Free Range International

When I first started this blog I used to hammer away on a couple of themes which really bothered me. The first were Provincial Reconstruction Teams which I maintain are, by design, unable to accomplish their assigned mission. The second theme had to do with the reason we remain in Afghanistan. Our current mission is predicated on three goals; to deny al Qaeda safe haven, to reverse the momentum of the Taliban and to prevent the ability of insurgents to overthrow the government. As I have pointed out many times in the past there is no chance al Qaeda can or wants to re-establish themselves on Afghan soil and there is also no chance that anyone of the various insurgent groups who are fighting against the Karzai regime has the ability to win militarily.

These two themes are now hot news after President Karzai announced that it was time for PRT teams to go and the Center on International Cooperation released a report co-authored by Alex Strick van Linschoten and Flex Kuehn on separating the Taliban from al Qeada.  I have commented on Alex Strick van Linschoten before noting that he has a really cool name.  How can you go wrong reading something from a member of the Strick van Linschoten family?  And as a huge bonus Alex knows what he’s talking about being another member of the outside the wire tribe.

Jousha Foust posted on the PRT issue saying unequivocally that Karzai’s is right in his desire to rid himself of PRT’s and have that money flow through the Afghan government.  The problem is that anytime Karzai mentions the need to funnel money through his government a majority of my fellow citizen are convinced the money will just disappear. I’m no fan of the Karzai government but if someone could explain to me the difference between giving a member of the Afghan ruling elite a suitcase full of money to get something done or paying Tom Daschle’s wife a few million bucks to get a favorable ruling from the USG I’d love to hear it. From Hillary Clinton’s cattle futures swindle to our current treasury secretary dictating to the IRS when and how much he would pay in back taxes (until he was appointed to his present post) American politicians are as corrupt as Afghan politicians but more sophisticated.  The only other difference is that America has the largest economy in the world allowing our political class to enrich themselves and their families without killing economic growth.

Afghanistan has no economy so the corruption here kills any chance that outside capital will flow in the form of investments. The only major western company  stupid enough to invest money here is AOL but they are tapped out. And when contemplating corruption here remember the problem was partly created by us when we pushed Karzai to adopt SNTV . It is not going to change. But if we funneled every penny through the Afghan government who would get the blame when construction projects proved to be inferior, when money disappeared or when basic needs are not addressed? Wouldn’t it be to our advantage if every time the local people complained about reconstruction projects we could point to the billions we fed into the Kabul government and say  “go ask them – we gave them billions for this”?  It’s not like anyone has the slightest clue where all the money we have spent to date has gone anyway.  But we can’t change the way our government does business – too many rice bowls and too much money being made by special interests don’t you know.

What could and should change is our mission here.  As the Strick van Linschoten piece (PDF available here) convincingly argues the core reason for our continued fighting in Afghanistan is predicated on the stupid idea that if we leave al Qaeda will return.  I’ve been calling bullshit on that idea from the start and it is important for us to acknowledge that this concept is nonsense because it drives the mission statements of the military and other USG agencies who are in the fight.  We shouldn’t  act like we can tailor make solutions in the third world because we remain clueless about ground truth in every country except our own.  We will never have enough situational awareness to institute custom one-off solutions in every country where instability threatens good order and discipline.  This fact should serve as a wake up call to all Americans.

We spend billions and billions of dollars on “top secret America” and get next to nothing in return. Witness the fiasco of our current response in Egypt. The head of our Central Intelligence Agency stated that Mubarak would step down yesterday. He said that because he’s an idiot politician; a CIA Mandarin would never make that claim because he knows the CIA has rarely been right about anything important in its entire history. Don’t take my word for it read Legacy of Ashes and The Human Factor; books written by CIA agents disgusted with the waste, fraud and abuse organic to that dysfunctional agency. How do you explain the head of intelligence for this administration saying something as preposterous as the Muslim Brotherhood are “largely secular”? Our liberal elites and their hand maidens in the press think we’re stupid.

Back to the ISAF mission statement for Afghanistan – here it is:

ISAF, in support of the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, conducts operations in Afghanistan to reduce the capability and will of the insurgency, support the growth in capacity and capability of the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF), and facilitate improvements in governance and socio-economic development, in order to provide a secure environment for sustainable stability that is observable to the population.

