Hard Graft

Blogs are everywhere and have spread to cover many aspects of life. The ease of setting one up has enabled many people from all walks of life to start putting their thoughts, fears and hopes onto the web. If anywhere apitomises this trend, it is the sector concerning defense and current affairs where there are some superb blogs which cover issues beyond simple deployments of troops and development of guns.

One example I could present would be Salaam Pax’s classic Where is Raed? (now collated in a book released by UK daily The Guardian). Written by an Iraqi in Baghdad before and during the 2nd Iraq war, it details day to day life in the last weeks of Saddam’s Iraq and as well as talking about the ravages of war it talks about daily life, surviving under sanctions and so on.

Freelance journalists are starting to switch to blogs rather than going through the traditional route of earning their spurs and hoping for a job in one of the big Anglo-Saxon papers like The New York Times for example.

War is Boring headed up by Freelancer and all round awesome guy David Axe is a superb example. He has assembled a superb team behind him to analyse and disect news from the latest Pentagon budget plans to how Twitter is aiding revolutionaries in Moldova. Danger Room by Wired magazine also does a sterling job on this.

Another fantastic blog is freer-ange international which is a blog by an ethical mercenary outfit concerned with protecting NGOs sans the typical brutality and gung ho borderline illeigal attitude exhibited by cowboys like Custer Battles and Blackwater Xe. The staff on there talk about charity work and cast a critical eye on the performance of main stream NGOs and the United States and ISAF’s involvement in Afghanistan.

The point is that all of these blogs are American-centric and staffed mostly by American freelancers but they offer a good view of what is going on in the world. These blogs definitely influence how I write my scripts.

One thing you will notice is missing here: the lack of British bloggers. There are British run defense blogs out there of course there are but the content and attitude exhibited are suspect and slightly embarrasing.

For example, take Lewis Page who writes for The Register covering defense affairs. His remit (as with many UK defense bloggers) appears to be limited to hyperventilating about UK defense and while Lewis does great work to expose government incompetence and inefficiencies I swear that if I hear him say “off the shelf” and “American” one more bloody time…

The problem is thus, the UK has several major defence projects ongoing such as the new Type 45 destroyer and the new Bowman radio/information system. Most (if not all) of these projects are beset by delays and budget overruns. The solution in many of Lewis’ articles is simply to buy American.

Sadly though, while the Americans may keep thousands of fighter jets and tanks in mothballed storage, they don’t really keep loads of brand spanking new AEGIS destroyers, Aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines and so on. Furthermore to depend on the Americans to develop stuff for us counts as a very short term and foolish thing to do.

There are extra costs and delays to take into account such as technology transfer, waiting for the US Congress to authorise arms sales and as we’ve seen over the F35 Joint Strike Fighter and the three to four year long row between the UK government and the US Congress over technology independence you’ll find that buying American might take just as long as making the bloody thing yourself.

Other blogs however tend to be worse. In fact, they tend to be confusing, emotionally charged, insecure and quite frankly narcissistic. Unwilling to suggest anything of help or provide a decent anaylsis of the situation instead they just wallow in misery and self-pity.

For example, take blog Defence of the Realm. Again, it does expose idiotic and serious failings in how the UK runs its Armed Services but this tends to deviate from Lewis Page by posting a never ending litany of doom, gloom and an almost emo-like misery about the the British forces, how they are equipped and the battles they’re losing.

Some of the posts are frankly patronising and rather irritating in nature, suggesting that Britain hasn’t done anything in Afghanistan, that the Americans have been doing all the work while the Brits have been busy getting themselves killed of hauling light guns up hills for MoD propaganda exercises. Never mind all the effort that the likes of 3 Para, 45 Commando and the Ghurkas have been putting in since 2006 that obviously doesn’t count.

Frankly, these blogs offer nothing new other than an infuriatingly self-centered and narcassitic view which endlessly bewails its problems in a dramatic and drama fueled series of rants which is patronising to servicemen. Yes, our lads over there know that they’ve got serious problems with equipment and a lack of political will in either their senior officers or in  Whitehall but lets not go about belittling their acheivements and frankly more or less saying that they’ve done bugger all in the last eight years in Afghanistan.

The confused nature of these blogs comes from that grand old British tradition: bickering over who is to blame. Some like Lewis Page blame (fairly I might add) the Civil service mandarins and the UK Treasury who hold the purse strings. Defence of the Realm tends to absolve politicians of all blame and instead lays it squarely at the feet of the Senior Officers who, they say, ask for these flawed, delayed, expensive and dangerous defence systems.

They are both right but are both wrong as well. Yes the Senior Officers ask for unprotected Pinzgauer transports which are useless against IEDs but it is the Whitehall civil servants at the MoD who approved the requests, the Treasury desk-wallahs who approve the funding, the MPs whose comittees give the Government an easy time over such purchases and us who vote the buggers in.

Simple answer: everyone is to blame for the torrid situation our lads are in but never, ever compound low morale by belittling and frankly patronising them in some self-centered quest for glory.

So, sadly, we’ve got a long way to go. The Yanks are trailblazers when it comes to covering the world via blogs and so on and we are woefully behind.

Time to drop the emo attitudes, start covering things outside of the UK sphere of influence or at least offer a non-state propaganda machine view of what the UK is doing out there.

Last week, I read a fantastic article about something one Brit is doing to revolutionise the lives of people living in Kabul’s old city. I also love reading about the Mat Lab in Southern Afghanistan enabling Afghans to set up their own businesses and survive on their own.  But if this mainstream newspaper hadn’t have published the story, I would never have known because all our blogs are wallowing in self-pity and bitter recriminations.

Its tragic. We’re letting our own lads down and the people of Afghanistan down. For those reasons therefore I choose to ignore the emo-fest going on in the UK and follow American blogs for a clearer view of the world.