Yesterday news broke of what appears to be a cold blooded shooting by a US soldier of an Afghan truck driver. The story was first reported by politico and the short segment featured below was apparently part of a 3 minute video titled “Happy Few Ordnance Symphony,” that was briefly posted to Youtube this week.
Speculation in the press is this incident occurred recently in Nangarhar province which is the only part of Afghanistan where US forces are operating outside the wire. I don’t think that’s the case as it is very rare to have snow in Nangarhar province and the portions that do see some snow would by in the Spin Ghar mountains where there are not any good hard ball roads.
If I were to hazard a guess I would say that this film was made on the ring road between Kabul and Ghazni….probably in Wardak province. That would mean the tape was shot before 2014.
I have written dozens of times about the unnecessary deaths US and NATO forces inflicted on civilians due to their tendency to shoot up cars that come too close to their convoys. This force protection measure was an attempt to stop SVBIED’s; the vehicle variant of the suicide bomber phenomenon. This post on the Raven 23 travesty contains several links to my previous posts on this topic.
The press always points to Raven 23 (the Nissor Square shootings) as the behavior of trigger happy contractors while studiously ignoring the hundreds if not thousands of examples of military convoys doing the exact same thing. Having had two vehicles shot out from under me, one by the British Army and one by the American Army (both incidents happened in Kabul) I am very touchy on this topic.
But what happened in all the examples I cite above and what you see in the video pasted above are two different things. The video depicts a gratuitous assault (and possibly a murder) on the part of an American serviceman. The problem is that there are anomalies in the video which are difficult to account for.
The weapon used in this shooting is an M4 Benelli tactical shotgun. That is a semiautomatic shotgun and when fired it should automatically eject the spent shell. In the video we see some gas escaping the barrel as it is apparently fired into the cab of an Afghan truck. What we don’t see is any recoil or the automatic extraction of the spent shotgun shell. That’s a little strange and I’m not able to explain why that happened.
It could be a non lethal round was fired at the Afghan driver which may account for the light recoil but I thought even non lethal rounds generated enough energy to cycle the action. I could be wrong but if that is the case then we are not witnessing a cold blooded murder but a really stupid assault on an innocent civilian. I hope that proves the be the case. If that kid fired buck shot from the M4 he killed that driver. You can see where the round impacted on the drivers window; there is no question buck shot would have resulted in a fatal wound.
My problem with the force protection measures used by ISAF military units in Afghanistan was that they not only killed civilians but they were also poor tactics. The gunners in those incidents could not have identified a threat, oriented on it and put enough fire on those vehicles to be effective. It was an OODA loop issue. I also think the Blackwater guys involved in the Nissor Square shootings reacted with excessive force. My problem there was they were prosecuted for doing exactly what the military did in similar circumstances.
When you’re operating in Afghanistan or Iraq where the battlefield is full of non combatants sometimes you have to suck up incoming, hunker down and drive like hell to get off the X. It;’s not fun and I’ve done it often enough to know what a raw deal it is. But it is what it is; I would not shoot at random civilians anymore than I would shoot at ISAF soldiers who fired on me. It’s not a rational response or legal option.
One of the reasons I’m an advocate of the PMC model is that contractors, despite the common perception of the media, are much less likely to drop the hammer on people than the military. Contractors don’t have the protection afforded military personnel by status of forces agreements. They are on their own and have to answer to host nation authorities when they use deadly force.
What we see in the video above has nothing to do with force protection. It is a straight up atrocity, an unlawful use of force and the soldiers involved should face the full force of the law for their criminal action. It is also a huge setback to America in our effort to get Afghanistan under control so we can leave. The prize now, as it has been all along, is the Afghan people. And the Afghan people are not going to forget this video anytime soon.
The new Secretary of the Navy caused a minor kerfuffle last week by carrying a sidearm while touring Afghanistan. Richard Spencer is a former Marine aviator, finance executive, and vice chairman of the nonprofit Marine Corps Heritage Foundation. He is a welcomed relief to the naval services after the hyper political reign of Ray Maybus. While on a tour of Marine units in Afghanistan he was photographed wearing a sidearm which lead to all sorts of speculation in the press and in the PMC community.
Secretary of the Navy Richard V. Spencer speaks with Marines and sailors assigned to Task Force Southwest at Camp Shorab, Afghanistan, December 23, 2017. Photo provided by US Marine Corps
The photo above caused CNN correspondent Barbara Starr to tweet “Can someone explain why the head of our Navy is wearing a sidearm?” That is a question that is much deeper than the ensuing debate answered. Allow me to explain.
Most people would assume that secretary Spencer would have adequate training to carry a pistol due to his prior service in the Marine Corps. This is not true. Every Marine officer is required to pass an annual pistol qualification but qualification with a pistol is not the same as training. Unless a Marine officer is assigned to a special billet, or is a master boondoggler, he will not receive the training needed to employ a pistol effectively from the holster under duress.
My industry friends like Tom Williams, who has a ton of PSD team leader experience, are unanimous in their opinion that a principal (in this case the SecNav) should never be armed. He hasn’t trained with or know the drills of his detail and thus a liability even if he has expert combat pistol skills – which he doesn’t because a quick read of his resume reveals he is not master boondoggle material.
Thomas is in this case is wrong (which I say in jest by the way as he is a close friend). Before I explain the genius behind the SecNav carrying heat around the Helmand let’s review the why behind personal security details because they are now in vogue. Everybody who is anybody wants one which is strange because they rarely work.
Let me ask you – name an instance where a PSD detail stopped an assassination. I can think of only one and goggling the question is worthless as the results focus on JFK conspiracy theories, other presidential shootings and fake news from the legacy media about how evil guns are.
The one example I can think of happened in Afghanistan and involved an attempt, in 2002, on President Karzai. At the time his security detail consisted of SEAL’s and although they killed the gunman who was setting up to shoot Karzai they also killed one of Karzai’s favorite aids who had already jumped on the shooter. It could be argued that the aid stopped the assassination attempt and the subsequent shooting by the SEAL’s was overkill but, in the context of this post, that’s splitting hairs.
SEAL Team members moments after smoke checking the assassin (and everybody near him) during the attempt on Karzai in 2002
One thing most people don’t think about is that finding a highly trained, dedicated, assassin is rarer than finding a diamond hidden in a goats ass. It can happen but I never heard of a good example. Your average VIP/celebrity, trained on a steady diet of Hollywood movies and Brad Thor thrillers, probably doesn’t realize the threat comes from goof balls, not scary professionals.
Bill Lind contends the world ended on June 28th, 1914 when Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated at the hands of Gavrillo Princip. Princip is a typical assassin; a loser who was part of a plot with other losers who screwed up their simple plan. One of the other assassins in the group, a nineteen-year-old student named Nedeljko Cabrinovic, had thrown a grenade at Archduke Ferdinand’s vehicle but failed to account for the fuse delay or the speed of the vehicle and it detonated four cars behind his target.
The exact same thing happened to me when I was cruising through Shah Joy on my way to Kandahar during one of my bootlegging trips. I was going about 40mph when I see a guy step out of a crowd in the bazzar, look at me and then throw a grenade at my truck. I hit the gas and watched the thing go off in my rearview – it knocked some locals down too and I was amazed anyone would be so stupid as to think a grenade thrown at a moving vehicle would somehow impact the vehicle.
And speaking of stupid – check out young Master Cabrinovic who, after realizing he had failed and the crowd was about to close in on him, swallowed a cyanide pill that had been in his pocket for weeks and had deteriorated so much that it only made him throw up. Being dedicated the kid went to plan B jumping off a bridge into the Miljacka river to drown himself but the water was only 4 inches deep…..you can’t make this kind of stuff up.
