Modern Warfare Reading Progress

Apologies for the recent light activity of the blog. Real life issues are greatly interfering with my hobby life, and the blog is suffering from a more restricted time availability, that I frankly prefer to allocate to reading and playing basically (...and some painting too).

This post intends to provide some views on my recent foray in the  unchartered waters of the modern warfare conflict focused on the so called "war on terror" or "asymmetrical conflicts" (choose your term).

As you already know, I have taken a double interest in the period aiming on the one hand to understand the development of future geopolitical issues related to the growing instability in the Middle East (a key world-energy supply region) and on the other, to get ready for the publication of the TooFatLardies incoming rules Fighting Season, based in the successful 2WW skirmish rules Chain of Command.


As usual when I confront a new gaming period, I must first get a historical understanding. The term "history" probably doesn't fit well considering that it is present not past; so documenting would be a more accurate term. There's a lot of media resources available on the Internet, but also a surprisingly ample and high-quality offer of books, some of them already mentioned in a previous post.


The first thing I have realised is that Afghanistan and Iraq are quite different conflicts, and that the coalition armies are far from homogeneous. In that sense, my recommendation to anyone getting interest in it is to focus on one specific theatre and one army, which in my case has been Afghanistan and the British regular forces (...special forces are a chapter on its own).

Based on this my first reading recommendation to get introduced into it is Leigh Neville's The British Army in Afghanistan 2006-14: Task Force Helmand published by Osprey in its Elite series (volume 205).



This is a typical Osprey short 66-pages book but provides an excellent introduction to the British involvement in the country. A handy description of the different tours, the tactical challenges faced and solutions, composition of the task forces and evolution of the materiel used (personnel weapons and vehicles) by the army. Add to it some maps, outstanding high-quality photos and the traditional plates, worthy and useful as a complement to additional reading.


My second recommendation is Attack State Red, written by Col Richard Kemp and journalist Chris Hughes. Col Kemp was the force commander of the Royal Anglian Regiment, touring the Helmand

province in the spring of 2007 (Herrick VI).  This is a book written from a company perspective and provides an excellent review of the military events, zooming frequently to the platoon and section levels, including also the personal narrative of the soldier on the ground. If you are familiar  with Lt Gen Moore's book We were Soldiers Once and Young of Vietnam, you will understand the type of book we have here.

Each chapter focuses on one specific operation, told in high level of detail and well supported by maps and graphics.

The best work to understand the nature of the military operation at small scale, the use of different weapons available and the challenges posed by the Taliban way of fighting. In this period the adoption of IEDs and hit-&-run tactics was not as generalised as later in the campaign.

Next is Callsign Hades by Patrick Bury, a young south-Irish platoon commander of the Royal Irish

Regiment, who saw action in Afghanistan in 2008. Different angle to Attack State Red (the view of the platoon leader) and also a different narrative, as the book tells on the personal experience and it becomes quite honest and high emotional at moments, specially in its last chapters.



The daily struggle to cope with a mission whose objectives are difficult to understand by the troops on the ground, the loss of friends and comrades, the scarcity of equipment and resources to accomplish the mission, the permanent but invisible presence of the enemy in the form of surprise attacks and the constant threads of IEDs ... all is masterly described in the book. 


In the end the pressure is too much for the author who left the army in 2009 despite a clear vocation for military matters  from its very early child years.

Last but not least I'm currently reading Dead Men Risen. The book describes the story of the Welsh

Guards tour in 2009 and contrary to the previous works, it's been written by a journalist (Toby Harnden) who spent time with the unit in Afghanistan but who could also conducted a significant amount of interviews and document research in the UK. The book was awarded the 2012 Orwell prize. If I have to use a word to describe this book is "disturbing", highly in fact. The Welsh Guards as far as I see were one of the units to suffer more casualties in the campaign, including its battalion commander Lt Col Rupert Thorneloe (first high-level casualty since the Second World War), prompting a major political row in the UK as it questioned the capabilities of the British Army to conduct the mission.

In which sense the book is disturbing? Well, each chapter is in fact the story of a person or group of persons who will die or will get seriously injured by the end of it. Harnden goes into great detail to introduce us to the life of each of these soldiers, who they were, how they were seen by the families and friends, who their families are, etc. You know that irremediably all these people are going to have their lives shattered  by the end of the chapter. A homage to the victims, I'm really struggling to end the book, to be totally honest. Probably the best of the four I reviewed but a very hard reading, I don't think I can recommend generally.

I also have in store another og Leigh Neville's work, Special Forces in the War of Terror also published by Osprey. This is not the typical 66 pager but a large 350+ pages lavishly illustrated and using quite recent information and documentation from the special forces actions in Iraq and Afghanistan mainly, with an additional chapter about Lybia, Somalia, Yemen and the most recent Syria theaters. I haven't read it yet, just skipped through it, but in principle looks another worthy work to have in your library.