How does a military force “facilitate improvements in the governance and socio-economics development” of the second most corrupt country in the world?  How does a western secular military “provide a secure environment for sustainable stability that is observable to the population” in an Islamic Republic?  The ISAF military effort is reducing the capability and will of the insurgents and they are also, believe it or not, growing the capacity and capability of the ANSF. I see signs of that everywhere I go in this country. It is our political leaders who are squandering the opportunities the military has won them and rather then piss and moan about it I’m going to man up and offer a solution our government can use around the world to bring simplicity and clarity to America’s efforts to have everyone just get along.

These ten simple principals, distilled by Jim Owens who heads up the Center for Cowboy Ethics and Leadership, are all one needs to know about running their lives, a company, or the most powerful nation on earth.      Here they are:

1 Live each day with courage

2 Take pride in your work

3 Always finish what you start

4 Do what has to be done

5 Be tough, but fair

6 When you make a promise, keep it

7 Ride for the brand

8 Talk less and say more

9 Remember that some things aren’t for sale

10 Know where to draw the line

Courage, pride, keeping promises, draw the line and ride for the brand. These are principals which have never failed us in the past. Translated to the sophisticated world of geo-politics it means acknowledging we can’t export our ideas about democracy to peoples who have no desire for them. We have to keep our goals simple, clean and consistent. We stand for freedom. We stand behind people who desire freedom and will lend them a hand in every and all circumstances. We should have backed the citizens in Iran when they confronted that hideous regime, the government of Honduras when they tried to enforce their constitution be expelling a tyrant, the citizens of Egypt and Tunisia when they spontaneously rose to rid themselves of dictators. But we didn’t did we? Our political leaders tried to finesse these situations or ignored them or worked against them. Our political class aided and abetted by the Mandarins who populate the senior levels of  USG agencies honestly think they have the knowledge, ability, and situational awareness required to manage every crisis in a unique custom tailored manner.  But they don’t, they are fooling themselves, bankrupting our nation and breaking our military.

It doesn’t have to be that way – we don’t need cleaver solutions dreamed up by legions of credentialed smart fellers.  We need leadership which articulates in unambiguous language what America stands for and who she will back.  If you are with us we’ll back you with our military might (while it lasts) and favorable economic policies.  If you are not with us you’ll not get favorable trade deals in our markets. If you attack us or our allies we will come to your country and kill you. See how simple that is? Apply it to Pakistan right now. They are harboring bin Laden, Mullah Omar and the senior Taliban leadership while actively aiding the insurgents we are fighting and, adding insult to injury, they have one of our citizens who rates diplomatic immunity in jail. What are they getting in return?  Billions of aid dollars which we have to borrow from “our friends”  the Chinese. What should they get?  A blockade of their ports and the grounding of all air transport in their country would be a good start. You know why?  Because some things are not for sale and at some point we have to draw a line.

How would we supply the gigantic logistic effort in Afghanistan if we did that?  I don’t know and I am sure we probably couldn’t. Which means most of the bloated headquarter staffs and base infrastructure would have to go and the combat arms units who remain would have to live like my colleagues and I do on the economy. Right vs wrong; good vs evil – there nothing difficult about figuring these things out when you live each day with courage.

The efforts of the international community to bring aid to Afghanistan, help develop the infrastructure with the goal of allowing Afghanistan a chance at self sufficiency are failing dismally.  That should not be a surprise to anyone familiar with the international aid racket.  The international community has spent hundreds of billions of dollars over the years in Africa without one iota of success. They are enriching vile, oppressive dictators while sentencing the average African to a life of misery, poverty and squalor. Most people in most places at most times have lived under the yoke of tyranny which seems, with the exception of the western world, to be the natural order of things. One need not be a historical scholar to understand what is self evident – just look at Zimbabwe, Haiti, Mexico or Illinois to see the heavy hand of tyranny stealing from the people to enrich powerful elites.

Is the average citizen of the African continent better off now that colonialism is dead? I doubt it and in fact have personally talked to hundreds of Africans who will tell you without much prodding that life in their country was much better during the days of European colonialism. Aid programs do not work unless the people delivering the aid are in the same boat as the recipients. If the countries who provide aid are not willing to send their aid workers into the recipient country and leave them there then it is much more humane for all involved to do nothing, to spend not one penny, to leave people to their own devices to fend for themselves and figure out how to join modernity on their own terms.  Throwing billions into countries ruled by tyrants does nothing but increase human misery and mayhem; conditions which I’m firmly against as a matter of principle.

