A proper ground forces display for visitors

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I suppose most of my readers have experienced military demonstrations in front of top brass, politicians, foreign officers and/or mere business people as well, probably so from both perspectives.

Such events are always scripted in detail, rehearsed and often commented by someone with a microphone and a whole arrangement of loudspeakers. Everything that's supposed to be displayed gets its (usually boringly long) share of the demo and afterwards the visitors have seen soldiers moving and using hardware.

I've never liked these displays. They're a systematic disinformation tradition.

Here's what I would like to have as a ground forces display:

The whole parliamentary armed services committee gets invited, all senior civilian ministry of defence folks get invited including the new minister (they always seem to be new). They take their seats and pick up the binos, expecting the display.

Over the course of the next thirty minutes they'll hear some sudden noises and see some mortar smoke pop up. Nothing else.

After said half hour, the most senior officer of the army steps up in front of the audience and summarises;

"This is modern warfare as done by a modern, competent army".

The tank attack happened before you arrived because tanks are quick and they're best when they get to execute their mission before anyone not cooperating with them is ready for them.
The infantry seeking and destroying stragglers of the brigade overrun and shattered by our mechanised forces rested their survivability first and foremost on being almost never seen by said enemies. As a by-product, we didn't see much of them either.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is competent modern warfare as it should be against a competent and respected opposition. It's what we would strive to do in the event of getting called up to defend the alliance.

This is the "empty battlefield" as military history reports it about wars for more than a hundred years, almost precisely since the introduction of smokeless gunpowder. This is why you see very rarely if ever an enemy in video footage even of warfare against rag tag militias.
This was - for once - no theatre, but an information event. Thank you for your interest and attention.

Just once, please.


S O
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Palestine joined the U.N. as observer and I'm appalled

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The news is that the U.N. general assembly has accepted Palestina as observer, and thus apparently / kind of recognised it as a state.

The result is that I'm appalled and could generally puke a lot right now.

The reason isn't the General Assembly's vote, though - it's what happened around said vote. It's the talking point spewed by far too many people, including the German and U.S. ministers of foreign affairs.

This talking point is very well summarised by Clinton herself:

Supporters of the Jewish state both in the United States and Israeli fear that the upgrade in United Nations status could open the door for Palestinians to bring war crimes charges against Israeli leaders in the International Criminal Court.
"it places further obstacles in the path of peace," Clinton said.
"We have been clear that only through direct negotiations between the parties can the Palestinians and the Israelis achieve the peace that they deserve," Clinton said.

(Politico)

Just as a reminder; why is it that if a foreign army invades your country you can shoot its soldiers without being a criminal or evil person because of it? Killing people is outlawed, after all.

The reason is your country's sovereignty. Said sovereignty is to be respected. An invasion would disrespect it.

Sovereignty doesn't come out of hot air, though. It's not made up directly. Instead, it's derived from the right of nations to self-determination:

The right of nations to self-determination (from German: Selbstbestimmungsrecht der Völker), or in short form, the right to self-determination is the cardinal principle in modern international law principles of international law (jus cogens), binding, as such, on the United Nations as authoritative interpretation of the Charter’s norms. It states that nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and fair equality of opportunity have the right to freely choose their sovereignty and international political status with no external compulsion or interference

(Wikipedia)

Now make no mistake; this right is also meant to apply to nations not having sovereignty yet:

On 14 December 1960, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted United Nations General Assembly Resolution 1514 (XV) under titled Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples provided for the granting of independence to colonial countries and peoples in providing an inevitable legal linkage between self-determination and its goal of decolonisation, and a postulated new international law-based right of freedom also in economic self-determination.

(Wikipedia)

So basically, what the Palestinians (or Arabs living in Palestine) have is the right to self-determination. This is a most fundamental right; the basis of national freedom. It's been strongly advocated by a U.S. president a while ago and others ever since.

Now what do Mr. Westerwelle, Mrs. Clinton and all the others who subordinate recognition of the right to self-determination to diplomatic tactics or strategy? They disrespect said right, quite equal to disrespecting the sovereignty of an already established state in my opinion.

This is in my eyes a 100% immediate disqualification for a job in anything resembling foreign affairs or a national-level cabinet.

