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RAF personnel told to hide uniforms Defence Secretary Des Browne Airmen at one of Britain's most famous RAF bases have been advised not to wear uniforms when they visit a nearby city, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) said. Senior officers at RAF Wittering near Peterborough, Cambs, fear that servicemen and women will be abused by locals who oppose British involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq.An MoD spokesman said the decision was a local one made by station commanders.He said generally soldiers, airmen and sailors were encouraged to wear uniforms in public. Defence Secretary Des Browne described the situation as a "great shame"."We must defend our forces' right to wear their uniforms in public," said Mr Browne."It is a great shame that some individuals in this community don't respect our forces - who are daily doing a great deal for this nation."This is not a situation we should tolerate. We are investigating it as a matter of urgency."I hope that by working closely with Peterborough City Council and the local police, service personnel at RAF Wittering will soon be able to wear their uniforms freely about the town with the support of the local people."A spokeswoman for Cambridgeshire Police said she was not aware of any incidents of servicemen being attacked or abused in Peterborough.

David Cameron says the Government has broken the military covenant   David Cameron says the Government has broken the military covenant Conservative leader David Cameron has accused the Government of breaking the military covenant and announced the launch of a Tory Commission to advise him on the issue.The Commission, chaired by author Frederick Forsyth and including Falklands hero Simon Weston and historian Sir John Keegan, will look at how the Government and society can better fulfil their obligations to the servicemen and women who put their lives on the line for Britain.Speaking at a London press conference, Mr Cameron said more needed to be done to ensure troops got the right equipment, better telephone and email links with family when serving abroad and the best health treatment when they were wounded.He said: "I believe the military covenant is well and truly broken, and I am determined that the Conservative Party will fix it. That's why I can announce today that I have set up a Military Covenant Commission. "This commission will look at how the Government and society can better fulfil our obligations under the military covenant. It will look at all the issues that affect our armed forces, from training and recuperation, the welfare of their families and their wider relationship with society."Mr Cameron was critical of the practice of treating soldiers wounded on the frontline alongside civilians in NHS hospitals."When our soldiers are wounded, they want to come home to a great British hospital, and in Birmingham Selly Oak they do," he said."But when they are injured on Monday they don't want to end up on a public ward by Wednesday. They want to recuperate next to their comrades and that must mean having genuinely separate military wards."Mr Cameron warned that the covenant had been broken not just by the Government but by society as a whole, citing an "ugly incident" where a Surrey petrol station refused to serve a soldier because he was in uniform.He said businesses such as mobile phone companies could do more to provide cheaper services to deployed personnel.

TA medics saved life of knife boy   An x-ray of the knife embedded in the skull of a 10-year-old boy Territorial Army medics helped save the life of an Afghan boy who was stabbed in the head with a knife. Doctors at the British military field hospital at Camp Bastion, Helmand Province, Afghanistan, successfully operated to remove the three-inch blade.The 10-year-old boy was stabbed when he tried to protect his father during a row with a male customer in his shop in Kandahar. The customer lunged for the boy's father and stabbed the boy. The knife went behind his eye and penetrated the front of his brain.The boy's father took him to a military base in Kandahar and pleaded with doctors to save him. Medics there used a portable digital X-ray machine, which produced an image in two minutes, before flying him to Camp Bastion for the operation at a tented field hospital.The boy, who has not been named, amazed medics by walking into the field hospital with the knife embedded in his head on July 14 last year.Surgeons of 212 Field Hospital operated the same night, before handing over to 208 Field Hospital, who administered the aftercare.Major Stephen Gallacher, 49, senior A&E nurse of 208 Field Hospital, said: "It was a horrendous sight. I just didn't think he would survive. But he was soon off the life-support machine and was up and about within days. It was just amazing."Maj Gallacher, a father-of-four from Caernarfon, North Wales, added: "We knew how the knife was sitting because we had the X-ray. The knife had come in at an angle and gone down behind his eye and had penetrated the front of his brain. To have simply pulled the knife out would have been a disaster because you wouldn't have known what damage was behind it."Fifty members of the 208 Field Hospital, which is based in Liverpool, received Operation Herrick medals for their three-month tour of duty last summer. The 212 Field Hospital is based in Sheffield.

