Warfare & Military history – Page 5

Dutch weapons used to suppress democracy protests in Bahrain

Published on February 19, 2011

A possibly Dutch AIFV on the Pearl Square in Bahrain

The “tanks” we’ve been seeing on the news from Bahrain suppressing the democracy protests at the Pearl Square are partially from Dutch origin. The armoured infantry fighting vehicle shown above is a YPR-765, of either Belgian or Dutch origin, sold to Bahrain in the mid-nineties. In total the Netherlands sold 25 of these vehicles, all armed with 25mm guns, as well another 35 M113 armoured personnel carriers, and a couple of support and command vehicles. As seen at the Broekstukken blog (Dutch) it amounted to roughly ten million euros worth of arms delivered to a regime that was far from democratic. This week the inevitable happened and these weapons, supposedly sold to Bahrain for self defence, have been used against Bahrain’s own citizens to keep a despotic regime in power.

Dutch governments over the years have been keen to lecture others on human rights, yet this is just a small example of our own moral failings. It shows that these same governments were quite keen to put profits before human rights when selling off surplus military equipment. Bahrain is not the only country we’ve sold those YPR-765 to: Egypt got 1207 of them from both Belgium and Holland. The Netherlands also sold them to Jordan, while Belgium helped supply Morocco and Lebanon with these vehicles. As long as a country was a loyal ally of America, its human rights record did not matter to our governments.

A blog that will give me nightmares

Published on February 7, 2011

This sub-blog on atomic and nuclear weapons and the preparations for atomic holocaust on Longstreet. The author, John F. Ptak, has a good nose for finding now declassified US plans for and reports on nuclear warfare, then finding the most embarassing phrases in them. Ptak has a good sense of moral outrage, not tempered by the distance in time from when these documents were written, or by the technocratic language of these documents. It’s a goldmine for nuclear war “enthusiasts”, those who like me, grew up during the Cold War and have been obsessed with it since.

I was just old enough in the early eighties to understand how dangerous the world had become, how close we were to nuclear war, much closer than any other time during the Cold War except perhaps the Cuban Missile Crisis. A belligerent senile fool in charge of one nuclear power, a succession of senile, paranoid walking corpses in charge of the other and while the first was busy pumping up the threat of the second, they in turn were terrified that all this talk about a winnable nuclear war was genuine. It was a time when a NATO exercise was interpreted by the USSR as the preparations for a first strike and it was pure luck that they didn’t panic. Even ten year old school girls knew enough to be scared shitless and write to the USSR president about why he wanted to blow up the world.

No wonder I had regular nightmares. Some people can watch films like Threads or The Day After as escapism; I can’t even read the Wikipedia pages about them… There are only two things I’m really, genuinely scared shitless about and one of them is nuclear war. So I can’t really read this blog, but don’t let that stop you.

Neither Britain nor Holland needs an army

Published on November 12, 2010

Simon Jenkins says what I’ve been saying for a while now: countries like Britain do not need armies anymore:

Six months ago I proposed in the Guardian that if Britain was short of money it should cut defence. I did not mean reduce defence, or trim defence. I meant cut it altogether. We are desperately short of money and absolutely no one is threatening to attack us now or in the foreseeable, indeed conceivable, future. Besides, as we have seen this past week, other ways of ensuring security make more pressing claims on us. We just do not need an army, navy or air force. So why are we paying £45bn for them?

[…]

The argument can take amazing forms. Come now, say the high priests. Just suppose another Hitler rose again, built a new Luftwaffe and U-boats, and bombed London and sank all our coastal trade. We would need a carrier. Suppose Russia falls under the sway of an oligarch with a grudge against Harrods and a business rival in Kensington Palace Gardens. Suppose he decides to nuke them. Supposed 100 suicide bombers block-booked themselves on Eurostar and went to every Premier League match. You would look pretty silly, Jenkins, wouldn’t you?

I would look pretty silly, and probably I wouldn’t be the only one. But for the time being, I regard such unrealities used to justify massive spending as no less silly. We can only meet realistic threats. We do not build 1,000 NHS hospitals and leave them to await the return of bubonic plague.

