nlike List, Carey was not enamored of Britain’s achievements: he spent a great deal of time describing the terrible conditions of the working classes in the United Kingdom that resulted from their global financiers’ monopolization. Free trade was leading to “barbarism,” he argued, because it tended to erode the social institutions that fulfilled human’s “greatest need,” their desire and ability for “association” with other humans. Like Tocqueville, Carey valorized the rich civil society of the early republic; unlike Tocqueville, he worried about disintermediation of the social sphere in commercial societies without tariffs. The “increasing dependence of the laborer, and making of her that mere instrument to be used by trade” was fueling class conflict in the form of riots and strikes, ultimately threatening political stability even in the UK.

There is a popular folk history that draws a straight line from Hamilton to List, and from there to Otto von Bismarck’s Germany, which industrialized behind Listian tariffs. From there the Listian idea is supposed to have spread to Japan, which took Germany as the model political economy for successful catch-up growth, and from there to the East Asian developmental states of the postwar period. (The most readable and popular version of this story can be found in Joe Studwell’s How Asia Works (2014), otherwise a compelling book.) Helleiner’s book makes clear what this version of history gets wrong. Not only were Legalist and kokueki discourses already widely available in the East, but to the extent that Western ideas were popular in Germany and Japan, they came more from Carey’s influence, not List’s. A good deal of space in The Neomercantilists is dedicated to documenting and debunking these myths in detail.

During the period 2001 to 2012 First Army's priority of effort had been planning, resourcing, and conducting post-mobilization training for up to 90,000 Soldiers per year in support of Operations Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom and other contingency operations

For example, activating additional manpower may generate requirements for additional facilities, equipment, training base capacity, and transportation. Sources of facilities include all the installations (forts, camps, posts, and centers) where troops are received, trained, equipped, and prepare to deploy.  Mobilization Force Generation Installations (MFGIs) are key installations for any army mobilization.  MFGIs are designated to provide mobilization support to both known rotational demands and also contingency operations.  In 2008 the Army operated ten MFGIs to support operations that were mostly focused in Iraq and Afghanistan. Right now only Fort Hood and Fort Bliss operate as a MFGI, which is optimized for steady-state rotational demands.  However, these mobilization platforms are too few and woefully inadequate to support the volume and speed needed for a major theater of war contingency.

Further, these newer artillery systems are fully digitized and integrated with precision equipment based on internal, gyroscopic, self-locating devices supplemented by GPS updating. They also have modular components that can be swapped out, thus simplifying repairs. This is important because Ukraine currently lacks the ability to produce munitions and repair parts, especially as Russian forces bombard Ukrainian industrial facilities. Most newer systems require a relatively brief period of training on individual weapon systems and munitions. They are easy to use and employ for artillerymen already trained in basic field craft.

The Ukrainian army has made good use of its legacy equipment over the past eight years of combat in the Donbas and during the first seven weeks of the Russian invasion, but that equipment is largely destroyed, run-down, ineffective, or outdated. As the campaign goes on, this legacy equipment will continue to breakdown and be destroyed in combat. Logistics and maintenance for this equipment will become ever more difficult as Ukraine’s supply of lethal munitions for equipment on hand dries up. The Ukrainian army lacks sufficient counter rocket, artillery, and mortar capabilities, which is particularly critical in defending its own counter-fire radar systems. Perhaps the most effective capabilities the Ukrainians do have in their inventory are Russian air-defense systems. The S-300, gifted to Ukraine by Slovakia, is an effective long-range system, but even with outside help provided thus far, Ukraine does not have the right systems and missile magazine depth for this to be a viable long-term option.

It’s almost as if these two abstract entities “efficiency” and “equality” were two products an economy could produce. Oh, wait …. It’s exactly like that. This is the same diagram you’d get to illustrate your choice of how many apples or oranges you want to produce — or consume. Like so many things in neoclassical economics, a particular way of thinking — legitimate enough in its domain — is then totalized. The result is a discipline that’s rendered strangely incurious and emptied of empirical content.

The first instructors at the former French base in Timbuktu were engaged in personnel training. But at the same time, western estimates of the number of Russians vary greatly. Out of apprehension their number has been exaggerated to 500 people. More restrained estimates are claiming the number is between 200 and 300 people. It all started with four instructors. Their photos were actively published by the French media.

Amis, for instance, devotes one of the most powerful sections of the book to an investigation into Larkin’s relationship with his fascist father, Sydney. Hitchens, he alerts us, simply did not know enough when he mistakenly wrote that Larkin detested Sydney. In fact, as Amis shows, Larkin loved him dearly. On literary ground, Amis seems to be saying, however subliminally, it is he, not Hitchens, who will always have the final word.

It was important that every means possible be taken to persuade people to hold these funds rather than attempt to spend them, for such an attempt on a large scale would have meant inflation. Direct controls on production, wages, prices, etc. operated on one front to dam up these funds but the Treasury had to operate on another front to see that the funds remained saved. The best way to accomplish this was to get as much as possible of these funds into Government securities (Treasury 1946, 83).

Government expenditures have been enormous by all previous standards and they have been financed in large part by methods which did not curtail private spending to offset the increase in public spending. The pattern is that made familiar in previous wars—expansion of currency and sale of bonds to banks as an offset to new deposits created by public expenditures. War loan accounts were made free of reserve requirements, and as the funds were spent and reappeared in private pocketbooks and bank accounts, new currency and new bank reserves were made freely available by expansion of Federal Reserve credit. Thus the total volume of currency and credit rose without putting any pressure on the banks to restrict private credits. Since the end of 1939 demand deposits...have much more than doubled in volume...Practically all the new money came into existence through Government borrowing.

For all the stress he puts on merciless geopolitical competition, in other words, in Kotkin’s account Stalin’s ussr exists in a geostrategic void. If Khlevniuk’s concerns over the revived appeal of authoritarianism are obviously addressed to a present dominated by Putin, Kotkin’s treatment of geopolitics may be the aspect of his biography that has the most contemporary resonance: a seemingly hard-nosed attitude to the realities of inter-state competition conceals a disregard for the actual pressures being applied by one group of states to another. It is a pitiless competition minus at least half the competitors. In that sense, his too is very much a Stalin for our times.

The book’s style partly reflects Kotkin’s ambition to capture a broad audience and claim a more prominent public role—recall the project’s origins in the mind of his agent.

Kotkin writes in a more pugnacious idiom, larded with Beltway-speak and incongruous platitudes (‘difficult neighbourhood’, referring to Russia’s geopolitical situation; Stalin ‘was, for all his moodiness, a people person’; ‘Eurasia needs to be understood geographically’)

But by far the most tendentious element in Kotkin’s account is its treatment of Lenin’s last writings and the growing tensions between him and Stalin in his final months. The document that came to be known as ‘Lenin’s Testament’, dictated in December 1922, delivered a famously scathing verdict on Stalin who, as Lenin put it, ‘having become general secretary, has concentrated boundless power in his hands, and I am not sure whether he will always be able to use that power with sufficient caution.’ An addendum from early January 1923 went still further, describing Stalin as ‘too rude’, a defect ‘intolerable in a Secretary-General’, and suggesting that ‘the comrades think about a way of removing Stalin from that post’. Kotkin contests the authenticity of not only the ‘Testament’ and the addendum, but also the ‘Notes on the Question of Nationalities’, in which Lenin criticized ‘Stalin’s haste and his infatuation with pure administration’. All of these items, Kotkin claims, were forgeries, produced in February–March 1923 but backdated; he holds that ‘the existing evidence strongly points to a manoeuvre by Krupskaya, and the staff in Lenin’s secretariat, to forge what they interpreted as Lenin’s will’. What is the evidentiary basis for this argument, and why is Kotkin making it? Founded on gaps in the stenographic records kept by Lenin’s office and the apparent absence of the original manuscripts, the case is at best ‘circumstantial’, as Kotkin at one stage admits—though this doesn’t prevent him from labelling the documents flat-out forgeries. More extraordinary is Kotkin’s reliance, in making his case, on a single piece of scholarship, Valentin Sakharov’s ‘Politicheskoe zaveshchanie’ Lenina (2003). Kotkin salutes Sakharov’s ‘trenchant challenge to the conventional wisdom’ on Lenin’s last writings; what he does not mention is that Sakharov’s 700-page book is an unabashedly Stalinist text, decrying the dominance of Trotskyist, ‘anti-Bolshevik’ interpretations and their ‘infiltration’—interesting word choice—into historiography worldwide. Sakharov has been equally plain about his sympathies elsewhere: in a 2007 article he referred to Khrushchev’s ‘unbridled defamatory campaign against Stalin’, and in 2010 wrote a screed denying the ussr’s responsibility for the Katyn´ massacre.

urge to exonerate Stalin while incriminating the Bolsheviks is also apparent in Kotkin’s treatment of the Soviet–Polish War. He claims Stalin was initially sceptical about launching an offensive, and defends the failed push to take Lvov—again in direct contravention of orders—on the grounds that not taking the city ‘seemed idiotic’. In the war’s aftermath, Kotkin protests, Stalin was ‘scapegoated for insubordination’ while others hid the faults of their own that had really caused the disaster.

