It should be interesting, as I expect a lot of the major issues to mirror problems with other old powers and how they handled insurgency "back in the day". To paraphrase a pretty keen US General of the past, "Counterinsurgency is a racket". However despite the political "
"'s, Afghanistan's best days are still ahead of her.
To start on the Wired article itself, you'll notice the "next-generation" anti-IED road clearing vehicle designed to knock out under-road IED's are huge, but despite the massive size of this behemoth and the millions that will go into it there is one error of shortsight not thought out by the fobbits in puzzle palace when they try to foist this sort of thing on the taxpayer. This flaw should be obvious to some, and I will explain without going into the murky electronic warfare which is just as incremental and circular in nature with a bit of recent history. For the Canadians, the insurgents started out knocking our unarmoured jeeps with old landmines as well as our soft-skin logistics tpt, so we switched to the Mercedes-jeeps. The insurgents responded with "double" and "triple stacks", which are pretty much what they sound like. The Conservative government decided then to allow the forces to buy these honking huge stuffy
Nyalas (RG-31) which are SA in design, and are meant to drive on minefields. They withstand triple-stacks.
Unfortunately Einstein was wrong: The two most common elements were not Stupidity and Hydrogen, but Soviet-era weapons from Soviet stockpiles and Chinese factories and stupidity(don't worry China, we forgive you! If you can't protect your citizens from lead or other forms of simple poisoning, how can we expect your citizens to have the same care for your stockpiles of weapons not for your army? I still haven't forgiven you for not fixing the lack of White Rabbit candies being exported after the melanoma scare.. Bad China!). The crater that took out our first RG-31 took out everything in a three-lane radius and left no survivors. So now as the U-wals decide to implement even larger and more-expensive road clearing attachments for the M1 Abrams, I will predict that the next IEDs will go where there is less armor - dig deeper, or just placing them where they cannot be scooped up. Sadly this shows that the fobbits in Puzzle Palace failed to read the opening phrases in the bible FM 3-24, which explain that the more you pursue in making your troops more safe in insurgencies, the less safe they become.
And on the official US field manual's author, I am pretty gleeful that
he has scrapped the old guy's plans to go in guns blazing but instead look at tribal-based solutions. It won't be anything near perfect, but that corrupt neighbour bob with the AK sure beats the ANP (which is not saying much; a stop sign beats those guys hands down).
However, NPR has a good explanation of the situation as well as an interview of an Ozzie who is one of the foremost experts on counterinsurgency. I still revere Petraeus as the best general in irregular warfare, but despite my bias it's important to note that he did win a sparsely-populated region using the same basic strategy with the same non-support from the HN government in a similar "almost all hope lost" scenario not half a decade ago. Hope Endures.
As far as the kill-all strategy of the last guy, the Canadians tried that hard and slaughtered the Taliban by the hundreds during Op Medusa. It calmed things down during that following winter more than the others, but it didn't work in the long run. Something about the lack of good government and many other things you will no doubt read about if Mongrel's link reads true.
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Topic: Don't you know there's a war on? (Read 77193 times)