I think this is enough reading to tackle the British in Afghanistan. There are seveal other books recommended in the TooFatLardies Yahoo Group and you can also take a look to the bibliography annex included in the British Army Osprey reviewed earlier in this post.

Finishing painting my models and start testing Fighting Season ranks high in my agenda, hope to start commenting soon on how the game works.

Painting British Modern Infantry - Progress Report

Usual readers of this blog know that I have recently embarked in a new painting project ahead opf the publication of the incoming TooFatLardies modern warfare rules "Fighting Season"·. Once I overcame the initial panic, I found a reasonable palette of colours to paint the new British Army MPT ammo and now I can show the first finished minis.

Photo 1: Command group 

(radioman, light mortar, senior leader, assisstant senior leader)

 

Photo 2: Infantry Section

The Photo 1 is The Assault Group modern British range while the minis in photo 2 are from Empress. Both brands are fully compatibale although there are some differences in the uniform (specially helmets).

I have another batch to paint on my table including a medic, a mine detector operator, a LMG and a couple of Minimis to provide more beef to the sections.

A Glimpse of Fighting Season

Too Fat Lardies has uploaded a very interesting battle report of Fighting Season this afternoon in its official blog "Lard Island" that provides a good flavour iof the incoming rules for modern warfare.

Aficionados to Chain of Command will quickly grab the similarities to the WWII rules, however, as Richard Clarke explians at the end of the blog post, the changes introduced to the basic rules-engine comes out in a total different type of game.

Coincidentally, I was reading the first chapter of Attack State Red this afternoon while returning from work and I could not believe how similar the action described in Lar Island was to what I just read in the book.

I found hell...

...and hell is painting the modern British Army multi-terrain purpose (MTP) cammo uniform. Or at least this what I thought when I discovered the dramatic change in the British battledress uniforms.

At the time of planning collecting some British forces for Fighting Season (the incoming TooFatLardies modern warfare rules), most of the graphics materials I found depicted the typical British soldier en in the simple two-colour cammo uniform (sand and dark brown) so I thought that painting was "piece of cake". However, just after I bought the first batch of minis early this week from Empress and The Assault Group (coinciding with my birthday) I noticed that the uniform did not entirely match what I found in my photo search.

So I returned to "googling" more in depth and to my dismay I discovered that in 2011 a full new battledress and equipment had been introduced, currently supplied to almost all units of the British Army. Why the dismay? Just see the photo below (MTP on the right)

What ISIS really Wants

This is somewhat off-topic to a blog mainly dedicated to my wargaming activities. But as I said, only "somewhat". Part of the pleasure of painting (and playing) with my toys is to do some extended research on the period involved; actually, I ended up in the wargaming world because of my interest for history  (I’m sure I’m not the only one here).

As you also probably know, I’m currently looking to play Fighting Season, the incoming modern warfare rules by TooFatLardies. We can not talk here about researching “history” but more properly “geopolitics”, which incidentally is a topic that I regularly follow in newspapers, magazines and books. And I’m especially curious to understand the emergence of the radical religious-based movements spreading across Africa and the Middle East.

Why? Because for good or for bad, Spain is at the forefront of a future clash with these movements; and if you take a look to the history of Iberian Peninsula, it can only be fully understood taking as a context not just Europe (the north) but also Africa (our south broder).

April Wrap-Up and a Reading list for Fighting Season

For heaven's sake! April's over and I hardly noticed, was I sleeping???. My blog activity over the past month was null, not a single post written (first time in years). Looking back into the past weeks, I just noticed that did not play a single game since Easter due to a combination of family engagements during weekends and some forays of my gaming group members into other wargaming interests... terrible.

I’ve been active on the painting front nonetheless and have managed to conclude a couple of units for my El Cid Project and some WWII bit and pieces (a US Airborne ATG and a mid-war German Panzer III).

Perhaps the most relevant news last month was the announcement by TooFatLardies of a new set of rules to play modern conflicts called Fighting Season, powered by the game mechanics of its 2 WW skirmish rules Chain of Command.

It was publicly tested in the recent London gathering Salute, with great success from what I grabbed from tweeter on the day and by the follow-up reports of different bloggers afterwards.  This announcement  also opened some interesting debates in the TFL Yahoo Group related to both how to simulate these type of asymmetrical conflicts and the convenience or not to “play” a conflict so close to our times that can arise high sensibilities.

As for the first aspect, the military prowess and strength of the Western armies forming the coalitions in Afghanistan, Iraq etc. always create a risk of creating a totally unbalanced and sort of whack-o-mole type of game, where one player just shot and destroy anything coming on its way.

As in the case of Vietnam is not only the military side that counts towards victory, but winning the political side of the conflict. The fact that the enemy is an irregular force, blended with the civilian population, imposes important restriction to the way the Coalition units can operate. This is an aspect already tried and effectively handled by TooFatLardies in the Vietnam-era rules Charlie Don’t Surf. I’m confident that the mechanics of Fighting Season to simulate the military/political tension will be nicely embedded in the game and will be one of the key differencing factors versus other modern-era rules in the market.