The new Entente

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Britain and France are improved their cooperation in national security matters with the signing of treaties. It's an odd piece of European cooperation (interesting commentary here).

Historically, Germany and France did cooperate closely to push forward European policy and unification. The grand strategy motivations were different, but it did obviously work out quite well - until the issue got overstretched with the common currency.

European unification seems to be at a saturation point with the Lisbon treaty, an ill-functioning common currency and with many new Eastern European members which have set back the European Union in regard to political diversity to the 60's.

The German-French cooperation seems to lose relevance on this background, unless we get some really bright ideas. The rather erratic character of France's president Sarkozy contrasts a lot with the Germany's passive conservative chancellor Merkel and adds to the forces against a great push forward.

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The British-French cooperation might be interpreted as a kind of successor for the German-French cooperation, except that they seem to be focused on external affairs (the military) and their cooperation primarily looks like a bilateral cost-savings measure.

Their cooperation -if it turns out to work with little friction- could nevertheless become a factor in European politics in general.

The largely impractical and overly bureaucratic attempts of full European cooperation on defence  and of a common security policy might become overshadowed by the British-French example. The new entente might also influence the way how other European nations think about national security - less peacekeeping and conventional deterrence, more nuclear thinking, more naval and more expeditionary.

Sven Ortmann
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How not to befriend a new great power

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Excerpts From Washington's Contentious CISMOA Draft For India

EXCLUSIVE: No CISMOA? Here's What They're Pulling From The Indian C-130J

Either you want to be friends or you deeply distrust them and want their military dependent on your technicians - choose!

Sven Ortmann
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Incarcerate warmongers!

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The national elections in the U.S. are over, not all results are finalized yet - but a new season has already begun: The season of the warmongers. There's rarely a day without a new 'contribution' to the warmongering against Iran - political 'strategists', senators, pundits - the 2006 fashion of warmongering against Iran is back in force (and I will certainly not link to such crap!).

Let me show you how Germans would handle them:

§ 80 Vorbereitung eines Angriffskrieges

Wer einen Angriffskrieg (Artikel 26 Abs. 1 des Grundgesetzes), an dem die Bundesrepublik Deutschland beteiligt sein soll, vorbereitet und dadurch die Gefahr eines Krieges für die Bundesrepublik Deutschland herbeiführt, wird mit lebenslanger Freiheitsstrafe oder mit Freiheitsstrafe nicht unter zehn Jahren bestraft.

§ 80a Aufstacheln zum Angriffskrieg

Wer im räumlichen Geltungsbereich dieses Gesetzes öffentlich, in einer Versammlung oder durch Verbreiten von Schriften (§ 11 Abs. 3) zum Angriffskrieg (§ 80) aufstachelt, wird mit Freiheitsstrafe von drei Monaten bis zu fünf Jahren bestraft.

This was an excerpt from the German criminal code. It basically says that you go to jail for no less than ten years if you prepare a war of aggression and you go to jail for at the very least three months for spurring people for a war of aggression.

These paragraphs are extremely rarely used; they seem to work quite well.

A member of parliament would be stripped off its immunity by the parliament and be sent to court and then jail for one of these crimes, too.

Thugs belong into jail, and thugs who are guilty of promoting the second-worst crime ever invented by mankind certainly belong into jail for a long time - not in the headlines, or commentaries of national newspapers, not on national TV shows and certainly not into the legislative or even government.

Sven Ortmann

edit: Article 80 was replaced by this article.
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google maps + stupidity = bilateral border conflict

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Nicaragua Raids Costa Rica, Blames Google Maps

Evil, evil corporate Google! ;-)
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Four Lions interview

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Four Lions released in U.S. on November 5th.

Here's an interesting and funny interview about it.

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Fighting in built-up areas - tactical considerations

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"Furthermore, in 1987 OA [operational analysis] demonstrated that the defender is at a systematic disadvantage in close country (be it woods or built-up areas). It seems that, amongst other things, in close country the defender is generally unable to mass the fire of his weapons, due to very short ranges available in relation to unit frontages. Given their relative protection, if only from view, the attackers can mass forces more safely than is normal. They can therefore isolate and attack small bodies of enemy relatively easily. The overall effect was described as 'counterintuitive'. [...] In FIBUA [fighting in built-up areas; urban combat] the attacker is expected to suffer high casualties.
By assumption, the defender will suffer fewer casualties. Conversely it seems that such expectations, formed from experience of high casualties in FIBUA, are based on ignorance of relative casualty rates. Attacking infantry generally have an advantage of 3.57 :1 in terms of attackers' to defenders' casualties in FIBUA.

