It amuses me sometimes when I hear of how this country or that “saved the world from the Nazis”.

At the most they saved their own asses. Not the world.

This is because, folks, the Nazis could never have won the war. Even if they’d won every single bloody battle, they’d still have lost in the end, collapsed under their own weight of contradictions.

Here’s an illustration of why:

If you’ve seen films like Tora! Tora! Tora!, Midway, The Sinking of the Bismarck, or even (gag) Pearl Harbor (sic), you’ll have noticed the aircraft carriers liberally used by the British, Japanese and Americans – but the Germans, despite their large and powerful navy (the Kriegsmarine), never had an aircraft carrier.

Well, that’s not quite true. The Germans had an aircraft carrier programme in place as early as 1935, with four carriers planned. The first, called Flugzeugträger A (Aircraft Carrier A) before its launch in 1938 and named KMS Graf Zeppelin afterwards, was scheduled to be ready by 1940 – and yet, it was never, ever completed, even though a few carriers would have given the Germans a terrific advantage at sea.

One of the main reasons why the carrier wasn’t completed was the little fact that Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, chief of the German Air Force, the Luftwaffe, didn’t want anyone but his own men to operate aeroplanes. So he systematically and successfully sabotaged the plans of the German naval chief, Grossadmiral Erich Raeder, to make the carrier operational. One way of doing this was to offer only obsolete planes, the Messerschmitt Bf109E and Junkers 87 Stuka, for use on the carrier – and those in navalised versions, which, he insisted, would not be ready before the end of 1944, by which time, naturally, they would be even more museum pieces than they already were. Another way was to insist that the pilots of the planes would remain under Luftwaffe command, which means that for every operation launched from the ship, the pilots would have to receive orders from Luftwaffe headquarters in Berlin and not from the naval officers commanding the ship!

No wonder Hitler, a man of limited imagination who was never enthusiastic about the sea in general and carriers in particular, gave up on the carrier…

So what happened to the Graf Zeppelin?

Although about 80% complete, the ship spent its time in harbour being used as a floating depot ship, while its planned sister ship, Flugzeugträger B, was scrapped in 1940 and the C and D were cancelled. In April 1945 its crew sunk it in shallow water to prevent it from being captured by advancing Soviet forces. They, however, raised it easily, towed it back to Russia, and in 1947 sank it as a target ship. The wreckage, seen here:

was finally found in 2006 by a Polish diving team.

Actually, the carrier was poorly designed, and wouldn’t have been much of a match for more sophisticated carrier forces, but that isn’t the point. The point is the fact that the Nazis were so busy in their internecine turf battles (of which I’ve mentioned just one) that they probably would have fallen apart immediately once Hitler left the scene.

All of which makes neo-Nazis today even more comical than they would otherwise be…

There is a ship named INS Jalashwa. The name means “Hippopotamus”.

It used to be the USS Trenton, a landing ship meant to land amphibious troops and tanks on enemy beaches during wartime, as well all saw on too many Hollywood films to mention.

Anyway, this particular ship was launched in 1968 and was junked by the US Navy in 2004. And then it was bought, off the scrap heap, by the Indian Navy…which means, of course, by the Indian government.

Back in 2007 I remember the breathless adoration with which the Indian media – as enamoured as ever with anything remotely American – welcomed the Trenton/Jalashwa. How it would make the Indian Navy the strongest power anywhere in the Indian Ocean, so it would become India’s Ocean, and more along the same lines…

No one actually bothered to ask just what the Indian Navy would do with a ship meant to land troops on hostile beaches in the event of conflict. Just which Okinawa or Normandy were we planning to invade?

As 2007 went on and the media were trying to condition the people to a more and more pro-America viewpoint and as (as I predicted) India prepared to buy just about any weapon system on offer from America, no matter how unsuitable, the Jalashwa deal was repeated ad nauseam as a forerunner of things to come.

When, earlier this year, a gas leak killed six and injured two on board the floating pile of junk, er, sorry, ship, it was passed over almost with embarrassment. If that had happened on a Russian supplied vessel, I wonder how much screaming about unreliable and dangerous Russian equipment there would have been!

And now a report in parliament says the ship was bought just about sight unseen, and that a secret agreement was signed with the Americans, which said they could board it at any time to check out what was going on aboard. And also that the Indian government could never use it in war. It was strictly to be a peacetime rescue and aid ship…

It’s interesting that hardly any of the media are reporting this, but not totally unexpected. Anti-American news of any form can’t be reported, you see. It’s “un-Indian” where the current government is concerned.

I just wonder how many other secret agreements lie hidden in every document this government is signing in its zeal to appease the Americans.

(Oh, while I'm on the subject, the great and upcoming Indian Navy's aircraft carrier, another junkyard purchase - this one from Britain - called INS Viraat, lies moribund, its complement of Sea Harrier fighters grounded after a series of crashes; and speculation was rife that the Indian Navy would buy another piece of scrapyard junk, the USS Kitty Hawk, as a replacement. Given this government's proclivities, and the fact that there ain't no smoke without fire...)  

    

Remember those old Reader’s Digest pieces about the invincible American navy?

I read this interesting little piece – no wonder the mainstream media didn’t carry it – about a little incident that occurred between the island of Taiwan and Japan. A Chinese Song class diesel electric submarine (like those in the picture) came up right bang in the centre of one of those US Navy exercises meant to warn China to keep to its place in the scheme of existence. Having bypassed a dozen anti-submarine vessels and at least two nuclear killer subs undetected, the Chinese submarine – not even a nuclear sub, just a diesel-electric boat – surfaced within attack distance of the USN carrier Kitty Hawk.

