Quotulatiousness

February 12, 2010

Careful wording of poll questions significantly influences responses

Filed under: Media, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:09

I know, “duh!”

But most people don’t know how much the choice of questions does influence the outcome of polling. This is a perfect example:

As the Obama administration proposes repealing the policy known as “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” a new New York Times/CBS News poll finds that a majority of the public support allowing openly gay men and women to serve in the military.

There’s less support, however, for allowing homosexuals to serve openly.

Confused?

The results highlight the importance of wording on the issue. In a test, half of the poll’s respondents were asked their opinion on permitting “gay men and lesbians” to serve, and the other half were asked about permitting “homosexuals” to serve.

The wording of the question proved to make a difference. Seven in 10 respondents said they favor allowing “gay men and lesbians” to serve in the military, including nearly 6 in 10 who said they should be allowed to serve openly. But support was somewhat lower among those who were asked about allowing “homosexuals” to serve, with 59 percent in favor, including 44 percent who support allowing them to serve openly.

This is a very simple example. It can get a lot more sneaky:

February 11, 2010

Britain to try new method of trimming defence budget: locking the generals out

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:40

It’s an unusual way of “[fixing] the counter-productive incentives within the system”:

Lord Drayson, the British arms industry’s man inside the Ministry of Defence, has moved to lock the heads of the armed services out of the room in which the Forces’ future is to be settled. This is being billed as an attempt to prevent interservice bickering, but it will leave the rapacious UK arms business facing almost no uniformed opposition in its bid to pocket more government cash.

The Financial Times, having seen a copy of a speech to be delivered by Drayson, reports that a new MoD committee set up to “review direction and affordability” will not include the heads of the army, navy and air force “because we need to fix the counter-productive incentives within the system”, according to Drayson.

“We need to make sure that the decisions made about capability are rigorously examined… from the perspective of Defence overall and not a single viewpoint within Defence,” the noble lord is expected to add.

A skeptic might assume that there’s no good reason for this, but there is a plausible explanation:

The RAF, left to itself, would squander fortunes on buying more Eurofighters and then turning them into a deep-strike force capable of penetrating strong enemy air defences — a thing that it is vanishingly unlikely the UK will need to do. The Army is currently planning to spend no less than £14bn recreating its heavy tank force, despite the fact that it is 20 years since that force went to war — and the general who commanded it then has since said that in fact the last real tank battles ever seen took place 20 years before that.

The Navy is also wasting money foolishly at the moment, not on aircraft carriers as everyone thinks — those are a good idea and a joint-service one to boot, and cheap in this context at £4-5bn — but on billion-pound unarmed missile destroyers.

February 8, 2010

Further skepticism warranted

Filed under: China, India, Military — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:28

If, as I believe, China’s official economic statistics are not to be depended upon, even more skepticism is required whenever the topic of military spending is discussed:

In Asia, China is increasing its lead in defense spending. China does not release accurate data on defense spending (a common trait in all communist nations), but admits that its defense spending has doubled in the last decade. Current Chinese defense spending is believed to be $90 billion a year. That’s nearly ten times the $9.2 billion Taiwan spends. China spends twice what Japan does, and more than three times South Koreas’ $24 billion. Tiny Singapore spends nearly $6 billion a year, and has one of the most effective, man-for-man, forces in the region. India, which is increasingly becoming a military rival of China, spends about $30 billion a year. Australia spends about $24 billion a year. All the other nations in the region spend relatively small amounts, barely enough to keep threadbare forces fed and minimally equipped. China’s only allies in the region; North Korea and Pakistan, together spend less than $5 billion a year on defense.

China increased its defense spending 14.9 percent last year. That’s down from the 17.9 percent jump in 2008. China claims that its defense spending is only 1.4 percent of GDP (compared to 4 percent for the U.S. and 1-2 percent for most other Western nations.) But China keeps a lot of defense spending off the official defense budget, and actual spending is closer to three percent of GDP. Currently, the U.S. has a GDP of $13.8 trillion, Japan $4.4 trillion and China, $3.5 trillion.

February 5, 2010

Crying “Wolf!” about China

Filed under: China, Economics, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:38

Jon, my former virtual landlord sent me a link to this article by Robert Fogel, suggesting that it was “time for another one of your ‘whistling past the graveyard / you can’t trust the numbers’ posts”. And he’s quite right.