Herbert Giersch, Karl-Heinz Paqué and Holger Schmieding of the Kiel Institute, just before Fratzscher left to pursue his career in the Anglosphere. In their 1992 analysis The Fading Miracle, a major cause of Germany’s relative decline was the arrival of ‘new competitors’ on the world market: Japan from the late 1950s and the newly industrialized countries of East Asia in the 1970s and 80s, followed of course by China in the 90s. If the Agenda 2010 policy has worked for German capital, in response to the low-wage challenge diagnosed by Giersch and his colleagues, it is—as Fratzscher concedes—precisely because it has come at the expense of labour. But the other side of Schröder’s reforms was the decisive turn away from the demand management undertaken from the 1970s in the frg. Fratzscher’s Panglossian study does not consider the possibility that German investment has been allocated perfectly rationally. A low investment rate in high-risk assets abroad is not the effect of a large ‘gap’ (in Germany or elsewhere), but rather a sign of a lack of profitable investment channels. This is not unique to Germany. The high savings rate in Germany is only the mirror-image of foreign-direct investment in low-risk German bonds. Germany can carry on with this model so long as profit can be sustained by wage repression, so long as the euro is undervalued there, and so long as there is adequate demand abroad. In the periphery, the opposite situation prevails—of an overvalued euro—and the results are plain for all to see.

This means increasing military cooperation in the short term, and united navies and air forces in the medium term.

Die Deutschland Illusion calls for Germany to get over its qualms on the use of private equity and proposes a ‘round table’ on the subject that would include politicians and financiers. He suggests the use of high-risk financial products like subordinated debt to help attract capital. Indeed the investment commission Fratzscher chairs has advocated just such dubious public–private partnerships, including a scheme to privatize pensions. He has also bitterly opposed a recent cdu–spd compromise policy lowering the retirement age, as well as the Mütterrente, which compensates household and maternity work in the form of a pension in old age. This is no return to a Keynesian mixed economy, but rather the investment side of Agenda 2010.

of his break with Lloyd George in 1921, when he joined what Arthur Henderson in 1917 called the long and interesting list of former ministers waiting to tell the truth about Lloyd George (Addison waited less long than Henderson

In 1939 only one in three thousand British adults was a member of the Spiritualists’ National Union, but this might understate its influence. Even greater numbers of people took part in ‘home circles’ – do-it-yourself séances – tens of thousands of which occurred up and down the country, supported by an organisation called The Link.

while the book is clearly written, its voice is often obstreperous. This is, I take it, deliberate. In a way reminiscent of early punk, Finlayson’s writing appears designed to demonstrate an ‘in-your-face’ attitude, a militant refusal to give a damn about niceties of social (here, philosophical) etiquette.

In his book Nationalism, Elie Kedourie incisively critiqued this attitude and its consequences, as it emerged in a soft form in Immanuel Kant’s Project for Perpetual Peace and in a very hard form in the external policies of the French Revolution.2828 See Immanuel Kant, Project for Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Essay (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2010 [1976]).View all notes In eighteenth-century Europe, Kedourie wrote, the ‘balance of power’ system which limited wars and created a space for common European cultural development rested on the mutual recognition of the legitimacy of states with different religions and political systems, as this had emerged from the Treaty of Westphalia that ended the great religious wars:[The] assumption was that the title of any government to rule did not depend on the origins of its power. Thus the society of European states admitted all kinds of republics, of hereditary and elective monarchies, of constitutional and despotic regimes. But on the principle advocated by the revolutionaries, the title of all governments then existing was put into question; since they did not derive their sovereignty from the nation, they were usurpers with whom no agreement need be binding, and to whom subjects owed no allegiance.

there is a cost to focusing so intently on his own experience. He mentions only in passing that Tulsa was not the only city to experience a ‘race riot’ in the years during and immediately following the First World War – among other places, there were violent racial confrontations in East St Louis, Chicago and Washington. These years also witnessed radical uprisings inspired in part by the Russian Revolution – the Seattle general strike of 1919, for example – and an ensuing Red Scare, when the full force of the federal government was brought to bear on the IWW, Socialist Party and other groups deemed ‘un-American’. Repression and lack of respect for judicial processes were part of the zeitgeist.

Pundits often argue that a certain rate of inflation dooms incumbent politicians in electoral campaigns. A journalistic rule of thumb dating from the 1970s argues that this occurs when the price level rises at an annual rate above 4 percent. Historians share much of the blame for this perspective. Princeton Historian Meg Jacobs, for example, has argued that inflation had always been the “Achilles heel” of the “redistributive ideology” of the New Deal order, while older economic historians such as Alan Matusow or Alan Metzler never seriously considered the reasons for the failure of strategies for combating inflation beyond having the Federal Reserve deliberately instigate a depression. These arguments have continued to trickle down to the present. As Janet Yellen argued in the 1990s and the 2010s, so Larry Summers argues today: it is time to raise interest rates, depress spending, and slow down price increases.

“Mr. Ahmady”, of the Afghan central bank told the WSJ, “that bank officials began reducing the amount of cash, including U.S. dollars, held at bank branches in provincial centers earlier this month amid concerns over the Taliban’s advance. By the time the first major provincial capital fell to the Taliban nearly two weeks ago, nearly all U.S. dollars had been repatriated, he said. “During this entire period, no dollars fell into the hands of Taliban before Kabul fell,” Mr. Ahmady said. “All of it was secured.”

The war proved to be a particularly powerful version of the Falklands facto

There are now uncertainties in Syria that Bashar’s father wouldn’t have countenanced. Divisions between the old guard and the reformers have paralysed the system. For example, when the US invaded Iraq, state television, in common with the rest of the Arab world, concentrated on the Iraqi dead. Until 8 April, newsreaders were comparing Baghdad’s heroic resistance to Stalingrad’s. Then, when Baghdad was falling, Syrian television stopped showing news. For four days, nothing but drama, sport, archaeology, weather and soap operas. Young technicians and journalists said that the station’s director and Adnan Omran, the Minister of Information – an old-guard politician and a former Ambassador to Britain – simply went home without issuing instructions. The journalists dared not transmit anything for which they might be called to account later. At another crucial juncture – when the US proposed the UN resolution legalising its occupation of Iraq – the Syrian Ambassador did not attend the Security Council. There were rumours that Syria would vote against the resolution, but it didn’t vote at all. Government sources in Damascus said that the hardliners, notably the Vice-President, Abdel Halim Khaddam, and the Foreign Minister, Farouq al-Sharaa, were demanding that Syria vote against the measure. By the time the President had sided with the ‘yes’ faction, the votes had been counted in New York. A few days later, Syria quietly cast its vote in favour of the resolution. The effect was to antagonise the United States by not voting immediately, while showing the Syrian public that the Government would not honour the pan-Arab principles on which the Baath Party bases its legitimacy. Something else happened afterwards that would never have taken place under Hafez Assad. A former Minister of Information, Mohammed Salman, admitted on Lebanese television that the Government’s delay over the UN vote was a mistake. In the old days, there were no mistakes.

The Ministry of Information was notorious, and still is, for lazy, unco-operative officials. A friend of mine called them slurpers, because their only job appeared to be slurping tea and coffee. It was far easier for them to answer requests with a ‘no’ than to risk criticism from above by saying ‘yes’. Censors said no to the publications of books they did not understand, no to visas for journalists they did not know, no to requests for interviews with senior officials and no to anything else a visitor might ask.

Anderson makes the case that the CIA’s obsession with covert operations, which when successful (as in Iran and Guatemala) garnered both kudos and bigger budgets, coincided with the neglect of intelligence-gathering. The CIA failed to foresee the Soviet atom bomb in 1949, North Korea’s invasion of the South in 1950, China’s crossing of the Yalu River later that year, the British-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt in 1956, popular support in Cuba for Fidel Castro on the eve of the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, the crushing of the Prague Spring by Soviet tanks in 1968, Khomeini’s rise to power in Iran, Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and Saddam Hussein’s conquest of Kuwait in 1990. This is not to mention the 9/11 attacks, which had the perverse effect of revitalising the CIA while it was floundering without a credible enemy after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

OSS disappointed him by posting him to San Francisco, where he carried out extensive research on guerrilla warfare and cultivated Asian Americans.

the failed attempt to assassinate Hitler in July 1940

‘In Berlin in October 1945,’ Anderson writes, ‘Sichel stood at the very epicentre of history, the roving ground where the future arrangement of the postwar world, of whether the United States and the Soviet Union were to remain allies or become foes, was likely to be revealed.’

Eleftherios Venizelos was a “western” Greek leader, true; but much of the population were and are not. It is perhaps indicative that the terms “Byzantium” or “Byzantine” hardly appear in the book.