Now obviously the sub didn’t have to surface where and when it did. It wasn’t in any kind of distress and diesel electric subs can send up a snorkel for air these days if they want air. So the surfacing was a signal – one so unambiguous even a Bush-brained neocon can be assumed to get the message.

One wonders how they will explain it away.

        

       

Military alliances make no sense.

All right, so I didn’t keep you waiting, there’s the message of this blog post.

Again – today, military alliances make no sense.

What is a military alliance, anyway? What does it get you?  Security? Not on your life.

This is not the nineteenth century, a time of endless conflicts and unending wars. No one begins wars nowadays without some compelling reason, even if that compelling reason is one others would find mercenary, cynical or plain crazy.

This isn’t the world of a few centuries ago when small countries might pool their armies to resist the aggressive designs of a single large and powerful enemy or a conglomeration of enemies. Even then it rarely worked; the Napoleonic Wars saw various small states band together, but in the end it was the big countries – the Russians, the Prussians, the British – who, jointly and severally, beat Napoleon. The Italian city states, for example, just got steamrollered into the ground. And that was then.

So, what would a military alliance in today’s world achieve? It wouldn’t be an alliance of small countries with one another. All that would achieve would be some kind of ad hoc alliance of convenience, like the Second Congo Civil War (the one that’s not quite over yet) where the two competing sides would fight to a standstill and then begin fighting among themselves. No, the much more likely shape of a modern alliance would be small countries clustering together under one large and hegemonic country, allegedly for “protection”.

Protection from what? Aye, there’s the rub.

Can you really imagine a World War II style campaign any more? No? No ground invasion of Western Europe, tanks landing in Denmark and rumbling past the Dutch windmills? Can you imagine Blitzkrieg in the nuclear age? Still no?

Then what the hell is the point of an alliance?

In my opinion, there are only two:

Firstly, the alliance enables a large and hegemonic power (I’m not talking names here) to claim that it has international backing as it goes about its nefarious purposes. All it has to do is call in its alliances.

Then, it enables that hegemonic power to get its “allies” to provide the cannon fodder for the fighting, to do the dying in its stead.

You’ll notice that all the advantages here rest with the hegemonic hyperpower in this equation. The little countries get nothing out of it except the doubtful privilege of providing the warm bodies to take some of the strain off the big one.

If you’re a country allied to a hegemonic hyperpower, you can be sure that the hyperpower won’t come to your aid in your troubles (your troubles, unless it’s convenient for the hyperpower to intervene for its own reasons, are far too small to figure on its radar) – but you can be just as sure that when the hyperpower demands your help in its squabbles, you’ll have to come running, even if that squabble has nothing whatever to do with you.

Also, because losing an ally is a big loss of face, you can be sure that your government will be forced to remain loyal to the hyperpower and periodically demonstrate its fealty. Otherwise it will be “regime-changed”. It’s happened again and again – Chile, Grenada, Nicaragua, Iran, Iraq, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and more are cooking right now. Just in order to preserve its existence, the government will have to crawl when it’s asked merely to bend.

Which is why I’m amazed that not one Indian media outlet or political party (except the left) has spoken out about India’s unspoken alliance with the US and its local vassals Australia and Japan.

And yeah - I couldn't think up a snazzy title for this post. So sue me. 

There is a hoary old tradition in Indian government circles. Except in those cases where recruitment is on the basis of national level or state level competitive examinations, there is almost every time a little comedy played out. Advertisements are posted in the papers, applicants short-listed, called for interview, and all the time everyone in the swing knows who’s going to be selected ultimately. The entire interview process is, basically, eyewash. And the “victorious” candidate is never the best. Well, of course he isn’t. If he was, there would have been no need to rig the interview in the first place.

Nowadays that tradition is about to step out of government appointments and into the military sphere.

It’s been years since the Indian Air Force (IAF) – for whom I used to work till eleven months ago – expressed the need for a multi-purpose fighter (Multi Role Combat Aircraft, MRCA, as they call it). Whether they actually need such a fighter is a different issue; right now, though, they are basically dependent on variants of the 1960s vintage MiG 21, which is in the process of being upgraded so it can hang on for a few more years. The MiG 21 was supposed to be replaced a long time ago by the Indian indigenous fighter, the Light Combat Aircraft (LCA) Tejas. But the LCA is so far behind schedule that it’s yet to even begin production, and it’s so far from Indian that even its engine has to be imported. The Indian Kaveri engine that was supposed to power it shows no signs of ever being made. Most damning of all, the IAF itself has obviously lost all interest in the LCA; it had been arm-twisted by the government into placing a farcical order for twenty aircraft, none of which is anywhere near being made yet, but in the meantime needed a real replacement. Meanwhile its real strength has dropped to some 29 squadrons, allegedly insufficient for it to perform its duties. That is, if you agree that it needs any new planes at all – which is a point I shall get back to in a moment.

So the Indian government short-listed six aircraft manufacturers for the contract to supply 126 combat aircraft: Dassault Aviation of France for the Rafale, RAC MiG Corporation of Russia for the MiG 35, Eurofighter GmbH for the Eurofighter Typhoon, Saab of Sweden for the JAS39C Gripen, and …very significantly … Lockheed Martin and Boeing for the F 16 Block 60 and F/A 18 Hornet respectively (both US). The cost of this contract is – hold your breath – ten billion dollars.

I wonder how many schools and hospitals that could create, how much damage to the environment could be reversed?     

I might as well say right now that in my opinion at least three of these six – Dassault, Saab, and the Eurofighter consortium – have been included just to make up numbers. No one’s even talking seriously about any of them. So we come down basically to the MiG 35 and the two American aircraft. And things get interesting at this point.

Remember this – the buying of a fighter doesn’t mean just the buying of the aircraft itself. It means the need to set up an entire infrastructure and support system, for repair, servicing, even for refuelling and so on. In order to economise, you know, nations try and make their aircraft (and other equipment) as far as possible compatible with the same set of tools and equipment. Just as you’d probably prefer to buy a car your local garage could service rather than something exotic nobody in your town had ever seen before. Get my point?

OK. So, since virtually our entire air force inventory is of Russian and French origin, all systems are configured for servicing Russian and French aircraft. Now you’d think that common sense would dictate that you stick to those manufacturers whose equipment you’re already using, whose aircraft are equipping your squadrons, whose tools you’ve stockpiled, right?

Right. If you have sense, that is.

Unfortunately, that’s precisely the sort of thing you can’t depend on in India.

And that’s why the two American aircraft are included in the list. Hell – you’d even have to get a new set of spanners to service the damned things.

And now let me make my prediction: the Indian government has already decided to select the Lockheed Martin F 16. All the rigmarole over trials and selection procedures are a gigantic farce.

Would you like to know how I arrived at that conclusion?

First. Our air force doesn’t really need any more planes of this type. We already have two highly capable multi-role combat aircraft, Sukhoi’s Su 30 MKI and Dassault’s Mirage 2000. We don’t need any more planes of this type to replace retiring aircraft simply because there is never going to be a big war again where they can be used. Wars – even bush-league wars - are incredibly draining on resources, as the US is discovering in Afghanistan and Iraq. The capitalist class that rules India these days isn’t involved in defence production enough to make any serious money out of it. So that class has no interest in going to war. Even a direct attack on India, if it ever came, isn’t going to provoke an all out war. All there might be is a lot of posturing and sabre-rattling, but, depend on it, no fighting (for example, Operation Parakram of 2001-02).

If there is a war at all, it’ll be a minor affair of strictly limited geographical area, where the Sukhois and Mirages might not even have to be used. If they are used, they would be more than good enough to do the job required.

So, since there is no risk of ever going to war again, there is no risk in buying equipment that can’t be digested and absorbed easily, that will require a separate system for maintenance, that might turn out to be unusable junk in the long term. You get what I’m talking about. The capabilities of the aircraft selected don’t matter at all, since it is never, ever, going to be used anyway.

Second. If at all we need aircraft, what we need are dedicated counterinsurgency (COIN) planes – slow flying, heavily armed and armoured aircraft of an entirely different type from the MRCA our air force is determined to procure (examples are the A10 Warthog or the Sukhoi Su 25). However, COIN planes are relatively cheap and where there is less money being thrown around there’s less chance that some of it might find its way into someone’s pocket. So, although back in 1999 (during the Kargil "war" against Pakistani troops) everyone was groaning about the dearth of COIN planes in the IAF’s inventory, nobody has mentioned them again afterwards.

Third. This government is, as I said, ruled by the capitalist class. No Indian government these days is its own master, hasn’t been for a decade and a half. Earlier it used to be the Ambani family that used to run India – and these days it’s Ratan Tata. Tata is openly pro-American and a strong supporter of the Nuclear Deal. And the Americans know very well how much influence he wields. So, when there was an air show in India earlier this year, Aero India 2007, they made sure that he got joyrides in both planes – and came down babbling about how he enjoyed the rides.

Fourth. The higher reaches of the military are absolutely rotten through with corruption and are completely susceptible to government pressure (in any case it’s only politically “reliable” officers who get to the top positions). So whatever is right for the Air Force isn’t necessarily what it will say is right for it. There’s no point saying that “this is what the IAF says is right.” I recall watching (in 2004) an American air force delegation given a free hand to tour parts of the Indian Air Force regional command headquarters here. They were allowed to photograph whatever they wanted and go wherever they wanted – even to areas out of bounds to Indian airmen without special clearance.

Fifth. If our current government has a foreign policy at all, it can be summed up in one sentence: suck up to the Americans at all costs. This is more than obvious at every stage. The government no longer even makes any serious attempt to deny it. To make the Americans happy, of course, any and all means are OK. Not so Russia or France – they are only our friends, not the Masters of the Universe (and France under Sarkozy is showing signs of backsliding, too).

Sixth. The Indian middle class couldn’t care less about what happens to its tax money (insofar as it pays any) so long as it can buy its LCD televisions and snazzed up cars. The Indian Middle Class is a topic in itself. I could go on and on…

So, the imperatives of the situation are: no big war; a lot of money going around; capitalist backing; government support; and personal pro-Americanism.

There is no reason the American planes would even be on the short-list unless they were to be chosen, for the reasons I outlined above. So, the IAF is going to select either the F 16 or the F 18.

Now, I believe we can narrow it down further. It’s going to be the F 16.

Why?

Firstly, unlike the F 18, production of the F 16 is winding down (it is no longer in production for the USAF) and jobs might be lost without the Indian order. Just as India, to please Britain, bought Westland helicopters in the late seventies so that that company got a new lease of life. The Westlands were such junk they never even got into proper service and were all scrapped. But who cared so long as India made Maggie Thatcher happy. Making Bush happy is all this government cares about.

Then, Boeing can be “compensated” by major orders for commercial aircraft, so even if it doesn’t get the F 18 order, everyone stays happy.

Naturally, there is one more “advantage” to buying American aircraft. If the Americans – as they have many times before – impose sanctions to twist India’s arm, there will be an excellent argument in favour of giving in to American demands – “or else our equipment would be useless.”

India’s defence minister, AK Anthony (a very short man who had a police officer dismissed for referring to him as “shorty” during a conversation on police radio) said the deal will be completely transparent. Right. Everyone knows how transparent it will be, with the papers and the television channels paid to support one point of view and misinformation carefully fostered. Already the right wing media refers to the MiG 21 as “flying coffins” and deliberately confuses it with all MiGs. I can assure you that you’ll find a lot of anti-MiG articles in the newspapers in coming days.

You understand that sucking up to America is all these people care about. Even if American bombs were to be raining down on Delhi, they would still be trying to suck up to Washington.

This is why any and all invaders were able to rule this country as and when they wished.

 

 

 

 

  

        

Among the more bizarre of the tendencies of Indians is the insistence on declaring that we’ve won all of our many wars since Independence; or at least all the wars against Pakistan.

 

Let’s take a look at these “victories.”

 

In 1947, on paper, we started off with all of the state of Jammu and Kashmir; the Maharaja of Kashmir signed over all of his state to India after Pakistani tribesmen invaded, not just the part left under his control. Yet when the fighting was over and a ceasefire signed, India was left with a shade over half the state. Is this a victory?

 

In 1961, we invaded the Portuguese colony of Goa and took it over within twenty four hours. The few Portuguese soldiers present, virtually unarmed and utterly isolated, laid down arms rather than offer suicidal resistance, yet the number of Indian casualties exceeded those of the Portuguese. I’d have liked to see how the Indian army of the time, malfunctioning radios, canvas gym shoes, World War One rifles and all, would have performed had the Portuguese put up serious resistance.

 

In 1962, following years of confrontation along the Himalayas, India sent a force into Chinese occupied territory (the Thag La ridge and Khinzemane) and unilaterally shifted the border northwards. The Chinese, who were waiting for some such provocation, invaded and in exactly a month captured all the territory they claimed. The Indian Army did not manage even to disrupt the Chinese timetable, let alone offer serious resistance. But to this day, although India can’t exactly pretend that it didn’t lose, it tries to save face by saying the Chinese did not advance further because of the strong Indian forces arrayed against them. Duh. Of course they didn’t advance any further – they had already achieved all their objectives. Why on earth would they want to advance any further?  

 

In 1965, India and Pakistan fought over the Rann of Kutch – a swampy marshland – in the state of Gujarat. Indian troops, by and large, dropped their weapons, food, everything, and ran away, so that the Pakistanis didn’t even have any logistical problems – they ate Indian food and shot at Indian soldiers with captured Indian bullets. Not surprisingly, this little battle is not even mentioned in popular Indian history.

 

Later the same year, Pakistan sent saboteurs and raiders into Kashmir, followed by troops across the ceasefire line (which is not an international boundary). In response, India invaded Pakistan, sending an armoured thrust towards Lahore. This thrust could not even capture Lahore, just across the international border, and almost undefended, because the Pakistanis simply blew up a bridge across the Icchhogil Canal. In the meantime, the Pakistani Air Force virtually shot the Indian Air Force from the skies (as even the Indian Air Force belatedly admitted in a book published last year) and the Indian Navy stayed bottled up in harbour to avoid the risk of politically harmful sinkings. And then, when Pakistan was well on the way to running out of ammunition, India negotiated a settlement and returned all captured territory. And we still claim this was a victory.

 

India invaded East Pakistan on November 22, 1971, and after a brief campaign captured the territory (which nowadays is Bangladesh). On the ground, a military victory, because the Pakistani troops, demoralised and without air cover, were more keen on trying to save their skins than in fighting back. Fine. But – what did it achieve? We now had freed Pakistan of a genuine albatross round its neck, and given Pakistanis a new reason to hate India; we had inevitably pushed Pakistan towards Islamic radicalism; while Bangladesh, the new nation, began hating Indians and blaming India for its woes now that it no longer had the West Pakistanis to blame. Today Bangladesh is a more unstable and dangerous entity than East Pakistan had ever been.

 

Seen in a long term, is this a victory?

 

In 1987, India sent troops into Sri Lanka with the alleged agreement of the Sri Lankan government – alleged agreement, I say, because you could hear the Lankan sinews crack with all the arm twisting. That force, the Indian Peace Keeping Force, soon got stuck in a vicious guerrilla war against the Sri Lankan Tamil secessionist outfit, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and after two years had to withdraw with its tail firmly tucked between its legs. The casualties were so enormous they have to this day never officially been divulged.  No wonder that this is another little war we studiously try and ignore.      

 

In 1999, India fought an alleged war against Pakistan over Kargil in Kashmir. Normal diplomatic relations continued between the nations and the international borders were perfectly quiet, and it was basically a fight between a relatively small number of Pakistani soldiers on hilltops and in bunkers, supported by artillery but with no air cover, and a relatively very large number of Indian troops with artillery and aircraft. Even so, it was only after months of fighting that a negotiated settlement imposed by Washington brought the conflict to an end, and Pakistan still occupies an important mountain on the Indian side of the boundary. Again, I don’t know what sort of victory this is. At the very least, it made Washington a player in a bilateral dispute, a lever the Americans have never abandoned to this day.

