Tag Archives: Soldiers as victims

Sowing the seeds of a century of hatred and conflict

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From a comment on GoComics:

“between them, hamas and the israeli forces have sowed the seeds of another century of hatred and conflict…”

Not sowed the seeds. It is already a well-established and ancient forest of hatred and conflict. It has been fed and watered frequently with bitterness and blood since before records began.

They like it this way. It is embedded into people’s culture and lore, into their tradition and values.

It can be changed, but not until: they want it to change; the rest of the world stops interfering to make it worse; the privatised arms industry is dismantled or otherwise not allowed to profit from provoking war; the women say “enough!” (which is hard when the cultures suppress women’s voices); they recognise that people with different value and beliefs are equal; they accept compromise and forgiveness over vengeance; they accept mistakes and harm are caused on all sides; they convince one another that getting along without bloodshed is what they want; they recognise that everybody has to live somewhere; they accept we are not entitled to anything when we are born other than what we are given by other people and that means someone else has to go without so we must share.

In the above ‘they’ means ‘everyone’ and anyone who says otherwise is part of the problem and not ready for change.

It can be done, and has been done many times around the world. But this one is particularly tricky.

“i’ll stick with what i said, thanks. yes, the conflict has gone on for a long time and both sides have scuppered solutions that have been suggested along the way. but what i said above was that the two sides have given the conflict renewed life with their latest actions…”

Yes, you are right. I did not mean to imply I disagreed.

“between them, hamas and the israeli forces have sowed the seeds of another century of hatred and conflict” and “the two sides have given the conflict renewed life with their latest actions”

Absolutely.

The ‘leaders’ on both sides with their desires for violence, and those external to the area who provoke and promote it, are terrible people. They are also spineless cowards since they do not take any risks themselves.

There was something more honourable in the days of feudalism and before, when the kings and princes and dukes and chieftains stood amongst their lines. They knew if they were defeated, they would at best be ransomed but as likely killed. And those doing the fighting did it eyeball to eyeball and saw the pain and screaming and blood for themselves. And then came home too ashamed to talk of what they had done.

Politicians now send others to do their dirty work. Safe and rich and powerful and the more people die, the greater they believe their military fantasy. And the more support they get. It is obscene: more sickening than a mass murderer who at least stabs people themselves. Even the sickos who shoot schoolkids in America have the decency to look at their targets and risk being shot themselves. Even they are less contemptible than cowards in tunnels who send suicide bombers to kill women in shopping queues. Or rich men in palaces who send bombers against hospitals and tanks against children.

And the contempt I feel for these ‘people’ will be as nothing compared to the hate and angst and despair felt by orphans, widowers and other relatives of their victims. And we know there can never be justice against the leaders, they always get away with it.

And people – through a lack of empathy and imagination, people with full bellies and nice homes – wonder why other people – starved, widowed, robbed of everything and with no access to justice – resort to terrorism.

Not until the citizens themselves – the women, the widowers, the conscripts, the reserves – refuse to allow it to continue will it stop.

The 1960s line was “Suppose they gave a war and no one came”.

Hopefully, this will be Israel’s Vietnam with the IDF troops going home afterwards traumatised at what they have done, and the atrocities being revealed and realising they were not war heroes after all but victims themselves. Forming an Israeli branch of Veterans For Peace, campaigning for conscientious objection and becoming a generation of pro-peace activists as so many ex-soldiers do after an unfair war.

Hopefully, it will be the Gazan Northern Ireland, where the women find a voice to tell their sons and husbands that this has to stop, that they do not want or need vengeance and just want to live peaceful lives. That there is more honour in working together with one’s enemy for a common good than losing more sons and husbands for a principle. Ultimately forcing the opposing sides to grow up and find a way to tolerate one another.

Hopefully, it will be the Israeli citizens’ Ukraine, realising the world knows their government has done a wrong thing and they have been lied to. That they are considered responsible for what their leaders did by the rest of the world, and not want it to happen that way again.

Hopefully, it will be the businesses’ South Africa, where those who want to make money realise that peace and reconciliation, trading with each other and the world, is better financially for all concerned. On realising the sanctions being imposed by citizens and organisations boycotting Israeli goods and goods from the occupied territories hurts their profits. So they demand a change in government policy, one that supports free trade through peaceful co-existence.

Lanchester’s Laws

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While playing an online multi-player wargame, someone attacked 10 units with 19 units of the same type.  How many attackers survived?  Contrary to what some might assume, it was not nine units.  They were equally matched and 16 units survived of the attacking force.