Princip, armed with a pistol and stationed further down the motorcade route, realized the plan had failed and went down a side street to a sandwich shop to get a bite to eat. Meanwhile Archduke Ferdinand insisted on being taken to the local hospital to pay his respects to the folks injured by the grenade attack but his driver got lost and he ended up on the same side street as the sandwich shop where his car stalled right in front of Princip. Does this, the most important assassination of the last century, sound anything like the plots you have read about or watched on the big screen?
Princip fired two rounds from a FN model 1910 pistol from 5 feet away striking the Archduke in the neck (hitting his juggler) and his wife in the abdomen (hitting something vital there too because she died minutes later). Although he was only 5 feet away he was shooting a 9x17mm round (essentially a .380 ACP we shoot the 9x19mm parabellum round which is a little bit mo better) so those two hits were lucky (or unlucky depending on how you feel about Austrian royalty). 99 out of 100 times that round fired at that distance by a poorly trained shooter would not result in a fatal wound.
Point is your average assassin team is little better than a insane clown posse squad.
What about your average protection detail?
So there I was, hanging out at the American embassy when the guard force got the word to clear the streets, President Karzai’s motorcade was coming through. Being the PM on that contract I figured I didn’t have to clear the street so I went out the sidewalk to watch. Rolling in front of Karzai’s vehicle were two Hummers from the DynCorp protective detail and to my utter astonishment there were American guys leaning out of the rear windows with their rifles on their shoulders aiming in at anyone who was on the side walk. Once the left the embassy that would have been about 3,000 or so Afghans. They didn’t aim in at me so I guess they weren’t total jerks but what kind of tactic is that? Talk about bad optics, talk about a failure to understand the basics of an OODA Loop.…to this day the image fills me with wonder at how goofy men can be given a rifle, a boring mission in a foreign country and no adult supervision.
Back in the heyday of overseas contracting (2003 – 2006) when the money was good and the jobs plentyful there was more of this kind of foolishness going on than you would believe. Many of the PSD jobs went to the lowest bidders who were often Brit’s or Aussie’s or Kiwi’s and these are not countries where men can train with or even own firearms. The only two companies I saw out there who did pre deployment training and developed solid SOP’s were Backwater and Triple Canopy. Everybody else was making it up as they went along.
Tom Williams worked for Blackwater back then so when he starts ranting about live fire training and IA drills and putting the principal inside the diamond he’s on the money. My buddy Frank Gallagher also worked for BW and wrote a good book (with John Del Vecchio) about his PSD time called The Bremer Detail: Protecting the Most threatened Man in the World). Now that I plugged this on the blog I’m going to have to get a copy and read it. I normally avoid books on boring topics and nothing is more boring than PSD work, which why I never did it. However it is true that both Frank and John are cool cats so I know the book will be worth the time and encourage you too to score a copy soon.
Having said that let me say this; your average PSD team has little to no collective training, and little to no ability to stop an insane clown posse assassin if the crazy dude has worked his way in close proximity to the principal.
The SecNav was visiting Marines in Afghanistan where the threat to him would not be Bernie Sanders supporters (like it is in the US) but Afghan troops loyal to the Taliban who would willingly sacrifice their own lives to take out an American VIP. What’s the best solution for that scenario? Don’t look like a VIP which is why it was good, non – linear, almost master boondoggler level thinking to wear a sidearm so he looked like he was part of the PSD team and not the principal the PSD team was guarding.
I would have given him a rifle too but no rounds. In that respect I agree with My buddy Tom – I don’t like having people with loaded guns around me when I don’t know their capabilities.
And there you have it; another CNN generate mystery solved with a history lesson bonus.
There have been several news items on Afghanistan that call for some optimism. Task and Purpose published this long piece by former Ranger and current journalist Marty Skovlund and it’s a great read. Marty also has done the War College Podcast and other media where he anticipates our continued involvement with the Afghans for decades to come.
Task Force Southwest is heading home after a successful deployment (they did not lose any Marines) and Vice News caught up with them before they left. You can get a good feel for what they’ve accomplished in the video below:
It is clear that the Marines in Helmand have stabilized the Afghan National Army in just as the Army has in Nangarhar province. Yet none of this has changed my opinion that it is not going to work and that we are wasting time, money and lives on a forlorn hope.
Last week former Marine Owen West was confirmed as assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict. His nomination had been held up by democrats who objected to this eminently reasonable article he published, in conjunction with his father Bing West, concerning women in the infantry.
Owen was a talented infantry officer who also served in the reconnaissance community before leaving the Corps for Goldman Sachs where he became the most badass banker on Wall Street. Owen remained in the Marine Corps reserves and did two combat deployments to Iraq. He also became, like his father, a successful writer publishing two thrillers as well as an account of his time as an advisor to the Iraq Army. That last book is the biggest reason for hope I have seen to date concerning our efforts in Afghanistan
“Stunning in its portrayal, this highly personal book conveys a tremendous sense of time and place, set in a wickedly complex war zone that our young men faced in a foreign land, coaching a foreign force, in a type of combat foreign to those who have forgotten that war is ultimately a human endeavor. Vivid and honest, it holds true the real lessons of counter-insurgent war and is essential reading for those who seek to understand what we demand from those we send to fight for us.” — General James Mattis.
What’s this have to do with Afghanistan? I’m not sure because I don’t know how much weight the assistant SecDef for Special Forces has in the big scheme of things. What I do know is that Owen West believes our current approach in Afghanistan is wrong. Check this out from the introduction of The Snake Eaters:
Only an advisor’s aggressive willingness to share risk—his performance under fire—with local troops gives him credibility with and influence over them. This gap in understanding is not limited to civilians. Our generals are uncomfortable prescribing advisors as a solution to these twenty-first-century wars. Advising a foreign military requires nontraditional training that takes years; soldiers need a wonk’s cultural awareness, the rudimentary language capability of a border cop, a survivalist’s skills, and the interpersonal savvy of a politician. Military hierarchy is built on control, so it feels unnatural for the leadership to dispatch these small bands of advisors, who on paper cannot give orders, to live among foreign, sometimes hostile soldiers in an effort to stabilize their countries.
Living with the troops and leading by example…..where have you heard that before? Not just in this blog; every legitimate resource on getting host nation armies from the third world into the fight says the same thing. We knew this a century ago when we were fighting in Banana Republic Wars. Now the belief that technology has changed the dynamic of counterinsurgency warfare has reduced our efforts to unsustainably expense parodies of an effective military solution.
The Snake Eaters details this without the rancor. It tells the story of a small group of untrained reservists controlled by a clueless higher headquarters who are thrust into the most deadly town in Iraq. Not every team member is a hero but the deadwood is replaced rapidly, those who see the mission through are classic representations of American fighting men. Some our career officers who step up and out of constricting formal roles associated with their rank and experience. Some are non conformists who learn the local language and advocate for the local people. All who remain display the two traits most important in the counterinsurgency battle; physical courage and placing the mission ahead of all other considerations.
The Iraqi’s they mentor run the gamut from cowardly sycophants to incredibly brave professionals. Ironically the Iraqi officer who holds the Americans in complete contempt is the favorite of the American advisors. When you are deep in the shit performance is all that matters but not enough American units have found themselves deep enough in the shit to have learned this basic rule of war.
Every institutional problem I have bitched about for over a decade on this blog is validated in the book. Placing force protection ahead of mission and the un-stabilizing effects of SF night rains that can destroy in a few hours trust that took months of blood, seat and tears to build are just two of those problems that are covered in detail. This is the first military book I’ve read that relates directly to the experiences I and my small group of Free Ranging friends had in Afghanistan. Take a couple of minutes to hear Owen explain the book to get a feel for why I’m raving about it.
The American military has some serious, fundamental issues that need to be sorted out. The Marine Corps aviation in on it’s knees and currently unable to generate the sortie hours required to maintain proficiency with its fixed wing fighters. The Navy cannot drive its boats but worse yet it can’t even recognize an impending collision soon enough to sound the appropriate alarms; the ones that would have forced men from their bunks so they don’t get crushed and drowned when their ships hit gigantic civilian tankers. The Air Force can’t retain pilots; the Army can’t retain talent yet in the face of these problems our politicians are forcing women on the infantry and transexuals into the force structure.
Countering these powerfully negative trends is the most qualified Secretary of Defense and the most powerful Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the history of our country. They are on record as opposing social engineering they know will weaken combat power yet seem unable to put a stake through the heart of PC centric change.
Add to that an Assistant Secretary of Defense who not only knows, but has proven the risk adverse, reliance on high tech, Kabuki theater of advise and assist while leading from behind will not work.
Will this make a difference? I don’t know but sure is interesting.
Yesterday an article showed up in the press consisting of an interview with one of the general officers stationed in Afghanistan. He made a series of statements that were so delusional that were he a junior enlisted man he’d be subject to mandatory drug abuse screening.
The article can be found here and is titled US General on Trump’s Afghan strategy: ‘This will be a very long winter for the Taliban’. It is hard to know where to start; literally every claim made by the general is factually wrong, supremely stupid, and just embarrassing for the home team.
So let’s start with the who; Air Force brigadier general Lance Bunch:
BGen Bunch – Air Force Academy grad and career fighter pilot.My friend Colonel Eric Mellinger, USMC, is also an Air Force Academy grad: does he look like the kind of guy who would try to sell you a bill of goods? I include this to preempt acquisitions of Air Force bashing by my Hollywood buddy Kerry Patton. It’s not the uniform; it’s the man; right Kerry?
Lance is was promoted to BG last summer so he is a junior one star. Brigadier general is an awkward rank just like 2nd Lieutenant is for the company grade and Major is for the field grades. Combine the awkward rank with the fact that Air Force pilots are not known to be authorities on ground combat matters and you could forgive Lance for being a bit naive. But we’re not talking naivete or garden variety obsequiousness; we’re talking crazy:
“The Taliban strategy is moving backwards. As they are unable to conduct offensive combat operations, they have transitioned back to high-profile attacks, assassinations and kidnapping for ransom, all of which indiscriminately target the Afghan people,”
“We are able to go after their [Taliban] weapons cache sites, their revenue generation, their C2 [command and control] nodes, all the areas where they thought they were safe and they are no longer so,” Bunch said. “It has definitely been a game-changer, and the Taliban is definitely feeling it.”
In just three weeks, U.S. and Afghan airstrikes, coupled with Afghan special operations raids on the ground, have eliminated 25 Taliban narcotics processing labs, destroying an estimated $80 million in drugs, and denied the Taliban more than $16 million in direct revenue that is passed on from local drug kingpins, the U.S. military said.
Come on man. The Taliban control’s more districts today than they have since ejected from power in 2001. We have spent 16 years going after command and control nodes; that is what the night raid program was all about. That is why year after year officers in Afghanistan have crowed about intercepting panicked phone calls to Taliban central in Peshawar or Quetta from ‘commanders’ on the ground freaking out about getting whacked. Yet every year the Taliban gets stronger, every year they gain more ground, every year the moles dig deeper while every year we say this is the year we whack them for good.
Where do you think the Taliban converts dry opium to heroin? Around the highly contested, kinetic towns like Musa Quala or across the border in Pakistan or Iran? All the ‘drug labs’ reportedly destroyed were in northern Helmand near Musa Quala, Sangin and the Kajaki Dam. Recognize those names? Do you want to give odds that the Taliban are not so stupid as to try and use this area of the country to convert opium to heroin knowing the Americans consider these towns free fire areas?
Air campaigns are only as effective as the intelligence they base their targeting on. Identifying drug labs and drug shipments requires solid human intelligence; trying to unmask them using signal intelligence or drone based pattern analysis is nearly impossible. This is why, after 16 years of fighting in Afghanistan, we still air strike wedding parties we mistake for Taliban. We don’t have good human intelligence but for some reason believe we can cripple the drug business by taking out laboratories in Afghanistan despite knowing that most of them are across the border in Pakistan?
Another article from Afghanistan caught my eye yesterday puts this “game changer” crap in proper perspective. The Walking Dead; published in Foreign Policy, was an excellent, original, investigative piece on the Afghanistan Army’s treatment of its wounded soldiers. Written by Maija Liuhto, a journalist from Finland, (home of the White Death winter campaign and the White Death sniper….Finns are cool) it is not a pleasant read.
A bullet pierced his stomach, and he lost a lot of blood, he says. “My friends wanted to come and help me, but I told them not to because it was an open area and they could easily get hit, too.”
Jawad had to use his shirt to tie the heavily bleeding wound. In the end, it was civilians who helped him get to a clinic. Jawad belongs to the Hazara minority not native to this area. He does not speak Pashto, the dominant language in the south and east.
Jawad, 20, stands on the runway waiting to be loaded onto a medevac flight at the Tirinkot Airbase in Uruzgan Afghanistan on May 4th 2017. Jawad was ordered to rescue injured soldiers when he was shot. He insisted on getting on the flight himself despite that his wound was still bleeding. Photo by Ivan Flores
Afghans are tough people; look at the picture above. An Afghan cop gets shot in the stomach, is treated with a crummy ace bandage and some 4×4 gauze and hours latter is standing on a runway bare chested and pissed off waiting to get evacuated to Kandahar for definitive treatment. It’s not the Afghan grunts who are failing; its their leadership, which is evident by the excellent reporting in the article linked above.
I feel compelled to say this again; the Pentagon’s plan is not going to work. We are supporting a central government that is not legitimate in the eyes of the Afghan people. As soon as we go the government will be forced to settle things the Afghan way and the best they can hope for is Ismail Khan or a few more like them are around to help.
The handful of grunts and operators still on the ground in Afghanistan need to trust their general officers. Blatant cheerleading consisting of the regurgitation of ridiculous talking points from the alternative reality that is Bagram is not helpful. It is indeed going to be a long winter in Afghanistan for somebody and odds are it’s not the Taliban.
Last week was terrible for the legacy media. Glen Greenwald at the Intercept started his article on recent news room debacles this way:
FRIDAY WAS ONE of the most embarrassing days for the U.S. media in quite a long time. The humiliation orgy was kicked off by CNN, with MSNBC and CBS close behind, with countless pundits, commentators and operatives joining the party throughout the day. By the end of the day, it was clear that several of the nation’s largest and most influential news outlets had spread an explosive but completely false news story to millions of people, while refusing to provide any explanation of how it happened.
It is ironic that The Intercept is leading this charge after they recently published an obvious bogus story concerning the Eric Prince proposal to privatize the Afghanistan War. Trump White House Weighing Plans For Private Spies To Counter “Deep State” Enemies was the title of the intercept article that tried to tie Eric Prince to the ghost of Dewey Clarridge by asserting:
“In addition to Prince’s former assassination network, the hidden cadre of spies with no official cover — NOCs in CIA jargon — includes the assets of another key player in the Iran-Contra affair, CIA Officer Duane Clarridge, who died in 2016”.
Having spoken to members of Mr. Prince’s staff last summer when they were preparing their pitch I can assure you private spy’s were not part of the plan. What the Intercept (and also Buzzfeed) did was take the Prince Plan (which was dismissed last summer) throw in some speculation on Mr. Clarridge’s group, link Eric to some people allegedly part of that group and than tar him with the guilt by association brush.
Implied in this dubious reporting was a Prince funded “assassination network” was standing by overseas; ready to go. That is silly, this so called network involved former American SF operators training for a classified program which required the participants to maintain a TS SCI level clearance. It never went beyond the initial training stage and the participants never left the country. There were never operators overseas and thus no “network” that could be reactivated.
The CIA was once able to justify its lavish budgets. In the 1960’s it designed, built, and fielded the SR-71 Blackbird in less time than allotted and under budget. The CIA, in conjunction with Howard Hughes, designed a ship that salvaged the Russian nuclear submarine K-129 which was 3 miles under the surface of the Arctic Sea. I believe that project also came in under budget. Have you ever heard the term “under budget” when referencing a federal program before? Me either.
The glory days of the CIA are long past and despite the superior work of the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology their record of human intelligence exploitation is dismal. One of the best books written on the topic is The Human Factor which makes for some disappointing reading if you believe the CIA is capable of fielding spies in the field (Non Official Cover or NOC’s) instead of mediocre paper pushing bureaucrats embedded inside embassy staffs.
This acknowledged gap in capabilities motivated a former CIA legend (now deceased) Dewey Clarridge to start a private spy network in Afghanistan. His efforts were exposed by the NYT’s and promptly terminated by the Pentagon. The value of the intelligence he generated remains unknown but if you read the initial reporting through to the best selling book written by the lead reporter (The Way of the Knife) you’ll note Mark Mazzetti’s opinion of the intel reporting by Clarridge improved over time. It appears he was providing a good product which is why the idea of using “private spies” is not as far fetched as one would reasonably suspect.
The Intercept article was book-ended by two Buzzfeed articles on the same topic. The first states that the Trump Administration was “mulling” over a pitch for a private intelligence outfit that could also perform renditions. The second contends that Eric Prince has his eyes on Afghans rare earth metals. That Buzzfeed article had a PowerPoint presentation that they claim was used by Prince to pitch the White House.
The PowerPoint in that article was interesting and the plan to start the privatization effort in Nangarhar and Helmand provinces sound. I skimmed through the slides rapidly but stopped when I got to Nangarhar. I stopped because I smelled a rat. Check out slide number 10 from the PPT linked above:
The FOB locations on this map are wrong. FOB Gamberi is in Laghman province were the FOB named Qarghayi is depicted. There is no FOB named Qarghayi (that is a district in Laghman province) and the FOB at the Jalalabad airport is named Fenty but is not identified as such. FOB Khogyani is closer to the Spin Ghar mountains and FOB Shinwar is also at the foot of the mountains, near, but not in Shinwar district. It’s named for the tribe not the district. This slide was made by somebody who does not know a damn thing about Nangarhar province.
Eric Prince and his staff may not know Afghanistan as well as I do but they know where the FOB’s are because they regularly flew aircraft into them. There is no way they would float an idea for privatizing the war in Afghanistan to the President of the United States with slides as inaccurate as the one above. No way. So where did these slides come from?
I don’t know Eric Prince but I do admire him. He has been depicted as an immoral war profiteer because his companies made money (like thousands of others in the military industrial complex) and one of his teams was involved in a screw up in Iraq. I say screw up because they happen in combat zones. I don’t say murder spree because our military did the exact same thing on countless occasions yet none of them faced federal prosecution. Read the links in this paragraph to see what I mean.
Prince’s company fielded good security teams that were trained to standard before being sent in country. That was rare in the PMC business; the only other company doing that back in the early 2000’s was Triple Canopy. I think more companies are doing pre-deployment training now but they weren’t back then.
Prince also rescued three American college coeds who were trapped in an Kenyan orphanage that was about to be overrun by marauding tribesmen protesting a recent election. Within an hour of getting the call Prince had his Afghanistan country manager ( who I know and liked) heading to Kenya where he had served at the American embassy as an FBI liaison agent. The next day the girls were rescued, when asked how much the operation was going to cost the parents Eric Prince said not one penny. Had it been any other PMC of that era the price would have been 35k each plus expenses. I was in the business back then and know the price structure for in-extremis country evacuations.
I may not know Prince but I do know Secretary Mattis and General Kelly. I can promise you that they are not, in this year or any year, going to entertain plans for private spies or privatization of an ongoing military operation.
I don’t agree with them. The routine unmasking of partisan political agendas in our federal agencies (who are supposed to serve the constitution, not the damn Democratic party) is alarming. An independent, non-politicized, professional intelligence service focused on collecting overseas and not meddling in domestic affairs would benefit the executive branch and the American People.
I understand the appeal of a private spy network but that has nothing to do with Eric Prince or his pitch to replace military trainers in Afghanistan with contractors. There is nothing in the articles that connects Prince to an intelligence collection pitch. Eric Prince does have a connection to the Trump White House because Betsy DeVos, the Secretary of Education, is his sister. There is not an article written in the past year that fails to make that point. I like her too; know why? Because she uses her own airplane for government travel and doesn’t charge the government for it. When is the last time the American taxpayer caught a break like that? Never probably but what she has to do with her brothers access to the President has yet to be explained.
The attempts to tie Eric Prince to the ghost of Dewey Clarridge use the same innuendo and speculation that has already ruined the legacy media. So too the alleged link in Prince’s Afghan plan to a rare earth element exploitation scheme. These articles are, in my final analysis, evidence of a subset of Trump Derangement Syndrome called Prince Derangement Syndrome. I wish all these so-called investigative reporters would look into the who, what, where and why behind the congressional sex harassment fund. I’m growing weary of the fabricated hysteria concerning Eric Prince, private armies and deceased CIA agents.
This is the favorite FRI post of Afghans who stills read through this blog. It has aged well.
Panjwayi Tim sent an article the other day worthy of serious consideration at the State Department if it were capable of serious consideration. It outlines a way forward in Afghanistan that has the following advantages:
It would work
It would reduce the amount of future fighting and dying to near zero
It costs the United States nothing
It would allow us to bring all our deployed units home
It would not benefit Iran or Pakistan
Because quantity has a quality all it’s own lets take a look at another plan for ending the fighting in Afghanistan and bringing our forces back home where they belong. I know I’ve posted a ton on this topic before but what the hell; I’ve got nothing better to do.
“The Americans should leave,” Khan said. “There can only be peace and security in Afghanistan if there is a just government in place that is backed by the majority of the people and is chosen through elections or a loya jirga (national council). It cannot be reliant on a foreign military.”
…He said foreign forces, which he described as “girls,” had failed in their fight against the Taliban.
I have written before about how the Afghan war will end and that will be when the people present a united front against the current belligerents. Historically this has been done when a militia or groupings of militia’s gain the peoples support. That is how the Taliban took control of most of the country back in the 90’s.
Ismail Khan is the one mujaheddin commander still standing who could build a coalition of Muj commanders, force an “understanding” on the Taliban, and win the support of the population. He is ready to re-mobilize his militia if given a green light from Kabul and if he can get the majority of his fellow mujaheddin commanders to do the same there is no question it would work.
Ismail Khan fought the Soviets, fought the Taliban, fought General Dostum who fought for and against both the Soviets and the Taliban and has never had allegations of human rights abuse directed at him. He is a Tajik and the former governor of Herat province who is highly regarded in Western Afghanistan, an area from which 90% of Afghanistan’s saffron crop originates. Saffron makes farmers a ton more money than opium which is why I mention it. He would need to incorporate the current Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) and central government into the effort but that is not a hard job for prominent warlords; they have thousands of years tradition and a lifetime of experience on their side.
