Senior serving British officers certainly are much more open and frank than ours:

Air Vice-Marshal Greg Bagwell, commander of the RAF’s No 1 Group, which controls all Britain’s fast jet combat aircraft, said that Britain was likely to end up with only six fighter and bomber squadrons, half its current number.

He warned: “That might not be quite enough.”

Air Vice-Marshal Bagwell’s remarks, in a briefing last week to Defense News, a trade journal, are among the most outspoken by any senior RAF commander.

He warned that even the reductions that have been publicly announced — from 12 fast-jet squadrons to eight — would leave the RAF only “just about” able to do its current tasks, with no leeway for the unexpected…

In the medium-term, over the next seven to 10 years, Air Vice-Marshal Bagwell said, the RAF “will be a six-squadron world; that’s what’s on the books”. He said he expected there to be five squadrons of Eurofighter Typhoon aircraft and just one of the Harrier’s long-term replacement, the Joint Strike Fighter. “I expect a single [JSF] squadron in 2020 and that’s it,” he said [more on the UK's F-35 plans here, plus the RAF's giving up aerial maritime patrol].

Asked whether this left the RAF on the same level as Belgium, he replied: “I think we’re slightly above Belgium, and we are not a Belgium-minded country.”

He added: “I might, over the next few years, argue that that might not be quite enough.” As recently as the 1990s the RAF had 30 front-line fast-jet squadrons [emphasis added]…

An RAF comprising six fast-jet squadrons would be smaller than at any point since its foundation in 1918. It would take British combat air power back to the pre-RAF days of the Royal Flying Corps.

Belgium no longer has a stand-alone air force, but an “air component”, with five fast-jet squadrons. In squadron terms the RAF of 2020 will be only slightly larger, but will still have significantly more aircraft, with an estimated minimum of 135 fast jets to Belgium’s 70.

Air Vice-Marshal Bagwell said that one way around the shortages was to collaborate more with the French [emphasis added, more here: "Good froggies!"].

“It looks like we are going to twin 3 Squadron [a Typhoon squadron] with one of the [French] Rafale [fighter-bomber] squadrons. I’ll make a prediction we will have British officers flying Rafale from a carrier within a few years. I’m quite sure of it.”..

Meanwhile:

U.K. Harrier’s Farewell
…

(All Pictures: UK MOD Crown Copyright 2010)
[Note the snow.]

Earlier on the Harrier:

Harrier’s last sea jump

By the way, the Canadian Air Force has two operational fast air squadrons (CF-18 Hornet “gun squadrons”): 409 at Cold Lake, Alberta, and 425 at Bagotville, Quebec.

The Royal Navy, for its part, is also fading fairly fast:

The Royal Navy’s new flagship is a ferry…

Lots more here on the recent UK big defence cuts.

Update: A pilot from 425 Squadron is flying Tornados in Afstan on exchange with the RAF (via Milnews.ca and the Spotlight on Military News and International Affairs).

Upperdate: A version of this post is at the Canadian Defence & Foreign Affairs Institute’s 3Ds Blog.

Mark
Ottawa

I bet you won’t see this reported in our major media, esp. given a possible motivating factor:

Sweden to Strengthen Presence in Afghanistan

Four days after the first jihadist suicide bomb on Swedish soil injured two in an attack in downtown Stockholm, lawmakers voted 290-20 with 19 abstentions on Dec. 15 to extend the country’s military presence in Afghanistan.

The decision allows the government to add troops to the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan. About 500 operate there now; the government now has authority to increase that to 855. Next year will also see more UAVs and tactical and troop transport helicopters sent to the theater [of course no Canadian political party will consider keeping our Air Wing in Afstan].

The vote in parliament, which was supported by the opposition Social Democrats and Green Alliance [emphasis added], gave no firm date for the provisional withdrawal of forces from Afghanistan. The expectation among government and opposition groups is that this may happen in 2014.