 

Don’t get me wrong; I don’t support or advocate military conquest. But it’s also evident – or should be, anyway – that false claim of victories are dangerous simply because they make the likelihood of military adventures greater. A country that has the moral courage to admit its ass was soundly kicked on the battlefield is unlikely to want to repeat the experience unless it becomes absolutely necessary.

 

Naturally, however, in a nation like India, this is not going to happen, because there are too many reputations to defend and hagiographies to write. And after we lose, whether militarily or politically, the next little warlet (full scale wars are of course no longer possible) we’ll go through the same little mix of amnesia and rewriting history.

 

And after that, the next one as well.    

Behold, I have a weapon
A better never did fly across the sky.
I have seen the day
When with this lethal air arm and this good Tomahawk
I bombed my way through more emplacements
Than twenty times your horde.
And I'll make 'em toast! Who will escape this fate?
Be very afraid
When you see me weaponed.
From here my missile I send, from here my hot
And bloody carrier-launched aerial strike.
What, are they not dismayed? It's terrorism
That makes them stand and fight against Abrams tanks
Till they brew them up. What should I do?
Now, what do I have now, o foul dead ender
To make you accept your lot?
This bunker buster nuke of mine
Will blow your towns to pieces
And flames will burn all to ashes, till nothing's left at all
Even like your bravery.
Oh cursed, cursed terrorists
I will bomb you, you devils
From my F22s flying up on high
Blow your women about in blast waves, roast your kids in firestorms
And burn your homes in napalm and white phosphorus fire.
Oh dead-enders! Die! Dead enders! Die! Oh!

All right, I couldn't resist writing this parody of Othello's speech in Act 5, Scene 2 of Shakespeare's play. So you can stop retching at my pathetic attempt at humour and go on reading.

Now for the more serious stuff...

Whenever I read about military establishments going in for gigantic arms shopping sprees, i wonder: What on earth is it for? We in India, for example, know perfectly well we are not going to be fighting another full scale war ever again. If the social and economic costs of war were not prohibitive enough, the nuclear bombs in our kitty, and in our prospective opponents', means that any real war is out. And if "war" is meant to consist of cross-border skirmishes and proxy battles using militias, what price aircraft carriers and fifth generation interceptors carrying beyond visual range air to air missiles, not to speak of all the fancy equipment we're acquiring at the expense of development?

If you have an overwhelming military power, it's of use only when your opponents choose to fight on the same level. As soon as they stop fighting by your rules, what happens to your fancy armour and your nuclear submarines?

Oh, you can attempt and perhaps - just perhaps - succeed in bombing your opponents "back into the Stone Age", but then what?They can't be kept in the Stone Age, can they? Within a few years they'll likely be back where they were before you began, only now with more and better preparation to face you when you try to do it all over again.

Or you can get down close and personal and try and occupy them. And then what happens?

Check out Iraq and Afghanistan if you'd like answers.

So, why would establishments choose to splurge on incredibly expensive weaponry like the aforementioned F22 Raptor or the B2 bomber, knowing all the while that these are useless even in the unlikely event that they actually fulfilled their claimed capabilities? How can you, for example, use a submarine launched ballistic missile with a two megaton nuclear warhead to stop a dedicated, committed sniper with a Dragunov rifle or, even more simply, a landmine? How can you win a war with these unless you're willing to use nuclear weapons to turn the country at the receiveing end into a huge parking lot? And even then you wouldn't need your main battle tanks and your Mach three interceptors.

I can't believe the establishments are stupid enough not to know this themselves. The defeats they are suffering should be proof enough anyway.

Therefore, the answer to just why they insist on acquiring these white elephants is not too difficult to guess.

In Norse mythology, the World Tree, Ygdrasil, has three roots. Two are being consumed, one by the eternal fire of Niflheim, the other by a terrible beast called the Niddhogg. When fire and beast have consumed these two roots, the tree will fall.

Military stupidity, the military industrial complex, and political corruption. The three roots of fascism's foreign policy.

Which two will be the first to go?

Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse for pathetic little dickless-wonder Indian weapon-worshippers...

Their insistence on the honesty of Indian armed forces personnel has blown up like a pricked balloon in the face of "ketchup colonels" and "booze brigadiers." Their insistence on the discipline of Indian troops has gone to pieces in the light of extra-judicial rapes and murders of civilians by Indian personnel. Their insistence on the camaraderie of Indian military existence has been slapped in the face by the rising incidence of "fraggings" of officers by their troops. Their love affair with Indian weaponry falls flat on its ass when one talks of the ridiculous delays and frequent and spectacular failures of such indigenous weaponry as the Arjun tank (already all but dead and bypassed in favour of the T 90), the Light Combat Aircraft (so far delayed that the Air Force is now going to buy 126 foreign aircraft instead), the Intermediate Jet Trainer, the Advanced Light Helicopter (crashed spectacularly and suffering frequent tail rotor failures), the apparently neverending nuclear submarine project, the Trishul anti-aircraft missile, the INSAS rifle (which is so ineffective that the Army is buying AK series and Tavor rifles to replace it), and the Lakshya pilotless aircraft, which is only used as a target drone.

Poor guys.

Could anything get worse for them?

Well, actually, it could, and it has.

Sunday morning, March 11. Delhi.

A paramilitary constable of the Indian Reserve Battalion, Nari Lepcha, shot and hacked five of his colleagues to death in Delhi after one of them, a noncom, tried to rape him anally.

Lepcha

This is hardly anything new as far as our forces are concerned, it turns out. It has happened before, and ended violently, but as usual our military fails to admit the problem exists. For, as that link says:

New Delhi, March 14: In pulling the trigger on his sexual tormentors, Nari Lepcha has yanked the shroud off a practice psychiatrists say is rampant, but defence researchers revealed that sodomy has never even been projected as a problem to them.

