Seriously? Another meet­ing with the Joint Chiefs, another strate­gic trial bal­loon with the “McChrystal lite” strat­egy and we’re going to study each province and its polit­i­cal needs? Are you freak­ing kid­ding me!?

Meanwhile, our troops fight on with what they have…

…while Washington does its “solemn duty”…whatever…

– Christian

So here’s a lit­tle side­bar story from the Oct. 28 sui­cide attack on the UN guest house in Kabul.

Turns out a con­tract truck dri­ver held off Taliban attack­ers with his AK while 15 UN work­ers were bar­ri­caded in a laun­dry room behind him. John “Chris” Turner was pour­ing 7.62 down range dur­ing the 2 hour gun­bat­tle, sav­ing the lives of the UN work­ers cow­er­ing in the cubby…

“I am armed. I carry an AK-​​47 and I kept fir­ing it to keep the attack­ers away from the group I was guard­ing,” he said, describ­ing how he shot from the entrance of the laun­dry room. The group later jumped over a back wall to take refuge in a house behind the guest house.

…he told the Associated Press in Kabul.
What a badass!

I’ve bumped into a ton of these cow­boy types in both the­aters and it doesn’t sur­prise me for one sec­ond that Turner did what he did. While the third coun­try nation­als are less ballsy, the Americans I’ve met tran­sit­ing through the AO are by in large adven­tur­ers, self-​​reliant and extremely patri­otic. They work hard as hell, put up with poor liv­ing con­di­tions and I’ve never seen them com­plain or act bit­terly towards the troops they help keep comfortable.

I’ll never for­get when we came back from a week out on patrol in Afghanistan and we’d been ambushed twice — once on our way back to the FOB — and we arrived into Salerno pretty late. The KBR work­ers opened the chow hall for us and whipped up some grub for the pla­toon that came back bat­tle and served it to us with a smile. They seemed gen­uinely happy to do it.

Guys like Turner do it for more than the money — part eccen­tric, part thrillseaker, part patriot — they do it in part because to them there’s a sense of ser­vice to their duties. They gen­uinely like being around the troops and doing what they can to make their lives eas­ier and safer so they can do the job of tak­ing it to the bad guys.

Here’s a video Turner made back in the day when he trav­eled to Afghanistan to do a doc on the drug trade there (and to get a bit of the whacky tobaccy for himself).

Great walk-​​off from his dad:

“He said he was burned a lit­tle, but that he wasn’t hurt,” the father said. “He’s got more guts than a Missouri mule.”

So the next time you hear the poobahs whin­ing about how F-​​ed up “con­trac­tors” are in the war zone, remem­ber they’re talk­ing about guys like Chris Turner, a man who put fear aside and slung lead to keep the UN work­ers he was liv­ing with safe from the evil doers…

– Christian

When I was search­ing for a pic to illus­trate the pre­vi­ous post, I ran across this one of a Soldier actu­ally employ­ing local foliage as camouflage.

Just yes­ter­day I was chat­ting with a source and he was say­ing how Iraq had made Soldiers lazy or com­pla­cent because of the rel­a­tive con­ve­nience of the fight­ing there (close, vehi­cle borne engage­ments in pri­mar­ily urban set­tings) whereas Afghanistan stressed old school sol­dier­ing skills that were last seen in Vietnam.

One of the things he men­tioned was using local foliage to cam­ou­flage your out­line, and low and behold, here’s a Soldier (clearly a des­ig­nated marks­man with his souped up M14) who’s des­tined for Ranger school.

U.S. Army Sgt. Zachary Adkins, from Sweetland, W.Va., con­ducts a dis­mounted patrol with his pla­toon near Combat Outpost Herrera, Paktiya province, Afghanistan, Oct. 11. The Soldiers were search­ing for sites from which the Taliban has been using to fire rock­ets at the out­post. Adkins is deployed with Apache Troop, 1st Squadron, 40th Cavalry Regiment.

– Christian

I just want to be clear (and per­haps I should have posted the full excerpt or the link to the report) but the Soldiers at COP Kahler and OP Topside did use clay­mores in their defense and had built well thought out defen­seive bar­ri­ers and wire.