Jim Storr, The Human Face of War, p. 103

Now let's think this through. No matter whether it's accurate or not, it offers the opportunity for an interesting thought experiment.

The background is the growth of world population, the increasing urbanization, the sprawl of settlements over the landscapes (a trend which has halted at a saturation point in Western countries) and the fact that much if not most historical warfare was about especially densely populated regions. Resource-rich regions with few inhabitants rarely attracted much organized violence.

The dispersed settlements offer much concealment and some cover - they could be (mis?)understood as a modern replacement for the open terrain trench lines of the World Wars. An assumed superiority of the offence over the defence (at least inside settlements, not so much for attacks from open ground into settlements) suggests that such terrain is actually a poor choice for a stubborn defence. We lack the infantry quantity to pull it off anyway, at least without an impressive mobilization.

This would still suit the exploitation of settlements as concealment for small picket teams which exercise control of the surrounding open terrain through surveillance and engage hostiles primarily with indirect fire support.

Army troops might be forced to defend stubbornly in close terrain, though: A heavy (armour or mechanized infantry) brigade which lost too many of its armoured fighting vehicles (AFV) and lacks the strength to fight its way back to a friendly rear area might be forced to set up a large hedgehog defence in built-up or woods terrain.

Its opponent would then be challenged to eliminate the encircled brigade's remains in order to prevent its relief and rebuilding.

Well, how should this be done? There are old (WW2) advices on how to eliminate a pocket. Besieging requires a comparable combat strength (a battalion can keep another battalion encircled), but the elimination requires a superiority of the attacker. This necessary superiority is often not at hand, and thus it becomes advisable to first split up the pockets into smaller pockets in order to be able to establish the required superiority at least over the smallest compartment.

The advisable general tactic is likely the employment of infantry with assault gun and mortar fire support.

At this point, the quote promotes a turn of tactics, away from the established ones:

The classic tactic would be to probe in order to find an opportunity, assign support and exploit the opportunity. Afterwards, a successful break-in would be reinforced and widened with reserves. It's  striving for one initial success which has to be reinforced till mission accomplishment (manoeuvre à posteriori, later known as "recon pull").

The advantageous loss ratio from the quote is built on conditions which would not be met for long with such a tactic: The superior massing of attackers can and would be countered with a counter-concentration by the defender. The attack is bound to drop into a 1:1 fight with the intuitive tactical disadvantages of the attacker still in effect and now ruling the outcome.

A different tactic which would build on the findings mentioned by Mr. Storr could regain the advantage offered by unusually good concealment: A quick shifting of attacks from one point to another. OODA fans might love this. The quick concentration, attack, partial disengagement, new concentration, attack sequence could override the enemy's ability to counter-concentrate. The superiority gained by local numerical superiority, surprise and shock could indeed lead to very favourable exchange ratios. The numerical superiority and shock are both linked to the unusual reliability of suppression inside settlements. Buildings which were not reduced to rubble by bombardment offer relatively few potential firing positions. The quantity of windows, doors, flat roofs and removed roof tiles is rather limited in comparison to the hundreds of plausible fighting positions on open ground with drainage channels and vegetation.

In the end, urban combat could turn out to be very, very intense and offensive. Many small platoon attacks quickly shifting in emphasis from one spot to another could coin the battle. 

The quick succession of many successful small-unit attacks could either lead to defeat of a pocket by attrition or it could serve to create a strength ratio which allows for the decisive, separating pushes or even an all-out concentric elimination attack.

A possible counter-tactic of the defender could be to revert to a picket line with strong  and quick reserves, but this would be self-defeating for a pocket defender. Pocket defenders need to maintain as much terrain as possible, for pockets become ever more terrible the more your force is being compressed. A picket line would easily yield to an unfocused attack.

The findings about the attacker advantage in FIBUA mentioned in Storr's book are interesting, but don't appear to be very general if they're really about the superior ability to achieve tactical surprise. It's an interesting thought experiment to think about is implications and proper exploitation.

S O

Gays and the army

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Some news from the American DADT front (DADT = Don't Ask Don't Tell, a policy which allows gays to serve in the military only if they keep their preferences a secret. Most NATO members allow openly gay troops.)

SAN DIEGO — The new commandant of the U.S. Marines Corps said Saturday that now is the wrong time to overturn the "don't ask, don't tell" policy prohibiting gays from openly serving in the military, as U.S. troops remain in the thick of war in Afghanistan.

