Fuzzybear sent me a link to a post over at AfghanistanShrugged called What Price Victory For An Afghan ETT?. (Embedded Tactical Trainer)
The post opens with this:
In military parlance, being "far from the flagpole" Vampire 06 has a lot of flexibility in how he approaches things. Too far away for it to be worth it for HQ's Staff Fobbits to stick their fingers in his business, he's pretty much got binary metrics to work against. Success, and Epic Fail.
So, Vampire 06 and his team take a minimalist, incremental approach. Given his resources, that strikes me as a wise way of doing business. And, he makes the assumption that given his mission - focusing on the people, rather than the enemy, is his best allocation of resources. There's wisdom in that, especially if there are other people who's main job is to focus on the enemy. And we're talking in the period of time when everybody in Afghanistan slows down on the shooting-at-each-other minuet.
However insurgency warfare is theater in the round and often their attacks are conducted just to provoke a response which detracts from the greater purpose.
Given that on Friday, President Obama will be outlining his approach to the war in Afghanistan, I thought today a good time to do this post. What Vampire 06 and his team are doing is where this war will be lost or won, with, in the end, the Afghan people doing the real suffering or gaining the most.
We've conducted this war as an economy of force operation since it began, and it's been sliding into the loss column as a result, just as Iraq did when our leadership failed to grasp that shifting to an economy of force operation there, as well as a complete misunderstanding that the nature of the war changed dramatically with the fall of Baghdad. We treated it as the end of the war, the enemy simply shifted from trying to match strength to strength (which few militaries on the planet can do against the Armed Forces of the United States) to pitting their strength against our weakness.
Once we went through the pain of learning the lesson (and far too few senior leaders suffered in the learning, which I believe is one reason it took so long to make the shift... more scalps, please) we re-taught ourselves lessons we'd learned in Vietnam and incorporated others learned by others.
So, it appears we're going to make a more full-spectrum effort here, with the application of the instruments of soft power that reside in the federal government (and, one would hope, those of our allies). And, one hopes, that the people sent from State, Commerce, USAID, Justice, etc, will be a little less self-centered than that State Department twit who dissed the Brits, (or, I would add, Greg Gutfeld and his stunningly ignorant disrespect of Canadian Forces - who's been pulling more than their share in Afstan while we dealt with Iraq - but at least Gutfeld apologized) and will treat the Afghans (in whose home we are guests, however muscularly we wangled the invitation) as partners who wish to learn from us, and take our ideas and adapt them to their culture, and not just be "The Ugly American."
When I used to teach military history, one of the ways I tried to engage the students in the topic (all were Army officers of various nations, you'd think it wouldn't be hard... but you can see a difference in papers written during the NCAA tournament time vice slack periods in sports, for example) was the premise that wars are won at the small unit level. Yes, it's the bottom up efforts that provide the base for all else. The problem we're facing in Afghanistan is - can we structure the Afghan civil society, economy and government to move sustainably into the vacuum created when we leave? That's the $700,000,000 question. It is a great post and well done. Unfortunately, it will prove the point I made when teaching military history. Wars are won at the small unit level. But they can be lost at any level.
Vampire 06 and his ETT are doing their bit - will the higher echelons do theirs - successfully?
Any of you Afghanistan vets got an opinion on the subject?
Update: Noah Schachtman is having an exchange with former Rumsfeld aides on the issue of Afghanistan - at the bottom of the post at Danger Room is a defense of Rumsfeld against my (and Noah's) assertion of an "economy of force" attitude about Afghanistan. To poach a quote from Noah's article:
I would say that this is couched in blame-shifting (to CENTCOM) and comparative terms ("noticeably fatter in every category"). None of which mitigates against the assertion that it was an economy of force operation, under-resourced for the extent of it's mission. Because the answer is, if in context the mission wasn't under-resourced, then the deterioration of conditions means the mission was badly defined.
Which still leaves the onus for the current situation sitting squarely on Secretary Rumsfeld's desk.