The 2nd Platoon, Chosen Company lead­er­ship made the best pos­si­ble uti­liza­tion of Class IV (con­struc­tion mate­ri­als) assets avail­able at Wanat. All avail­able Concertina wire was installed, and all avail­able con­certina stakes and poles were uti­lized. All avail­able HESCOs were emplaced, and based upon lim­i­ta­tions of the con­struc­tion equip­ment avail­able at Wanat (a sin­gle Bobcat with bull­dozer blade that ran out of gas on July 11th and 12th) all avail­able HESCOs were filled to the max­i­mum extent pos­si­ble. All avail­able sand­bags were max­i­mized. All avail­able weapon sys­tems were posi­tioned with estab­lished fields of fire and range cards. With the excep­tion of weapons sys­tems either sup­pressed or destroyed by the ACM, all weapon sys­tems had been emplaced such that they could be suc­cess­fully employed dur­ing the engage­ment. Available hand tools were max­i­mized, and given the tools avail­able the posi­tions were exca­vated to the great­est depth fea­si­ble.

And on the use of clay­mores, it wasn’t that they didn’t use them, it’s that they didn’t use them effec­tively…

Insufficient num­bers of Claymore mines were posi­tioned to con­trol the dead ground to the north, east and south of OP Topside (only four Claymores were thus employed). At OP Topside the Claymore mines were sim­ply placed atop the ground. Claymore mines were prop­erly tested by the sol­diers, and the three Claymore mines whose wires were not dam­aged func­tioned cor­rectly. Claymore mines were only emplaced after dark­ness at OP Topside, which was an effec­tive TTP. However, the lim­ited num­bers and fail­ure to have over­lap­ping Claymore fields of fire is evi­dence that Claymores were not employed to their max­i­mum effec­tive­ness at OP Topside. Of the four Claymore Anti-​​Personnel mines emplaced at OP Topside at Wanat, one of them had its wires sev­ered by a nearby RPG det­o­na­tion, ren­der­ing it unus­able. A sec­ond Claymore was either knocked over by the RPG det­o­na­tions, fell over for some other rea­son, or was delib­er­ately turned around by the ACM. There was no way for the defend­ers of OP Topside to know that this Claymore mine had either fallen over or been tam­pered with. The other two Claymore mines func­tioned as intended, and at least one killed an ACM insur­gent in the act of cross­ing the wire.

And this is sort of along the point of what Byron, atacms and Mat are get­ting at in their com­ments on the pre­vi­ous post…Afghanistan is tac­ti­cally more like Vietnam than Iraq ever was (at least east­ern Afghanistan is) and I was talk­ing to a source about this yesterday…time to dust off the old school fire­base defense plans and agres­sive patrolling and search and destroy mis­sions, maybe. If you cou­ple that with a com­pre­hen­sive coun­terin­sur­gency strat­egy that’s well resourced not incre­men­tal, then we might be able to eek one out.

And for those of you ques­tion­ing the lead­er­ship and train­ing (as I did a bit), here’s another thing the offi­cial his­tory (draft) said:

2nd Platoon lead­er­ship main­tained high stan­dards of dis­ci­pline within the pla­toon. Numerous can­did pho­tographs taken by sol­diers at COP Kahler from 9–12 July do not evince a sin­gle instance of sol­diers being out of proper uni­form, or not wear­ing their per­sonal pro­tec­tive equip­ment. CONOP Rock Move came at the end of a 15-​​month deploy­ment, but no degra­da­tion of dis­ci­pline could be doc­u­mented, or was reported by mem­bers of the pla­toon. Rigid adher­ence to high stan­dards of dis­ci­pline, to par­tic­u­larly include the stand-​​to mea­sures that per­mit­ted the pla­toon to suc­cess­fully with­stand the deter­mined attack, reflect great credit upon the lead­er­ship of 2nd Platoon and Chosen Company. Stand To at 04:00 (approx 75 min­utes before BMNT) resulted in the gar­ri­son of COP Kahler being alert, awake, all defen­sive posi­tions were fully manned, and all sol­diers were fully equipped and armed prior to attack being launched. This stan­dard defen­sive mea­sure, first doc­u­mented by Major Robert Rogers of Rogers Rangers in 1755, and metic­u­lously imple­mented by 2nd Platoon lead­er­ship, pre­vented dis­as­ter.

I leave you with that for now…I’ll have more on the weapons issue later this afternoon…

– Christian

First of all, dear­est readers…lighten UP! Yesterday’s post on the Russians buy­ing an amphibi­ous assault ship from the French was tongue in cheek, and if you don’t get the irony, watch Spinal Tap or Tropic Thunder a few more times.

OK, so I want to intro­duce to you an excit­ing new source we’ve secured for Military​.com, DT and DoD Buzz con­tent from the Christian Science Monitor. We’ve high­lighted a cou­ple sto­ries from my good friend and for­mer col­league Gordon Lubold, who is the Pentagon Correspondent for the Monitor. Well, after months of nego­ti­a­tions, we’ve earned the right to post Gordon’s con­tent on our sites, which is a huge coup con­sid­er­ing his solid sourc­ing, great analy­sis and top-​​notch writing.