If the Afghans could figure out a way to link his militia to the Afghan Army and use them as auxiliaries they could probably clean up the Helmand province in a few months. Not because Ismail Khan’s militia is proficient but because Ismail Khan knows how to use the ulema (the body of Mullahs who are the interpreters of Islam’s doctrines and laws and the chief guarantors of continuity in Afghan communities) to reach the people. He carries series weight with the Afghan people and the people and the ulema are the only entities that can force peace in Afghanistan. In the context of ending the current war with the Taliban the Afghan military and central government are irrelevant.
Ismail Khan; tanned, rested, fit and waiting. (Photo from Khama.com)
The Marines in Helmand are winding down their tour and are a bright spot of good news for our military efforts in Afghanistan. Good news because they have taken no casualties while accomplishing the mission they were assigned. The LA Times ran a good story on them last Saturday; an incident described in that article is a perfect example with which to compare and contrast what would work against what is not going to work.
From the LA Times story linked above:
One recent morning, two convoys of Afghan security forces traveling south toward Lashkar Gah came under fire from a house inside the village of Malgir. Inside a windowless, high-ceilinged room at an operations center near Shorab, Marines, Afghan officers, and American civilian contractors watched footage from a U.S.-made ScanEagle drone hovering above the village.
Once Afghan troops in the area determined the shooters’ location and that there were no civilians nearby, officers in the control room requested airstrikes, which were carried out by U.S. Apache helicopters. One of the shooters was killed, two were wounded and two escaped, said Afghan army Maj. Abdul Wakil.
All that technology, all those assets, all those people deployed at lord knows what cost to kill one guy shooting small arms at a convoy? You get that with our efforts in Afghanistan and it’s old news; let’s focus on the village and read between the lines of the story.
Malgir, the village where the Marines directed an air strike with army Apaches, is in Nad Ali district near Gereshk. The area around Malgir belongs mostly to the Barakai tribe (who for the most part are pro government) with significant areas of Ishaqzai/Poplazai (who are mostly pro Taliban) tribal dominance . There is a concentration of Shia Hazara peoples in the southern end of the district who seemed to be on the short end of the stick regardless who controls the area.
In 2009 the British launched an operation aimed at Malgir to clear out Taliban. The Taliban ‘moved in’ after the collapse of the Barakzai militia who had been running the place until 2008 when they stopped getting paid. The Barakzai had over-taxed non Barakzai locals in the area which probably had something to do with their getting their stipend from the provincial authorities cut off. There were three prominent Muj warlords in the area at that time, Haji Kadus (Barakzai/Shamezai tribe), Qari Hazrat (Ishaqzai tribe and local Taliban commander) and former provincial governor Sher Mohammad Akhundzdza (Alizai from Northern Helmand and at that time a Taliban commander).
Haji Kadus was a favorite of the American Special Forces having dime’d out all his local rivals as ‘Taliban’ (most weren’t) which had landed them in Gitmo. When the British started planning their operation Haji Kadus divided up Malgar with Qari Hazrat allowing him to protect his communities. As the operation unfolded the British made Haji Kadus a Major in the Afghan police and then maneuvered into the village of Haji Gul Ehkitar Kalay.
The British decided to establish a patrol base in the house of Haji Gul Ehkitar (the village was named after him) and negotiated a fair rent which was paid to Haji Gul’s nephew Sur Gul, who happened to be a Taliban commander. The only Taliban mahaz commander to fight the British was Sher Muhamad’s who had been cut out of the pre-invasion deal making. Haji Gul’s Taliban did not fight but he, reportedly, used the British Army rent money to buy IED’s which he turned against his renters. Haji Kadus, who knew what Haji Gul was up to, said nothing to the Brits. When the foreigners went home Haji Kadus was not going with them so he had to make accommodations that made sense in the long game. A smart Indian doesn’t crap in his own tepee.
This is all very complicated right? But here’s the point; Muj commanders like Ismal Khan know this history and know how to put minor Muj commanders on a short leash without much (if any fighting). Know who else knows this entire inter-tribal history inside and out? BGen Roger Turner, the commanding officer of TF Southwest. The British learned from their mistakes and developed a detailed order of battle with comprehensive dossiers on every player inside their former AOA (area of operations). They spent the time and money to fly to North Carolina to bring Roger Turner and his staff up to speed.
Here’s the point. The intricate knowledge of tribal dynamics is not knowledge Gen Turner and his Marines can act on in the context of their current mission. It is good that they know how things got to be the way they are but that hard won knowledge is meaningless to the Marines now. They are locked down on the bases focused on improving the performance of Afghan Security Forces.
Ismail Khan, on the other hand, can use this knowledge to sort out recalcitrant Muj commanders quickly. He can generate change to the local tribal dynamics in a manner that the change sticks. He would probably be able to do so without any serious fighting. If he had to fight he would incorporate local tribal fighters because that’s the way Afghans fight. Those tribes on his side would be rewarded, those against him punished, in both cases this would involved acquiring or losing land. Nothing else matters in the Helmand; land ownership and water rights are the only game that matters.
Boost airfield where the Marines working with the Afghan Police are based. There were very few houses around the airfield in 2011 when I was last there. Now there are hundreds of houses built outside the wire of the airfield. These are a problem as they can be used to shield an attacking force massing to overrun the airfield. They also impeded our ability to use supporting arms against attacking infantry given the number of civilians who would be caught in the cross fire. Another good reason to get out now why the getting is good.
Getting the Department of State to understand that offers like the one made by Ismail Khan should be taken seriously is impossible. As Upton Sinclair famously said “it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it”. State Department mandarins are not salary motivated but they are power motivated and giving up power is anathema to them. That is a crying shame; we’re running out of time and are already out of money for further adventures in Afghanistan. We should be giving Ismail Khan a shot a solving the Afghan problem we created. It will cost us little and is the only route to peace available now.
In my last post I speculated about the demise of Sgt Johnson, the SF support team member killed in Niger last month. Unfortunately, I was correct but, in all honesty, it was not hard for to see how this story was going to unfold. From my last post:
Read between the lines and you’ll conclude (and I hope the conclusion is wrong) that Sgt Johnson was captured and thus not in the ambush kill zone at the conclusion of the battle. If that proves to be the case his killing by the African land pirates would have been brutal, when discovered 48 hours later the remains a gruesome sight to behold. The Pentagon obviously knows what happened and they aren’t saying squat.
The village chief of Tongo Tongo, Mounkaila Alassane, confirmed the account in a separate phone interview.
“The back of his head was a mess, as if they had hit him with something hard, like a hammer,” recalled Alassane, who said he also saw the body. “They took his shoes. He was wearing only socks.”
In the story an anonymous (is there any other kind) American official claimed that when they received the body of Sgt Johnson his hands were not tied. This may be factually true but is a ridiculous assertion. Sgt Johnson’s remains were autopsied; how he died and any abuse he sustained both pre and postmortem is known and documented. Covering up unpleasant truth’s under the guise of waiting for an investigation to conclude is dishonest and foolish. This is especially true when a known race monger like Fredrica Wilson has inserted herself into the story using the body of Sgt Johnson to make political hay.
As the Pentagon, like the rest of the federal government, continues to expand beyond its original mandate it is relying more and more on secrecy to prevent the American public from knowing what it is up to. It is also using the old “that’s classified information” dodge to cover incompetence and magical thinking about everything from operating in countries where we have zero national interest, to aircraft readiness, severe problems with gold plated hanger queens like the F-35, to the impact of women in combat arms.
In that era a sharp decline in confidence in U.S. military leadership accompanied growing American disillusionment with the war in Southeast Asia. In February 1966, a Harris poll found more than six in ten (62%) expressing a great deal of confidence in “people running the military.” By March 1973, a NORC poll found that number had fallen to 32%.