This is a very simplified version of reality, but essentially there are, initially, nearly twice as many attackers as defenders shooting, so a defender will be killed in half the time of an attacker.  Then the ratio of attackers to defenders is even greater: 19 to 9.  Now the likelihood of a defender being killed before an attacker is even greater than before.  Eventually, only a few defenders are being outnumbered 4:1 or 5:1 and so they are eliminated very quickly, with few if any losses to the attackers.

This is described in Lanchester’s Laws which say that when you have people shooting at one another at range, and each can fire on any other opponent (as opposed to one-on-one melee combat), the effectiveness of the forces are in proportion to the squares of their numbers meaning the attrition over time is far greater for the lesser force.  That is, the smaller force, will lose members faster and faster and the greater force lose them slower and slower.

One can imagine how ten people shooting at two people may manage to shoot both before any of the ten are themselves shot, contrary to what is usually represented in Wild West and action movies.

As examples, assuming a 1% chance of killing with any given shot, a battle between 100 attackers and 50 defenders will – statistically – end in victory after 55 rounds with 86 attackers surviving.  Some more analysis:

Attackers Defenders %likelihood Rounds Survivors
100 99 1% 265 13
100 90 1% 148 43
100 50 1% 55 86
100 14 1% 15 98
100 10 1% 11 99
100 99 50% 5 6
100 90 50% 3 28
100 50 50% 2 65
100 10 50% 1 95
100 99 90% 2 2
100 90 90% 2 19
100 50 90% 1 55
100 10 90% 1 91

The lower the likelihood of killing with one shot, the greater the Lanchester Law effect: the larger number of attackers will whittle away the defenders before the defenders can respond in a significant way.  At the other extreme, 100% likelihood of killing in one shot, it resembles melee combat and the number of survivors is simply the number of attackers minus the number of defenders.

What is the point of this?

  1. When playing tabletop wargaming, always attack with overwhelming numbers to maximise enemy losses while minimising your own.
  2. The Generals of the Great War were indeed incompetent buffoons, believing attrition would win them the war, by sending in wave after wave of small numbers of their own troops in short lines on the front to be massacred.

The second point is particularly so since the infantry were walking into defensive machine gun fire, where the likelihood of killing per unit of time was far greater than for the attackers.  Attacking in that way maximised the losses for the attacker.  And this would have been apparent for any player of wargames or mathematically minded person at the front.  The defence for the the donkeys running the war was that they knew no better – then they were idiots.

The Prussians had been playing wargames as a military training tool for over a century by the time of the Great War.

Why do I as a pacifist play wargames?  Partly recreation, partly research.  It helps one to understand the true horror of mechanised, organised, warfare.

We need more data on peace-making

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“Accept repentant Boko Haram fighters or they go back to terrorism, presidency urges Nigerians”

This is a news story about young men who had been members of a terrorist organisation being allowed to repent, and the national leader asking people to allow them back into their communities.

19/09/2019 “the establishment of ‘Operation Safe Corridor’ in Gombe State has been described as a global model in combating insurgency in the world” link.

11/06/2020 “No repentant Boko Haram Terrorists combatant who has been reintegrated into the society will evade arrest if he reneged on the pledge” link.

Anyone who thinks one cannot negotiate with terrorists and one must fight fire with fire could do worse than look at Operation Safe Corridor. The deradicalisation, rehabilitation and reintegration (DRR) process of ex- Boko Haram members seems to have been a remarkably impressive demonstration of best practice in tackling extremist violence.

General Olonisakin: “the Armed Forces of Nigeria is not only trying to win the war but to also win the peace”.

It must be incredibly tough on those still displaced or still in areas affected by Boko Haram. Forgiveness does not come easily.

It’s quite an example though of how violent groups recruit and kidnap young people to do their fighting for them, and how such fighters themselves can also be the victims.

I’ve written before about trading justice for peace. Punishing these young men would have been injustice on injustice and not resulted in any peace.

Violence is complicated. Peace is really hard.

I do hope all this gets researched and documented. An observation:

“The operation Safe Corridor is good, but how much have been invested in communities to bolster their resilience capacities, heal their grievances and give them back their lives to enable them embrace these formers? What is the post deradicalisation programme that can effectively monitor these formers to track their progress in reintegration or further resurgence in their old tracks? What has been the role of formers in the process deracalisation or PVE? These and many more should be reassessed and appraised.”

