Simulating Syrian Intervention? 01/11/2012
Posted by Vaughn in Conflict, Defense, Global, Policy, Politics.Tags: Bashar al-Assad, Foreign Policy, Global Security, Syria
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I RECENTLY READ that the Ministry of Defense (M.O.D.), Britain’s equivalent to the Department of Defense, is having an issue with keeping its recruits’ attention. (Not a real surprising story there.) The M.O.D.’s inability to keep the attention of its potential canon fodder is not being blamed on Britain’s deployment to horrific war zones — after all this is in the job description and what these young men have been sold, and have been buying [my own self included, in a smaller sense] for centuries, as a rite of passage — but because M.O.D.’s war simulators were not fully engaging potential grunts into the peaked interest necessary to compel full commitment to the nation’s military defense. Those boys, mostly; they’d probably rather let DICE and Activision virtually teleport them to the pixelized counterparts of the countries that the West are currently entangled with.
Those who game or follow entertainment business news, will know that Activision and DICE are the names attached to two firms who currently control the first-person shooter/combat simulation market with their current Battlefield 3 (part of the Battlefield series) and Modern Warfare 3 (a part of the Modern Warfare behemoth) titles, respectively. The games, to a lesser degree, are a crash-course in urban warfare, general sniper tactics — the latter, particularly online — and the all-out mayhem soldiers should (somewhat) expect in fighting. But this cannot be stressed enough, that this only to a degree. (You’re in a cushy room, for God sakes.) There are none of the tragedies of war, there are no days and weeks spent in terrible weather conditions on patrol, nor the 50-70 pounds of gear, no dying friends, no complicated interactions with locals who may be resistance fighters: No left behind family left to pick up the pieces of a shattered promise to go through life together. The article is important, though, because it tells the novice and those outside of the subculture of combat simulations’ gamers, in general, what this type of gaming has become.
Troops are so used to playing high-quality commercial games set in combat zones that they tend to lose concentration unless the MoD simulations look equally realistic. This has become an important issue at the MoD, which is increasingly turning to digital simulations to help prepare soldiers for duty.
Thousands of troops sent to Afghanistan have been trained on Virtual Battlespace2, a spin-off from a commercial game that can, for instance, test their responses when they come under mortar attack from insurgents.
Though the military stresses that these games only supplement traditional methods, it reflects the way technology is transforming military training. With budgets being squeezed across the MoD, simulations are also a comparatively cheap way of giving troops a “virtual” taste of what they might come up against in a warzone.
- “Ministry of Defence Forced to Update Its War Games for Xbox Generation,” The Guardian
The modern video game experience trumps what many of the advanced militaries of the world can produce in order to train their soldiers for battle, and commercial gaming has unexpectedly become an unofficial augment to government’s official means of recruiting, as war culture products have been, since there has ever been a thing called “culture.” The reason it’s such an uphill slog for governments’ recruiters versus the more realistic vision presented by the gaming industry, particularly those two big-name companies just mentioned, is the profit motive of gaming companies to produce the most realistic experience to date, with each iteration becoming better than the other, as the bar is raised year by year. And as pointed to in the article, the gaming industry as a whole is able to spend more money on perfecting their simulations than the government.
All of this has produced a dialogue between the M.O.D. and private gaming firms to specifically help produce better products for the government. In the United States this has already happened to some degree, when the U.S. Army actually released a game called America’s Army, to decent reviews and sales. So it is quite evident that the military branches of Western governments have a particularly high regard for the ability of games to recruit and to simulate, which is why I didn’t scoff when I read about a video game being used to seriously discuss potential outcomes with a hypothetical military operation in a current hot-spot.
Foreign Policy recently ran a feature article — “The Syrian Invasion” — discussing the outcomes of a game that simulates military intervention in Syria, a nation currently embroiled in a civil uprising that has Syria’s regime and president, Bashar al-Assad, tightening his vice-grip on his slipping power and the melting of his version of law and order. Combat Mission: Shock Force, simulates a fictional 2008 invasion of the country in response to state-sponsored terror. It’s not equivalent to what the Modern Warfare and Battlefield series have become in the culture, but the game is realistic. It primarily focuses on the larger strategic elements of such a war, however, more than the moves of individuals or squads in space, in order to squeeze off rounds and move through tight quarters to meet objectives.
