Oman / Dhofar campaign: catch all

[davidbfpo]

Thanks to twitter I found out that in July 2015 a short, hour long documentary was released and is available to buy or rent via Vimeo:https://vimeo.com/ondemand/operationoman

From the website:

More than 40 years have passed since Britain fought a secret war in Oman. Major Nicholas Ofield has returned for the first time since his involvement in the conflict to retread his battlegrounds and reflect on what the conflict meant personally, and in the wider socio-political context. Supported with rare archive footage and interviews from Colonel Mike Ball and Major Mike Austin, who also fought in the conflict, Operation Oman is the gripping true story of one of the most successful counter-insurgency campaigns ever fought.

I just watched the clip 'Kill Group' where Major Olfield recounts firing 1500 rounds from four machine guns and missing five insurgents at 400m range.

Small snag. It may not be available in the USA. They are on offer:http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Operation-.../131570220457?

[davidbfpo]

On a tweet by @OperationOman is the photo below:

A Hedgehog. 44 gallon oil drums filled with sand to create a defensive position. Mounted with a Vickers Machine gun

[davidbfpo]

Dr Geraint Hughes, from the blog Defence-in-Depth, refers to Oman in a wide-ranging article:

With reference again to Dhofar, the Popular Front still had a base of sympathisers within the local community even after their formal defeat in December 1975, and the province was by no means 'at peace' even after Qaboos declared the emergency over.

The main article is likely to be added to the COIN thread, maybe a new thread. The cited article alas is behind a link to a "pay wall" and entitled 'Demythologising Dhofar: British Policy, Military Strategy, and Counter-Insurgency in Oman, 1963–1976,' by Geraint Hughes, The Journal of Military History, 79:2 (April 2015): 423-456.

This article re-examines the civil war (1963–1976) between the Sultanate of Oman and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Oman (PFLO), particularly the U.K.’s support of the government. Using archival evidence and private papers, it argues that the counter-insurgency (COIN) campaign’s image as “population-centric” is flawed, and that the British and Omani governments relied more on military measures against the PFLO to recapture Dhofar province than on the “hearts and minds” and civil development programmes emphasised in traditional accounts. It counsels against using Dhofar as a possible example of indirect military assistance in contemporary COIN, arguing that the conflict’s specific historical characteristics may not be replicated now or in the immediate future.

Link:http://www.smh-hq.org/jmh/jmhvols/792.html

[davidbfpo]

SWJ has an article which uses the Dhofar campaign as an example, with a lot of references, especially to one book: J.E. Peterson, Oman’s Insurgencies: The Sultanate’s Struggle for Supremacy (London, United Kingdom: Saqi Publishing, 2008 (which is cited in the thread).

There alo a reference to a 2011 JSOU report on Oman, which has a chapter on Dhofar:http://jsou.socom.mil/JSOU%20Publica...Oman_final.pdf Which I don't think is cited here and has not been read beyond the cover.

Link:http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art...-islamic-state

[sullygoarmy]

My professor at Fletcher, Dr. Richard Shultz, travelled over to work with the Omani Army in the early Spring and got to get some great stories about their efforts in Dhofar.

[davidbfpo]

An article by Dr Simon Anglim, whose work IIRC has appeared on SWC, possibly on the Dhofar campaign; id'd via Twitter and from the website The Strategy Bridge in 2014:http://www.thestrategybridge.com/the...bel-war-195759

He starts with:

The years 1955–1959 brought a major insurgency to the Gulf state of Muscat and Oman which, for a while, threatened the integrity of the Omani state. All the key battlefields were in Northern Oman, within 150 miles of the capital, Muscat, and because this is a mountainous region, Omanis remember it as the Djebel (Mountain) War; in the UK it is referred to usually as the Djebel Akhdar campaign, after its climactic battle. Historically, the Djebel War has been almost completely overshadowed by Oman’s other insurgency, Dhofar 1965–1975, which was longer, bigger, bloodier and far better covered in print. However, the Djebel War sends messages in its own right. It was truly ‘complex’, difficult to pigeonhole as either insurgency or civil war and showing many of the characteristics of both, and at the tactical level mixed battalion-level battles, including sieges of fortified areas, with close air support and bombing of the rebel infrastructure, alongside guerrilla warfare, sabotage and terrorism. As strategy, it illustrates limited military force dealing with a potentially major crisis where larger-scale deployments were unacceptable politically.