I talk about behaviour, I don't criticize the Efficiency of the U.S. military! You invade Iraq in a very short time. That's efficiency. But, at the beginning, correct me if I'm wrong, the population was globally grateful to the liberators. But this change very fast. Why? Because of the behavorial factor, no? When the liberation became an occupation, and when the job became harder, mixing high-intensity with peacekeeping/law enforcement operations, types of ops demanding FINESSE (a french word huh?) human qualities, and maybe a bit of HUMILITY, then the things changed. The population became hostile, the "average" U.S. soldier shows itself as a very bad peacekeeper. In today's world, peacekeeping and being smart with civilians is part of the job of the professional soldier. In fact, we talk the same, but you are an American, and you defends your guys, finding them excuses or reasons. I am not.

"http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4475034.stm Do you think the above is decent?" No, but as I already said, this kind of (bad) things happen in all armies. I'm talking about a cultural behaviorial trend. "Out of curiosity, how old are you? I am wondering if this is just a generational gap issue. " I am a young heavy metal listener ;)

"Out of curiosity, how old are you? I am wondering if this is just a generational gap issue." Are you implying that us "old farts" don't understand? (giving his best arched eyebrow look) GV, You are seeing the experience through a straw.....what you see on the media. I recommend you listen to what folk slike Shek, who commanded troops in combat in Iraq, say about the situation there. Several of the Brits on this page have admitted there is a cultural difference between the US and European armies.....saw it for years while I was in uniform. The US has depended on firepower and maneuver as a way of war...no apologies for that. Does that make us poor peacekeepers? Maybe not as good as others. But you have to have peace before you worry about keeping it. A lot of Europeans like to make fun of the Ninja Turtle GIs in the Balkans....but it was the 1st Armored Division crossing the Sava River into Bonsia which finally ended the Balkans bloodshed. The Europeans within NATO could not stop the killing until the US put troops in. That was peacemaking. We let the others who are better at peacekeeping take care of that area. As I have said before....if we did not provide that umbrella of security for a lot of countries we would be excoriated by those same folks for failing to step in and provide assistance.

>>"By the way, the "trigger happy" mentality in the U.S. Army is a well know fact." - GV<< When something is a "well known fact" that is usually the first clue it is a stereotype based on poor information, the observers' bias, etc. I could note some "well known facts" concerning the quality of French soldiery from American and other anglophone perspectives, but I do not wish to turn this into a tit for tat sort of argument . . . but I think the fact that most everyone reading this knows what I'm talking about illustrates both the pervasiveness and silliness of these stereotypes. But, to cite a non-French example, I wonder if anyone recalls which nation's contingent deployed to the Balkans was known for a time as "SHOOTBAT"? It was not an American force . . .

>>The Brits have great experience in COIN warfare and if they’re belly-aching (as they clearly are in several high profile cases) then something is wrong, particularly if it is coming from the SAS quarter. << A guy with two years in the SAS bellyaching does not mean anything to me, personally. The guy has six years in the Paras, maybe made it to what? The rank of Corporal? Then he goes out for the SAS, which takes around a year to train a qualified operator (?), and so his record includes a year or so of what we call team time over on this side of the pond. That makes him what, on this side of the pond, we also call the new guy, and by extension the guy whose job is primarily involved with learning his job from guys with more team time, etc. Short version of the story, this guy is not an experienced SAS operator, and not an expert on COIN. He wants to complain about professionalism of US troops on the one hand, and then explains that his intuition or psychic powers or whatever told him no one on objectives were bad guys, knew any bad guys, or had any other intelligence value. CAG sometimes hits targets that do not turn out to match the intel brief, but suffice it to say when CAG is kicking down your front door they are not there on a random shoot in the dark hunch and fishing expedition, and interrogation of any guys on site is only prudent . . . My suspicion is that the guy in question leaked through the SAS selection, the way guys will leak through any selection process, and discovered he did not have the stomach for the job. Making a political issue gives him a better out than just owning up to not being up to the task at hand. That's just my guess, but helps explain the utterly off the wall stereotypes he's apparently tossing out that have zero to do with CAG, as well as his apparent need to allude to the Nazis just to keep things extra ugly and all.

