Sic Semper Tyrannis

For Auld Lang Syne

Posted in loving memory of our uncle John H. Lang, USN 1919-1947, Canadian Engineers, Canadian Black Watch and British Royal Highlanders, World War One.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWzfP_hee0Q

Juan Cole on Yemen

Juan is kind enough to write on this place and quote the SST article on Yemen.  Since I am not doing well in recovering from the flu I will return the favor.  When I was "out there" in the early 80s one of the best things about it was that people didn't take the place seriously unless they were actually stationed there.  It was a bit like living in an Evelyn Waugh novel, "Black Mischief" and "Scoop" come to mind.  There was the small diplomatic community which obsessed over dealing with each other.  There was the altitude which made me ill from time to time.  There was one big war and lots of little ones.  We lived in big, dusty, masonry houses, whitewashed to a false purity.  The Red Chinese intelligence boss from their embassy would come to my house once a week to tell me all about what the 2,000 odd Chinese construction workers had seen the Soviets doing the previouis week.  It was an interesting place.  pl

http://www.juancole.com/2009/12/top-republican-myths-about-crotch.html

Yemen as quagmire

"Foreign Minister Abu Bakr al-Qirbi told the BBC that Yemen had the will and ability to deal with al-Qaeda, but was undermined by a lack of support.

He estimated that several hundred al-Qaeda members were operating in Yemen and could be planning more attacks.

A Yemen-based branch of the network has claimed it planned the failed attack.

Yemeni officials said Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, 23, the Nigerian man accused of trying to blow up the Detroit-bound jet on Christmas Day, was living in Yemen from August until the beginning of December, the official Saba news agency reported. "  BBC

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I was Defense and Army Attache in the US Embassy in Sana, North Yemen in 1981 and 1982.  I have been back several times. most recently three or four years ago.  The same man, Ali Abdullah Salih, is president of a united north and south Yemen.  He was merely president in the north when I lived in Sana.  There have been no "breaks" in his service.

The country is an example of tribalism run riot.  Except for the coastal plains the terrain is a wilderness of dissected mountain ridges, each of which is topped by a very defensible village. 

The tribal structure is very complex and divided into; confederations, tribes, clans, families, etc.  In the north of the country live Zeidi (Fiver) Shia.  Their type of Shiism is the closest to Sunni Islam.  Their jurisprudence is actually based on Mu'tazilism.  The rest of the country is largely inhabited by Sunni Shafa'i.

There is constant war in Yemen, war over women's honor, water rights, land, beasts or just for the fun of it.  The government does not exercize any substatial control over most places outside the cities.  The tribesmen are both in the army and out of it and a favorite political move is for some dissident officer to desert taking many of his men and such odds and ends as; small arms;  artillery and tanks to his home district after proclaiming "come and get me."  The tribesmen are heavily armed.  An AK-47 is a standard accessory in personal fashion, and they DO shoot at each other a lot.

The Yemenis are crafty folk.  In the Cold War they were adept at getting free money and weapons from the USSR, USA, Saudi Arabia, and East Germany.  They hired the French, Taiwanese and Italians to do odd jobs for them using other peoples' money.

Salih is particularly good at that.  He delights in "screwing" the big guys by playing on their fears. 

This is the next Afghanistan?  pl

 

 

Jedburghs and Rangers

"..in 2009, perhaps it is time for Congress to review their handiwork. Of course many outside the military establishment are enamored with the myth and romanticism of Special Operations. There are so many “groupies” among staffers and in academia that it is hard to see Special Operations for what it really is and what it has become. And within the military, Special Operations has been “hijacked” by a group of hyper-conventional Ranger types and other supporting elements that Special Operations and most important, its heart and soul – Special Forces - has lost its way. There are so many in and out of the military who claim ties to Special Operations that it is unlikely that there will ever be a critical look at USSOCOM and what it has become."  SWJ

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One of our brethren here sent me this article.

We have delved into this subject before.  I think my views are well known  I have had the flu for the last few days and am more grouchy than usual.  My wife says that is arguable.

