Diggers revisited

In December last, the media was accusing the Army – short of engineering equipment in theatre – of buying up commercial JCB diggers, giving them a lick of camouflage paint and sending them to Afghnaistan. This, we averred, was a "cheap shot, and wholly wrong". The Army had bought state-of-the-art JCB High Mobility Engineer Excavators (HMEE) - custom-designed military equipment, complete with armour.

As it turns out, although the HMEEs were on order, the media was right and I was wrong. As the latest post from Michael Yon illustrates, the Army is indeed using ordinary, commercial JCBs in theatre, although they have armour bolted onto the cabs as well a paint jobs.

Whether these have been bought specifically for theatre, however – or simply drawn from stock and armoured – is not known. It would hardly seem rational to by new plant, as the MoD seems to have a considerable surplus of these machines, to the extent that it is selling some off from its reserves - unused.

This was also the case with its armoured bucket loaders which are still on sale, and the Combat Engineering Tractors, which have some life left in them and are a bargain for less that £10,000 each. In fact, there is a whole raft of new and nearly new construction equipment available and even heavy-duty military bulldozers - all ex-MoD.

What makes this so important is that Israeli and US experience demonstrates that the right sort of engineering equipment is not only a force magnifier but also a life saver. Given its willingness to hazard flesh instead of using steel, and the general lack of plant available in theatre, it is easy to gain the impression that the Army is not really trying.

COMMENT THREAD

Blessed be the peacemaker

Re-reading Michael Yon's latest despatch for the umpteenth time, my own thinking hardens into a single question: why are we messing about?

The heaviest piece of kit used in the entire operation to clear Pharmacy Road is an armoured JCB Caterpillar 434 (pictured left) – with all the substance and presence of a Tonka toy. It is not even an HMEE.

The dangerous work is done by unprotected troops and ordnance clearance teams driving nothing more lethal than the absurdly expensive, unarmoured Tellar Disposal and Search Explosives Ordnance Disposal vehicles.

What we should have been using were these (pictured below) – the Mantak D-9 Armoured Bulldozer. There is even a remote-control version.


There are more pics here (about eight-tenths the way down). One of the captions reads:

Talk About Intimidating. You do NOT want to be anywhere around this monster when it is barrelling towards you with several tons of mines scooped up from your locally laid minefield, otherwise you might be eating a lot of dirt and body parts for dinner.

Procedure-wise, what should have been done is equally straightforward. A straight line should have been drawn on a map, between FOB Jackson and FB Wishtan. The route should have been published well in advance, with warnings to keep clear. On the appointed day, the D-9 is started up, put into gear and driven from A to B, in a straight line. This is the engineering solution.

Michael Yon writes about these baked mud walls stopping 30mm cannon rounds and being left standing when 500lb bombs drop in compounds. They would not last two minutes in front of a D-9.

Then, you open up a compensation office and pay a fair price for the damage. The cost would still be cheaper than a brace of GBUs and the delivery charges – much less the compensation you have to pay to the relatives of dead soldiers and limbless servicemen.

But what about "hearts and minds?" I hear you cry. Well, there is nothing benign in permitting the Taleban to kill Afghan citizens. Yon writes that two civilians were killed by IEDs after the road clearance operation.

One was killed when he tried to strip one of the blown-up vehicles left by the British engineers. The other died on a route he had thought cleared by the British. It had not been. "The Taleban blows up a lot of local people in Sangin," Yon observes. Where is the "hearts and minds" in allowing that to happen?

The Afghanis, we are told, want security more than anything. That is how you give it to them. Sending out our own young men to die in narrow alleys, surrounded by high walls, prey to the IED and the bullet, is not. It achieves nothing.

Blessed be the peacemaker – it is called an armoured D-9.

COMMENT THREAD

An engineering solution

Those with a far more intimate knowledge of London than I will no doubt be able to put names to places and streets, but my lack of specific recall does not negate a general point that the design of central London owes much to military planning, and the need to defend important spaces.

Much the same can be said of many towns and cities in England and indeed, as this tract testifies, of many of the urban centres in Europe.

The relevance of this comes to mind as we read Sean Rayment's account in The Sunday Telegraph of the multiple IED ambush which recently killed three soldiers in Sangin (and five before them in July), fortified by the vivid description of a recent action in the town by Michael Yon.

The latter in particular describes areas of the town which form natural funnels and ambush points, without cover or escape routes, where the close-in ambush in which the Taleban seem to specialise can have particularly deadly effect.