“We will not be intimidated. Our resolve is firm. What we are trying to achieve is to bring security and well-functioning civilian institutions to Afghanistan. When the U.N. calls, Sweden will come,” said Fredrik Reinfeldt, Sweden’s prime minister…

So a country with a population just under a third of Canada’s will be keeping almost as many troops in Afstan as we will after 2011. And the Swedes will not all be inside the wire:

…
A group of Swedish officers and soldiers who are part of the Operational Mentoring and Liaison Team (OMLT) are based at Camp Mike Spann, about 12 kilometres south west of Mazar-i-Sharif. They act as mentors to the Afghan army and currently support commanding officers at corps and brigade level…

Seems those Vikings, even the neutral Swedes, get things–esp. the Danes (see the “Danish note” here; the Danes, unlike the Swedes, have had a serious combat role and are continuing it–unlike us).  I regret even thinking this but just maybe this country needs a real terrorist attack to wake up.

Update: A version of this post is at the Canadian Defence & Foreign Affairs Institute’s 3Ds Blog.

Mark
Ottawa

Conference of Defence Associations’ media round-up.

Mark
Ottawa

When will the fall be made final?  Quelle misère out of which it should be put. At Taylor Empire Airways:

…
I am Canadian’ pitchman joins As It Happens…

I gave up on CBC Radio right around the time my twenties disappeared into the rear-view mirror…

Just to age myself I started giving up on their radio about 15 years ago moving into my late 40s. All I can listen to now (despite the global warming fixation) is Quirks and Quarks, almost always pretty interesting. Ah, for Basic Black.

From a 2006 post at Daimnation!:

CBC radio dying too/Sook-Yin Lee sucks
…

In the car, with nothing else to consider, I listened Saturday, July 22, for a while to Definitely Not the Opera. The show was spending large amounts of our money to do special programs from New Orleans.

Host Sook-Yin Lee achieved a truly great moment in postmodern irony. She asked some nice old black guy she was interviewing whether he considered her a lady. He replied that he certainly did unless evidence otherwise came to his attention, for instance that a woman was, say, truly sexually loose. Ms Lee ragged him about this for some time (what a hoot) knowing full well that the fellow did not know this: “Sook-Yin Lee Funny Porn Movie Shortbus”.

How utterly disgusting, arrogant and condescending. And you’re paying for it.

Thank goodness for this:

Of course, the fact that Lee isn’t particularly good looking helps make her being naked and having sex un-erotic.

Chris Taylor has another post, with great photos, of CBC types outside the wire:

CBC Radio, 1943-44

There was a rather different view about reporting one’s country’s wars a while back or, as the French say, autres temps, autres moeurs.

Mark
Ottawa

Following up on these posts,

Afghans and Americans at arms together/Kandahar progress Update

“Obama administration Afghan war review due out tomorrow”/Tourists/What happens to foreigners Update

the start of a thoughtful post by Andrew Potter at his Maclean’s blog:

In Afghanistan, all roads lead to Pakistan

Today’s summary of the president’s report on the war strategy is getting tons of press [see also the president's remarks and the "Press Briefing by Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, Secretary of State Clinton, Secretary of Defense Gates and General Cartwright"], and while the picture being shown is positive, the truth is that on virtually every measure, the overall situation is very complicated. For every story you read about things getting better, there is one about how they are getting worse somewhere else [see, e.g., the NY Times and the "Kandahar progress Update" above]…

After that, see this must-read from BruceR. at Flit on how things may play out:

…I don’t understand why anyone would assume that the Tajiks and Hazara and Kabuli Pashtuns who still hate the Taliban will not fight for their homes if we left. They’re not going to be so easy to roll the second time, and the fact the ANA make poor doorkickers in our concept of ops does not mean they’d do just fine against similarly armed Pashtun insurgents, especially if we left a SOF/FID/CAS/Fires thumb on the pro-government side of the scales.