As with just about every other “forward looking” report on China, Fogel focuses on current trends which cannot continue in a straight line:

In 2040, the Chinese economy will reach $123 trillion, or nearly three times the economic output of the entire globe in 2000. China’s per capita income will hit $85,000, more than double the forecast for the European Union, and also much higher than that of India and Japan. In other words, the average Chinese megacity dweller will be living twice as well as the average Frenchman when China goes from a poor country in 2000 to a superrich country in 2040. Although it will not have overtaken the United States in per capita wealth, according to my forecasts, China’s share of global GDP — 40 percent — will dwarf that of the United States (14 percent) and the European Union (5 percent) 30 years from now. This is what economic hegemony will look like.

Maybe. Or maybe the demographics that this ultra-expansionist scenario depends on won’t play out the way Fogel thinks. There’s also the problem of depending (in any meaningful way) on official government statistics:

Most accounts of China’s economic ascent offer little but vague or threatening generalities, and they usually grossly underestimate the extent of the rise — and how fast it’s coming. (For instance, a recent study by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace predicts that by 2050, China’s economy will be just 20 percent larger than that of the United States.) Such accounts fail to fully credit the forces at work behind China’s recent success or understand how those trends will shape the future. Even China’s own economic data in some ways actually underestimate economic outputs.

[. . .]

though it’s a common refrain that Chinese data are flawed or deliberately inflated in key ways, Chinese statisticians may well be underestimating economic progress. This is especially true in the service sector because small firms often don’t report their numbers to the government and officials often fail to adequately account for improvements in the quality of output. In the United States as well as China, official estimates of GDP badly underestimate national growth if they do not take into account improvements in services such as education and health care. (Most great advances in these areas aren’t fully counted in GDP because the values of these sectors are measured by inputs instead of by output. An hour of a doctor’s time is considered no more valuable today than an hour of a doctor’s time was before the age of antibiotics and modern surgery.) Other countries have a similar national accounting problem, but the rapid growth of China’s service sector makes the underestimation more pronounced.

Well, then, at least Fogel accepts the notion that the official data may not be accurate. That’s better than a lot of commentators, although he’s still looking at it as if the official numbers were some sort of “baseline”. They’re not (although he does make a very good point that GDP numbers don’t capture improvements in quality . . . but that’s true for all economies, not just China’s). They’re even more pure fiction than the Climate Research Unit’s imaginary data.

It’s not even a deliberate lie: it’s a natural artifact of the current Chinese economic model. China’s economy is much more free now than it was ten years ago, but it’s not a free market economy yet. The central planners still attempt to control the “levers” of the economy — and they have some pretty crude ways of doing that. During the modernization of the industrial sector, probably the biggest driving force was the Peoples’ Liberation Army (PLA). They needed huge quantities of equipment, and the government didn’t want to buy everything from former Soviet and Warsaw Pact inventories (for one thing, the quality was generally poor and the technology was at least a generation behind the West).

This meant that the PLA needed — and got — much more say in what was produced and where it was produced. In other centrally planned economies, the state handled this sort of industrial policy. In China, the PLA got directly involved. A Soviet arms factory might have a military liason office with a general, several staff officers, and some GRU/KGB/NKVD oversight. The Chinese equivalent would have the general directly in charge of the factory, running it like a division of the army.

In this way, the PLA stopped being just the customer/end user. They cut out the middleman and absorbed the entire supply chain. The PLA became a significant economic player in the Chinese industrial economy . . . and this is still true today. The generals aren’t formally in charge, but they own the companies that do military production.

So what? So let’s look at how a civilian corporation’s incentives differ from one owned directly by the army. In a civilian corporation, the CEO runs the business with an eye to generating the largest profit possible while staying (for the most part) within the law. A CEO who deviates from this to ride a favourite hobby horse will eventually face the wrath of the stockholders who want that maximized profit. There are natural limits on how much freedom to invest in uneconomic activity any CEO will be given. Sensible stockholders don’t try to micromanage the firm, but do raise questions if too much of the company’s efforts are devoted to things clearly not related to the company’s long term benefit. Company accounts can be rigged, for a time, to show misleading results, but eventually (Enron, Worldcom, etc.) the truth will out.

A Chinese firm that’s owned by the army? Profit may be nice, but the “CEO” reports to a different master: the guys with the guns. The company accounts will show exactly what the guys with the guns want them to show . . . and the oversight and auditing committee members carry submachine guns. You’re told that your target is 10% growth? Don’t you think that the reported result will be at least 10%? Because your life may depend on the reported results being acceptable.

