We’re working the Operation Cobra’s Anger story for more inside gouge, but one thing the wires are reporting is that 3/4 and other elements of this morning’s assault on Now Zad involved air assaults using MV-22 Ospreys.
As you all know, the birds from VMM-263 just chopped from the Bataan to Camp Bastion in Helmand province Afghanistan and fell in on VMM-261 who’ll do a pump there. Many Osprey critics hounded the program for not pushing the assault envelope in Iraq. Well, it seems as if the Corps has put the birds to quick use on a 3am lift of Recon troops, infantry grunts and Brits.
I’m working on getting more details from this on the Osprey’s role, but I thought I’d bring this to your attention early on while working the sources…
This article first appeared in Aviation Week & Space Technology.
DUBAI, UAE — China, France and Russia are increasingly aggressive in courting customers for their military products, but it is the U.S. that is raking in the big dollars — and increasingly so.
What’s more, the U.S.’s improving relationship with India could signal that record high levels of military exports are not just an aberration but are sustainable. This prospect would bring relief to U.S. defense companies, which face the possibility of shrinking modernization projects when Washington starts focusing on cutting its massive budget deficit.
A decade ago, the U.S. booked about $10 billion in foreign military sales (FMS). When those contracts reached $28 billion in fiscal 2008, many in the Pentagon thought it was an aberration, especially given the $10 billion jump from the year before. But there has been no sign of a letup. Vice Adm. Jeffrey A. Wieringa, director of the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, says the value of FMS commitments signed during the last fiscal year reached $38.1 billion, and this year’s total could top $50 billion based on estimates of deals in the negotiating pipeline.
Bucking a trend
Is the U.S. bucking a trend? Some defense suppliers, such as Saab, have suggested that sales are suffering because potential buyers are holding off on big-ticket spending decisions; others, such as the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (Sipri), note that nations such as Thailand or Malaysia are curbing expenditures. But at a broader level, Sipri sees “few signs that the global financial crisis is significantly affecting decision-making” among major arms importers.
Moreover, the amount of money being spent under the so-called Section 1206 authority — a mechanism created in the fiscal 2006 budget to train and equip foreign military forces — has risen steadily.
A man who holds more knowledge about small arms (and crew served weapons) in the tip of his pinky finger than most “experts” will learn in a lifetime, Chief Warrant Officer 5 Jeff Eby had one of his usual “couldn’t care less what people think” conversations with my alma mater, Marine Corps Times, which ran with a story from him saying that H&K had won the competition for the Corps’ Infantry Automatic Rifle.
Our friends at Soldier Systems piled on, saying they’d heard that shooters actually liked one of the Colt versions tested rather than the FN or HK ones.
I love Gunner Eby and have worked with him on stories in the past. He’s a treasure for the Corps as an institution and a boon for reporters trying to cover it. He’s a CWO5, so he’s safely in place and couldn’t care less what his commanders think about who he talks to or what he says. But he’s an advisor, not the final decisionmaker.
So Syscom wrote me back a vaguely-worded email response to a query about all this, seemingly denying that the service had made a final decision on the IAR and stating only that the Corps had ordered “24 weapons” from an “existing contract” that was let back in December ’08. That would most likely be the original contract to Colt, FN and HK for the IAR downselectees. They have not answered my follow up questions on which weapons (make and model) and whether, definitively, they have or have not decided on an IAR winner.
This vagueness could also stem from the service’s internal debate over whether to even go through with the IAR program. Loud voices within the Corps and the joint community argue against limiting a SAW gunner to 30 rounds, despite the weight boon from a rifle-style machine gun. Syscom seems less than enthusiastic about the program from the start, but one shouldn’t read their incomprehensible responses (or total lack thereof) to questions about this program as emotional.
UPDATE: Just got an email from Syscom stating that the order was for 24 more HK 416s and that the Marine Corps is “still testing the IAR” whatever that means.
