British to adopt LRDG tactics on Iraq-Iran frontier

[LongLeftFlank]

Yes, yes, I know, the LRDG didn't really "beat" Rommel. Write an angry letter to the Telegraph. At least they know what the LRDG was, though!

<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/08/24/wiraq24.xml>

Telegraph

British to adopt the tactics that beat Rommel

By Oliver Poole in Amarah

(Filed: 24/08/2006)

The soldiers of the Queen's Royal Hussars will today board a fleet of stripped-down Land Rovers, festooned with weapons and equipment, bound for the depths of the Iraqi desert.

Their mission is to adopt tactics pioneered by the Long Range Desert Group, the forerunners of the SAS, more than six decades ago in the campaign against Rommel in North Africa. They will leave Camp Abu Naji, the only permanent base in Maysan province near the local capital of Amarah, and head into the remote region near the border with Iran.

Rather than staying in a fixed spot well known to enemy fighters in the most violent of all the Iraqi provinces under British control, they will live, camp and fight on the move. Roaming through the sparsely populated areas of Maysan, an area as large as Northern Ireland, they will travel without heavy armour that would become bogged down in the sand dunes and sleep under the stars.

I won't quote more than this, as it is copyrighted material. Click the link.

[LongLeftFlank]

Oops, here's the link. Sorry.

Zer Link!

[FAI]

I'm rather confused here. That kind of tactic only worked when the enemy was easily identified (uniform, camps, heavy weapon emplacement, fighting vehicles, the works). Not the kind of elusive enemy they face in Iraq. I can see instead they wander into hostile teritory, and since the insurgents generally have better intelligence, walk right into an ambush, without armor.

[Beastttt]

you use the LRDG to spot and call in attacks

very rarely would they attack themselves

call in heavier cav(helio troups)

airstrikes

cruise missle attack

their biggest problem will be IFF ID'ing

but calling in a fighter to pull a WW mission to see if it can spook them into doing something stupid

or because they are vehicle bound they will have access to better spotting equipment

bigger cameras to spot weapons at longer distances

shotgun microphones for long distance hearing

just being out there to spot is a big advantage if they have a radio to call in with

[rudel.dietrich]

I don't really get this either, the LRDG was really like a modern day cavlary outfit.

They were usefull in disrupting an enemies line of communications and severing supply lines.

The enemy in Iraq has neither of those things.

What exactly is the object? To rove around for the purpose of collecting a nice body count?

That sounds ALOT like another war 40 some years ago that I will not name.

[Michael Emrys]

Originally posted by rudel.dietrich:

I don't really get this either, the LRDG was really like a modern day cavlary outfit.

They were usefull in disrupting an enemies line of communications and severing supply lines.

The enemy in Iraq has neither of those things.

What exactly is the object? To rove around for the purpose of collecting a nice body count?

That sounds ALOT like another war 40 some years ago that I will not name.

No, Beast is closer to it. For the great bulk of its operations, the LRDG was just a reconnaisance outfit. They might do a little mining, but for the most part, they tried to avoid shootouts. Their job was intelligence gathering, and getting into shootouts would likely only compromise their primary mission.

Hit and run raiding was primarily the province of groups like the SAS or PPA. Usually, when the LRDG engaged in that kind of thing, they didn't come off too well.

Michael

[John Kettler]

Having just reread Swinson's THE RAIDERS I can assure anyone interested that the LRDG's primary function was the long range transport and retrieval of road watch teams. Later on, following a debacle of a combat drop, S.A.S. founder David Stirling figured that since the LRDG was already driving hundreds of miles across the desert, it made sense to simply use the LRDG to get to where his sabotage teams where they needed to go. This worked okay to a point, but he soon realized that he needed his own

organic transport capability and that the Chevy 300 cwt. trucks were too big and hard to hide. This was the genesis of the heavily armed and ultimately famous "pink" S.A.S. jeep, used primarily for attacks on Rommel's airfields, and in postwar years with different vehicles for S.A.S. operations in Oman and Yemen. What the QRH is planning to do thus is more akin, though not really, to S.A.S. ops than LRDG. Classical Rommel period S.A.S. ops involved a long trek from a base

to the vicinity of the target, a short layup period to scope things out, a swift, devastating strike, followed by a hasty exit to the nearest good area of concealment, preferably with cover.

Regards,

John Kettler

[Bigduke6]

What can this big silly expensive Rat Patrol-type unit do, that a few Arab-speaking agents dressed as Bedouin, riding in a single Toyota pick-up, and equipped with a burst transmitter cannot do?

[Andreas]

Provide good picture motives for the BBC website.

All the best

Andreas

[Mace]

Originally posted by Michael Emrys:

For the great bulk of its operations, the LRDG was just a reconnaisance outfit. They might do a little mining, but for the most part, they tried to avoid shootouts. Their job was intelligence gathering, and getting into shootouts would likely only compromise their primary mission.

The SASR (Aussie SAS) has been carrying out LR patrols in Afghanistan.

