Griffons and politics
Further to Mark's piece below, I think a few things need to be said about Senator Kenny's piece in the Citizen.
First of all, the comments of Loachman over at Army.ca have been echoed by a correspondent of mine in the Tac Hel community:
So much for the idea of using Griffons for troop transport. Which isn't to say they couldn't have any use over there - say, in a Close Combat Attack (CCA) role, using the C6 for offensive rather than defensive purposes. But that's a discussion for another post.
Secondly, there's some question about the wisdom of using more choppers in COIN ops rather than less. Bruce at Flit pointed out an interesting paper the other day, one that draws a correlation between the level of mechanization of a military, and its chances of success in a COIN campaign. The use of both helicopters and armoured vehicles was said to negatively affect the ability of a military to develop the HUMINT required to effectively fight a counterinsurgency campaign:
While I would like to delve deeper into the framework of the study before conceding the conclusions the authors draw, the issue of force structure and mechanization in COIN warfare is controversial enough within professional military circles that some serious thought should be given to whether we want to further mechanize in our Kandahar efforts, even with the obvious force-protection benefits.
For these reasons, I think Senator Kenny's suggestion to deploy Griffons to Afghanistan as means of avoiding death and injury to our troops by IED isn't a realistic solution.
But I have no doubt he's making that misguided suggestion in good faith. Which is why Peter MacKay should be ashamed of himself. It's said that the liar's tragedy is that he can never believe anyone else; I wonder if a one politician can ever accept that another might not be speaking out of pure partisanship? I often disagree with Senator Kenny's conclusions, but it's plain to me that he's one of the few politicians in Ottawa willing to criticize his own party as well as his opponents when it comes to the CF. For this he should be applauded, not subjected to a cheap political attack.
I have no problem with MacKay telling the world that Kenny is wrong about the Griffons - I think the senator is wrong too. But our MND should know better than to accuse the least partisan parliamentarian on the issue of national defence of political spin on this topic.
First of all, the comments of Loachman over at Army.ca have been echoed by a correspondent of mine in the Tac Hel community:
Loachman is bang on, obviously one of my colleagues, though not sure if he's at my squadron. For shits and giggles... I looked at the charts he's mentioning to see what we could lift. We'd be quite limited... there is no way we could carry ten troops, we can't even do that in Canada without door guns.
So much for the idea of using Griffons for troop transport. Which isn't to say they couldn't have any use over there - say, in a Close Combat Attack (CCA) role, using the C6 for offensive rather than defensive purposes. But that's a discussion for another post.
Secondly, there's some question about the wisdom of using more choppers in COIN ops rather than less. Bruce at Flit pointed out an interesting paper the other day, one that draws a correlation between the level of mechanization of a military, and its chances of success in a COIN campaign. The use of both helicopters and armoured vehicles was said to negatively affect the ability of a military to develop the HUMINT required to effectively fight a counterinsurgency campaign:
As Figures 2 and 3 demonstrate, increased levels of mechanization are associated with diminished incumbent success in counterinsurgency warfare. Countries with no main battle tanks in their stockpiles managed to win or draw 61% of their wars, while countries with one thousand or more tanks won or tied only 35%, a statistically significant difference. The impact of helicopters is even more profound: countries that did not employ helicopters on the battlefield won or tied 70.3% of their wars, compared to only 43.5% of those that used heliborne assaults. The win/loss rates are even more dramatic: helicopter-capable states won only 9% of their wars, compared with nearly 38% for those without helicopters. These differences are also statistically significant.
While I would like to delve deeper into the framework of the study before conceding the conclusions the authors draw, the issue of force structure and mechanization in COIN warfare is controversial enough within professional military circles that some serious thought should be given to whether we want to further mechanize in our Kandahar efforts, even with the obvious force-protection benefits.
For these reasons, I think Senator Kenny's suggestion to deploy Griffons to Afghanistan as means of avoiding death and injury to our troops by IED isn't a realistic solution.
But I have no doubt he's making that misguided suggestion in good faith. Which is why Peter MacKay should be ashamed of himself. It's said that the liar's tragedy is that he can never believe anyone else; I wonder if a one politician can ever accept that another might not be speaking out of pure partisanship? I often disagree with Senator Kenny's conclusions, but it's plain to me that he's one of the few politicians in Ottawa willing to criticize his own party as well as his opponents when it comes to the CF. For this he should be applauded, not subjected to a cheap political attack.
I have no problem with MacKay telling the world that Kenny is wrong about the Griffons - I think the senator is wrong too. But our MND should know better than to accuse the least partisan parliamentarian on the issue of national defence of political spin on this topic.
posted by Babbling Brooks at 9:31 a.m.
1 Comments:
Would that not be a valid argument against the Leopard MBTs also, or do we want to just use it as an argument against what we did not deploy and leave the already deployed as justified?
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