The Aid business is now a deadly business according to the New York Times in a long detailed story about NGO’s  located right down the street from us. The Times, like all media except the Toronto Star, ignores our operational success and implementation savvy because it runs counter to their narrative. You would think our success at accomplishing all projects on time and on budget in the most kinetic provinces would garner some attention in the US media but it hasn’t. The only reporter to recognize what we were accomplishing and write about it was the Toronto Star’s Mitch Potter who wrote about my buddy Panjwaii Tim and his Kandahar operation.

From the linked New York Times article:

Among the contracted aid groups working for coalition government programs, which nearly always employ armed guards and work in fortified compounds or from military bases, the body count has been particularly severe. Eighty aid contractors employed by the United States Agency for International Development were killed and 220 wounded from January through early November of this year. (In the same period, 410 American soldiers and  Marines died.)

The aid contractors were attacked on average 55 times a month  a seven-fold increase over 2009, Mr. Gast said. By contrast, 20 people employed by charitable and humanitarian groups, which refuse to use armed guards or work with the military, were killed during the first nine months of this year.

The article goes on to point out that Doctors Without Borders has a compound in Lashkar Gah which has never been attacked unlike the heavily fortified IRD compound which is right down the street.  That’s a good point, sort of, as I too think the heavily fortified compounds are a waste of money and invite attack from armed actors of various stripes. I live right behind the Doctors Without Borders compound and our compound is more modest and inconspicuous. Unlike our Doctor neighbors every expat bedroom is a mini armory/ammunition supply point. We don’t have wire lacing the top of our walls but we have plenty on our side of the wall out of view of the public. I pity the fool who jumps into our compound because he’s landing on top of triple strand concertina which will slow him long enough for the dogs to get into action.

Here is what really irritates me about the New York Times piece:

Mr. Watson agrees that the lines are often blurred. It makes it difficult for us in the humanitarian community to demonstrate to those on the other side of the conflict that we strive to be neutral intermediaries, he said.

The only “neutral intermediaries” Afghanistan has seen in modern times was the medical team headed by Dan Terry and Tom Little who accounted for 10 of the 20 humanitarian group members that were killed this year.  Unlike Oxfam and Doctors Without Borders and all the armed knuckleheads like me running around the country, Tom and Dan lived here, were fluent in local languages, were never armed, and were seen by all sides as being neutral. Yet they were gunned down in cold blood by Islamic insurgents affiliated with the Taliban. The Taliban once believed in in neutral intermediaries which is why Tom Little and Dan Terry lived and worked in Afghanistan during the Taliban reign. Now the Taliban clearly do not respect neutral intermediaries which was proven beyond a doubt to myself and the other expats Free Ranging beyond the wire by the murder of Tom Little and Dan Terry.

The Governor of Nimroz Province Abdul Karim Brahui, my super Provincial Manager Bashir and I opening up the Kang district canal which will bring irrigation to the district for the first time in 40 years. Will projects like this help?  I think they might but don’t really know.  What I care about is that we do what we say we are going to do without wasting millions of donor dollars to do it. The international NGO community seems to specialize in administering  ineffective aid at the margins. They want to be perceived by all sides as “neutral intermediaries” which makes motivates their international staff while giving them a false sense of security. But they do not have the staying power or religious based motivation that sustained Dan Terry and his wife for 30 years and thus the results they produce are as transitory as they are.

If the true neutral intermediaries are no longer safe in Afghanistan then the only way “aid” is going to be accomplished is by aid workers who can protect themselves. Which is what we do but what nobody else (in the aid game) wants to do (because hiring former military guys to deliver aid is like giving fish bicycles or something) despite the fact it is the only way to get things done.

The ineptitude of our Taliban advisories is one reason why the military portion of the surge is working so well.  Another reason is that we have (under the radar) eased up the restrictions on the use of firepower. As I mentioned in past posts the Marines down south have no problems with the ROE and they shoot HIMARS and run tac air daily.  Spencer Ackerman at Danger Room has blogged on the HIMAR  but unlike his observations it seemed to me that shooting  HIMARS was easier for the Marines then working in Tac Air.  Regardless it is clear that the military has turned a corner and is prevailing on the southern field of battle.  For a retired infantry guy like me it is great to see but it is also irrelevant.