"There's risk involved; I'm trying to determine how to measure that risk," Gen. James Amos said. "This is not a social thing. This is combat effectiveness. That's what the country pays its Marines to do."

Last month, the Pentagon was forced to lift its ban on openly serving gays for eight days after a federal judge in California ordered the military to do so. The Justice Department has appealed, and a federal appeals court granted a temporary stay of the injunction.

Amos said the policy's repeal may have unique consequences for the Marines, which is exempt from a Defense Department rule for troops to have private living quarters except at basic training or officer candidate schools. The Marines puts two people in each room to promote a sense of unity.

"There is nothing more intimate than young men and young women - and when you talk of infantry, we're talking our young men - laying out, sleeping alongside of one another and sharing death, fear and loss of brothers," he said. "I don't what the effect of that will be on cohesion. I mean, that's what we're looking at. It's unit cohesion, it's combat effectiveness."

First of all: I have no problem with gays. In fact, I consider them to be former competitors who dropped out of the competition. I'd have no problem if all good-looking male singles but me became gay tomorrow. I'd really be fine with that. (Emphasis on "male"!)

I have also no issues with gays in an air force or navy. I accept absolutely no argument against gays in air forces and navies.

The army (and a parallel army branded as a "marine corps") is different. I poked some fun at the DADT policy problems before, but I have to admit that it's really tricky with ground forces. I avoided the topic for a year, but Amos provided now the perfect provocation for a comment. He has hit the nail without the more often associated bigotry.

There's no good reason to prevent all-gay combat units. Gays proved to be effective warriors, soldiers and leaders in history. Alexander the Great was gay, Frederick the Great was most likely gay, Thebes' sacred band was gay, many Spartans were pretty much bisexuals - the list is long. In fact, it's longer than the list about females as effective warriors or soldiers. A segregation between heterosexuals and homosexuals would probably be unacceptable for political and civilian reasons, though.
 
There's no good reason to prevent wholly gay or mixed air force or navy units. There's one really important issue which makes mixed army units very risky, though:

The general said it - it's about cohesion.

Cohesion is something which civilian pundits usually ignore in discussions about the integration of gays (and women!) into army units. That's a serious mistake. It's almost all about cohesion. Forget the shiny electronics, forget rifles and bullets. Forget tanks, forget camouflage patterns - warfare is largely about what happens in our brains. Cohesion is one of the most important symptoms of what happens in our brains in wartime.

Cohesion is the footing of an army. A unit without good cohesion is brittle, it will break under pressure and be destroyed. A unit with good cohesion can stand and survive vastly superior attacking forces and does not disintegrate even if it's forced to pull off a difficult withdrawal.

German soldiers know cohesion through the keywords "kleine Kampfgemeinschaft" and "Kameradschaft". Cohesion has been a traditional strength of German forces thanks to a suitable personnel system. It's widely considered among experts to be one of the variables which can explain the military efficiency of the German army in both world wars. Cohesion is one of the most important factors for small unit performance, and even major battles are now largely accumulations of small unit engagements.

The U.S. forces are known to be restricted in regard to building cohesion by their early industrial age-like personnel system. They have extreme difficulties to create good unit cohesion because troops cannot serve in a stable team for long. 

The Marines fare best, for they established a USMC-wide ethos and esprit de corps.

The introduction of openly serving gays is - like the introduction of females into army units - an experiment. It can be successful and it can be a failure. "Successful" would likely mean no more improvement than a slightly enlarged recruitment base, while "failure" describes a loss of cohesion which can have disastrous consequences. We won't know the result before the next military crisis in warfare. We need at least a crisis comparable to the crisis of TF Smith in 1950 to know whether the experiment was successful.

There is a huge risk in such an experiment, and this risk comes on top of the huge risks around the uncertainty about modern conventional warfare. We didn't have a top league peer vs. peer conflict for 65 years, we don't know modern conventional warfare. The closest thing we know is 70's technology conventional warfare between very dissimilar powers.
Now on top the uncertainty about the effect of gays on unit cohesion. Repeat:

"There's risk involved; I'm trying to determine how to measure that risk"

Most comments on DADT which I ever bothered to read were either partisan or quite homophobic. The article about Amos finally pushed the real issue into the public.


I don't say gays in the army are a bad thing, nor the opposite. I'm not pro or contra DADT. I say there's a real professional issue, a risk which needs to be explored and understood, maybe managed.
It would be nice if we could have discussions about females and gays in armies based on such professional issues alone, without the other diatribes.

