Geopolitics in the 2020s.

[Genuine Hibs Fan]

1 hour ago, NotThePars said:

https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/ap-exclusive-letter-venezuelan-jail-give-freedom-74420152

The men were summoned to the headquarters of PDVSA for what they were told was a budget meeting on Nov. 21, 2017. A corporate jet shuttled them to Caracas and they were told they would be home for Thanksgiving. Instead, military intelligence officers swarmed into the boardroom and hauled them off to jail.

This is the good stuff

[Genuine Hibs Fan]

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/27/mohsen-fakhrizadeh-iranian-nuclear-scientist-reportedly-shot-dead-near-tehran?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

Well this seems absolutely not suspicious

 

[MONKMAN]

Mossad, got anyone sightseeing in the area?

[ICTChris]

Random shooting IMO.

The spate of assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists in the early 2010s were typically bombs, usually stuck on the outside of their car by a passing motorcyclists. This is a change in tactics, using a team with guns.

That could suggest that it’s different people doing this or that it’s the same perpetrators but they’ve updated their methods. Note ve successfully as the attackers were all killed, according to the Iranians.

[ICTChris]

Lol what 

I was having a banter.

[Lofarl]

Could they no have waited till Trump had fucked off.

[DeeTillEhDeh]

Lol what 

Whoosh!!

[D Angelo Barksdale]

[Enigma]

I immediately thought that could be a Saudi response to another “Houthi” attack on an oil facility a few days ago.

[jagfox]

 

 

[jagfox]

 

 

[jagfox]

 

[ICTChris]

On 19/11/2020 at 18:41, Henderson to deliver ..... said:

Absolutely fucking grim stuff here as are brave Bruces and Sheilas have been caught doing war crimes.

No wonder the UK government are battering through the 'war crimes are good actually bill 2020', a rare bit of foresight from the tories given that witnesses in Oz have already told the inquiry that both us and the Yanks have been up to similar and worse.

 

I've been reading a bit about this, there's been a comprehensive report published about the background.

One of the things that the report says is that the commanders of thr Australian special operations forces (SOF) became detached from their units and this allowed a culture to take hold in these units that lead to the alleged war crimes occurring.  This sounds similar to what is alleged to have happened in the British SAS, who have been accused of similar crimes in Afghanistan.  One of the difficulties of this is that an ability to operate without too much command oversight is one of the benefits of the SOF, they are more self-sufficient than standard infantry and can therefore be deployed quicker.  This ties into the way that the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and elsehwere have been fought.  SOF have been used as raiders and to capture/kill 'high value tagets', the most obvious example of that being the killings of Osama bin Lande and Abu Bakir al-Baghdadi.  This focus is something relatively new - previously SOF would identify targets and then regular infantry would attack high value targets or raid enemy installations/bases.  I remember reading a report somewhere about some members of the US SOF community expressing that this isn't what they are really designed to do - a lot of elite units now effectively get dropped outside compounds, kick the doors in and kill everyone in sight, before withdrawing.  Thsi isn't exactly what SOF have been used for in the past and some of the soldiers in these units aren't pleased with the development. 

The overall affect of this is that very battle hardened SOF units who, by design, operate without the same level of officer oversight have been accused of commiting war crimes - it seems likely that these crimes did happen, tbh.   As noted above, there's a high profile case against SAS soldiers accusing them of executing civilians on raids in Afghanistan, there's also been the case of a Navy SEAL convicted for posing with a corpse who was pardoned by Trump.  How militaries deal with this is interesting - will there be more oversight in SOF units?  The recommendation of the Australian report is that their units follow hte structure of the UK Special Boat Service, where there is an extra officer in each platoon, giving more opportunity for oversight and mentoring.

The big issue here is the way that wars are now fought, which heavily emphasises SOF.  The recent war between Armenia and Azeribijan saw Azeri SOF units have a lot of success, especially in pivotal battles.  Recent military operations by Russia in Crimea, Donbass and Syria have also featured extensive use of SOF.  Russia now has an overall command for all their SOF, similar to the US structure.  The vast majority of Russian casualties in Syria have been SOF.  Ukraine have emphasised improvement of their SOF in their military rebuilding and are heavily integrating with NATO - Ukrainian SOF are the only non-NATO SOF member of the Rapid Reaction Force.

Western militaries also continue to heavily lean on SOF in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan.  One of the ways that the level of conflict has been maintained is by using relatively small groups of troops to inflict disproprortionate casualties and successes against 'high value targets', as well as reducing scrutiny of actions because of the lack of government oversight in terms of the deployment of SOF.  The danger is that this reliance will end up having more downsides than up - war crimes and questions around whether this model allows required control of territory. 