Foot also suffered from caricature in a hostile press. Foot was presentationally shambolic. His first television interview as leader was conducted in a wheelchair because two days after being elected Labour leader, he fell down the stairs and broke his ankle. Most infamously, he was condemned for wearing a ‘donkey jacket’, a tartan tie, and brown shoes at the Cenotaph at the 1981 Remembrance Sunday commemorations. One newspaper also claimed that Foot dropped his wreath ‘as if putting out the rubbish’. The reality was that the coat had been bought by his wife Jill from Harrods and it had won the admiration of the Queen Mother who said, ‘Oh hello, Michael. That’s a smart, sensible coat for a day like this.’

Part of the reason there has been no place for Russia inside the Euro-Atlantic order is that, despite its weakness in the post-Soviet period, it nonetheless remained too large to be absorbed comfortably – especially in a system that revolved around a single, superordinate power. The paradox of Russia’s recent resurgence is that, for all its refusals to fall into line with Washington’s priorities, it is still in no position to mount a frontal challenge to the West

lready on Washington’s agenda even before the fall of the USSR, the expansion of Nato was treated as a given from 1994 onwards, the only question being how to make the Kremlin swallow it – to ‘get the Russians to eat their spinach’, as Victoria Nuland, then chief of staff to Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, put it. (Digestive metaphors seem to be a feature of the Foggy Bottom mentalité: Madeleine Albright later referred to the need to ‘minimise Russian heartburn’.) The Yeltsin government several times floated the idea of joining Nato, but Russian membership was never seriously considered. The ‘Partnership for Peace’ launched in 1994, the Permanent Joint Council set up in 1997 and the Nato-Russia Council that replaced it in 2002 seemed to provide avenues for cooperation between Moscow and the alliance. But as the Russians quickly realised, they were alternatives to membership rather than stepping stones to it. When Putin asked Clinton at a 2000 summit how he would respond to Russia’s joining the alliance, Clinton apparently looked desperately to the advisers flanking him: Albright ‘pretended that she was looking at a fly on the wall’, National Security Adviser Sandy Berger ‘did not react at all’, so Clinton was reduced to saying he would ‘personally’ – a word he repeated three times, to be on the safe side – support it. All of these facts are in Conradi’s account but, strangely, he arrives at the opposite conclusion to the one his narrative suggests: ‘successive US presidents from Clinton through to George W. Bush to Obama,’ he writes, ‘had made a point of trying to integrate Russia into the Western world.’ Given Conradi’s attempt to be fair-minded overall, this reversion to standard ideological assumptions seems especially unfortunate.

on January 3rd, after Trump had flown back from his Christmas vacation at Mar-a-Lago, he convened the Oval Office meeting on Iran, asking his advisers about recent reports from the International Atomic Energy Agency on Iran’s nuclear activities. Both Mike Pompeo and the national-security adviser, Robert O’Brien, told Trump that it was not possible to do anything militarily at that point. Their attitude was that it was “too late to hit them.” After Milley walked through the potential costs and consequences, Trump agreed. And that was that: after months of anxiety and uncertainty, the Iran fight was over.

There are also political (and in lesser measure military) considerations that dictate the presence in both Wales and Northern Ireland of regional brigade HQs and of at least a battalion.

A very honest and in depth look must be given to the other 2-star commands in Army 2020: are a 2-star London District and a 2-star UK Support Command actually needed on top of the 2 divisions plus JRRF? Can’t the London District and UK Support Command be combined into a single non-deployable Division HQ? I think it is more doable and less damaging than other cuts we have seen. The resulting Divisional HQ could control a couple of non-deployable brigades: Guards Bde, for the Public Duty units in London, and 11 Infantry Bde as administrator for the units posted to Brunei, Cyprus and for the Falklands Infantry Company. 

This makes the Adaptable Force very virtual indeed, with a realistic output which is a small fraction of what would be expected by reading a list of 7 brigade HQs, 3 cavalry regiments (+ 3 Reserve) and some 15 infantry battalions (+ 13 of the Reserve; 1st SCOTS and the Royal Gurkha Rifles don’t even have a paired reserve unit).

The 561-strong Light Role Battalion should be uplifted to as many as 750 men for deployment, a value better in line with what is found in other NATO armies, the Army says. This in theory requires almost 200 men from the reserve unit, which is a 50% output from regiments which are established for 400. Can it be done? Ideally, yes. In practice, it seems very, very likely that the regular regiments of the Adaptable Force will be raided far and wide to piece together something that can be deployed.

Finally, the infantry battalions: the Army was denied the chance to cut more of those, with a firm ceiling put at 5, to prevent the loss of capbadges, notoriously a politically sensible subject. However, the battalions remaining are simply tiny: Light Role battalions have now an establishment of a mere 561 men, all ranks, all trades. This is very, very little indeed, and has been achieved by, among the rest, cutting all companies down from 3 to 2 platoons. A

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  The Maneuver Support Company is valid in its current form? In Afghanistan it is very often broken down into Fire Support Groups, made up of sections of HMG, MG Sustained Fire, Javelin Anti-Tank, Mortar, Sniper. These sections are organized on the lines of a Platoon and assigned directly to the Rifle Company, giving it the firepower it needs to . Normally the FSG will use the 60 mm Light Mortar, and the 81 mm mortars will be kept at Battalion level. In some cases, the Maneuver Support Company remains, albeit in a different form, including the RECCE element, a Fire Support Group and a Fire Support Team (the latter being the 6-man team for the direction of Joint Fires, be it mortar, artillery, rocket or an air attack). A Fire Support Team is assigned at Company level on deployment. Are these “ad hoc” structures indicative of long-term trends? What and how should be made permanent in the force structure?

It’s not a new observation that those in power in Britain have become more culturally militarist as the UK has been shorn of actual global military influence. It’s harder to explain the persistence of imperial lackeydom after Iraq

was convinced, with some justification, that banks were already involved in ‘passive resistance’ to government borrowing.

Another test, devised by the young psychologist Daniel Kahneman – the future Nobel laureate in economics, who was participating in the officer candidate academic studies program at the time – included an interview in which the psychotechnical diagnosticians assessed certain character traits. The examiners also gave a grade for the general impression they got from the draftee, according to three categories they were taught in their training course: the “good” soldier, the “intermediate” soldier and the “failed” soldier.

a professional corps of officers and noncommissioned officers has barely emerged, in part because wages are low, risks high and many commanders dishonest.“Only the sons of poor people are here to show off that we have forces in the district,” army Maj. Abdul Nasir Haqmal said this winter from his hilltop post in Kandahar. “The salary of the rest of the soldiers is going to the pocket of corps commanders and people in the ministry of defense.”Where government and Taliban territory meet, police outposts are often battered nightly, frequently by fighters with night-vision gear. Regular Afghan soldiers and police, lacking the same capability, have resorted to buying their own or sometimes even lighting debris or brush on fire to interfere with the Taliban’s devices. The Pentagon tried to equip certain units with night vision, but stopped after so much of the gear was lost, stolen or sold.

“There’s a problem of awareness. The senior ranks aren’t counting on the ground forces. The message to the young commanders, not stated out loud, is that it’s possible to conclude a war with good intelligence and a good air force. This influences the spirit of the commanders. This is the reason for the fear of sending ground troops into enemy territory. When it happens, in a wide-scale war, it will be traumatic for the public. The Yom Kippur War will be a picnic in comparison,” the senior officer said.“After the Second Lebanon War and Protective Edge [the 2014 Gaza war], the IDF didn’t conduct in-depth inquiries, and conclusions weren’t drawn. The subliminal message sent downward is: The IDF is the air force. This is a disastrous concept. As a result, the resolve  of the young command is crumbling,” he added.“There’s the lowest standard in the ground forces; without aspiration for excellence or discipline. The air force alone can’t stop the firing of missiles and rockets on the home front. In Protective Edge, the air force fired hundreds of precision munitions without achieving very much. Everything was done to relieve frustrations.”

“This is the worst crisis I’ve seen since I was drafted for compulsory service in 1965. The Manpower Directorate shows presentations and says that on  average among the units, the situation is okay. They remind me of the joke about the man who drowns in a pool whose average depth is 40 centimeters [16 inches]. The IDF has good brigade commanders and battalion commanders, but among the company commanders and the officers in combat support roles, many are fleeing because they don’t want to stay in an army they see as mediocre,” Brik says.“There’s a mix of factors here, which is related to the new model for the career army, under which only a few officers know with certainty that they’ll be promoted and continue in service until they retire. Also, if it’s necessary to compromise on carrying out missions because there aren’t enough resources and people, and you don’t admit it because you don’t want to damage the army’s image, there are officers who say: I prefer to leave instead of them silencing me when I say what’s really going on,” Brik adds.“I hear these things all the time in meetings with young officers. The army has a serious problem at the ranks of captain and major with high-quality officers who want to leave. Within a year or two we may well reach the point of no return.”

Brik ascribed much of the blame for the high attrition rate among qualified career officers to the uncertainty caused by a new promotion structure, under which any officer who is not promoted to lieutenant colonel after 14 years must leave. Many officers fear being discharged booted out at this juncture, when they are too old to easily enter the civilian job market but too young to retire.- Advertisment -“The new career army model leads officers to leave the army after serving as company commanders,” Brik said. “Surveys within the army show that 50 percent of officers don’t advise their relatives to sign on for long stints in the career army.”