S O

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Man in disguise boards international flight

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Man in disguise boards international flight

This 20-something year old Chinese is more competent than all those supposedly oh-so dangerous violent organized crime incompetents known as "terrorists". And he wasn't even smart enough to use gloves.

BTW, those very expensive airport security checks failed once again, as they apparently  (almost) always do in internal and investigative journalism tests, too.

S O

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Airborne AFVs

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Almost a decade ago I looked closely at what would be an ideal airborne AFV (armoured fighting vehicle). The inspiration was the Russian BMD series of the VDV.

BMD-1 BMD-2 BMD-3 BMD-4

The classic employment of forces with such vehicles would be to land and then race to capture and defend some logistical hub for reinforcements (or a base) - such as a bridge (Arnhem scenario), airfields (Crete scenario) or a port.

They should also be capable as a theatre-wide reserve that simply gets dropped into a local land war crisis, to reinforce the tip of an offensive or to quickly block the escape (or advance) of hostile forces.

Russian airborne troops in combined arms attack exercise

Most Western airborne forces are far away from such capabilities. They lack armour support, motorised mobility and their artillery and mortar components are no match for a conventional brigades' fire support. They're typically just light infantry formations. Their utter lack of organic combined arms capability is seriously restricting their utility, but it's at least an "airborne on the cheap" approach.

A mechanised airborne force has many other advantages over a largely foot-mobile force, too: It can drop far from its objective(s) because of its high speed march capability. the ability to move quickly with some degree of protection also allows it to break out of encirclement or simply withdraw in face of overwhelming opposing forces.

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Germany has no regular infantry brigade and uses its mountain and airborne infantry brigades as regular infantry instead. Their Wiesel vehicles are nothing but barely bulletproof weapons carriers.

U.S. airborne forces have been used as regular infantry or as low logistical footprint quick (air-lift) deployment force (such as in the opening days of Desert Shield '90) for two decades - much like the British and French ones. The Russian airborne forces serve as a national quick reaction force for the whole, incredibly huge Russia (and CIS!), but they have roots in a quite ambitious and aggressive concept.

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There's such a thing as an international consensus that large-scale, Crete-style airborne operations are very, very unlikely in the future. There was a surprising quantity of combat jumps in the post-WW2 period, though. A recent example is the air-drop of commando companies in Sri Lanka's civil war.

Invasion of Crete. Bundesarchiv, Bild 141-0864 / Unknown / CC-BY-SA

That didn't deter me from looking at the equipment problem of large-scale offensive airborne ops when I was still more interested in hardware than in the "what to do" and "how to do it".

My basic conclusion at the time was that the risk of the air drop (about a tenth of the equipment can be expected to get lost in accidents and screw-ups and problems may reduce the properly landed force to any percentage!) was an important factor.

Such an air assault force had to be able to compensate for almost any loss of capabilities. Redundancy and versatility were required - no specialised vehicles would be acceptable.

The Russians probably thought the same when they gave the BMD-4 the BMP-3's weaponry of 100mm gun, 30mm autocannon and coaxial machine gun.

I was never a fan of this kind of armament, though. Instead, I would combine a French 81mm turret mortar (MCB 81) with a 12.7 mm coax machine gun. This would allow for direct  AND indirect high explosive (fragmentation) and red phosphorous (incendiary smoke + some illumination) fires and also for direct rapid fire against thinly armoured vehicles and soft targets.

AMX10-PAC with MCB 81 (81.4 mm gun-mortar)

The Russian approach seems to aim more against AFVs and doesn't meet an indirect fire requirement. The availability of portable high performance AT weapons lets me believe that no such emphasis on AFV vs AFV combat is necessary. Instead, it can be a capability of some or all dismount elements.

This dismount element could be a small (7) squad with very versatile training and equipment.

Such a light airborne AFV (similar to BMD) with substantial fire support capabilities could turn airborne infantry battalions into combined arms battalions. It wouldn't meet the current "mine resistant vehicle" fashion, but that wouldn't be a significant problem in the envisaged airborne mission profiles. The airborne troops can still trade their vehicles for mine-protected trucks if they're sent to a stupid, mine-infested war.

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My more recent thoughts on operational art don't include such an airborne combined arms regiment. It looks like a non-essential luxury to me now (and I wasn't sure about its necessity back then).

I remember this concept as the one and only exception of my general, strong distaste for turreted mortars (= very expensive, bulky, high and heavy mortar installations in comparison to solutions such as CARDOM). This one time I weighed the versatility advantage of the turret heavier than its extra price tag.

