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Radio War Nerd EP #125 — Military Readiness (Patreon)

Published:
2018-03-15 18:02:09
Imported:
2026-06
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Guest: Gabriel Uriarte, fellow history nerd

Recorded March 11, 2018

PORTUGAL—One of the big surprises in the Syrian war has been the poor performance of Turkey's military, in its 2016 incursion, and in the recent incursion into Afrin. The War Nerd talks to former Argentine journalist now living in the US, Gabriel Uriarte, about how militaries decay or revitalize. Uriarte draws on his knowledge of Argentina's military decay leading up to its disastrous war in the Falklands to shed light on the structural and institutional reasons for military decay in other cultures like Turkey's. . . 

At 2:00:25 the Nerd and Ames look at current war news: US sellout of Syrian Kurds officially beginning . . . Skripal poisoning . . . Liberal freakout over Trump agreeing to talk to Kim Jong-Il . . . Saudis attack "triangle of evil" . . . 

Total time: 2:43:05

Direct link to this episode's mp3 here 

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Comments

Shawn van Leeuwen

glad to see Gabriel back on the show. Been waiting for a discussion on Turkey's military and always great stories about Argentina during the grim times.

Manfred

What I don't get is why Turkey would even want to get a quick win in Afrin? The only thing of value coming out of this for them are pictures on TV and those would end if they win. Secondly, what is Turkey supposed to do with its FSA proxies if the operation ends? They might be useless as a combat force but could still develop into a headache if you have to stow them somewhere. Thirdly, the longer the war goes on, the more YPG fighters will be sucked in. And that is currently the only way for Erdogan to get at them.

mark

John, what you said about the relationship between Turkey and Qatar is not accurate. There is a strong ideological link there. Both regimes are influenced by the Muslim brotherhood doctrine. With the fall of the Muslim brotherhood regime in Egypt and the corruption of the other MB regime in Sudan by Saudi money, Qatar and Turkey have been tightening their relationship. Since they now see themselves as the only true MB oriented regimes left. Their media outlets also make sure to portray the other in good terms.

