… but perhaps not for the reasons many people have suggested as it whizzes its way around the blogosphere [via Chicago Boyz].

U.S. Army Task Force Regulators 1st Battalion, 6th Infantry Regiment Staff Sgt. Fred Hampton, of Lexington, Ky., kneels on a knee to talk with a young Iraqi boy at the future site of Regular 6 Park in the Thawra 1 section of the Sadr City District of Baghdad on June 20. Photo: Tech Sgt. Cohen Young, Joint Combat Camera Center Iraq.

Most responses focus on the hope, trust and fraternity displayed by the fact that the boy has his feet planted on Sgt. Hampton’s boot, viz:

A couple of people pointed out the sand is pretty damned hot during an Iraqi July, and this would seem to be a reasonable explanation for the boy’s posture. Fair play to the soldier for allowing him to do this, and I agree that this is not a bad shot of the US army engaging with the community, etc.

But, has noone else thought to ask the question: why hasn’t the soldier shouldered his weapon? Or is it standard operating procedure to talk to children like this? Strictly from a body language perspective this is hardly a display of openness. The same applies to the child: his left arm appears to be crossed across his body too. Anyone with kids will tell you this is a classic display of shyness. Perhaps that’s why the weapon remains raised - the kid’s left hand is not visible, tucked inside his T-shirt as it is.

If a picture speaks a thousand words, this one does more than represent “the highest ideals of our country and our guys, and the hopes and aspirations of the Iraqi people. This is why we fight.“

The Register’s subbies generally peddle a pretty good line in hyper-witty headlines, but the standfirst from this article by Lewis Page is exceptional:

Land Warrior wearable war-smartphone survives Iraq baptism

Txt-happy grunts in virtual-keyboard iPhone bitchslap

The world’s first unit of digitally networked foot soldiers returns from combat in Iraq this week. Reports have it that the American troops’ controversial “Land Warrior” wearable-node technology has changed in both role and configuration during its 15-month baptism of fire. Indications are that the equipment - slated for disposal by army chiefs just last year - has done well enough that it will now live on.

Read the rest here.

I’m not given to anniversaries or other attendant numerology, but it caught my eye that it’s exactly 12 years since the Khobar Towers truck bombing of 25 June 1996 in Saudi Arabia.

From the FBI indictment of the 14 men charged with offences relating to the bombing:

At about 10:00 p.m. on June 25, 1996, a tanker truck loaded with at least 5,000 pounds of plastic explosives was driven into the parking lot in front of the Khobar Towers residential complex in Dhahran. Moments later a massive explosion sheared the face off of Building 131, an eight-story structure which housed about 100 U.S. Air Force personnel. Although rooftop sentries were immediately suspicious of the truck - parked some 80 feet from the building - and attempted an evacuation, few escaped. Comparable to 20,000 pounds of TNT, the bomb was estimated to be larger than the one that destroyed the federal building in Oklahoma City a year before, and more than twice as powerful as the 1983 bomb used at the Marine barracks in Beirut.

The attacks were attributed to Hizballah Al-Hijaz (Party of God in the Hijaz), with alleged links to al-Qaeda, presumably before the factional Shia/Sunni split. The 9/11 Commission report alleges that Osama bin Laden was seen being congratulated on the day of the bombing, and perhaps acted as a facilitator for the group. Iran has repeatedly been fingered by the US as the state sponsor behind the attacks. None of these allegations has been substantiated by publicly available evidence.

Joshua Woody’s Memorial Site.

One of the unsung heroes of this corner of the blogosphere, Ghosts of Alexander, has an excellent post on Russian use of social science in their 19th-century expeditions to Turkestan. In Russia’s Human Terrain System GOA contrasts the investigations into local cultures by the Russians with the current HTS and social science techniques deployed by the US in Afghanistan. And concludes that … bah, why trump the man? Read the article instead.

[Cross-posted at CTLab]

I’ve got a new post up at Complex Terrain Lab:

On Wednesday 11 June 2008 the Frontline Club in London hosted a discussion evening, Media Talk: Assassination and Insurgency - Are the Taliban Winning? Moderated by Nazanine Moshiri of Al Jazeera, the panel brought together Alastair Leithead (BBC), James Fergusson (journalist and author), James Appathurai (NATO spokesman), John D. McHugh (photojournalist) and, via Skype from Kandahar, Mawlavi Abdulsalam Zaeef (ex-Taliban ambassador to Pakistan).

Read the full article here.

The folks at RAND have been busy, with another COIN report out today: Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan by Seth G. Jones, the fourth volume in the RAND Counterinsurgency series [research brief here]. The tone of the report partly reflects what I’ve been hearing the last couple of days about operations in Afghanistan - “comprehensive organisational dysfunction” sticks in my mind - although Jones concentrates more on capacity-building and security security reform:

This study explores the nature of the insurgency in Afghanistan, the key challenges and successes of the U.S.-led counterinsurgency campaign, and the capabilities necessary to wage effective counterinsurgency operations. By examining the key lessons from all insurgencies since World War II, it finds that most policymakers repeatedly underestimate the importance of indigenous actors to counterinsurgency efforts. The U.S. should focus its resources on helping improve the capacity of the indigenous government and indigenous security forces to wage counterinsurgency. It has not always done this well. The U.S. military - along with U.S. civilian agencies and other coalition partners - is more likely to be successful in counterinsurgency warfare the more capable and legitimate the indigenous security forces (especially the police), the better the governance capacity of the local state, and the less external support that insurgents receive.