[ICTChris]

I am in Special Forces, but my only special skill is making giant posts on this thread about subjects no-one else is interested in.

[Ziggy]

38 minutes ago, ICTChris said:

I am in Special Forces, but my only special skill is making giant posts on this thread about subjects no-one else is interested in.

Lethal.

[NotThePars]

What all these forces need is some sort of system where every gun is hard coded to an individual soldier which can be controlled with the introduction of nanomachine technology and ensure full accountability of who is firing and where. Control of this can then be handed over to a non-governmental organisation preferably out of the hands of human control to prevent any one power monopolising the technology. To get round the inevitable problems of troops feeling like their country is being minimised we should name it something that fills them with national pride. Maybe call it the Sons of the Patriots system. SOP for short.

[Thistle_do_nicely]

1 hour ago, ICTChris said:

I am in Special Forces, but my only special skill is making giant posts on this thread about subjects no-one else is interested in.

I read the whole post about SOF above, I know its easy to think "f**k is this tl;dr territory now, too many words words words?" with a post but I enjoyed it.

Got me thinking about drones too and whether they get recorded akin to body cams for police officers; bizarrely if drone strikes are fully recorded then there's scope for more oversight to prevent war crimes than with boots on the ground, but then afaik if there's a "lawful order" to authorise it then everyone will just shrug their shoulders if it happens to obliterate an orphanage alleged to be full of terrorists or something.

[NotThePars]

I read the whole post about SOF above, I know its easy to think "f**k is this tl;dr territory now, too many words words words?" with a post but I enjoyed it.

Got me thinking about drones too and whether they get recorded akin to body cams for police officers; bizarrely if drone strikes are fully recorded then there's scope for more oversight to prevent war crimes than with boots on the ground, but then afaik if there's a "lawful order" to authorise it then everyone will just shrug their shoulders if it happens to obliterate an orphanage alleged to be full of terrorists or something.

 

There’s loads of workarounds for drone pilots to obliterate civilians in the zones they operate in and that’s before you realise that the surveillance provided by drones is nowhere near as clean cut as advertisers insist it is. It’s also been frequently proven to be really difficult for drone operators and analysts to accurately gauge the difference between innocent civilians and enemy combatants in places like Waziristan which have no clear demarcation between the war zones and civil society.

 

More critical journalists and writers have also frequently pointed to instances where drone pilots are particularly trigger happy in an (maybe more sympathetic) attempt to protect the soldiers on the ground. I think it’s Alexander Cockburn’s Kill Chain which opens with a transcript of a drone attack on innocent civilians where one of the apparent signs of an imminent attack on a nearby US convoy is that some of the men got out of their car to pray. Cockburn’s conclusion basically points to a confluence of factors that essentially argues that drone pilots are overworked, undertrained, ignorant of the society they operate in, and overwhelmingly prioritise their fellow nationals to the lives of those living under drones.

 

As far as I know no one has ever been charged and convicted for killing civilians either and that’s before you consider that Military Aged Males aren’t counted in many of the death tolls of civilians.

 

This is all of the top of my head though as it’s been a year since I read about it when I wrote an essay and my dissertation on drone warfare.

[ICTChris]

5 minutes ago, Thistle_do_nicely said:

I read the whole post about SOF above, I know its easy to think "f**k is this tl;dr territory now, too many words words words?" with a post but I enjoyed it.

Got me thinking about drones too and whether they get recorded akin to body cams for police officers; bizarrely if drone strikes are fully recorded then there's scope for more oversight to prevent war crimes than with boots on the ground, but then afaik if there's a "lawful order" to authorise it then everyone will just shrug their shoulders if it happens to obliterate an orphanage alleged to be full of terrorists or something.

They absolutely record drone strikes - practically all strikes from the Turkish TB2 drones on Armenian positions were recorded during the recent war.  The Azeri regime played the videos on billboards in the centre of major Azeri cities during the conflict as a morale booster for the population.

As @NotThePars says above though a lot of the use of drones isn't in relatively conventional wars like in Karabakh it's in unconventional warfare where there is no line between the civilian population and combatents.  

I think that the impact of the Karabakh war and the Turkish offsnive in Northern Syria is going to be huge.  The Turkish forces have shown that relatively inexpensive drones can be decisive in conventional wars.  This will help Turkey in a number of ways - obviously they have the military advantage of this, there is also a diplomatic advantage, with other countries pursuing friendly relations with TUrkey to gain access to this technology.  Israel, who also supplied Azerbijan with drones, take this approach when it comes to diplomacy as well. If countries want Israel iarms and expertise they have to normalise political and ecomomic ties. 

[Detournement]

Forget about the legal bullshit. 

If US drones or the drones of any other country are killing large numbers of civilians it's because their tactics are to kill civilians.