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Major-General Chip Chapman. Notes From a Small Military - I Commanded and Fought with 2 Para at the Battle of Goose Green. I was Head of Counter Terrorism for the M.O.D. This is my True Story
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
CONTENTS
PREFACE
LIONS LED BY DONKEYS
JOINING ‘THE REG’: P COMPANY AND PARACHUTING
MEN AT WAR – THE FALKLANDS 1982
AMPLIFIED FEAR 1
AMPLIFIED FEAR 2
AMPLIFIED FEAR 3
THE ‘TOMS’
FOLLOWING THE FLAG: WIVES, GIRLFRIENDS AND HANGERS-ON
NICKNAMES
TRAINING AND EDUCATION
DISCIPLINE
FOREIGN TRAVEL AND ALLIES. THE PROLOGUE
RUSSIA
JAPAN
BANGLADESH
BELIZE
BURKINA FASO
SAUDI ARABIA
THE USA
IRAN AND OMAN
AFGHANISTAN
CANADA
THE MINISTRY OF DEFENCE
GENERALSHIP, COMMAND AND LEADERSHIP
LA VIE MILITAIRE
CAREER CHRONOLOGY
GLOSSARY
Copyright
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To Geinor, who has followed the flag with unstinting good humour, fortitude, devotion and love.
Those looking for a unified theory of the military within this book will not find it. There are contradictions. This is deliberate, because it is a story of people and how they react. And of how I reacted at various times in my career. I had a fourfold intention in writing this book: to make you laugh, to make you cry, to inform you and, occasionally, to make you think.
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Burden reduction has been an abiding theme of DCC [Dismounted Close Combat. I preferred the more descriptive former title: FIST (Future Infantry Soldier Technology). But we always made a ham fist of bringing any equipment in which actually reduced the burden] systems since 2008 and will remain so. To date the maximum weight carried by the individual infantryman has been driven down by 9kg to 66kg. [That’s 145 pounds in imperial weight2a] through battery and power management improvements, adoption of lighter radios, polymer magazines, lighter equipment, water scavenging, and ‘other measures’. [So why is it still more weight than the first day of the Somme?] The aim is to reduce the maximum to 60kg by the end of Epoch 1 of the DCC capability management plan (which runs from 2010 – 15) to 40kg by the end of Epoch 2 (2016 – 20) and to 30kg by the end of Epoch 3 (2021 – 35).
This is a classic example of how defence ‘mystifies and misleads’ (a phrase first used about the Confederate general, Stonewall Jackson – acknowledged as one of the few geniuses of the American Civil War). The reader will be quite content with the familiarity of a number of years bracketed together and quite baffled (as am I) by what on earth the meaning of an epoch is that so sets it apart from the years.
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