Today, we ran a Lubold story on Afghanistan com­man­ders’ increas­ing counter IED capa­bil­i­ties in-​​country, includ­ing pulling in more EOD Techs, MRAPs and countermeasures.

The U.S. mil­i­tary is respond­ing to the dra­matic rise of road­side bomb attacks in Afghanistan by sig­nif­i­cantly step­ping up its efforts to com­bat the No. 1 killer of American troops in the war.

It is send­ing thou­sands of new bomb-​​resistant trucks there, increas­ing by 50 per­cent the num­ber of explo­sive ord­nance dis­posal experts, and import­ing “lessons learned” from the war in Iraq to counter impro­vised explo­sive devices (IEDs) in Afghanistan.

The effort is not expected to weaken “counter-​​IED” capa­bil­ity in Iraq. That will stay put for now, with the mil­i­tary increas­ing its efforts in Afghanistan. 

But Afghanistan is a much dif­fer­ent IED envi­ron­ment than Iraq, with aspects that make it eas­ier and harder to coun­ter­act the threat. For exam­ple, IEDs are eas­ier to emplace and con­ceal in Afghanistan, since 90 per­cent of its road­ways are unim­proved — dig­ging in a road­side bomb is a lot eas­ier to do and cover up than on a paved sur­face like most of the roads are in Iraq. Also, most of Afghanistan’s IEDs are made from home­spun mate­ri­als, mak­ing the foren­sics and inter­dict­ing of the explo­sives etc. harder to do.

But IEDs are much less sophis­ti­cated in Afghanistan and while deadly, we haven’t seen the kind of triple stack anti-​​tank mine setups, Senao base sta­tion acti­va­tors or EFPs we saw in Iraq. Most are crude, com­mand det­o­nated IEDs which put the insur­gents at much greater risk.

Nevertheless, IED attacks are spiking…

In July 2007, there were 230 IED “inci­dents” in Afghanistan the Pentagon’s ter­mi­nol­ogy for road­side bombs that were det­o­nated or detected. These killed 12 mem­bers of coali­tion forces. Last month, there were 828 inci­dents that killed 49 mem­bers of coali­tion forces, accord­ing to the Joint IED Defeat Organization, an arm of the Pentagon.

In Iraq, by con­trast, there were 170 inci­dents last month, down from the 2,137 reported in July 2007, accord­ing to the organization. 

…but deaths from IEDs are not. According to Gordon’s num­bers, the rate of KIA per IED attack has ticked up a frac­tion of a per­cent, now at about 5.7 per­cent. By con­trast, in Iraq the May 2007 death rate for IEDs was 90 troops in about 1200 attacks, or about an 8 per­cent KIA rate.

What will the MATV bring? Not sure. Look, I’ll meet my crit­ics half way and say that an MRAP robust­ness in a light­weight pack­age is a bet­ter call than flood­ing the zone with, what my boy Dave Woroner likes to call, bank vaults on wheels. But I won­der if, given McChrystal’s new guide­lines, the MATVs are still not COIN-​​centric enough to do that job effectively.

What won the IED bat­tle in Iraq? Not “bang­ing trons” from Prowlers or MRAPs or even the upar­mor­est of upar­mored Humvees. It was turn­ing the pop­u­la­tion against the IED lay­ers and boots on the ground (which I include snipers, who I say are the best counter IED weapon in the US/​Coalition arsenal).

So please read the rest of Gordon’s story on Military​.com and be sure to keep a scan on other CSM con­tent relevent to your inter­ests. We’re glad to have them aboard and look for­ward to fur­ther news on tac­ti­cal devel­op­ment and strate­gic events.

– Christian

As we get set for the lat­est round of pres­i­den­tial elec­tions to kick off in the 20th, I thought it tastey food for thought to for­ward this post at the Small Wars Journal by Military​.com con­trib­u­tor and well known author Bing West.

In his post, West turns the Obama “civil­ian­ized” Afghan strat­egy on its head, and says the key to suc­cess is killing more bad guys.