Absolutely – data is needed and needs to be published about conflict interventions and resolution as a bigger picture. This was a major conclusion from my Master’s in Peace Studies – a lack of off-the-shelf case studies fro those new to or outside the field.

Essentially we have the Oxford Research Group’s ‘War Prevention Works : 50 Stories of People Resolving Conflict’ from 2001 and High Miall’s ‘The Peacemakers: Peaceful Settlement of Disputes Since 1945′ from 1992.

I think there is a desperate need for Practitioners’ Manual for Peace based on evidence from past interventions, which requires that consolidation of data to underpin and inform it.

I do find it interesting it appears to be being led by the Armed Forces of Nigeria. How’s that for defence diversification?

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

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It is being argued the British Army should not be prosecuted for war crimes committed in Northern Ireland.  The argument goes that if the terrorists can get away with their crimes because of The Belfast Agreement, then it is only fair the Army does too.  But this assumes there was a level playing field in a combat between terrorists and the Army.  Yet that is not how it was.  The Army was called in to support the police; the Army were there as a policing force.  The combat was between the loyalists and nationalists, between paramilitary republicans and paramilitary unionists; the Army were apart from them and intended to keep the peace.  As such, they are not exempt from adhering to civil, military and international laws.

It is indeed unfair that at an individual level a squaddie should be subject to laws and punishment that a terrorist is not.  But that is how it must be: the police who uphold the law must be subject to those laws.  And that includes the Army when they are the police force.  It is also unrealistic to compare the expectations of behaviour of a salaried, trained, professional soldier with a support structure and command structure to a civil terrorist operating within a totally different social environment and structure.  Yes, it is reasonable to expect the Army not to be criminal in their operations and so yes it is reasonable to expect them to be subject to punishment if they break the law, especially when they are there to keep the peace.

The state and its agents must work within the law or they are not entitled to be in their position of authority.  Unless, of course, we are to live in a criminal autocracy or dictatorship where the agents of the state can kill its citizens without fear of redress.

Because once the British Army is granted exemption from law in their operations, they will be expected to commit war crimes as expedient ways to achieve results.  And then we will be the bad guys.

 

The more you practise, the luckier you get

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tl;dr: Do independent study with a purpose.

Last year, doing my history research module, I used to get distracted when doing independent study and wander off spending hours reading irrelevant stuff. But I did get into the habit of thinking about the module themes as I did so, and I did use the primary and secondary document analysis techniques.

On the afternoon before the exam—when I should have been revising—I came across the Commissar Order: the instruction to German soldiers to not take Russian political Commissars prisoner. I remembered that from reading gory Sven Hassel war stories and proceeded to waste the entire evening reading about it. But I did so using my newly-learned research and historiography skills; that way I could pretend it was ‘revision’.

It turned out this document was genuine and was later hugely significant in the Nuremberg war trials and, as a consequence, has been key in influencing international war crimes legislation prosecution since then. It also gives exquisite insight into the war on the Eastern Front.

Courtesy of module A327 Europe 1914-1989: war, peace, modernity, I was able to appreciate the significance of this document, evaluate its authenticity and put it into a political context. I actually got pleasure from using those skills to gain a much broader and deeper understanding of this tiny, trivial, scrap of history than I otherwise would have done. That scrap is still influencing international relations in the world but for the better now.

Anyway, so blinking what?

The next morning when I saw the exam paper, one of the documents to evaluate in the first question was… The Commissar Order! Either the gods smiled on me, or it is true that the more you practise, the luckier you get.

How might post-traumatic stress disorder change warfare?

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This is a brief note from thinking about Open University DD210 Living Psychology module, book 2, chapter 13, page 149…172 ‘3. The impact of extreme circumstances‘, ‘4. Recovery, resilience and post-traumatic growth‘ and ‘5. Perils, pitfalls and positive effects of psychological interventions‘.

Post-traumatic stress disorder.  People can be damaged by what they are ordered to do; might this change how warfare is conducted?

Millennia ago and centuries, marching off to another country or city allowed preparation time, bonding and training time on the way there.  On the way back there was lots of time for reflection with those who had been through the same experience, done in an environment of routine, with physical activity and done outdoors.  Might that have prevented PTSD for most people?  Is PTSD a phenomenon that arrived with the ability to leave the front line and go home fairly quickly?

Might the consequences of PTSD on military personnel make government change the way warfare is conducted so that it is prevented?  If so, what will that look like?