Gabriel Uriarte

My delivery *is* painful. So, for those who might want to get a less incompetently-spoken version of what I was trying to say, here's that outline I sent that John and Mark kept referring to: '... [W]hy so many seemingly impressive modern armies underperform when first (or even second-, as with Turkey now) employed in actual operations [is] something I've been thinking about this for a while (I became interested in the TSK because so many of its fumbles in 2016 reminded me very specifically of stuff we did in the Falklands). I've even developed a kind of check-list of things to look for to qualify the impressive totals for men and equipment one'll get from the CIA Factbook or the IISS's Military Balance. They could be summarized as: Procurement, Conscription, Coups, and COIN. Briefly: * Procurement. Armies tend to prioritize acquiring new equipment over making sure what they already has actually runs and the people using them are trained. Spinney wrote the classic description of this in "Why the Defense Budget Is Always Underfunded" <a href="http://chuckspinney.blogspot.com/p/the-defense-death-spiral-why-defense.html," rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">http://chuckspinney.blogspot.com/p/the-defense-death-spiral-why-defense.html,</a> and to me the key phrase is "Robbing readiness to fund procurement." It's why, in the US case, all those headlines about how only 1/6th of the Army's brigades or 1/10th of the Navy's planes are actually deployable can co-exist quite truthfully with unprecedented levels of defense spending. Unless an army is engaged in actual large-scale fighting, defense spending will tend to skimp on unsexy items like maintenance or intensive training in favor of buying new stuff. And you'll tend to see the same problem in most armies no matter how small. A guy I knew who did consulting for the Colombian Defense Ministry was scandalized by how they were spending tons of money to acquire F-16s (for use against, uh...), while at the same time making very perfunctory efforts to train their regular infantry to fight guerrillas. - A subset of procurement is that attention to logistic units tends to suffer. Peacetime armies become accustomed to having any emergency or shortfall covered by domestic civilian infrastructure. This is why operations even a few miles from the border end up with units lacking supplies or transport (remember the mess of Israeli logistics in 2006; same thing happened to the Turks in 2016). * Conscription. Here the key variable is to me not the presence of conscription itself (the Wehrmacht was a conscript army), but the term of service. If you see it's one-year, you should really start marking down those hundreds of thousands you might see in "The Military Balance" or Wikipedia. It's not just a problem of inadequate training, but rather that most units will, in a very real sense, not really exist for good chunks of the year. If you allow three months for individual training and three months for basic unit training, that means that for at least half the year your "155th Mechanized Infantry Brigade" will really just be a collection of buildings, warehouses and adjoining training areas filled with conscripts who might, at the later stages of training, be able to conduct basic company or battalion-level actions. And even in the last six months, larger-scale formations (if given proper intensive training, not necessarily obvious because of Procurement above) might become OK at doing one thing, but that one thing might not be what you end up needing to do. (Two of the Argentine Brigades sent to Malvinas had only conducted offensive maneuvers on a plain, the third I believe had not conducted maneuvers of any kind.) This problem, however, affects different arms differently: it has by far the worse effect on infantry units (although lack of realistic training for armor can lead to very nasty, 10-tanks-killed-in-one-day affairs), while artillery units tend to be OK. That's why it's better for an army of this kind to rely on artillery rather than fancy combined-arms stuff, and it's at least one lesson the TSK seems to have learned from Euphrates Shield. (It's also why I'm a bit more pessimistic than most people regarding how long the YPG/J can hold on if this continues the way it is: against basically light infantry, heavy artillery support can achieve more than people realized: Russian howitzer and MLRS support shot through some very average SAA formations across some pretty formidable mountain terrain in northeastern Lattakia in 2015-16.) - A subsidiary problem here is this kind of short-term conscription has a bad effect on officer corps as well. There's a problem (and I have documented sources for this in the Argentine case) that they simply don't get that much practice using actual units in realistic conditions, and the experience they do get is circumscribed by the very basic state of training of the people under their command. That half of the year is spent teaching a new batch of people the same basic military skills leads can lead to boredom and staleness, and it makes actual troop command much less attractive than staff postings in the defense bureaucracy (a big contributor to generals' bloat) or overseas. - There are some interesting "Open-Source Intelligence" consequences of armies using one-year conscripts. The first is that, if there is any plan for truly large-scale employment of these units, there will be either reservist recalls or extensions of the terms for conscripts already under arms, neither of which can be easily hidden unless you're the 1930s USSR or current-day North Korea. The other is that the dates in which conscripts are inducted can tell you a lot about when such an army might feel itself able to do something (domestically or externally): at the simplest level, if all conscripts for one year enter, say (to take the Argentine example), in February, then you can be pretty sure that until at least June or so nothing major will happen. There are wrinkles, such as tri-yearly or quarterly inductions, but, anyway, paying attention to this small detail of a country's military can tell you a lot more about it than studying its weapon systems. * Coups: Here what I'd say is that one really shouldn't see the problem here as one of individual talent, of professional officer corps being "decapitated" and replaced by political hacks. Besides the many examples of armies that became arguably better from such decapitations (the French in 1792 or the Russians in 1918), nobody in any army rises to high command without good political connections and instincts. There's also the fact that most modern armies are very top-heavy at the general-rank level: in the US this ("Generals' bloat") has caused comment for decades now, and in other armies the problem is at least comparable (Turkey pre-coup had roughly the same ratio as US) or even worse (UK is three times worse than the US). The result of this is that there's usually plenty of rank-suitable people available to fill critical positions even should large vacancies occur. A better way of thinking about the problem with coups and purges is that, in the kind of country where they happen, these are to a certain extent endemic (observers of the Turkish Army were complaining about officer dismissals back in 2012), and this leads what I think is known as "command turbulence": people haven't been at their jobs for a while and/or have little experience working with colleagues and superiors. When you've had purges of the scale and duration of Turkey (they're still not over), you can be pretty sure that this problem will be be acute. (How much it affects things will depend on what you're asking these people to do: if it's a fancy combined-arms thing like Euphrates Shield, that's just asking for trouble.) - A subset of this issue is that, in general, officer from certain arms (those furnishing coup-capable units) tend to be more liable to be purged by one faction or another, leading to odd result that the more senior people in some promotions, and thus eligible for high command postings, come from branches like engineering (Galtieri was an engineer) or the military police (the current head of the Turkish army is from the Jandarma). The guy who headed Euphrates Shield, now sidelined, was a Special Forces guy: part of his problem was that (according to one source I've seen) he was trying to use his own HQ staff to command EShield, which was as if JSOC tried to command the ground phase of Desert Storm. - A final subset is that armies where coups and purges are common tend to develop highly politicized and conspiratorial mindsets. The requirements for planning a coup or guarding against it (extreme compartmentalization of information, highly decentralized hierarchy, as short a chain of command as possible) tend to be the exact opposite of those for large-scale conventional operations. This can lead to armies that can achieve brilliant surprises on day one but fall down because they simply weren't thinking ahead to D+1 contingencies (there's no D+1 in a coup: either it works or it doesn't). * COIN. Here it's basically what you know already. I'd focus less on the demoralizing effects of pulling out nails or electrocuting genitals, as against the fact that, in strictly military terms, COIN for most large units will usually mean static deployments in small units guarding installations or checkpoints. This is why the British required their units coming out of Northern Ireland to have between four and six months of retraining (and these were manned with professional soldiers) before they were considered fit to be assigned to the Army of the Rhine or the reserve. Also, one of the practical ways in which involvement in COIN can degrade an army's capabilities is because, especially in urban contexts, there's a tendency for the capture/torture/kill units to operate semi-autonomously under ad-hoc "task forces," leading to the existence in practice of several parallel chains of command, which, as my father pointed out in the Argentine case, means that the chain of command has really ceased to exist. I strongly suspect that one reason why our command system was so chaotic in Malvinas (utterly unclear theater jurisdictions that also kept changing all the time, brigades from three separate corps thrown together under a commander who was junior to one of the brigadiers) is because our military had become accustomed to operating in coup/counterinsurgency conditions where a formal, open and predictable chain of command tends to be a liability. OK, I hope this hasn't been too long for that "outline" I spoke about last Saturday. Possibly this along with the map could supply enough material for an episode. The subject will certainly keep for a future occasion, however, if indeed it merits one at all. '