If the PLA had scaled back their involvement in the economy as the economy liberalized, this might only be a problem in old fashioned “heavy” industries. There’s not much evidence that this happened, however. The PLA’s portfolio may not include all sectors of the economy (even the PLA must have limits), but the official stats can’t indicate what portion of reported growth is from freer parts of the economy and what portion is from the 47th PLA industrial army.

Then there’s the other factor that will hobble China’s reported growth, demographics:

It’s the same story with the relative decline of a Europe plagued by falling fertility as its era of global economic clout finally ends. Here, too, the trajectory will be more sudden and stark than most reporting suggests. Europe’s low birthrate and its muted consumerism mean its contribution to global GDP will tumble to a quarter of its current share within 30 years. At that point, the economy of the 15 earliest EU countries combined will be an eighth the size of China’s.

Europe does indeed have a falling birthrate: most population growth in Europe these days is from immigration and the vastly higher birth rate of recent immigrants. Set aside the immigrants and the immigrant birth rate and most EU countries are well below replacement rate — they’ve stopped growing and started shrinking in population. Is it any wonder that Europe’s predicted share of the world GDP is poised to shrink as well?

China has a different demographic problem, and one that has the potential to cause disruptions far beyond their own borders: the aftermath of the famous “one child” policy. China has a vast disproportion of males, because Chinese parents opted to keep boy babies and abort girl babies. This may be another case where we can’t depend on the official numbers, but even if you do think they’re close to accurate, it doesn’t paint a pretty picture:

To say that China’s one-child family policy has been a disaster is an understatement. A report released earlier this month by the nation’s top think tank — the Communist Government’s Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) — says that the policy has created a huge gender imbalance with significant implications for future social stability.

Indeed, according to the report, 24 million men reaching marriageable age by 2020 will never marry because of the sex imbalance. Think of it in these terms: what if the entire population of New York City or of Australia was never able to marry. Imagine the social implications in a city or nation that large where no one can marry. Imagine if that city or country is comprised solely of 24 million men; men with no homes to return to at night; men without the responsibilities of a family to keep them engaged in productive pursuits.

Military adventurism may be in the near future for China’s neighbourhood. It’s one of the traditional ways to control and direct the excess of young males away from domestic social disruption. Fogel still prefers the rosy glow of the positive scenario, however:

Of course, China faces its own demographic nightmares, and skeptics point to many obstacles that could derail the Chinese bullet train over the next 30 years: rising income inequality, potential social unrest, territorial disputes, fuel scarcity, water shortages, environmental pollution, and a still-rickety banking system. Although the critics have a point, these concerns are no secret to China’s leaders; in recent years, Beijing has proven quite adept in tackling problems it has set out to address. Moreover, history seems to be moving in the right direction for China. The most tumultuous local dispute, over Taiwan’s sovereignty, now appears to be headed toward a resolution. And at home, the government’s increasing sensitivity to public opinion, combined with improving living standards, has resulted in a level of popular confidence in the government that, in my opinion, makes major political instability unlikely.

I’m not too sure that the Taiwan situation is even close to a peaceful resolution, but that’s a different topic altogether.

Anyway, speaking of hobby horses, I guess this topic counts as one of mine:

February 1, 2010

Good news, computer gamers!

Filed under: Gaming, Military, Science — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:16

Despite all the “video games turn our children into mindless killers!” tabloid headline nonsense, a recent study says that video games make you smarter and faster:

The U.S. military has long suspected that troops who have long experience with video console and computer games have made Americans better soldiers, at least when it comes to operating high-tech military equipment. But now a study (by the Office of Naval Research) has found that such experience also enables troops to solve problems faster, and act more quickly with those solutions. In technical terms, the computer game experience increases perceptual and cognitive ability 10-20 percent, over those with no computer game experience. The navy was interested in this because most sailors have technical jobs, and many of them involve operating electronic equipment. Officers and chiefs (NCOs) have noted that, over the years, the new recruits appear to be more skilled when they first show up. It didn’t have anything to do with new training methods, so many supervisors suspected video games. That proved to be the case, but the increased problem solving ability and responsiveness was a generally unrecognized bonus.