We shouldn’t confuse a lack of Afghan army enthusiasm with being cannon fodder in the south with a lack of determination to fight for the north when the time comes…

…When I deployed, I remember looking at this pretty analytically. I had a contempt for the Taliban I no longer have quite so much, and the reports from the field were rosier than even my bullcrap filter could compensate for, so it’s fair to say I was of a more optimistic cast than now. But when I could look at it coldly and logically, I basically saw what Junger saw… that, worst-case, fighting in the south bought time in the north, and ISAF’s presence could give those people after 20 years of war an indeterminate number of years of relative peace while we were there. Worst case, we could give them a shot at normalcy. To me that was enough of a humanitarian argument to justify my serving in ISAF. Still is…

…If the violence starts ramping up again in the summer of 2011, as it has every year higher than the year before, than we really need to start digging the fallback positions and figuring out what ANSF with ISAF enablers can realistically hold onto in the years to come. Because the only alternative will be an indefinite, fruitless Western commitment.

Hell of a lot to think about.

Mark
Ottawa

1) The Economist’s style at its height:

…
Organs of state
A dodgy election is followed by a grisly allegation
…
…

2) A piece in The Guardian on the very put-up nature of the 1999 NATO attack on Serbia (in which the Canadian Air Force took part, in an operation not authorized by the UN Security Council–unlike the CF’s current deployment with ISAF in Afstan):

Kosovo and the myth of liberal intervention

Earlier at Daimnation!:

Klueless about Kosovo

What to do with Kosovo?

Mark
Ottawa

Bouhammer’s Afghan Blog explains some realities.  The Afghans are Muslims and people too:

…
COIN is just another mission in combat, no different than a deliberate defense or a movement to contact. COIN is also not new, we have been doing it for years. We did it in WWII, Vietnam, etc., etc. Our US Special Forces have been executing COIN since their inception in the 60s. It has had other names like Foreign Internal Defense (FID) which it was known as for years in the Special Ops Community. And just like the risk that SF takes or our ETTs and MITT teams have been taking for years, the teams must always have their guard up and always paying attention to the local nationals, never fully trusting them. When I was an ETT a few years ago my team was always in “RED” status on our weapons and we always had at least one weapon with us on the FOB. Since we lived with the Afghans on the FOB, our guard was always up that one of them could turn on us. There have been embedded advisors (ETT, PMT, STTs) being killed by Afghan forces since we started embedding with them. Does that mean we just abandon the mission and not train them anymore?

…I am not saying to trust them all, as I never did 100% because they didn’t have US ARMY on their chest, but you have to trust them some as we are tasked with embedding and training them. Just because they are an Afghan or a Muslim does not mean they are the enemy. I have met many Afghans that I would and I did proudly fight side by side with. I have many good memories of breaking bread with them and drinking chai. I have seen Afghan soldiers killed, tortured, and wounded as a result of trying to defend their country and sometimes trying to protect and defend Americans fighting with them…

So the West should just give up, especially Canada–a country of some 33 million that has taken some 150 dead, almost all in the last five years. A war that averages 30 dead service members a year? Quelle catastrophe, or, what does a country have armed forces for?

Update: From the rather sceptical NY Times:

NATO Push Deals Taliban a Setback in Kandahar

KABUL, Afghanistan — As the Obama administration reviews its strategy in Afghanistan, residents and even a Taliban commander say the surge of American troops this year has begun to set back the Taliban in parts of their southern heartland and to turn people against the insurgency — at least for now.

The stepped-up operations in Kandahar Province have left many in the Taliban demoralized, reluctant to fight and struggling to recruit, a Taliban commander said in an interview this week. Afghans with contacts in the Taliban confirmed his description. They pointed out that this was the first time in four years that the Taliban had given up their hold of all the districts around the city of Kandahar, an important staging ground for the insurgency and the focus of the 30,000 American troops whom President Obama ordered to be sent to Afghanistan last December.

“To tell you the truth, the government has the upper hand now” in and around Kandahar, the Taliban member said. A midlevel commander who has been with the movement since its founding in 1994 and knows it well, he was interviewed by telephone on the condition that his name not be used.

NATO commanders cautioned that progress on the battlefield remained tentative. It will not be clear until next summer if the government and the military can hold on to those gains, they said. Much will depend on resolving two problems: improving ineffectual local governments and strengthening Afghan troops to fight in NATO’s place.

The Taliban commander said the insurgents had made a tactical retreat and would re-emerge in the spring as American forces began to withdraw.