The right of nations to self-determination is a foundation of the civilised world, it's THE foundation of international law since we don't ascribe this right to monarchs and princes any more.

Nobody should ever rate such a fundamental principle lower than one's own tactics or strategy. This is most disrespectful.

I'm fine with Germany not voting on the issue in the General Assembly, that's always an option. Yet Mr. Westerwelle should have shut up and not let such poison out. German foreign policy has been about strengthening international law for all its benefits. Now he needlessly sided with those who treat international law as nice to have if it helps you and to be disregarded if it's an obstacle to anything substantial you want to do.

That's a horrible mistake, sadly not our first one; the 1999 Kosovo Air War participation was quite tainting as well.

The whole topic is close to my indignation about the frequent nonsensical accusations of Germany in regard to Slovenia and Croatia gaining independence and getting internationally recognised. The common and utterly idiotic story is that Germany supposedly is guilty of promoting the bloody war in Croatia and possibly Bosnia by recognising Croatia early. 

For starters, we weren't even the first, not alone and many Western countries considered to recognise these nations' right to self-determination. The war in Croatia had begun in March 1991, including some early ethnic cleansing actions by Serbians while Croatia was recognised by Germany (together with Iceland as 3rd European country doing so) as late as December 1991. Still, Germany was made a scapegoat in the anglophone world.

More fundamentally: How dare these people to assert we should decline this right to self-determination to other nations? That's the exact same crap as happened these days!

A nation's right to self-determination is not up for debate or bartering. What's up for debate is merely whether the group in question is a nation.

There's no doubt the Slovenians were and are a nation, and the Croatians were and are as well (their Krajina border wasn't optimal, though; yet no worse than the status quo ante). Furthermore, the Palestinian Arabs are no doubt not the same nation as Israelis, albeit some of them are a not fully equal minority within Israel's U.N-recognised borders of 1966.

__________

The treatment of the right of nations to self-determination and the whole independence recognition thing shows how too many leading Western foreign politicians and too many people offering (in my opinion idiotic) comments on foreign policy are still very much devoid of principles. Principles which the Western world has created, officially established, vowed to respect and can claim as one of its great civilisation advances.

I don't care about walls, pyramids or even stuff like moving letters or the number zero much in comparison; international law is the great civilisation advance which brings peace, cooperation and the respect that's necessary for both from the village and region level up to the continental and global level.

Respect for international law, its basics and foreign people is our best hope for avoiding the Fourth World War as described by Einstein:

I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.

Albert Einstein US (German-born) physicist (1879 - 1955) (quotationspage)

I'm trying to stay civil here, so I won't extend this into a more detailed appraisal of the mind of Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Westerwelle and what I'd love to do with their heads right now.

S Ortmann
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Covert artillery

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http://grognews.blogspot.de/2012/11/garbage-delivery.html 

Well done!

It reminds me of the South African Valkiri MRL which uses a tarpaulin to look like a normal supply truck.

Further related:

2010-04 Club-K Container Missile system video

2009-02 Warship Stealth

edit 2012-12-01: Comments on grognews are skeptical whether it's really an improvised MRL. Well, the photo is actually two years old (hence "captured"), and another photo shows uniformed officials inspecting it so it's not totally pulled out of someone's behind. It may still be from another region than Gaza, but I honestly don't care. It's the idea that's of interest, not the location.

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[Fun] Almost everyone won, supposedly

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The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

S Ortmann
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The European modes of warfare from WW2

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There's a widespread misconception about what WW2 in Europe looked like on the macro scale. The typical view is that the victorious armies reduced opposing armies, seized land and concluded the campaign victoriously.

I meant to write about (against) this for a while but didn't because I deemed a lot of evidence necessary to convince anyone. Obviously, I did not muster the motivation to compile all the stuff I already know for such a blog post. Instead, I finally settled on a cheapened version of the blog post; no evidence, but possibly inspiring some people to keep the eyes open so they can see the evidence more clearly elsewhere themselves.

OK, so what's wrong with the typical view as mentioned before?

The thing about "reduced" is badly misleading at best.

This is quite fundamental, for the prevalent idea of a war between great power is one in which one side's military destroys the other and then victory happens. A totally mislead belief even without francs-tireurs or similar guerillas.

