Aftermath of the London Olympics

Army warns Olympic Games recovery will take two years

Military faces big task to get back to normal, says planning chief, after deploying 18,000 troops to London 2012 duties

the Guardian,

13 August, 2012

The armed forces will take two years to recover from their involvement in the Olympic Games because so many personnel have been deployed at short notice and taken away from normal duties, the military's chief planner for the Games has said.

In an interview with the Guardian, Wing Commander Peter Daulby also warned that critics who wanted a smaller military put the country at risk of not being able to cope with these kind of civil emergencies, or a "national strategic shock".

Daulby, who was put in charge of the military's Olympic planning 18 months ago, said the need to send thousands of extra troops to the Games at the last minute after the G4S debacle showed "the country needs a military for more than war fighting".

Describing the Olympics as the largest peacetime operation ever performed by the armed forces, he said: "It just shows you the dangers of pulling the military down. I am sure that there are some people who think that if we are a smaller military power we will be less likely to get involved in international operations.

"If we shrink the military, do we really understand what we are losing? Look at the speed with which we pushed up the throttle. It proves the military offers the country a huge amount of resilience."

Daulby, 45, was one of several senior officers who spoke to the Guardian about the military's contribution to the Olympics, which increased more than threefold from May last year.

Then, only 5,000 personnel were expected to be deployed, but that increased to 18,000 when the Olympic organisers Locog admitted they had significantly underestimated the number of security guards needed at the venues – and G4S conceded it had over-estimated its ability to recruit and train the extra staff.

"We were originally planning to provide niche capabilities," said Daulby. "When the requirement for venue security was doubled, that was a bit of a game changer. We had to generate 18,000 people. That does not mean that there are 18,000 spare people. It means that the government has prioritised [the Olympics].

"It will take two years to recover from this, to get back to normal, to get everything back into kilter. You can't expect them to go back to normal routine very easily."

He said the UK's commitment to Afghanistan had not been affected by the Olympics, but the military had exceeded by 6,000 the maximum number of people he thought the Ministry of Defence could supply.

"Anything above 18,000 and you start to shut down elements of defence," he said.

"We put a bucket of men up and that was taken. We put another bucket of men up and that was taken. We have proved we can do it … most people think they have done something really special here. I think there is a great sense that the UK has nailed this."

The rush to train and get everyone ready meant "we were building the plane at the same time as flying the plane", he said.

"We did not think that it would be healthy for the Olympic Games to be too militarised. Our fears were not well founded. It has been an enhancing experience."

Brigadier Richard Smith said the scale and difficulty of the military's role in London 2012 was comparable to operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"In terms of threat it is not comparable, but in terms of scale it is more than comparable. The complexity of the basing and the training to get them to task … it's been a massive operation in a short space of time.

"In Iraq and in Helmand, we could build up over time and establish ourselves. For this we had a short space of time and we had to get it right first time."

Smith said the armed forces had realised the need to reconnect with the British people after years of operations abroad, and admitted there was anxiety how the public would react to so many people in uniform at a sporting event.

With the UK withdrawing from Afghanistan, and British bases in Germany being closed, too, the public will need to get used to seeing more of the military, he said. "It is a really important point. We recognised we have an opportunity to set conditions for us when we are predominantly UK-based armed forces. We want to easily connect with the people from whom we are drawn. This has given us the opportunity to show us as professional and approachable human beings."

Smith said the military had tried to be flexible when presented with concerns, including those from some competitors. "In the equestrian community, they were worried that the helicopters from HMS Ocean would scare the competitors in the dressage at Greenwich Park. We adjusted the flight paths so they did not. We didn't want to blunder in as a blunt tool."

Asked if the military could mount a similar operation in five years' time – when defence cuts will have stripped 20,000 posts from the army – he said: "I am not going to answer that. Give us a challenge and we will rise to it."

Among the most difficult tasks in the days before the Games was finding enough portable toilets and showers to equip Tobacco Dock, east London, where 2,500 personnel were stationed for the Games. The military works on the basis of one toilet for 10 people, and one shower for every 20.

"It has been a mammoth task," said Major Austin Lillywhite. "We had to go to Ireland for the portable toilets. We couldn't find them anywhere else at such short notice."

The MoD hired 192 coaches to ferry troops to and from the Olympic venues, and spent £300,000 on equipment such as TVs for entertainment at the temporary bases.

It also signed a laundry contract so that military uniform for everyone on duty had been cleaned and ironed.

"We want the men and women to look a good standard. If they all turned their irons on at the same time in the morning, the power would go down."

None of these contracts are coming out of the military budget. The Treasury and G4S will be paying for the military's extra contributions.

G4S announced on Sunday that it was giving £2.5m to the armed forces as a goodwill gesture. The donation will go towards welfare amenities, including sports equipment, and to sports associations which have backed serving athletes, including rowing gold medallists Heather Stanning and Pete Reed.

Provisions supplied to feed the Olympics troops

Eggs: 205,800

Vanilla ice cream: 21,056 litres

Potatoes: 38,999 kilograms

Sausages: 7,756 kilograms

Apples: 33,376

Beef: 7,252 kilograms

Chicken: 5,240 kilograms

Post Games UK: full-blown police state

London that is widely known as a perfect example of surveillance society with its watchful CCTVs, is now a perfect example of a police state after the massive Olympics militarization, a fact even organizers implicitly acknowledge.