On this basis, any rational appraisal of the prospects of successfully policing the town would necessarily conclude with the Irish Tipperary joke – where a local tells an American couple asking for directions to the town: "I wouldn't start from here."

That British troops are singularly failing to pacify the town and the surrounding countryside, therefore, is no reflection on their skills or courage – both of which, Yon will aver, they have in plenty. Simply, they are being asked to do an impossible task, venturing daily into the mincing machine to act as targets for an increasingly proficient enemy.

As we have argued in the case of roads, therefore, if the job is impossible for the infantry to deal with "as is", the only logical – and essential – course of action is to reshape the environment, better to enable troops to prevail against the enemy. In other words, it is not infantry but combat engineers that are needed, their task to re-plan and then rebuild the town (or parts of it) that will remove the death traps that are giving the Taleban their edge.

In any modern society, there are provisions in law for the state to intervene in town planning, not least through compulsory purchase of land which is required for development. In the context of the urgent need to control and effectively police the town and its environs, if such provisions do not exist in Afghanistan, then they need to be introduced as a matter of urgency, then to allow the (armoured) bulldozers to move in.

It is unlikely that our engineers have need of any guidance, but should they require an aide memoire, this US army manual of 1897 will tell them all they need to know, so well-established are the principles. And, without their application, any occupation and intended pacification is merely going through the motions, sacrificing young men on futile gestures.

Bearing in mind that Gen Richards is talking of a 40-year occupation, the current strategy of "mowing the grass" is no more likely to produce dividends over that period than it has over the last three, while the current casualty rate is more likely to ensure the complete removal of our forces within the decade, their mission unfulfilled.

Our forefathers knew what it took to impose the rule of law. Major surgery is required on the town and its environs, or we will see much more of it, of a different kind, in Camp Bastion hospital.

COMMENT THREAD

"Same old failings"

The starting point of this piece is the assertion that we will never get sensible military procurement until or unless MPs and the media start to take the subject seriously.

Only then, do we assume that they will make the effort to understand the issues and put the pieces together. And, if they do so, they will be able to target their criticisms accurately and fairly. But they must also come up with clear ideas of what should be done. There is no point whatsoever relying on the MoD – or the military. Time and time again, it has become demonstrably clear that they have very little idea of what they are doing.

The illustration of this broader thesis comes with today's media coverage of the annual National Audit Office (NAO) report on MoD project management, which has featured, amongst other things, the problems in bringing "Terrier" battlefield engineer vehicle into service – a project slated at £300 million, each vehicle costing £5 million.

The focus on this machine in the report has prompted three media articles dedicated specifically to the subject of the Terrier.

In no particular order, there is a piece by Chris Irvine, in The Daily Telegraph, another in the same paper (online both) by Thomas Harding and a piece in The Daily Mail by Matthew Hickley. Then, in each case there is comment by an MP, Edward Leigh, the Conservative chairman of the Public Accounts Committee.

To understand the scale of the problem, we first have to look at each article individually. Then we need to look at the bigger picture, Leigh's response to the newspapers and the role of the NAO.

Taking Hickley's Mail piece first, the headline (which would not have been written by the author) proclaims: "Army forced to buy JCBs and paint them in camouflage colours to clear warzones." The message, however, accurately reflects the copy, which tells us:

Plans for new armoured bulldozers to help British troops to clear obstacles in warzones have been hit by such long delays that the Army has had to buy JCB diggers instead and paint them in camouflage colours.

This assertion is then reinforced by the picture (above), which shows a line of ordinary, commercial JCBs.

Taking that one point (we will return to the others) – that the Army is, in effect, using ordinary JCB diggers, with a new paint job - this is a cheap shot, and wholly wrong. The vehicles being bought are the state-of-the-art JCB High Mobility Engineer Excavator (HMEE) - pictured below, right.

They were purpose-designed, initially for the US Army and are custom-built military machines. Furthermore, the version to be fielded is armoured, which adds to the differences – although we have reservations about this, as these machines are not mine protected. Nevertheless, they bear no more relation to the civilian machine than does an Army truck to a Tesco delivery vehicle.

Moving on to Chris Irvine's Telegraph piece, he also writes in similar terms that "The Army had to buy JCB diggers and paint them to camouflage them after plans for new armoured bulldozers to clear warzones were met by long delays."

The issue we need to address here is the inference that the Army bought the HMEE because of the delays in procuring the "new armoured bulldozers" – the Terriers (picture, below left) to which the NAO report refers.