What really happened were two different modes of achieving success in campaigns, with a third mode relevant in almost all inconclusive campaigns/offensives.

(Mode 1:) Some of the German successes 1939-1941

Characteristic of these successes were very quick campaigns, mostly decided by striking where the opponent wasn't prepared.

1940 Norway: Norway was poorly defended, not the least because Britain wasn't prepared to intervene in sufficient strength. They had considered the option of invading it themselves, but were still unprepared.

1940 Western Campaign: Rear airborne invasion in Netherlands and the famous Ardennes push with tank divisions prevented an effective defence by the enemy. The Western powers were actually not substantially inferior in any quantitative parameter, but almost half of the Western forces were defeated with remarkably little fighting. The key to success wasn't destruction of many Western powers divisions, but rendering them useless for the defence of France.

1941 Yugoslavia: 11 days of the most successful preemptive attack ever. Very little combat. An entire regiment rolled through the country without a single even only platoon-sized fight.

1941 Greece: Overrun because the Greek forces were focused on the Italians in Albania and simply not positioned for successful defence.

The primary mechanism was capturing territory through turning movements and encirclements in 1940/41.

(Mode 2:) Overpower for victory, reduction of enemies as a mere finisher

The German military forces were ultimately defeated (depending on how to determine it they had effectively lost sometime between late '41 and mid-'43). Yet, the German military had more (and more powerful) combat aircraft, tanks, AAA and more troops and field artillery pieces in in early winter of 1944/45 than in 1939/40!* It had sustained huge losses for years, but it did NOT shrink. Its reduction was NOT the key to Allied victory!

It was driven back because
(1) The share of aggressive young soldiers in the combat arms was reduced.
(2) Mode 3 rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat

This leads to 

(Mode 3): How most non-decisive offensives really looked

One force overpowers another (or threatens to do so), the weaker force enters a retrograde movement usually with delaying actions, eventually the culminating point of the offensive is reached and both armies get a break for a while (including receiving many replacements for personnel and material).

_______________

The idea of WW2-ish warfare being about destruction of an army in the field followed by occupation of land and forcing the political leadership into surrender is largely misguided as far as it concerns Europe. This is what the war of 1870/71 looked like (albeit the initial political leadership in person of Napoleon III surrendered with the army). WW2 wasn't about reducing the hostile army to get your way. It was about forcing it to yield by overpowering it or by making its geographic position horrible.

I suppose this fundamental misconception has probably caused a lot of damage to at least Western military thought for decades.

You can win by reducing the other army and then occupying their capital, but this isn't really WW2-ish. It's more close to the Israel wars style where destroying a tank army in the field (irreplaceable during the war) yielded success.

S O

*: This is what I meant to collect evidence about, but didn't for want of motivation. The Luftwaffe had thousands of fighters and many other aircraft even by War's end (little fuel and too few fully trained pilots, though), there were thousands of capable tanks in early '45 whereas the force of 1939 was a collection of fewer training tanks by comparison. AAA figures multiplied. Field artillery is tricky, as the share of smaller calibres and low quality captured guns rose over time. Troops quantity only collapsed in '45, while quality collapsed already in '41/'42.

Likewise the "defeated" German submarine-centric navy entered the war with less than a hundred subs and had hundreds about a week before war's end, on average larger and much more powerful ones.

P.S.: Very huge conflict, very short text. Readers should take it as an inspiration to look at WW2 history in order to check whether this blog text is about right. Small deviations in the grand scheme of European WW2 from the text's description don't bother me. I suppose those who get all-focused on minor deviations will never benefit from any model-like approach attempting to describe general patterns.

edit:
To be really, really clear: The remark that drove me towards finally writing this blog post was about destroying the enemy quicker than he can replace his losses. That's what I meant with "reduction" here. This "reduction" is not the same as attrition, but the balance of attrition and replacements. WW2 did work like this in the Pacific Naval Warfare (not even the air war), but WW2 in Europe was not about taking more out of the contest than gets added to it.
To assume the latter is analogue to thinking of a fight as a pushing match in which the opponent ultimately goes down.
In European WW2, said match was rather about going past him or about pushing him until he yields with a step backwards, then follow up with a step forward of your own and finally resume with exerting pressure. Rinse and repeat.