The army noted the same thing, especially under combat conditions. For example, because so many troops had years of experience with video games, they took to CROWS (the remotely controlled machine-gun turret on many vehicles) quickly, and very effectively. The guys operating these systems grew up playing video games. They developed skills in operating systems (video games) very similar to the CROWS controls. This was important, because viewing the world around the vehicle via a vidcam is not as enlightening (although a lot safer) than having your head and chest exposed to the elements, and any firepower the enemy sends your way. But experienced video gamers are skilled at whipping that screen view around, and picking up any signs of danger. The army now has a CROWS trainer built into its America’s Army online game. Many NCOs believe that all that multitasking kids do with their computers (and other electronic gadgets) have made the combat troops more effective.

I also suspect they’ll find similar positive effects among older computer users . . . that those who do some gaming (other than the Minesweeper/Solitaire/Freecell kind of games) probably have better overall mental awareness than those who do not.

January 26, 2010

When politicians get too close to the sharp end, militarily speaking

Filed under: Government, Military, Politics, USA, Weapons — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:42

This is a good example of why it’s a bad idea to allow politicians to get too deeply involved in military acquisition and logistics:

The U.S. Army wants to use more precision “smart” weapons. To that end they have replaced unguided MLRS (227mm) rockets with a GPS guided one. There is now a very popular GPS guided 155mm artillery shell in use. Laser guided Hellfire missiles are widely used by helicopter gunships. But there’s still one unguided “dumb” weapon that the army just can’t seem to get away from; their unguided 70mm (2.75 inch) rockets. Back in 2003, the army planned to begin phasing out these rockets. But, instead, during the last five years, the army has purchased nearly a billion dollars worth of 70mm rockets. Not because they wanted to, but because the politicians from Vermont, where the rocket is manufactured, had enough clout to force the army buy over 100,000 70mm rockets they don’t want, won’t use, and will eventually have to dispose of. That last step will cost more money, unless they can find some foreign country that wants to buy them, cheap.

I guess the plant that produces them is in a district represented by a member of a powerful committee in Washington.

CF improve medical evacuation by adding medical technicians to crews

Filed under: Cancon, Health, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:35

Strategy Page reports on a change in crew composition for Canadian Forces medical evacuation helicopters:

Canadian forces have added a medical technician to the crews of their medical evacuation helicopters, joining a trend that has played a part in saving the lives of many troops wounded in combat, or injured in a combat zone. Previously, Canadian troops had relied on American, or other NATO, air evacuation services. But now Canada has suitable helicopters (CH-146s) for that work, and established an air ambulance service. Following a four year old recommendation by their own military planners, Canada trained medical technicians to work on the medevac choppers, and thus increase the chances that badly wounded soldiers would survive. Canada has also upgraded all of its combat medical care during its years of operations in Afghanistan. This is part of a trend that has been going on since World War II. It’s all about having more medical care available sooner.

The fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan has brought about a major change in how the United States deals with combat casualties. The result is that over 90 percent of the troops wounded, survive their wounds. That’s the highest rate in history. There are several reasons for this. The main one is that medics, and the troops themselves, are being trained to deliver more complex, and effective first aid more quickly. Military doctors now talk of the “platinum 10 minutes,” meaning that if you can keep the wounded soldier, especially the ones who are hurt real bad, alive for ten minutes, their chances of survival go way up. Medics have been equipped and trained to perform procedures previously done only by physicians, while troops are trained to do some procedures previously handled only by medics.

January 24, 2010

Canadian infantry to get new personal equipment

Filed under: Cancon, Military, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:25

Strategy Page reports that the Canadian Forces will be introducing new equipment for infantry soldiers next year:

Canada is joining its NATO allies in providing its infantry with new basic equipment, including electronic gear that, until quite recently, no one saw the troops getting for a decade or more. The Canadian gear set is called ISSP (Integrated Soldier System Project). The first components of ISSP will be issued next year. ISSP contains the usual elements of improved infantry gear. New uniforms, that incorporate improvements the troops have been demanding for years, plus new helmets and protective vests, that are lighter and provide improved shielding from bullets and fragments. New communications gear gives each soldier a link with everyone in his unit, while individual GPS is something troops have already provided for themselves. As other armies have discovered, the troops have already bought a lot of the new gear that is now proposed for the new standard issue.

A lot of this new stuff is commercial, with the military taking the best and most appropriate gear designed for outdoor living. This is particularly true of stuff marketed to the demanding mountain climbing and winter sports enthusiasts. Canada isn’t plunging into unknown territory here. The U.S., France, Germany and most other major NATO countries have already gone this route, and left a lot of practical experience in their wake. Thus the major goal is to get all the most useful gear, and reduce the weight of stuff the infantry have to carry into combat. It’s much easier to find new gear that works better, than it is to find stuff that’s lighter, and still gets the job done.

