British COIN (merged thread)

[Red Rat]

To be brutally honest other than the special forces ops not seen much evidence of good practice from the line infantry (even the Marines and the paras). Slow to learn, slow to adapt, slow to evolve. And it all returns to the single most important weakness in the Brit approach - that of short tours. The indictment of "one spends two months learning the job, two months doing it and two months counting the days until you go home for tea and medals" still holds good and effectively precludes the build up of tactical efficiency on the ground. One needs to recognise this fatal flaw in the approach and address it and not (as the Brits are famous for) continue to muddle on.

TTPs evolve week by week, month by month and are different according to which AO you are in and the threat faced. What is seen on TV is a combination of tactical good practice and bad practice. Details on UKSF Ops are extremely hard to come by so it is hard to state how effectively they have evolved. The use of SF has evolved considerably - but that was not necessarily an SF decision.
What most media coverage cannot show is the whole picture; the planning, the ISTAR coverage, the intelligence. I am not saying that mistakes have not been made, they have, especially in the early years, but the army now is different from the army then. The equipment and TTPs have changed out of all recognition.

There are problems with short tours and I agree that we should be on longer tours. Ledwidges comment (Losing Small Wars) on 'militarism' is both accurate and damning. Should we change things? Yes? Can we? No; it is not politically possible; we are already in drawdown.

That sound like a yank spin doctor speaking I interpret that to mean in effect the Brits (and probably the yanks) don't have a f***ing clue what is going on on the ground.

Au contraire my South African sparring partner! Our key intelligence and civilian affairs staff are on 12 month tours. Within our patch we generally know who the key players are, their families, their enemies, their friends, their rivals, their business partners, their business interests, their schools, what they thought yesterday, last week, and last year. What their aspirations are in public and quite possibly what their aspirations are in private; it is a very sophisticated knowledge of the human terrain. We know what weapons are favoured in what areas and at what times. Our knowledge of the terrain, human and physical is, I suspect, as good in many ways as what we had in N Ireland.

OK but when a yank troopie notes to the journalist that he cant fire unless fired upon when does the robust fit into that?

Well British troops don't have that problem. There are always people who do not understand the ROE; this sounds like one of them.

Well if you are not going to take on the Taliban and kill them why not just use low grade militia to do the defensive work and guarding duties. Like with NI the institutional lack of aggressive action starts to eat away at the heart of fighting units like a cancer.

NI was policing for most of the campaign. We enabled the police to carry out their duties and provided niche capabilities; N Ireland at its worst is probably what we would like Afghanistan to become. We realised in N Ireland that everytime we killed someone we were exacerbating the political problem, it caused a greater sense of political grievance, made martyrs out of volunteers and resulted in more even more volunteers; that is why from the mid to late 1980s we tried very hard to capture and not kill. Capturing them and sending them to prison stopped attacks, criminalised the struggle and discouraged others. Very few volunteers who served time in prion re-offended. Mark Urban's book Big Boys' Rules is a good account of the nuanced use of force in N Ireland while Kevin Toolis' book
Rebel Hearts: Journeys Within The IRA's Soul is a very good look at the impact of violence and how it fed the struggle.

And how, dare I ask, does this apply to the troops currently deployed in Helmand? It seems like the military powers that be are starting to mentally detach themselves from the war in Afghanistan. Seen that before in people who have realised that they have no answers and they just shut the problem out.

Already at the strategic level the army is planning for life 2015+. The size and shape of the army in 2020 will be decided in the next 12 months or else 2020 will be come 2021, 2022, 2023...

As to having no answers, no country is prepared to pay the price in blood and treasure to win the conflict in Afghanistan; I suspect they never were. Early on in the UK's engagement in Afghanistan the MOD stated that the engagement would have to be at least 25 years in order to achieve what the stated aims were; 10 years in and we are leaving.

One needs to remember that Rhodesia comprised 80% plus Brits most of whom had come out after WW2 and (speaking as a South African) they proved to be exceptionally intuitive, innovative and adaptable and achieved much with very little. So one really needs to put ones finger on where it has gone wrong in the UK since then and fix it. Something has happened to reduce the ability of the Brits to think and act using their initiative and this applies not only to the military (as you would well know).

WW2 and the Rhodesian Conflict were both existentialist conflicts where there is eveything to play for. In such circumstances it is adapt or survive. Iraq and Afghanistan were discretionary wars of choice where the imperative is to evolve so as not to be seen to

a) Fail
or
b) Be culpable

Plus society has changed considerably; we are softer and more liberal now.