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Japan and its 'military' spending - an example

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I've read -yet again- how someone complained that Japan has a 1% GDP defence spending and the U.S. has a 5% defence spending yet the Japanese still fear the U.S. might not be able to defend them if cuts occured in DoD budget.

It doesn't matter where I read it, as this kind of thought could probably be found hundreds of times with an internet search engine and the same attitude more generally would certainly be found ten thousands of times.

Let's ignore whether the Japanese defence spending is really 1% (official figures say so), whether the U.S. military (hardly "defense") spending is really 5% (about right +/- 1 % point depending on how you define it) and whether any Japanese really has such a worry at all.

Let's instead look at the scenario of a rise in Japanese spending from 1% to much more, even if less than 5%. In fact, let's focus on non-economical effects for now.

Japan has "Self defense forces" with a small budget and inefficient arms production rates. It may be a hollow force or not (there were Cold War rumours about ridiculously low ammunition stocks), but it still has a top ten air force and a top ten navy. Their relative neglect of the army is understandable, given Japanese geography and the army's striking uselessness against Godzilla.

 (I didn't check the entire videos for accuracy; consider them entertainment.)

Warning: Atrocious music.

What would Japan look like to foreigners with a bigger budget for arms and troops?
Let's say quadrupled to UK-like 4% (The UK fits as an analogy because of its geography):

Even the pretence of a "Self Defence" character of the armed forces would disappear instantly. All that additional money would hardly go into stocks, better pay, better barracks and modernisation of existing units or the army in general. Most of it would no doubt be spent on additional warships, combat aircraft (or development projects for the same).

This would in turn be a threat to other countries in the region, especially South Korea and mainland China. Even the Taiwanese might be irritated.

Keep in mind that an additional 3% GDP on military affairs and military strength gain would no doubt look ugly to regional foreigners in conjunction with the still-widespread and rather disrespectful Japanese brand of nationalism.

The consequence would be a diversion of South Korean national security efforts away from continental threats, likely a lot of irritation and disunity among the U.S.'s friends in the region and China would almost certainly force the pace of the regional arms build-up.

How exactly would this benefit the U.S.?

You got to assume U.S. leadership will be stupid enough to let the hyped-up rivalry turn into actual war (not the "war" Americans talk so often about; "War on drugs", "War on Christmas", "War on women", "War on terrorism" - ACTUAL WAR) to see any benefit in substantially greater Japanese "self defence" spending.

S Ortmann

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RFID: An example for when to step in and say "Stop, reverse and never dare again!"

Texas student suspended for refusing RFID tracker

People should generally not be treated like criminals or slaughter cattle, period. I hope every German judge would intervene forcefully against such practices if given the opportunity, on the grounds of article 1 of the constitution:

Article 1
[Human dignity – Human rights – Legally binding force of basic rights]

(1) Human dignity shall be inviolable. To respect and protect it shall be the duty of all state authority.

(2) The German people therefore acknowledge inviolable and inalienable human rights as the basis of every community, of peace and of justice in the world.

(3) The following basic rights shall bind the legislature, the executive and the judiciary as directly applicable law.

Iron Dome's baptism of fire

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So Iron Dome, the U.S-sponsored Israeli anti-rocket system (which shoots with relatively cheap guided missiles to intercept unguided ones), appears to be working. The reports about its effectiveness suggest a very high rate of intercepts (possibly by firing more than one interceptor rocket per incoming one), but even more so they confirm that the system is selective:

It predicts the point of impact and compares it with a map of protection-worthy areas. Uninhabited areas (even large open spaces within settlements) are not defended. This is an important characteristic for a hard kill defence against unguided munitions, quite close to hard kill systems for tanks which don't engage RPG warheads which are going to miss anyway.*

This is of great relevance in those famous cost comparisons between the offensive and the hard kill defensive munition, of course. Too bad; the entire approach becomes invalidated once it faces guided or trajectory-correcting munitions or even only munitions suspected to enter a terminal trajectory correction (or guided) phase a few seconds prior to impact.