If Britain does not need an army nor cannot actually afford one, what about Holland? We’re spending about eight billion euros a year on “defence”, yet still had to cannibalise our army, sell off equipment that had barely entered service just to pay for our “missions” in Iraq and Afghanistan, fighting people that had never threatened nor harmed us. That we could do, but against a real enemy our army is just too small to be a credible defence and anyway, who is going to attack us anyway, Belgium?

Omaha Beach: a Flawed Victory – Adrian R. Lewis

Published on November 5, 2010

Omaha Beach: a Flawed Victory

Omaha Beach: a Flawed Victory
Adrian R. Lewis
381 pages including index and notes
published in 2001

Omaha Beach: A Flawed Victory was not quite the book I expected it to be or wanted to read. What I thought I was getting out of the library was a book describing the landings itself, looking in detail at how the battle for Omaha Beach evolved, similar to a book on Kursk I got at the same time. What I got instead was an analysis of the strategic choices made for the landings and how that led to near-disaster at Omaha. The actual battle is dealt with in the first chapter, the rest of the book deals with the reasons why the battle happened as it did.

Any disappointment I felt was shortlived. The book I got was easily as interesting as the book I wanted to get. What it managed to do was to make me question the “official” reasons why the Americans at Omaha Beach did so much worse than their colleagues at Utah or the British/Commonwealth forces at their landings. What I’ve always read was that the American commanders at Omaha had both underestimated the German resistance and the German fortification and had rejected the use of all the various special enginering tanks the British had developed to tackle these fortifications, the socalled “Hobart’s Funnies“. What Adrian R. Lewis argues instead was that the real problem was that the Normandy Landings were planned according to the wrong doctrine, that the experience build up in earlier landings in the Pacific and the Mediterranean was ignored in favour of finding new solutions to the same problems because the commanders in charge of Operation Overlord overestimated the uniqueness of the operation.

Books read August

Published on September 1, 2010

Eight books read this month, which is a respectable score but not spectacular. Theme this month was war and science fiction, as you will see.

The battle of Kursk — David M. Glantz & Jonathan M. House
A recentish history of the famous tank battle, making full use of the opening of Soviet state archives since the end of the Cold War.

Omaha Beach: A Flawed Victory — Adrian R. Lewis
At first I thought the author had it in for the British — some American WWII historians do have a chip on their soldier about the way the UK treated the American contribution to the struggle in Europe after all — but in the end it turned out he had a much more valid case to make. What Lewis attempts to do here is to argue that the strategy and tactics developed for the Normandy landing were flawed both in conception and execution, with the methods developed in earlier landings in the Pacific and Italy ignored. I’m not sure how much I should believe him, but it’s a well made argument.

First Among Sequels — Jasper Fforde
Thursday Next is back in the first of a new series. If you like Fforde and Thursday Next, you’ll like this one as much as the earlier books in the series. Fun but slight.

Shades of Grey — Jasper Fforde
Much more ambitious is this book, in which Fforde takes his considerable inventioness and creates something more than just a cheap laugh. In a Britain of after the end everything revolves around colour, as in who can see red colours, or green colours, or yellow and how well you see a specific colour range determines your place in society. A classic sort of coming of age story in which the young hero discovers what his world is really like, it reminded me somewhat of John Christopher’s White Mountain series.

Hitler’s Empire — Mark Mazower
An indepth look at the economic realities of Nazi occupied Europe and how the nazi ideals were in conflict with the need to win the war. It’s a great book on a horrible but fascinating subject, looking at all aspects of the nazi economy, including the Holocaust.

The Dragon Never Sleeps — Glen Cook
Great space opera by an author best known for his dark fantasy, which does share some of the feeling of his fantasy works. I got this as a gift for my birthday, as well as the next book and it’s been great.

Passage at Arms — Glen Cook
Das Boot in space. ‘Nuff said. Very well done.

Spin — Robert Charles Wilson
Suddenly, without any fuzz, the stars went out, as something slid between them and the Earth. And then it turns out that while days go by down below, in the rest of the universe millions of years are passing… Apart from some slight niggles, an excellent grand scale science fiction novel.