This is very good news, although there’s always a trade-off between “useful stuff to have” and “weight to be carried”. Modern computer gear is far lighter than it used to be, except for batteries, but there’s always the temptation on the part of the planners to add “just one more” neat bit of kit to the burden already being humped across the field by the infantry.

There’s also the challenge of making the technology both useful and as non-distracting as possible. As Robert Heinlein wrote back in the late 1950’s, “If you load a mudfoot down with a lot of gadgets he has to watch somebody a lot more simply equipped — say with a stone axe — will sneak up and bash his head in while he is trying to read a Vernier.”

January 22, 2010

On the fight card today, RAF versus RN

Filed under: Britain, Military, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:54

No matter what the outcome of the next British general election, the military situation is going to be near the top of the agenda for the incoming government. Britain’s army is stretched very thin with overseas obligations, while the RN and the RAF are at daggers drawn over the future of British carrier aircraft. The RAF would love to sink the navy’s carrier plans, as it would free up huge amounts of budget room for them to buy new toys for themselves (if there are no carriers, there’s no need to buy carrier aircraft, which are much more expensive than similar non-maritime planes). If the RAF succeeds, the army would prefer more money for troops on the ground, helicopters, and unmanned drones. The Economist provides a state-of-play summary:

Even in a great seafaring nation, the remorseless logic of austerity forces admirals to plead for their budgets. It has long been clear that fixing the fiscal crisis would mean taking money from the already cash-strapped Ministry of Defence. Where to make the cuts is something military chiefs have started to argue about in public.

On January 19th Sir Mark Stanhope, Britain’s top admiral, defended long-standing plans to build two expensive new aircraft carriers. The country is bogged down now in an Afghan ground war, he said, but future conflicts may require projecting power by sea. Britain has flirted with phasing out its carriers before, only for the Falklands war to prove their indispensability.

The day before, Sir Mark’s opposite number in the army, Sir David Richards, said that Britain’s agonies in Afghanistan showed the need for more helicopters and unmanned drones, and for better-equipped troops. An “impressive” amount of this gear could be bought if money were redirected from expensive equipment intended for big state-on-state wars; the risk of such conflicts was small enough to be dealt with through NATO (ie, America). Though Sir Richard did not say carriers should be cut (he offered to get rid of some army tanks), they are an obvious target.

It has been an aspect of all British governments since 1945 to take on additional responsibilities while constantly looking for economies in the military budget. Neither the Conservative opposition nor the current Labour government wants to take the political heat for increased military spending (that’s not even in consideration: the debate is over how deep the cuts must be). During a recession, it’s understandable that the politicians would take this kind of stance, but this is true regardless of the state of the economy.

January 20, 2010

This has got to be a mis-communication

Filed under: Americas, Bureaucracy, Military, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 21:55

At least, I hope it’s just a miscommunication:

Food handouts were shut off Tuesday to thousands of people at a tent city here when the main U.S. aid agency said the Army should not be distributing the packages.

It was not known whether the action reflected a high-level policy decision at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) or confusion in a city where dozens of entities are involved in aid efforts.

“We are not supposed to get rations unless approved by AID,” Maj. Larry Jordan said.

Jordan said that approval was revoked; water was not included in the USAID decision, so the troops continued to hand out bottles of water. The State Department and USAID did not respond to requests for comment.

Surely not even the most pig-headed rules-lawyer would have required this . . . I hope.

H/T Castle Argghhh.

Update, 21 January: For reasons of incompetence, I forgot to actually include the URL in that link to Castle Argghhh. Fixed now.

While I’m updating the post, this may be relevant:

The MRE (Meals Ready to Eat, in a pouch) are frequently used as emergency rations. The MRE has evolved from its initial introduction in 1983 (12 separate entrees) to today (24 menu entrees). The MREs change from year to year, and new entrees are added in place of others. The U.S. military has generally switched out entrees each year (apparently the notion that such a deal is a zero-sum game seems to persist, as opposed to just adding new ones). This constant evolution has done much to diminish the bad reputations MREs had early on. Back then, the MRE (officially, “Meals, Ready to Eat”) was often called “Meals Rejected by Everyone”.

