But where are the Gurkhas?
There ought to be Gurkhas
Quick send in the Gurkhas
If you’ve seen The Man Who Would Be King, you know that only a Gurkha could survive fighting in Afghanistan. Or is this true?
Three questions:
With the Brits so firmly on our side in this fight, will the Gurkhas be a major factor in flushing out bin Laden from his caves?
Is this kind of fight tailor-made for Gurkhas to handle? Would the Gurkhas do a good job battling in Afghanistan? I saw in another thread that someone classified both the Afghans and the Gurkhas as “warrior mountain peoples”, making them collectively some of the toughest SOBs on earth.
More of a GD question, but can/should/would the US set up a Gurkha program of its own to handle future Afghanistans? They could handle assassinations, gaining information through torture, all the things that would sully an American soldier’s hands. Maybe we could issue warrior immigrant visas for foreigners to help out in our dirty work.
Please forget the justification I gave for question #3. The main reason we’d want to have our own Gurkha program would be to have fighters who we wouldn’t be afraid of putting in harms way. We would probably require them to uphold our own standards of conduct, not least because they’ll be immigrating here.
Personally, I find the idea of having proxy warriors to be morally reprehensible, mush like hiring an assasin. If we must fight, we must risk our own blood. Having Ghurkas as “consultants” might be another matter.
The problem isn’t that our soldiers wouldn’t have the stomach for it, it’s that they wouldn’t be allowed to do what arguably has to be done in wartime. They don’t have to be of a particular ethnic group–we could set up Scots Ghurkas, or Italian Ghurkas, something like the French Foreign Legion. Save the hysterical racist accusations for the Pit, please.
No more so then the regular British Army. Uh, or whatever forces the Brits decide to use.
**
Gurkhas are good soldiers but they’re not supermen.
**
There is no Gurkhka program for the United States. So far as I know Great Britian has eliminated segregated units and the Gurkah Warriors serve in the exact same units as their British pals. If there are Gurkahs involved they will be fighting for the Brits and in that capacity I suppose they might offer our troops some advice.
Never said they were. What I was asking was, since (A) Gurkhas are already acknowledged as some of the fiercest fighters in the world, and (B) this is their neck of the woods, or mountains as it were, then wouldn’t they make a disproportionate contribution to any ground campaign in which they played a major role?
Or maybe all soldiers of all backgrounds are equally effective in all terrains, and I’m just being “racist” again.
*The ancestral home of the ruling house of Nepal, Gurkha was seized in 1559 by Drabya Shah, the younger son of the king of Lamjung, who established his own kingdom.
His descendant, Prithvi Narayan Shah, created an ethnically diverse military force that came to be known as the Gurkhas (or Ghurkas) with which he conquered the Malla kingdom, and consolidated the numerous petty principalities into the state of Nepal.
These troops were, from the mid 1800’s, heavily recruited by Great Britain and, since 1947, have been a significant minority within the army of India.
Upon returning home, many of the Gurkhas became teachers and community leaders, bringing western ideas and technology to the mountain regions*.
From Encyclopaedia Britannica.
There is strangely no mention of Scots or Italians in this article.
I had always thought that the Ghurka, although a fierce and able warrior, was a man of honour and probity who would be chary of doing anything which would sully the hands of an American soldier.
Bearing this in mind, I have been in contact with the Ghurkas and informed them that if they require any ‘dirty work’ performed on their behalf on the unfamiliar terrain of the US mainland, to get in touch with Doghouse Reilly, who would be happy to use his local knowledge in the furtherance of their cause.
The Gurkhas dont have segregated regiments within the British Army any more. One of the lads I shared a house with at university was being sponsored through university by the Army. Ethnically anglo-saxon, he was in the Queen’s Own Gurkha Transport Regiment.
Gurkhas are not Special Forces; they are highly trained, thoroughly professional, well-disciplined light infantry, and, although strictly speaking mercenaries, any thoughts of them as some kind of “Wild Geese,” hired assassins, etc are completely erroneous. In terms of individual toughness and drive, they are probably comparable to Special Force units; but their training and role are that of infantry.
The Brigade of Gurkhas, now dwindled to a 3500-strong Gurkha Rifle Regiment (plus the aforementioned Corps support troops), is subject to the same Queen’s Regulations and military code of discipline as any British Army regiment.
That said, they are a remarkably tough group of men, with a very fierce pride in their military history (and justifiably so), and a high sense of honour. As for “integration,” while the transport companies and other Corps support may well be mixed, I really doubt whether the rifle companies are of mixed composition; not from any latent racism (you’ll find men of West and East Indian backgrounds in most British regiments), but from the simple fact of a language barrier. Not many squaddies from Newcastle or Glasgow speak Gurkhali (although it may sound like it to an outsider!)
Anyone who has had the good fortune to see a Gurkha pipe band at a tattoo will remember their perfection of turn-out and faultless drill, all at a cracking 140 paces per minute.
The Gurkhas are fallen on hard times recently, with the cutbacks to British Forces reducing them from Brigade size down to the current levels; this justified by the MOD since Hong Kong was turned over to the PRC: the Brigade was stationed in Hong Kong for many years. The cutbacks to the Gurkhas are causing real hardships in the dirt-poor Kingdom of Nepal; I forget the exact figure, but something like 25% of that nation’s income is from British Army pensions to former Gurkhas (or their next-of-kin). The only other option for foreign military service for Gurkhas is in the Indian Army, which split the Gurkha regiments with Britain as a result of Independence.
I understand that companies of the Gurkha Rifles act as reinforcement companies for British Infantry regiments.
That’s why I disavowed this argument in my second post. I realized I was confounding the ideas of Gurkha-style soldiers with soldier-of-fortune type mercenaries.
Everybody says the Gurkhas, are tough, but just how tough? Give some examples from history.
I wonder if there’s any truth to the anecdote I heard from the Jeffster: When aviation was new, a British commander told his Gurkhas that he needed volunteers for a mission that involved jumping out of an airplane. He got some volunteers.
The thing is, those chaps were unaware that there was such a thing as parachutes.