The amount of hostility between the two main groups shows through in the comments to the SWJ article.  At the dawn of history when I was in Army SF that was also there, but, in those days the UW people were so firmly in control that there was no contest for emphasis in what we were doing.  I think these two groups need to be "shorthanded" for title and I propose "Jedburghs" on the one hand and "Rangers" on the other.  pl

 

Mexican targets, a Nigerian bomber and Ayn Rand

"Senior Mexican officials have begun a sweeping review of the military's two-year occupation of this dangerous border city, concluding that the U.S.-backed deployment of thousands of soldiers against drug traffickers has failed to control the violence and crime, according to officials in both countries.

The multi-agency review, which has not been made public, represents a "serious reassessment" of President Felipe Calderón's anti-narcotics strategy and reflects growing alarm that Juarez, across from El Paso, has descended into lawlessness, U.S. officials familiar with the process said.

The war on Mexoco's powerful drug cartels has been the defining policy of Calderón's administration, involving unprecedented cooperation with American political and law enforcement authorities. Failure in a high-profile battleground such as Ciudad Juarez would represent a major defeat for Calderón and for U.S. officials determined to curb the multibillion dollar flow of drugs across the border.

"There is an almost unanimous consensus in the city that the strategy hasn't worked," said Hugo Almada, a sociology professor at the Autonomous University of Juarez who earlier this month organized a peace march of more than 3,000 people.

"The most terrifying question that everyone asks is, 'If the army comes in and can't control the situation, what happens to us now?' " Almada said. "  Washpost

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This, of course, relates directly to my prior post on the possible use of US forces against the cartels.  Yes.  I know that if many Americans were not the sort of people who want to soak themselves in cocaine and heroin, then Mexico could be left to its own fate, but we are what we are and the large scale drugs trade is sapping the country's strength (ours).  Targets?  We should be primarily inerested in the "big" people to include corrupt officials and bankers.  There will be some collateral damage (dead innocents).  There always are.  A border war against the drug lords is inevitable.  We should get on with it and make sure that the damage that we inflict injures all the syndicates more or less equally.  pl

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"He grew up amid extraordinary privilege, a wealthy Nigerian banker's son who attended top international schools and had traveled to the United States. But sometime some time this year, according to relatives' accounts, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab became an enemy of the West.

As a college student living in London and Dubai, Abdulmutallab, 23, the Nigerian native had worried his family with his embrace of an increasingly radical view of Islam. Then, a few months ago, he renounced his wealthy lifestyle, broke all ties with his parents and disappeared. Family members suspected he had gone to Yemen, his mother's native country. " Washpost

 

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Radicalized in the London mosque/coffee house scene, more or less trained in his mother's home country of Yemen, this child of extreme privilege epitomizes the vulnerability of Muslim youth to the siren call of preachers of violent jihad.  I worked for a Muslim owned company for a number of years and observed first hand the process of peer recruitment of youthful fanatics in England. 

 

The consensus (ijma') based nature of Muslim understanding of what consitutes Islam and,what does not, makes small groups of young people recruited initially by peers susceptible.  Is this true of other religions as well?  Yes, to some extent, but religions that are hierarchically "driven" in terms of acceptance of types of behavior are not so easily exploited by small group pressure.

 

This vulnerability to small group radicalization is a phenomenon that will persist.  It is only made worse by the invasion and occupation of Muslim countries by Western forces.  pl

 

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"You can admit it now: Maybe in your teens, or in college, you experimented. Hiding in your dorm or your parents' basement, you took hit after hit. Your friends began wondering why you'd changed, but it was too late: Ayn Rand was in your bloodstream.

My own dealer was a libertarian teaching assistant who introduced me to "The Fountainhead" and "Atlas Shrugged" in graduate school; soon I was subscribing to Rand-inspired newsletters and quoting Howard Roark and John Galt -- Rand's two most famous creations -- on the virtues of selfishness and individualism. It took the better part of a year to get over it, but, like so many others, I eventually realized that architects shouldn't go around blowing up buildings and that, above all, you can't really divide all humans into capitalist geniuses and collectivist looters. " Washpost

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Ayn Rand and Jean Jacques Rousseau have much to answer for.