The fact is, under Keir Starmer’s leadership the party has lost more than 100,000 members. It has waged a war on party democracy, shut down internal debate, and suspended not just activists but CLP chairs and secretaries en masse. It has closed Labour’s Community Organising Unit and sacked its community organisers. And it has landed Labour in a funding crisis which hamstrung campaigns across the country by driving away the army of small donors which sustained it in recent years, alienating the historic funding base in the trade unions, and failing to win over the new corporate donors Starmer has been courting. (In case you missed it: there’s already a very successful party of capital in Britain today and the rich are doing quite nicely, thank you.)

“DOD has acknowledged that building an organic Afghan aircraft maintenance capability is a years-long process,” the report says. “Training a fully qualified routine-level maintainer can take up to 18 months, and an advanced-level maintainer up to 7.5 years.”

After completion of the aforementioned training, an evaluation and inspection committee from UAE Armed Forces Headquarters assessed the recruits and recommended a continuation of the training for two more weeks. At the end of the training period, an Emirati officer informed the recruits that their salary had been increased from USD 500 to USD 1,000 per month

They were later inspected and deprived of their cellular phones, given military uniforms (see figure 10.4) and organized into groups of approximately thirty-five to ninety-nine. The most experienced members of the groups were placed in command. The Sudanese recruits were later subjected to medical examination after which ten individuals were sent back to Sudan due to their unfitness

September 2019 an Emirati company, Black Shield Security Services Company, undertook the recruitment of 611 Sudanese nationals through its client companies “Al Ameera” and “Amanda” promising job opportunities in the UAE as civilian security guards in Abu Dhabi, as shown in sample contracts (see figure 10.1)

That withdrawal coincided with the deployment of the MiG-29A (see annex 31), Su-24 (see annex 32) and PantsirS-1 (see para. 65 above). All were operated by ChVK Wagner, whose numbers had increased to approximately 2,000 by that time.

oncentrated firepower and situational awareness that those new battlefield technologies provided was a significant force multiplier for the ground units of GNA-AF, which slowly degraded the HAF operational capability. The latter’s units were neither trained nor motivated to defend against the effective use of this new technology and usually retreated in disarray. Once in retreat, they were subject to continual harassment from the unmanned combat aerial vehicles and lethal autonomous weapons systems, which were proving to be a highly effective combination in defeating the United Arab Emirates-delivered PantsirS-1 surface-to-air missile systems. These suffered significant casualties, even when used in a passive electro-optical role to avoid GNA-AF jamming. With the PantsirS-1 threat negated, HAF units had no real protection from remote air attacks

Chadian and Sudanese armed groups remain active in Libya and have taken part in the conflict. Many Sudanese fighters were deployed to the frontlines of the Tripoli campaign of HAF to fill defensive and security tasks. A significant presence of Syrian fighters on both sides is further exacerbating insecurity within Libya

“No,” McChrystal agreed. Then he asked, “What do you mean?”“These guys just aren’t—” McChrystal thought he was about to say “heroes” but had stopped himself. “They’re not like we were.”“What are you talking about?” McChrystal replied. “These guys are doing a hundred times more than we ever dreamed of doing, and doing it better.”His friend seemed disappointed by the response, so McChrystal explained further: “It’s not just a few, you know, burly men anymore. Shit, this is a machine now. You and I don’t even know how to run it.”

SOCOM, whose genealogy can be traced to a small hostage-rescue team in 1979, has grown to fully inhabit the in-between space. Made up of elite soldiers pulled from each of the main military branches—Navy SEALs, the Army’s Delta Force and Green Berets, Air Force Combat Controllers, Marine Raiders—it is active in more than 80 countries and has swelled to a force of 75,000, including civilian contractors. It conducts raids like the one in Syria in 2019 that killed the Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and carries out drone strikes like the one in Iraq in 2020 that killed Iranian Major General Qassem Soleimani. It works to locate hidden nuclear-missile sites in North Korea.

Anthropology did seem at the end of the 20th century to be in the throes of an existential crisis. A hundred years earlier, by contrast, it had been quite assured of its place and function. Marrying grandiose claims to disinterested scientific status with practical pursuits, in France and Britain especially it was closely associated with the administration of the colonies. However intellectually rarefied it may have been, ethnology – as it was usually known – often amounted to an exercise in gathering information about the empire’s subjects. Who was ruled? How did they live? What did they think? What languages did they speak? It didn’t help that the discipline as a whole was dependent on colonial infrastructure for access. The networks of imperial power granted fieldworkers safe passage among remote peoples and – after a hard day’s work interviewing people about what they ate for dinner or whose cousin was whose – a gin and tonic on the local district officer’s veranda. The anthropologists took up their posts in universities, the lexicons and lists of customs filtered back into colonial administration, and the masks and statues were delivered to the museums. The G&Ts were left out of the monographs, though not out of L’Afrique fantôme (1934), Michel Leiris’s riveting diary – and exposé – of an ethnological collecting mission led by Marcel Griaule across what was mostly French colonial Africa.

The Patriotic Party can have no such influence on the left, but it does provide Erdoğanism with an anti-imperialist discourse and with bridges to the ‘deep’ state apparatus of China.

Vast new infrastructural projects were initiated, largely funded from the Gulf.

the UK’s MoD remained enthusiastic, the review said, not least because “the annual cost of the programme (i.e. non-kinetic targeting) represents extraordinary value for money given current policy restraints”.

Consider two candidates: one who attains the top of their field after being trained and supported by the best of the best, and the other who trails them by a step or two – but never had their advantages. Which one has the most potential?

According to the GWU article, ‘Olena Semenyaka is the female figurehead of the Azov movement’. A former disciple of Alexander Dugin, she broke ties with him following the Maidan revolution and joined the Right Sector before switching to Azov. She has since become a prominent proponent of the Intermarium – a sort of Eastern European Union stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea, rather along the lines of the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. To this end, she has established links with far right groups across Europe.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the structures of silence began to collapse. The retired general Paul Aussaresses brazenly recounted his role in murdering FLN leaders during the Battle of Algiers and framing their deaths to look like suicides. Louisette Ighilariz, a former FLN militant, gave a harrowing interview to Le Monde about her torture and rape, and her search for the French doctor who had rescued her from her interrogators. These testimonies, along with the publication of new books by Branche and other young historians, prompted many long silent veterans to share their stories of the war. It was, as the son of one veteran joked, a kind of ‘coming out’. But it was also an attempt to understand their experiences. Renaud Beaufils, who refused to speak to Branche when she was writing her first book, contacted her because he wanted to know more about a clash in which a dozen of his fellow soldiers were killed. ‘I no longer know if I lived that period,’ he told her. Berthelémy admitted to Branche that after his failed attempts to speak about his killing of the young boy, he all but suppressed his own memory of it. Later he was reminded of it in a dream in which he was judged and condemned for the crime. Berthelémy, a long-time activist in an anti-war veterans’ group, urged his fellow soldiers to speak to Branche, and many of them did.

acques Inrep​ was among the first psychologists in France to recognise the long-term effects of the war on combatants. While working as a psychiatric nurse in the late 1960s, he realised that many of his patients were appelés, though he didn’t initially ‘make the link with the war’. Many were violent, often towards their wives. One patient remembered his use of the gégène (electric shock torture) in the Aurès Mountains, and of pornographic images to intimidate women. This provoked Inrep’s own memories: he, too, had served in the Aurès, where he had witnessed rape and torture. After his patient committed suicide, Inrep went into clinical psychology, keen to understand the ‘mental destructuration’ that occurs in ‘limit situations’. In the 1980s, he found a professional ally in a left-wing psychiatrist, Bernard Sigg, who had deserted in 1960 after treating veterans in a military hospital in Casablanca. Sigg had become persuaded that they suffered acutely from shame at having fought ‘under the sign of transgression’, that is, by carrying out crimes against the laws of the Republic in whose name the war had allegedly been fought. It is thanks to researchers such as Inrep and Sigg that the war’s psychological toll has been widely, if belatedly, acknowledged, including by the French state. Since 1992, three decades after the ceasefire, soldiers suffering from psychological issues related to the war have been entitled to compensation.

It took another twelve years and a long battle by appelés’ associations for soldiers in Algeria to be recognised as combattants and so become entitled to the rewards of service. Because Algeria hadn’t been a war, demobilisation was ‘dislocated from any collective experience’, without the processions or parades that traditionally followed wars.

The vast majority of appelés had left school young, often to work under their fathers.

the French government had banned corporal punishment in the home in 1928

Raphaëlle Branche, who in 2001 published a doctoral thesis, La Torture et l’armée pendant la guerre d’Algérie, based partly on interviews with former appelés

“President Duque and Álvaro Uribe, they promised us three things, in exchange for one: First of all, they promised a runway, so we can land planes; and a place to train, a camp; and the freedom to cross the border between Venezuela and Colombia,” Álvarez explained. She added, “In exchange, we would fight against the ELN” – a reference to a Colombian socialist guerrilla group. “I know this because I am the translator between Jordan Goudreau and Cliver Alcalá,” Álvarez said in the video testimony, referring to a former Venezuelan general who fled to Colombia in 2018 and has been involved in numerous coup attempts against Venezuela’s leftist government.