Kent Harris in Stars and Stripes, First Rock tries new intel approach in Afghanistan:

ORGUN-E, Afghanistan — Gathering intelligence about the enemy is good. Getting the time to analyze that information is even better.

That’s the basic concept of the 1st Battalion, 503rd Infantry Regiment’s Battalion Intelligence Team.

First Rock has expanded the number of troops analyzing intelligence it picks up from various sources around Paktika province, according to Capt. Tim Culpepper, the team leader. Instead of having six or seven soldiers perform that task, the team has 42 analysts.

“We are gathering more information, but the real benefit is our ability to go through it all,” Culpepper said. “If I had a normal S2 (intelligence) shop, I wouldn’t get through 10 percent of what we’re getting.”

Read the rest here.

In the meantime, physics professor Faheem Hussain at Counterpunch asks What is NATO doing in Afghanistan? and concludes that it’s time for the evil empire to withdraw. Everyone’s an expert now.

Small Wars Journal alerted us to a Charlie Rose interview with our Insurgency Research Group colleague Colonel H.R. McMaster (soon to be General). SWJ has a short YouTube video but I’ve tracked down the full, hour-long version, which also includes an interview with Philip Bobbitt, plugging his new book, Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-First Century. Bobbitt will be launching the UK edition of Terror and Consent at the London International Institute for Strategic Studies tonight, which I’m unfortunately going to miss.

I’ve had a few problems getting this video to stream consistently, but it may just be my connection today. If anyone finds an alternative source please let me know.

This is an alarming anecdote from Tom Englehardt’s reading of Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez’s Wiser in Battle: A Soldier’s Story:

Let me briefly set the scene, as Sanchez tells it on pages 349-350 of Wiser in Battle. It’s April 6, 2004. L Paul Bremer III, head of the occupation’s Coalition Provisional Authority, as well as the president’s colonial viceroy in Baghdad, and Sanchez were in Iraq in video teleconference with the president, then-secretary of state Colin Powell and secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld. (Assumedly, the event was recorded and so revisitable by a note-taking Sanchez.) The first full-scale American offensive against the resistant Sunni city of Fallujah was just being launched, while, in Iraq’s Shi’ite south, the US military was preparing for a campaign against cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army militia.

According to Sanchez, Powell was talking tough that day: “We’ve got to smash somebody’s ass quickly,” the general reports him saying. “There has to be a total victory somewhere. We must have a brute demonstration of power.” (And indeed, by the end of April, parts of Fallujah would be in ruins, as, by August, would expanses of the oldest parts of the holy Shi’ite city of Najaf. Muqtada himself would, however, escape to fight another day; and, in order to declare Powell’s “total victory”, the US military would have to return to Fallujah that November, after the US presidential election, and reduce three-quarters of it to virtual rubble.) Bush then turned to the subject of Muqtada: “At the end of this campaign al-Sadr must be gone,” he insisted to his top advisors. “At a minimum, he will be arrested. It is essential he be wiped out.”

Not long after that, the president “launched” what an evidently bewildered Sanchez politely describes as “a kind of confused pep talk regarding both Fallujah and our upcoming southern campaign [against the Mahdi Army].” Here then is that “pep talk”. While you read it, try to imagine anything like it coming out of the mouth of any other American president, or anything not like it coming out of the mouth of any evil enemy leader in the films of the president’s - and my own - childhood:

“Kick ass!” [Bush] said, echoing Colin Powell’s tough talk. “If somebody tries to stop the march to democracy, we will seek them out and kill them! We must be tougher than hell! This Vietnam stuff, this is not even close. It is a mindset. We can’t send that message. It’s an excuse to prepare us for withdrawal.

“There is a series of moments and this is one of them. Our will is being tested, but we are resolute. We have a better way. Stay strong! Stay the course! Kill them! Be confident! Prevail! We are going to wipe them out! We are not blinking!”

Shit.

Update: Anonymous informs me that Tom posted this at TomDispatch yesterday.

Following on from my last post about unmanned systems, John Robb tells us about a new unmanned aerial vehicle sniper system from Sagetech:

The TAPSS system [Tenacious Automatic Precision Shooting System] is much more accurate than a traditional human sniper team for both the first and second shots fired … for a range of 1500m. A traditional sniper weapon’s maximum range is typically limited to 600-800 m. Kills have been recorded at longer ranges than this, but it is typically considered to be a “lucky shot”. The TAPSS automated firing system pushes the useful range of the sniper weapon out to 1500 m.

Each 50- caliber ammunition round will likely cost from $4 to $8, as opposed to a cost of $60,000 for each AGM-114 Hellfire missile. UAV sniper will also have a relatively large number of stowed kills; about 100 50-caliber rounds versus 2-4 Hellfire missiles for other UCAVs.

John sees this and similar technology as elements of the inevitable development of ‘cloud airpower’. You can certainly ditch the pastoral euphemism here - this is further ‘Death from the Sky’. As David Axe wrote in response to Matt Armstrong’s original piece on the problems of unmanned systems:

Problem is, much of the world already associates U.S. military robots with death, thanks to the use of Predator drones as aerial assassins in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia — and the military has no plans to scale back these sneaky, lethal attacks.

It  would seem so. Perhaps it should scale up its consideration of the potential psychological and strategic effects of the technology first.

Judging by this video (”Marines under attack, crying for their lives”) it’s not just civilians who react badly when under fire from an unseen assailant. The comments on this video are as puerile and unhelpful as they usually are on YouTube, but at least everyone recognises the fear. This mostly manifests as ‘kill all f***ng cowardly ragheads’ - what passes for standard YouTube debate - but the power to elicit strong fright responses is undeniable, no matter which foot the boot is on: