ARmy Rumour SErvice

Originally Posted by alfred_the_great

[snip]In my most cynical moment I would suggest Influence is about 18 months away from dying a permanent death.

. . . . until the next time.


Like those old Christopher Lee Dracula movies: drive a stake through the old boy, but a few years later he rears up again.

Point is that as long as we are in the information age (an age in which pissing on stiffs is a strategic error, remember), and engaged in actions that are not about the heroic, titanic, binary, life-or-death-of-our-people nation v nation conflicts, but about more ambiguous, less easily defined security issues, demanding of more complex solutions than simple "see without being seen, kill without being killed", any force that takes the field without a well-developed understanding that it must manage the impact of its actions on a wide range of audiences, in order to maintain the necessary support, let alone to succeed (whatever that means) is going to shoot itself in the foot - or lose more more people than it needs to - time and time again along the way.

If that doesn't suit the contemporary military world-view, it is because that p'tickler world-view has long since passed its use-by date.

Originally Posted by Caecilius

Why thank you oh intellectual one. You really are up your own arrse in a spectacular manner, aren't you?

Rennie is a man with a poor education and half-baked ideas who likes to belittle his opponents when they inevitably begin to beat him in an argument. Is he a friend of yours?

In my few encounters with him, he has been unable to push out a coherent argument except when based on the sort of nonsense you highlighted on the first page. Imagine my surprise, upon reading the article, to discover that it was written in exactly the manner I expected. I must admit that it is a little unfair to read Rennie's paper without having read the book in the first place, but then you seem to have produced a whole threads worth of argument having read nothing more than the (admittedly excellent) review.

The paper was produced in response to a paper written by Mackay and Tatham, which can be found on the DA website. Go buy the book, it's an easy read, and an eye opener.

Originally Posted by Stonker

. . .

Point is that as long as we are in the information age (an age in which pissing on stiffs is a strategic error, remember), and engaged in actions that are not about the heroic, titanic, binary, life-or-death-of-our-people nation v nation conflicts, but about more ambiguous, less easily defined security issues, demanding of more complex solutions than simple "see without being seen, kill without being killed", any force that takes the field without a well-developed understanding that it must manage the impact of its actions on a wide range of audiences, in order to maintain the necessary support, let alone to succeed (whatever that means) is going to shoot itself in the foot - or lose more more people than it needs to - time and time again along the way.

An excellent summing up of term 1 of ACSC. You may feel like the lone voice of reason, but what you're saying has a wider currency inside than you seem to think - we're moving on from the Army you knew

Originally Posted by StandardIssue

An excellent summing up of term 1 of ACSC. You may feel like the lone voice of reason, but what you're saying has a wider currency inside than you seem to think - we're moving on from the Army you knew

Please God.

It's long overdue.

And I've been told before (by people better placed than you) that massive change was in the offing

And been disappointed.

Don't get me wrong: just understand that changing the Brit Army's way of thinking doesn't take a fortnight.

There's 300 years of habit to be overturned, and two world wars weren't enough to do that.

Originally Posted by Stonker

And I've been told before (by people better placed than you) that massive change was in the offing

And been disappointed.

Don't get me wrong: just understand that changing the Brit Army's way of thinking doesn't take a fortnight.

There's 300 years of habit to be overturned, and two world wars weren't enough to do that.

Roger that - identifying the problem set is a start, and the "ways and means" are going to be particularly tricky in an "age of austerity" - so no-one's complacent.

Originally Posted by StandardIssue

[SNIP] . . . no-one's complacent.

Don't bet on it.

Originally Posted by StandardIssue

An excellent summing up of term 1 of ACSC. You may feel like the lone voice of reason, but what you're saying has a wider currency inside than you seem to think - we're moving on from the Army you knew

That might be true, but having seen the RN's output from the last two ACSCs, I would submit it's business as usual.

Originally Posted by StandardIssue

An excellent summing up of term 1 of ACSC. You may feel like the lone voice of reason, but what you're saying has a wider currency inside than you seem to think - we're moving on from the Army you knew

2 Questions:
a. Is this along the lines of the "mosaic of conflict" that FCOC and new doctrine refers to?
b. Are recent/current ACSC students at risk in the next tranches of redundancies?