But in a dozen interviews, Afghan landowners, tribal elders and villagers said they believed that the Taliban could find it hard to return if American troops remained…

Meanwhile, maybe this is the paper’s effort to be fair and balanced:

Taliban Extend Reach to North, Where Armed Groups Reign

The growing violence is the north is not exactly new news, see here and here.

Mark
Ottawa

Just in case you didn’t know, from Foreign Policy’s AfPak “Daily brief“:

…
No surprises here

The Obama administration’s one-year review of the Afghan war strategy, which White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said will “not surprise” anyone following the issue, is due out tomorrow, and Barack Obama met with his national security team for two hours yesterday to give the final approval (Post, FT, Tel). The report is said to note that although progress has been made in some areas of Afghanistan and the transition to Afghan security control “can and should begin” in July 2011, the Karzai government receives low marks for efficiency and corruption (Post)…

The NYT and LAT add to reporting about two grim new National Intelligence Estimates on Afghanistan and Pakistan, representing the consensus views of the U.S.’s 16 intelligence agencies, which military officials reportedly claim were “written by desk-bound Washington analysts who have spent limited time, if any, in Afghanistan and have no feel for the war” (NYT, LAT) [see also this post four days ago]. The NYT reports that the dispute reflects two things: debate in Washington over whether the U.S. can succeed in Afghanistan without more Pakistani cooperation, and “longstanding cultural differences between intelligence analysts, whose job is to warn of potential bad news, and military commanders, who are trained to promote “can do” optimism.”..

UBC’s intrepid Brian Platt (see the whole blog on his recent Afghan trip) would count as one of these tourists:

…
New Year’s in Kabul?

An Afghan official said earlier today that in spite of daily violence in Afghanistan, the tourism industry is up from last year, with around 12,000 visitors going to see the sites in Kabul, Bamyan, Parwan, and other provinces (Pajhwok). Most of the tourists were from the U.S., Canada, Germany, France, Italy, and Norway. Bonus click: Afghanistan 2010 — a year in photos (FP).

Sign up here to receive the daily brief in your inbox. Follow the AfPak Channel on Twitter and Facebook.

Update: From Terry Glavin:

…

Mark
Ottawa

Further to this post on Sebastian Junger,

Progressives, war, and what happens if NATO pulls out of Afstan

BruceR. gives his overall assessment at Flit–please read the whole post:

I still haven’t seen Restrepo yet, but Sebastian Junger’s War was brilliant, I thought, as a portrait of young men at war. His article here on the response he received is also very much worth reading…

…I don’t understand why anyone would assume that the Tajiks and Hazara and Kabuli Pashtuns who still hate the Taliban will not fight for their homes if we left. They’re not going to be so easy to roll the second time, and the fact the ANA make poor doorkickers in our concept of ops does not mean they’d do just fine against similarly armed Pashtun insurgents, especially if we left a SOF/FID/CAS/Fires thumb on the pro-government side of the scales.

We shouldn’t confuse a lack of Afghan army enthusiasm with being cannon fodder in the south with a lack of determination to fight for the north when the time comes…

…When I deployed, I remember looking at this pretty analytically. I had a contempt for the Taliban I no longer have quite so much, and the reports from the field were rosier than even my bullcrap filter could compensate for, so it’s fair to say I was of a more optimistic cast than now. But when I could look at it coldly and logically, I basically saw what Junger saw… that, worst-case, fighting in the south bought time in the north, and ISAF’s presence could give those people after 20 years of war an indeterminate number of years of relative peace while we were there. Worst case, we could give them a shot at normalcy. To me that was enough of a humanitarian argument to justify my serving in ISAF. Still is…

…If the violence starts ramping up again in the summer of 2011, as it has every year higher than the year before, than we really need to start digging the fallback positions and figuring out what ANSF with ISAF enablers can realistically hold onto in the years to come. Because the only alternative will be an indefinite, fruitless Western commitment.

Mark
Ottawa

A pretty good preview I think, though dealing militarily (even if quasi-covertly) with Pakistan’s FATA would be very hard even if Pakistan were non-nuclear.

Earlier:

“Afghanistan: Progress-more needs to be done”/”Bleak Intelligence Brief”/Polish Update

Plus.

Mark
Ottawa