Historians can be paparazzi late to the scene.

It was masterminded by Fouad Ali Saleh, who was of Tunisian origin and claimed to be acting in the name of God as well as in support of political detainees in Arab states: the second claim was even more disingenuous than the first. Saleh was a member of Hizbullah and a staunch supporter of Ayatollah Khomeini. During the Iran-Iraq War, France had fallen in behind Saddam Hussein, providing Exocets and fighter aircraft to Baghdad; French companies may even have supplied the regime with precursor elements for chemical weapons. Saleh had all the hallmarks of an undercover operator in the service of a foreign power, taking the fight to its enemies.

until the mid-1980s, when a bombing campaign in and around Paris left thirteen dead and hundreds wounded. It was masterminded by Fouad Ali Saleh, who was of Tunisian origin and claimed to be acting in the name of God as well as in support of political detainees in Arab states: the second claim was even more disingenuous than the first. Saleh was a member of Hizbullah and a staunch supporter of Ayatollah Khomeini. During the Iran-Iraq War, France had fallen in behind Saddam Hussein, providing Exocets and fighter aircraft to Baghdad; French companies may even have supplied the regime with precursor elements for chemical weapons. Saleh had all the hallmarks of an undercover operator in the service of a foreign power, taking the fight to its enemies.

In his demagogic 1850 speech on the Don Pacifico affair, he had said that ‘as the Roman, in days of old, held himself free from indignity, when he could say Civis Romanus sum; so also a British subject, in whatever land he may be, shall feel confident that the watchful eye and the strong arm of England will protect him from injustice and wrong.’ By the time of the war, Palmerston had turned that into a rhetoric of universal justice.

He was a division commander by 1933 and a corps commander by 1938. There were some bad moments during the Great Purges of 1937-38, in which so many high-ranking military officers perished, but Zhukov was still a step below them, and emerged an (involuntary) beneficiary.

Arms and the man hardly constitutes a novel theme in either literature or politics. But martial concerns have rarely been fashionable on the Left, except as a target of derision or anger. It was by no means to Healey’s advantage within the Labour Party, therefore, that he displayed a lasting preoccupation with an inescapable military dimension to the geopolitical conflicts that divided the postwar world.

Although – a trifle immodestly – he claims in his Introduction that his material was considered by Denis Brogan in London to be ‘the Ariadne’s thread through the labyrinths of American politics’, it is hard to see Berlin as Theseus in these reports, which veer from matters of local American concern (labour troubles etc) to generalities so general one can only yawn one’s way through. The burning issues of America’s entry into the war, the loss of the Philippines, the disastrous first eight months of 1942, the whole question of the Second Front, the great conferences at Yalta and Tehran, the agonising questions of post-war Europe, of Palestine and – still so agonising today – of Poland, are dealt with summarily, drily, in no way memorably. Why should this gifted man have failed to deliver something more rewarding? The answer is, of course, censorship. Not imposed – though that, too, possibly – so much as self-imposed. The FO in London – Berlin does not say so, but it can be inferred – knew that the Americans were reading the British Embassy signals: it therefore wanted nothing that burned, nothing contentious or embarrassing – above all, nothing personal. So, effectively restrained, Berlin penned his weekly school letter and gave it to the headmaster to read, revise and encypher. Professor Nicholas, the editor, fawns and bows, proclaims those despatches written in Berlin’s absence to be ‘school of Berlin’: but he cannot get away from the fact that, deprived of the right to portray personalities, express opinions, or be funny, Theseus puts up a pretty disappointing display against the American Minotaur.

Labour was consistently well behind in the opinion polls. Its appeal to the electorate in 1970 would perforce be based not on any achievements in restructuring British institutions or the economy but on the ‘sound’ management which produced, in 1969, a huge balance-of-payments surplus of £440 million. That year saw two truly spectacular political disasters.

The reserve-currency role of sterling gave Britain illusory economic status at a time when it was slipping further and further behind West Germany and France.

The centre-right gained most votes; its candidate was the fixer Jean-Claude Juncker. After some tergiversation, Merkel prevailed on the Council to accept him and Juncker became president of the Commission on the strength of about 10 per cent of the European electorate. Had she not done so, Habermas told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, it would have been ‘a bullet to the heart of the European project’.

In writing of social provision, Barnett unconsciously applies a double standard. Increases in public expenditure are singled out for attack. The housing programme and the National Health Service are presented as greedy predators, guzzling up resources. But the alternatives, private expenditure on health and housing, also divert resources away from industrial investment. Much of the cost of health care in the 1930s was met by fees or donations, so it is by no means certain that the establishment of the National Health Service led to an increase in the share of the national income devoted to health.

Mann’s coup was so poorly organised, and leaked information so freely, that it was discussed in the course of a Chatham House seminar before it took place. The plotters had a penchant for meeting in loud groups at fashionable restaurants – in one instance in Malabo itself, with 35 drunken Afrikaners roaring away to anyone who cared to listen. Mann assumed that almost everyone would be pleased to see the back of the odious Obiang, and that by noising his plans abroad he was allowing Britain, the US, Spain and South Africa to know what was happening: if they didn’t react he would take it that he had their tacit consent. The plotters actually told Bulelani Ngcuka, the head of South Africa’s prosecution authority and a Mbeki intimate, what they were planning and again assumed that the lack of official response meant they had Mbeki’s implicit permission to go ahead. In fact, there is strong reason to believe that the coup did enjoy US and Spanish support, and London certainly did nothing to stop it.

When Churchill took over they all got junior government jobs. Lyttelton muscled in, successfully insisting that his British Metal Corporation take control of the entire supply of non-ferrous metals for the war effort.

At the moment, we are told, we have almost an embarras de richesse, with a budget surplus of £14 billion.

‘The Huns are always the same,’ Britain’s first semi-European leader declared to the company assembled on HMS Britannia. ‘When they are down they crawl under your feet, and when they are up they use their feet to stamp on your face.’

They really were traitors. Swedish colonels, West German bureaucrats who betray secrets to the East, are not in their league. They usually do it for money, or because they are under pressure or because they have some personal grievance. Nor are their fellow citizens as fascinated by their treachery as the British public are by the tale of the upper-crust spies. Philby, Burgess, Maclean and Blunt were doing something more fundamental: they betrayed what their country was doing but by the same act destroyed the way their country did things. After them, the delicate muscle-tissue of the executive, uncritical trust moving in sheaths of class loyalty and schoolmate confidence, never worked so well again. This isn’t to say that state servants do not still use it. They do, but with misgivings and with much greater difficulty. The damage done by the spies here was irreparable in the long run, but if one considers that the old-boy system was overdue for replacement, one could argue that the Cambridge spies betrayed their friends, in this instance, but not necessarily their country.

But Brandt’s achievement was not so much a matter of personality as of the lessons he learned from experience – lessons drawn from the Norwegian and Swedish models of democratic socialism, which were simply not available to party members who stayed in Germany throughout the Nazi period.

Isaiah Berlin said that ‘he doesn’t have any human perceptions; he’s all glass and rubber.

Britain’s hugely profitable arms trade is an enduring by-product of that state, and here Hamilton-Paterson contributes an unsettling thought. ‘It is the arms industry perhaps more than any other that best preserves the inventive standards and traditions of British engineering, research and technical expertise.’

After 1945, Edgerton’s ‘new British nation’ set out to be self-sufficient, but not just economically. He gives many pages to the ‘warfare state’ which arose under the Labour government, its enormous and largely concealed expense condemning Britain to years of rationing and austerity and robbing the welfare state of resources. ‘After the Second World War, Britons built not only a new Jerusalem but a new Sparta.’ In the 1950s, during the early Cold War, defence spending at 10 per cent of GDP was far higher than it had ever been in peacetime – much higher than in 1913 or 1938. Less evident is the extent to which rearmament affected the whole balance of power in government and even in the universities, where the sudden demand for male scientific, engineering and mathematical graduates actually reduced the proportion of female science students below its prewar level. Edgerton sees that as highly significant: ‘The profound militarisation of the 1950s went along with a new masculinisation of the public sphere, the other side of the much noted promotion of feminine domesticity.’

Back in London, right-wing advisers were selling the war cabinet a different plan. The Allies should seize the Russian ports of Murmansk, Archangel and Vladivostok, and use them as bases to cross Russia and – with the help of anti-Bolshevik forces – re-establish the Eastern Front.