The post opens with this:
There’s been a lot in the news lately about what “victory” in Afghanistan looks like. I really don’t know, nor do I want to venture an opinion on that one. People at much higher pay grades than mine can figure that one out. All I can speak for is the little piece of Afghanistan that I share with my ANA and the local populace of Bermel.
I’ll tell you this; it’s little things. Try to accomplish much more you’ll begin a slow circle of the drain leading to frustration and self induced psychosis. What I’m about to tell you about is 5 kilometers. That’s 3.1 miles, not very far. But it might as well be a light year here.
In military parlance, being "far from the flagpole" Vampire 06 has a lot of flexibility in how he approaches things. Too far away for it to be worth it for HQ's Staff Fobbits to stick their fingers in his business, he's pretty much got binary metrics to work against. Success, and Epic Fail.
So, Vampire 06 and his team take a minimalist, incremental approach. Given his resources, that strikes me as a wise way of doing business. And, he makes the assumption that given his mission - focusing on the people, rather than the enemy, is his best allocation of resources. There's wisdom in that, especially if there are other people who's main job is to focus on the enemy. And we're talking in the period of time when everybody in Afghanistan slows down on the shooting-at-each-other minuet.
Our strategy consisted of two tasks in support of our overarching goal of population separation. [Click the link to the post to get a better understanding of what that means - the Armorer] One, demonstrate that the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan could assist them materially and in conjunction with this conduct an information operations (IO) campaign. Two, we try to gather intelligence on the local area and personalities in preparation for the upcoming fighting season. All of this was focused on the line of friction. [Again, your incentive to read V06s post] We defined some criteria that would cause us to deviate from the line. I won’t elaborate on those but we stuck to them and didn’t lose our focus.
We also decided on criteria that would cause us to go into kinetic operations. Basically; this was self defense only; we would not chase the enemy. We couldn’t allow the enemy to distract us from our task. That may sound strange. However insurgency warfare is theater in the round and often their attacks are conducted just to provoke a response which detracts from the greater purpose.
However insurgency warfare is theater in the round and often their attacks are conducted just to provoke a response which detracts from the greater purpose.
Given that on Friday, President Obama will be outlining his approach to the war in Afghanistan, I thought today a good time to do this post. What Vampire 06 and his team are doing is where this war will be lost or won, with, in the end, the Afghan people doing the real suffering or gaining the most.
We've conducted this war as an economy of force operation since it began, and it's been sliding into the loss column as a result, just as Iraq did when our leadership failed to grasp that shifting to an economy of force operation there, as well as a complete misunderstanding that the nature of the war changed dramatically with the fall of Baghdad. We treated it as the end of the war, the enemy simply shifted from trying to match strength to strength (which few militaries on the planet can do against the Armed Forces of the United States) to pitting their strength against our weakness.
Once we went through the pain of learning the lesson (and far too few senior leaders suffered in the learning, which I believe is one reason it took so long to make the shift... more scalps, please) we re-taught ourselves lessons we'd learned in Vietnam and incorporated others learned by others.
So, it appears we're going to make a more full-spectrum effort here, with the application of the instruments of soft power that reside in the federal government (and, one would hope, those of our allies). And, one hopes, that the people sent from State, Commerce, USAID, Justice, etc, will be a little less self-centered than that State Department twit who dissed the Brits, (or, I would add, Greg Gutfeld and his stunningly ignorant disrespect of Canadian Forces - who's been pulling more than their share in Afstan while we dealt with Iraq - but at least Gutfeld apologized) and will treat the Afghans (in whose home we are guests, however muscularly we wangled the invitation) as partners who wish to learn from us, and take our ideas and adapt them to their culture, and not just be "The Ugly American."
