Articles

Israel – Don’t give your enemies more ammunition!

by Richard Kemp and Rafael Bardaji

Article published by ynetnews.com, 16 February 2022

After a recent visit to Israel, we’re deeply concerned by the unprecedented degree of tension and sheer animosity permeating the political arena.

As friends of Israel rather than Israeli citizens, we do not seek to intervene on any partisan basis, but to sound the alarm about the very real potential for Israel’s enemies to exploit the current rhetoric and do harm to the country as a whole.

Political polarization and confrontation are nothing new to us since they are trends now rooted in our own countries and across the Western world, from the US to Italy. But our experience fighting successive attempts to delegitimize the state of Israel shows us that the country simply cannot afford the level of domestic political tensions that other democracies can go through. Israel has proved itself time and again to be the most resilient country in the world when it comes to physical warfare. But it is also subject to the most insidious political warfare — continuously under attack by international institutions such as the UN, the EU and the International Criminal Court (ICC) as well as a range of foreign governments, human rights bodies, academia and much of the world’s media.

It is in this realm that the current discourse and strife will be most damaging. For Israel to be strong, to prosper, to be a force for good in its region and the world, and to fend off incessant political warfare campaigns, it needs to be united in the basic questions, despite all the disagreements that may reasonably emerge around specific proposals and policies. That national unity is being eroded by the tone and conduct of the debate on reforms to the judiciary presented by the coalition government.

We have heard Israeli voices telling us that what is at stake is the survival of democracy in the country – if democracy is not dead already. We have been told that it is better not to make even a single concession than to try to reach an agreement. Such extremist attitudes are not likely to lead to improvements in the quality of reform, and are likely instead to embolden Israel’s many international enemies. Continue reading →

Articles

Vladimir Putin’s failures are fooling the West

Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 16 February 2023. © Richard Kemp

Another day, and yet more worrying news from the frontline: Ukrainian troops are firing as many as 6,000 artillery shells a day to try and beat back Russia’s new offensive. It is an expenditure rate the West is struggling to feed; so high that Defence Secretary Ben Wallace has said that Ukraine’s forces could run out of ammunition unless they use it more sparingly.

His comments remind us of an essential truth: that brute force and, critically, the ability to sustain and replenish it over an extended period, is historically what wins wars in the end.

This rule counters the orthodox interpretation of this war so far. For many, Ukraine’s early success against apparently overwhelming Russian force suggested that high-tech weaponry – and nimbleness in strategy and deployment – were enough to defeat larger forces. It also vindicated the British military consensus that we should invest in cyber, computers, unmanned vehicles, and ‘ranger’ units to train, advise and mentor allies rather than in combat infantrymen, heavy armour and other conventional weapons – sometimes disparagingly referred to as ‘legacy’ capabilities.

But that is not what the war has shown us at all. Indeed, it would be disastrous if Vladimir Putin’s failures fooled the West into thinking that hard military power is a thing of the past. His forces have struggled not because they have relied on the massive use of tanks, armoured vehicles, and troops against a nimbler opponent, but because those capabilities have not been deployed effectively.

And on the Ukrainian side, yes, cyber and drones have played a role, with electronic intelligence and airborne surveillance also pivotal. But the true game-changers have been the heavy, punchier weapons provided by the US, such as HIMARS, which have been particularly devastating against Russian logistics bases, starving front line forces of vital combat supplies. Likewise, tanks and armoured infantry fighting vehicles have shown their persistent combat utility, which is why they are at the top of Zelensky’s list for military aid. Continue reading →

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Vladimir Putin is about to make shock gains

Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 7 February 2023. © Richard Kemp

With Russia back on the offensive after significant Ukrainian combat successes around Kharkiv and Kherson in the second half of 2022, the past few weeks have been the bloodiest so far of an already bloody war, with both sides taking extraordinarily heavy casualties. Expect it to get worse.

Ukrainian defence minister Oleksii Reznikov says Russia has mobilised ‘much more’ than 300,000 troops, perhaps up to half a million, and these are pouring into Ukraine in preparation for what is expected to be a major offensive in the coming days and weeks. Although Kyiv has also been building up its forces and supplying them with modern equipment donated by the West, Putin has a much greater advantage in troop numbers than he did when he invaded a year ago. Despite repeated optimistic reports of Russia running low on artillery shells – a battle winner in this conflict – Putin’s war stocks are vast, and his factories have been working around the clock to churn out even more.

Under pressure towards the end of last year, Russia withdrew its forces to positions of strength, trading ground for time as it massed resources for a planned hammer blow while grinding down the Ukrainians in the east, softening them up for the assault to come. Much of this has been done by infantry attack, throwing away ‘expendable’ troops in time-honoured Russian style. The Kremlin has at the same time been conserving artillery shells (though expending thousands each day around Bakhmut alone) and the armoured vehicles that are so essential for the fast-moving blitzkrieg Putin is planning.