Press TV,

13 August, 2012

Organizers decided earlier this year to dress the official mascot for the 2012 Olympics in London, where the security and surveillance cordon are nicknamed the Ring of Steel, in a Metropolitan police outfit.

The mascots, “Wenlock” and “Mandeville”, feature a huge single eye that is actually a camera lens that organizers said can “record everything.”

The dolls effectively create an explicit symbol of the pervasive surveillance state and suggest an unwelcome addition to British social life that is now subject to an even more intrusive surveillance system thanks to the biggest and most expensive British security operation in decades for the Olympics.

The irony has been taken up by critics of the Games.

“Water cannon and steel cordon sold separately. Baton rounds may be unsuitable for small children. A more perfect visual metaphor for 2012, I cannot imagine,” Games Monitor mocked.

One can only appreciate what the Olympic mascots have been ironically symbolizing when a few figures on the military deployment during the Olympics are taken into consideration.

The British government deployed more than three times as many regular troops as former US president George W. Bush administration did in 2002 for the Winter Olympics at Salt Lake City, which began only six months after the 9/11 incidents and four months after the US invaded Afghanistan.

A total 41,000 troops, police officers, private security staff, etc were deployed in London.

There also comes a long list of equipment on the ground and in the air: a Navy aircraft carrier HMS Bulwark and the force’s largest warship HMS Ocean will watch the city, Typhoon fighter jets, Apache Helicopters, eagle-eyed surveillance drones and E-3 Sentinel spy planes will swarm the skies, radars and surface-to-air missiles will scan the skies while an 18km, 5,000-volt electrified security barrier partitions off the Olympic zone.

The police state was further intensified by a de facto suspension of civil liberties.

Public protests were banned -- and remain so -- during the Games in “exclusion zones” near key locations and protesters face police with enhanced powers including the right to use force to enter private properties, seize political posters and prevent the display of any material that challenges the image of London as a “clean city”, which advertising sponsors including McDonald’s and Coca-Cola kept promoting.

Security measures also included new police checkpoints, number-plate and facial recognition CCTV systems, biometric ID cards and disease tracking systems.

And is that all set to be removed now that the Games have ended?

The answer is no as there are speculations that the government is using the opportunity to impose limitations on the British social life that would be otherwise impossible thanks to civil rights campaigners.

The idea for the continuation of the draconian measures would be that Britain faces threats from terrorists lurked inside its own cities and increasingly bigger surveillance would be needed to predict and contain such threats.

Here, victims would be the ethnic minorities and in particular Muslims.

The police did announce in May 2011 that 290 CCTV cameras formerly installed in the Muslim areas of Birmingham will be back online for the Games and there is no end visible to the extra surveillance.

What is more is that Olympic hosts have been unwilling to shelve the security measures taken up for the Games as the example of Greece’s high-tech surveillance cameras showed back in 2004.

After all, dissent is not desirable especially in the surveillance society of Britain and police began preparing London for the Games by predicting crimes early before the Games.

Back in July, officers reportedly arrested several graffiti artists in pre-emptive raids, which serves as a good example of the state intrusion into legal private activities of individuals in the police state the Olympics have helped intensify.

After media reports of 30 arrests, police claimed they arrested only four people for illegal wall paintings.

However, one of the detainees Darren Cullen turned out to be a known graffiti businessmen whose company Graffiti Kings has carried out graffiti projects for big names including Microsoft, Olympic sponsor Adidas and even for Team GB.

In a separate incident in Cardiff in July, police faced human rights campaigners’ call not to turn the city into a “police state” after a WalesOnline journalist was stopped and searched outside their headquarters.

The concerned journalist said he was “shaken up” by the police behavior and their violation of their guidelines.

“Working in the city centre, it feels like this place is turning into a police state,” he added.

That was echoed by anti-surveillance campaigners Privacy International.

“Olympics shouldn’t be an excuse to turn Britain into a police state,” it said.

Less tourists visit UK during Olympics 
Tourist traffic fell all over Britain, not just London, during the Games.

Press TV,

13 August, 2012

UKinbound said a survey of more than 250 tour operators, hoteliers and visitor attractions showed that tourist traffic fell all over Britain, not just London, during the games.

The survey said 88 percent of British tourism-oriented businesses reported some losses during the games compared to the same period last year.

London normally hosts about 1.5 million tourists on average in August, but UKinbound and other trade groups say a significant number have chosen to steer clear of the city, and even the rest of Britain because they thought it would be too busy.

Tourism officials say that international Olympics visitors to London, including athletes, officials and tourists, totaled about 300,000.

Domestic spectators from Britain made up the majority of people visiting games venues.

Restaurants and shops have complained that these games visitors did not spend as much money on food and shopping as typical summer tourists.

“The people who came to the games really didn’t do very much sightseeing, didn’t do very much shopping, didn’t do very much eating out,” said Miles Quest, a spokesman for the British Hospitality Association.

“London’s hotels have hit about 80 percent occupancy, not more than typical August rates”, Quest added.