David Axe is out with the Queen’s Royal Hussars group again, and he is still in the grip of raging Brit Romanticisation Disorder. Please, enough with the Lawrence of Arabia stuff. Or, well, get a room, or a secluded tent at least. More seriously, he’s impressed by the tactics and the determination to keep the…
Read More BRD outbreak rages!The chatter is building up that a serious change in policy in Iraq is afoot. Supposedly, there is talk of an ultimatum to the Iraqi government to do various defined things or face undefined sanctions (this is an old John Paul Vann idea from South Vietnam), but there are also reasons to imagine that the…
Read More Talking to Iran, part 2This Martin Kettle op ed from the Grauniad regarding General Dannatt’s act of random reason and senseless honesty really annoys me. First up, this quote from Samuel “Clash of Civilisations” Huntington, and Kettle’s approving comments: In the end, although the generals might propose, it was the political leaders who disposed, even in the heat of…
Read More Dannatt, elite consensus and Samuel HuntingtonIn my head-on-the-block post regarding the unlikelihood of an attack on Iran, I mentioned that most of the Royal Navy is engaging in a large exercise off Sierra Leone, with the involvement of the Fleet Lead Commando Group, HMSs Ocean and Bulwark, and a large supporting cast. Now, many miles away indeed, the Royal Marines…
Read More Tony Blair: ChopperSo, the redeployment of the Queen’s Own Hussars battle group from Abu Naji to the border. How’s that going? Ellen Knickmeyer of the Washington Post goes to the non-front and finds out. A few hundred British troops living out of nothing more than their cut-down Land Rovers and light armored vehicles have taken to the…
Read More Test the theoryEvery blog and its cat has been discussing the tale that Richard Armitage supposedly threatened to bomb Pakistan back into the stone age, but no-one seems to have mentioned a very obvious fact about this: Pakistan has an estimated 20-60 nuclear warheads deliverable by various means. Now, you don’t go round threatening to bomb nuclear…
Read More All the Pakistan that’s fit to printMost things in this report are terrible, but I’m especially worried by this.. General David Richards, the British general who recently assumed command of Nato forces in Afghanistan, had expressed his reservations about this strategy and was expected to withdraw them when he took over at the end of July. But so far this has…
Read More A bad signThis is very bad news indeed, especially if it turns out to have been shot down. The Nimrod MR-2 fleet has been increasingly in demand in the last few years for very different roles to its primary mission, patrolling the North Atlantic looking for submarines and the shipwrecked, as the Army has become aware of…
Read More Very bad newsDoes Operation HERRICK, the British-led expansion of ISAF to southwestern Afghanistan stand a chance of success? What is “success” anyway? Just as importantly, does it stand a chance of disaster? Well, the deployment is now well under way, as the 16AAB less two infantry battalions and plus assorted DFID and NGO civilian personnel establishes itself…
Read More AfghanitasticDoes anyone else feel that General Jackson really shouldn’t be sending out press releases to demand more fawning from a hostage his soldiers have rescued? Isn’t it part of the tradition that you do your duty not because you expect adulation but because it’s your duty? I remember Jacko being interviewed by the BBC just…
Read More Who’s Bad?