K.Európai polgárként az ember megszokja, hogy minden országban vannak, akik leszelnének egy darabot a szomszédból.
Der Sonderausschuss Landwirtschaft (SAL) hat am 16. Dezember 2015 unter dem luxemburgischen Ratsvorsitz und vorbehaltlich der förmlichen Abstimmungen des Europäischen Parlaments und des Rates einen endgültigen Kompromiss zum Vorschlag für eine Verordnung über das Schulprogramm für Milch, Obst und Gemüse gebilligt.
Die Vertreter des Rates und des Europäischen Parlaments hatten den Gesamtkompromiss in einer Trilogsitzung am 10. Dezember herbeigeführt. Zugleich hat der SAL eine Verordnung des Rates zum selben Thema gebilligt, mit der das Schulprogramm insbesondere im Hinblick auf die Festlegung der EU-Beihilfe ergänzt wird.
Die Schulprogramme wurden ursprünglich ins Leben gerufen, um den Verzehr von Obst und Gemüse sowie Milcherzeugnissen zu fördern, die aus Sicht der öffentlichen Gesundheit vorteilhaft und für die Abgabe an Schulkinder geeignet sind. Außerdem handelt es sich um wichtige Sektoren für die Landwirtschaft der EU. Im Rahmen der Programme erhalten Mitgliedstaaten EU-Beihilfe für die Abgabe dieser Produkte in Bildungseinrichtungen.
Das Schulobst- und -gemüseprogramm und das Schulmilchprogramm sind derzeit zwei eigenständige Programme. Die Kommission unterbreitete im Januar 2014 einen Vorschlag zur Zusammenlegung der Programme und zur Änderung der neuen Verordnung über die einheitliche gemeinsame Marktorganisation (einheitliche GMO) im Rahmen der reformierten Gemeinsamen Agrarpolitik (GAP) sowie zur Änderung der Verordnung zur Festsetzung bestimmter Beihilfen und Erstattungen. Dem neuen Programm wird ein jährliches Budget von insgesamt 250 Millionen € zur Verfügung stehen (Milcherzeugnisse: 100 Millionen €, Obst und Gemüse: 150 Millionen €).
Die nächsten SchritteVoraussichtlich Ende Januar wird in einer Sitzung des EP-Ausschusses für Landwirtschaft und ländliche Entwicklung über den Kompromisstext abgestimmt.
Der Präsident des SAL wird im Namen des Vorsitzes ein Schreiben an den Vorsitzenden des EP-Ausschusses übermitteln. Darin wird erklärt, dass der Rat, falls das Parlament im Plenum die Kompromisstexte in der vom SAL gebilligten Fassung nach Überarbeitung durch die Rechts- und Sprachsachverständigen annimmt, einer Einigung mit dem Europäischen Parlament über die Schulprogramme für Milch, Obst und Gemüse in erster Lesung zustimmen kann. Damit dürfte das neue Programm im Frühjahr 2016 in Kraft treten und ab August 2017 angewendet werden können.
A luxemburgi elnökség ideje alatt 2015. december 16-án az Európai Parlament és a Tanács hivatalos szavazásának függvényében a Mezőgazdasági Különbizottság jóváhagyta az iskolatej-, iskolagyümölcs- és iskolazöldség-programról szóló rendeletre irányuló javaslat végső kompromisszumos szövegét.
A Tanács és az Európai Parlament képviselői a háromoldalú egyeztetés keretében december 10-én tartott találkozó során alakították ki az átfogó kompromisszumos szöveget. Ugyanezen alkalommal a Mezőgazdasági Különbizottság jóváhagyott egy ugyanerről a témáról szóló tanácsi rendeletet is, amely kiegészíti az iskolatej-, iskolagyümölcs- és iskolazöldség-programot, nevezetesen az uniós támogatás meghatározása tekintetében.
Az iskolatej-, iskolagyümölcs- és iskolazöldség-programok eredetileg e termékek fogyasztásának előmozdítását célozták, mivel egészségügyi hatásuk kedvező és alkalmasak iskolai fogyasztásra. Ráadásul ezek az ágazatok az uniós mezőgazdaság szempontjából is jelentősek. E programok keretében a tagállamok uniós támogatást kapnak ahhoz, hogy az oktatási intézményeket ilyen termékekkel lássák el.
Az iskolagyümölcs- és iskolazöldség-program, illetve az iskolatej-program jelenleg különálló programok. A Bizottság 2014 januárjában javaslatot nyújtott be, egyrészt a két iskolaprogram összevonására, másrészt pedig az egységes közös piacszervezésről szóló új rendeletnek a közös agrárpolitika reformja keretében történő módosítására (5958/14) és az egyes támogatások és visszatérítések meghatározásáról szóló rendeletnek a módosítására (6054/14). Az új iskolaprogram teljes éves költségvetése 250 millió euró (tejtermékek: 100 millió euró; gyümölcsök és zöldségek: 150 millió euró).