The reason our current military success is meaningless is because our other governmental agencies insist on working through the government in Kabul despite a decade of experience proving the central government is not going to function like a western government. The other problem that every senior decision maker involved with this endeavor also knows is that the people of Afghanistan will not accept a government installed and maintained by infidels as legitimate. It’s one of those inconvenient truths that is not talked about in polite company.

It occurs to me that a rational approach towards Afghanistan would mandate we spend more time and effort bolstering leaders like Governor Abdul Karim Brahui  while simultaneously ignoring and marginalizing the central government in Kabul.  That is the only way (as I see it) that we can compliment the military success we are seeing in the South.  But the big boys in the aid racket don’t want effective solutions; they want giant multi-million dollar contracts and despite a 10-year history of failure they will get them. Those fools will continue pissing away a kings fortune daily while accomplishing little. That is not right, it is not fair, it pisses me off but I’ll you this; it is the truth.

There are a couple of recent articles in the flood of coverage about Afghanistan which caught my eye last week.  The first is factually wrong but I understand what the author was saying and he is, in a sense correct.  The second is factually correct, I understand what that reporter was saying too and think he is, in a sense wrong.  By analyzing both one can get a read on where we are in our battle to bring security to the population in the context of nation building.

The first article is Afghanistan’s Forgotten Province by Karlos Zurutuza which is about Nimroz Province.  From the article:

‘You’re right, no troops based there,’ he says. And I’m realizing now that there’s not a PRT (Provincial Reconstruction Team) in the area, either.’ I ask him why none are stationed there, but he doesn’t have an answer. Neither do the experts.

Nimroz is a major smuggling hub in Afghanistan: heroin goes out and weapons get in across the Afghan-Iranian border,’ says best-selling writer and renowned Afghanistan commentator Ahmed Rashid. He says he has no explanation for the military abandonment’ of this remote, but potentially key, southern province.

Nimroz Province has two major municipal centers; the capitol of Zaranj which is on the border with Iran and Delaram which is astride Rte 1 bordering Helmand Province.  There are no ISAF forces in Zaranj but there is the 2nd Marine Regimental Combat Team in Delaram.  There are over 10,000 ISAF troops in the Province and if you google “Nimroz Province” you’ll see several articles about the Marines fighting there.  So the article is wrong but the point the author is trying to make which is Nimroz has not received anything like the redevelopment love being dumped into other key provinces is correct.  Was correct is more accurate because Nimroz is about to feel the love.

This War was published by self described “person of liberal temperament”  James Traub who takes the reader on a lengthly yet concise review of American force projection overseas to explain why he thinks Afghanistan “…feels like, increasingly, is Vietnam, especially to people who formed their views of American military power, and indeed of America itself, in opposition to the Vietnam War.”  He is unable to make his case because we just do not know what the end game will look like.  Along the way he reports from the front of the Khandahar battle a few things I find very interesting.

By the time I arrived, Arghandab had become safe enough for the district governor, Hajji Abdul Jabbar, to report to work every day at the district center inside the base. Abdul Jabbar was just about the whole of government in the district, since the few officials sent from ministries in Kabul tended either not to show up or not to work when they did. Every morning, Abdul Jabbar held an audience for petitioners, listening to their grievances and stamping their tattered papers. Once a week, he met with the district  shura, a group of village elders and farmers. The meeting I attended featured a lot of shouting and accusation, much of it by Abdul Jabbar. It seemed pretty formless, but Kevin Melton, a very tall and very young official from USAID, leaned over to me and said, They’re talking about security. Normally it’s ISAF doing the talking. They’re pointing fingers at each other; that’s progress.

I felt like I was watching a political-science experiment: forging a social contract in a state of nature. Melton believed that what mattered was not so much building roads or schools as overcoming the legacy of distrust, the habit of seeking violent solutions to all problems. He saw his job as helping give local citizens a voice in decisions, so that ultimately they could take responsibility for themselves rather than simply accepting assistance. And he felt that his efforts were working. Thanks to small-team units living out in the district and to constant patrolling among the villages a crucial element of COIN strategy the Taliban presence had dropped significantly. If things continue as they have for the last four months, Melton quoted Hajji Mohammad, the  shura leader, as saying, this next year could reverse the last seven.

