As usual, I have to agree.

Gen. Andrew Leslie, one of our Generals who was a big wheel in ISAF once did an interview, in which he said some rather pertinent and probably inadvisable things about the modern political realities of COIN.

He basically said that the idea of modern insurgency is to give the western commander a catch 22 he can’t avoid. His example was force protection.

If he makes minimization of collateral damage/civilian casualties and restrictive ROE his priority, then he is going to suffer more casualties. If he suffers a lot of casualties, the NDP (our far left political party), is going to scream in the house about how our troops are being sacrificed for “US imperialism” and how we should be doing “peacekeeping” instead, and that our troops should be brought home, and he loses.

If he prioritizes effectiveness and force protection over collateral damage, the NDP will scream about civilian casualties, and demand our troops be brought home, etc….

Either way, he loses…..

Our big problem is that the politicians are willing to spend blood and treasure to further mushy ill defined ends, because a small professional military will do whatever is asked of it as a measure of pride and professionalism. Worse, our General corps go along with it because they are fully politicized.

No that I agree with the idea of putsches and coups, but given the results of Vietnam, Angola, Mozambique, Rhodesia and Namibia, perhaps it might have been a good lesson for our politicians if Les Paras and 1er R.E.P. had succeeded back in the day.

For example, how many men are wounded because of their armor? How many over-use injuries are there because of it? How many of the enemy get away because the men pursuing them are too tired and too slow to catch them? While the weight of armor may save a lot of your men, how many more are going to be killed because the conflict drags on inconclusively while you have them finger-trapped within the confines of their armor?

There are other questions, too–What are the psychological effects? Sure, you think you’re an invulnerable myrmidon, all armored up and mighty, but what are the effects in terms of making you more risk-insensitive, encouraging you to do more stupid sh*t under fire because you think you’re invulnerable? Alternatively, what effect accrues from simple physical exhaustion, created by the fact that hauling around all that armor leaves you too tired to think straight or to act effectively?

Past a certain minimalist point, passive armor is a Chinese finger-trap. The really bad thing about it is that the commanders in a Western military force are not able to make rational decisions on the question simply because public sentiment will not allow that–The casualty-averse politicians and public will not accept that Johnny dying today is better than hypothetical Johnny, Ted, Mike, and Tim dying over the course of a conflict that is extended due to an inability to come to grips with and destroy the enemy.

One of the things I wonder about in Afghanistan is how much of the ongoing conflict is happening because the troops simply haven’t been able to force the enemy into effective engagements due to our armor-weighted forces being too slow and too tired to pursue them to destruction? There has to be a factor there, psychologically, when Ismail the Taliban watches plodding overburdened American troops fail to keep up during a foot pursuit, or be unable to quickly respond under fire because they’re so heavily laden that they simply can’t do more than watch as the Taliban forces dance around them unburdened by armor or the ten tons of other crap the forces of righteousness have to lug around.

There are tactical, operational, and strategic costs to up-armoring the troops that are never accounted for in the calculus of command. Were you to suggest that things would be shortened up by “going light”, I dare say that you’d be relieved of command very quickly, these days–Mostly out of a misplaced set of priorities set by the civilian side of it all.

Agreed. I had to look over some PPE combat data once for Powers-That-Be and that was pretty much my conclusion. Survivor bias in the data was driving “more” limb injuries, blunt trauma, and TBI.

The interesting maths was working backwards from the “additional” LIMB injuries to figure out how many TORSO injuries had been prevented, and hence the armour effectiveness.

“Wasn’t that handling error in a lethality trial? Previously the shells had been punching holes in plyboard targets but no one realised that clothed humans were actually a bit tougher…”

Could be… It was certainly a test of some kind, and it went off while being handled, with someone still downrange and they were barely bruised.

My take was that the lethality of shrapnel was all from the velocity of the shell itself, and the bursting charge just dispersed the balls, so when propelled by the bursting charge alone, shrapnel balls were propelled at well below lethal velocity. After all, shrapnel certainly killed plenty in combat, and drove the development of the helmet in the first place, so it wasn’t that shrapnel in actual use wasn’t lethal.

As for the body armour issues, we have a lot of survivor bias going on. When helmets were first issued in WWI, staff officers complained that the number of head wound presenting at field hospitals was going up. they concluded that the helmets were counter-productive, since they gave soldiers a false sense of security, and they were exposing themselves more/getting head wounded more.

In reality, the increase was caused by soldiers surviving fragment and shrapnel wounds BECAUSE they were wearing helmets, and surviving to get to the hospitals rather than being left dead on the battlefield.