The Army is conducting yet another review of the camouflage pattern of its combat uniforms. This makes it what, the third or fourth such review on the pattern du jour? What I find interesting though, is not so much how much attention is being paid to the debate around the camouflage pattern, and whether or not we need one “one pattern works nowhere” uniform, or several regional/seasonal uniforms to maximize local effectiveness, but how little attention we are paying to camouflaging everything else but the uniform.
One of the first things that leaps out at you about the ACU pattern is its lack of black. “Black is not a naturally occurring color” the Army says, and its use on the battlefield defeats the effectiveness of camouflage. Yet we’re all packing at least one piece of black equipment; our weapons. As a scout looking for bad guys, one of the things you look for is black angular objects, which are universally man made, and on the battlefield usually mean weapons.
So why do we still have black weapons?
I’m not talking about sending all our guns back to the factory to get some sort of high speed “realtree” pattern retro added, but rather just addressing the issue at the unit level and paint them some color other than black. I searched and searched TRADOCs website looking for regulations regarding camouflaging equipment, and other than a circular detailing how to apply CARC paint and what pattern to use on the woodland camouflage pattern on tactical vehicles (which, by the way, still includes the color black), the only guidance I could get on the subject was to ensure that what ever camouflage you use does not interfere or degrade the performance of the equipment, which seems a no brainer to me.
So, having not found anything that expressly forbids painting weapons, I decided to do the foolish yet administratively correct thing and broach the subject with my food chain.
“No” was the answer I got. The rational behind the decision was varied.
“Let joes paint their weapons, and they’ll be tagging them with gang signs.” Ok, a valid concern, so to mitigate that you limit their color options to, say, tan, and you have their team leader supervise them. Better yet, let the team leader do all the painting.
Read the rest of this post at Military.com’s KitUp!
I’m going to be talking today at 1400 EST to Andrew Lubin, a freelance journalist, blogger and Military.com contributor about his recent trip to Afghanistan.
Andrew has some rather controversial impressions from his visit — is the Army losing its fighting spirit, can McChrystal win the counterinsurgency fight, what makes the Marines’ strategy so successful?
We’ll answer all those questions and more live today on our Boots on the Ground podcast. Please join us for a listen.
UPDATE: Below you’ll see the final version of the podcast. You can also feel free to subscribe to Boots on the Ground with iTunes.
Andrew paints a pretty bleak picture of Army operations in the East…a contingent of troops who lack the aggression and are unwilling to assume the risks inherent in a true counterinsurgency campaign. Lubin also says that while the overall commander, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, is a solid Soldier, it’s unclear that he lacks the “Big Army” mentality to streamline the decision making, shift the emphasis from force protection to “clear, hold and build” in a simultaneous way and to win over the Afghans who respect aggression and decisiveness.
Lubin also tells of some pretty harsh restrictions on fire support missions and feeds in some reporing he’s uncovered about what went wrong at Wanat and Camp Keating which were both nearly overrun by Taliban assaults. This is a must listen.
My ears perked up at this line last night in the president’s speech about Afghanistan. It’s one sentence that has potentially huge implications:
This is no idle danger; no hypothetical threat. In the last few months alone, we have apprehended extremists within our borders who were sent here from the border region of Afghanistan and Pakistan to commit new acts of terror.
Has anyone heard about these apprehensions? Who are the perpetrators and what were they planning? This is explosive news. Am I just missing something?
Surely this is not a reference to the Somali gangs rounded up here and in Canada. “Last few months,” “within our borders,” “sent here … to commit acts of terror.”
Whoa. I’ll do some digging but if any readers have some insight into this please let me know.
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown confirmed Nov. 30 that an additional 500 U.K. personnel will be sent to Afghanistan, and said that another eight coalition nations – besides the U.K. and the U.S. – are willing to provide further military support for the operation.
Brown said the latest increase takes London’s contribution to more than 10,000 personnel, if the U.K.‘s Special Forces are included. The ministry has previously said that the additional troops would raise the number of British forces deployed to 9,500, though it now appears this figure did not include the Special Forces.
The additional British forces will be deployed to Helmand in southern Afghanistan in December. Brown declined to identify which partner nations had already indicated they would be willing to provide more personnel.