Europe has made a huge effort to give the population a say in decision-making.’ That the adjective is risible hardly matters; it is the indefinite article and feeble monosyllable of the penultimate phrase, to which van Middelaar reduces Athenian democracy, that delivers the message of his Greek conclusion. The Assembly where all important political issues were directly debated and determined by citizens, which was most famously what Athens actually invented, is never so much as mentioned. Instead, what Athens gave the world was the chorus in Greek drama. That it observes and comments on, but plays no role in the action, is a detail that undermines his attempt to collapse voter into spectator as the higher truth of the polis. The title of his chapter is franker: ‘The Greek Strategy: Seducing the Chorus’. For a European public to come into being, what’s needed is not a democracy determined by citizens, but a drama that entrances – ‘thrills’ – them. Politics at its best, Ankersmit had argued, is an exercise in aesthetics.

The way he tells it, his time in the 10th Special Forces Group put him in some of the most contentious, and pivotal, moments of the post-9/11 Middle East. Publicly available Army records are sparse, but they don’t contradict him. His job was to kill people deemed “high-value targets” by Army command, he says. As a member of the elite Delta Force squad, he says, he was deployed to Sadr City in 2006, the site of some of the most prolonged violence during the Iraq War, just as Saddam Hussein was executed and the “surge” began. (He declined to watch Hussein hang, even though he was invited to attend, he says.) He also claims he was deployed to Libya in the wake of Ambassador Christopher Stevens’ death at the raid on the U.S. Embassy compound in Benghazi on September 11th, 2012.

In this respect it is fair to acknowledge that, at least so far as the Inquiry has been able toascertain, thiswas far more so in the case of SASR than of the Commando Regiments. The evidencedoes not reveal a consistent pattern of misbehaviour in 2 Cdo Regtor any of its sub-units, as it doesin SASR and at least two of its squadrons, namely Squadron and Squadron. It cannot be excludedthat that may be attributable to the Inquiry having less success in breaching the code of silence in 2Cdo Regtthan in SASR, buton the available evidence the Inquiry would attribute it to the closerresemblance of 2 Cdo Regt to a conventional unit -in particular that its officers were not sidelinedand disempowered, but very much remained in practical command of operations

As to the mission, the circumstances and co-incidence of the name of the EKIA andthat of , and the contemporaneous intelligence report of an execution,were so striking asto call for further inquiry.

a whole-of-ISAF document, not an SOTG-generated targeting list;b.a ‘living’ document, in that it was subject to constant updating and review as new intelligenceand priorities emerged

Counter-nexus operations (Operation MAKHA NIWEL). Operation M AKHA N IWEL was anenduring CONOPS for SOTG counter-nexus operations, targeting the drug industry due to itsassociation with funding the insurgency, conducted by FE-

Disruption operations (Operation SARA T OFAN). Operation SARA TOFAN was an enduringCONOPS for SOTG disruption operations, to disrupt insurgent networks, conducted by FE (and itspartner force

FE-B – Force Element Bravo, a Commando Company from 2nd Commando Regiment (2 CdoRegt)

Body count competitions and the use of the Joint Priority Effects List (JPEL).Dr Crompvoetssaid that she was given the impression that there had beena ‘large number of illegal killings’that had been ‘reverse engineered’using the JPEL. Shedescribed thisas a ‘sanctionedkilllist’—a reference to a prioritised list of validated targets that may be prosecuted to achievelethal or non-lethal effects. Theimplication was thatnames of people killed were added tothe JPELafter they were killed

The following table (Table 1.09.1),

There is also the observation that appropriate scrutiny from higher up may have been avoidedin part, due to the SFofficers who have proliferated throughout the ADF.156This may havecontributed to a lack of institutional appetite to look into things earlier, either because it soundedlike the continuation of behaviours that were ‘ok in my day’and perceived troublemakers making amountain out of a molehill.On the other hand, it is notable that the present Inquiry was instigatedby and continued under two Chiefs of Army, both withSF backgrounds.

Some Joint Operations Command lawyers above the SF Task Group started to try and assert some control over what they increasingly believed were ‘sanctioned massacres’. The ROE were tightened up, but there was scepticism about whether this had any actual effect as ‘SF just got more creative in how they wrote up incidents’.145 As the lawyers started to become more ‘troublesome’, the SF unit started to rely more on their own lawyers, ‘with the promise of being inside their ‘elite tent’, doing cool stuff in return for legally polishing their version of events and the truth in a way that created enough doubt as to exonerate them.

Many people spoke of how widespread the knowledge of wrongdoing was, making it very difficult to believe that the lack of oversight can be put down to simple disinterest: What was really concerning was everyone knew which SF units, Squadrons and patrols, and under which commanders, most of the killings were perpetrated. The same names would pop up with remarkable frequency. A reasonable person would think, now that’s odd, that name has popped up at a few incidents, the circumstances and witness accounts are very similar, hmm there is a pattern here. That didn’t happen,

If they didn’t do it, they saw it. If they didn’t see it, they knew about it. If they knew about it, they probably were involved in covering it up and not letting it get back to Canberra. And to make it even harder, if they didn’t know about it, the question will be: why didn’t you, because you should have.

For example, when a Troop Commander wouldn’t let the troopers engage spotters, he wasapparently branded ‘’and unworkable.119There was a perception that this Troop Commanderreceived no support from above

While officers were not so sure to confirm this, this ,suggests that, to at least some extent, there was an attempt to keep junior officers out of the loopby soldiers and NCOs:98.99For example,while the practice appears to have been widespread, there was an attempt not to draw attentionto the use of throwdowns. .100However, the questionsweren’t asked, partly because 10144., .102This had the effect of empowering theNCOs, with Patrol Commanders basically doing the Troop Commander’s job. For example, in acompound clearance operation, the modus operandiwould be for the Troop Commander to be inan overwatch position until the area was secured. ,103but it also had the effect of removing officers from effective control in many situations,and as such, afforded an opportunity for Patrol Commanders and soldiers to act without oversight.45.In some cases, as their role became inmany ways superfluous, the traditional relationshipbetween junior officers and NCOs changed as well:It may be the case that the guidance and nurturing normally provided by NCOs to their junior officers was replaced by a more domineering or controlling approach.10446.That this is perhaps an understatement is supported by multiple accounts, .105The TroopCommanders effectively became figureheads

to take it from 18 to 20 appears linked to the deaths of two prisoners who were shot following an explosive entry into a compound that didn’t result in the expected outcome

For some rotations, a new team member freshinto theatre who hadn’t yet shot someone would be required to shoot a prisoner, ‘to pop hischerry...to prove that he was up to it’.80That appeared to be the price of entry into the in group.While healthy competition is obviously a good thing, when competition is measured by bad orinappropriate metrics internally as well as externally, it can become highly corrosive. For example,adopting a body count metric, formally or informally, is likely to skew the way operations areconceived and executed.81There is clear evidence that someelementsdid keep score of the numberof kills. While not in itself a breach of the Law of Armed Conflict, ‘in terms of establishing an ethicalframework for your troops as a Patrol Commander, it’s a clear fail’.

Running became a death sentence, even for women and children, with the deadperson’s actions being recorded as ‘tactically manoeuvring’ to a firing position or suspectedweapons cache in the subsequent report onceit had been ‘legally massaged’:75‘It got to the pointwherethe end justified the means’

If the systemis looking for and expecting enemy killed in action, it would be naïve not to expect that this is whatpeople are going to try and achieve, by whatever means were available. The narrative that emergesis not one of a limited number of exceptional events, but rather, widespread and systematicbehaviours:69‘I think there was that thirst to get out there and chase. You know, chase, chase, chase.Keep going, sometimes beyond reason’.

his coincided with the way theAustralian force began to align themselves towards a ‘Warriormentality’culturally at odds with the mission that was still supposed to be based on a ‘hearts andminds’approach, and withtheADF as a whole

the mission profile changed, and the type of activity became less‘special’and more routine, while still maintaining a high tempo, there was sense that they weretrying to create activity to justify their presence in the scale that they were deployed as SpecialOperations unit.

We were out there fighting on a daily basis. If we didn’t go out that day, I’d just about guarantee it wouldn’t make a pinch of shit of difference...we were playing with people’s lives, both ours and theirs

Contributing to this gradual decline in standards was fatigue and a general sense of loss of purpose. Fatigue is an issue that is going to be a factor on any deployment and was mentioned by multiple interviewees

in the base – the Fat Lady’s Arms – ‘somewhere there where we can do certain stuff but we’re not going to get caught and it’s not going to be regarded as misconduct because that’s who we are and that’s what we do’.42 Although unauthorised, the pub managed to get resupplied through the system. A Sergeant with 10 operational tours said, ‘I have seen alcohol consumed on every operation since 1999 by every rank on every operation since 1999, by every rank and including JTF and unit commanders’.43 While alcohol on deployments was linked to ‘risky or unacceptable behaviours’, it is ‘difficult to conclude that almost everyone in the SOCOMD chain of command was not aware of this’. 44 Alcohol was widely justified as a coping mechanism for stress, grief and high tempo operations and the unit was basically given a pass because it was ‘special’, reinforcing a perception of entitlement, with the ‘logic of exceptionalism warranting the application of different rules and behaviours to those that applied to other ADF members’.