That level of public confidence is a perishable commodity that will disappear in the absence of sustained superior performance. Superior performance is impossible to sustain in a climate of obfuscation, blatant lies, and politically correct dogma such as ‘diversity is our strength’. Killing (the right) people and breaking things is our strength; diverse peoples meeting the same high standards is our strength, diversity is our doom; not our strength.
Although it is popular to point our that the Pentagon spends more (517 Billion in 2014) than any other nation on earth that is not the correct way to judge military spending. Our spending is so high because our GDP is so high – we are by far the richest country in the world and our military spending reflects that. Military spending as a percentage of GDP is a much more meaningful measurement; as you can see in the Forbes graphic our military spending is not out of line at all.
According to health detective (and NYT’s best seller author) Chris Kressler, medicare and medicaid, by 2040, will consume 100% of the federal budget. I heard him on the Joe Rogan Podcast so I know it to be true. Arguing against the accumulated knowledge of Joe Rogan’s guests is a fools errand, go ahead and try, it can’t be done. You can judge the veracity of Mr.s Kressler’s claim by reading his latest book Unconventional Medicine; if you do stand by for some really bad news about the growth of chronic diseases. There is hope on the horizon but that would involved cutting edge bio-remediation with medical grade fungi; to understand that listen to this podcast with Paul Stamets. It is a fascinating discussion of vital importance to our collective futures that will be ignored because, although the science is there an proven, it is too far outside the box.
I mention our impending fiscal and medical doom to highlight one salient point. The Pentagon is not going to get huge increases in funding. What is needed immediately is drastic decreases in military expenditures that make no sense. AFRICOM would be one, the Service Academies another, (they produce substandard officer material, are too expensive, and run by toxic, PC Centric flag officers).
The Army is now accepting recruits with a history of serious mental illnesses which is a clear sign the Army is too big and stretched too thin. We are a maritime power protected by two giant oceans and do not need a large standing army. There is no reason for us to have bases in Europe just as there is no good reason to have bases in Okinawa. Saying you need forward deployed troop formations when the amphibious shipping required to move those forces is not forward deployed is ridiculous. If we are the world’s policeman (and we shouldn’t be) than we are spending too little. If our defense establishment exists to defend American we are spending too much.
It is past time for the Axis of Adults to start acting like adults by putting the needs of the nation ahead of the needs of the Axis of Adults. The quadrennial defense review process is a joke. The results from this so called review are always the same; cuts is service funding without meaningful alterations in the percentage of defense dollars going to each service. compounding that problem is a congress who is interested in whatever the big institutions funding them tell them to be interested in. There are no longer checks and balances; just an imperial executive branch working with a parliament of whores.
Now that we have a POTUS who is not a creature of the DC swamp we could develop a defense establishment that is oriented on rational defense strategies instead of defending service rice bowls. We also need a foreign policy that is in some form a rational depiction in the interests of the people of this country. Right now both our foreign and defense policy seem centered on the ability to conduct war in two distinct geographical locations simultaneously. Why?
We need to think about fundamental change before we run out of time; we’ve already run out of money.
The best way to avoid military losing support personnel in Africa is to not be in Africa.
Something interesting popped up on the cover of Politico this week concerning Afghanistan. The Man who Thought He Could Fix Afghanistan is about Scott Guggenheim, the most influential development expert that you’ve never heard of. Apparently Mr. Guggenheim is famous for “pioneering the kind of bottom-up approach that rejects the older, headquarters-oriented style of proffering aid” in Indonesia.
Mr. Guggenheim has a solid track record in the humanitarian aid community. He has the proper credentials (PhD from John Hopkins), has spent his professional life working for the World Bank and most importantly he has a unique relationship with Afghanistan’s president Ashraf Ghani who he has known since 1981 when both were if grad school. Mr. Guggenheim seems to be a decent, smart, motivated guy and if there is a chance that America can help get Afghanistan develop into a functional state he would be the linchpin of our effort. From the article:
He has been called “the brain of Dr. Ghani,” but in interviews in the months after the election, he was at constant pains to deflect attention. His business card contains just his name and a Gmail address. This is deliberate. “Ashraf likes having someone who has no political or economic ambition,” Guggenheim told me. He sees his role not as a consigliere but as a kind of a fixer for Ghani, the executor to the president’s blue-skied vision. “Ashraf has a pretty clear agenda. I always thought my job was to help him realize it,” Guggenheim said.
My buddy Boris and I have a lot of experience at implementing bottom up aid and were chatting about the article over the weekend. Here’s his take on Guggenheim:
“…he represents the actual US government-its informal wing. Like there’s a military and paramilitary institutions, there are parts of the government which are technically not governmental. Pure power, no responsibility, but also no clear decision-making authority or processes-rule by committee. In other words, cancer.”
The cancer is in our foreign policy establishment which has proved to be unable to generate positive change in our rapidly changing world. They have no answers for what is plaguing Afghanistan so empowering experts like Mr. Guggenheim is their best option. But it is not going to work because trying to nudge the Afghan President to be more democratic and less authoritarian is not the answer.
Further along in the article our current answer to Afghanistan was presented when ” In the absence of civilian leadership, the generals stepped in.” Again from article:
“McMaster was also good at calling out whoppers. “Our side would try some standard bullshit on how we have great plans to fix everything,” Guggenheim said, “and McMaster would say, ‘I heard all this in 2012. Tell me what’s new.’”
The bluntness of General McMaster is appealing. The current strategy of maintaining a military life line to the Afghanistan National Security Forces (ANSF) until they can stand on their own is a reasonable play. But it too is not going to work because of this: sixteen years of fighting in Afghanistan and we are still bombing wedding parties and killing innocents. Last month we dropped more ordnance than we have since 2012 yet the casualties sustained by ANSF are up by 52%. And that’s not counting the Afghan police we killed in our latest drone attack.
Why would our military shoot a Hellfire missile at a few guys shooting their AK’s off into the air? That’s a rhetorical question, there is no logical answer to that kind of stupid. The guys shooting off their AK’s could have been Taliban instead of off duty Afghan police and it would still be a stupid move coupled to an egregious waste of money.
This is why the only rational course of action was the contractor modeled championed by Eric Prince and poo poohed by all the elites in DC and the media. Contractors don’t shoot Hellfire missiles at random gunmen who are shooting their rifles in the air. Contractors, under the Prince model, would have been working for and at the direction of the ANSF; improving combat performance while realizing billions in savings. Contractors would not have spent 500 million dollars on planes that could not fly in Afghanistan and were sold for scrap at 6 cents a pound.
And contractors who know how to operate in Afghanistan (meaning they’re armed) and stayed long enough to develop strong relationships (because they were armed) can do bottom up reconstruction work without losing money to bribes or dodgy subcontractors (because they’re armed and thus taken seriously by all the players). Boris and I know this because, being plank owners in Ghost Team, we did it, for years, without drama (because we were armed).
USAID hated us being armed but tolerated it because we delivered. The Karzai government hated us being armed because it allowed us to be successful thus depriving them of another chance to siphon off aid money into their Dubai bank accounts. The provincial governors loved us being armed because it enabled up to travel to every job site and keep people honest while ensuring projects were on track and on spec. The local people loved it too because nothing brought more calm to turbulent lands than a couple (or just one) armed westerner showing up with the monthly pay roll. If you are working in a warrior society it is most helpful that you too are a warrior. Afghans respect men who take responsibility for their own protection and don’t pay other Afghans, from outside the local area, to do it for them.