A következő lépések:Az Európai Parlamentnek január végén még szavaznia kell a kompromisszumos szövegről a Parlament Mezőgazdasági és Vidékfejlesztési Bizottságának ülésén.
A Mezőgazdasági Különbizottság elnöke az elnökség nevében levelet fog küldeni az Európai Parlament Mezőgazdasági és Vidékfejlesztési Bizottsága elnökének. A szóban forgó levél értelmében abban az esetben, ha a Parlament a plenáris ülésén a Mezőgazdasági Különbizottság által jóváhagyott formában megszavazza a kompromisszumos szöveget, akkor a Tanács a jogász-nyelvészi ellenőrzést követően első olvasatban meg fog tudni állapodni az Európai Parlamenttel az iskolatej-, iskolagyümölcs- és iskolazöldség-programról. Ennek megfelelően az új program 2016 tavaszán hatályba léphetne, alkalmazása pedig 2017 augusztusától kezdődhetne meg.
No one has done better than the great British comic illustrator Heath Robinson to illustrate the intrinsically reciprocal dynamic of military engineering in general and mining and countermining in particular. This cartoon is from a collection Heath Robinson at War I found in a rummage sale years ago–no doubt there are abundant reprints.
I would guess, though, that for many KOW readers the dominant mental image of war underground is more akin to that in Sebastian Faulks’ novel Birdsong, later adapted for television. The harrowing scenes of tunnel warfare beneath the trenches of the First World War are extraordinarily vivid. In his introduction Faulks described it as ‘a hell within a hell‘. For a lot of people, it seems to me on the sound scientific basis of a dozen or so conversations (some of them drunken), that’s where tunnel warfare resides–at a safe historic distance from today, a claustrophobic nightmare of our grandfathers and great-grandfathers.
Of course this is completely wrong. Tunnel warfare has been a constant in human history for as long as there have been humans making war. In recent memory it was a major preoccupation of the American military. Consider the poem below written in praise of the massive tunnelling efforts of Vietnamese communists during the Vietnam War. I love it. (Can anyone tell me if the words ‘your entrails, Mother, are unfathomable’ rhyme in Vietnamese?) I found it in the front matter of the classic book The Tunnels of Cu Chi by Tom Mangold and John Penycate.
The Mother–The Native Land
by Duong Huong Ly
When she dug the tunnels, her hair was still brown.
Today her head is white as snow.
Under the reach of the guns she digs and digs.
At night the cries of the partridge record the past.
Twenty years, always the land is at war.
The partridge in the night cries out the love of the native land.
The mother, she digs her galleries, defenses,
Protecting each step of her children.
Immeasurable is our native land.
The enemy must drive his probes in everywhere.
Your unfathomable entrails, Mother,
Hide whole divisions under this land.
The dark tunnels make their own light.
The Yankees have captured her.
Under the vengeful blows she says not a word.
They open their eyes wide but are blind.
Cruelly beaten, the mother collapses.
Her body is no more than injuries and wounds.
Her white hair is like snow.
Night after night
The noise of picks shakes the bosom of the earth.
Columns, divisions, rise up from it.
The enemy, seized by panic, sees only
Hostile positions around him.
Immeasurable is our native land.
Your entrails, Mother, are unfathomable.
And even more recently tunnel warfare has begun to concern Israel in a major way since the 2006 capture of Corporal Gilad Shalit by Hamas commandos who attacked his army outpost near Kibbutz Kerem Shalom via an infiltration tunnel originating in Rafah. Locating similar tunnel entrances and destroying them was the primary objective of the 2014 IDF incursion into Gaza (Operation Protective Edge). I cannot recommend highly enough this report on Hamas’ tunnelling efforts in and out of Gaza by Dr Eado Hecht given as testimony to the UN. There are dozens and dozens of journalistic accounts but none so far as I’m aware approaches Hecht’s in detail and sheer good judgment.
In other words, the underground battlespace has always been an aspect of warfare but in contemporary times it’s vitality has become much more apparent. That being the case it merits more serious attention than it has gotten of late. I’ve been doing some of that lately in the form of quite a lot of library time (my forte) as well as some fieldwork in Israel and in the sewers of a major city, which I can’t talk too much about yet because technically I wasn’t supposed to be there. I thought I might share a few observations for the amusement of the handful of other claustrophile war studies types who must exist out there.
Why is tunnelling and counter-tunnelling the new hotness?