Until now, the narrative in the West has been that Ukraine is comfortably winning this war, albeit while facing heavy bombardments on its major cities. The reality is more complex. The latest estimates suggest that each side may have taken upwards of 120,000 casualties already – hardly indicative of a triumph for Ukraine. And there may be worse to come: the truth is that recent promises of new combat equipment for Ukraine – especially longer range missiles, tanks Continue reading →

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Poland’s bravery has humiliated Germany

Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 20 January 2023. © Richard Kemp

Kyiv had hoped for a clear green light from Germany at the Ukraine Defence Contact Group meeting at Ramstein air base on Friday to provide them with Leopard 2 battle tanks. Instead, the new German defence minister, Boris Pistorius, equivocated all day, at one stage saying it could take a month to reach a decision.

That sort of procrastination might be acceptable in peace time, but this is a war in which every day counts. We’re almost one year into the most deadly conflict in Europe since 1945 and Germany has been an unreliable partner since the start. First, they only wanted to send 5000 helmets while other countries quickly dispatched lethal weapons; now they have been dithering over tanks, dividing NATO, putting all of the West in a difficult position and – worst of all – jeopardising Ukraine’s war effort.

Poland leads a group of Western countries that want to send in some of the Leopards they bought from Germany. Technically they need permission from Berlin to do so. Yet such is the strength of feeling that the Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said on Thursday that this country may send the German-made tanks to Kyiv without this approval. ‘Consent is a secondary issue here,’ he remarked.

The contrast between Warsaw and Berlin could not be greater. Poland has done exactly what Germany should have done and promised to do. It’s becoming a European military superpower: with a far smaller GDP it already has more tanks and howitzers than Germany and is on course to have a much larger army, with a target of 300,000 troops by 2035, compared with Germany’s current 170,000 which shows little realistic signs of increasing any time soon. In fact, the German chancellor is already backtracking on promises he made in the wake of Putin’s invasion, admitting last month that his intention to meet NATO’s minimum 2% of GDP defence spend starting this year is unlikely to be achieved until 2025 at the earliest.

The Poles have also embarrassed Germany with their fearlessness. On paper, due to its history in the Soviet Union and geographical Continue reading →

Articles

Jew-Hate at American Universities

Article published by the Gatestone Institute, 10 January 2023. © Richard Kemp

As Jews were hounded out of German universities in the 1930s, where would you have stood? Many of us would like to think we would have found the moral and if necessary physical courage to stand up for our fellow students rather than see them persecuted, bullied, abused and thrown out. Well, now we can actually put our courage to the test as before our eyes we see a re-run of an almost identical pattern of antisemitism — this time at American colleges, with a similar picture at universities in Britain and elsewhere in the West.

A new study by the antisemitism watchdog Amcha Initiative documents a pervasive, relentless assault on Jewish identity at US universities.

It has been going on for years, but this report paints a stark picture of an increasing, intensifying and carefully coordinated campaign of attacks on Jewish identity at over 60% of the colleges and universities that are popular with Jews, including 2,000 incidents intended to harm Jewish students since 2015.

Most of this dark work is being done under the spurious and despicable cover of delegitimising Israel, spreading blatant lies about the Jewish state and conspiring to prevent those lies from being exposed or countered by seeking to ban anyone who dares speak or even show support for the truth. With bloodthirsty cries of ‘intifada, intifada’ (meaning the mass murder of Jews), these activists demand an end to Zionism, which, for the avoidance of doubt, means just one thing: an end to the democratic State of Israel. This itself is antisemitism in any book and is spelt out as such in the US State Department definition of antisemitism, a definition that Jew-hating campus activists do all in their power to resist, distort and discredit.

But sometimes even the threadbare ‘anti-Israel’ mask of campus activists slips, as they expose the naked racism behind their campaign with slogans like ‘Jews control the government and the banks’, ‘Jews out of CUNY’ [City University of New York] and ‘Jews are racist sons of bitches’.

Even without such transparent venom, there is no disguising their anti-Jew agenda. Attacks against any student or professor who supports Israel or Zionism are made in the full knowledge that this means the overwhelming majority of Jews — the Amcha report quotes Pew polling data showing that more than 80% of American Jews view Israel as integral to their Jewish identity. In short, however these campus activists might pretend otherwise, they are attacking Jews.

And they do not hold back. A 2021 poll from the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law shows college students with a strong sense of Jewish identity and connection to Israel have learnt Continue reading →

Articles

Prince Harry on Afghanistan

Article published in The Daily Express, 7 January 2023. © Richard Kemp

Prince Harry has made much of his security concerns but publicly announcing he personally killed 25 Taliban fighters in Afghanistan is like shooting himself in the foot. It will re-kindle jihadist animosity against him and incite some who want to take revenge.