This is not limited to a SOCOMD chain-of-command issue, of course, but reflects a wider failure of policy to provide appropriate guidance to those on the ground.36 This led to an attitude where it was preferred if the target that was supposed to be apprehended fired shots, as it justified a lethal response and removed the known problem of the person being briefly interrogated and possibly released straight back into the field

These appear to have had a corrosive effecton behaviour. First among these was the policy of ‘catch and release’as it is repeatedly referred to,which came to signify an out of touch chain of command, helping to create a ‘them and us’situationbetween them andhigher command. This involved releasing detainees if there was no clearevidence of serious criminal misconduct or if they were not considered to be important enough interms of leadership. From a policy position, one can see the logic. Unlawful or unfair detention leadsto ill feeling that ultimately can fuel an insurgency, but the rapid release of ‘known’ insurgents waspossibly ‘the single most important factor in the population’s lack of confidence in the governmentin Uruzgan Province’.25

There was some admiration for US practice, especially when it came to maintaining the ‘shockof capture’on detaineeswhere their disorientation contributes to them sharing time-sensitive anduseful information. The maintenance of this pressure was deemed essential for the successfulextraction of actionable intelligence within the narrow window of opportunity following theapprehension of a target. The desire to maintain that pressure, unsurprisingly, led to some tension.

research in the British Army demonstrates thatwhile officers were generally well aligned with the army’s stated values, this was most prominentfor cadets, declined for lieutenants and captains and only partially recovered as majors, suggestingthat whatever ethics training British junior army officers received, it was insufficient to counter theirlived experience when it came to maintaining army values

8.T

There may well have been a sense, at least at Squadron level, not least because of the numbers of EKIA, and the number of them who were found to be unarmed, or armed with only a pistol,grenade or ICOM, but to have been ‘manoeuvring tactically against the FE’, that the ROE were beingexploited, and lethal force was being used when perhaps it was not always necessary

he presence of intelligence, surveillance, andreconnaissance (ISR)assets, particularly in the air, would provide ongoing observation and imageryof events ontarget, the ISR was typically pushed ‘off target’once the FE was there. Variouslegitimate reasons were given for why this was so. One –and perhaps the least persuasive –was sothat others with access to the ISR would not be able to observe tactics, techniques and procedures.Others, which are entirely reasonable, were that once the FE was on target it was a better use ofthe ISR to monitor escape routes for potential ‘squirters’, and approaches for potential threats.However, the result was that the ISR did not provide visibility of what happened on target. TheInquiry has confirmed this in its review of many hours of Heron UAV [Unmanned Aerial Vehicle]imagery.

Australia requires a more surgical and refined national Special Forcescapability than thatrequired for the more or less conventional operations into which SOTG operations in Afghanistanevolved. The sustained use of Special Forcesto conduct what were in truth largely conventionaloperations meant that the limited pool of Special Forcespersonnel were required to deploy onmultiplerotations, with little respite between deployments. It also denied conventional forces anopportunity to deploy and learn from the experience of operations for which they were trained andsuited.While Government may have had an understandablepreference for using Special Forces,because of their proved success in the past and the lowerrisk profile, it was the ADF’s responsibilitynot simply to accede to that preference, but to provide fearless and firm advice that the protracteduse of Special Forces to conduct what were not in truth ‘special operations’, but missions that couldhave been conducted by appropriately trained and enabled conventional forces, was imprudent,unwise, and potentially jeopardising the welfare of Special Forcespersonnel.

the manner in which events were reported. It was seen asmore important to report in terms that met the expectation of higher command (such as,in theperiod 2012-2013, the practically universal description of operations as ‘ and the attribution of outcomes to the Wakunish partner force, when in reality theywere not involved in planning, were not included in orders, were not told about the objective ordestination in advance, there was a limited level of trust of them, those who inserted on the firstturn operated in effect as a patrol under the command of their Australian mentor, and most insertedon the second turn, also under the effective command of an Australian mentor)

All that said, it was at the patrol commander levelthat the criminal behaviour was conceived,committed, continued, and concealed. But for a small number of patrol commanders, and theirprotégées, it would not have been thought of, it would not have begun, it would not have continued,and, in any event,it would have been discovered. It is overwhelmingly at that level thatresponsibility resides

Those who did try to wrestle back some control were ostracised, and oftendid not receive thesupport of superior officers. Indeed, this was not confined to troop level: a squadron commanderwho insisted on proper standards (and during whose command of FE-no relevant impropriety hasemerged) was permitted to be nominated by NCOs as ‘Cock of the Year’. This attitude fostered theempowerment of the patrol commanders and, thus, thedisempowerment of those who mightcontrol and restrainthem, and the ‘warrior culture’ that some, though by no means all, of the patrolcommanders embraced. A substantial indirect responsibility falls upon those in SASR who embracedor fostered the ‘warrior culture’and the clique of NCOs who propagated it. That responsibility is tosome extent shared by those who, in misconceived loyalty to their Regiment, or their mates, havenot been prepared to ‘call out’ criminal conduct or, even to this day, decline to accept that itoccurred in the face of incontrovertible evidence, or seek to offer obscureand unconvincingjustificationsand mitigations for it

82.The position

The combined effect of many of these factors is again powerfully illustrated by the SOTGresponse to being asked by HQ JTF 633 for clarification of the QA in respect of theincident at .35There is no suggestion that the staff officers and commanders who contributed to that indignant response . But the continuation of such behaviour was enabled by their truculent attitude to being questioned

command accepted with little question that complaints by local elders of civiliancasualty incidents were an insurgent tactic, in which the elders were either complicit or coerced,and/or motivated by compensation; yet there is little evidence to support this: to the contrary, manyof the complaintsnow appear to have been legitimate

those who were ‘behind the wire’being reluctant to questionthose who were on the ground,but in turn protective of their FE by being resistant to obtaining full and accurate accounts forprovision to higher headquarters, and embellishing operational reporting to demonstrate thelegitimacy of engagements

by at leastearly 2012, there was a consistent presumption on the part of the chain of command and a numberof inquiry personnel that complaints by local elders were part of an insurgent strategy, and that theelders had either been coerced or were a willing party to supporting insurgent messaging; or weredriven by compensation. This was reflected in the manner in which the three complaintsinvestigated by the IOI were handled at multiple levels, and also in the CommandingOfficer’s comments on the . The evidentiary basis for that presumption now appears tobe slight, but that does not deny that it was prevalent at the time

also supported by theevidence of , who when asked how far up the chain of command he thought knowledgeextended tha

Inconnection with the incident, ,then a patrol second-in-command, was questioning what had happened to the prisoners. There islittle doubt that his persistence in this respect contributed to his sidelining from the patrol andtransfer to mentoring responsibilities.

The criminal behaviour described in this Reportwas conceived, committed, continued, andconcealedat patrol commander level, and it is overwhelmingly at that level that responsibilityresides

The Inquiry has found no evidence that there was knowledge of, or reckless indifference to, the commission of war crimes, on the part of commanders at troop/platoon, squadron/company or Task Group Headquarters level, let alone at higher levels such as Commander Joint Task Force (CJTF) 633, Joint Operations Command, or Australian Defence Headquarters.

The role of the patrol commanders in target development marginalised theprofessional intelligence advisers.The imperative of using air assets when they were available,coupled with an implied KPI based on EKIA achieved, caused SOTG personnel, particularly FE, topressure intelligence staff for target information, even when it was not actionable.Control ofintelligence reporting meant that command was denied an alternative perspective.Someintelligence staff developed suspicions, but were not in a position to challenge the accounts givenbythose who were ‘on the ground’

was asked about his relationship with intelligence staff working within the SOCC. ’sreply (italics for emphasis) was:Q123.... A.I don’t think they were well regarded or relied upon because thetargeting at thatpoint had been really delegated for particular targets to patrol commanders.And the patrol commanders really became the subject matter expert, if you like.It’s certainly what they wanted to be called about a particular target.So really, it undercut the int staff’s ability -the int staff’sability within the SOCC to do their job beyond the collation of different intelligence sources, the reporting that we were doing and orders of, you know,if we were about to do a targetingpackage we would get them to give a general outline.I think in terms of specific targets they were really just facilitating the patrol commanders to do the analysis and also to follow leads.