Friday, March 14, 2008 Mohammed/Muhammed Rahim: Al Qaeda biggie captured!!! Update: It looks like he was captured off the street in Lahore back in August 2007. You gotta wonder where the CIA has been keeping him stashed since then... Al-Qaeda and Taliban have received another setback when their two important aides were arrested from different places in Pakistan, sources said Wednesday. Muhammad Rahim was arrested few days back from Lahore while Sheikh Ilyas Khel was netted from the general bus-stand in Peshawar, the sources maintained. According to them, Rahim was Osama bin Ladenís special aide, hailing from Nangarhar province of Afghanistan, while the other had worked for Laden as translator and guide during his stay in Afghanistan. Rahim was chief of Qaedaís team, which was engaged in negotiations with the Afghan govt-nominated commanders including Hazrat Ali in early 2002 However, it couldnít be ascertained whether or not they were extradited by Pakistan either to Bagram or Guantanamo prison. .. The Pentagon says authorities have captured a high-level al-Qaida figure who helped Osama bin Laden escape from Afghanistan in 2001. Officials declined to say when or where Mohammad Rahim was captured - announcing only that he was handed over by the CIA to the Pentagon earlier this week and is being held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Defense Department spokesman Bryan Whitman says Rahim is a close associate of bin Laden and has ties to al-Qaida organizations throughout the Middle East. Whitman says Rahim helped prepare the hideout at Tora Bora, a mountain area used by bin Laden as the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in 2001. Whitman says Rahim assisted al-Qaida's escape from the area during the U.S. operation to try to catch the al-Qaida leader.

BRITISH ARMY UNVEILS ALL-TERRAIN 'PTIBULL' Daily Telegraph (UK) ^ | 16/03/2008 | Sean Rayment Fast, powerful and with a fearsome array of weaponry, it has already been named "Pitbull" by the soldiers who will drive it deep behind enemy lines. The Army has unveiled its new £200,000 all-terrain vehicle, tailor-made for the hostile terrain of Helmand in Southern Afghanistan. Senior officers say the vehicle will greatly enhance the fighting capability of their soldiers, and will save lives. Armed with a mix of machine guns and an automatic grenade launcher, and with a range of more than 500 miles, the vehicle will be used to hunt down and destroy the Taliban during long range surveillance and reconnaissance operations. Its crew of three will be able to call in air strikes using onboard communications equipment. The new all-terrain vehicle has a 5.9 litre engine capable of 80mph on roads and 40mph across the Helmand desert. It has revolutionary air suspension which allows for a comfortable ride even over the roughest of terrain and helps the gunners to hit their targets while on the move. Known officially as the M-Wmik - Mobility Weapons Mounted Installation Kit - the vehicle will replace the ageing Land Rover Wmiks, variations of which have been in service since the Fifties. The Sunday Telegraph was given an exclusive preview of the vehicle's capabilities on the Army's training area on Salisbury Plain last week. After almost 48 hours of rain, the terrain had turned into a quagmire but the M-Wmik cut through the clogging mud with ease and the bumps from the deeply rutted track were almost completely absorbed by the suspension. The driver, Warrant Officer Nick Hartley, said it was easy to handle, with automatic transmission and power steering. "It's awesome. It does exactly what it says on the tin. Troops will be able to go deep into Taliban territory and hunt them down. It can go anywhere and it is very stable." The vehicle and crew are protected against mines by reinforced armour plating but the military says its best defence is its manoeuvrability and speed. First to use the vehicle on operations will be the Pathfinders, from 16 Air Assault Brigade, due to begin arriving in Helmand soon. The 202 vehicles purchased were made by Babcock Marine, a British engineering company, which also makes ships. Working with the Army, the company procured the vehicle in seven months.