The United States also has other rations, including variants for cold weather (which has a higher calorie count than the regular MRE – 1540 per meal compared to 1250 for an MRE), and a kosher/halal variant for Jewish and Moslem soldiers (both religions, for instance, forbid the consumption of pork). Vegetarian entrees are provided, as well. The United States also has developed the Humanitarian Daily Ration (HDR), which has three meals and is based on vegetarian entrees to provide a low chance of offending cultural sensibilities. Many of these HDRs were dropped over Afghanistan in late 2001. Several hundred thousand HDRs are stockpiled for disaster relief, and production can be ramped up quickly. MREs and HDRs are particularly attractive because they provide uncontaminated food that does not require refrigeration, in a compact package. The UN, and many other food aid organizations, use the HDR for situations like Haiti.

January 5, 2010

A decade of war

Filed under: Africa, Asia, Europe, History, Middle East, Military — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:19

Strategy Page has an annotated list of the last decade’s wars, declared and undeclared, and armed confrontations just short of warfare:

It’s actually been a decade of less and less war. There’s also been a lot of déjà vu, with many wars seeming to be endless. Some wars are like that. So what were all the current hot spots like a decade ago, and what happened to them? Below is a list, with the short version of what happened (check out archives for the much longer version).

Afghanistan was sort of under the control of the Pakistani backed Taliban in 2000. But the civil war, that began in the late 1970s, was still going on. The Taliban were winning, slowly, fueled by taxes on the heroin trade. But the Taliban were increasingly unpopular, mainly for trying to impose lifestyle rules on a hostile population. September 11, 2001 brought in the Americans to help the factions still fighting the Taliban, and within three months, the Taliban were out of power, and fleeing to Pakistan. A democracy was established, but corruption and tribal rivalries crippled it from the start. The Pushtun tribes resented the domination of the non-Pushtun tribes (60 percent of the population), and this enabled the Taliban to rebuild and undertake a terror campaign to regain control of the country. It’s a suicide mission (even most Pushtuns oppose them), but that’s pretty normal for Afghanistan.

[. . .]

Iraq- Saddam Hussein was under siege at the beginning of the decade, refusing to comply with the terms of his defeat in the 1991 war over Kuwait. Saddam, as he later admitted, had no weapons of mass destruction, but did not want the Iranians (who wanted to kill him for invading in 1980) to know. It was a successful deception, so much so that all the world’s intel agencies agreed that Saddam had these weapons, and that was used to justify the U.S./British invasion of 2003. There followed five years of terrorism, as the Sunni Arab minority (which Saddam had led) tried to murder their way back into power. That didn’t work, and Iraq ends the decade with a booming, not shrinking, economy, and a bloody resolution to some long time political disputes.

December 15, 2009

RAF and Royal Navy facing further cuts

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:40

With the costs of maintaining British troops in Afghanistan still rising, the government is expected to announce further cuts to the Royal Air Force and Royal Navy today:

Some RAF bases face closure to pay for extra equipment for British forces in Afghanistan, a defence minister indicated this morning.

Quentin Davies said that it would be a “very good thing” to get by with fewer RAF bases if that was possible and that the Ministry of Defence wanted to spend its money with “maximum effect”.

[. . .]

Some Tornado and Harrier aircraft and small navy surface vessels are likely to face cuts. A number of RAF bases will be closed — including reportedly RAF Kinloss in Moray — and part of the sovereign base areas in Cyprus will be sold.

The two large aircraft carriers are expected to survive this particular cut, although it wouldn’t be surprising to see further delay introduced into their construction . . . even though stretching out delivery dates is an expensive way to increase short-term savings:

The announcement follows the publication of a report from the National Audit Office saying the gap between the cost of planned weapons projects and what the MoD can actually afford could be as much as £36bn.

The gap would have been larger had the ministry not delayed a number of projects, such as the construction of two large aircraft carriers, the Queen Elizabeth and the Prince of Wales, the NAO reports.

However, the decision to delay the carrier project to save £450m over the next four years will increase costs by £1.12bn over later years — a net increase of £674m, the NAO says.

The MoD has also decided to reduce an order of Lynx Wildcats from 80 to 62 helicopters, saving £194m but reducing planned flying hours by a third. The report says that last year the price for the 15 biggest military schemes rose by £1.2bn, £733m of which was the result of delays designed to save money in the short term.