As to motive in this specific case- we’ll probably never know. In terms of the SAS trooper’s they-were-just-harassing-farmers assessment, you may be right, but then on the other hand he was “the man on the ground”. Either way I think you’ll find that perception is reality, particularly in the mid-east and it is that perception that is going to be a stumbling block to the resolution of this insurgency and it may prevent the U.S from building the bridges it needs to with the local communities. Perhaps it’ll take the proverbial 6-10 year window to resolve this COIN, shed some of the bad press and get back some of that old mojo.

>>In terms of the SAS trooper’s they-were-just-harassing-farmers assessment, you may be right, but then on the other hand he was “the man on the ground”.<< My point is that if you are on a fishing expedition and you burst in and there's nothing but guys minding their own business, I'm 100% on the former SAS guy's wavelenth. Be polite, be apologetic, be humble, give the man some cash for his ruined door or whatever you can reasonably do to undue the "evil Americans/Westerners/whoever came and kicked in my door" story that will begin making the rounds. But, we don't send CAG out fishing. If they did a hit they had solid intelligence that something or someone significant was on site, and, to me, professionalism does not mean relying solely on your gut instinct and non-fluency in Arabic to settle the issue when the game is played up at that level. Even if the target is completely uninvolved with what you thought was going on, you're still going to want to question the people on site -- maybe their story washes, maybe it doesn't, but a guy who doesn't speak fluent Arabic is not going to be able to sort that out on target. Maybe there's no evidence of anything untoward, but you're still going to want to get some basic information on those innocent farmers, in the event they also miraculously turn up on the next target you hit, or get whacked while implanting IEDs a week later, etc. And you're also checking your HUMINT or SIGINT or whatever, trying to find out why Saddam's personal hair dresser was not hiding in the garage like you thought, etc, if that's how it went. None of which can be done by a guy with twelve months or less of team time flying by the seat of his pants and his gut instinct. All of which is central and pivotal sort of detective work as far as COIN operations go . .. >>Either way I think you’ll find that perception is reality, particularly in the mid-east and it is that perception that is going to be a stumbling block to the resolution of this insurgency and it may prevent the U.S from building the bridges it needs to with the local communities.<< The guy is complaining about how CAG/Delta Force/whatever their name is this week conducted operations. CAG hits account for some utterly miniscule one-tenth-of-one-percent or less sort of portion of operations, and the rules they play by are, for various reasons, different than the rules patrolling infantrymen play by. And they have tended to be highly successful and high profile -- hostages recovered, Saddam captured, Uday and Qusay shuffled off this mortal coil, etc. Regardless, I think perception certainly does outweigh reality in the Middle East, but I don't think the average Iraqi's perception has anything to do with the former SAS guy's stereotyping and slander. At least the amount of actionable intelligence coming from Iraqi sources to American forces certainly does not suggest alienation or the fact that the Iraqis see themselves perceived as "untermensch" in American eyes. Which brings me back to the suspicion that there is more to the basic story than meets the eye, since it simply does sound particularly convincing and does not seem to be grounded in the reality of working with members of the US SOF community. Dredging up stereotypes of the American military that resonate well with Europeans, but which are reconizably incoherent in the context of the people the Telegraph say he was working with, simply suggests an axe to grind, or a need to find a convenient excuse. In any case, his actions and statements reflect very poorly on the SAS, and if he had any commitment to the honor of the regiment, as he claims, I would think he would have kept his mouth shut even if he felt some real or fanciful need to vote with his feet concerning current British foreign policy. (Which is another whole issue with the article, since Tony Blair has been calling for Saddam's ouster longer than Bush II has been in office, and yet somehow by serving in Iraq poor Private Whats-His-Name is toadying for US foreign policy? The guy is supposed to be a professional, but does not appear to be, and is supposed to be educated enough to be an officer . . . but does not appear to be conversant in his own country's modern political history. Dodgy across the board, I think . . .)