Attempts at sodomy in the security forces are not just common. They often end up being bloody, said psychiatrists who have worked with both victims and abusers in the forces.

Cases of sexual malpractice have, however, not even been “projected as problems” by the armed forces to their psychological research wing, the Defence Institute of Psychological Research.

While refusing to comment on the incidence of sexual malpractice in the forces, Dr William Selvamurthy, the chief controller of the psychological research institute, told The Telegraph: “Sodomy, rape or sexual malpractices have never been projected as problems to us.”

This in a country where homosexuality is officially still illegal.

Poor weapons-worshippers. What will you do now?

 

 

Strange are the ways of our military establishment.

A couple of years back there was a big brouhaha when it came out that, in order to get promotion, the army was faking killings of "terrorists", since the policy then was that any unit which killed enough "terrorists" got across the board promotions.

In one such instance, a colonel in North East India forced villagers to pose as dead insurgents, with bottles of ketchup poured over them as blood. (They were lucky too - it would have been easy to have shot them because as per the Armed Forces Special Powers Act the army has blanket amnesty for all acts of violence committed by it and there would have been nothing anyone could have done.) The colonel, who became known as the Ketchup Colonel, and his immediate boss, a brigadier under whose direct orders he was acting, were ultimately court martialled and, in June of last year, sacked.

So far so good, but what would have happend if it had not come out in public? Answer: nothing.

Well now. It's no secret that the US armed forces are not the only ones who are having trouble meeting their quotas. Despite repeated ad campaigns and a lot of fancy promises, India's extremely officer dependent army, which gives no leadership roles to its noncoms, is short almost twelve thousand officers while the navy and air force have their own shortages.

So, it's no surprise that the Ketchup Brigadier has been reinstated. Hell, he's even been promoted.

With the increasing number of courts martial of corrupt, murderous, delinquent and just incompetent officers and the already crippling officer shortage, expect more and more forgiveness of sins along these lines.

Political links and sycophancy were always tickets to high rank in our army. Now - like our politicians - a little crime might help as well.

I wonder what our Army chief, who's in "Israel" to buy equipment (he was apparently mightily impressed by the "Israeli" performance in their defeat to Hizbollah last summer in Lebanon) thinks about it.

Not much, I'd say.

When I read of how the American "surge" is going to pacify Baghdad, I smile. I thought at least some people would study recent history at least some of the time...

For an allegedly peaceful nation, we Indians have had a pretty blood soaked time in these last sixty years.

We've fought and "drawn" (well, at least we did not unconditionally surrender, so I guess we can claim victory in the good old Indian tradition) wars over Kashmir in 1948 and 1965 against Pakistan; defeated the isolated and almost defenceless Tibetan enclave of Tawang in 1951 and the Portuguese colony of Goa in 1961; beaten Pakistan in 1971 in Bangladesh and fought an alleged war in Kargil in 1999 to an alleged victory. In between we've also found time to destroy the Khalistani separatist movement and fought much moe aggressive insurgencies in Kashmir and North East India to a standstill. And we picked a fight with China in 1962 and quite rightly got our asses soundly whipped.

That last, 1962, war remains the only one we dare admit was a defeat because even our propagandists can't spin that to sound like anything else.

In all this, we as far as possible avoid mentioning another, and most embarrassing, defeat.

In 1987, Sri Lanka was mired deep in civil war between the Tamil population of the North and East of the country on one hand and the arguably racist and fascist Sinhala government on the other. India, which had spent much time cosseting and training the Tamil rebels, finally brokered a "peace agreement" between the Sri lankan and Indian governments (conveniently leaving the Tamils right out of the picture) which involved the dispatch of a force of Indian soldiers, the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) to "ensure the implementation" of the agreement.

The relations between the Indian Army and government and the main Sri Lankan Tamil rebel group, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), one of whose soldiers is in the photo, soon disintegrated as the Indians were seen as colonial occupiers (and proxies for the Sri Lankan regime, which they undoubtedly were). In October 1987 the Indian Army launched a major attack on the Tamil capital of Jaffna, called Operation Pawan ("Wind"). It was expected to be a cakewalk.

The LTTE resisted brilliantly. They fought the IPKF to a standstill, with a precursor of the events of the film "Blackhawk Down" occurring at Jaffna University, only even more disastrously. Indian officers, striding forward in dress uniform out in front of their troops like the British at the Somme in 1916, were picked off like lollipops by LTTE snipers in palm trees. One unit, I remember, had so many of its officers killed it was completely immobilised till fresh officers were flown out of India to take command (the Indian Army does not encourage its noncoms to take the initiative or command. It's a very officer dependent army.)

Although Jaffna ultimately fell, after shelling and airstrikes and punitive power cuts imposed by the attackers, it was at enormous Indian cost while the Tamil rebels managed to evacuate virtually without casualties to bases in the thick jungle. There they fought the Indians for the next two years, with bombs, mortars, rockets, snipers, AK47 rifles that made mincemeat out of the IPKF soldiers with their single shot FN FAL rifles. It was, depending on your viewpoint, a triumphant or disastrous campaign.

So what did the Indians do? Answer: the Indians obligingly "surged" three more divisions (at first the IPKF had included just one), adding up to a hundred thousand men, as well as naval and air force units. There was no political debate. It did not matter anyway. They still did not manage to beat the guerrillas.

All this time the Sri Lankan military gleefully sat and watched the Indians do their fighting for them.

