Keyboard Warriors

So, as I'm trying to catch up with the stuff I didn't comment on last week, while I was engaged in my Halloween week movie marathon posts, I thought that it was high time we looked back at that incident a couple of weeks ago when a group of stowaways 'hijacked' an oil tanker of off the Isle of Wight.  I know, in the light of day it sounds like a joke but, the captain of an oil tanker which had sailed from Nigeria, bound for Fawley, became sufficiently worried about the aggressive conduct of some stowaways discovered on his ship, that he called the British authorities for assistance.  Eventually, military special forces soldiers (presumably from the SBS, which is based in nearby Poole, boarded the vessel and detained the stowaways.  What interested me about te story was the way in which it unfolded on social media.  As soon as it looked as if special forces were going to deployed, all the keyboard warriors went into overdrive, relishing the prospect of a bunch of stowaways (probably refugees and asylum seekers) being beaten up - and possibly killed - by a group of highly trained elite soldiers.  I've encountered these sort of military groupies before - show them a uniform and they go weak at the knees.  They are fond of basically ejaculating all over their tablets whenever the military go into action, but, very rarely, have they ever served themselves.  The imagined macho exploits of their hard man heroes are, one has to assume, a proxy for their own frustrated inability to take action over anything.  At the first sign of real conflict, these guys will most likely turn the other cheek, before turning away altogether and running for cover.

Now, I hate to disillusion them about their heroes, but, in a previous job, a long time ago, I used to have contact with real life serving SAS and SBS guys.  Obviously, I can't go into details, but although my contacts were limited and the guys I actually dealt with face-to-face were armourers and the like - and therefore might be atypical for these units - I was always struck by just how non-macho these guys were.  Instead, they were intelligent professionals who knew their fields of expertise and, funnily enough, always came over as pretty nice guys.  Certainly not the type of macho morons you'd expect if your only impression of them had come from TV series like Ultimate Force or films like Who Dares Wins.  They for sure didn't come over as blood thirsty killers spoiling for a fight.  Quite the opposite.  Indeed, Ultimate Force, in particular, dds the SAS a real disservice, portraying them as a bunch of ill disciplined borderline psychopaths, (not to mention, in Ross Kemp's case, overweight and out of shape).  But, unfortunately, this is probably where those keyboard warriors get most of their impressions of special forces.  The reality is that SAS and SBS members are selected as much for intelligence as they are physical ability, (significantly, the SAS had its origins in the Artists Rifles, a regiment that recruited from the arts).  After all, the last thing you want from soldiers who have to operate undercover, behind enemy lines on covert missions, are a bunch of morons going around shooting everyone in sight.  The ability to act on their own initiative is a far more valuable attribute under these circumstances.  

One last observation about this story - it seems that it was easy for social media to see that the SBS were about to be deployed through the movements of military helicopters.  Apparently their flight plans (which seem to include the identity of the specific aircraft) are all logged on a public database. While I know that this is peacetime and it is undoubtedly a CAA requirement that aircraft movements through UK airspace, particularly over land, are all registered, it is hardly reassuring from a security perspective that the movements of military aircraft can so easily be traced, in real time.  Because, you know, I'm sure that the Russians and all those other beastly foreigners the government likes to warn us about, can see this data too...