Once again the assertion is wrong. Although ostensibly based on the NAO report, that is not what the NAO actually says. The passage is here:

2.17 Terrier will replace the Combat Engineer Tractor that was withdrawn from service in March 2008 because of concerns about the safe integration and operation of the Bowman communications system, reliability and obsolescence problems. The delays to Terrier will extend this capability gap; but users have been willing to accept that the vehicles will not be available to support operations until 2012 rather than risk a lower level of reliability. The Department does not believe that the delays will have an operational impact in the short term because of Urgent Operational Requirement action to purchase alternative engineering vehicles for current operations, including the JCB High Mobility Engineer Excavators.

The most relevant sentence here is the last, where the MoD argues that the delays in the Terrier procurement will not affect operations because, inter alia the HMEE has been bought. From this, it is a long way to go to assume that the HMEE was bought because of the delays in the Terrier programme. And, in fact, that was not the case,

Those that have followed this issue will know that the HMEE is to be purchased as part of the £96 million Talisman package, devised as a "specialist route clearance system", which "will provide a new high-tech way of dealing with the IED (Improvised Explosive Device) threat."

In this role, the HMEE brings to the table capabilities which the Terrier cannot supply. Specifically, the HMEE is a development of the JCB Fastrac, a machine which is optimised for (relatively) high-speed road use. It is thus capable of travelling long distances at convoy speed, keeping up with other vehicles without the need for specialist transportation. It can also operate freely on a wide variety of roads.

Strangely enough, when the concept was first announced in 2005, it was much lauded, not least by Sean Rayment in The Sunday Telegraph as the US Army's "latest secret weapon in the war against terror". How times change. But it is a pity that Telegraph writers do not read the Sunday version of their own newspaper.

The contrast with the Terrier, to anyone who thinks about it, is obvious. A tracked vehicle, if it is to travel any distance, has to be transported on a low loader. Furthermore, it is not by any means ideal for working on metalled roads – tracks tending to tear up the tarmac. It may have a limited role in Afghanistan, its design use being to carry out engineering works in the "indirect fire zone". But it is not an equivalent to the HMEE (and vice versa).

At best, the two machine types have overlapping capabilities, which is probably what the MoD was getting at when it argued that there would be no "operational impact" from the delay in the Terrier. Most of the jobs the Terrier would have been called upon to do, the HMEE can also do. But the HMEE can perform tasks for which the Terrier would be wholly inappropriate.

With that, we now come to the next point, majored on by Thomas Harding, his article headed: "Mine clearing vehicle that could save lives of British troops delayed for two years." Unfortunately, he has been misled both by the MoD and the NAO, which position the Terrier as a "mine clearance vehicle", which is actually only a secondary role.

Harding thus writes: "The armoured vehicle can clear minefields and make routes safe for following armour and is likely to have proved a significant asset in Afghanistan where dozens of soldiers have been killed by roadside bombs." He then goes on to say, "As a result of the hold-up the MoD has been forced to buy 10 off-the-shelf Buffalo route clearance vehicles as part of an urgent £96 million project."

The juxtaposition of these two issues is not altogether a happy one. In the mine clearance role, the Terrier is mainly what is known as a "breach" vehicle. Usually, to clear mines, it tows a bit of kit called Viper minefield breaching system (now replaced by the Python) which it uses literally to blast a way through a known minefield, paving the way for armour.

In insurgency warfare, the mine is used as an ambush weapon and, therefore, a different approach is used, needing equipment to investigate suspect locations, to determine whether there is an explosive package hidden there. Once one is detected, it is then identified and dealt with.

Thus, the distinction is between "breach" and "clearance". The Terrier is used for the first, the Buffalo for the second - as one of a suite of vehicles, providing part of the detection capability. There is no comparison. The Terrier can be used for the one (as an ancillary function) but cannot perform the role of the Buffalo. There can be no question, therefore, of being "forced" to buy Buffaloes because of delays in the Terrier programme. The two are completely different animals, used for different jobs.

However, as between the Terrier and the HMEE, there can be an overlap. Both vehicles can be fitted with mine clearance rollers (pictured right). But this kit is also currently fitted to Mastiffs and can be fitted to virtually any other armoured vehicle (in Oman, rollers were fitted to Saracens), so one hardly needs a £5 million, specialist engineering vehicle for the purpose, especially as the Terrier is not mine protected. Futhermore, this equipment - unlike the Husky detector gear - will only deal with pressure-plate activated devices, and not those triggered by command wire or other remote actuation mechanisms.

