonecipher as proof that Boeing can give the US Air Force what it wants. Four additional 767 tankers will be built for Japan. Boeing also hopes to sell two or three to the UAE.

Another article notes that if the USAF decides on the 787 platform (ex-7E7) for its new tankers

“It’s pretty far out. First time they could get a tanker on that is probably 2010-11-12, somewhere out there. That’s the problem there, because right now, with the sales we’ve got, the production line is chock-a-block full early on with commercial customers.”

And there are concerns that the 787, designed to maximize efficiency, won’t make a good tanker anyway.

While Boeing remains a natural to build new tankers, the recent problems have created problems with the politicians who decide what goes to who. And John McCain, the leading critic of the previous 767 lease plan/rip-off, hasn’t let up.

Boeing’s biggest problem on Capitol Hill is that it has generated a lot of anger from McCain, who is to take over the Armed Services subcommittee that controls Air Force procurement.

McCain has complained that executives in Boeing’s Washington, D.C., offices stalled his tanker-deal investigation for two years, and he has said that during a meeting with Stonecipher last February, he’d reached agreement that executives such as Rudy deLeon, Boeing’s top lobbyist in D.C., would be disciplined. Boeing never followed through, and the result is deLeon remains unwelcome in McCain’s office.

To smooth things over with Congress, Boeing is counting on old friends of McCain, such as former White House Chief of Staff Ken Duberstein; former Sen. Warren Rudman of Vermont, who conducted an internal investigation of company ethics for Boeing last year; and the retired head of Boeing’s D.C. office, Stan Ebner.

Stonecipher, through a spokesman, declined to discuss the frosty situation.

Meanwhile, EADS continues to push for its Airbus A330-based tanker.

New factor in Iraq: irregular brigades fill security void

A reader tips me off to this Wall Street Journal article by Greg Jaffe. I googled and found it reproduced on USAF AIM Points.

It concerns irregular paramilitary units that are “popping up” around Iraq:

The unplanned units — commanded by friends and relatives of cabinet officers and tribal sheiks — go by names like the Defenders of Baghdad, the Special Police Commandos, the Defenders of Khadamiya and the Amarah Brigade. The new units generally have the backing of the Iraqi government and receive government funding.

While regular units of the Iraq Army have taken up residence on rehabilitated army bases, the others camp out in places like looted Ministry of Defense buildings, a former women’s college, an old Iraqi war monument and an abandoned aircraft hangar. Frequently, U.S. officials don’t find out about them until they stumble across them. Some Americans consider them a welcome addition to the fight against the insurgency — though others worry about the risks.

“We don’t call them militias. Militias are…illegal,” says Maj. Chris Wales, who spent most of January tracking down and finding these new forces. “I’ve begun calling them ‘Irregular Iraqi ministry-directed brigades.’ ” The “pop up” label comes from other U.S. military officials in Baghdad.

Troops who might have otherwise joined the regular Iraqi Army are drawn to these units because they are often led by a particularly inspirational commander or made up of people with similar tribal and religious backgrounds. This makes the units more cohesive and potentially effective against the insurgency. “Just show us where to go and we will eat the insurgents alive,” an Iraqi in one of these units told Maj. Wales earlier this month when he tracked them down at a long-shuttered Baghdad airport.

I’ve written about this type of thing several times previously, the Badr Brigade in particular.

One thing we need to be very careful of while helping set up (or “install”) a new democracy in Iraq is that the people are very tribal and they won’t simply cast off thousands of years of culture to embrace American-style government and military structures. This isn’t to say that they will utterly reject our way of doing things, either. The final result is bound to be somewhere in between the old and the new, and if we want it to succeed we need to be as careful as we can not to step on certain toes.

It’s not news to anyone that Iraq suffers from security problems. And it’s not news to anyone that everyone who wants a weapon has a weapon in Iraq. So why not try to harness some of those loose cannons?

Obviously, it’s dangerous ground:

Some U.S. officials worry about the new units’ allegiances, which often seem split between their religious and tribal sponsors and the central government, creating the risk that the units could be used as militias if Iraq falls into civil war. U.S. military commanders in Baghdad are especially concerned about the Defenders of Khadamiya, which is forming to guard a major Shiite shrine on the city’s northern edge at the behest of Shiite cleric Hussein al Sadr. U.S. military officials worry that the group, which now numbers about 120 men but plans to grow to more than 800, could be used to settle internal Shiite scores or deployed in a Sunni-Shiite conflict.

This would be troubling, to say the least. And the “civil war” talk will only gain momentum if Darth Sadr (for example) rebuilds his army with the blessing of the Shiite-dominated government.

But I think that those scores are going to need to be settled at some point. There’s a lot of bad blood that’s going to need to be worked out. The tribal structure demands it, and in many cases it will be better to get it resolved rather than to let is simmer and fester. And, in many ways, the “civil war” anti-war types are constantly wringing their hands over has been going on for over a year.

Getting back to the militias:

As these irregular units proliferate, U.S. officials face a thorny dilemma: whether to encourage these forces, whose training and experience varies wildly, or to try to rein them in. “There is a tension between on the one hand encouraging and fostering initiative and on the other executing the plan for the Iraqi Security Forces that everyone agreed on,” says Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, who is overseeing the massive U.S. effort to help train and equip Iraqi military units. “To be candid, I would err on the side of fostering initiative. I want to get the hell out of here.”

If (and that’s a big ‘if’) some of these units can be counted on to provide support and security for the legitimate government, they will be a boon. Not only will they increase the size and capability of security forces, they will take armed and potentially-rogue fighters off the “street”.

I’d think it would be in the best interest of the Coalition and especially of the new Iraqi government to set up some sort of program to “deputize” various groups after they’ve been looked over and vetted. If some form of compromise can be worked out where they operate “for” their particular group but with the official “backing” of the Iraqi government, the mutual benefit of improved security could be significant.

Maybe armbands denoting “deputization” or something similar can be worked out, with the understanding that some money, weaponry, and supplies will be forthcoming for the agreement to play ball. Perhaps service in these irregular units can be parleyed into a job in the police or military at some point for interested individuals.

The flip-side of this all would be that unofficial, un-deputized militia units would have to be dealt with more harshly and quickly to prevent these groups from exploding (both figuratively and literally) all over the place. If there is something practical and honorable to be gained from joining the new order, those groups that would be helpful will do so.

The fact is that these sorts of groups are going to be around for a long time. We can try to wipe them all out, we can turn a blind eye to them, or we can try to enlist them. Many of them just want to provide security for their people. That’s what we want, as well, so it seems that a middle ground should be reachable in many cases.

And there’s far too much good stuff in the article for me to excerpt. You really should go read the whole thing.

I’m back from the Chicago Auto Show. To be honest, that might be the best $10 ticket on the planet. Lots of good stuff. I spent a little bit of time at the Army’s Stryker display and got a bunch of pics. Too tired to write about it tonight, but here’s a taste:

I’ll post more this weekend.

I’m traveling to the Chicago Auto Show today. If I have time I’ll get some good stuff on the Stryker that’s on display.

Meanwhile, check out some of these sites (in no particular order):
Strategy Page
Intel Dump
Defense Tech
Scrappleface
Winds of Change
Hell in a Handbasket
One Hand Clapping
Hobbs Online
Master of None
All Agitprop
Wizbang
Airborne Combat Engineer
You Big Mouth, You
Stryker Brigade News
Expat Yank
Belmont Club
Michelle Malkin
Frank Warner
Spoons Experience
Blogs of War
Blackfive
Citizen Smash
2slick’s Forum
Rantburg
In the Red Zone

Good stuff, to be sure.