The gloves should be taken off.

I’m referring to the war on terror that is being waged against Islamic terrorists. As far as I can see the Russians have the right idea. Bomb them to hell and back. No laser guided bombs, instead sticks of dumb bombs from on high.

Of course someone will tell me I’m justifying breaking the Geneva convention. However the Geneva convention is for the protection of prisoners and civilians.

“The Geneva Conventions extensively defined the basic rights of wartime prisoners (civilians and military personnel); established protections for the wounded; and established protections for the civilians in and around a war-zone.”

It’s not as if Isil has been following the convention, so personally we shouldn’t have to fight a lopsided battle.

Article 3 states that even where there is not a conflict of international character, the parties must as a minimum adhere to minimal protections described as: non-combatants, members of armed forces who have laid down their arms, and combatants who are hors de combat (out of the fight) due to wounds, detention, or any other cause shall in all circumstances be treated humanely, with the following prohibitions:

(a) violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture;

(b) taking of hostages;

(c) outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment

(d) the passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court, affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.

 

As you can see from the emboldened text they have broken all of the rules.

So here’s what I suggest we do.

Raqqa is purportedly a stronghold of Islamic state and should be cleansed. Therefore a warning should be given that if the population don’t leave within 48 hours then the consequences are theirs to shoulder.

Then I’d nuke the place.

Too extreme? Why should we fight with our hands behind our backs?

I might just drop a hint to a particularly rich gulf state that unless they stop funding terrorists, they might find that one of their Holy cities might become a sheet of glass as well.

Going to war on a shoe string.

The date is 2003 and yours truly was off to Iraq. My vessel of choice (Actually no choice) was the RFA Argus.

The Argus was a containership that was bought and converted to carry out two roles. The primary role was to perform as a helicopter training ship, to enable pilots to practise all sorts of evolutions before deploying to various naval vessels.

The secondary role was to undertake the job of Primary casualty receiving ship. Number one hanger had been converted into a state of the art, hundred bed hospital.

In their wisdom the PTB had neglected or ill thought out a number of items of immense interest to me. After all, avoiding premature death is in my own interest.

The vessel was supposed to be able to survive a chemical attack. As the assistant NBCDO (Nuclear, Biological, Chemical warfare, and Damage control Officer), it was my responsibility to rectify any defects.

One primary defence against NBC is to pressurise the inside of the ship by drawing in filtered air and closing all doors and ports (Windows).

There was only one slight problem with this. This converted merchant ship had hundreds of opening ports and doors. After days and days of sealing openings with gaffer tape and tins of expanding foam my staff(Two), plus a bored surgeon Captain, finally managed to achieve pressurisation.

The second defence is to pre-wet the ship. This is done by having pop up nozzles supplied from the ship’s High pressure salt water main, to spray the ship’s outside to wash off any contaminants. This was operated by zonal air operated master valves controlled from the NBCD control room. Solved. After crawling around trying to trace the pneumatic piping for leaks, I finally traced the fault. The master pneumatic supply pipe had never actually been connected to a source of compressed air. A bodge up comprising rubber hose and fittings, sorted out another cockup.

Another item of concern was the emergency generator fitted to supply the hospital. One of our ships that was being disposed off was the source of the generator. The problem that reared it’s ugly head was it’s generating capacity was too great. The hospital’s max capacity being 200 kw and the generator’s max being 1.2 Mw. Resulting in an oil change after a week’s running at light load. Now, if it was me under the knife on the operating table, I wouldn’t want the surgeons to be in darkness for four hours. Fix, a temporary load bank was wired in to the circuit. Good one you say. Nope. This was a piece of kit bolted onto the deck, just forward of the funnel, designed to use kilowatts and turn them into heat.  Every heat seeking missile in the world would have thought Christmas had come early.

As I noted before, the hospital complex was most certainly state of the art with two operating theatres, sterilisers, and oxygen. Whoah. Where does the oxygen come from? Well. some bright spark had an oxygen making plant situated, complete with storage bottles, directly above the hospital, just under the flight deck. Just imagine a bomb hitting that!

And finally (And I’m sure you’ll be pleased about that).

You remember those pneumatically operated pre-wet valves. The control valves were mounted in NBCD HQ. When the appropriate pre-wet valve was in the correct position, the control valve would vent into NBCD HQ. Of course the design fault here was that the air was from an unfiltered compressor situated in the main machinery space. A quick fix, which Apollo 13 would by proud, involved more duct tape and a plethora of S10 respirator canisters.

The Moral of the story is:

How the fuck did this pass muster for ten years or so, seeing that there is a supposedly fool proof computerised programme to do away with this negligence?

The smoking war at sea.

This is the era when the badly researched science of second hand smoking was just starting to waft it’s ugly aroma.

Here we are off the coast of Iraq in early 2001

There I was onboard a massive grey painted ship just over the horizon from an enemy shore. The vessel in question is the Navy’s helicopter training ship and is sailing in her secondary function as “casualty receiving ship”. Not to be confused with a hospital ship. The reason being is that the vessel is fitted with a variety of armaments.

Hostilities have commenced and my Action Station post was I/C (In Command) of HQ1 (Command post for Fire fighting, damage repair, & Nuclear, Chemical and Biological threats). Adjoining HQ1 was the machinery control room run by a team of engineer officers and ratings.

Smoking areas on ships were a bit hit and miss at that time. It varied depending on which ship you were on.

I’m quietly sitting in my command seat when over my head set comes the somewhat worrying report from the Bridge that a Russian made anti ship missile search radar was sweeping us, and that the ship was going to turn and head out to sea at maximum speed. (Max speed being  a sprightly seventeen knots and sea skimming missiles have a habit of speeding in in the hundreds of knots).

Well naturally anyone would do what I did. I reached into the top pocket of my action coverall produced a packet of cigarettes and lit up. After a few moments a shout rings out from the adjoining control room, “you can’t smoke here”. My reply. (In wind up mode) “ Fuck off. I’m allowed to have a last cigarette before we all die in a blazing fireball in the next few minutes”. No reply.

Funnily enough no smoking in that space was never mentioned again.

Aside: One of the reasons I retired when I did, was the draconian rules on smoking that came about after 2007 onboard ships.

A Pittance of time

Someone read one of my old blogs and it brought this to mind. Although this was written for Remembrance Sunday I thought this was apposite to our troops who are being killed or wounded almost daily in Afghanistan.

I have been in more wars and conflicts than I wish to remember. Can we stop now? We are losing too many of our youth to satisfy the ambitions of those in Government who have no idea of the horror. Has Gordon Brown ever seen a headless corpse inches from his eyes? I have. It still gives me nightmares after 40 years.

Priceless, World war has started.

Frank Davis excels himself on his blog. Do go and read it.

The Royal Blogging Corps

frank_davis

September 13th, 13:13

Blue skies. Light winds. Perfect flying weather.

I feel like I'm in a war. It's a war that started on 1 July 2007. The day after tomorrow it will have been going on for 2 years, 2 months, 2 weeks, 2 days, 2 hours, and 2 minutes. But actually it's a global war, and it didn't start everywhere at the same time.

It's a war that's very like the Second World War. Once again we weren't ready, and the Nazis overran us easily. They had a war machine, and we didn't. These latest Nazis have, as before, overrun most of Europe in short order. There are smoking bans from Bantry Bay to Bratislava. They haven't captured Spain yet. And they haven't fully pacified Holland or Germany or Croatia. All the rest seem to have given up without a fight. And the news is always unremittingly grim. Iraq is the latest country to fall under the heel of the jackboot.

Absolutely Hilarious, read the rest here.