Red meat for the mar­tial types…

It appears our strat­egy is nation-​​building, with fight­ing and dis­man­tling of the Taliban a sec­ondary con­sid­er­a­tion. Thus, the num­ber of enemy killed will not be counted, let alone used as a met­ric. This non-​​kinetic the­ory of coun­terin­sur­gency has per­suaded the lib­eral com­mu­nity in America to sup­port or at least not to vocif­er­ously oppose the war. But we have to main­tain a bal­ance between mes­sages that gain domes­tic sup­port and mes­sages that direct bat­tle­field operations…

More senior-​​level atten­tion must be paid to inflict­ing severe enemy losses in fire­fights and to arrest­ing the Taliban, so that their morale and net­works are bro­ken. A recent direc­tive for­bids apply­ing indi­rect fires against com­pounds where civil­ians might be hid­ing. That direc­tive upholds human decency and may reduce enemy pro­pa­ganda.

Interesting — and con­tro­ver­sial. Removing the most mil­i­tant of the insur­gency from the bat­tle­field worked in Iraq — though that took mil­i­tary nego­ti­a­tions with key tribal lead­ers to dry up sup­port for the heart of the insur­gency. But they were removed from the bat­tle­field. Can’t guns and bul­lets do the same?

And West also calls for bet­ter and more tech­nol­ogy to keep the bombs drop­ping, bristling at the restric­tions being placed on direct and indi­rect fire sup­port for troops in all but the most “bro­ken arrow” of situations.

But indi­rect fires heli­copter gun­ships and jets used to be called pre­ci­sion fires and gave the US its enor­mous advan­tage in com­bat. Now that such fires are restricted, what pro­vides our advan­tage when the enemy sen­si­bly fights from com­pounds? Dont expect Afghan sol­diers to do it for us. We have equipped and trained the Afghans in our image. They are as heavy and slow-​​moving on the ground as we are, and rely upon our advi­sors to call in the firepower.

This is my third war. It has the high­est level of mil­i­tary schol­ars. Those schol­ars who empha­sized the con­cepts of non-​​kinetic coun­terin­sur­gency need also to design con­cepts that bring more lethal­ity to the ground bat­tle­field. Were pump­ing bil­lions into UAVs. Surely we can find tech­nolo­gies and tech­niques for the grunt.

Like I said, food for thought. Also, be sure to check out his video below.

– Christian

As jour­nal­ists we deal with infor­ma­tion regard­ing the wars on a near-​​constant basis. Usually we approach what we see with stoic eyes — a func­tion of our mis­sion to bring you the news as objec­tively as pos­si­ble — but occa­sion­ally that’s impossible.

This morn­ing I received an email from the local chap­ter of the U.S. Naval Academy Alumni Association with the tragic news that Capt. Matt Freeman, USMC, had been killed in action in Afghanistan.

I met Matt dur­ing my last tour on active duty, when he was a plebe at Annapolis and I was on the fac­ulty teach­ing English, among other sub­jects. He knew that I was a Tomcat guy and asked if I had heard of his dad, Gary, call­sign “Freeperson.” I had. I’d flown on Freeperson’s wing when I was going through the F-​​14 RAG for the first time. He was the kind of fighter pilot stu­dent RIOs wanted to fly with dur­ing syl­labus events — calm and com­pe­tent dur­ing briefs and in the air. And more than that, he was a Tomcat com­mu­nity icon with a great rep­u­ta­tion. When I related that to Matt his face lit up with a proud smile, the kind only a son can offer when some­one says some­thing good about the father he loves.

Matt grad­u­ated with the USNA Class of 2002, and his grad­u­a­tion cer­e­mony at Navy-​​Marine Corps Memorial Stadium was the last offi­cial func­tion of my career. I had a warm spot in my heart for his class. My time on the fac­ulty had coin­cided with their time as mid­ship­men. I’d watched them grow from clue­less plebes to poised junior offi­cers. They were the first class to grad­u­ate after 9–11; their Annapolis edu­ca­tions would be put to the test.

Although Matt went on to become a Marine Corps Harrier pilot, this tour he was serv­ing as a for­ward air con­troller — the guy on the ground who tells pilots where to drop their bombs. It’s tough duty, proof that when they tell young sec­ond lieu­tenants dur­ing The Basic School that they’ll always be rifle­men first, regard­less of war­fare spe­cialy, they mean it.

