Officer of Engineers

Actually, it's online.

http://www-cgsc.army.mil/milrev/engl...ug01/canig.asp

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Chimo

Blademaster

Smoke what is your forum and pls give me the link to your forum.

Confed999

http://pub47.ezboard.com/bmilitaryhistory or you can click the "website" button under his posts.

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No man is free until all men are free - John Hossack
I agree completely with this Administration’s goal of a regime change in Iraq-John Kerry
even if that enforcement is mostly at the hands of the United States, a right we retain even if the Security Council fails to act-John Kerry
He may even miscalculate and slide these weapons off to terrorist groups to invite them to be a surrogate to use them against the United States. It’s the miscalculation that poses the greatest threat-John Kerry

dave angel

from my experiences british force protection doctrine is based on two pillars: you can't protect yourself if you don't know whats going on - therefore talking to people and building a rapor is utterly essential, and not offending local sensebilities unneccesarily, no one likes the indignity of having foreign armies on their soil, so don't make that humiliation worse than it has to be.

from Bosnia (IFOR1) i recall a very clear divide between US and UK practice, the US mech platoon would drive through a village and thats it, they had 'patrolled' it. they utterly dominated it for the minute they were there, but five minutes later they might as well not have bothered. a UK mech platoon would dismount outside the village, use the warrior AFV's to secure the surrounding 1km or so, and the platoon would then patrol in four-man fire teams through the village. they would speak to everyone they met, especially the local head-boy, drink coffee in peoples homes (or what remained of them), chat and generally become part of the village for the hour they were there. we would also ensure that the same units patrolled the same villages so that a rapor between villagers and individual soldiers could be established.

it then gave the battalion int cell a vast amount of information about what was happening on the ground.

i imagine US int report for the same patrol would say 'its still there'.

short-term its undeniable that the US method is 'safer', but long-term the UK method produces results.

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before criticizing someone, walk a mile in their shoes.................... then when you do criticize them, you're a mile away and you have their shoes.

Shek

An interesting article. I did have to laugh - I went to the Military Review website to see the actual photos, and the American soldiers didn't have body armor on nor were there weapons at the ready, and so it did negate to some small degree the article. However, I was incensed to see their hands over their muzzles - I always bit my guys heads off over muzzle awareness violations like that.

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"So little pains do the vulgar take in the investigation of truth, accepting readily the first story that comes to hand." Thucydides 1.20.3

Bluesman

Sometimes, semi-intimate contact with the locals is NOT desirable. Sometimes, overwhelming, overaweing ready-for-anything posture IS the way to go.

Now, having said that, sometimes it ain't. If you can get away with that 'cop on the beat' schtick, then by all means, play the game.

Remember, soldiery and what is essentially a helpless populace may lead to mutual feelings of contempt, and the next thing you know, somebody's got panties on his head, or schoolboys are getting gang-wailed by tough-guy soccer hooligans in camo. Over-familiarity, theft by either side from the other, rape of local women, swindling soldiers by the hungry local sharky-boys...all of this is inevitable when foreign soldiers mix with the locals. It has ever been so, and it is only one of the milder reasons that war is such a plague on the people whose land it comes to.

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"The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it, and if one finds the prospect of a long war intolerable, it is natural to disbelieve in the possibility of victory."
- George Orwell