Australian and New Zealand troops deployed to East Timor, a tiny, impov­er­ished coun­try adja­cent to Indonesia, patrolled around the clock to ensure peace and quiet for Mondays pres­i­den­tial elec­tion.
Around 1,100 Australian and 150 New Zealand sol­diers work along­side 1,500 U.N. police from more than 20 coun­tries and native secu­rity forces to sup­press gangs, quell polit­i­cal vio­lence and hunt down a rebel army led by for­mer police offi­cer Major Alfredo Reinado.

(more…)

Northrop Grumman is devel­op­ing a bio­met­ric intel­li­gence sys­tem to help U.S. troops keep tabs on sus­pected ter­ror­ists and insur­gents. The sys­tem, which iden­ti­fies peo­ple by their fin­ger­prints, iris pat­terns or other bio­log­i­cal met­rics, is meant to meet a need iden­ti­fied by U.S. forces in Iraq.

On February 5, 2006, sol­diers from the Texas-based 4th Infantry Division, deployed to north-central Iraq since the pre­vi­ous fall, sor­tied from their base to set up check­points out­side the town of Balad. The town was so bad that the Iraqi army had sent one of its crack Kurdish units, nor­mally based in the peace­ful north of the coun­try, into an out­post down­town. But snipers had kept the Kurdish troops from even leav­ing the base. Balad was des­per­ately in need of some spring cleaning.

But stand­ing at their check­point on a road out­side Balad, the sol­diers real­ized they lacked the nec­es­sary tools. Army intel­li­gence had pro­vided them with a list includ­ing names, descrip­tions and in some cases out­dated pho­tos of known bad guys. The sol­diers car­ried fuzzy color copies of the list in their pock­ets and com­pared every passerby to the descrip­tions. But the pho­tos too grainy and the descrip­tions too vague: pretty much every Iraqi man has a mous­tache, black hair and brown eyes. As for names? Besides shar­ing a small num­ber of pop­u­lar sur­names, Iraqis have a habit of tack­ing their fathers and grand­fa­thers name onto their own or even going by nick­names that dont match their photo IDs at all, assum­ing they even have photo IDs. There was just no way for the American sol­diers to reli­ably know if they had hap­pened to ensnare a bad guy in their net. And on that February after­noon, they returned to base empty-handed and frustrated.

Stinging from fail­ures like those in Balad last year, in January the Army gave Los Angeles-based defense firm Northrop Grumman $20 mil­lion to develop a bio­met­ric solu­tion. The idea, says Northrop Grumman vice pres­i­dent Larry Schneider, is to ingest dis­parate sources of mil­i­tary infor­ma­tion world­wide, to estab­lish a cen­tral repos­i­tory that can be queried. So if some­one shows up at one place and says his name is one thing, then shows up some­where else say­ing his name is another thing, that can be iden­ti­fied and can be passed back to tac­ti­cal land forces.

Soldiers might reg­is­ter detainees bio­met­rics using a portable scan­ner. That info, com­bined with a brief his­tory of the sus­pect, would be fed into a cen­tral data­base back in the States and ana­lyzed by algo­rithms end­lessly search­ing for con­nec­tions between sus­pects. If, dur­ing a future oper­a­tion, the sol­diers hap­pen across any of the same sus­pects as before, the sys­tem would alert them. Over time, the sys­tem might accu­mu­late enough data on sus­pects move­ments to begin draw­ing con­clu­sions about behav­ior pat­terns, allow­ing intel­li­gence agents to pre­dict sus­pects activ­i­ties and, if nec­es­sary, thwart them.

People talk about how were dis­ad­van­taged in asym­met­ric war­fare, Schneider says, using the mil­i­tarys favorite term for big indus­trial armies fight­ing elu­sive, low-tech insur­gents and ter­ror­ists. Biometrics, he adds, are an exam­ple of how our tech­nol­ogy advan­tages us.

– David Axe

With the Army and Marine Corps stretched to break­ing in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Navy is scram­bling for ways to con­tribute more to inland fights. One result is a new river boat squadron, sec­ond of its type, stood up two weeks ago. Riverine Squadron Two and its sis­ter, Ron One, are part of Navy Expeditionary Combat Command, which gath­ers all the Navy’s coastal and land forces under one ban­ner and adds brand new capabilities.