U.S. President Barack Obama is expected to unveil a revised Afghanistan strategy during a speech Dec. 1, including a substantial increase in U.S. forces.
Brown, with United Nations Sec. Gen. Ban Ki-moon, announced Nov. 28 that the U.K. is to host a conference on Afghanistan at the end of January 2010. Brown said: “The conference will cover both our military and our political strategies, but concentrate on the political strategy for Afghanistan.
“We will need further troop and training commitments from partners. I expect to see 5,000 further troops committed by other nations, and the London conference will be also an opportunity for some to make new commitments,” he added.
The British and U.S. governments face growing opposition to the war in Afghanistan, and the emphasis on ‘Afghanization’ – in which the Afghan military and security forces increasingly take over from the International Stabilization and Assistance Force – is an effort to address such concerns, and to provide an exit strategy.
“I hope we will see this process of Afghanization happening in a way that people can feel more secure, that side by side with the British troops, the Afghans are taking responsibility for themselves,” said Brown, “so we can look forward to a time in the future, for which there is no timetable at the moment, when Afghan forces can take responsibility in new areas and British forces are able to come home.”
One of the criteria Brown had set to provide additional British troops was that all members of the U.K. deployed force would be “fully equipped for the operations they are asked to undertake.”
More than 90 days of this “consulting” and “deliberating” and “solemn duty” stuff and Obama comes up with a Bush-esque surge…and oh, yeah, it’s gotta be over in three years (by the time he’s running for a second term).…
And why 10K less than McChrystal asked for? Anyone wonder why 30K is a better number than 40K?
Military.com|by Christian Lowe
President Obama’s Afghan surge of 30,000 additional U.S. troops will include an immediate infusion of California-based Marines, with the first elements set to be on the ground in southern Afghanistan around Christmas.
The Leathernecks will bolster a force of about 8,000 Marines who deployed to the region in July to knock back Taliban gains in Helmand and Kandahar provinces where insurgents linked to Mullah Mohammed Omar threaten Afghanistan’s second largest city.
“The first troops out of the door are going to be Marines,” said Marine Commandant Gen. James Conway, according to the Washington Post. “We’ve been leaning forward in anticipation of a decision. And we’ve got some pretty stiff fighting coming.“
Sources also tell Military.com that the Army will likely send three additional Infantry Brigade Combat Teams, or about 9,000 more combat forces and 5,000 support troops — including police and military trainers, bomb squads and engineers — as well as around 7,000 headquarters staffers to manage the war more effectively.
The Soldiers will likely deploy to eastern Afghanistan, which is under the command of Maj. Gen. Curt Scaparrotti from the 82nd Airborne Division. According to Gen. McChrystal’s strategic review, RC-East includes the key provinces of Khost, Paktia and Paktika where Taliban insurgents are vying for control.
Gen. Conway, who recently traveled to the region, said that the Corps is poised to send as many as 9,000 Marines to bolster efforts in southern Afghanistan, where the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade has been deployed since July to back up British, Canadian and Dutch forces who command operations there. McChrystal’s analysis shows that Taliban insurgents led by Mullah Mohammed Omar are making a strong push to control Kandahar, the country’s second largest city and a key logistics hub for RC-South forces.
“The [Taliban] has been working to control Kandahar and its approaches for several years and there are indications that their influence over the city and the neighboring districts is significant and growing,” McChrystal wrote in his August 30 assessment.
Sources say the additional Marines will likely come from 1st Marine Expeditionary Brigade based in Camp Pendleton, Calif.
While Army officials won’t say on the record what units are included in the Obama surge, recent history in Iraq gives an indication of how the service might carry out the new plan — a combination of truncated turnaround schedules, redirections, and extended deployments. Army documents provided to Military.com show several infantry brigade combat teams that have more than a year back home that could be part of an escalation, including the 2nd IBCT of the 82nd Airborne, the 1st IBCT of the 10th Mountain Division and nearly all of the 101st Airborne Division.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is part two of Joe Buff’s story on the rise of modern piracy and the international response to swashbuckling banditry. Read part one HERE.