Update: Believe it or not, there’s actually some sense to the government’s announced changes:

The headlining move comes with the announcement, widely anticipated, that the British fleet of US-made Chinook heavy-lift helicopters is to increase from 48 to 70 aircraft, with initial deliveries of ten new choppers arriving by 2013. The Chinook is the only helicopter in widespread Western service with enough spare lift to operate with any freedom in Afghanistan’s heat and high altitudes, and the new copters will be extremely welcome among British forces there.

It is also expected that another Boeing C-17 heavy transport plane will be ordered to join the existing UK fleet of 5, which are regarded as crucial to sustaining the “air bridge” logistic link between Blighty and its troops in Afghanistan.

These short-term improvements will be paid for not by any budget increase, but by reducing the active forces of Tornado bombers and Harrier close-support jets, and early retirement for much of the existing fleet of antique Nimrod MR2 maritime patrol aircraft. These moves will allow closure or mothballing of some of the RAF’s 45+ UK stations, with associated further job losses and savings.

They’ve also announced the retirement of the Sea King helicopter from active service, with the existing inventory of Merlin HC3 moving from the RAF to RN service (including whatever refitting will be necessary to “maricise” them for full-time service with the fleet).

Overall, the changes make a good deal of sense . . . what a surprise.

December 1, 2009

US Army bows to the inevitable

Filed under: Middle East, Military — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:23

With more than one in ten of the troops deployed to Afghanistan being female, the US Army had been trying desperately to prevent healthy young soldiers doing what healthy young soldiers are often most interested in. The army has finally acknowledged that their King Canute imitation wasn’t realistic, given human nature:

Last year, the U.S. Army in Afghanistan has removed the prohibition on sex between male and female soldiers. There are 68,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, and about ten percent of them are female. So far this year, about fifteen percent of these female troops have had pregnancy tests, and a few percent of the female troops have gone home because they were pregnant.

Since the 1990s, the army has been big on clean living (or whatever you want to call it) in combat zones. No booze, no sex and not cavorting (you know what that means) with the locals. But with most of the troops in combat zones being young and single, things happened. Some couples got caught. Commanders got tired of having to punish (usually with an Article 15, which is just short of a court martial) troops for “unauthorized fornication.” So now it is, if not authorized, not likely to get you punished (aside from the occasional unexpected pregnancy).

November 26, 2009

It’s not a protective force field . . .

Filed under: Military, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:35

. . . but if it provides a useful degree of protection against splinters and shell fragments, it’s certainly worth testing in a combat zone:

The U.S. Army has developed shell proof wallpaper. The fabric is applied, like wallpaper, on the inside of troop work and living quarters, in areas where the enemy fires rockets and mortar shells into the area. Thus when fast moving fragments or debris hit the structure, the new material, called X-Flex, stretches and halts, or slows down, the fast moving object. This makes it much less likely that anyone inside the structure will be killed.

Over the last five years, the U.S. Army has gone to great lengths to protect troops in camps. Tight perimeter security has kept suicide bombers, and terrorists in general, out of the camps. But there are still rocket and mortar attacks. These usually cause few casualties, but those that do occur are the result of shell fragments or debris coming through the walls.

If it works as well in real life application as it apparently has done in controlled testing, it’ll be a welcome addition to the defenses.

November 24, 2009

Corruption and imaginary museum thefts

Filed under: Media, Middle East, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:13

Do you remember the reports from Iraq in the wake of the invasion about the mass looting of museums? If any of it happened, it was a small-scale effort, not the major haul that was so breathlessly reported:

Western archeologists are finding that many of the news stories coming out of Iraq about the theft or destruction of ancient artifacts were false. The national museum had preserved nearly all its treasures, and there was no widespread damage to archeological sites. Like much of the reports from Iraq over the last six years, the main intent was to get an exciting headline, not report what was actually going on. Some reporters, especially those embedded with U.S. troops, reported having their stories rewritten, or simply not published, because their editors felt what was actually happening over there contradicted the U.S. medias belief about what was actually going on. Some of this attitude persists.

A recent international corruption survey found Iraq at the bottom of the list (of over 160 nations) in the company of Somalia, Afghanistan, Burma and Sudan. Because of election laws, that force people to vote for “lists” rather than individuals, it’s difficult to hold anyone accountable for corruption. A new election law, that fixed many of these problems, was recently passed, but senior (and often corrupt) officials are still trying to block this reform. Many of the Shia politicians running the government would be happy to see a Shia dictatorship established, with them running things. Most Iraqis are not so sure about that idea.

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