MS

Sorry to say, had to stop listening due to too may 'you knows' and 'umms'.

Paul Vd

So Britain and the US are bringing equipment into AlTanf.. What would a US/UK conventional attack on Syria look like today ? Couldn't the whole SAA do a Hezbo on them ?

Sérgio Teixeira da Silva

If that doesn't become an extra episode, could it be included in show notes? It's slightly too awesome to stay just a comment.

Avery

That Churchill editorial was shared by a professor of mine who rarely talks about his Indian upbringing. Genuinely good decision by WaPo editors

xnfec

As I recall, Argentina won two world cups, 1978 - referred to here and 1986 (the hand of God). I think they got to the final in 1990 as well and lost a close match to Germany. When did the Junta fall? Also, from a previous episode, hadn't the pre-war Japanese a form of institutionalised purging of the ranks, which came with it's own problems? I knew someone who was at West Point in the 90's. In those days, the top cadets were allowed to pick their deployments and in his year they all picked the pay corps; I don't know if this is the case now or in every year though. In the UK, I've heard, the top graduates tend to be sent to logistics. After Gallipoli, the allied troops withdrew to Salonika where they became "the gardeners of Salonika", which was used as a criticism of them. Their subsequent history is very interesting and might make a good episode. Their story is nicely summarized in Misha Glenny's book "The Balkans" which, in my opinion, is a very good introduction to the history of the Balkans if you want a start, and there is a reference in it to a another book specifically about them titled "the Gardeners of Salonika". There was an actual death of a Russian in London at the same time; a former associate of Berzovsky, Nikolai Glushkov, the former deputy director of airline Aeroflot who was apparently strangled. As to the Thraroor article, I'm guessing Bezos leans to the libertarian right? There are elements there who hate Churchill and the Empire.

Ilias

Excellent episode about matters that I would never have known about myself. Damn you Gabriel, you've made me worry excessively about the Greek army's 9-month serving duty for conscripts (which I will enroll in in the future)!

Paul Vd

Mark Ames. Why did you say that there isn't a motive by the UK for a false flag ? There totally is. The UK is looking for political support to back the US in the future attack on Syria.

radiowarnerd

Thanks--I didn't realize. Very interesting to know.

Samson

You know um i mean um. You know

Keith O Brien

Thanks for this very interesting episode. That Hugh Grant quote at the end about the British giving their empire up out of a heightened sense of politeness had me in stitches. It’s like a corollary of having “conquered half the world in a fit of absence of mind".

Carter Adams

The strangest myth of English-speaking empires is that all that conquest and subjugation happened accidentally, just the result of circumstances beyond our control. As far as propaganda goes, it's fucking genius, but it's pretty hard to stomach.

Angus Crowe

Interesting comments RE NZ & Turkey and how the view they collectively Gallipoli campaign. Speaking out against war in NZ or being critical of the NZDF's involvement in foreign wars can lead to fairly vitriolic public backlash here (NZ), quite contrary to how many view NZ from the outside. Not sure whether John or Mark know about the 'Hit & Run' exposé by journalists Nicky Hagar and Jon Stephenson which revealed that the NZ SAS had committed revenge attacks against an undefended village in Afghanistan, killing a number of civilians. The public animosity towards Hagar and Stephenson was tremendous - "how dare you critisie our brave troops, don't see you going over there and risking your life for your freedoms" etc. I'd never felt more alien in my own country than during that period last year. There are some nascent peace groups (Peace Action) questioning the established narrative or NZ's involvement foreign wars, also growing calls for further recognition of our own land wars in the 1860's, but the parochial response is still pretty widespread.

radiowarnerd

Thanks Angus. I did get some sense of that when living in NZ, but when you hang out mostly with academics you always get a skewed view. My main connection with populist rage was letters to the editor of the ODT after the All Blacks lost, but there was a lot of military nostalgia in Dunedin taking strange forms.

Angus Crowe

Ha, I can imagine. Not if you heard this during your time in NZ (also not sure if it can be substantiated) but apparently instances of domestic violence increase directly after All Black loses.