Is it even possible to speak of enough of them wanting enough in common to begin building a coalition from which a rough patchwork state might be fashioned? TF-K clearly has responsibility, as does their parent command RC-South. Political factors are primary. Your email address will not be published. During my recent visit to Australia, I had a chance to continue my discussion with Major General (Retired) Jim Molan. His website is Michael Yon Online. I noticed that General Petraeus at one stage was talking about one brigade combat team, 4-5,000 people once every 45 days. While the British command RC-South, the Canadians TF-K. We at that stage had been involved in the invasion with troops and aeroplanes and ships and we still had ships and certain number of aeroplanes in various other places. Nitpicking but how does one discern between a AK-47 and AKM through graining gun camera footage? to squeeze all the information that they can from their stakeholders (‘the people’?) As discussed above, and still noting US ownership of this publication, this section would be enhanced with the US-specific reference removed. One of the strongest criticisms of the current wars is that ‘truth has become the first casualty’ again – pragmatic shepherding of embeds like Michael Yon can go a long way to mitigating this perception…, A crew from the United States Air Force spent Saturday night and Sunday morning airlifting different groups of wounded soldiers from Kandahar to Camp Bastion to Bagram, back to Kandahar, then back to Bagram, and back to Kandahar. This is coalition warfare at its best…” At its best, huh? There are minority groups who would probably be delighted with that outcome. There is massive risk in perceiving Western norms as the only ‘right’ way and attempting to inflict these upon cultures to which they are alien. I’m not a big fan of the ‘our way or the highway’ approach to COIN but this does highlight a clear breakdown in understanding on all sides, the Taliban being at least one other player in the game..uh-oh that’s getting Clausewitzian: ‘the people’, the military, and the (shadow) government…hmmm…, On one of the CAC blogs there is a tactical decision conundrum (we used to call them games but this is serious now) regarding a sniper and an armed child. 26 Issue 3, p42 . He discusses Australia's military credibility which is essential to the country's alliance with the U.S. for future security. John Stanley. This a truism of ‘classic’ COIN but if the ultimate aim is stability, then this aim might be achieved by actually supporting the insurgent cause or, more accurately, the root/underlying cause of the insurgency which is not quite the same thing. In an August 2008 speech, Molan stated that: “Our military competence was far worse than even we thought before East Timor, and people may not realise that the military performance bar has been raised by the nature of current conflict, as illustrated in Iraq and Afghanistan.”. ", KERRY O'BRIEN: You mean, because our involvement was not a complete -. You never knew who was fighting you most of the time. Whereas, we should at least have plans and capability to very quickly increase our training for an airplane like the JSF, which is easier to fly than the F-18. Correct, a pilot’s primary concern is with flying his helicopter – that’s why the Apache and most other helicopter gunships since the damn things were invented carry a personality known as a gunner, or copilot/gunner (CPG), whose primary tasks is to manage the sensors, targeting and weapon systems. In the long term, Singapore has become a powerful force for regional stability. It also needs to be the responsibility of a minister so that someone is accountable and visibility is greater. Should you stay or should you go? In 2016 Molan was endorsed by the Liberal Party as a candidate for the Senate representing New South Wales at the 2016 federal election. The first of these is paragraph 1-149 which emphasises that traditional military styles of operation may be counter-productive in this environment. While this is good advice, to be consistent with the broader i.e. From Michael Yon’s posts, BLUF = Bottom Line Up Front, not to be confused with that ultimate hearts and minds tool, the BUFF: Like 14,691 others, I have been following Michael Yon’s Facebook page as he reports from Afghanistan and had intended to promote him again yesterday as a great example of the Information Militia in operation – Tom Ricks beat me to it with Learn how to be a war correspondent. Freeing the embedded wisdom of an organization’s most valuable assets (human resources) currently constrained by titles, roles, politics and procedures. A similar process also occurred in South Africa in the early 1990s. KERRY O'BRIEN, PRESENTER: Australia had little more than 300 troops in Iraq when Major General Jim Molan was invited to oversee a force of 300,000 there, including 155,000 American troops. To get at this kind of mobilization capability, it will require a significant focus by government on funding and focusing on the core requirements and not just in defense per se. Paradoxes of counterinsurgency operations. Afghanistan does not have ‘a people’ it has an atomised, massively riven enclave of tribes, families, ethnic groups, war lords, state sponsored criminal gangs, foreign jihadi and so on. So as the debate intensifies in the US and a new President is about to be elected, what