I'm breaking my radio silence on the FBR board only to explain some things that may not be obvious. I admit GF already touched on it but I'll give you my input as well if I may. An enemy rifleman or machine gunner in defilade, just a single human being, can inflict terrible losses on an opposing force. That also includes snipers. Anyone interested in good reading on the effectiveness of the latter should read Marine Sniper but I digress. Anyway, if you are paying attention to the news, you know that various governments including the USG are very sensitive to casualties. Public opinion on the war isn't what it was. Each death matters. It's to the point where the US POTUS is making appearances to greet the dead on their return home. Sentiment is the same in other countries as well. But beyond the politics, lets take a look at this from the point of view of the guy on the ground.

If I'm under fire and my life is in danger. I want to get my men and myself out of that situation as quickly as possible so we don't get hurt. If I have fire support or aircraft available to assist. I'm going to use them as quickly as possible to end the fight. In this case, we have a weapon like Brimstone which has the benefit of low collateral which if you are in small arms range of an enemy is a big deal BTW. So the coalition forces used the tools available to quickly kill the enemy. To me it sounds 100% reasonable and appropriate. It would be ashamed to have to conduct a hasty attack battle drill on a defilade if you didn't have to and you suffer casualties.

Now, lets do a cost to benefit analysis comparison of Brimstone vs Hasty attack against a rifleman in defilade. The Brimstone can kill the enemy with very little collateral, ZERO risk to the troops on the ground and about $100,000-$50,000 in ordinance(my guess). If you assault the position in a hasty attack and suffer JUST ONE CASUALTY, assuming a KIA or career ending WIA, you have to REPLACE a soldier and COMPENSATE the family($400,000 SGLI for US Soldiers). This will easily exceed the cost of the Brimstone by an order of magnitude. So even if you take the "accountant bean counter" point of view it's still much better to use the Brimstone.

Frankly, for any reason other then avoiding collateral, I'd be PISSED TO VIOLENCE, if I was ordered to risk my soldiers to save a few thousand on a missile. 

 

LOL!!! Thanks for that, I already had gut cramps from BW's rubbish and now you've given me an even worse case.

We don't know much about the actual circumstances of the shot - the guy may have been holed up with an RPD,  four or five hundred rounds and a case of hand grenades, in which case I'd really want to stay shy of tackling him with anything less than two sections and a pair of GMPG's backing me up.

 

Which I'm sure a British regular army unit would take too with professionalism and courage. However, if that's not their mission and they're supposed to be say, putting up a flying VCP to stop a suspected car bomber or raid a time sensitive location, then by getting into that, they let the lone gunman mission kill them, stop them from performing their assignment and the bad guys win.

 

Let's face it, you just need one CASEVAC required and that's play stopped for the day, and another helicopter put at risk extracting the wounded.

 

If it's not worth doing, lob a missile or bomb at the bugger I say,

 

Ian

 

 

as I stated before, without knowing the tactical contraints, its just dumb to pass judgement.  in the case of afghanistan a lot of the attacks that are elevated also have the advantage of being reverse slopes along the cliff faces etc...ie you can't get to them with LOS small arms etc.... 

there are any number of times where australian (and coalition forces) have called in precision strike to deal with a problem.

value in the operational sense should be about whatever merit can be applied to terminating the problem - be it JDAM, brimstone, SS-21 etc....

considering the fact that even B52's have saved the bacon of specforces in afghanistan - then the troops with attached controllers certainly are better placed to know who or what they're calling in to turn an event.

 

 

I understand everyone's rightful indignation with Bluewings regarding his comments. There is another angle though in which I think what he says does have relevance and I think it applies particularly for afghanistan on a tactical level.

I don't think it's about "this instance" of use of a precision munition against a single insurgent (whom as it has been stated is capable of killing/wounding several people) but rather the fact that as with many operations in Afghanistan/Iraq, certainly in the opinions of those I've known who have done several tours, the only means available to deal with insurgents is to apply technology designed for a major armoured conflict and adapt its usage to single targets. In this case the available solution was to use a weapon that does seem ideally suited for situations where minimal ColDmg is imperative. 

 

Our forces are ill-equipped to deal with a war of attrition, forces take a long time to move anywhere on the ground because of IED's, meaning that remote patrols have to rely on Jets, helicopters are in short supply, there are regular problems with communication in the mountains, there's not enough IR headsets available meaning that sometimes the only option is to use a Javelin missile to target a single insurgent, not that the cost isn't justified to save the lives of our servicemen, but that the lack of other equipment makes its use essential. The basic problem seems to be that the Taleban are able to continue to wage a war at a pace of their choosing knowing that as the months go on, as long as they can inflict enough casualties the public apetite for sustained operations is going to diminish. (is this already happening?)

Servicemen have told of agonisingly slow journeys as a convoy of vehicles follows a soldier on foot with vintage mine-detecting equipment, an example of how immobile such primitive but effective weapons have rendered mechanised forces. The taleban do not seem to be decreasing in number, the numbers waiting cross-border or willing to fight is unquantifiable, in short, the Army has to adapt to fighting the type of conflict for which it is least-inclined to fight, a war of attrition against an innumerable enemy unafraid of "matyrdom".

 

So the point I guess I am making is that though the use of this weapon in this instance was entirely justified, the development of more readily-available ground/air based support that can be operationally deployed with persistence at short notice will be a very welcome and much needed development to troops on the ground. The more development and hard cash that is put into the technology that is needed to make ground-operations more effective against this specific enemy the better. The Taleban are currently (in my view) winning the war, in that I sense that the public is already growing itchy about the conflict itself, some people seem to have resigned themselves to the fact that there will be a pull-out at some point, leaving Afghanistan to its legacy as a graveyard of empires.

 

I would be happy to spend additional tax (if it were needed) to support a wartime budget (we are at war), there are a great number of items of equipment that would make the job easier, and expedited development fielding is a must in my view, using the most expensive items in our inventory regularly to kill single insurgents is not sustainable, and does consume resources that could (in my view) be spent on providing solutions that particularly apply to this conflict like...

 

?Completely getting rid of "snatch" land rovers from operations and replacing with newer IFV's- they offer no protection except against small-arms.

?More dedicated mine-clearance/detection vehicles to speed up transit.

?Persistent UCAV support.

?More sniper-detectors fitted on vehicles.

?More transport helicopters.

?More IR sights for troops to spot semi-concealed positions/suicide vests. (NOT just night-vision, which is often used by the govt to divert stupid journalists in to thinking there is enough)

?Fielding of the new guided rockets (which I guess should be called missiles) for apache for the anti-personel tasks that are often given to hellfire)

 

There's a long list of things that troops are asking for, and the only reason I support Bluewings to a limited extent in this instance is that there is such a long-list of items that troops are asking for that 100K is a significant expense when repeated hundreds of times (javelin) by troops who lack any other means of doing the job we seem willing to ask them to do, but not so willing to properly fund. I've heard people in the forces specifically me

I would also say that evidence of the cost-implications of using anti-armour rounds on soft targets are the developments on guided rockets from so many different manufacturers.

 

No vehicle can be made mine-proof. Mobility and adequate protection in a squad-sized vehicle that serves as as base of fire platform and communications/sensor control node would be a help.

?More dedicated mine-clearance/detection vehicles to speed up transit.

Persistent unit attached ARMED UAS support. The desired unit would be a robot helo.

 

?More transport helicopters.

Right. Better IR is very cost effective. Not only do the Taleban  stink, but they are IR bright.