His accusation that the British Army trains its soldiers to see their enemies as ‘chess pieces’ to be swept off the board, in other words dehumanising them, will also feed into jihadist propaganda, potentially encouraging wider attacks within the UK.

It will also be seized on by lawyers who want to prosecute British soldiers on allegations of unlawful killing and ill-treatment of enemy prisoners because it paints a picture of a military that indoctrinates its troops to act against the Geneva conventions that require enemy dead, wounded or captured to be treated with respect.

Harry’s description of how British soldiers are conditioned for combat is the opposite of the truth. They are trained to give enemy dead a decent burial, to handle prisoners humanely and to treat the wounded as they would treat their own. There are plenty of examples of British wounded finding themselves in the same field hospital ward as injured Afghan captives.

Of course when their blood is up, some soldiers act differently as is the nature of war, but that is not because of their training as Harry falsely suggests.

He also makes a play of his own humanity, writing that he made it his mission ‘never go to bed with any doubt whether I had done the right thing … whether I had shot at Taliban and only Taliban, without civilians in the vicinity. I wanted to return to Great Britain with all my limbs, but more than that I wanted to get home with my conscience intact.’ Continue reading →

Articles

Harry has betrayed our soldiers with his Taliban bragging

Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 6 January 2023. © Richard Kemp

I was stunned to learn that the Duke of Sussex talks of enemy combatants as being mere ‘chess pieces’ to be taken off the board, less than human. This is not how it is in the Armed Forces. Those of us who have served in the military are taught, even in the heat of battle, that we must treat our enemy with respect and in accordance with the laws of armed conflict. We consider the Geneva Conventions with deference, determined to abide by them in every circumstance.

Yes, of course fighters that are trying to kill you should be killed first, but even then their bodies have to be handled respectfully and given a decent burial. Soldiers are taught to give proper medical treatment to enemy wounded in the field; indeed, there are several examples of wounded British soldiers finding themselves in field hospitals alongside injured Taliban insurgents.

Equally, soldiers are trained to treat prisoners of war according to humanitarian rules. I remember British soldiers in Iraq voluntarily giving their own rations and water to starving Iraqi soldiers on the battlefield. They saw them as fellow human beings in dire straits, not as chess pieces to be callously knocked off the table.

Prince Harry’s absurd claim that it is not possible to kill someone ‘if you see them as a person’ has been disproved in every battle the British Army has fought. Our troops have long held a reputation for being both ferocious and humane. His suggestion that soldiers must be trained to ‘other’ their enemies, as he puts it, before being able to do their duty in war, not only traduces their agency and morality but will also give ammunition to lawyers who want to drag them through the courts on accusations of unlawful killing.

Let’s not forget that we are about to see the beginning of another inquiry into the latest round of allegations from Afghanistan.

While on the one hand Prince Harry makes clear his personal determination to avoid killing innocent civilians, on the other he takes aim at military restrictions intended to achieve exactly that. He says he was denied permission to fire at the enemy after a terrorist attack. That might well have been frustrating, but it would only have happened if his commanders believed uninvolved civilians were in the area and might have been killed.

Harry emphasises how he wanted to return home with his ‘conscience intact’, knowing he had not killed innocent people. That doesn’t distinguish him from the majority; it’s true of every soldier I ever served alongside. But sometimes things go wrong, which is often followed by a lifetime of guilt. I was speaking only the other day to a member of my regiment who accidentally killed a child in Northern Ireland over 40 years ago and will never forgive himself. Continue reading →

Articles

This offensive is Putin’s final gamble. If it fails, he is doomed

Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 30 December 2022. © Richard Kemp

Russia reportedly seeks to launch a major offensive in Ukraine in the coming months. Putin’s legacy, his power and even his life may depend on a decisive victory to justify the immense damage he has inflicted on his own country, not to mention on Ukraine, since the war began. He has caused an estimated 100,000 Russian military casualties so far: a devastating figure that grows by the day.

Given Russia’s size – and its history of fighting mass manpower conflicts, treating its troops as expendable – some seem to think that they can keep this up almost indefinitely. In reality, though, these battle casualties could be Putin’s Achilles’ heel.

His initial plan was to quickly vanquish Ukraine and cow the West by the act of invasion alone. The small size of his force – just 190,000 men – was clearly not intended for a protracted conflict against stiff opposition. As the war unfolded, his generals focused on killing as many Ukrainians as possible, mainly with massed artillery barrages and ballistic missiles, while being ready to give up territory to preserve their thinly-spread army; in effect, buying time to mobilise the number of troops they know they need to eventually overwhelm the country.