This brings us to the problem of the "bigger picture". The limitation of the NAO is that it looks at individual projects, mainly from a cost perspective. It does not look at projects in context (how they relate as part of a system, with other equipment), nor does it consider whether they are necessary or whether an alternative would be more appropriate. It simply looks at the situation "as is".

The trouble is that no one else is looking at the bigger picture either. Perhaps the Defence Select Committee should be doing this, but it does not. And neither does the media. As we see with this story, it dissects the information served up to it on a plate and goes no further. But, if you examine the "system" as a whole, a different and altogether more disturbing picture emerges.

Looking specifically at the HMEE, the question has to be asked, what is it for? An excavator, with or without armour, cannot be used to look for mines or other explosives. That is the job of the Husky (see left) in combination with the Buffalo. You would not expect an excavator to dig up a mine or explosive device once found. For a start, the HMEE armour (and design) is not up to that, which would make it far too dangerous. Explosive devices, invariably, are hand-cleared or blown up in situ. The only role one can think of, for which the HMEE is particularly suited is filling in the craters after a device has been blown up.

The question that devolves is why, in the £96 million Talisman project, the Army is buying HMEEs - 13 of them at a cost of £6.2 million – when it is not buying Huskies, an essential component of any route clearance operation? Another question is why the Army is spending £6.2 million on buying HMEEs at all, when it has already has a fleet of 25 armoured mine clearance vehicles, which it is now trying to sell off, unused, at the knockdown price of less than £4.5 million.

If the NAO is interested in value for money – which is its purpose in life – then it needs to look a bit closer at the Talisman project. Tucked into that, as Ann Winterton discovered, are some additional Mastiffs. Their role will be to function as armoured bomb disposal vehicles.

Only last year though, the MoD replaced its entire overseas fleet of bomb disposal vehicles, spending £7.5 million on 18 Swiss-built Bucher Duro vehicles, called the "Tellar" (pictured right). As we pointed out at the time, these unarmoured vehicles are totally unfit for purpose and now, surreptitiously – disguised by another project – these are being replaced.

Thus, we find ourselves in a position where, after the waste of nearly £20 million, we are going to end up with route clearance teams which still lack the essential Huskies to make them truly effective. But the NAO has no comment about that, and the media – entirely heedless of what is going on – is chasing after hares, making false points about JCBs, missing the real story.

That leaves Edward Leigh, who comments on the NAO findings. He complains of the "same old failings", which threaten to leave British troops poorly prepared for frontline action. He condemns what he calls "a lack of realism" and then declares: "This is about more than money. This kit will sooner or later be operated, perhaps in anger, by our men and women in the forces."

That latter sentiment is one with which we would agree. But, instead of offering any more detailed critical evaluation or himself looking at the bigger picture, Leigh is mouthing sound bites in response to an agenda dictated by the NAO. We are indeed – to use his words – dealing with the "same old failings", but there are far more failings than those identified by the NAO. As an MP, and chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, it is his job to root them out.

Instead, from our parliamentary representatives, we also get the "same old failings", which means that money will continue to be wasted and "our men and women in the forces" still won't get the right kit.

They – and we, the taxpayers – deserve something better.

COMMENT THREAD

Crossing the Rubicon

This Sunday saw Sean Rayment, defence correspondent of The Sunday Telegraph, do what he does best, reporting on the ground, the first of his two pieces bearing the entirely predictable headline: "Afghanistan: British troops face huge rise in Taleban bombs".

So widely has this been predicted and expected (see left - click to enlarge), though, that it could hardly qualify as news.

It is, however, useful to have the quotation from Major David Ashman, who commands the Joint Force Explosive Ordnance Disposal Group. This is the group which is responsible for defusing IEDs and unexploded bombs, and he conforms that IEDs were now "the main killers" of British troops. He says: "The reality is, the Taleban have switched tactics. They simply were losing too many people in conventional fighting. IEDs allow them to attack us from a distance and in relative safety."

Such is the scale of the change that, between April and last month, British troops encountered 150 IEDs, compared with 90 in the previous six months. The rate of attacks has risen fivefold, from 15 a month to 75.

Clearly, even with minimal equipment, British forces have developed considerable expertise in dealing with this threat, the casualty rate fortunately not reflecting the level of attacks.

But, while one would expect the Taleban to target coalition forces, they are also attacking economic targets – as indeed was the Indian Embassy in Kabul (pictured, right), which last week took a major hit from a suicide bomber, killing 41 people and injuring more than 140.