Produced in 2007, the game, as the author of the article says, “shows the hallmarks of considerable research into the forces of the combatants and the capabilities of the weapons they use.” Generally, though, it’s about command and control and the decisions and factors involved in determining the success of such a combat enterprise. The game allows for several options in regards to how one might choose to invade Syria to face a melange of elite forces using the old Iraqi “Republican Guard” tag, fedayeen units and conscripts armed with souped Soviet-Era mechanized weaponry and Kornet missiles. One can go in with the U.S. Marine Expeditionary Brigade, a U.S. Army Stryker light-armored vehicle element or a multi-national coalition led by Germany, comprised of Britain, Canada and the Netherlands.
The results of the simulations varied, but the outcomes and the way in which the battles unfolded was a range with a core theme of N.A.T.O. units attempting to move dug-in Syrian fighters. According to the article’s author, at times it appeared to play out like Iraq at the beginning of the insurgency in 2003 with Syrian forces made up of conscripts and fedayeen fighting with rocket-propelled grenades and machine-guns, and at other times, the fighting looked like Lebanon in 2006 with Syrian commandos ducking-in-and-out using Kornet anti-tank missiles and fighting in a guerrilla style. What was found — as pointed out, in a still somewhat limited simulation system that doesn’t take into account drone intelligence operations assisting Western generals, or the auxiliary forces that would find their way to fight in support of Syria such as Hezbollah – was that military intervention in the country could become a mixed bag, highly dependent on which Syrian military shows up.
If it is the Syrian military that cowardly fires at civilians to squelch dissent and hasn’t fought a real opposing force in 30 years, then there would be some somewhat non-damaging Western losses, from a public perception sense. But if the Alawite-dominated Syrian force that decides it must fight to the end engages, primarily motivated by the consequences of what a loss would mean to their people in a Shia dominated land following a regime change; politically damaging numbers could conceivably be racked up against any Western coalition of fighters. While intervention in Syria hasn’t been prominently discussed, it has been pondered by some, and after the limited handling of Libya, it seems unlikely that a full intervention would ever take place. But if this video game simulation that factors in many of the things generals would have to, tells us anything, it’s probably that doing anything like this could be a courageously stupid coin flip.
Read “The Syrian Invasion” at Foreign Policy [Here]
The War in Africa 12/07/2011
Posted by Vaughn in Defense, Global, Journalism.Tags: Africa, Foreign Policy, Global Security, Special Operations
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Photo Credit: Army Times
STARTING with The Nation‘s, Jeremy Scahill, reporting of secret bases used for the War on Terror (I forget that this is now an anachronism, and the conflict is now known as “The Overseas Counterinsurgency Operation“), in Somalia, the new-ish reports of a drone program in the region and President Obama’s recent move to send 1oo special operations soldiers to act as advisers; it is clear that there is a move afoot to focus American efforts on the continent. This, accompanied by the newly established Africa Command (AFRICOM), to oversee counter-terrorism operations in the region, makes this only more obvious. The motivation behind this is partly the rise of al-Shabaab (“Movement of Striving Youth”), an African al-Qaeda affiliate working primarily out of controlled areas in Somalia. (And years of perhaps inchoate policy in regards to terror threats on the continent, however there are some who ask whether the cells in Africa present a clear threat to America.)
When it has come to intelligence, there has simply been a vacuum on the African continent, both those of the technical and human variety. The war in Africa, itself, beyond the War on Terror produces a new reality with regards to the overall global counter-terror effort, as we ramp down in Afghanistan and Iraq and ramp-up elsewhere in what seems like the equivalent of proxy wars, like those of the Cold War, only this time focused on counter-terror. Recently, the Army Times conducted a six-month long, six-part special investigation on the matter in a series called “Secret War in Africa” which began with “The Secret War: Africa Ops May Just Be Starting.”
In “The Secret War: Africa Ops May Just Be Starting” the Army Times tells of a pivotal mission of divergent details and accounts — in the sense of what’s true depends on just who you ask — where two human intelligence (HUMINT) soldiers were taken hostage as either covert operators or as non-covert military personnel, in what may have been a clandestine operation in the Ogaden of Ethipoia. It was the first major incident, that indicated something had changed with our approach.
The two men were on the ground as part of Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa’s intelligence directorate, and were granted permission to go “beyond the wire” to handle, presumably, intel-collection duties. But just how they did that may have been part of the problem, as they reportedly developed a cover story which had them working for the Red Cross and which created a much larger issue when they were eventually approached by Ethiopian troops, and their weapons were found. The two soldiers were detained by the Ethiopian forces who presumed the soldiers to be hostile, particularly after their cover story of working for the Red Cross was upturned by their concealed pistols.