The presence of a USAID Field Service Officer (FSO) is due to the civilian component of the surge and they are showing up in just every key district in the South.  The second bit of information in the quote is that the American army has dispersed it’s maneuver battalions in the same manner the Marines have done in the Helmand.  They are off the FOB’s and in the ville with the people which means Gen Petraeus may in fact be the most effective General Officer of his generation.  The General sits on top of a massive military bureaucracy fighting a nasty insurgency with a coalition combat force and a dysfunctional host government. Despite this he has been able to turn his intent of getting off the FOB’s into action which is something his predecessors were unable or unwilling to do.

As I said above Nimroz Province is about to feel the love as the Marines and their USG surge counterparts start to focus on a Province which has been quiet yet remains  important due to the border crossing with Iran. The Province has a new Governor, Abdul Karim Barahawi who is an elder in the Barahawi  Baloch tribe and a respected, reportedly effective, commander who fought both the Soviets and the Taliban. He is a serious, competent man who wants to do right by the people of his province. Nimroz is a place which has plenty of Taliban but pretty good security. The roads are not safe at night for expats or Afghans who work for the government but commerce seems to flow without too much shrinkage. The Taliban in Nimroz seem to be mostly locals and focused on protecting and running the logistical pipeline from Iran into the Helmand Province.

The Americans face a tough choice in Nimroz. It is calm enough and the threat diffuse enough that there is no geographic or human terrain at which one can aim a kinetic operation. There is little to clear but it is not safe enough to hold. The Marines understand the best way to accomplish the “Hold” part of the mission is not with combat troops.  They want to weaponize money and use that to conduct the build but due to self imposed force protection measures they cannot get out and about in Nimroz or any other quiet, permissive area of the country.

We are spending billions of dollars to accomplish a mission we can’t do because of artificial constraints that do not reflect reality on the ground. Yet lightly armed experienced international stability operators can work all anywhere in the province when they work with local shura’s, village elders and district government officials.  I know this from personal experience.

Let me provide a hypothetical example to illustrate the point of how artificially high the overhead is for your typical US Government (USG) employee trying to do reconstruction. In this example the USG employee concerned with good governance and assigned to a PRT to mentor  provincial authorities.

To make this a best case scenario allow me to further stipulate that USG employees are allowed to move off post for official meetings with just two vehicles and four armed protection specialists and that he is able to get off base once a week or about 40 times in a 12 month deployment.  Here’s the stubby pencil math:

Cost of vehicles (including import fee’s and ECM equipment) 450k each

Cost of security operatives (including R&R rotations, mobilization training, insurance, admin fees etc…) 550k each

Cost of housing both operatives and USG official on a FOB 1 million each

Total cost divided by 40 trips =  $203,750.00 per trip most of which are less than 3 miles total.  I cost less than half that per year and don’t need or want the security specialists.

I have often argued contractors are the only efficient tool we have but let’s face it – that doesn’t look like it is going to happen.  Creating yet another USG agency with a mandate to operate closer to the contractor model won’t work.  Once a US Government Agency comes is created it is impossible to un-create and will grow exponentially regardless of performance.

This is where having unlimited amounts of other peoples money (OPM) really hurts.  I know most of the USAID FSO’s in the Helmand and I deal with the American military on a daily basis. The FSO’s at the district level are smart, competent and just as dedicated to the mission as the Marines they are living with.  They are also frustrated because they know all to well the cost of being hamstrung by force protection mandates. The Marines are looking for a few good men to operate the way we are currently operating in Nimroz Province and they too are frustrated.  I have been advocating for years that armed contractors (not security contractors but project implementors) are the perfect solution. But let’s be honest that is not going to happen.