As we scan the news of the day we can see the Internet has collapsed the Narrative and laid bare the corruption of Hollywood, politics and the media. This is causing the long-term loss of the progressive elites authority when it comes to lecturing the rest of us from a pretended position of moral superiority. Change is in the air but will not happen fast enough to help the people of Afghanistan. Men like Scott Guggenheim, who has his picture on posters scattered around Kabul with the caption Ghani ba ehsara-e en shakhs meraqsad: (Ghani dances on the order of this man); are not the answer.
The answer for playing the Great Game in a region full of cut throats involves being a cut throat. Advocating for an independent Pashtun home land and one for the Baluch while staying on to keep an eye on China would be a great example and one Michael Yon just wrote about. That kind of thinking would place American interests first and I know that’s a great idea because John McCain was in Annapolis yesterday lecturing the midshipmen of the folly of putting America first.
Mr. Guggenheim needs to come home and stay home or he will be killed by the players in Kabul who are jockeying for attention from the President. America needs to listen intently to the words of Senator McCain and do the exact opposite of whatever ridiculous prescription he’s selling at the moment. The man is an idiot as seen by the “plan” he came up with for Afghanistan a few months back. Afghanistan needs to hang tough until they get a leader strong enough to force his will on the various factions that comprise Afghan leadership while understanding a strong central government operating out of Kabul is never going to happen.
For now all we can do is wait, hope that enhanced training and access to American combat enablers keeps the ANSF in the fight and pray that somehow we have learned enough to never repeat the mistakes we made in Afghanistan. Given the recent drone attack that may be expecting too much…but a man can pray.
I had a chance to visit with Mac on All Marine Radio last week. We touched on many topics and as we got to the end our visit we hit on something that really bothers us both. That something is winning battles only to lose wars. Although the legacy media is not focused on the fighting going on overseas things have quietly been changing for the better. ISIS is getting its ass kicked and will soon be nothing more than a bitter memory. The Taliban now have no path to victory. They cannot win as long as America and a few hearty allies maintain a commitment to the government in Kabul. The Taliban is not going to win a military victory (I don’t think they could have done it even if we cut and run) and the people of Afghanistan know this to be true. You can listen to Mac and I talk about this – I come on at the 23 minute mark.
All this good news should elicit a feeling of success but it hasn’t generated positive vibes with me nor is anything remotely positive seem to be working its way to the surface in our media culture. Here is my guess concerning that phenomena.
The first problem with our military efforts overseas is they are not linearly successful. Last week is was noted that every Afghan Army Corps was on the offensive. Today we see that the Taliban has launched bloody attacks in four provinces; Paktia, Ghazni, Farah and Wardak killing 78 Afghans and wounding 179 soldiers and civilians.
Raqqa has fallen and it appears that ISIS is on its last legs. That was inevitable because ISIS was a foreign entity that had invaded and claimed land that was not theirs. Yet in the face of victory we get the disturbing news that the Baghdad government is in the process of taking the oil production center of Kirkuk away from the Kurds. This is a problem; the Kurds have been loyal allies to the west, they are an oasis of sanity in a part of the world that is being consumed by Islamic madness. They have all the right enemies, the Turks, the Iranians, the Iranian puppets in Iraq and the Syrians. Operation Northern Watch. which ran from 1997 to 2003, was implemented specifically to protect the Kurds from Saddam after he gassed them back in the 90’s. Now we are going to stand aside while Iranian proxy’s invade them? Does that sit well with you?
We are currently achieving our military objectives despite the fact our military is in serious trouble. The air component of the Marine Corps is essentially non functional as evident by an alarming rate of mishaps coupled with an unsustainable decrease in flight hours. The army is lowering it’s enlistment standards to meet its recruiting goals. The navy is in shambles and apparently unable to safely operate its surface combatants. The service academies are giant money pits that are producing an inferior product. Yet the folly of using the military as a platform for social engineering continues.
Despite the bad news the military is delivering some good news but that good news is irrelevant which is the really bad news. Clausewitz explained why:
WAR IS A MERE CONTINUATION OF POLICY BY OTHER MEANS.
We see, therefore, that War is not merely a political act, but also a real political instrument, a continuation of political commerce, a carrying out of the same by other means. All beyond this which is strictly peculiar to War relates merely to the peculiar nature of the means which it uses. That the tendencies and views of policy shall not be incompatible with these means, the Art of War in general and the Commander in each particular case may demand, and this claim is truly not a trifling one. But however powerfully this may react on political views in particular cases, still it must always be regarded as only a modification of them; for the political view is the object, War is the means, and the means must always include the object in our conception.
Providing the time and space for the Afghan government to get its act together is half a solution. The other half requires diplomats with the vision and ability to foster this process along. Diplomats who understand the tribal dynamics well enough to split the already fractured Taliban movement apart. Diplomats savvy enough to bring tribal groupings onto the side of the central government while simultaneously forcing the central government to be responsive and accountable to the people they are supposed to serve.
We need a diplomatic corps that can work with the Iraqi government to find diplomatic solutions to ancient problems. Our military efforts in the middle east should be subordinate to these diplomats but that is not the case now and hasn’t been for a long time. The military will eventually sort itself out; they answer to congress and we have seen that congress loves to get the generals in front of them to ensure compliance with whatever agenda the congress is pushing.
What I’ve never seen (and maybe I’m not paying close enough attention) is those same congressional committees calling state department mandarins into account in public hearings. Congressional oversight is used to bludgeon military leaders while the State Department gets a pass. Why? The State Department is the main tool for implementing foreign policy. Why does John McCain bully the SecDef and General Dunford about a plan for Afghanistan when their plan should be based off the State Department’s plan and their efforts subordinate to the overall State efforts?
Why is War the policy option we now use to solve the problems we created by using war as a proxy for diplomacy? I don’t know the answer to that but suspect this is the reason why, in the face of good news, we find little hope, dwindling confidence and the sense that progress towards a more peaceful world is an illusion.
The Ken Burns Vietnam series wrapped up it’s first week featuring a story I know well, the destruction of Bravo company 1st Battalion 9th Marines (1/9) in the Leatherneck square on July 2nd 1967. 1/9 (pronounced one nine in Marine speak) was known as The Walking Dead back then as it was in 1987 when I joined the battalion as a rifle platoon commander. 1/9 took more casualties than any other battalion in Vietnam but their nickname did not come from the unfortunate stat.
Ho Chi, Minh gave 1/9 the Walking Dead handle in early 1966 when 1/9 was working out of Hill 55, which was 16 km southwest of Da Nang, in the Qung Nam province. The French had occupied it years before and had lost 2 battalions on that hill to the Viet Minh. Later in the war it would become famous for the sniper school established there by Captain James Land. Graduates from that school included Carlos Hathcock and John Roland Burke; both Marine Corps sniper legends .
When 1/9 arrived on Hill 55 the area was under solid VC control. While establishing defensive positions on the Hill a lineman from 9th Engineers was captured, tortured, mutilated and killed by local Viet Minh. He was left (one presumes) as an example to intimidate the Americans who were new to the area. It had the opposite affect, the enraged Marines started a series of aggressive small unit patrols throughout the river valley area. They took heavy casualties in those patrols but not that many prisoners.
On the 12 May 1966 a 14 man patrol from Bravo 1/9 located and attacked a giant Viet Minh base camp/training area complete with classrooms, ranges, barracks and a hospital. The rest of 1/9 piled on this camp starting what turned out to be a four day brawl that gutted the 324B NVA Regiment. Hanoi Hana, the Vietnamese version of Tokyo Rose, during one of her nightly broadcasts said of 1/9 that Ho Chi Minh had called them “Di bo chet” (The Walking Dead) and promised them they would all be dead before Uncle Ho’s birthday which was 19 May. 1/9 pulled back to Hill 55, dug in and waited; the promised attack never came.