NECC — based along­side patrol boats (pics!) and amphibi­ous ships at Little Creek, Virginia — includes con­struc­tion bat­tal­ions, logis­tics troops, har­bor patrol units, ord­nance dis­posal teams and the new river­ine squadrons, and is the sub­ject of a story in the cur­rent issue of Defense Technology International.

“It was def­i­nitely the ongo­ing war that cre­ated the idea,” says Captain Robert McKenna, NECC’s 44-year-old train­ing offi­cer. “We real­ized that the Army and Marine Corps were near­ing capac­ity and that there was more to be done. We were look­ing for ways for the Navy to con­tribute more. Then we started look­ing out and said, the Navy really is con­tribut­ing. And the sailors con­tribut­ing the most in the­ater are the ones wear­ing this uniform.”

He ges­tures to his green and brown fatigues, the same ones worn by the Navy’s 16,000 Seabees, 3,000 port cargo han­dlers and hun­dreds of Explosive Ordnance Disposal experts — all of whom have been busy abroad in recent years. “They had no type com­mand that took care of their Title X func­tions: train­ing, equip­ping, manning.”

“We saw a need to put them into a coher­ent struc­ture and bet­ter equip them,” adds NECC com­man­der Rear Admiral Donald Bullard, 55. “And then, all of the sud­den, we began to look at other capa­bil­i­ties” includ­ing Navy civil affairs and riverine.

Riverine forces in nim­ble, heavily-armed boats played a huge role in the Vietnam War, but were run down after the evac­u­a­tion of that coun­try as the Navy shifted focus on deter­ring the Soviet Navy. In Iraq, a coun­try criss­crossed by large rivers, canals and marshes, the U.S. and British mil­i­taries (pic­tured) found them­selves chas­ing down water­borne smug­glers and insur­gents in jerry-rigged engi­neer boats until spe­cial­ized forces could be reconstituted.

(more…)

Defense Tech’s David Axe was in Lebanon in December, report­ing on the U.N. force there. His story has been embar­goed. Until now …

The weird thing about Beirut is all the bul­let holes in build­ings, road signs and over­passes. Its not the bullet-riddled stuff, per se, thats so strange, but the con­trast with all the shiny new stuff. Fifteen years after the end of a decades-long and bloody civil war, Beirut is boom­ing. This despite the inter­rup­tion of last sum­mers war with Israel.

Air raids dur­ing that con­flict knocked out power, felled bridges, took out the air­port for a cou­ple months and blew the top off the light­house on the beach near the Jnah neigh­bor­hood. Some parts of the Shiite south­ern sub­urbs took a beat­ing, but Beirut proper escaped mostly unscathed. No, most of the war dam­age in Beirut is left over from the civil war and tes­ti­fies to the scale of the destruc­tion in that conflict.

On December 14th near down­town Beirut, Im in a bat­tered sil­ver BMW with my chummy fixer Hasham, a for­mer police detec­tive who has, in retire­ment, exploited his con­nec­tions to become the citys go-to man for inter­na­tional media. This guy knows every­body. Traffic is heavy this morn­ing Everybody going to work, Hasham says and in the grid­lock he waves to friends in nearby cars and passes notes through his rolled-down win­dow. He greets hotel bell­hops, gov­ern­ment bureau­crats, pass­ing police­men and street-corner baris­tas in the uniquely Lebanese mix­ture of English, French and Arabic.

Hasham says the war with Israel was like cold water on Lebanons hot tourism indus­try. In the year before the war, mil­lions of tourists passed their hol­i­days in Beirut and the pic­turesque south. Now the stream of tourists is just a trickle, and hotels are so des­per­ate for lodgers that theyre giv­ing away upgrades like candy. Still, this lit­tle slump is noth­ing like the pro­longed mis­ery of the old days. Most of the recent war dam­age has been repaired, inter­na­tional invest­ment is flow­ing in, peo­ple are work­ing and Hasham is qui­etly optimistic.