Similarly, we are seeing similar trends in places like Afghanistan. Helmets and body armour are protecting the head and torso from frag and blast, so we are getting far more traumatic amputations of limb, or limb wounds requiring amputation than previously, because once again, the protective equipment is allowing wounded soldiers to survive what in the past would not be survivable.

I think the high incidence of brain injury from blast is similar. Some of it may be that we are recognizing it better now, but that we always had it, or that we are getting more of it now because the ballistic protection of our helmets is preventing more severe and lethal head injury, so the incidence of concussive brain injury is going up.

Possibly… but sulfanilomide would likely have saved even more.

Not to mention non-fatal diseases and their effect on troops. In WWI the AEF had 43 deaths from mumps, but 82,000 troops were diagnosed with it, which not only meant their loss as effectives, but more drain on non-combat resources to transport and care for them until they recovered or were sent back home.

I look at Afghanistan more and more as exercises in institutional self-justification. It’s a never-ending self-licking ice cream cone for the careerist officer.

Which is what most of them are. Careerists, not soldiers.

What’s the number-one feature of a successful insurgency? Oh, that’s right–An external sponsor who will keep pumping in money and weapons. In Afghanistan, that would be…? Who, precisely? Oh, that’s right–The same assholes we pump billions of dollars into in the form of military aid. Pakistan. Take away the Pakistani support, and the Taliban in Afghanistan would wither away within a few short years, unable to operate without the ISI paymasters that keep the whole thing running. With our money. The money our State Department and Pentagon keep giving them, because…?

Afghanistan is a never-ending whack-a-mole game that’s going to keep right on going until someone stops putting the quarters into it. Stop the funding, destroy the untouchable refuges in the sponsor country, and the Afghanistan career-building machine stops. Which is why it hasn’t, and why we need to utterly root out the careerist officer class, along with their State Department enablers. None of these assholes have sacrificed their holy careers to go on record by resigning or testifying in front of Congress and the American people. They’d rather kill their troops in a futile conflict that they know they can’t win, than do any of that. Which makes them traitors to their oaths and their men.

This is exactly what was going on in Vietnam, only that generation of officers and diplomats had the smarts to make the other guys pay for it. Today’s vermin? LOL… We’re paying for it all, handing off billions to Pakistan who rakes in all that military aid, and then turns around to stab us in the back with it by supporting and enabling their proxies, the Taliban.

This is a reality, and you’ll note that we’ve seen f**k-all for any of our officer class going on record about it. We should have cut Pakistan off about the time we found bin Laden in Abbottabad, but no, we’re gonna keep right on dumping quarters into the career-building machine, pissing away young men’s lives for no purpose.

The Founders were right to have suspicions of a standing army. What we have before us today is a perfect illustration of why a constitutional republic such as ours does not need, nor should have a standing professional army with a potential for someone to make a career at it. Nor should we have a professional career political class. The moment you institute such things, life-long career military officers and politicians, you wind up with a situation whereby those institutions take on lives of their own, and begin to become positively inimical to the interests of the general population. Look at the State Department or the “Defense” Department of today for case studies–Instead of citizens acting on behalf of other citizens to fulfill necessary functions of a government, what we’ve created are entire classes of self-interested apparatchiks whose sole interest is the perpetuation of their holy careers and the dysfunctional institution that enables those careers.

Frankly, I think we’d do better with anything else than what we’ve got going now, which is a burning dumpster fire of public monies. Put this crap out to contract, and set it so that the men running our wars don’t get paid unless they win, and they pay a penalty for every soldier they get killed. The incentives in a careerist structure are all wrong for what we need–None of these assholes in the Pentagon or the State Department have any interest whatsoever in winning in Afghanistan, because if they do…? There go all those lovely opportunities for graft and career-building.

If you want to solve the problem of careerists in government, do away with careers. Nobody should be able to make a living doing nothing but political or government work, because the minute you allow that crap to start, they lose sight of what they are really supposed to be doing, and instead focus on their own self-benefit. You can tolerate that in a sergeant or some guy working on a road crew for the state, but what you cannot tolerate is having that mentality grow up in the management classes.

Your officers are career-prioritising risk-averse who know what “unnecessary” deaths will do to their chances.

They WILL trade a 50% reduction in effectiveness and mission success for a 10% reduction in casualties.

They are entirely rational.

Wasn’t that handling error in a lethality trial? Previously the shells had been punching holes in plyboard targets but no one realised that clothed humans were actually a bit tougher…

If you’re close enough for primary blast to kill you, then you’re probably massively fragged anyway or suffer a secondary or tertiary blast kill.

It’s wise to concentrate on frag/ballistic protection and not worry about a bit of extra blast protection.