Ask a Soldier

[cav scout]

Shouldn't the AT-4 be capable of being produced in a 'training round' type of way? Like, sure, disposable, but dummy warheads have got to be vastly cheaper than lives ones?

While the savings from replacing the shaped charge warhead with something inert might be significant ($1000 vs $2000 maybe? just pulling this out of the air) it wouldn't be enough to justify production of a ballistically correct training rocket. And frankly AT-4 training is not a huge priority.

The current system is cost effective and works just fine: 1) training with expended tubes to create the muscle memory for placing the weapon into a ready-to-fire state and going through the conduct of fire (this is what Uncle Anton is referring to above); 2) 9mm tracer round live fire training to make sure you know how to properly use the sights and can hit something; 3) Occasionally getting the opportunity to shoot a real AT-4 (probably one approaching its expiration date) for familiarization.

 

[Flying Pig]

To be honest, they're used so rarely in anger - and even more rarely for their intended purpose - that there's not much point spending hours and hours learning to shoot with them. It's the same with most other heavy and specialist weapons, to be honest. Every soldier has been trained so that he can use a mortar, GPMG or any other piece of kit carried by his platoon, but he won't spend much time practising with them.

 

[Borachio]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-25017411



What's your view on the TA and its current expansion plans, Mr Pig?

Can the British army really be said to have a role in global geopolitics with such a small full-time force?

 

[Flying Pig]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-25017411



What's your view on the TA and its current expansion plans, Mr Pig?

Can the British army really be said to have a role in global geopolitics with such a small full-time force?

I think there is a misconception which politicians deliberately peddle, and that is that territorial soldiers are equivalent to regular ones. This may be true in other arms and services, but it is certainly not true in the infantry. Professional soldiers are inevitably an order of magnitude fitter, if nothing else, because while most civilians spend their days at a reasonably sedentary job and then go to their TA training on a Tuesday night to do some PT, regular soldiers spend most of their working lives doing training specifically intended to make them better at the sort of fitness that soldiering requires. Of course, it is also the case that career soldiers are rarely the most intellectual of people, which I would argue is still true of the officers, while you often get TA soldiers with a huge amount of intelligence, education and experience in civilian life who can match part-time service with quite high-flying jobs in the real world. The more that the Army can draw upon those sorts of people, the better. I heard an anecdote once about an RM commandant-general who was visiting his troops on exercise in Norway, and spotted a reservist who looked a bit older than the rest. Asking him what his story was, the man replied that he'd been spending the past few years abroad - working as a research professor at CERN!

That said, I'm not convinced that reducing the military really means reducing its capabilities. We've lost Germany and Ireland, and between them those two represented a huge endemic commitment of manpower. After next year we'll lose Afghanistan, too, and it's not really foreseeable that we'll be deploying large bodies of soldiers abroad in the near future. As long as we retain the capacity to deal with likely threats, such as a brigade or division-sized deployment to the Falklands or Gibraltar, and structure the Army in such a way that it is able to respond efficiently to emergent threats - which I believe the Army 2020 structure does manage to do - then I don't think that a cut of this size will endanger our ability to use military force as we wish to do so. My only concern with cutting the Army into a high-readiness and a low-readiness force would be that the low-readiness force will probably suffer lower morale and a higher turnover than the high-readiness troops, even if units, officers and NCOs are rotated between the two, as I believe they should be. The danger is that we'll end up with half an army fit for fighting and half an army fit only for garrison duty.

 

[Borachio]

What's this "high readiness" and "low-readiness"? Do you refer to the regular army and the TA, respectively?

And how is the TA being integrated into the regular army?

I've heard the intention is to get TA members to agree to a year long commitment, at some stage in their service. And that this is likely to put a lot of applicants off the idea. Simply because employers are unlikely to grant 12 month sabbaticals.

Maybe I've got the wrong idea.

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

Any people who were on combat tours got any similar stories (comments of this article) of enemy stupidity?

I respectfully disagree with the assessment that Afghanistan insurgents don't follow Wile E Coyote logic.

I remember one time we had a PTDS (a security camera on a blimp) spot an insurgent putting one of the small pressure plate triggered IEDs on a small footpath. He then hid in the bushes waiting to see what happened, when a flock of sheep came by and walked over the pressure plate.

Nothing happened.

The insurgent, intending to troubleshoot the problem, walked over and started tapping the plate with his foot. It still didn't go off. He then can more brazen and then started running back and forth on top of it. Still didn't go off. Finally, convinced his device was a dud, he jumped up and down on top of the thing.

BOOM!!!

I say that insurgent is the living* embodiment of everything Wile E Coyote stands for.

*Yeah...only a broken leg. After that, his friends wheel barreled him up to one of our FOBs seeking medical attention, using the story that he was an innocent villager who accidentally stepped on an IED left by other more evil insurgents. I was not around for the Candid Camera moment, when we revealed to the insurgent that "Suprise! We have you on camera and you are going to jail!" but I'm sure that was hilarious too.

 

[Flying Pig]

What's this "high readiness" and "low-readiness"? Do you refer to the regular army and the TA, respectively?

And how is the TA being integrated into the regular army?

I've heard the intention is to get TA members to agree to a year long commitment, at some stage in their service. And that this is likely to put a lot of applicants off the idea. Simply because employers are unlikely to grant 12 month sabbaticals.

Maybe I've got the wrong idea.

High-readiness and low-readiness doesn't mean regular and reserve - the idea is to have some units doing things which mean that they can go from their day to day duties to a combat zone in 24 hours, like the airborne and commando brigades have usually been for the past decade or so. The rest of the army will then be free to do things like large-scale exercises which limit the speed with which everyone can be packed up and moved halfway across the world. The idea is for units and personnel to transfer frequently between the two groups, so as to preserve versatility and make sure that the entire 'garrison force' (I think that's what they're calling it) doesn't end up like the Gurkhas in Hong Kong. Keeping 400 men who are good at eating, drinking and fighting somewhere that totally rules out the latter tends to lead to a battalion that's not really worth its salt, especially the officers who are rarely mothered as tightly as the ORs.