When I used to teach military history, one of the ways I tried to engage the students in the topic (all were Army officers of various nations, you'd think it wouldn't be hard... but you can see a difference in papers written during the NCAA tournament time vice slack periods in sports, for example) was the premise that wars are won at the small unit level. Yes, it's the bottom up efforts that provide the base for all else. The problem we're facing in Afghanistan is - can we structure the Afghan civil society, economy and government to move sustainably into the vacuum created when we leave? That's the $700,000,000 question. It is a great post and well done. Unfortunately, it will prove the point I made when teaching military history. Wars are won at the small unit level. But they can be lost at any level.
Vampire 06 and his ETT are doing their bit - will the higher echelons do theirs - successfully?
Any of you Afghanistan vets got an opinion on the subject?
Update: Noah Schachtman is having an exchange with former Rumsfeld aides on the issue of Afghanistan - at the bottom of the post at Danger Room is a defense of Rumsfeld against my (and Noah's) assertion of an "economy of force" attitude about Afghanistan. To poach a quote from Noah's article:
Oh... PS: the story that we denuded Afghanistan to prepare for Iraq is horseshit, to use the scientific term. CENTCOM fenced A'stan's nut before the war started. Indeed, during the early years of Iraq, US troop strength in A'stan was increased. On my last trip there in the summer of 2004, the command was noticeably fatter in every category than it was in 2003. If you don't believe aging ex-bureaucrats, ask [former NATO-in-Afghanistan commander] Gen. [Dan] McNeill or [former CENTCOM chief] Gen. [John] Abizaid.
I would say that this is couched in blame-shifting (to CENTCOM) and comparative terms ("noticeably fatter in every category"). None of which mitigates against the assertion that it was an economy of force operation, under-resourced for the extent of it's mission. Because the answer is, if in context the mission wasn't under-resourced, then the deterioration of conditions means the mission was badly defined.
Which still leaves the onus for the current situation sitting squarely on Secretary Rumsfeld's desk.
Well, What do expect from an old Vet? New A'stan or Iraqi war vets, help us to understand.
V/R Grumpy
I think the Afghan thing was less about troops and far more about focus, interest and effort shifting to Iraq.
And clearly, towards the end of the Bush era, a decision was made (or, alternatively, decisions were *not* made, which, of course, *is* a decision in itself) to leave Afghanistan to the Obama administration.
They're putting out their view on it today. It then becomes their war de jure as well as de facto, which it already is.
Of course, it's always been our war, but that's the nature of the game.
But they're dealing with the situation that grew from the seeds planted by Rumsfeld, and accepted by Bush. That's simply truth. History may vindicate Rumsfeld and Bush on how they handled things. Only time will tell, and the best assessments will probably be made after I'm long gone - just as we continually reassess WWII in light of new information coming out of the classified archives.
Actually, much of the problem in Afghan today, and tracing back to when it went fallow after the initial push, is directly due to so many of our "allies" being worse than worthless when it comes to warfighting.
They promised lots and provided nearly nothing, and what they did provide came with so many strings attached that it ends up as a net neg.
Not all our allies are so bent, but too many of them are.
There is also the brain dead idiocy of the ISAF command structure, 6 month rotating commands, each national contengient willing to fight demanding its own AO, doing things its own way and with very little effort to actually coordinate anything between themselves in any way at all.
Incompetence is the rule of the day when ever such structures are put in place. It's a mandatory part of the process. And is also mandatory for any time we need to call upon the europers for anything.
You can blame the usual in laying it all on Rums and/or Bush, but you do know damn well that there has not been anything different in any operation that ever involved european forces for a long time. And the more time goes on, the worse the parasitism has gotten. Now, there's not a single european nation that can actually field a force honestly competent for its own defense against an aggressor.
That such a compromise with the multi-culti idiot left in our own country in its irrational need to be seen as nothing more than a minor player in anything of importance is, quite honestly, just another sad indictment to how far we have sunk as a nation by a full generation of appeasing the knee jerk anti-American elements born among us.
Now, take yourself to any forum or blog dealing with Afghan by foreigners who have forces in Afghanistan and you'll see all the gasping squeals about the area being "Americanized" and all the misery, horror and doom that that entails.