Even though the Indians do not even field any troops in the region, they are major players, having pledged US$750 million to Afghanistan's reconstruction since 2002. Today they are the fifth-largest bilateral donor in Afghanistan after the United States, Britain, Japan and Germany.

The amount of aid they have offered, and the effectiveness of the activity – which includes substantial private investment - makes them an important target. Their contribution to the stability and prosperity of the country runs entirely contrary to the objectives of the insurgents - and their sponsors.

What also comes over from recent events is the scale of "conventional" fighting, something of which emerged from the report of a friendly-fire incident, when nine Paras in close contact with the Taleban were wounded by a misdirected attack from an Army Air Corps Apache helicopter during a firefight.

Much further north, the US forces were also attacked, with nine killed in what is slated as "one of the deadliest against US forces in Afghanistan since the military campaign was launched in 2001."

Even before this, Captain's Journal blog was commenting on the "escalation". It cited the Washington Post in this context, which noted that:

Each year since 2002, the number of US and allied troops in Afghanistan has grown. And each year, during the "fighting season" of spring and summer, the number of attacks by the Taliban has also increased, prompting commanders to conclude that still more troops are needed.

Captain's Journal definitely buys into the idea that more troops are needed and, after the successful recovery of Musa Qala and Garmsir – with substantial assistance from US formations, it is hard to argue that there is a "critical mass" needed if territory is to be wrested from the Taleban and the coalition forces are to maintain a presence on the ground. That, it would appear, looks set to happen.

On the other hand, it is becoming clear from the scale of fighting that continues in the environs of Musa Qala that the are is far from pacified. Coalition forces face the nightmare of expending huge resources merely holding the ground – as Air Chief Marshall Sir Jock Stirrup puts it – "for a few years".

In the growing asymmetric phase of this campaign, however, this positions coalition forces as "targets", exposed to the steady toll of attrition for which our modern democracies are ill-suited to resist. Soon enough, without any obvious signs of progress and no clear-cut victories, the pressure to scale down the military and then to withdraw will become very difficult to resist.

What is particularly depressing, therefore, is a long piece in the weekend Herald which recounts the, "Battle to break the grip of Taliban terror in Musa Qala," centred on the battle for "hearts and minds" which we cannot win and should not even attempt.

Not least, there is the never-ending spectre of collateral damage, the latest episode being recorded last week when a US air strike killed 47 civilians, including 39 women and children, as they were travelling to a wedding in the village of Kacu in the eastern Nuristan province of Afghanistan.

Another piece of depressing news, garnered via a Parliamentary Question from Ann Winterton is that in the last two years, UK Royal Engineers have repaired, reconstructed or constructed only 25 miles of road in Helmand province, carried out by project managing locally employed contractors.

This really does reinforce our view that too little attention is being given to fighting the peace without which, in our estimation, we cannot win the campaign.

Thus, while more troops will undoubtedly be welcome, in many senses, they will be the wrong sort. Rather than more over-extended infantry formations, we need to see combat engineers, capable of holding their own against Taleban attacks, while able to focus on infrastructure projects such as the sadly neglected road-building programme.

Here, the scale of the problem is beginning to emerge. While the donor nations make pronouncements about the amount of work done, claiming that over 2,500 miles of road have been repaired or refurbished, the length of the road network in Afghanistan extends to just over 25,000 miles. The actual work completed therefore amounts to little more than ten percent.

Furthermore, owing to the poor standards of some construction, major disrepair is being suffered on some routes (for instance, the road from Sar-e Paul province and Shiberghan, the capital of Jawzjan province). This raises the prospect of roads deteriorating faster than they can be rebuilt or repaired, especially as the annual road maintenance budget is estimated as $116.7 million, much of which is unfunded.

Coincidentally, on our sister blog, we give two examples of the vital role of infrastructure works in developing countries, in Zambia and the Congo. What applies here must apply with just as much force to Afghanistan.

In emphasising this, we have, to an extent, crossed the Rubicon. Having devoted the time and energy to looking at the bigger picture, somehow the details of specific equipment – very much the standard fare of this blog – begin to look less important. In fact, rather than specific military kit, we tend to take the view that we need more bulldozers (armoured or otherwise) and road graders than we do tanks, Mastiffs and other weapons of war.

More than even that, though, it seems we need a change of attitude, the fundamentals of which we set out in our piece on Zambia, recognising that the battle will be fought and won not by military prowess but by delivering on the lasting peace and prosperity than can only come when a properly devised reconstruction programme is fully integrated with the military effort.

And, despite the best intentions of our troops in the field, this we see no signs of materialising.