Holding ground

Operations clear ground. Bases hold it. The distinction sounds like doctrine and is actually a budget line, and it is where a great deal of border and rural security spending goes wrong.

The episodic pattern is familiar everywhere. A force surges into an area, achieves something measurable, and withdraws to barracks. The armed group returns within weeks, because nothing was left behind that could stop it. The operation is recorded as a success and the ground is exactly as it was.

What a base changes, and what it costs

Permanent presence converts a series of raids into a standing claim on territory. The population can plan around it. Informants can reach it without being seen to make a journey. Patrols begin inside the area of interest rather than driving into it along a road the opponent can watch.

All of that is real. So is the bill, and the bill is not concrete.

A base is a commitment of people. The manning arithmetic is the number that should decide whether to build one, and it is almost always calculated after the site has been chosen.

The arithmetic

Minimum daily manning for a single patrol base, before leave, sickness, courses or casualties:

• Thirty on security. Four sangars, an entrance, an exit and an operations room with camera watch, rotated through three teams so that nobody stands to for twenty-four hours. Doubling the sangars during darkness comes out of the same thirty.
• Twenty on operations and patrolling. The element that leaves the wire. This is the only part of the establishment that generates effect. Everything else exists to put these twenty into the area of interest.
• Ten resting, who are also the reaction force. A base without a rested quick reaction force cannot reinforce its own patrols, which is the first thing an opponent will test.

Sixty people, every day, indefinitely. Apply a realistic availability factor for leave, training and sickness and the establishment behind one patrol base is closer to ninety. Multiply by the number of bases in the plan before agreeing to the network, not after.

The failure mode follows directly. An under-manned base cannot patrol, because every available soldier is standing on its wall. It stops projecting force and starts absorbing it. It becomes a fixed, known, lightly held position in hostile country, which is a reasonable definition of a target.

Three kinds of base, three different jobs

A single large base dominates the ground it sits on and very little else. The network is what dominates a region, and the network has three components that are frequently collapsed into one in a proposal.

• The forward operating base. Large, fortified, and the only node with real depth: fuel, ammunition, workshops, medical and the command element. Sited for road access first and tactical elegance second.
• The patrol base. Small, austere, and the element that actually holds ground. Sited to cover a crossing, a route or a community rather than to look coherent on a map.
• The logistics base. The unglamorous one, and the first to be cut. It exists so that forward bases are resupplied on a schedule rather than on an operation. If every convoy needs an escort, the network has been sited beyond what it can sustain, and that is a design fault rather than a threat.

Seven jobs, and only two of them are defensive

A base justified solely as a defended position is a bunker. The functions that earn the manning bill are presence, patrolling, intelligence, command and control, sustainment, rest, and defence, roughly in that order of value.

Intelligence deserves a line of its own. Human intelligence is a function of familiarity and time. It comes from consistent contact with the same people over months, which is precisely what a permanent base provides and what a surge operation cannot. It cannot be surged, and any plan that assumes otherwise is assuming the hardest part is the easy part.

Four ways it goes wrong, none of them tactical

Every one of these is visible in an assessment before a base is built, and invisible in a progress report afterwards.

• Sited for the map, not the ground. Positions chosen for symmetry or political visibility rather than for the crossing, route or community they are meant to influence.
• Built before the manning was found. Construction is fundable and visible. Establishment is neither. The result is a completed base held by half the people it needs.
• Resupply beyond sustainable reach. Where every convoy is an operation, tempo is set by logistics rather than by the enemy.
• No route from soldier to commander. Training delivered to one cohort with no pipeline behind it. Two years later the trained cadre has moved, retired or been promoted away, and the capability leaves with them.

What we would establish first

Six questions, before a site is chosen. None requires special access, and any one of them can stop a programme that was going to fail.

• What establishment does the network need, and does it exist? Against actual strength, not authorised strength.
• Who carries the recurrent cost in year three, from which budget line?
• What is the resupply distance, and does it require an escort?
• What is the training pipeline from entrant to base commander, and does it replace people faster than attrition removes them?
• Under what authority do the troops operate, and against whom? A base that cannot lawfully process what it finds is a checkpoint with beds.
• What happens to the network when the external support ends?

Our interest

We assess ground holding capability, design base networks and build the training pipelines that keep them manned. An article arguing that the binding constraint is people rather than construction is an argument for the kind of work we sell. Read it accordingly.

The honest caveat is that sixty is a planning figure drawn from how these bases are actually manned, not a standard. A different threat, a different perimeter or a different set of tasks moves it. What does not move is that somebody should calculate it before the first load of aggregate arrives.

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