That mobilisation, however, has been fraught with difficulties, not least hundreds of thousands of Russian men fleeing the country to avoid fighting, accompanied by large anti-Kremlin protests. Estimates suggest around 100,000 of newly mobilised troops have been deployed so far – barely enough to replace the casualties sustained. Leaving aside the lack of training and equipment shortfalls of these new recruits, Moscow at present simply does not have the numbers to decisively overcome resistance from the depleted Ukrainian army.

We shall see how many of the remaining 200,000 that are claimed actually appear on the battlefield. Whatever happens, Moscow is evidently concerned about its ability to build up enough forces, even Continue reading →

Articles

Vladimir Putin’s war has humiliated the EU

Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 22 December 2022. © Richard Kemp

Naturally, President Zelensky’s appearance before Congress, as a war-time leader appealing for American support, has been likened to Winston Churchill’s address on almost exactly the same date in 1941. Yet by then the US had declared war on Germany and victory was arguably assured. Today in Ukraine, victory is far from assured. Putin could still win.

A more appropriate comparison would be with Churchill’s conference with Franklin D Roosevelt on board the USS Augusta and HMS Prince of Wales in August 1941. As with Ukraine, the US had been supplying arms to the UK. Churchill’s purpose, like Zelensky’s, was to consolidate US support for a long war ahead.

Though even this is not like-for-like. In 1941, with all of Europe occupied, Churchill had nowhere else to turn. That is, of course, not the situation today – Europe is free and prosperous. So why did Zelensky not make his address to the European Parliament in Brussels instead? Indeed, how extraordinary that after decades of peace on the Continent, with European nations claiming to have learnt the lessons of the Second World War, a fellow European nation battling tyranny still has to rely on the United States above its neighbours.

Despite a comparable GDP to the US, the EU has provided markedly less aid to Ukraine. Washington’s assistance alone amounts to 62 per cent of all provided. In military equipment, the comparison is even more stark: EU countries are supplying less than half that of the US.

It doesn’t help that EU countries are themselves reliant on America. Having hollowed out their armed forces since the end of the Cold War and developed a righteous arrogance on defence matters, their military cupboards have long been bare. Some of the wealthiest nations on the Continent have inadequate supplies to maintain their own sovereignty, let alone that of Ukraine or the West.

But this is no excuse. The weakness of European will since February has been disgraceful. Remember when, as Russian troops massed on Ukraine’s borders, several Western European countries were so terrified of antagonising Putin that they balked at the idea of providing even small, defensive-only equipment? For a time, Germany refused all arms exports, limiting military aid to 5,000 combat helmets and doing its best to hold up weapons supplies from Eastern European Nato members.

Advocates of EU governments would say that, in recent months, they have toughened their stance (even if only to save face, having witnessed the strength of Anglo-American leadership). But are they doing enough now? France, with the second largest economy in the EU, is still only the 11th largest donor in the world. Germany, meanwhile, has repeatedly failed to follow through on the commitments it eventually made. Its ‘tank swap’, a scheme to replace Soviet-era tanks with German models, still remains largely unfulfilled. Continue reading →

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Don’t even think about cutting support for Ukraine, Rishi

Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 20 December 2022. © Richard Kemp

Margaret Thatcher understood the need to keep bean-counters away from military strategy, which is why she banned her chancellor from attending the war cabinet during the Falklands conflict. Now there is concern that Rishi Sunak is doing the opposite, defaulting to the investment banker’s mentality by reportedly ordering a data-driven review of British military assistance to Ukraine.

There are suspicions that his purpose is to save money despite government protestations that the review seeks to ensure we are providing the best possible assistance. The truth is that this cannot be done by Whitehall cost-benefit analysis, but only by our military commanders deciding what is needed and how it can best be supplied through close liaison with Ukrainian generals and international partners. A review at this time, whatever its findings, can only hamper that vital work as the officers directly involved have their efforts diverted into feeding into civil service analysts.

This is war by spreadsheet. What can the calculation be? Square miles of territory taken back, tanks knocked out or Russians in body bags per pound spent? Conducting reviews while this conflict rages constrains what should be the only goal: to give Zelensky the men, machines and munitions he needs to overcome the enemy.

The Prime Minister told an audience in Estonia this week: ‘Putin is realising that he cannot win on the battlefield.’ That may be good rhetoric but it is not reality. If such thinking lies behind his urge to review British support, his generals need to disabuse him by explaining that Ukraine can still lose this war and will do so if Western support is in any way diminished. In fact, significantly greater resources from Britain and the West are needed now, for Russia is intensifying its war on Ukrainian cities and Zelensky faces a major offensive from Putin’s newly-mobilised forces.

Britain has played the leading international role in defending Ukraine against Russia from the very beginning of the invasion. Any sign of Continue reading →