S.O.

edit 2010-12: http://www.sinodefence.com/army/armour/zlc2000.asp

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Observation aircraft

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Reconnaissance aircraft have always been less glamorous than fighters. They don't have much if any direct effect on the enemy, but rather serve as a kind of enabler to other forces.

The very first attempts of military aviation (with balloons) were aimed at observation. Air/air and air/ground combat came later.

The bombers of the First World War were quite fragile and unsafe aircraft which were only able to carry and drop rather modest bomb loads. Their pilot's only means of dropping these bombs accurately was flying low - low enough to expose the crew to effective rifle and machine gun fire from the ground.

Few armoured aircraft were developed for air/ground attacks before 1919, among them several German types (among them the very advanced metal fuselage J 10) and the British Sopwith Salamander. These emphasized the use of machine guns against ground targets, but the overall concept was a rather awkward one.

Junkers J 10

Artillery observation from a safe altitude, equipped with map and radio transmitter was much more useful than bombing and strafing runs. Aircraft were already able to serve as forward observer tools for the great might of the artillery arm and thus able to bring down extreme amounts of ammunition on spotted targets - much unlike the bombers.

This principle flourished in 1918 when the Entente powers had gained air superiority through vastly superior aircraft production and pilot training figures as well as through aggressive tactics.

It became the primary idea of air-ground cooperation of the 20's and 30's. A whole category of aircraft - army cooperation aircraft - was defined to accomplish such missions.

The Hawker Audax was a typical example in the inter-war years.

Hawker Audax

This category had some notable examples in the Second World War, such as the STOL aircraft Fi 156, the awkward-looking, unusually large Fw 189 "Uhu" (Eagle Owl).

Fw 189

These artillery spotters didn't meet the expectations in wartime, though. Efficiency demanded that they had to fly alone or with minimal escort and by 1940 they lacked the speed and climb rate needed to evade fighters. Improved army air defences such as 37 and 40 mm light anti-air artillery (AAA) were able to deny low altitudes (below 3,000 m) to these aircraft at least in the divisional rear areas.

They were useful, but apparently so primarily at the edge of friendly troops and in area with total air superiority. The L-series of U.S. observation (liaison) aircraft such as the Stinson L-5 was able to exploit such conditions late in the war, for example.

Being hampered in their potentially most influential role, many of the wartime army cooperation aircraft were used to transport officers, documents and wounded troops instead. Having someone with a radio in the sky, loitering over a division on the march can be very useful for coordination and security as well.

The whole concept came under pressure with the rise of helicopters in these secondary tasks during the Korean War. It wasn't before the Vietnam War (which largely lacked effective hostile fighters over South Vietnam) that the artillery observation planes rose to prominence again. They got a nicer name; forward air controllers (FAC). This time, they also served as guides for bombers and were thus equipped with unguided rockets for marking the target area visually.

O-2 Skymaster

The category progressed from the small O-1 Bird Dog (which was much like the WW2 L-series aircraft types) to the more capable O-2 Skymaster and finally the purpose-designed and very versatile OV-10 Bronco. The latter had a similar configuration as the Fw 189, albeit for very different reasons.

These aircraft were of great importance in Southeast Asia at that time. Meanwhile, they were not expected to be really relevant in Europe. Why? Well, they wouldn't have been survivable in World War 3. Sure, a very slow aircraft is difficult to hit for a supersonic aircraft, but it can be done. Crews of radar-guided anti-air guns would consider these aircraft as mere target practice, and an easy one!

These aircraft got subsequently little attention after the Vietnam War. Well, observation helicopters continued the encroachment into the realm of the observation aircraft. An example was and is the OH-58 Kiowa.

The whole category of a quite slow, persistent eye over the battlefield fell nevertheless way behind fighters and bombers in regard to attention - until 2003. The occupation wars began, there was no effective hostile air defence or even fighter aircraft arsenal and ground forces needed an eye in the sky to serve them yet again.

This time extreme endurance drone took over and became the new sexy craze in aviation technology. They got lasers instead of white phosphorous rockets for target designation, a thermal cameras ball instead of human eyeballs and a satellite data-link instead of a normal radio. The Predator drone was the early example, but again there was a wartime increase in weight, complexity, versatility and armament.

And yet again, people tend to forget that these fragile aircraft wouldn't be of any actual use in a real war. Instead, they would simply be shot down by a hostile military. The Georgians were taught this lesson in 2008 by Russia the hard way.

This begs the question: When do the last people understand that loitering over the head of your enemy is really only practical if your enemy is really, really incapable?

S O
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