Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Lack of a radio left Redcaps at the mercy of murderous Iraqi mob

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 10 Feb 2004 02:14:18 -0500

Lack of a radio left Redcaps at the mercy of murderous Iraqi mob

Six British soldiers who died in a police station siege lacked
the means to send a simple SOS to nearby Paras. Jason
Burke reports
Sunday January 25, 2004
The Observer

An army inquiry into the deaths of six British military policemen in Iraq last
year has found that the men were unable to send a single radio message
requesting assistance.

The revelation will put the embattled Ministry of Defence under new pressure.
Soldiers in the Gulf last year were using 25-year-old 'Clansman' radios because
of delays in the introduction of new communication technology. Clansman radios
are known as bulky, insecure and prone to failing because of their poor
batteries.

The six Redcaps were killed when a mob of Iraqis armed with Kalashnikovs and
rocket-propelled grenades stormed a police station where they were training
local officers in the central Iraqi town of Majar Kabir in June.  Hundreds of
men from the elite Parachute Regiment's 1st Battalion were stationed near by but
were unaware of the Redcaps' plight. During fighting elsewhere in the town a
group from the Parachute Regiment battled their way to within 100 yards of the
trapped military policemen before being forced to withdraw.

The toll was the highest single loss for a British unit from enemy fire since
the Falklands war of 1982.

Military communications experts told The Observer this weekend that the new
Bowman radio equipment, due to be introduced by the end of this year, would have
enabled the detachment from the Royal Military Police (RMP) to contact the
Paras. Production and contracting problems have meant that the system will be in
service eight years late. 'Bowman can patch individual radios through to the
nearest other unit operating a similar radio, as well as allowing soldiers to
talk to their commanders,' one military expert said. 'If the Redcaps and the
Paras had been equipped with the full range of the new Bowman equipment, then
they would have been able to speak to each other at the very least. The Redcaps
would not have been left on their own.'

Geoff Hoon, the Secretary of State for Defence, came under intense criticism
last week when he admitted the army had lost track of 200,000 sets of body
armour. The wife of a tank commander, killed in Iraq when shot through the
chest, revealed that her husband was ordered to hand over the bullet-proof
ceramic plates in his flak jacket to other soldiers days before being killed.
Lieutenant-Colonel James Cowan, commanding officer of the Black Watch, made an
almost unprecedented public statement that soldiers did not have enough nuclear,
biological and chemical protection suits to go round, had no equipment to
decontaminate vehicles and had unusable detection kit.

The inquiry into events at Majar Kabir has revealed that the Redcaps, who were
led by an experienced 41-year-old sergeant, were equipped with both VHF and HF
transmitters that should have been adequate, in normal circumstances, to contact
their commanders at the Parachute Regiment base in the town of Amara, about 10
miles away. Yet when investigators studied records they found that no messages
had been recorded at the base. Senior officers, aware of the Clansman's
limitations, sent up at least one Gazelle helicopter with orders to act as a
'radio link' for the RMPs. Last week army investigators told relatives of the
dead men that there were 'bad signal problems out there'.

At times during the war, including the fighting for the southern port of Um
Qasr, British soldiers were reduced to using local mobile telephones working off
a Kuwaiti network to talk to each other. On at least one occasion tank
commanders communicated with hand signals.

It appears likely that, even if they had been able to get a signal, the Redcaps
would have been unable to use their radios because they were mounted in their
three Land Rovers left outside the building. Two of the vehicles were burnt by
the mob and the third was driven away. Iraqi policemen who found themselves cut
off in the police station with the six British soldiers told The Observer on the
day after the killings that the leader of the detachment, Sergeant Simon
Hamilton-Jewell, had asked if they had a radio.

However, the Bowman system is easily portable and experts said it was likely
that the RMPs would have taken it with them into the police station if they had
had it. The Clansman, by contrast, is usually mounted on a vehicle and would
have been impossible to carry. Even the 'man-portable' version of the Clansman
is heavy and bulky.

'Basically if something is going to slow you down, then you try not to bother
with it,' said one former British special forces soldier. 'If it's light and it
works, then you are going to use it a lot. It's barely a conscious decision.
It's just the way you have to operate. You are continually making security
calculations when you are in a hostile environment, trading speed against
safety.'

The soldier, who served in the first Gulf war and in Kosovo, said it was wrong
to blame the MoD 'for everything'. 'If you carried all the kit you could
possibly need - plus body armour, which weights 13kg - you would never get out
of a vehicle,' he said. 'You can never legislate for everything. That's war.'
However, the families of the dead Redcaps are angry at what they see as MoD
shortcomings. 'It's like Dad's Army,' said Tony Hamilton-Jewell, whose brother
was killed at Majar Kabir. 'They have to wake up to the fact that we need a
twenty-first century army, not one still run like something from the eighteenth
century.'

The Bowman system, which will cost around £2 billion, can also be used to locate
a user by global positioning satellite. One of the major problems in Majar Kabir
was that no one was fully aware of where the Redcaps were.  The Bowman system
will allow commanders to keep track of all their men all the time.

MoD sources admitted last week that there had been 'shortfalls' but said they
were due to 'asset tracking' problems in the theatre of military operations, not
a lack of equipment. 'There was no lack of money or will. But lessons have been
learnt,' one senior MoD official said.

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/iraq/story/0,12956,1130873,00.html
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