Even the mass demon­stra­tions and occa­sional riot­ing by hun­dreds of thou­sands of super-religious Shiites and their Christian allies dont get Hasham, a sec­u­lar Sunni, too worked up nor does the prospect of a sec­ond round with Israel. The pro-Hez demon­stra­tions peaked in December with nearly a mil­lion peo­ple in down­town Beirut, all demand­ing that Iran-backed Hezbollah have more power in gov­ern­ment. The crowds are smaller and usu­ally qui­eter now. Even so, American pun­dits are call­ing the protests a har­bin­ger of a vio­lent coup. Hasham just shrugs. Since 1973 we had shit, he says. But even at the height of the civil war, he got up every day and went to work with the polices counter-drug depart­ment. He got shot three times but kept on going.

There are a lot peo­ple both Lebanese and for­eign­ers work­ing on behalf of this sto­ried lit­tle coun­try, doing their best to make sure all those scars of war remain just that: fad­ing signs of old wounds. Western and regional invest­ment is pour­ing in. And 10,000 heavily-armed U.N. peace­keep­ers in the south swear theyre doing their best to keep the peace. Thats the sub­ject of a news fea­ture in the February issue of DTI:

Since the sum­mer war, UNIFIL has added 8,000 sol­diers and sailors to its orig­i­nal con­tin­gent of 3,000, and has qui­etly inte­grated artillery, heavy tanks, tank destroy­ers and patrol boats to its main body of light infantry, medics and engi­neers, while also boost­ing daily patrols from just a hand­ful to around 200. The result, in the final days of 2006, is a new UNIFIL, one with an appar­ent grow­ing will to figh­t­and the means to do so.

Check out my Lebanon pics here. And go on patrol with the UN below:

–David Axe, cross-posted at War Is Boring

All the atten­tion is on the army and police, right now. But Iraq’s tiny air force is about to get a bit big­ger, C4ISR Journal reports:

Working through the U.S. Air Force, Iraqs nascent defense min­istry has ordered six new Raytheon King Air 350 twin tur­bo­prop air­craft and related sup­port ser­vices in a firm-fixed-price con­tract val­ued at $132 mil­lion. Disclosed by the Defense Department, the deal includes five King Air 350 Extended Range air­craft equipped for intel­li­gence, sur­veil­lance and recon­nais­sance mis­sions, and a sin­gle King Air 350 ear­marked for the light trans­port role. Support equip­ment, spare and repair parts, train­ing and tech­ni­cal data are included in the sales package.

The new planes will be oper­ated, in part, by 70 Squadron based at Basra Air Station. In October, U.S. Air Force advi­sor Lieutenant Colonel Kelly Latimer showed me the squadron’s mod­est fleet of single-engine Seeker and CH-2000 patrol planes, which she said could be out­run by cars. The King Airs are faster, can carry more sur­veil­lance gear and have longer legs but are still sim­ple and robust enough for the Iraqi Air Force to keep fly­ing.
$1 bil­lion in arms sales to the Iraqi gov­ern­ment, includ­ing the King Airs, helped the United States achieve record arms sales in 2006, as my boss Sharon Weinberger reported recently in Aviation Week:

[One] fac­tor dri­ving the bot­tom line is Iraq. Its sov­er­eign gov­ern­ment is now able to buy equip­ment directly from the U.S. [Jeffrey] Kohler, [direc­tor of the Defense Security Cooperation Agency] says Iraq is allo­cat­ing about $1 bil­lion a year out of its own bud­get to pur­chase defense equipment–and about $800 mil­lion has gone for U.S. equip­ment this year alone. With Iraq expect­ing to allo­cate $1 bil­lion annu­ally to arms pur­chases, such large buys from the U.S. could grow.