Refer picture:

http://www.defence.gov.au/media/download/2005/sep/20050923/20050902adf8205214_0042_lo.jpg

[nijis]

I suspect they'd be doing border patrols. A lot of military operations in Iraq are intended just to establish a presence and remind people that the MNF are still around. Or just observe stuff. Figure out the lay of the land, civilian traffic patterns, etc. I'd guess a pretty big majority of combat missions in Iraq consist of little more than just driving around with your eyes open.

"What can this big silly expensive Rat Patrol-type unit do, that a few Arab-speaking agents dressed as Bedouin, riding in a single Toyota pick-up, and equipped with a burst transmitter cannot do?"

Stop suspicious vehicles. Ask the drivers questions. Search their trunks. Detain them if need-be.

More importantly, not get captured themselves. You may remember the Basra jail incident in September, where a couple of undercover observers were spotted, captured, and handed over to the Mahdi Army. In many parts of Iraq, betraying the slightest hint of not being from the region/neighborhood will get you grabbed by militia or insurgent group, precisely because people are so preoccupied with spies, suicide bombers, and the like.

[ August 25, 2006, 05:23 AM: Message edited by: nijis ]

[cassh]

Bigduke6 -

What can this big silly expensive Rat Patrol-type unit do, that a few Arab-speaking agents dressed as Bedouin, riding in a single Toyota pick-up, and equipped with a burst transmitter cannot do?

Quite a lot actually. To call the idea "big silly and expensive" just highlights you own naivety and lack of understanding of patrolling, intelligence gathering and counter-infiltration tactics. You need a mix of capabilities and solutions to allow for efficient counter-infiltration/smuggling – e.g.

</font>

• Recce patrol teams</font>
• Ground based sensors</font>
• UAV and airborne sensors</font>
• UAV and airborne strike capability</font>
• Eavesdropping and electronic chatter surveillance</font>
• Local indigenous human intelligence</font>
• Agents on the ground (your Arabs in a pick-up)</font>

The armed recce patrol is your most important asset in this mix as they actually control the ground in question.

Existing recce land rovers with HMG/GPMG Milan/Javelin are not expensive, and are a pre-existing asset every battalion has. To buy in new pick-ups and train up a network of agents and their C4I systems would take time and not be wholly reliable from the get go. With pre-existing reconnaissance teams you have an instantly deployable asset.

Arab speaking agents sending burst transmissions with air/land/UAV interdiction and strike capability responding on actionable timescales is not going to prove a reliable technique if this is the only methodology employed - as there is too much that can go wrong and it lacks flexibility:-

How does a agent in a truck stop and search a smuggler/enemy patrol?

Why get in a third party to interdict an enemy?

Having just "agent patrol teams" increases the chance of contacts not being taken out or interceptions occurring. This is because a couple if "civvies" in a pick-up are not going to take out an enemy convoy, smugglers or Bedouin train on their own.

Why not just allow roaming covert recce patrols to uses their organic weapons to intercept/take out targets they find? They have full night vision / fighting capabilities and anti-armour/anti-vehicular interdiction and are trained in this kind of work.

They can stop and search any convoy/patrol they encounter, and their threat is in itself a great area denial tactic – making life more difficult for the enemy. As recce platoons are amongst the most experienced and best trained soldiers in any battalion they bring a very high degree of flexibility and options to the command team.

Suggest you not be so glib about things you clearly don't understand!

[flamingknives]

It's clearly an excuse to do a gamey jeep rush.

[hellfish]

I've actually been wondering if it might be more useful to take a page out of the Rhodesian COIN book - especially in the rural areas - and utilize small teams that can rapidly be reinforced when they come into contact. It still feels like we're often using bulldozers to run over anthills in Iraq - maybe we should think about small, mobile teams who "own" land that they always operate on. Say, one rifle squad for 10 square miles.

I applaud the Brits for at least trying to break the FOB mentality and try something new. Maybe it'll work?

[nijis]

I think anything short of a company would have difficulty maintaining a secure base environment, although I know the Marines are experimenting with smaller FOBs in some of their more secure areas.

What you need in Iraq, IMHO, is not so much smaller units and more FOBs but units that don't rotate out, like national army and police units or 19th century European colonial armies, for that matter. Individuals might come and go, but the institution remains. Every time a unit leaves, the new one has to learn afresh the AO's terrain, personalities, and a hundred other details about their environment. Plus, anecdotale evidence suggests new units moving into the area tend to shoot a lot more civilian motorists in the month or so it takes to settle in.

Of course, decade-long tours of occupation duty might make recruiting difficult, and probably erode the unit's edge in conventional warfare. So maybe you could have a compromise -- specialized counterinsurgency platoons that remain in place in each battalion-sized AO throughout the conflict, providing intelligence and other support to the main units as they come and go.

[ August 25, 2006, 07:00 AM: Message edited by: nijis ]

[hellfish]

Originally posted by nijis:

What you need in Iraq, IMHO, is not so much smaller units and more FOBs but units that don't rotate out, like national army and police units or 19th century European colonial armies, for that matter. Individuals might come and go, but the institution remains. Every time a unit leaves, the new one has to learn afresh the AO's terrain, personalities, and a hundred other details about their environment. Plus, anecdotale evidence suggests new units moving into the area tend to shoot a lot more civilian motorists in the month or so it takes to settle in.