When demands began to be raised in India for the return home of these troops, Rajiv Gandhi, the Prime Minister who sent them there, and who in 1991 was blown away by an LTTE suicide bomber, vehemently refused to contemplate it until the "job was done".

Does all this sound, er, familiar?

It took an election defeat and a change of government before the soldiers were withdrawn in 1990 - and the war in Sri Lanka was still on. It goes on to this day.

Did someone just say "history repeats itself"?

Oh, while I am on this point - I remember in the early days of this farce, the Indian media used to daily quote official statements that went something along these lines: "Today three (or five, or twenty seven) Indian soldiers were killed in Sri Lanka. The total number of Indian dead is now eighty two (or five hundred and ninety)" Then, as time went by, the total number of dead began disappearing from the daily announcements, though the daily number was still being announced. I kept on adding them up and found they were already above 2000, when the totals began - sometimes - to be announced again. And, somehow, each total was lower than the last! To this day no one knows how many IPKF soldiers died. The guesstimates range from six hundred to two thousand, and shrink and swell according to who is doing the guessing. Time magazine guessed that it cost India some five thousand dead in comparison to five hundred Tamil rebels, and that figure may not be too far from the truth. It certainly fits the first person accounts of Indian survivors of the IPKF I met, including a lieutenant colonel who nearly lost an eye to an LTTE grenade and a soldier from this town who was the sole survivor of his thirty two man platoon.

And another little gem: somewhere in 1988, I remember that TV news began referring, invariably, to the IPKF as the PKF. Why was the "I" missing? As a concession to Sri Lankan sentiments? To reduce the impression of being an occupation force? No.

It was, believe it or not, because some idiot or other had told the government that the Tamil for "Peacekeeping Force" sounded more poetic than that for "Indian Peace Keeping Force". OK, I know this is a jaw dropper, but it is too ridiculous to invent. Gives you an idea of the IQ of our military and of our civilian bureaucracy.

IPKF or not, Indians spend much energy rying to forget that particular "splendid little war".

Butting into other peoples' conflicts is most certainly not worth it.


Now go tell that to the folks at the Pentagon.

If there is one film that encapsulates the idiocy of the military experience, it is this. Beginning in the late eighties in the brutality of a Marine recruit's training, most of it takes place during the build-up to Operation Desert Storm and during the actual course of that "four day, four hour, one minute" operation.
It starts off like, and could have become, a standard Hollywood genre war film of the type parodied in MAD Magazine - the tough sergeant, the gentle boy, the bullying recruit, the clean cut protagonist who is muddled by what is going on, they are all there; the only figure missing is the chaplain mouthing platitudes, but there are enough crucifixes on view to make up for that. However, the director (Sam Mendes) takes pains to make sure it does not go that way.
The film is based on Anthony Swofford's 2003 book about his own experience as a Marine in Kuwait. I have no idea (not having read the book) if the book's account has been played around with, but it's still a compelling watch.
Brief story: the soldiers (pumped up for action by cheering as American helicopters on "Apocalypse Now" bomb and rocket a Vietnamese village) arrive in Saudi Arabia unsure of where they are, unsure of the difference between Saudis, Kuwaitis, and Iraqis, and are met by a Lt Colonel who tries to pump them full of zeal for combat. Then they wait, and rehydrate, and masturbate, and wait some more, spending their time on scorpion fights and discussing the infidelities of their girlfriends. Bizarre things happen - they are made to play American "football" in chemical warfare suits in the blazing desert sun for the benefit of a TV crew, they burn drums full of faeces as a punishment (a similar scene to one in "Platoon", but much more explicit). Finally they do go to war...where their first combat experience is being strafed by USAF A10 Warthog ground attack aircraft. The rest of their war consists, as one man says, of "walking over a lot of sand". There are gruesome depictions of charred Iraqi corpses in the Highway of Death, which make Swofford throw up, and blazing oil wells whose smoke make the day turn to night. Then - more walking over sand, anmd at last a chance for Swofford ( a trained sniper) to shoot an Iraqi officer, the culmination of his training and waiting for action, his chance at revenge against the system. But he is denied permission to take the shot because it would give warning of an imminent air strike. And then there is more walking. And, before he can fire a shot, the war is over.
There are so many ways this film scores over vainglorious Hollywood garbage like "The Three Kings" and "Courage Under Fire". There is really no heroism at all, and all there is, at the end, is a return to civilian life where no one fits in. Of course there is the delicious irony of contrasting this movie to the prolonged defeat the Americans are going through right now in Iraq.
And as for why they all went through this, it was Swofford's remark to a TV interviewer which pretty much summed it all up:
"I am 20 years old and was stupid enough to sign a contract."
No wonder the Bush worshippers did not like this film.
You reap what you sow, baby.

Indian paramilitary and army soldiers serving in the jungles of North East India, where malaria is prevalent,  tend to fall ill (and die) from malaria in large numbers when on leave in their (largely rural North Indian) homes, where malaria is rare. The reason for this is the fact that they almost invariably stop taking their anti-malarial chloroquine tablets a fortnight or more before their leaves. And the reason for that is the idea that chloroquine causes impotence. And when they go home, apparently, all they want to do is to screw.

No amount of instruction or counselling from medical officers has made the slightest difference - especially if the medic is a woman, no self-respecting North Indian male will lower himself to obey orders from a member of a negligible and despised sex who should know that her place is tending the kitchen and having babies.

I guess the Plasmodium protozoans which cause malaria are happy, though, so at least something is coming out of it all right.       