Iron Dome missile launcher,
(c) supposedly by NatanFlayer

Reports also indicate coverage is still patchy and short-range rockets pose the biggest problems despite their low velocity and crudeness; the reaction lag for detection, classifying, decision-making et cetera is the problem. Again, not without parallel: I remember calculations from a book about three decades old showing that there would be no time to launch a nuclear counterstrike while the first strike of the Soviet Union would be under way. No U.S. president could have made such a decision within the IIRC 7 minutes time window. Hence the importance on surviving a first strike with enough weapons and communications intact for a retaliation and thus for deterrence prior to the must-never-happen first strike.

Reaction lags are always a problem in systems involving human decision-making

So in the end, the semi-mobile Iron Dome system (it would be kind of static in a mobile warfare context, for its dislocation is restricted to an area which might be overrun by a day's manoeuvring - there's no need to adapt to unexpected landscapes) doesn't really provide a baptism of fire for counter rocket area defences at all, it's merely relevant to a specific niche, and only so in very low intensity. I suppose the Israelis would never deploy enough Iron Dome firing units to cope with a Soviet 1980's style division's MRL salvo**, for example (or with an Arab army 1970's Soviets wannabe style MRL salvo).

The practice of marking areas for something isn't unknown in mobile warfare or in what passes as such nowadays; the U.S. Army had lots of no-fire zones during its 2003 Iraq invasion. The problem with such things is that they depend on thorough updates in short intervals, or else the effort will turn very ugly in face of an opposition which actually does mobile warfare, too. Blue Force Tracker systems are in theory up to this challenge, but they contribute to the excessive radio traffic addiction of modern Western-style ground forces and this addiction creates a multitude of potentially disastrous problems against capable opposition as well.

In the end, small wars reports remind me more of what we don't know about wars between great powers for lack of such wars (=good thing in itself!), than they enlighten us (or at least me) about the current state of affairs in general.

S Ortmann

*: I think I wrote about this selective fires thing sometime, somewhere before, but I'm too lazy to look it up.

**: In case you wonder why I took a now-defunct example: It's not about re-fighting WW3, but about using an example known to be a realistic threat when people are serious about preparing for warfare between great powers. We might go back to such seriousness, after all. I'm fine with it if we never do, of course. That's kind of the point of this blog.

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Gaza

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Just in case someone wonders why the conflict about Gaza still lingers on (and is thus on hand for power games to help in domestic politics and elections):

WikiLeaks: Israel aimed to keep Gaza economy on brink of collapse

Haaretz / Reuters, January 2011

Expect a revolt if you run the largest prison on earth.

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Helmet cams and training

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The introduction of cameras to police cars had delivered lots of video evidence for courts, and occasionally hilarious youtube videos, too.

The introduction of helmet cameras to infantrymen (or people supposed to be the same) has delivered lots of raw footage of firefights. This YouTube account has published several examples.

Sadly, my most regular reaction to what I see on such videos is to doubt that these people received basic training, switch off and then ask someone else for a second opinion (which is usually as harsh, but I may have a selection bias towards selecting like-minded people for these questions).

I suppose there are also videos of good examples.

The training value of good examples videos has to be great if employed well. The training value of poor example videos with clear marking of what was done incorrectly is likely not negligible either.

It looks as if this development has added another tool for the tool set of infantry and more generally soldier training; field manuals, instruction charts and staged instruction movies look like 18th century parading by comparison - at least in regard to preparation training for the specific conflict.

These very same videos might on the other hand be an equalising factor between different nations' combat troops: Countries with no substantial participation in conflict could benefit, and even paramilitary forces could with a small budget.

This looks similar to the development of laser-based training systems such as MILES or AGDUS, which added realistic direct fire lethality to training. Same in regard to training projectiles such as for gotcha or the official army training munitions such as FX Simunition which follow the same approach with actual combat weapons.

We might see effects of such equalising training aids in the long term; sooner or later some foreign infantry force without remarkable reputation is bound to surprise us with competence. This happens occasionally anyway, but the next time it might be because of such equalisers.

We better pay attention to pushing the envelope with continued improvement of our forces. That's the way to go anyway, for we want the required bang for minimum bucks, right?

S Ortmann

Clarification: I don't mean videos as substitute for outdoor training. I meant these actual combat videos in the (widened) niche that staged training videos have in military training already. Troops need to be trained prior to combat experience, so the more close their approximation to actual combat is, the better.

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