GV, Your argument examples are not informed nor consistent. You state that Royal Marines would never make an indecent video, and I show you your example that shows up on the first page of a Google search, which means that it didn't take much time to find, and then you dismiss it through a double standard. I agree that one point doesn't make a trend, and yet your argument all along has been that the single Fallujah video made does represent the entire US Army. Furthermore, your only arguments that make this video about a high intensity conflict where the immediate operation itself has barely anything to do with hearts and minds (because of the longstanding evacuation requests by the US Army prior to the assault in order to make target discrimination much easier) indecent is because it exists and is accompanied by a song over a decade old made by a grunge band with the false impression that this introspective song about the costs and pain and fear of combat somehow glorifies it. If you want discuss how the US Army can improve its performance, then let's discuss real material examples instead of hollow examples and generalised stereotypes. I will gladly discuss concrete examples; however, what you are bringing to the table are preconceived notions based on cultural differences instead of outcomes. So, let's look at the British "soft" approach and its results in winning hearts and minds:

http://telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/10/23/wirq23.xml The poll, undertaken for the Ministry of Defence and seen by The Sunday Telegraph, shows that up to 65 per cent of Iraqi citizens support attacks and fewer than one per cent think Allied military involvement is helping to improve security in their country.

I haven't had a chance to go in and really dig deep into the poll to see if their methodological errors and to see the motivations behind the support of Iraqis for attacks against UK soldiers, but even so, the numbers seem quite startling for the "successful" approach. The reality is that counterinsurgency is war, and nothing goes according to plan in war. As such, both the US and UK has made mistakes. I don't like bringing up examples like the above, because they do have a potentialloy confrontationa and nationalistic tone to them, but in order to hopefully move the thread forward, we need to look at realities and separate out BS evidence. As I'm sure Yimmy would attest to, while the UK has a lot of COIN experience, a great deal of it isn't that applicable in Iraq (the colonial strategy of divide and conquer counters the goal of a unity government in Iraq), many campaigns weren't urban based or had to worry about the media. Furthermore, the UK has quite frequently totally stepped on their cranks during the initial stages of insurgencies, with only their organisational culture allowing them to adapt quickly, saving them from perpetuating bad strategies. So, while the record shows that the Brits have historically done well in COIN, the stereotype that they have all the answers doesn't play out for me - it's just that they've been very successful in learning and adapting, allowing them to defeat insurgencies when they make their major miscalculations. Bottomline, I think your Fallujah video argument is full of crap and distracting from the true potential of the thread, which is to discuss real examples instead living in a stereotype world.

>>But, at the beginning, correct me if I'm wrong, the population was globally grateful to the liberators. But this change very fast. Why? Because of the behavorial factor, no?<< No. It changes because the Iranian and Syrian backed insurgents started attacking US troops. 90% of insurgents are foreigners and have nothing to do with hearts and minds...but everything to do with the money the Syrians and Iranians were willing to pay (and the fact that they wanted some virgins...then again...nevermind). >>When the liberation became an occupation, and when the job became harder, mixing high-intensity with peacekeeping/law enforcement operations, types of ops demanding FINESSE (a french word huh?) human qualities, and maybe a bit of HUMILITY, then the things changed<< The fact is that our military was not prepared for a long peacekeeping mission...we were prepared for kicking butt and taking names, and let God sort 'em out friend from foe...so our soldiers had little training for COIN/winning hearts and minds. That has all changed drastically though...although we start aren't handing out estrogen tablets to our soldiers yet like the Europeans. >>the "average" U.S. soldier shows itself as a very bad peacekeeper.<< They aren't cops, they are hunter/killers. You are confusing peacekeeping and winning hearts and minds with COIN. We aren't peacekeeping. We are fighting a foreign funded insurgency against a high majority of non-Iraqi's...the Iraqi's aren't te problem...it's the foreigners. >>In fact, we talk the same, but you are an American, and you defends your guys, finding them excuses or reasons. I am not.<< No, I am speaking facts (which the British/European media doesn't seem to know much about)...you are speaking stereotyped propaganda from sources like the Telegraph, etc. Until you have met an American Soldier, or seen how he acts in the streets of Baghdad/Iraq, then you can't use big words like "Unprofessional" to describe them. By the way, we made the quickest land invasion in world history when we invaded Iraq...that is not merely effeciency, that is "Hyper-effeciency" (yes, I coined that term :)

"No, I am speaking facts (which the British/European media doesn't seem to know much about)...you are speaking stereotyped propaganda from sources like the Telegraph, etc." - GOP And the US media is different how? ;)