Any people who were on combat tours got any similar stories (comments of this article) of enemy stupidity?

Plenty of friendly stupidity - I remember once calling for fire with a six-figure grid reference, only to hear the distinctive whoosh and thump land over the hill behind me, as a particularly sleep-deprived or dozy support platoon commander had obviously read the grid reference backwards. There was also the time on exercise that the troops thought it would be a brilliant idea to capture a wild boar with a pit trap for dinner, whereupon they realised that they had a pit with a very angry pig in it and no means of killing the thing. So somebody had the even more brilliant idea of stealing some fuel from the vehicles, pouring it into the pit and lighting it. Cue one very very angry 200-pound fireball with tusks emerging at speed from said pit, a rather chaotic harbour area and this perplexed and less-than-amused FP having to go and see what on earth was happening.

EDIT: I may have told this story here before, I forget. But it's a good one.

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

Couldn't they have just shot the boar? Why would they try to recreate a (was it Roman? I'm don't remember.) tactic?

 

[Flying Pig]

You don't get issued with live bullets on most exercises - if you put two thousand blokes in Germany with bullets for a week, one of them's going to get shot.

 

[Cutlass]

And they don't issue bayonets or knives either? Seems someone ought to have thought of cutting a branch and making a spear.

 

[Flying Pig]

Yes, but then you've got to get within poking range of the thing. Nobody was very keen on that.

Some of your better recruits, I take it?

There's a reason that 'sweating like a paratrooper in a spelling test' is a phrase.

 

[Cutlass]

Some of your better recruits, I take it?

 

[Silurian]

Couldn't they have just shot the boar? Why would they try to recreate a (was it Roman? I'm don't remember.) tactic?

I think they were in the Total War game

Historical accounts of incendiary pigs or flaming pigs were recorded by the military writer Polyaenus[7] and by Aelian.[8] Both writers reported that Antigonus II Gonatas' siege of Megara in 266 BC was broken when the Megarians doused some pigs with combustible pitch or resin, set them alight, and drove them towards the enemy's massed war elephants. The elephants bolted in terror from the flaming, squealing pigs, often killing great numbers of their own soldiers

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_pigs_(ancient_military_weapon)

 

[Tigranes]

I hope it wont be too much necroing to ask -- how do one gets recruited into British Army? Here in US every other shopping plaza has an Army/Navy office. Plenty of adds on TV and a lot of activity in universities. Is it somewhat the same model they use in UK?

 

[Flying Pig]

Largely the same but less so, I think. Most reasonably large towns have a careers office, in which the Army usually has a presence and the Navy and RAF sometimes share, depending on the area. There are occasional TV adverts and posters - often in train stations or at bus stops - as well as Officer Training Corps units at universities, which give students part-time commissions and a taste of what the good parts of being an officer are like.

 

[Paul in Saudi]

I am a retired US Infantry officer. If I am not raining on the Flying Pig's parade, I may be able to answer some questions. (I retired in 1993, so I am not up-to-date with current stuff.)

 

[Viregel]

Out of interest, what was Northern Ireland like? I never imagined it as a full-out "war", if you know what I mean; though I guess there would have been varying degrees of violence throughout the country. Sorry if this has been answered before.

 

[Tigranes]

Largely the same but less so, I think.

Thank you! Because US and UK associate so closely in many areas one often thinks military affairs here and there must be similar. What are the main incentives for young men to enroll? How exactly you got recruited, from University? Or it runs in the family?

 

[Flying Pig]

Out of interest, what was Northern Ireland like? I never imagined it as a full-out "war", if you know what I mean; though I guess there would have been varying degrees of violence throughout the country. Sorry if this has been answered before.

That's a good picture of it, though it did get extremely violent at times. In places like Londonderry or Belfast at the worst of times we would be making regular patrols in body armour and helmets - I never had bayonets fixed, but I heard of units who had been doing so in order to intimidate people. Those sorts of tactics are for controlling ground in a deeply hostile place, and there were often explosions and very intense shoot-outs, usually preceded a few moments before by the sudden disappearance of the (forewarned) civilians. Some officers went out there with their families in relatively quiet times, and had to check under the car every time before they turned the key: to my mind they were mad to place the stress of worrying about their families' safety on top of the stresses of being surrounded by people who hate you and enemy combatants who look like the people (who hate you and help them) that you're trying to protect. Rural postings were incredibly boring, usually filled up by lots of training, manning checkpoints on the border and occasionally being shot at from the other side. British troops couldn't fire into the Republic, as that would be an act of war.

Thank you! Because US and UK associate so closely in many areas one often thinks military affairs here and there must be similar. What are the main incentives for young men to enroll? How exactly you got recruited, from University? Or it runs in the family?

I never went to university; I came from a mining family in a very poor, rural part of the country, and decided that I would quite like a job which involved travelling and doing something interesting. The army used to have a much bigger presence in British society than it does today, simply because more people had been involved with it.

 

[Tigranes]

I never went to university; I came from a mining family in a very poor, rural part of the country, and decided that I would quite like a job which involved travelling and doing something interesting. The army used to have a much bigger presence in British society than it does today, simply because more people had been involved with it.

In other words Army did not have to entice you with posters and scholarships -- you just found their office and told them -- take me? And why not Royal Navy? It must have so much prestige in British society.

Another question -- have you been interested in history before you Army years or it came forward naturally while you've been serving?