Matt had been in Afghanistan just over a week when he found him­self as part of a 5-​​man team patrolling the Kapisa Province accom­pa­nied by Afghan National Army forces. Air Force Master Sergeant Rex Temple’s blog describes the details of the battle:

While trav­el­ing through one of the vil­lage ham­lets lined with thick stone walls and mud brick houses, the insur­gents unleashed a furi­ous attack. The insur­gents were well pre­pared and it was almost as they were informed and antic­i­pated their arrival. Approximately 60–100 Taliban insur­gents fired RPGs, AK-​​47s, PKMs, and Ditska (equiv­a­lent of US 50-​​cal.) and other weapons at the approach­ing forces. [Army SPC Chris] Lowe along with his team sought shel­ter in a kalat (mud-​​stone house inside a walled in com­pound). Captain Freeman crawled on top of the roof look­ing for advan­tage points and was fatally hit by a bul­let. Doc the medic was try­ing to pro­vide assis­tance and recover the body. Doc yelled out for some help and Lowes reflexes took over as he scram­bled up a lad­der to the roof. Doc was tug­ging on Captain Freemans body and Lowe appar­ently sensed the dan­ger. He grabbed Doc and threw him down. About the same time, Lowe took a bul­let to his upper right thigh area. Both he and Doc fell off the roof to the ground. Doc appar­ently fell on top of Lowes leg and thought he broke it because Lowe was yelling My leg, my leg.” But when the Doc saw the spurt­ing blood, his med­ical train­ing kicked into high gear and he applied a CAT tourni­quet to stop the bleeding.

The femoral artery was nicked, but Doc was able to sta­bi­lize the bleed­ing and Lowe was trans­ported out of the bat­tle space to a heli­copter land­ing zone. Meanwhile the fierce fight­ing con­tin­ued until the Air Force F-​​15s armed with a 500 lb bomb along with a pair of Army Kiowa Attack heli­copters arrived. The ANA counter-​​reacted by method­i­cally blow­ing up the kalats where the Taliban was hid­ing. The insur­gents retreated and ran for the hills. The next few hours were small tac­ti­cal engage­ments as the Taliban dis­ap­peared. Tragically that day dur­ing this 6.5 hour bat­tle, the ANA lost 4 sol­diers, US 1, and the French had 3 sol­diers wounded. The body count of the insur­gents was 6-​​fold includ­ing one promi­nent Taliban area commander.

The staff of DT wishes a speedy recov­ery to SPC Lowe, a true hero. And we also pass our deep­est sym­pa­thies to Freeperson and the entire Freeman fam­ily. Matt’s death is a great loss to the Marine Corps and the nation. He had much more left to do with his life.

– Ward

It seems that all we’re see­ing on the nightly news is “angry mobs” this and “health reform” that.

Meanwhile, troops are fight­ing and dying in Afghanistan dur­ing a with­er­ing assault on Taliban strong­holds in the south of the country.

We’re not going to let that pass, so as events war­rant, DT will be post­ing con­tent or alert­ing read­ers to good mate­r­ial that will keep them up to date with what’s going on.

First, I’d like to men­tion that after a long hia­tus, Michael Yon has agreed to con­tribute con­tent to Military​.com and its asso­ci­ated prop­er­ties. Yesterday, Ward had a pod­cast inter­view with him even as bul­lets and rock­ets were wiz­zing by. The inter­view was so com­pelling, we penned a com­pan­ion piece that ran as today’s lead story on Military​.com. Please be sure to keep his site in your scan as he con­tin­ues his embed through Christmas.

Also, I’d like to direct your atten­tion to a com­pelling video posted on the Washington Post site shot by Ann Scott Tyson of said paper.

I’ve run in the same cir­cles as Anne for many years on the defense beat, and she is polite, pro­fes­sional, per­sis­tent and com­pas­sion­ate. Well, add to the ballsy as hell, because the video she shot of a day long skir­mish with Marines in Helmand is bad ass…and a trib­ute to her calm under fire and com­fort with new media. She is one of those rare defense scribes that is as com­fort­able in a sit-​​down with SecDef Gates as she is bunk­ing on a cot and eat­ing warm MREs in the dust of Iraq or Afghanistan. Keep her con­tent in your scan.

Watch the video, read the story, lis­ten to the pod­cast…don’t ignore was going on over there in the still (for now) “for­got­ten war”…

– Christian

I’d also like to make our read­ers aware of some great cov­er­age com­ing from a good friend of mine who’s embed­ded over in Afghanistan.

David Wood used to work for the Baltimore Sun before he left the paper dur­ing the cur­rent media crunch, but he landed a great gig at AOL’s new Politics Daily site and they promptly sent him for a six week embed in Afghanistan.

He’s got a great dis­patch that exam­ines the new strat­egy being worked up by McChrystal et al and comes as our boy Ward Carroll just posted an OpEd on the sub­ject.

The Marines have launched a “behind Taliban lines” assault today and with all this com­ing together, I think it’s time to make sure we have some good reads to fol­low events in the Stan…

– Christian