Isn't that what they tried in Vietnam?

[nijis]

Actually, that rather obvious point didn't occur to me. Do you know why the practice was discontinued? I suppose you lose unit cohesion if people are constantly being rotated in and out, but I'd argue that in an intelligence-driven war that downside is outweighed by the losses in institutional memory that goes with whole units being rotated in and out -- particularly if you're only talking about platoon-sized attachments whose main responsibilities are intelligence and civil affairs.

What you really need in a counterinsurgency is a way to keep the same individuals in place for 2-3 years -- a colonial officer corps, in other words -- but you'd have to offer some pretty hefty inducements to find willing takers.

[ August 25, 2006, 08:41 AM: Message edited by: nijis ]

[hellfish]

It was loss of unit cohesion, as I understand it. Enlisted served for a year and officers often served only six months before being transferred to a staff job.

But you're right - I think keeping units permanantly in Iraq with a minimum of personnel turnover would work best, but I don't see that ever happening. SF kind of work like that - the teams are often kept intact for long periods of time and specialize in certain regions.

[Cary]

Originally posted by fytinghellfish:

</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by nijis:

What you need in Iraq, IMHO, is not so much smaller units and more FOBs but units that don't rotate out, like national army and police units or 19th century European colonial armies, for that matter. Individuals might come and go, but the institution remains. Every time a unit leaves, the new one has to learn afresh the AO's terrain, personalities, and a hundred other details about their environment. Plus, anecdotale evidence suggests new units moving into the area tend to shoot a lot more civilian motorists in the month or so it takes to settle in.

Isn't that what they tried in Vietnam? </font>

[nijis]

I'm sure it's better to get far down in the weeds, but I suspect that in Iraq the US military (as opposed to the civilian reconstruction teams, state, etc) is probably now as far down in the weeds as it can get without exponentially increasing its security problems -- at best, we could go from company-sized FOBs to platoon-sized FOBs. Iraqi police officers incidentally live in the equivalent of squad-sized FOBs -- their homes, with their own protection forces -- and die at a tremendous rate. There might also be a loss of economies of scale in terms of unit efficiency, so having more and smaller FOBs may mean fewer patrols.

What we need are not so much more FOBs, but officers and NCOs who been in the same locality long enough to know all the major players by name, know their family histories, speak decent Arabic, etc. I've met a lot of young company commanders and S-2s who are very impressive and have learned an awful lot about their AO in a short period of time, but it's never enough and the loss of continuity when they transfer out is near-total.

"SF kind of work like that - the teams are often kept intact for long periods of time and specialize in certain regions."

Alas, I'm not allowed to speak to them. As far as I know their main tasks are training and raids against high-value targets, although I suspect there's a lot more which I'm not supposed to know about. As far as I can tell however they don't seem to be involved in the day-to-day operations of securing an AO, however. They also seem to have a much more high profile role in Afghanistan. If anyone knows more about their role in Iraq, and is allowed to tell, I'd be fascinated to hear.

[ August 25, 2006, 09:17 AM: Message edited by: nijis ]

[hellfish]

I'm reminded of the recent work the 3rd ACR did in Tal Afar - they operated in small, disbursed units within the city and had astonishing success. When the 1st AD replaced the 3rd, things started going to **** again.

[bitchen frizzy]

Depressing directly-related story:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060825/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_base_looted

[cassh]

nijis said

I think anything short of a company would have difficulty maintaining a secure base environment, although I know the Marines are experimenting with smaller FOBs in some of their more secure areas.

You may have missed the entire point of mobile patrolling – the idea is you don’t have a static FOB, but rather harbour/laager each night in a different location with the wagons in an all-round defence. By moving about you present less of a target and are able to OP key routes and areas each night to build up an intel picture.

The idea is to remain undetected - meaning that you’re not wasting resources defending a fixed location and can bug out if a heavy contact occurs. By moving about and laying low the enemy knows your area of operation and the threat - but cannot easily bring you to battle on their terms.

In this way armed recce patrols can retain the initiative and operate in more favourable conditions.

In this type of patrolling re-supply is also mobile by rendezvous with helicopters or trucks.

[MikeyD]

One thing to remember is Iraq is roughly the size of Texas (I think). So patrolling the Iran/Iraq border would be roughly the equivlent to patroling the Texas/Mexico border! Its too long to build a fence and too porous to set up checkpoints. The only alternative is to make the opponent unsure of his likelyhood of running into trouble when he crosses. The presence of LRDG-type patrols turns crossing the border into a crap-shoot. Am I going to reach my destination unnoticed or an I going to be caught with my pants down out in the middle of nowhere? Publicity about the existance of LRDG patrols may do more good than the patrols themselves!

[ August 28, 2006, 10:01 AM: Message edited by: MikeyD ]

[nijis]

"You may have missed the entire point of mobile patrolling."

I was actually thinking of platoons as the minimum size for static FOBs that will necessarily make up the vast majority of the MNF's frontline military presence. The LRDG concept might work for border control or a few other specialized missions in unpopulated areas, but it seems pretty useless if you're trying to exert control over cities and towns.