Gurkhas hand back medals in protest - Search: Gurkha veterans protest Gurkhas are mounting a bid to stay in Britain Thousands of retired Gurkha soldiers are to gather outside Parliament to campaign for justice and fair treatment. In a symbolic gesture of protest, 50 pensioners will hand back their precious Long Service and Good Conduct medals to the Government.Gurkhas - soldiers from Nepal - have been part of the British Army for almost 200 years.Despite a number of recent Government announcements thousands of retired Gurkhas are still suffering great injustice, organisers said. Currently only those that retired after 1997 have the right to apply for indefinite leave to remain in the country.Gurkhas who retired before 1997 do not have the right to settle in the UK even though many of them have served more than 25 years in the British Army and many have seen active combat.Pension rights for years of service before 1997 are also dramatically lower than for service after that time.Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg will speak at the protest in Parliament Square to demand increased rights for Gurkhas. Mr Clegg will call for an end to the forced deportation of retired Gurkhas and ask the Government to grant them the right to live in the UK, regardless of the date they retired.The protest comes a day after Liberal Democrat defence spokesman Lord Lee of Trafford launched a backbench bid in the Lords to make it easier for retired Gurkha soldiers to settle in the UK.    We spend millions on housing and feeding ungrateful immigrants many of them illegal's but we forcibly repatriate Gurkhas who have served our country honourably. Many of them have been killed or wounded in defence of our country. If we were to make it a condition that to live in England you would have to serve in our forces for a period of 18 months to earn the right to stay, all the 'Do Gooders' would be up in arms moaning about human rights. However here we are refusing the right to stay in United Kingdom to soldiers and their families who have do just that.Someone cleverer with words than me should draft such a proposal and put it in No 10's petition web site. I for one would sign it.Lets keep the people who are loyal to our country and kick out those that are not.ED

The Fight Over How to Fight Should we prepare for big wars or small ones? After Afghanistan and Iraq, the answer might seem obvious, but the truth is harder and more expensive: both. Evan Thomas and John Barry NEWSWEEK Updated: 1:03 PM ET Mar 15, 2008 Great armies and navies are always tempted to fight the last war, especially if they won it. The British Army entered World War I wedded to the "up and at 'em" infantry advances of Waterloo—even though by the turn of the century the Maxim gun had made such tactics tantamount to suicide. Truly fearsome militaries prepare to fight the next war. Think of how the German Army used planes and tanks in a coordinated blitzkrieg to outmaneuver the Allies at the outset of World War II. But what if a military must prepare to fight not one war, but two very different kinds of war? That is the challenge facing the world's greatest superpower at the beginning of the 21st century. The American military must continue to ready itself for high-tech warfare; it must still be able to fight "big wars" against rising powers like China. At the same time, it must anticipate what military planners blandly term "low-intensity conflict" but what Rudyard Kipling more aptly called the "savage wars of peace"—small, asymmetrical conflicts against determined partisans with wicked low-tech weapons like IEDs, the improvised explosive devices that have cost America so dearly in Iraq. The tension over which war to prepare for has created a generational divide in the American military, particularly the U.S. Army, between old bulls who want to focus on all-out combat, drowning the enemy in precision firepower, and young upstarts who believe that in today's messy world of failing states, firepower is not enough—it is necessary to win hearts and minds. Many of the combat veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, who are among the most capable and experienced young officers America has had in a generation, fall into the latter camp. But the uncomfortable fact is that the U.S. military may not have the resources to be able to fight both kinds of war with any assurance of victory. Though political leaders have barely begun to address the problem, the shape, size and funding of America's armed forces is one of the most pressing issues the next president will face. The end of the cold war was supposed to give the winning superpower a breather. In 1999, the then presidential candidate George W. Bush spoke of his desire to "skip a generation" of weaponry, to move to a shiny new age of high-tech warfare in which sensors, satellites and computers would replace manpower. Among military planners, phrases like "network-centric warfare," "digitization" and "the transparent battlefield" were all the rage. The new thinking was given a partial test after 9/11 when the military invaded Afghanistan and Iraq. In fact, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's push to employ a faster, leaner, more-wired force worked well. In Afghanistan, Special Forces working with local warlords used their laptops to call in precise airstrikes and topple the Taliban; in Iraq, Gen. Tommy Franks could boast that "speed kills"—and Baghdad fell in less than three weeks. Then came disaster. In Afghanistan, American forces and their unreliable allies were not able to capture or kill Osama bin Laden, and the Taliban survived to fight another day. The growing insurgency in Iraq overwhelmed U.S. forces and left a good portion of the American people and their elected representatives believing that the war was a lost cause. The military seemed caught by surprise, its high-tech forces unable to defeat a shadow army that wired bombs with garage-door openers and the sort of cheap electronic gizmos that could be purchased from RadioShack. In retrospect, the military's unpreparedness seems puzzling. According to the Congressional Research Service, since the end of