Rousseau for his inspiration of the line of thought that lead inexorably to Lenin, etc. 

Ayn Rand has inspired the flowering of an unbridled selfishness that corrupts endlessly.

Investment bankers, unashamed of their looting of the economy, they are the new heroes of popular imagination.  "Greed is good," Gordon Gecko proclaimed.  "We do the Lord's work here," the head of Goldman Sachs announced.  Can anyone doubt that the endless corruption of US Congressmen in the lobbying trade is inspired by other than Ayn Rand's obsession with self above all else?

All those people who spend their lives in the service of others are thought to be "suckers" by the Ayn Rand crowd, suckers or those who not clever enough to be truly venal.

The country is largely served by people who are depised by the "objectivists."  How long can that last?  pl

Men on Horseback

"The NSC's strategic guidance, a classified document that outlines the president's new approach, was described by the senior administration official as limiting military operations "in scale and scope to the minimum required to achieve two goals -- to prevent al-Qaeda safe havens and to prevent the Taliban from toppling the government." The use of resource-intensive counterinsurgency tactics -- employing U.S. forces to protect Afghan civilians from the Taliban -- is supposed to be restricted to key cities and towns in southern and eastern parts of the country, the official said.

"The strategy has fundamentally changed. This is not a COIN strategy," Vice President Biden said on MSNBC last week, using the military's shorthand for counterinsurgency. "This is not 'go out and occupy the whole country.' " "  Washpost

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It appears that the Afghan policy war is not over.  Chandrasekaran is a good reporter but not good enough to get this unaided.  Sooo, someone(s) at the NSC briefed him so that the message would be delivered to the "other team" that their behavior is being watched closely and that the NSC team is prepared to use the public media as a weapon if need be.

The reporter then went to the Defense Department where he was told their side of the story.  Secretary Gates appears to have become the leader of the pentagon faction

Petraeus is interestingly absent from this nearly open struggle.   He will wait to see what the outcome may be.

A major confrontation over policy and presidential authority is coming.  The policy review scheduled for July 2010 may well precipitate it.  pl

JSOC and the Mexican drug lords.

The Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) is a subordinate command of Special Operations Command. The confusion in naming ought to be straightened out.  JSOC commands the counter-terrorist commando forces.  The Delta force, Navy SEAL Team Six, etc.  There are aviation assets, intellligence collection and fused analysis centers, et.  This is a very specialized group of forces.  JSOC exists for one reason only.  That is to kill or capture purely terrorist enemies of the United States.  Imagine a SWAT team on a global basis.  JSOC has little relevance to warfare of any other kind.  The people in it do not like to be called "soldiers."  They like to be called "operators.  That's fine with me.  Over the last seven years these very specialized "operators" have killed or captured their way through most of the high value Islamic terrorist targets in Iraq and Afghanistan.  What is left is warfare against semi-Islamist tribals or politicians and their militias.  Those are suitable targets for conventional forces,  COIN enthusiasts or Green Berets like I once was.  You, know, people who like foreigners as something other than targets.

JSOC appears to be running out of "high value targets," in the places where they have been used so successfully.  They can continue in places like Yemen and Somalia but they should be given something really useful to fo.

I suggest that they should be unleashed on the Mexican drug cartels.  Kill or capture.  Kill or capture.  Those should be the instructions.  The legal niceties could be "cleaned up" through arrest or execution warrants.  On the other hand, maybe that is not necessary if recent history is a guide.

I suggest a special federal court for this purpose.

This is not irony.  These druggies deserve that we should send them "the very best."  pl

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_Drug_War

 

 

There is training and then there is hazing...

I idly watched a two hour television production last night entitled "Two weeks in Hell."  It was about the two week pre-selection period at Ft. Bragg in which the Army now decides if volunteers have what it takes to even start training to be a Special Forces soldier. 

Wow!