The water lay black and still. In the distance the low hills behind Vishakhapatnam harbour were dark and showed not a glimmer of lights.

With a sudden swirl, a long thin shape broke the surface. It swung left, then right, like an elephant's trunk seeking air to breathe. It trailed a thin wake behind it as it went.

Ten metres below, something long and predatory slid through the water, black and smooth and lethal. It resembled nothing so much as a gigantic shark, complete with hydroplanes like pectoral fins and a huge conning tower like a flattened dorsal fin.

Inside the steel cylinder, a naval officer put his eyes to the rubber eyepieces of his periscope and tried to decipher some landmark with which to orient his vessel. Somewhere out there was the enemy he had to bottle up, or, if possible, destroy. It was midnight on the third of December, 1971.

The stage was set for one of the great tragedies of recent military history.

It's incredible how little use has been made of the submarine in the post Second World War era. As of this writing, just two ships have been sunk since that time by submarines, the Indian frigate INS Khukri by the Pakistani submarine PNS Hangor  in 1971 and the Argentine cruiser General Belgrano by the British submarine HMS Conqueror during the war for the Islas Malvinas. But give the Pakistanis credit. They did try...

The PNS Ghazi was originally a Tench Class submarine, USS Diablo, first launched in 1944, during World War Two and then upgraded to the level of a fleet snorkel submarine. It was leased to the Pakistanis by the Americans in 1964 and became the first submarine operated by a South Asian navy. (At this time the Indian navy – as usual in those days – went crawling to the British for a sub from their scrap-heap: the latter refused on the grounds that Indian personnel were incompetent to operate submarines. The first Foxtrot Class sub only joined the Indian navy in 1967, when India finally realised that the Russians better bets as a source of weapons than the British and their American masters.)

In 1965 the Ghazi operated off Bombay harbour without success – the Indian Navy stayed almost entirely in harbour to prevent any potentially prestige-damaging sinkings. Ghazi did claim to have sunk the frigate INS Brahmaputra but this ship was displayed intact for the media at the conclusion of the war. It's said that an Indian anti-submarine Alize aircraft flew right over the Ghazi without noticing it.

In 1968 the Ghazi went for a refit in Turkey, acquiring there the ability to lay mines through its torpedo tubes. It returned to Pakistan in 1970.

In 1971, when war threatened, the by now 26-year-old but still long-range (17000km) sub was sent over to the Bay of Bengal, leaving Karachi harbour on Nov 14. It had a crew of 93 under Captain Zafar Muhammad Khan and its mission was to sink the Indian Navy’s carrier, Vikrant, stationed ostensibly in Visakhapatnam. Ghazi was the only one of Pakistan’s four submarines capable of getting this far – the others were just short-range French Daphne Class coastal submarines.

War broke out on Nov 22 1971 when India finally invaded East Pakistan (please, no more of the ridiculous lie that war started with the Pakistani air strikes of Dec 3). At this time, Vikrant shifted to a secure anchorage in the Andamans. Vice Admiral Krishnan, Commander of the Eastern Naval Command, was aware that Ghazi was in these waters and decided to distract attention by laying a false trail of spurious provision orders and radio messages that seemed to indicate that Vikrant was still in Visakhapatnam.

The Pakistani authorities, on Nov 26, accordingly ordered the sub to move to the approaches of Visakhapatnam harbour. At around the same time, the old Indian destroyer, INS Rajput was ordered to the Bay of Bengal to generate misleading radio traffic. The Rajput was ready for decommissioning and did not have even depth charges fitted. Ghazi arrived off Visakhapatnam on 27 Nov, carrying mines as well as torpedoes.

On the night of 3 Dec, the evening before Pakistan launched air strikes in response to the Indian invasion, Ghazi moved to the harbour approaches to lay mines. Visakhapatnam being a narrow mouthed harbour (I've posted a video I took of that harbour, here) a few mines, strategically laid, would likely have blocked it for days or weeks.  

So the old sub, in darkness, unable to orient itself owing to the lack of lights due to blackout, moved in for the kill, as it thought. And then...

Around midnight something exploded in the front section of the sub, so loudly that windows were rattled in Visakhapatnam and people thought an earthquake had come. It blew the bows right off the submarine and drowned everyone aboard. The next morning fishermen reported oil slicks and floating wreckage. This was the first indication, despite later claims, that the Indian Navy had of the sinking. Divers, finally, on the 5th December, found the wreck and identified it.

Initially the Navy was ready to acknowledge that it was an accident but political pressure from Delhi forced it to claim that depth charges from the Rajput had sunk the sub, which actually had no charges fitted at all.

What sank the Ghazi? It might have been the explosion of one of its own torpedoes or mines, a spontaneous explosion of built-up gases, or perhaps it (as the Pakistanis claim) struck one of the mines it had itself laid. The explosion was certainly internal - the hull is  blown outwards, but the burns characteristic of a gas explosion were absent on the bodies that were recovered. The only certain thing is, that it was not the Indian Navy that was responsible for this sinking. Both the Americans and the Russians have offered to raise the sub at their own expense and find out how it sank, but the Indian government refused to allow it. I guess it's afraid the "Indian Navy sank it" claim might finally meet a watery grave of its own.

Today the Ghazi lies on the seabed off Visakhapatnam, wrapped in fishing nets. One hopes its crew died quickly when the end came. One hopes they did not have time to close watertight doors and lie in their bunks waiting for the end, while the water slowly rose.

Slow drowning is not the best of fates for brave men sacrificed by a stupid and ignorant leadership.