the cold war in 1990 the U.S. military has been deployed 88 times—to fight in a series of savage little wars of peace from Somalia to the Balkans to Sierra Leone. Didn't the Army learn anything from the experience? The answer is yes and no. The older generation of officers—the generals who run the show—were trained to fight the Soviet Army as its tanks powered through the Fulda Gap in Germany. These officers were steeped in tank battles and artillery duels, and although the Big One never came, they did get a chance to fight a conventional armored conflict against the Iraqi Army in 1991, crushing Saddam Hussein's forces in less than 100 hours. After the gulf war, the Army shrank in size by about 40 percent. The officers who advanced to the top ranks tended to be conventional warriors; the outliers and mavericks—the few who knew other cultures, had trained Third World armies and had studied the small wars of the colonial era—were confined to the ghetto of Special Forces or let go altogether. The men who ran the lightning invasion of Iraq and the long, botched occupation that followed tended to be Desert Storm vets who knew little or nothing about counterinsurgency warfare. Now, however, a younger generation of officers has been bloodied in the city streets of Iraq, fighting against hidden foes. (Some of these same officers were deployed on nation-building missions to the Balkans or Africa or Haiti in the 1990s.) In Iraq, these young captains and majors and lieutenant colonels have had to desperately improvise, to make up tactics as they go along. Naturally, some are furious at their higher-ups for sending them to war so unprepared. In May 2007, one of them, Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, wrote a blistering piece in Armed Forces Journal called "A Failure of Generalship." He painted the Army's high command as a bunch of none-too-bright conformists. The promotions system, he wrote, "does little to reward creativity and moral courage." On the contrary, to move up, an officer "must only please his superiors." Yingling pointed out that no one seemed to be taking the fall for failure in Iraq. He had a point: Gen. George Casey, who presided over the downward spiral between 2004 and 2006, was rewarded by being made Army chief of staff. By contrast, Gen. George Marshall, in his first year as Army chief of staff under FDR in the run-up to World War II, fired 34 generals and 445 colonels from an Army half the size of today's force. After war came in December 1941, he further relieved 17 division commanders. So why no comparable purge during the Iraq War, which has already lasted longer than World War II? More was at stake during 1941 to 1945, of course, but it is also true that the commanders in Iraq were following the policy decreed by Bush and Rumsfeld. The failure of imagination started at the top. True, more officers should have challenged their civilian bosses, but that is rarely the way in a U.S. military obedient to civilian control. Under the twin pressures of Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army has dramatically changed its training for officers and soldiers. Now, at its National Training Center at Fort Irwin in California's Mojave Desert, infantry units are plunged into a nightmarish theater in the round: a network of a dozen "Iraqi" villages, complete with several hundred "Iraqis"—the leading roles played by a cast of Arabic-speaking extras supplied by a contractor. But the real test of the Army's commitment will be whether the military retains and promotes the experienced young officers coming off the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. "One of the challenges we have as senior leaders is that ... we have to change the Army," says Gen. Raymond Odierno, the former No. 2 in Iraq who was recently named vice chief of staff of the Army. "We have to make sure we don't lose this." His boss in Iraq, counterinsurgency guru Gen. David Petraeus, says that the military is beginning to make accommodations for officers who are repeatedly deployed and can't take the war-college courses needed for promotion. Still, young officers were dismayed to see some of Petraeus's own "brain trust" of smart colonels passed over for promotion in recent years. The fact that Petraeus was brought back to Washington, D.C., last fall to oversee the most recent promotions board was taken as a sign that the Pentagon leadership recognized those frustrations. But simply tipping the balance over to small-war fighting isn't the answer, either. The U.S. Army last week published a critique of the Israeli military's performance in its fight against Hizbullah in Lebanon in 2006. It concluded that the Israelis, preoccupied with counterinsurgency efforts in Gaza and the West Bank, had neglected training for conventional combat and paid a heavy price. Yet if the U.S. Army needs to prepare for both Big War and Small War and nation-building postwar, how can it juggle the competing demands of each? Counterinsurgency and nation-building in particular are labor-intensive; there is no substitute for boots on the ground. The current U.S. Army is stretched to the limit: after their third or fourth tours in Iraq, young officers are fretting about their stressed families. Partly because the Army has been decentralized to be able to fight in smaller, more-mobile units, there is a serious shortage of captains and majors. The minimum requirements for enlisting are dropping, allowing in more and more teenagers who never finished high school. Some experts think that the active Army needs to nearly double to 800,000 or more troops. But where will the money come from? Every soldier now costs, on average, roughly $125,000 a year. At the same time, the centerpiece of the Army's current plans for the big war out there sometime is the high-tech "Future Combat System," a $300 billion family of vehicles networked into an all-seeing whole by sensors, UAVs and satellites. It will be up to the nation's political leaders to decide whether to make some hard choices or try to convince the voters that they need to pay for it all. Too bad this is a topic that is rarely discussed during the presidential campaign.