Depending on the conflicting account you choose to believe, the men were held anywhere from 48 hours, according to Major General (Maj. Gen.) Timothy Ghromley the head of Central Command during that time; or about 10 days, according to a senior intelligence officer. The account by Maj. Gen. Ghromley had the men under his charge acting in rogue. According to him, they were not to be operating in a covert manner:
‘They’re completely overt,’ he said. ‘They’re supposed to identify themselves as U.S. service members.’
The account by the intelligence official implies something a bit different, calling it a “clandestine operation.” The men were not in their uniforms, but according to the senior official; if they were detained they’d be able to declare their status as American soldiers, so that in the official’s words, “somebody could get them the hell out of there.” It eventually took the ambassador to Ethiopia, the State Department, and Central Command commander, (now-retired) Admiral William Fallon, to free them. The incident led to African intelligence operations in the specific area to become public and compromised. Everything from notepads, military-related items and papers, was scooped up by the Ethiopian government, according to the State Department. An intelligence official quoted in the Army Times article stated:
‘It was like amateur hour, this team that got rolled up,’ the intelligence official said. ‘There was information that they had that they should not have been carrying … It gave away techniques and procedures that we couldn’t afford to do, because we knew at that time that al-Qaida was building up its capability in Somalia and that was why we were trying damn hard to get into Somalia with really sensitive collection.’
The event which transpired between March 2007 and March 2008, depending on who one talks to (again), may have set the operations back in the horn of Africa for years. That is until now. A quick timeline of events show an escalation between the summer of 2009 to roughly the present:
• On Sept. 14, 2009, a U.S. special operations helicopter raid killed Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, a senior al-Qaida in East Africa figure.
• On April 19, 2011, the U.S. captured Somali national and al-Shabaab member Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame, 25, as he crossed the Gulf of Aden on a ship to Yemen from Somalia. The U.S. held Warsame, who allegedly has links to Yemen’s al-Qaida branch, for two months on a Navy ship before flying him to the U.S.
• On June 7, TFG [Transitional Federal Government] forces killed Harun Fazul, the most-wanted al-Qaida figure in East Africa, when he mistook their roadblock in Mogadishu for an al-Shabaab position.
• On June 23, U.S. drones struck al-Shabaab targets near Kismayo.
• On July 6, there were reports of airstrikes in Lower Juba, the southernmost region of Somalia, according to the website SomaliaReport.com.
• In early August, under increasing military pressure from the TFG [Transitional Federal Government] forces backed up by 9,000 African Union peacekeepers from Uganda and Burundi, al-Shabaab announced its withdrawal from Mogadishu.
• On Sept. 15, there were more airstrikes on an al-Shabaab training camp in Taabta in Lower Juba, according to SomaliaReport.com.
• On Sept. 21, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal reported that the U.S. is building a “ring of secret drone bases” including facilities in Ethiopia, the Seychelles and “the Arabian Peninsula.”
• On Sept. 23, airstrikes hit al-Shabaab’s main camp at the Kismayo airport.
• On Oct. 4, an al-Shabaab truck bomb killed an estimated 65 people in Mogadishu.
Read “The Secret War in Africa” series at the Military Times [Here]
9.11.01 | A Confirmation 09/11/2011
Posted by Vaughn in Conflict, Defense, Editorial, Essay, Global.Tags: 9/11, Foreign Policy, Politics
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9.11.01 | A Confirmation
THE REGULAR SCHOOL YEAR hadn’t begun yet, it was still summer and I was taking a stats course during summer session at the local city college; a course I didn’t take all that seriously. My mom and dad didn’t wake me up that morning, after watching the replays from hours earlier of what was going on back east, for some unknown reason. I’ve never asked them why. It was probably out of fear and their own still-developing conversation of what was next. I am an only child and at times my parents, possibly because I am pretty much their sole fully-fleshed frame of reference for young people, often treated me like I was much younger than I was. They didn’t say a thing to me other than “Did you see?”; when I did awake.
A couple of people on my father’s side of the family worked at the Pentagon — an aunt and an uncle — but they were not hurt. That part of it is hazy, so I am not exactly sure when we found out they were safe. My dad’s nearly thirty year career in the military and my life behind the concertina wire of base fences overseas already made me acutely aware of the situation, far before it happened. We’d had run-ins with al-Qaeda in the years prior, and I’d already had discussions about Osama Bin Laden before the event, and I wrote somewhat extensively about Clinton’s response in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Khartoum to al-Qaeda’s bombing of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and the U.S.S. Cole in my high school political science course, and I even discussed it with a teacher who was a former Marine.
