In some of my earlier posts I made references to the changing face of warfare in association with globalization.  I made an argument more towards the fight against idea’s and traditional states. I also made the case towards needing to reeducate the military and civic leadership around types of conflicts they would need to manage on a go forward basis, and as a part of this I called out the probable need for additional special forces vs large traditional armies.

I recently read Operation Certain Death by Damien Lewis (and highly recommend it) about the SAS rescue of British Soldiers held captive by drug-crazed the drug crazed rebel group The West Side Boys in the Sierra Leone jungle.

http://www.amazon.com/Operation-Certain-Death-Damien-Lewis/dp/0099466422/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/105-6828698-5270064?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1181703192&sr=8-1

If you saw the movie Blood Diamond, then you were introduced to the concepts of Blood Diamonds, Mercenary Soldiers and Child Soldier all struggling together in the torment that has become Africa.

http://www.cinemanow.com/Buy/Movies/1007,0,5,,1,2,0/1001,0,5,,1,2,147974/Blood-Diamond-(WB).htm

It is interesting that earlier this year was sitting with a friend of mine is very close friends with the former head of the SAS and found our thinking to be remarkably aligned. I have included sections of Appendix 1: Analysis here from the book Operation Certain Death along with my comments as think they are incredibly relevant to debate on globalization.

Appendix 1: Analysis

Everything changed with the end of the Cold War. Up to then we knew what we had to do and we knew who the potential enemy was and we could train and prepare accordingly. Now it’s all guesswork.

- General Sir Peter Inge, Chief of Defense Staff, 1996

The Sierra Leonean hostage crises and Operation Barras was a huge media story at the time. But when starved of material to report, the press can be fickle, and the attention of the world media soon moved on to other events. It was hardly surprising. In the aftermath of the assault, none of the eleven British hostages was at any time presented to the news-hungry press pack. And few, if any, of the British soldiers who comprised the Operation Barras assault force were inclined to talk to the media, either. The journalists reporting the story at the time secured their ‘eyewitness accounts’ of the assult on Gberi Bana either from the West Side Boys’ survivors (even Foday Kallay himself, speaking from prison), or from other Sierra Leoneans – namely Corporal Mousa and the village ‘recruits.’ No press access was given to the British side of the story. In this world of instant news the attention span of the public is increasingly short-lived, and the press soon lost interest. And that, it seemed, was to be the end of the story.

Note: British SAS and Para forces raided the West Side Boys compound early in the morning when they were hung over. Foday Kallay was their self proclaimed leader, Corporal Mousa was captured along with the British soldiers and being held captive and the village ‘recruits’ were young people who were being forcefully inducted into the West Side Boys rebel group and were identified by the special forces and spared where ever possible during the raid.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Side_Boys

The hostage-taking and subsequent rescue placed the British establishment on the horns of a dilemma: it was a daring and audacious assault by Britain’s finest troops that showed the British military at its best; but at the same time the capture of eleven, heavily armed British soldiers by a renegade band of rebels did quite the opposite. At the time, the British establishment’s position on the hostage crisis and rescue assault appear confused. Was this to be a chapter in British military history to be celebrated, or shunned? Was it something of which the British people should be proud, or somewhat ashamed? Did the “Barras” of operation Barras stand for the embarrassment of the West Side Boys, or of the British forces taken hostage (as a Sierra Leone newspaper had suggested)? When the furor of the capture and rescue had died down, the story looked set to fade away into obscurity. And the British soldiers involved – hostages and rescuers alike – went quietly back to their regiments to continue to do their duty.

The press reports at the time were often, and somewhat understandably, inaccurate. Newspaper articles has ‘SBS frogmen emerging out of the river to attack the rebel base’’ the SAS abseiling through the roof of the hostage building’, and Foday Kallay ‘strutting about in the captured British soldiers’ uniform’. In the research that I have carried out for the writing of this book, I have come across just one authoritative account of the assault, written a year after the event. Richard Connaughton, formerly the British Army’s head of Defence Studies and now a security consultant, wrote a short article entitled “Operation Barras’ in the academic journal Small Wars & Insurgencies. It is a brief and somewhat dry account of what he describes as ‘an audacious and brilliantly executed joint operation’. At the same time, he points to the ‘serious and embarrassing setback when 11 British soldiers and their Sierra Leonean liaison offer were taken hostage by a bandit group’. Other than that far from widely read publication, the story of the hostage crisis and Operation Barras seemed to have disappeared without trace.

Which is a pity, because this is a story that needs to be told. In fact, it demands to be shouted from the rooftops, not just because it is a compelling human tale, but because men risked their lives and were injured – and died – doing their duty. Clearly, there were acts of great and exceptional fortitude and heroism among the men of the British assault force, who went into the rebel base heavily outnumbered and succeeded in rescuing the hostages. But the real courage that emerges from the pages of this book lies as much with the hostages themselves – ordinary soldiers thrown into a horrific situation, who rose to the terrible challenges they faced with a dignity and integrity of which they should feel proud.

There are perhaps two types of courage in this world: physical courage and moral courage. Whereas the men who assaulted the rebel base did what they had been trained to do, and exhibited immense and extraordinary physical courage in the process, the British soldiers taken hostage were thrown into a completely alien environment for which their training could never have prepared them. As such, they had the choice to proceed with moral cowardice or moral courage, and almost without exception they chose to do the latter. Despite the powerlessness of their situation, despite the depravity and terror they faced from the rebels on a daily, almost hourly, basis, they retained their principle, their values, their solidarity and their beliefs, even when they could have been killed for doing so. Not for one moment did they ever allow their actions or behaviour to sink to the same level of meaningless horror and evil as the rebels. And it would have been so easy for them to have done so. That is what saw them through their terrible ordeal, and that is what helped save them.

In the telling of their story there is also the opportunity, indeed the need, to discuss the wider issues thrown up by this short chapter on the history of suffering in a country like Sierra Leone. That discussion in part concerns our response to the demands of international peacekeeping in strife-torn regions across Africa and in the wider, conflict-torn world. In fact, the story of the British military intervention in Sierra Leone has many lessons to offer us in an increasingly insecure world…