Max Boot, in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal–
Gen. Stanley McChrystal was appointed commander in Afghanistan to shake up a troubled war effort. But one of his first initiatives could wind up changing how the entire military does business.
Gen. McChrystal’s decision to set up a Pakistan Afghanistan Coordination Cell means creating a corps of roughly 400 officers who will spend years focused on Afghanistan, shuttling in and out of the country and working on those issues even while they are stateside.
Today, units typically spend six to 12 months in a war zone, and officers typically spend only a couple years in command before getting a new assignment. This undermines the continuity needed to prevail in complex environments like Afghanistan or Iraq. Too often, just when soldiers figure out what’s going on they are shipped back home and neophytes arrive to take their place. Units suffer a disproportionate share of casualties when they first arrive because they don’t have a grip on local conditions.
I’ve also heard rumblings of Army units using new media like Facebook, Flickr, et al to keep their stateside counterparts in touch with the news from local villages and chiefs (the Army just recently unblocked social networking sites).
When McChrystal was appointed, the conventional wisdom was that Secretary Gates intended to shake up the Big Army’s cumbersome warfighting methodology (Gates did the same with the Air Force, appointing a special forces pilot to the CSAF slot). That decision seems to be working well for the Air Force, just as it’s working well for the Army. I’m with Boot, this new strategy shows incredible promise and could ultimately do for Afghanistan what Petraeus’ surge did for Iraq.
More on Gen. McChrystal here.
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Great idea.
Viewed from one angle, the approach could be said to be a variation of the Navy’s Blue Crew/Gold Crew arrangement to keeping a forward presence.
Viewed from another angle, this could be seen as creating ‘depth’ that used to be there before the tooth-to-tail ratio got skewed so bad that there is no longer such a thing as ‘reach back’. (OK. there’s still reach back, just nobody standing there to hand you anything).
Viewed from any angle, it seems a pretty clever way to re-establish a system that supports long-term operations – with the opportunity to do it better than ever before.
It’s all good (as long as the guys at home aren’t second guessing the guys deployed at the time – which shouldn’t be a problem if everyone remembers where they’ll be sitting ‘next year’)
Not unlike keeping certain units on station for a long, long time…
Permamently assign some units to Iraq/Afghanistan AOs?
I saw last night that the General wants to start a new way of fighting by working on the Afghan culture and not conventional war methods. For heaven sake…we are not fighting the Afghans but the Talibans! Let’s hope we fight them with conventional methods. This sounds like General Obama not our military thinking!