are your thoughts on the right time for American combat troops to withdraw? JIM MOLAN: Well, at the time that I was Chief of Operations, we had roughly 400 people in Iraq and they were conducting training and other staff duties in Iraq. Can the United States Build an Effective Pacific Strategy for the 21st Century? Jim Molan on Australia’s Increased Commitment to Afghanistan. I don’t agree with everything in this post from Rebecca Griffin but the information on the real cost of this Afghan War helps add perspective when we question the aims of the conflict – if the aim is really to counter Al-Qaeda, then for these $$$ could we not be smarter about it: Jim Gant’s Tribal Engagement Team concept starts to look even better…I do think, though, it reading posts like Rebecca’s, we need to cognisant of what Afghanistan might be like if the US (and nato in deliberate lower case)  wasn’t there and how a withdrawal will actually work – we don’t want to be seeing helicopters off the Embassy roof again and dealing with a another generation of ‘boat people’…. giving honest information, and feedback regarding a company’s (security forces?) This conflict, or rather this element of the wider conflict, is lost without them. Are the principles, etc., that are listed applicable globally? DeSilva-Ranasinghe, Sergei // Policy;Spring2010, Vol. kill the market and thus the demand. In a fight for national survival, anything goes. To contain them, denying Fascist Islam a state from which to plot and launch more attacks? That ISAF has resorted instead to bureaucratic tap-dancing and not released any comment on the issue is perhaps indicative of deeper rifts within the coalition. How to prevail in the Second Nuclear Age? 5.a. But rather than asking what do they want, a precursor question is probably ‘Who the hell are they, anyway’. This is not that unusual and is somewhat typical of what many young men were doing at the time in joining the Army and leaving once they had gotten it out of their system, and/or to take advantage of other opportunities, many of which may have resulted from that military service. To postulate that hybrid war is either new or different from any other form of war is illustrative of a concept inability to consider and learn from history. They say heroin addicts are happy, too, when they are out of touch with reality.” Moment of Truth in Iraq, Michael Yon, 2008. This is not uncommon and supports directly Kilcullen’s theory of the accidental guerrilla. Jim Molan: As Australia is a Coalition partner of the United States, the credibility of our military, part of which is the government’s willingness or There is some confusion within the military regarding timing of releasability of names of the fallen. I was a staff officer who just happened for strange historical reasons to have a force of 16,000 appallingly armed and trained but well intentioned Iraqi soldiers to protect the infrastructure. One example of this would be the 1969 movie Mosquito Squadron, a blatant rip-off of 633 Squadron (without even a rousing theme track), and not a good movie at all but one which has inspired many people, myself included to find out more about the real exploits of the Kiwi Mosquito squadrons in WW2 that pulled off precision strikes like the Amiens prison raid…, …and here’s a list of links to the first six parts of Peter’s novel, The Doomsday Machine…, Ironically, the Intentional Development website (edit 4 Feb 13: removed the link as it was dead as the proverbial door nail – managed to recover the image via the power of the Wayback Machine) from which I took this image specialises in…. If nothing else, ‘Bridgegate’ sends a clear message to ISAF that it needs to seriously up its Information and Influence Operations game…it is probably too broad a stretch to imagine that the Taliban planned or even anticipated this spatting between coalition partners but they must be loving it. If the sentence remains in the publication, it could be preferred by deleting the term ‘U.S.’ in order to be more applicable to a broader counterinsurgency audience – specifically, the less national references in a publication like FM 3-24 that is intended in an environment that is almost by definition JIM; possibly even more so, if various findings on the need for coalition ‘theatre entry standards/levels’ as prerequisites for entering a coalition are validated. The U.S. needs to be frank in relation to the threat. KERRY O'BRIEN: General Casey told you never to underestimate what you achieved in Iraq. To get the most out of The Accidental Guerrilla, read the preface,  Chapter 3 The Twenty-First Day, and Chapter 5 Turning an Elephant into a Mouse in conjunction with Jim Molan’s Running the War in Iraq. The release points out that “…all the land surrounding the airport has long been the responsibility of the Royal Air Force Regiment, a British infantry unit that specializes in protecting airports from attack. He is a frequent commentator in the press and on the media generally on defense issues and with the recently announced Trump policy on Afghanistan as well as the North Korean crisis we had a chance to discuss the evolving policy environment for Australia. Embedded media like Michael Yon offer great potential to conduct our own information operations – a function we have historically be very weak in – but they come with risk.

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