Is modern piracy a containable nuisance, a regrettable but acceptable cost of doing business for shipping companies? And should it also be allowed to continue as an unfortunate but bearable burden on various navies’ nations’ taxpayers? Would a land invasion to clear out the strongholds by force be very effective, or would it turn into a bitter bloodbath that backfires? Barring such a landward force-based solution, could the ongoing fight again Somali piracy turn into a new type of quagmire, at sea? Or need it best be viewed as any other crime-solving problem, as something that will more or less always be there, fluctuating in intensity with local economic conditions and with the varying extent of funding made available for law enforcement? The latter is not an attractive outcome. Nor does erecting a floating security wall, in the form of a close-in blockade along Somalia’s entire 2,000 miles of coastline, seem practicable or desirable to the authorities policing the piracy problem.
In a video just released by the pirates who hold them hostage, the British couple Paul and Rachel Chandler, seized with their yacht in October, expressed fear that unless the UK pays ransom very soon, they might be killed or sold to terrorists. Is this just an imagined concern of the Chandlers, or the latest bargaining tactic by their captors, or do the pirates really mean it? The specter of pirates selling hostages and/or captured ships to terrorists, if that becomes their only resort to raise cash from their efforts, is disturbing indeed. While the Somali pirates are inspired by the profit motive, not extremist ideology, they might have no compunctions about doing business with terrorists for capitalist reasons. That business might even come to include live operational training of Al Qaeda suicide pirates by Somali instructor pirates, preparatory to capturing an innocent merchant ship as platform for a horrendously costly WMD attack against some strategic strait (Malacca or Gibraltar?) or canal (Suez or Panama?) or populous harbor or oil terminal (Singapore or Galveston?).
It’s proving difficult for foreign countries and coalitions to deter Somali piracy. The overall phenomenon results from disparate extended family groups sending out expendable small units to first infiltrate, disguised as fishing boats, and then threaten a very wide area. Put this way, modern piracy sounds almost like a waterborne guerilla insurgency, a type of enemy that on land is notoriously difficult to dissuade by “third generation warfare” means. This is especially an issue when, at least so far, international law and foreign government policies alike have given the pirates sanctuary within their own territorial limits. The pirates do have a significant technical advantage as well, in that each mother ship’s or skiff’s arbitrary and evasive marauding path consumes food and fuel at a linear rate, whereas maritime security units need to protect a vast area that goes up with the square of the range of any individual pirate sortie. If pirates increase their practical operating range from 300 miles to 1000 miles, for instance, which is by a factor of 3–1/3, the area they bring under threat, which foreign navies and coast guards need to patrol, increases by a factor of more than 10. Another problem in deterrence lies in the rather poor target classification capabilities of the pirates themselves. When they close in and open fire with automatic weapons and rocket propelled grenades, not realizing that a warship is a warship, Sailors can get hurt or killed.
The subject of international cyber arms control (ICAC) has risen in conversation around the beltway and beyond, and it’s an issue has polarized many in the technical and policy making communities.
The argument among experts revolves around whether an international cyber arms control treaty might reduce the plethora of criminal and national security threats, while promoting greater cyber security for all. The very first argument is that cyber crime should be handled separately than cyber warfare and cyber terrorism.
Once you get past that, there are those that firmly believe it is critical that an ICAC be developed and implemented as soon as possible given the increases we have seen in cyber attacks, cyber crime and the growing fear of cyber terrorism. Those opposed to the idea feel that implementing a cyber arms control treaty will be difficult and enforcing it will be nearly impossible due to the facts that no special materials are needed to create cyber weapons and all that is needed to manufacture a cyber weapon is a creative technical person and a computer that is connected to the Internet. The opposition is quick to point out that compliance verification and ongoing monitoring would require a level of openness for inspection that few governments would find acceptable.
This article first appeared in Aviation Week & Space Technology. 
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown confirmed Nov. 30 that an additional 500 U.K. personnel will be sent to Afghanistan, and said that another eight coalition nations – besides the U.K. and the U.S. – are willing to provide further military support for the operation.
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