British military chiefs were drafting plans for action against Israel

[Dcdrac]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1818971,00.html

Discuss.

[hodgy]

This should be in the History... thread surely?

[richardm]

Yeah, an article about 50 year old plans. But a right bunch of charmers commenting on it:


Ancient Pistol
Hey, let's blow the dust off those plans & get them updated.

EnglishroG
What a pity those plans were never implimented.

KarlHungus
Bring back those military chiefs.

[Skeptic]

I don't think this means anything. Army chief draw up plans for all kinds of eventualities all the time. How much do you want to bet the USA "drafted plans" against Easter Island at the same time? I'm willing to bet there's a Lt. Col. in the Pentagon whose job is to handle the "Invasion Plan if Easter Island is taken over by nazi japanese communist Islamist government" file.

Yeah, an article about 50 year old plans. But a right bunch of charmers commenting on it:

Ancient Pistol
Hey, let's blow the dust off those plans & get them updated.

EnglishroG
What a pity those plans were never implimented.

KarlHungus
Bring back those military chiefs.

Well, it is The Guardian readers we're speaking about here. They're all "anti war" and "anti imperialist" and "anti involvement in the middle east" unless it's the British Empire getting involved in an imperialist middle east war against the jews.

Fighting the jews always takes precedent over being "anti-war" for these folks, of course.
__________________

[Cylinder]

I'm willing to bet there's a Lt. Col. in the Pentagon whose job is to handle the "Invasion Plan if Easter Island is taken over by nazi japanese communist Islamist government" file.

You're not too far off the mark, but I'd place my bet on the officer in question being a butter-bar. If you're the LTC in charge of the Easter Island desk, you probably should be for looking at civilian employers PDQ.

War planning in the US consists of three very basic tiers: studies, OPPLANs and OPORDs.

Studies are pretty much what the word implies - an officer or group of officers studying a potential problem or potential strategic objective. Studies are most often the purvey of the War Colleges. Many are simple academic exercises but some are serious, peer-reviewed endeavors. The Pentagon may also commission studies to cover strategic gaps or changes in geo-political realities.

One of the most famous examples can be found in Cornelius Ryan's volume A Bridge Too Far that documents Montgomery's 1944 failed offensive to capture Arnhem in eastern Holland. In researching his novel, Ryan interviewed the Dutch general who commanded their war college before the Nazi occupation. Criticizing Monty's use of the high road into Nijmegen to move armor, the general commented that the same problem was used to train officers before the war. His conclusion - "they would not pass [the course]."

Whenever you read or hear a reporter citing "war plans by the Pentagon," you can be fairly confident that you can substitute the words "a study commissioned by the Pentagon" or even worse, "a study by some guy at a desk somewhere."

At some point in their life, studies can be sent up the chain, reviewed, refined and merged to become OPPLANS - operational plans. OPPLANS are reviewed by the Pentagon and the JCS [ETA: I cannot be certain that OPPLANs are vetted by the JCS, but I think that is the case] but can still contain some offbeat political assumptions. The thing to remember about OPPLANs is that they can never be executed - they are not quite mature. A good example of OPPLANs are the color-coded plans (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Color-coded_War_Plans) maintained by the War Department on the eve of WWII. For instance:

War Plan White dealt with a domestic uprising in the US, and later evolved to Operation Garden Plot, the general US military plan for civil disturbances and peaceful protests. Parts of War Plan White were used to deal with the Bonus Expeditionary Force in 1932.

War Plan Gray dealt with invading a Caribbean republic.

War Plan Purple dealt with invading a Central American republic, or possibly with Russia (There may have been two different Purples).

War Plan Green involved invading Mexico to secure oil resources and occupy Mexico City to establish a pro-American government.

War Plan Gold was a plan for war with France and French Caribbean possessions.

The tin-foil crowd often use the tactic of citing an OPPLAN as evidence of a political motive, which is false. OPPLANs have yet to be vetted for all things political.

At some point, the Pentagon, the Joint Chiefs and the President get together and review, refine and recalibrate OPPLANs to fit existing order-of-battle and geopolitical needs to create OPORDs - operational orders. OPORDs are the real deal - all that it takes to implement them is an executive order.

OPORDs are tasked. That is, individual objectives are delegated to real units who in turn plan for their individual missions. This was one of my peace-time task in the USAF - mission planning for our tasking under the various OPORDs relevant to our AOR.

Probably the most familiar example of this is a ICBM or SLBM launch officer opening a safe, authenticating an order and entering coordinates from a mission profile. The package retrieved from the safe was the platform's tasking under the relevant OPORD.

[Cylinder]

Here (http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/a-list/2006w24/msg00016.htm) is what looks to be a good news report concerning an OPPLAN.

While Oplan 5077 has been around since the Reagan presidency, it was elevated from a conceptual plan to an operational plan with assigned forces and detailed annexes in 2001, shortly after the [George W.] Bush administration took office, according to Arkin.

"The Pacific command developed a new `strategic concept' for the Taiwan contingency in December 2002, and an updated plan was produced in July 2003. Last year, based upon new 2004 guidance from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and the Joint Chiefs of Staff ... a final Taiwan defense plan was published," Arkin wrote.

[Cylinder]

One more quick dreail and I'll stuff a sock in it...

CTs often cite Operation NORTHWOODS (http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20010430/northwoods.pdf) as a "war plan" or "the Pentagon wanted to." The language of the memo betrays its real staus as a study in Page 5:

THE PROBLEM

1. As requested* by the Chief of Operations, Cuba Project, the Joint Chiefs of Staff are to indicate brief but precise decription of pretextx which they consider would provide justification for US military intervention in Cuba.

...and again in Page 4:

The Chief of Operations, Cuba Project, has requested that he be furnished the views of the Joints Chief of Staff on this matter by 13 March 1962.

If you're looking at the markup, NOFORN means that the document is not cleared for release to foriegn nationals.

...and again in Page 1:

2. The Joint Chiefs of Staff recommend rthat the proposed memorandum be forwarded as a preliminary submission suitable for planning purposes. It is assumed that there will be similar submissions from other agencies and that these inputs will be used as a basis for developing a time-phased plan. Individual projects can then be considered on a case-by-case basis

The last paragraph highlights the planning summary I posted above quite well. NORTHWOODS was nixed by JFK through the Pentagon and the Chairman was demoted to NATO CINC for his limited participation in what was only a vague study. That's a good example of the political vetting described above.

[Soapy Sam]

I seem to recall that we burned quite a bit of Washington once, too.

Brits do stuff like that. It's what makes us loved everywhere. (Read P.J.O'Rourke on the Northern Ireland Question some time.)

Seriously, to understand the attitudes of the British establishment to Israel - (which many older Brits think of as "Palestine" to this day) you must dig deeply into British / Arab relations after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the pre WWI rivalries between Germany, France, Russia and Britain- (The "Great Game") , and the British (or to be honest English) Public School System with its focus on educating a leadership elite selected from a narrow class who inherited some quaint worldviews along with their titles and estates.

Many Brits of my parents' generation remember the Irgun as terrorists, not as freedom fighters. My father considered Menachem Begin should have been hanged. For all I know he had a point. I feel much the same way about Gerry Adams. Thirty years from now, no one will remember him either, which is how it goes- blood cools. People forgive, forget, a new generation gets on with life, develops new problems.
I don't recall any US immigration officer asking me if I planned to torch the White House while in America.