I think the reasons that the underground is an increasingly active component of the warfare are possibly pretty obvious. Firstly, consider the scene below–no doubt you’ve seen dozens like it, this one’s from some marketing bumf of the Lockheed Martin company ‘Staying ahead of the curve‘, which purports to show the post-2030 battlespace. Everybody loves these clean scenes, right out of a George Lucas film. Yay blue! Get those reds!
‘ ‘Damn’, says the half of the world that can’t afford the high tech accoutrements of the system of systems, ‘since I can’t hope to challenge “next generation air dominance” I guess I’ll just give up.’ Well, no, not actually. In the real world, clever people who are determined in their cause find other ways of bringing/avoiding the pain. In the case of Hamas attacking the IDF from infiltration tunnels is in fashion because every other means of advancing to contact with them is pointlessly suicidal. Similarly never operating without top cover–or at any rate scurrying like mad whenever you’re in the open is simply what you do in an era of ubiquitous surveillance and sensor-to-shooter gaps measured in minutes or seconds. I suspect we all know now that the post-2030 battlespace will look a lot like this 2015 one from Damascus–apparently shot from a Russian operated commercial drone with a go-pro camera. Yay gray! Get those grays!
Another reason for the proliferation of tunnels is the parallel proliferation of walls in our world today–the two basically always seem to go together, always the ying to the others yang, where you have walls you will soon have tunnels. This is less directly related to warfare than it is primarily to the efforts of governments to curtail migration and smuggling (and somewhat plausibly terrorism). See for instance this CNN report on a drug ‘super tunnel‘ running under the US-Mexico border. Pretty crappy, eh? Here, have some more Heath Robinson.
A final reason is simply the much discussed and completely self-evident urbanisation of the surfaces of the planet where most people now live. If you’re fighting in cities you are either fighting in and from tunnels or you are dead.
Anyway, you get the point. Tunnelling is a time honoured asymmetric tactic. Also if you put a wall between someone and the potential of great profit that they can’t around then they will put a lot of energy into going under.
The science of tunnelling and counter-tunnelling is surprisingly slow moving*
In this day and age of rapid innovation and scientific progress it is sometimes oddly disorientating to come across fields of endeavour where the number of really fundamental ‘game changing’ innovations are so few. Remember this famous scene from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey? It’s not in a cave but that’s what the war was about–the winning tribe got to keep the cozy cave by the water, the losers got to carry on roaming the desert being preyed on by leopards.
That’s stage 1. People lived underground in the comparative comfort of natural caves and undoubtedly had to defend them against the attentions of others who craved those same natural security and comforts.
Stage 2 differed only in that people started to dig their own caves and tunnels where they wanted them, for defence or for hiding, instead of waiting for Mother Nature to do it for them. Accounts of such activity are found in the The Bible, Judges, Chapter 6, Verse 2: ‘And the hand of Midian prevailed against Israel: and because of the Midianites the children of Israel made them the dens which are in the mountains, and caves, and strong holds.’ And actual remnants, some very extensive and well preserved, such as the cave cities in Cappadocia, Turkey built initially as defence against the Hittites in 1000 BC and inhabited up until just a few centuries ago, can be found in many places.
Stage 3 began in the late Middle-Ages with the invention of gun-powder. Then as now heroism alone was no real challenge to a fortress that was minimally competently defended; you had to go underground. The miner was the most feared of all attackers:
The skill of the miner was reflected in the number of sites which, otherwise vulnerable, were immune through water to the slow but deadly process of undermining. Considerable subtlety was employed in the underground approach. The entrance would be distant and well-concealed. Diversionary attacks would be staged to distract the defenders’ attention. As nothing could be achieved from the surface the castle holders would dig out countermines, and on several occasions would break into the besiegers’ galleries and engage them in hand-to-hand combat. There are numerous accounts of desperate battles underground, and the skill, science, and courage of the attacker was often matched by similar qualities in the counter-miner.
Philip Warner, Sieges of the Middle Ages (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1968), pp. 23-26.
(If you haven’t already read the report on Gaza tunnels by Hecht that I mentioned above then do that now and reflect on what, if anything, has changed in this basic dynamic).