This is the same unit patch we used in the late 80’s when I was a member of 1/9
On the 2nd of July, 1967 Bravo and Alpha 1/9 left the wire of Con Thien on a unit sweep. About a mile outside of the wire Bravo walked into a vicious, well coordinated battalion sized ambush, the commanding officer, Captain Sterling Coates and 3 of his platoon commanders were killed early during the contact by an artillery round, the remainder of the company was pinned down. The NVA then used flamer throwers to set the brush around the Marines on fire forcing them to break cover where they were hammered by both direct fire and indirect fire. Alpha 1/9 moved in to help but they too got pinned down by heavy direct and indirect fire.
A hastily assembled reaction force comprised of Headquarters and Delta companies 1/9 along with 4 tanks charged out of the wire to help. A young Lieutenant by the name of Frank Libutti from Charlie company (which was detached guarding the base at Dong Ha but would fly in later that day) was at the Battalion HQ and part of that force. Twenty years after this battle Frank Libutti was a Colonel, the commanding officer of the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit (Special Operations Capable) and his Battalion Landing Team was the 1st Battalion, 9th Marines.
I was a platoon commander in Charlie 1/9 on that deployment and the company commander for B 1/9 was Bob Coates. The commanding officer of Bravo 1/9 back in 1967 had also been named Coates. I always thought that to be one hell of a coincidence as did Col Libbuti. What he stressed to us when he talked about that day was that the Bravo 1/9 of 1967 could not be compared in any way to Bravo 1/9 of 1987. The difference in the proficiency of the 87 Bravo company from the 67 Bravo company wasn’t superior leadership or more advanced weapons; it was due to the most contentious issue in the Vietnam War. The use of the individual replacement system of personnel management.
‘The rotation policies operative in Vietnam, virtually foreclosed the possibility of establishing fighting units with a sense of identity, morale, and strong cohesiveness….Not only did the rotation policy foreclose the possibility of developing a sense of unit integrity and responsibility, but it also ensured a continuing supply of low quality, inexperienced officers at the point of greatest stress in any army, namely in its combat units.’
The rotation policies were driven by two factors; the draft (which mandated two years of service) and the refusal of the Johnson administration to mobilize the reserves to give the commanders on the ground the men they were asking for. A two year commitment meant that draftee’s could be deployed for 12 months max when mobilization, training and demobilization is factored into the time line. The Marines were not using draftees at this point in the Vietnam War which was why Marine combat tours were 13 months instead of the 12 month Army tour.
Prior to Vietnam American infantry units were formed, trained together and then deployed together into combat. This built unit cohesion, trust in the chain of command, developed the leadership abilities of small unit leaders before combat, and allowed for casualty replacements to be integrated into already functional combat units. Battalions that train together and fight together are giant families designed to withstand the shock of war and function in the face of incredible adversity.
In Vietnam individual soldiers and Marines rotated into battalions that were a conglomeration of individuals serving out their time. Officer came in as individuals too but they tended to have shorter tours (6 months on average) to free up combat command opportunities for other officers. New joins in Vietnam, just like new joins in every war experienced higher casualty rates. Junior officers, sergeants, staff sergeants and more senior SNCO’s always experience high casualty rates in all wars at all times. When rotated into combat units as individuals they did not last long. This rotation policy meant there was no established cohesion or pride at the battalion level. Those battalions were stripped of experienced small unit leaders. It is remarkable these battalion still fought as well as they did.
The Burns series includes multiple requests from General Westmorland for more troops. It ignores what he wanted to do with those troops and that was to get Americans away from the populated regions and into Cambodia and Laos to cut the Ho Chi Minh trail and take on the NVA. John Del Vecchio covers this well in his most recent post which can be found here and is essential reading for those who want to understand the context surrounding the tactical decisions in Vietnam.
Calling up more troops required committing the reserves who had trained together and had developed unit cohesion. Using them to go after the NVA in their “safe spaces” may well have given the South enough space and time to get organized. That option was taken off the table because President Johnson was afraid it would draw Chinese or Soviet ground forces into the conflict, a probability that, given the million plus casualties the Chinese had suffered in Korea, was remote.
Our 7th President, Andrew Jackson (the only president to pay our national debt) once said “never take counsel of your fears“. Sage advice that as was General MacArthur’s saying that it is “fatal to enter any war without the will to win it”. The biggest complaint by the military during the Vietnam War was the feeling we weren’t fighting to win but instead doing just enough not to lose.
Part of the McNamara’s whiz kids genius strategy was using remote sensors on the border of the DMV to detect NVA formations moving south. To support that dubious plan the Marines moved up to the DMV, well within the artillery fan of the North Vietnamese, to establish fire bases. Those fire bases then supported undermanned battalions as they swept the DMZ to clear out NVA formations. But there weren’t enough of them to secure the ground they swept which allowed the NVA to move into newly swept areas knowing they could stay there for weeks or months before the area was “swept” again.
The 1/9 Marines were cool long before Zombies stole their nickname
Which brings us back to Bravo 1/9 and what the Burns documentary called “The Marketplace Massacre”. I’ve never heard the Bravo 1/9 ambush called that, never seen it referenced that way in historical accounts and if you google the name it is used to describe an event in Sarajevo. Regardless what did happen was that Bravo 1/9 walked into a hornets nest and got hammered.
In the documentary the claim is made that Charlie and Delta companies went out and extracted Bravo and Alpha companies but because they could’t get to all the fallen they had to return two days later to recover 34 bodies. That is not what happened; the narrative presented by Burns is flawed on this point.
It is true that on day one of the battle, after 3/9 was flown into that area and had attacked the NVA battalions who had ambushed 1/9, the battalion pulled back and found they had 34 missing in action (the battalion not just Bravo company). It is also true that it wasn’t until 5 July that 23 Marine KIA were recovered (the nine remaining Marines were never found). What is not true is Marines left the field on day one and the bodies were not recovered by some half ass effort sortieing out from Con Thien three days later.
When 1/9 pulled back into Con Thien on July 2nd the commanding officer of Alpha company, Albert J Slater pulled the survivors of his company, the survivors of Charlie company (who had flown into the fray from Dong Ha) and a detachment from 3rd Reconnaissance company together and went back out to join the battle. 3/9 had remained in the field and was joined by the 1st and 2nd battalions of the 3rd Marines. Captain Slater took his company to the northwest looking for good dirt (key terrain) and when he found some they dug in, fortified and then concealed their positions. The NVA had no idea the Walking Dead were back in play.
The maneuver battalions (3/9, 1/3 and 2/3) stayed on the offensive trying to maul what turned out to be the 90th NVA Regiment before they could get back to safe haven on the other side of the DMZ.
On the 5th of July a 400 man NVA battalion came across the DMZ in an attempt to flank the Marine maneuvering elements and walked, in column formation, right into Alpha 1/9’s prepared defense. The Walking Dead then got some payback and destroyed the NVA battalion with direct and indirect fires. The NVA 90 Regiment soon broke contact and withdrew some after marking the end of Operation Buffalo.
I know these kind of details are not going to make a PBS documentary about Vietnam. What is remarkable about this battle is not just the tenacity demonstrated by Capt Slater and the surviving members of a battered battalion. What is remarkable is they performed this way under constraints placed upon them by a President and DoD leadership who were arrogant in their unfounded faith of systems analysis, ignorant about the realities of war and dismissive of the senior military leadership who was supposed to be influencing the effort via sage council.
It seems to me that Burn and company are giving McNamara and LBJ a pass on their disastrous decision making which stemmed from politically motivated assumptions. The men who fought in Vietnam got the short end of the stick then and they are getting it now. They deserve better.