–David Axe

The U.N. force in south­ern Lebanon ain’t what it used to be. In the wake of the sum­mer war between Israel and Hezbollah, United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, or UNIFIL, has grown from a lightly armed body of observers to a mobile armored force with real teeth.
That trans­for­ma­tion is the sub­ject of my upcom­ing fea­ture in Defense Technology International. For Military.com I checked out the low-tech side of this high-tech force:

In stark con­trast to Western armies oper­at­ing in Iraq and Afghanistan, United Nations forces in south­ern Lebanon enjoy unqual­i­fied healthy rela­tion­ships with native secu­rity forces and local res­i­dents. These facil­i­tate intelligence-gathering and coop­er­a­tion that boost the force’s effec­tive­ness.
… On December 18, a two-vehicle patrol from [Italian Lt. Col. Ciccarelli] Giordano’s [cav­alry] reg­i­ment descends from the regiment’s hill­top base near the town of Chama and heads down a sea­side road. Periodically, it stops and sol­diers hop out of the armored vehi­cles to stand on the side of the road, mak­ing them­selves vis­i­ble to pass­ing motorists.
“They stay here to observe and to report every kind of sit­u­a­tion,” says Lieutenant Livio Lombardi. “Sometimes [peo­ple] ask for us to inter­vene … in med­ical prob­lems or in the pres­ence of bombs [left­over from the sum­mer war].”

–David Axe

Cluster bombs, peo­ple. Hundreds of thou­sands of them.
In the wake of the sum­mer war between Israel and Hezbollah, south­ern Lebanon is pretty quiet. But every once in a while an explo­sion rolls over the region’s sea­side cliffs and green hills, tes­ti­mony to the ongo­ing cleanup of ord­nance left­over from the con­flict. This is the sub­ject of my lat­est piece for The Washington Times:

Lt. Col. Ciccarelli Giordano, com­man­der of an Italian army cav­alry reg­i­ment that belongs to a bat­tle group based on a hill­top near the Mediterranean coast, is philo­soph­i­cal about the dan­ger­ous ground his troops tread.
“You know what hap­pens after war,” he said.
There are 11,000 troops — includ­ing 3,000 Italians — assigned to the U.N. force, up from 3,000 just six months ago. … The Italian con­tin­gent is drawn from forces recently with­drawn from Iraq.
The Italian bat­tle group’s expe­ri­ences in Iraq and in pro­vid­ing secu­rity for the 2004 Olympics in Athens have helped pre­pare it for the dan­ger­ous job of defus­ing or destroy­ing unex­ploded munitions.

Italian EOD teams are mod­eled after their British coun­ter­parts. The Italians train in the U.K. and use mostly British-made kit, includ­ing Wheelbarrow robots. They ride in Puma armored vehi­cles tailed by trucks and ambu­lances. They dress in your stan­dard bomb suits. And they stay very, very busy.

“Yesterday we found a new clus­ter bomb-contaminated area,” bomb squad Capt. George Colombo said. Minutes later, a dis­tant blast tes­ti­fied to another squad’s work.
The U.N. esti­mates there are between 700,000 and 1 mil­lion unex­ploded muni­tions in south­ern Lebanon, some left over from the 1978 Israeli inva­sion.
Less than 15,000 have been destroyed thus far, said French Lt. Col. Jerome Salle, a U.N. spokesman.

Most of the sto­ries from my stint in Lebanon are still embar­goed by my boss at DTI. Expect a flurry of posts in a few weeks.
–David Axe