Is PTSD just an infantry complaint?  Do snipers get it worse than combat area engineers?  Do bomber crews get PTSD?  What about drone pilots who work 9-5 and go home every evening?  Who suffers most: conscripts, volunteers or militia?  Do revolutionaries / guerillas / freedom fighters get it?  Do victors get it?  Is it worse for those who suffer defeat?  How bad is it for child soldiers?

How bad is it for civilians in a war zone?  Refugees?  Survivors?  Orphans?  (And does anyone in governments care about civilians in war zones? It does not seem so.)

What research is being done in PTSD?  By whom?  Why?  Is it for peaceful purposes to demonstrate how warfare is bad, or to make warfare and killing less stressful for the troops so that it can continue?

War causes social breakdown, allows us to be worse than animals, and to get away with it

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I decided to go into war prevention because I suspected it was not cost effective and because it creates a generation of people wanting vengeance.  The Iraq War was sold to us as a great way to make money from reconstruction (by destroying what already existed), to support international development (i.e. take their oil industry) and produce peace (by turning a militarised country into a terrorist region).

What I have since learned about is some of the human cost.  I had some idea, of course, but there are murkier aspects that do not get talked about.

One example is male sexual abuse.  I did not think it likely to be a big deal: rare and hardly very damaging.  All a bit “Fnarr, fnarr, you’ll get over it.”  I was very wrong.

The scale of the problem and the nature of the physical damage to the body are described in this Guardian article from 2011 entitled The rape of men: the darkest secret of war.

I wanted to cherry-pick some quotes about the marital breakdown, humiliation, physical consequences of the permanent damage caused, lack of support and lack of recognition, but the article itself if pretty relentless in providing these itself.  Essentially, it is not about sexual gratification, it is about the perpetrator being so dehumanised that they routinely perform the most degrading torture on innocent strangers and war both creates the environment for such cruelty and makes it possible to hide the act both at the time and later.  If interested, I suggest you read it for yourself.  It’s all quite sad.

I thought Sven Hassel’s books about what went on at the Eastern Front were bad; reality is worse.

War causes social breakdown and allows us to be worse than animals and get away with it.  It makes one wonder what the agenda is for those people who promote it.

The horrors of war: the gueules cassées

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I believe gueules cassées is French for ‘broken faces’ or ‘broken jaws’ (I know not which) and is the term used for the French men who had their faces blown off in the Great War.

Some 15 million men were crippled by the Great War.  In the UK alone by the late 1930s there were still over half a million men receiving pensions for physical disability caused by that war (National Archive).  And then there were those who remained in hospital for the rest of their lives.

The nature of trench warfare is such that the face is often the most exposed part of the body meaning the Great War – with its shrapnel and grenades – was the cause of a huge increase in the number of severe facial wounds.  Also, battlefield medicine began to improve during that war increasing the likelihood of wounded men surviving terrible wounds that would have previously been fatal.

But what happens to a young man with no lower jaw or a hole in his skull where his nose was?  And in France losing ones face was not considered a disability so they received no pension, despite being unable to go out in public.

Léon Dufourmentel (1884 – 1957) was a French surgeon responsible for caring for the gueules cassées and was innovative finding methods for repairing facial wounds by transferring flaps of skin from the scalp to, for example, the chin.

Apparently five of his patients were taken from the hospital to the Palace of Versailles for the signing of the peace treaty in 1919.

Such people are still supported in France – because soldiers are still being shot in the face – through the Union des Blessés de la Face et de la Tête (Union for those with Facial and Head Injuries) and the Foundation for Gueules Cassées are.  They organise international events to raise awareness and funding.

Whether you choose to do a Google image search for the term is up to you.  They are seriously horrid pictures.  They are the sort of images the media are prevented from portraying during a war for fear of upsetting morale.  Whether you call that sensible censorship or propaganda is up to you.

Alternatively view the war memorial in Trévières to the dead of 1914-18.  She was herself maimed in the Second World War and now stands as an inadvertent representative of the broken faces.

The War Memorial at Trévières with her lower jaw blown off

The War Memorial at Trévières. Taken from Traces of War.com

As I write this, there is nothing on the English language Wikipedia about the gueules cassées.  Nowadays plastic surgery is commonplace, even expected of the rich and famous – every day the newspapers and news web sites are littered with such ‘news’.  But nothing much is said about those who suffered and made it necessary for innovative techniques in surgery to be invented.  Perhaps a little more exposure to the horrors of war, and a little less commercial censorship, rather than glorifying and sanitising war by  the media and search engines, might not go amiss.