As the SOTG S2, was at a level on the Headquartersabove the FE intelligence staff;however,FE intelligence staff workeddirectly to the operations staff and the OC,and onlyhad a measure of indirect technical control over them

he devolution of operational command to the extent thatthe national command has no real oversight of the conduct of SF operations not only has thepotential to result in the national interest and mission being overlooked or subordinated, butdeprives national command of oversight of those operations

commanders were protective of their subordinates, including in respect of investigationsand inquiries. Again, that is an inherent responsibility of command. However, the desireto protect subordinates from what was seen as over-enthusiastic scrutiny fuelled a ‘waragainst higher command’, in which reporting was manipulated so that incidents wouldnot attract the interest or scrutiny of higher command.The staff officers did not knowthat they were concealing unlawful conduct, but they did proactively take steps toportray events in a way which would minimise the likelihood of attracting appropriatecommand scrutiny. This became so routine that operational reporting had a ‘boilerplate’flavour, and was routinely embellished, and sometimes outright fabricated, although theauthors of the reports didnot necessarily know that to be so,

It is evident that fear of the consequences of reporting misconduct to the chain of commandhas deterred some from doing so.In most cases this is fear for career prospects, although in somethere has been fear of physical reprisals.In any event, experience shows that where a complaint orreport is adverse to a member’s chain of command, there are powerful practical constraints onmaking it.To enable members to feel safe and secure in reporting concerns about their chain ofcommand, units need to have an alternative reporting line.Traditionally, this has been providedinformally by the Chaplain and the Regimental Medical Officer, but a more clearly authorised formaland confidential system, to which members can report concerns without fear of retribution, isrequired to overcome the inherent constraints on reporting about the chain of command throughthe chain of command. This needs to be embedded at unit level, so that it is not remote andunfamiliar from those who may wish to resort to it, and so that doing so is not perceived as ‘goingoutside the unit’.As a suggestion only, it might be based on the XO network

Theintroduction of a second officer into a troop as Executive Officer (XO) would reinforce theofficer influence, provide a sounding board, and enable oneofficer to be ‘on the ground’’withanother in an overwatch position.The troop sergeant, with equivalent rank to the patrolcommanders, has limited authority over them.The Inquiry has been attracted by the BritishSpecialBoat Service model, in which the troop sergeant equivalent has the rank of Colour Sergeant –superior to the sergeant patrol commanders, while still inferior to theSquadron Sergeant Major(SSM, Warrant Officer Class Two). While the requirement is less obvious in the CommandoRegiments, a similar approach could be adopted there

Junior officersin SASR, at troop command level,were not well-served by mentoring andsupport, and were able to be sidelined by the dominant patrol commander clique.Operationalfactors contributed to this, enabling the troop commander to be dislocated for plausible reasons inan overwatch position.The empower of junior officers requires the support -previously lackingbecause of the ‘rite of passage’ and ‘sink or swim philosophy’ –of Commanding Officers andSquadron Officers Commanding, and of Warrant Officers

were routinely embellished, often using boilerplate language, in order to proactively demonstrate apparent compliance with ROE, and to minimise the risk of attracting the interest of higher headquarters. This had upstream and downstream effects: upstream, higher headquarters received a misleading impression of operations, and downstream, operators and patrol commanders knew how to describe an incident in order to satisfy the perceived reporting requirements.

42.Professor Whetham has observed, in his Recommendation 1 (Deliver education to all SOCOMDpersonnel on the causes of war crimes), that educating military personnel about the causes of warcrimes so that they understand how such crimes can come to be seen as almost required andtherefore justified,is vital, but not easy.He suggests that military ethics training should employ casestudies drawn from military personnel ‘from the same services and country as themselves’,so thatthey understand that they too could become torturers or murderers –thatthe ‘good guys’ can alsodo bad things. He recommends that every member of SOCOMD should receive education on thecauses of war crimes, tobe delivered by SOCOMD soldiers themselves and reviewed by appropriateexternal (ie, non-SOCOMD) reviewers who can act as critical friends; and that members of theSOCMD community should be recorded talking candidly, and on the record, about the ethical driftthat took place over a period of time, how hard itwas to resist the prevailing organisational cultureand the missed opportunities that could and should have been taken to address the failures that somany people appeared to recognise at the time,but felt powerless to change.The Inquiry adoptsthese recommendations.43.In particular, the Inquiry believes that in high stress situations, soldiers will default to theirpractical training experience, rather thanto theory learnt in a classroom. They will respond as theyhave practised responding in exercises.This can be addressed by embedding in continuationtraining, as well as in the selection process, practical ethical decision-making scenarios, based onthe types of incidents described in Part 2, in which trainees are under pressure to make unethicaldecisions

As operations in Afghanistan evolved, SOTG were, at least to a substantial degree, notconducting ‘special operations’, but missions that could have been conducted by properly-enabledand supported conventional forces. In particular, FE was predominantly involvedin kill/capture and disruption type missions, which were a form of cordon and search; whileForceElement (FE)was predominantly engaged in company-strength attacks and clearances

, the devolution of operational command to the extent that thenational command has no real oversight of the conduct of Special Forcesoperations not only hasthe potential to result in the national interest and mission being overlooked or subordinated, butdeprives national command of oversight of those operations.What is ‘special’ about Special Forcesis the operations they conduct. If anything, the secretive nature of their operations makes effectiveoversight by National command all the more important. That they conduct ‘special’ operations doesnot mean that they should be excepted from ordinary command and oversight arrangements

Moreover, ISAF SOF, under the operational command of which the SOTG sat, were stronglyinfluenced by a predominantly ISAF SOF attitude and strategy which was focussedon killing or capturing insurgent leaders and disrupting insurgent lines of communications

When soldiers are exposed to that environment repeatedly, over a decade, without lengthydwell times between deployments, it is unsurprising that the moral compass of some may shift.It isno coincidence that it was in the later years of Operation (OP) SLIPPER – in particular –thatthe problems reached their nadir

All this occurred in a foreign and different environment, isolated from the norms of Australiansociety, and out of sight of those whose supervisionor presence would ordinarily impose restraintson behaviour.Those are conditions which are fertile for a ‘Lord of the Flies’ syndrome to prosper,and there are strong signs of that afoot on Rotation , Rotation and Rotation

Catch and release,and the kill count

Typically, the troop commanders were ontheir first SOTG deployment. Their patrol commanders were vastly more experienced.Of itselfthat is not unusual.However, in a carry-over from domestic counter-terrorism tactics,techniques, and procedures, the patrol commanders became the lead planners for operations.The operational control and influence of troop commanders was diminished, if notmarginalised.

Those who did try to wrestle back some controlwere ostracised, and often did not receive the support of superior officers. Indeed, this wasnot confined to troop level: a squadron commander who insisted on proper standards (andduring whose command of Force Element [FE]no relevant impropriety has emerged)was permitted to be nominated by NCOs as ‘Cock of the Year’.

The officers who might have counter-balanced this were disempowered. This commencedfrom selection, where non-commissioned officers (NCOs) were effectively the gatekeepers.There is a perception in many quarters that officers were selected on the basis that they wouldbe compliant.Junior officers were poorly supported. They were not well-mentored, but wererather left to swim or sink.

rom 2010, rotary wing assets became increasingly available to support SOTG operations, anda pattern developed by which there would be alternating four day windows during which rotarywing assets would be available. As a result, a cycle was established of four days planning and targetdevelopment (during which the Force Element remained positioned to conduct vehicle-mountedoperations if necessary), followed by a four day ‘rotary wing period’ (during which operations wereconducted).

FE-A – Force Element Alpha , based on a SASR troop, or troop plus

Composition

The deployment pattern was structured around the Afghan fighting season, whichtraditionally begins in April as snow melts in the mountains and slows in November as winter setsin. Generally, there was a rotation from February to July, a rotation from July to November, and awinter rotation from November to February

For East Timor it is about 20 per cent; for Afghanistan it is higher than that at about 40 per cent. These are volunteers and, in most cases, very enthusiastic volunteers. For those who are on a second tour in a specific theatre— and I am still talking about Special Operations Command—about 20 per cent are on a second tour of East Timor, and because Afghanistan is more topical, about 30 per cent are on their second tour. For Special Operations Command, because they do tend to be more specialised and because they are not so great in number, we are inside the respite period for a number of them

Special Operations Task Group Rotations

Commandos are very well equipped. They have very heavy firepower

May 2006 - October 2008 (four rotations)

May 2007 - December 2013 (17 rotations)

August/September 2005 - September 2006 (three rotations)

October 2001-November 2002 (three rotations)

Operationally, the SAS works in patrols of four to six men and there’s rarely an officer among them. This is different from the rest of the army, where an officer is almost always within 100 metres of a soldier or helicopter or truck. An SAS patrol can be isolated for weeks, save occasional radio situation reports. This is where sinister events occurred.

Before the war, on a tactical level the Armenian army was superior: it had better officers, more motivated soldiers, and a more agile leadership. In all previous wars with Azerbaijan, this proved to be decisive. But Azerbaijan found a way to work around it. This is where the drones came in: they allowed the Azeris to reconnoitre first the Armenian position and then the placement of reserves. Armenian positions then could be extensively shelled with conventional artillery, weakening their defences. Drones then guided the onslaught towards the Armenian reserves, bringing in artillery, multiple-rocket systems with cluster munitions, their own missiles, or using Israeli-made LORA ballistic missiles to destroy bridges or roads linking the reserves with the front. Once the Armenian side was incapable of sending reserves into battle, the Azeri army could move in any number it wished to overwhelm the isolated Armenian positions. This procedure was repeated day after day, chipping one Armenian position away each day and resupplying artillery during the night. This tactic also worked well in mountainous territory the Armenians thought would be easy to defend. In the mountains, there is only one road connecting the front to the rear, which made it even easier for drones to spot targets. When the battle over Shusha demonstrated that the Armenians would not stand a chance even in this territory, the Armenian army started to disintegrate and Yerevan had no choice than to agree a ceasefire on adverse terms.