I knew it was going to be a bad day in Beirut when I got booted out of the break­fast buf­fet at the down­town Radisson.
I had been enjoy­ing my hum­mus, green olives and nan with a pot of strong cof­fee when I made the mis­take of putting down my fork so I could turn the page in the Patrick O’Brian novel I was read­ing. The waiter grabbed my plate with­out ask­ing if I was done, and scur­ried off. I fig­ured, hey, no prob­lem, I can always get another plate. And besides, I still got my cof­fee. But then the waiter came back and took those too.
Now, I could’ve raised a fuss, but I was too tired to remem­ber how to say, “stop,” in Arabic. (I remem­ber now: “kiff.”) you see, I’m still on D.C. time so I couldn’t sleep the night before. I was nearly deliri­ous. And, on the radio, they were play­ing a Christmas ren­di­tion of the Macarena. (don’t ask.)
Anyways, I had inter­views — I’m on assign­ment here for Defense Technology International. So a cou­ple hours later I hailed a cab and headed out. By 4 o’clock, I was done with my inter­views, even more exhausted and, what’s more, starv­ing. I needed some kebab bad. I tried to hail a cab but they were all full. I walked down a street, hail­ing cabs all the while, until I came to an army check­point. A sol­dier asked me, in Arabic, where I was going. I replied in french and we had a rather mud­dled con­ver­sa­tion that resulted in him point­ing back the way I had come and ges­tur­ing with his rifle. So I turned around … And got turned around. I couldn’t remem­ber which way was home.
I finally got a cab. The dri­ver spoke some french. He didn’t know where the Radisson was, so it was up to me. I had no idea so I picked a direc­tion and hoped I might even­tu­ally rec­og­nize some­thing. But half an hour later, I decided we were going in the wrong direc­tion. I admit, I blamed my cab­bie. Beirut is his town; he should know where the Radisson is. So I told him to stop “over there” and I hopped out with a mind to walk a cou­ple blocks then hail another cab with, hope­fully, a smarter cab­bie.
By now I could’ve killed and eaten a small Lebanese per­son. Perhaps a baby Druze.
I walked down a sketchy alley­way full of broken-down cars and greasy, dark-eyed mechan­ics who stared at me as I passed. I was feel­ing very American in a very bad way, so I waved down the first cab I saw and hopped in with­out look­ing at the dri­ver. Then a voice said, in French, “num­ber two?”
It was the same cab­bie as before. And it was too late to refuse his ser­vice. He was already speed­ing down the road, assur­ing me that he had just remem­bered where the Radisson was.
(Lest you fail to appre­ci­ate the sheer enor­mity of this coin­ci­dence, let me stress: Beirut is crawl­ing with tens of thou­sands of cabs, and in 10 min­utes I had walked sev­eral blocks in a ran­dom direc­tion from where I got dropped off. Hundreds of cars passed within sight, includ­ing scores of cabs. The odds of hail­ing the same cab­bie a sec­ond time in that envi­ron­ment are astro­nom­i­cal.)
Hey, Macarena!
Half an hour later, I was at the Radisson and my cab­bie was 20,000 livres richer. That’s no fewer than eight kebab-equivalents. Speaking of which, I found the near­est kebab stand, politely refused some skew­ered lamb brains bob­bing in olive oil and ordered two kebabs.
They were the most deli­cious kebabs I’ve ever had. And they haven’t even made me sick (yet).
– David Axe
p.s.: the Lebanese army has sta­tioned an M-113 armored per­son­nel car­rier with a .50-caliber machine gun at the McDonald’s down the street, per­haps to guard the “McArab” chicken shawarma they serve there.

I’m off to south­ern Lebanon for a cou­ple weeks in order to check up on the U.N. force (includ­ing the bad-ass at left) that’s sup­pos­edly keep­ing an eye on Hezbollah and inter­cept­ing Syrian infil­tra­tors and Iranian weapons. With pro-Hez demon­stra­tions only grow­ing in Beirut, it seems that the U.N. force is at best inef­fec­tive and, at worst, an irri­tant to local Shi’ites. My job is to check out the U.N. forces’ weapons and tech­nol­ogy for Defense Technology International, but I’ll be keep­ing my eyes open for other sto­ries too. And I’ll blog the trip once my boss at DTI, the fab­u­lous Sharon Weinberger, gives me the all-clear. You can help under­write my trav­els by buy­ing my new book, ARMY 101, com­ing soon from University of South Carolina Press. Okay, enough whor­ing. Wish me luck!
–David Axe