Still — despite the cliché — this was truly a detached cinematic experience for me, an apocalyptic Hollywood flick about the dangers of this world. My nascent sociopolitical and personal consciousness was not yet jibing with this reality, even with my knowledge of Bin Laden’s already fully-realized applications of terror abroad. To me, this moment I saw on replay was the flickering images of The Siege. I drove to that morning statistics’ lecture and walked through the campus in a zombieish haze, wondering why I even decided to go, when the professor said something like: “For those interested, they’ll be playing the news all day in the conference room.”
The weeks and months just after, I remember discussing with a professor during office hours what it was like being at school during the uncertainty of Vietnam, knowing that at some point you could be called on — as the Afghanistan War hadn’t started yet, and I believed that there could be a draft — and he said: “Oh, I think these times will be far more interesting.” Shit, if he wasn’t right. With another professor, I remember saying, “We have to be wary of producing even more terrorists, in our response.” (Shit, if I wasn’t right.)
9/11 was ultimately for me a clarion call that I feel and hear to this day, and which I probably will feel for the rest of my life. I took courses on terrorism and on social movement organizations, which had a specific component in the lectures on terror groups, and I took classes on Mid-East relations, because of it. I also declared as an international development studies major during the year after; and I’ve just recently begun to develop an interest in picking up more languages. Because if you can’t understand another culture’s language, then you can’t truly understand that culture. And I also further looked to understand al-Qaeda’s reach in my other home, my mom’s native land, the Philippines.
I ended up feeling even more like a child of the world because of the event, part of a tapestry of people who looked at that moment and said: “We are one against the extremism and terror, and want to understand why,” while not feeling particularly heartened by the racial prejudice, arrogance and disease of misinformation that I could see forthcoming in the States. I felt not a part of the jingoistic America I was beginning to see. Still, a part of me felt the real threat from terror that the fearful version of America I saw was feeling, but also the resolve of my own patriotism; which believed in the idea that our response was necessary and should be swift, pronounced and surgical. I also believed that we could and should respond to this event, while fiercely maintaining our ideals of “exceptionalism.”
Further, I was determined to absorb the notion that the kind of inequality in the poorer communities of our nation and the structural problems within our economic system that I saw ravage America’s streets and which created various levels of rage against the power structure, and which I heard in hip-hop and specifically Tupac’s lines, was similar to the anger that was ultimately being mobilized by Islamist extremism around the world; but instead it wasn’t the marginalized ethnic minorities in our borders, but the hungry and suffering populations all over the globe who exist in their lands with little development, great discontent and burdened by their lots of young and uneducated. This helped to focus my lens.
Looking back over the last ten, I could chart my growth as a kid and then as a young man who was influenced profoundly by this moment. I began to question faith as a whole during this time, admittedly with only some childhood experiences with Catholicism; and now I was pointing to the darkest corners of belief — seen in the myriad forms of religious radicalism which wrought events like this — as a part of my justification for my agnosticism and then my atheism.
This time also blotched my view of our government and chipped away at some of my idealism, as I began the path to cynicism as one of the foolish who believed that there was a chance that the Iraq War could change the map of the Middle East — regardless of whether or not it was justified — since I actually never bought the story of W.M.D.s. And to further complicate this dangerously slippery worldview, I believed that in the end, if the war did “change the map,” it would actually provide a decent moral justification: that of providing another democracy in the region, to act as a countervailing force against the extremism we faced. I was just so appallingly blasé about it. How did that happen? After I was myself surrounded by war, my whole life, in some way?
What I didn’t get was that war was always to be a final measure that was reached with great deliberation, and it wasn’t to be engaged in just because it could meet a desired, possible peace-creating and seemingly existential end, even if it seemed so easy, and waged against an already diminished military which we had encountered before, as was the case with Iraq. I didn’t realize that the drumbeat to war, which I was swept up in, and which was supported by most of the New York Times‘ op-eds, was just a mere rally-around-the-flag that I had bought into, although for an altogether different reasoning; and this was despite my disdain for that new jingoism.
The events of 9/11 probably didn’t change me in the sense that it placed me on a path to becoming someone else I wasn’t going to be before it, essentially spurred to make a 180 degree pivot, but it did congeal who I was on the path to being. These ten years after have cleared up my thinking about and strengthened my interests in the world that created it. It also made me realize the costs that so few of us pay in the prosecution of a war that we all benefit from, in some small way, even if we don’t believe we do. The War on Terror was undertaken for a nation of people, among other things, who are ten years after, as disconnected from the struggle as they were before. (Other than their dealings with the T.S.A.) Only one percent of us fight these wars, and that one percent fight it over and over, re-deployed constantly. And then, if lucky, because they survived, they will fight it again, in their minds at night or in their struggle every day without a limb.