The first week seems to be intended to separate the boys from the men and the second week to see if the men who are left can work together under extreme stress.  There is no doubt that it is a very tough process.  The "candidates" as they are called carry around immense rucksacks all the time.  They are systematically deprived of sleep and other rest, are placed in a seemingly unending series of unexpected and nearly insoluble problem situations and run through some of the nastiest obstacle courses I have ever seen, and I have seen some beauties.

I have some doubts about what results.

I went through the SF Officer Course in 1964.  the Army Special Forces Regiment was 11 years old by my calculation from the date of establishment of the 77th SF Group.  The enlisted guys were trained in what was then called the SF Training Group.  I never saw what happened over there.  I know they received what was called "branch training," and then occupational specialty training somewhere else before they went to a unit.  The specialties were; weapons, (light and heavy) demolitions, commmunications and medical.  The medical course was a year long and had a long practicum in a hospital.  The officer course was four or five months long.  SF was a "branch immaterial" assignment in those days.  So, the officers were of any Army branch except JAG.   We were organized in student detachments like an "ODA."  There were a lot of foreign officers; Vietnamese, French, British, Greek, Italian, Canadian are the ones I remember from my course.  There was a PT test at the beginning and then a lot of forced marches and running, but it was simply assumed that you could do whatever was expected of you.  There was a tremendous amount of work out in the woods;  patrols ususally parachute delivered at night and into an obstacle like a swamp,  major exercizes in which you linked up with local mountaineers in western North Carolina who "played" guerrillas for you to train and guide.  There was a lot of specific technical training on all the things the enlisted guys were learning as career specialties.  There was a lot of "weeding out."  The wash-out rate was high.  For officers that is a career killer.

There was no harassment.  None at all.  "The Quiet Professionals."  You were told over and over again that if you have to yell at someone, then you have lost that man, probably forever.  Guerrillas are civilians.  They will kill you for shaming them.  Persuasion, charm, understanding of where HE is coming from, courage in adversity.  Those were the things that were taught.  You have to have a certain grade of material as students to be able to teach lessons like that.

When I got to my first SF unit, I found that the men were better soldiers than the officers.  They really did not need us, but, the army has to have officers.  This need is in the bloodstream.  Our soldiers were an interesting collection; old paratroop sergeants from the 82nd and the 101st, some of them still around from WW2 and Korea.  Some of these guys had been sergeants before there had been such a thing as SF.  There were many New Americans; Wehrmacht veterans, French and Spanish Foreign Legion, Finnish Ski Hunt Commandos, former Royal Marines.  You name it,  we had it.  These men were something out of the Iliad.  To say that a 25 year old kid like me was their leader was a bit comic, but they didn't seem to feel that way.  They simply took charge of the "college boy" officer replacements continuing training and looked pleased when you did something right.

Needless to say, they had not been selected in anything like the brutal, searing way that I watched last night.  They had selected themselves.  There was nothing that they did not know about soldiering.  After a while, when you saw that they accepted you, there was no greater privilege than to be their "boss."

SF work is a thinking soldier's work.  You have to be tough physically, but, it is equally important that you be smart.  I wonder how many thinking soldiers are excluded from the regiment by what I saw last night, by an insistence on physicality before all else.  I wonder how many of the old timers could have passed that test.  pl

National Journal Blog - 21 December 2009

http://security.nationaljournal.com/2009/12/2010-will-be-the-year-of-what.php#1402351

Iran/Iraq without America

"The Iranian government said Saturday that an oil field that its troops occupied a day earlier was on its side of the border with Iraq, despite Iraqi claims to the contrary.

A group of about 11 Iranian soldiers seized a portion of the remote Fakka oil field in Maysan Province in southeastern Iraq early Friday, according to Iraq.

Government officials in Baghdad said they had summoned the Iranian ambassador to protest the military action, but diplomatic efforts had so far failed to resolve the dispute."  NY Times

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That's the story here.  We are not in this apparently.  We are seen as --- irrelevant?  Move along folks nothing to see here... 

How many dead?  How many wounded?  How many ruined lives?  How many broken marriages?  How many?    pl