Posts by Matthew Poole
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Hard News: Behind those Herald…, in reply to Nick Russell,
When the Herald and Stuff are publishing stories basically encouraging young people to invest in the housing market regardless of whether they can afford to, I start to wonder whether the crash is going to be this month or the month after.
The Herald has to be making a fair whack of cash off all the non-bank lenders that're advertising in the business pages these days. ISTR similar adverts back in '06-'07, and we know how that all played out.
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Then we get Liam Dann, yesterday, talking about how the average Auckland house price increased by $114,000 last year. Which means the average purchaser's average 20% required deposit increased by $22,800 last year. That's probably almost literally a (very small) truckload of smashed-avo brunches just to keep up with the increase in the required deposit, not actually to achieve the deposit amount.
But yes, oh propertied classes, please do keep telling those of us who are looking longingly skywards for a hint of the bottom of the property ladder how we're ambitionless losers who simply need to work harder and spend less.
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Hard News: The long road to Hit and Run, in reply to Alfie,
But it was shelved after being deemed “insufficiently accurate”, a decision made by a commander who oversaw one of New Zealand’s six-month deployments to the country.
There’s that SAS connection again.
Que? The officer in question was either Air Vice-Marshall Kevin Short, who by definition of his branch of service could not have been a member of NZSAS, or Major General Tim Gall who has no listed service with NZSAS in his biography.
ETA: From the article:
OIA material supplied shows it was “drafted” in early 2014 and then “shelved” by the Commander Joint Forces “at the time”.The Commander Joint Forces until March 2014 was Air Vice-Marshal Kevin Short, currently Vice Chief of Defence Force, commander of Crib 9 of the PRT in Bamiyan from July 2006 for six months.
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He was succeeded by the current Commander Joint Forces, Major-General Tim Gall, who was the Land Component Commander at the time the review was “drafted” and directly responsible for our deployment to Bamiyan.
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Hard News: The long road to Hit and Run, in reply to Alfie,
Note that Keating is a former NZSAS Commanding Officer
As I pointed out last week he's one of at least three senior officers across the Army/NZDF who have held the post of CO NZSAS, and the highest-ranking enlisted soldier is also a former member of the Regiment (though not an operator).
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Hard News: The long road to Hit and Run, in reply to Alfie,
To describe this meticulous journalism as editorialisation is disingenuous at best.
No, haven't read the book. But my specific comment related to conveying the overall understanding of the tactical situation as it related to the wisdom of a decision to demolish houses.
And Hager is known for his editorialising. Informed editorialising, to be sure, but still editorialising. Unless he explicitly asked officers about their tactical (and strategic) knowledge and understanding of the wider situation, and relayed nothing more than their responses, it's still editorialising.
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Hard News: The long road to Hit and Run, in reply to ,
No, we don't. Not really. They can editorialise about what it might have been, but they weren't there. The people who know the understanding of the tactical situation on the ground at the time are the officers who were there at the time. Nobody else.
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Hard News: The long road to Hit and Run, in reply to ,
It’s a stupid tactical decision if you can think beyond your own immediate interests.
Maybe, maybe not. Neither you nor I has the first idea about the understanding of the tactical situation on the ground at the time.
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Hard News: The long road to Hit and Run, in reply to Alfie,
My understanding is that nobody from the village was returning fire, which would surely have raised an immediate alarm within the SAS group.
Maybe it did. We have insufficient detail on that. It wasn't wholesale slaughter so someone stopped the shooting.
Note also that no weapons were discovered in the aftermath.
Well, yeah. There were no combatants there. But that's the detail you find out after you've attacked the wrong people, not before.
Then how do they explain the second raid several days later where our SAS used explosives to destroy the houses which were in the process of being rebuilt. Revenge wasn’t a motive? Sure thing.
Actually, if they believed insurgents were going to be using it as a base of operations, that's a prudent tactical decision.
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Hard News: The long road to Hit and Run, in reply to Alfie,
Which suggests that they may have been complicit in covering up a serious war crime.
You cite to Fisher’s piece and then use that wording? Really? Killing non-combatants is a war crime if they’re killed despite it being known that they are non-combatants. From what Fisher describes, with a source who should be considered credible, the snipers engaged what they reasonably (in the circumstances) believed to be combatants. There are probably legitimate questions about their target validation, but that’s not the same as deliberately targeting non-combatants.
What’s described is a cluster-fuck of confirmation-bias-gone-rogue (seeing people who intelligence says are combatants, behaving in a manner ascribed to combatants), rather than an active targeting of non-combatants. Which, unfortunately, happens in wartime. It’s one of the consequences of spec ops fighting largely in the dark. That doesn’t make it a war crime, though. The problem is not particularly that non-combatants were killed by mistake (and I have seen zero credible evidence to suggest otherwise), but that their deaths were covered up all the way up to the political civilian level. That is a real problem.
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Hard News: The long road to Hit and Run, in reply to Russell Brown,
They are. For what the SAS does.
Well, yes. You generally respect a collective for what the collective does, at least in my experience.
The book seems to make a pretty clear case that having a top command dominated by SAS veterans may not be the best thing.
I don’t have a lot of contact with military culture, but the Army officers I know (a relative and a family friend) have impressed me with their restraint and discipline. If other soldiers worry that that restraint is missing from SAS culture in command, it seems worth paying attention to.
I don’t think it’s a lack-of-restraint thing, particularly. It takes serious self-control and discipline to get into the regiment, after all, and their operations do not lend themselves to being a rabble. That said, Danyl’s summation – “the culture of the SAS is one of secrecy, elitism and unaccountability” – is probably not far of the mark. When much of what you (as a special operations force) do is literally classified, and you are a strategic asset for national policy as well as the best-trained military unit in the country, you will not be readily accepting of scrutiny from outside your immediate command. That is largely true of special forces around the world, from what I have read.
Those are not characteristics that should be fostered beyond the edges of such a unit, and they’re possibly questionable within. So when you have multiple top-level officers who have been the dispenser-of-accountability behind tightly-closed doors -as well as the protective buffer between their subordinate unit and meddling others who could be perceived as not having earned the right to poke in their noses - that raises legitimate concerns about institutional adoption of a culture of cleaning up messes in secret rather than the exposure-to-sunlight appropriate to the military of a democracy.