Being efficient, accomplishing the mission in a cost effective manner with minimal loss of life; all the things I was taught were important as a junior officer in the Marines turns out to be completely irrelevant to the ever expanding big government agencies. Americans have a long history of successfully fighting small wars far from home as do many of our allies. These small wars were fought on shoe string budgets by small units of Marines and sailors (and at times the American army too) who had arrived on ships are weren’t going home until the conflict was over. It is now inconceivable that the United States would send combat units into a theater of action for years on end. That is the only way a western military will ever be able to operate effectively while limiting their casualties and civilian casualties from collateral damage. I bet you could raise a battalion or two of volunteers to try a deployment like this but it is hard to imagine the USA pulling it off.

So what to do about Afghanistan’s forgotten province?  I ask one of my brother Marines what he would do were he given this problem to solve under the historical constraints normally faced by Marine commanders fighting a small war.  He replied immediately ; Q-cars, fire force and pseudo operators. Which is exactly what I would say as would all of my friends who are in the business. But there is no way the American military could even contemplate let alone run such decentralized high risk operations.

There are legitimate reasons to give Nimroz Province some attention but we don’t have to spend billions to do it.  We are going to put our money on the line to prove that. Soon Ghost Team will be heading into Nimroz Province with the intent of getting the irrigation canals up and the capitol city refurbished.  Nimroz will soon no longer be the forgotten Province.

I have written in the past about night raids and aggressive ISAF convoy tactics causing unnecessary civilian casualties.  I have also written on the importance of not allowing enemy fighters who attack ISAF units to live and fight another day.  Counterinsurgency requires adaptation and my annoyance at night raids or shooting car loads of locals who come too close to convoys is that there are better ways to handle both situations. Nine years and counting and I have seen little adaptation to the local environment by the American military and our NATO allies until now.

I have just witnessed adaptation by the military after spending some time with the Marines of Regimental Combat Team 1.  They are operating in the southern Helmand province where the terrain is flat and the enemy not able or willing to operate in large numbers. Prior to this trip all my observations regarding military efforts have been “effects based”.  I had been on the outside looking in.  I have never before traveled with a military patrol nor have I had the opportunity to observe and talk with troops in the field.

I have posted in the past on the rules of engagement often linking to Herschel Smith at  The Captains Journal with whom I am in complete agreement.  We feel the rules of engagement are too restrictive and endanger the lives of ISAF and Afghan soldiers in the field. I posted recently about my first visit to RCT 1 where Col Furness and his staff do not feel the rules of engagement are too restrictive or inappropriate. On this trip I had a chance to talk to grunts in the field, platoon sergeants, company commanders as well as all three battalion commanders. The consensus is that the Marines do not consider the rules of engagement too restrictive. The only bitching I heard from the junior enlisted men concerned the strict PID – positive identification of a target before they can engage.

The examples I heard about the problems with PID were instructive. One of the Sergeants told me about an incident where the lead MATV had hit a large pressure plate IED which destroyed the mine roller attached to the front of it and most of the engine compartment. As the Marines worked to recover the vehicle small teams of Taliban would open up from the outside of some compounds a few hundred of meters to the East. Then they would displace and do the same thing from the West. The battalion commander had strict rules about firing into the populated portions of blocks (this was in Marjah) and being a passenger in the targeted  vehicle he was standing right there taking the whole situation in. The sergeant was frustrated because they never got a fix on the shooters so they could not return fire. I asked LtCol Ellison about this and he was blunt; “I’m not lighting up an area where families we know and support are living in order to suppress a couple of idiots who were shooting a few long range, ineffective rounds.”

I’m growing fond of LtCol Ellison – that’s warrior talk there brother.

Another interesting story unfolded as we were touring the Choor Bazaar. The ANA troops had spotted a man carrying an AK47 and they exchanged gunfire with him. The man ran into a local compound just as a patrol of Marines rounded the corner on a dead run. The Marines threw in a frag grenade which killed the gunmen and went into the compound to recover him and his weapon. The man’s brother came to the bazaar to speak to LtCol Ellison telling him his brother was “not right in the head” and should not have been out with a rifle. He understood that his brother should not have been shooting at the ANA and that Marines responded as expected to an active gunman. After saying that he asked for his brother body and the AK 47 he had been using. LtCol Ellison was polite but firm telling the man the Marines will not tolerate shooting at the Afghan security forces in Marjah because they leave him little choice in response. Having established this point he apologized and asked the man to come in and make a claim for their loss (financial compensation for accidental death) at the district governors office. He promised they would have no further issues with the burial and to ensure that told him a squad of Marines would be there to protect them.  All of this was heard by the mans neighbors who crowded in to listen to the interpreter as the discussion progressed. The man then asked if he could have his AK back.  LtCol Ellison just looked at him and his terp said “no”.  And that was that – the villagers headed back home and we continued on our way.