“He’s gone totally native,” one British offi­cer at Basra Air Station said of the mav­er­ick com­man­der of the Queen’s Royal Hussars bat­tle­group. He’s the sub­ject of my first fea­ture for Defense Technology International, where I am the new mil­i­tary edi­tor.
Lieutenant Colonel David Labouchere com­mands 500 sol­diers in three squadrons scat­tered across the dry expanse of Maysan province on the Iranian bor­der. His mis­sion: to inter­cept ille­gal weapons and for­eign fight­ers slip­ping across the old mine­fields and hulk-dotted for­mer bat­tle­fields left over from the Iran-Iraq war. As many as 3 mil­lion peo­ple died here from 1980 to 1988 in what was just the blood­i­est chap­ter of a long bloody his­tory. Maysan is entirely Shi’ite, deeply tribal and hos­tile to all for­eign­ers — defined as any­one not from Maysan. That means Sunni insur­gents and ter­ror­ists don’t last long here. On the other hand, British forces aren’t ter­ri­bly wel­come either. It didn’t help that, until August, British forces in the province oper­ated from a for­mer Ba’ath prison called Abu Naji. The base became a mag­net for mor­tar and rocket fire. After one par­tic­u­larly intense bar­rage in May, Labouchere decided it was time to rethink his tac­tics. He found his inspi­ra­tion in his­tory.
Nearly a cen­tury ago, British Lieutenant Colonel T.E. Lawrence — a.k.a. Lawrence of Arabia — raced across North Africa the Middle East on horse­back, unit­ing war­ring tribes in the fight against the Ottoman Empire. Lawrence com­bined tac­ti­cal bril­liance with a deep respect and sophis­ti­cated under­stand­ing of Arabs and Islam. Labouchere does the same. Where else­where in Iraq, coali­tion com­man­ders fret over every vio­lent act per­pe­trated by one Iraqi on another, often inter­ven­ing in a way that just esca­lates ten­sions, Labouchere accepts a cer­tain amount of blood­shed in his province … as long as it’s in line with tra­di­tional ways of resolv­ing con­flicts. Observing one recent fire­fight between tribal fight­ers and Iraqi cops, Labouchere chose not to step in. By Iraqi stan­dards, he says, it was sim­ply a “con­ver­sa­tion”.
Like Lawrence, Labouchere relies on speed and agility. He trav­els light in just a dozen vehi­cles per squadron, mostly trucks and speedy Land Rovers but includ­ing a hand­ful of Scimitar light tanks armed with 30-millimeter can­nons. At night he bivouacs in depres­sions or nes­tled between hills to shield him from pry­ing eyes. By day he sor­ties to patrol the bor­der, show the flag in remote towns and hold court with Iraqi cops, local army troops and the tribal lead­ers who are his eyes and ears and his allies in the fight against smug­glers and for­eign fight­ers. He and his troops shit in ditches, shave with bot­tled water and eat foil-packed rations. They sleep under the stars on col­laps­ing cots. They live sim­ply and waste lit­tle, all in an effort to stay light and to ween them­selves from slow, vul­ner­a­ble ground con­voys.
Most resup­ply is by air. Every cou­ple days a Merlin heli­copter arrives with water, food and fresh troops and car­ries away sol­diers in need of rest. For big­ger spares and lubes, a Hercules will air­drop a dozen pal­lets … or the bat­tle­group will clear a desert airstrip for a quick land­ing. For diesel fuel — the heav­i­est and most vex­ing of Labouchere’s logis­ti­cal needs — he tries to buy tanker ser­vices from a trusted local con­trac­tor.
Staying light means doing with­out many of the high-tech whizbangs other coali­tion com­man­ders take for granted. Periodically, Labouchere’s supe­ri­ors send him some fancy new gizmo on a Merlin. More often than not, he sends it right back. A cou­ple weeks ago they sent him a Raven drone and its oper­a­tors. In a rare act of indul­gence, Labouchere let them demon­strate the tiny drone. But when it crashed into his Merlin, putting a dent in the prized $30-million chop­per, Labouchere sent the oper­a­tors pack­ing. Who needs a drone when you spend most the day rac­ing across the desert, scan­ning the hori­zon with your own two eyes? Labouchere eschews net­worked comms and nav­i­ga­tion in favor of old-fashioned radios and paper maps, prefers alert troops to radio jam­mers for avoid­ing road­side bombs and refuses weapons heav­ier than a 7.62-millimetere machine gun, If he gets in a pickle, his bat­tle­group is stacked with for­ward air con­trollers and the U.S. Air Force is just 15 min­utes away. A low-level flyby has always suf­ficed to defuse a bad sit­u­a­tion.