Pre-gun powder the basic technique of attack was this: choose a vulnerable section of the fortress, a turret, say, then slyly dig a tunnel beneath it. Once you are beneath the foundation then expand your tunnel–very quietly–into a large cavity shored up with stout timbers so it does not collapse on you as you work. Now stuff the place with inflammables and set it alight. In the ensuing fire the supports will be consumed and the structure above will come crashing down beneath its own weight. Undoubtedly effective, the technique also required great skill in quiet mining and accurate navigation–and was intrinsically perilous. After all if the defenders detected your efforts they could dig a tunnel to intercept yours. There is a terrific example of this at St Andrews Castle, Scotland where you can still see the mine dug during a siege in 1546 and the counter-mine, which after some initial difficulty locating its target ultimately allowed the defenders to ambush and slaughter their attackers. Here’s an illustration:
Gun powder made the job of the attacker simpler and easier. Its explosive power meant that you didn’t have to dig such a large cavity, meaning also that you didn’t have to make as much noise or take so much time and were therefore less likely to be intercepted. Also if your underground navigation was off a bit there was still a good chance that you could ruin a fair chunk of the wall you were attacking. Over a few centuries the arms race of mine and counter-mine came to the point where by the early modern era a really properly defended fortress would, in theory, have a system of counter-mines already dug long before the besiegers arrived–in fact, actually at the first stage of the fortification’s construction.
A system of permanent countermines was one of the most expensive but effective systems of fortification, enabling the governor to offer a foot-by-foot three-dimensional defence of the ground from the tail of the glacis all the way back to the counterscarp… From the main gallery, a number of galleries or half galleries (four and a half feet by three) radiated underneath the glacis along the imaginary prolongations of the capital (central) lines of the bastions and ravelins. From these again there was a further proliferation in the form of major branches (rameaux, three by two and a half) and simple branches or listeners (ecoutes, two and a half by two) which sprouted off at right angles. These stuffy masonry tubes gave the counterminers the means of detecting the approach of the enemy, and offered a variety of sites where they could plant their charges of gunpowder. The branches and listeners were built of such small dimensions not for the sake of economy (in fact it was very awkward to excavate them), but because small tunnels were easy to tamp (stop up) when a charge was about to be exploded.
Christopher Duffy, Fire and Stone: The Science of Fortress Warfare, 1660-1860 (London: Greenhill Books, 1996). pp. 83-84.
(If this all sounds quaintly ancient to you then read go read Hecht’s piece, particularly para. 36 where he remarks on the extreme difficulty of locating tunnels. In the old days ‘listeners’ would use barrels of water into which they would plunge their heads to enhance the sound of distant tunnelling–think of how things sound when you submerge your ears in the bath–or basic microphones, such as a brass cymbal placed against a wall of a mine, in the hope of triangulating on their attackers. That’s still fundamentally how it’s done today.) Again, Heath Robinson’s imagination is fanciful but not entirely inaccurate.
Stage 4 came along in the late 19th century with the invention of excavating machines that could bore tunnels faster and more accurately than men could with shovels and pick axes. At first glance, you might think this a terrifically consequential development allowing the rapid excavation of lots of large tunnels. In actuality, the extra noise made by mechanical digging greatly compromises their offensive utility because it makes them more easily detectable to anyone listening. It has long been known that North Korea has dug several very large, deep, and long ‘invasion’ tunnels suitable for the use of large units into South Korean territory but there is a good deal of dispute over how many there may be.
Stage 5 is where we are now and it involves the development of really effective detection equipment. It bears emphasising how difficult this is technically. The ground underneath you is naturally a jumble of layers of differing density and full of cracks and fissures so mapping it with ground penetrating radar, say, even if useful depth could be achieved would still present big problems of analysis. Infiltration tunnels, moreover, can run deep and do not need to be large–a space sufficient for a man’s shoulders or perhaps the width of a bicycle’s handlebars is perfectly sufficient for commandos to transit even with heavy weapons–and they can be dug quietly. Finding a tunnel is a bit like finding a spaghetti noodle in a plate of spaghetti.
Siege warfare is never anyone’s first choice. It’s extremely expensive. It’s exhausting and challenging on many levels. But when every other option is locked down it works. In fact, it’s never really gone completely out of use. It’s probably that our belief in the salience of mobile warfare practically since Napoleon ran roughshod over Europe two centuries ago has just blinded us a bit to it’s new fashionableness. Anyway, it’s back.
So, what next?
Well, this post is already quite long so I’ll keep this bit short. Let’s recap. For a variety of reasons the ground beneath us is now a vital part of the battlespace. Historically, this is nothing new–perhaps what we’re seeing is a reversion to the norm. That being the case it is worth spending some time reacquainting ourselves with the strategic and tactical wisdom of the past, much of which now lies forgotten on dusty shelves. But we should also be exploring more and be more attentive to the infrastructure of the places we live. On which point I must admit that I have something of a man crush on this fellow, urban historian and photographer Steve Duncan. I don’t think I could get away this as a research methodology–pretty sure my university would disown me. Have a watch:
But, really, if we’re going to make some progress in this field we need to be scrambling around these places more and learning from the people who work and live in these environments a lot more. Also, goddamn that looks fun.