Ltcol Ellison is an exceptionally gifted commander with a very clear understanding of what he is doing and where his efforts are going.  His rules of engagement are different from his sister battalions to the north and south of him.  He has packed away his 81 mortars and sent that large platoon out west in the desert across the Helmand river to interdict Taliban fighter infiltration. He only lets his company commanders shoot illumination rounds from their 60 mortars unless there are exceptional circumstances requiring HE (high explosive) rounds.  He told me the battalion that proceeded him, the 1st Battalion 6th Marines had cleared central Marjah and that he was solidly in the hold phase of the operation.  He has spread out into over 80 positions ranging from lone static MRAP’s  (manned by rotating fireteams) watching areas of high IED activity to squad, platoon and company combat outposts.  LtCol Ellison told me “we shoot a lot of Hellfire’s and sometimes other air delivered ordnance but for the most part our aggressive patrolling keeps the Taliban out.  We’re driving the incident numbers into the basement.”

In the northern outskirts of Marjah and beyond the 2nd Battalion 9th Marines (2/9) has been tasked with pushing the Taliban out of the populated areas and keeping them out.  They have sections of 81mm mortars in each company patrol base and use them frequently.

The portion of 2/9’s A.O. that I saw looked exactly like the rest of Marjah.  The same large grid pattern with clusters of houses surrounded by fields but there were a lot less people visible in the streets and fields.  The Marines patrol aggressively but get much more contact and they are much quicker with the supporting arms and heavy machineguns.  Fire missions have to be cleared at the battalion level but that is how the Marines do things regardless of front specific ROE and the reason for this is de-confliction.  They have a lot of Marines out patrolling at any given time and have to know where all of them are before they cut lose the firepower.

Rifle company CP’s are pretty high tech these days. The watch chief has a chat window open with the battalion and updates them constantly with locations of friendly patrols as well as a narrative of what they are up to. Accounting for them when clearing fire missions is virtually instantaneous.  When a patrol makes contact or calls in a casualty the chat box pops up on every operations screen in the region. This makes clearing fires or launching a medical evacuation  just  a matter of minutes after the green light is received.

Marjah is the first place I have seen ANCOP’s who are the Afghanistan National Civil Order Police. The Marines make good use of them and they also give them specialized training at Camp Leatherneck prior to sending them out.  The ANCOPs I saw in Marjah were clearly Tajiks from the North of the country.  They spend a lot of time talking with the local people and they are clearly a valuable asset in gaining the kind of local atmospherics which can greatly aid the Marines as they work through the “Hold” portion of their mission.  I have seen articles like this one in the press about patrols from 2/6 looking for the houses of certain tribal members.  I am guessing that was earlier in the  deployment. They seem to know all the tribal members now and would be sending the ANCOP’s out to locate the compound for a specific guy if they did not already know where he lived.

Marjah is a small area of Helmand province with a unique set of circumstances.  It was fascinating to me that Marine battalions had adapted with different operational templates between units just a few miles away from each other.  But that is what it takes to do counterinsurgency.  The ability to adapt and make tactical determinations based on micro level ground truth is essential to the mission.

The Marines have a distinct advantage in counterinsurgency due to the size of their maneuver units.  Marine rifle companies, battalion and regiments are much larger than their army counterparts. This is a legacy of World War II where the Marine battalion table of organization was designed to allow the battalion to function in the face of heavy casualties. Size matters in most things and especially when it comes to boots on the ground but the Marines also have another advantage;their well documented bias for action.

Not all my readers thought Mac’s observation in this post; (that this is smart guys war) – was that smart.  I did at the time and now that I have seen the line units in the field I agree with Mac even more. I’m all for stopping most night raids and using those teams for village stability operations. I am also for adopting convoy techniques that fit the local environment so that the shooting of civilian vehicles (which I have to admit has dropped off considerably over the past year) stops.  But it seems to me that the current ROE is proving to be more than adequate for those who can fight the smart guy war.