Accustomed as I am to heavy, bristling, techy American meth­ods in Iraq, I was shocked and lit­tle bit unnerved by Labouchere’s “keep it sim­ple” phi­los­o­phy. But when I saw it work­ing … when I saw the way locals had warmed to his pres­ence … when I saw how much ground he cov­ered and how quickly … I declared his meth­ods “rev­o­lu­tion­ary”. “This is actu­ally quite an old way of doing things,” Labouchere coun­tered. I saw his point: over­look­ing for a moment the vital pres­ence of the sophis­ti­cated Merlins, there’s no new tech­nol­ogy in the bat­tle­group. We’re talk­ing diesel engines, machine guns, radios, maps and can­vas cots. What’s novel, in the con­text of this war, is Labouchere’s con­fi­dence in tra­di­tion and basic prin­ci­ples. But he’s right. Delicate com­mu­ni­ca­tions net­works can’t replace a friendly local pop­u­lace. Billion-dollar sup­port con­tracts to firms such as Halliburton don’t boost Iraqi con­fi­dence in their gov­ern­ment and armed forces — and they cer­tainly don’t kill for­eign fight­ers sneak­ing across the bor­der. Heavy tanks and mas­sive fixed bases just draw fire and sprout huge con­voys that also draw fire … and that require escort, which only leads to more forces oper­at­ing from fixed bases requir­ing still more con­voys, and so on. An American base hous­ing a thou­sand troops might gen­er­ate a dozen small patrols per day. Labouchere does twice as much work with half the force — and he does it more cheaply and with a pro­por­tion­ally smaller foot­print that’s far less irri­tat­ing to Iraqis.
But could a force like Labouchere’s sur­vive in an urban jun­gle like Baghdad, where coali­tion forces have turned to heav­ier and heav­ier vehi­cles for pro­tec­tion against rock­ets and road­side bombs? “Why couldn’t it?” Labouchere asks. He points to another his­tor­i­cal les­son, this one from Northern Ireland, where British heavy vehi­cles just pissed off the natives and pro­voked a pro­por­tional response. If we went light in Baghdad, Labouchere’s argu­ment goes, it might help defuse some of the ten­sion. And it would cer­tainly be cheaper.
It’s a bold pro­posal, but one with firm ground­ing in his­tory … and one get­ting an early test run on Maysan’s sandy wastes.
Imagine a Stryker brigade adopt­ing Labouchere’s model. Imagine what we could accom­plish com­bin­ing American resources with Labouchere’s no-nonsense meth­ods. Now imag­ine that American com­man­ders had half his guts and smarts.
–David Axe
UPDATE 11:16 EST: David Axe here. Folks have responded pretty vio­lently to this post, espe­cially to that last sen­tence. Let me clar­ify. There are plenty of brave and smart U.S. com­man­ders, espe­cially at the bat­tal­ion level and below. But it’s telling that none have adopted Labouchere’s model. Here’s why I think that is: Labouchere’s meth­ods are risky. His con­stant worry is that he’ll get caught in a fire­fight against a supe­rior force and get mas­sa­cred. But that’s a risk he’s will­ing to accept in order to oper­ate the way he does, in order to win. Most coali­tion forces in Iraq are, by Labouchere’s esti­ma­tion, ham­pered by an obses­sion with sta­tic force pro­tec­tion, a fortress men­tal­ity. While it’s great to take care of your troops, if tak­ing care of your troops means you hand­i­cap your own abil­ity to oper­ate — thus pro­long­ing the war and, as a result, incur­ring fur­ther casu­al­ties on your force — then something’s got to give.
UPDATE 11:25 EST: David again. Not to get car­ried away with the updates, but I gotta respond to one crit­i­cism. Folks are say­ing that the recent takeover of a city in Maysan by a Shi’ite mili­tia proves that Labouchere has failed in his mis­sion. I have addressed that very point here at Defense Tech and in a piece over at World Politics Watch. My basic point: sev­eral of the mili­tias in south­ern Iraq rep­re­sent law and order, and police do not. So a mili­tia takeover is actu­ally a good thing. I believe Labouchere would concur.