Being an outgoing Marine Corps Commandant gives you a hell of a lot more leeway in calling it like you see it. Short timer CMC Gen. James Conway has been one of the most vocal opponents of the Obama administration’s push to repeal the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy.
Today, the typically (and now, with his post-retirement fishing hole in sight, even more so) blunt spoken Conway took aim at the administration’s Afghanistan policy, saying the July 2011 withdrawal deadline may be boosting Taliban morale. “In some ways, we think right now, its probably giving our enemy sustenance… we’ve intercepted communications that say, “Hey we only have to hold out for so long.”
Yet, the enemy is getting tired, Conway said, recent interrogations of Taliban prisoners show a level of exhaustion and frustration with the endless fighting, “they’re getting hammered.” U.S. and NATO troops have wrenched the initiative from the Taliban, he said, constant strikes against Taliban supply lines have made it harder for them to move bomb making materials to the battlefield.
The 2011 withdrawal date really doesn’t mean much to his Marines fighting in southern Helmand province, Conway said, as they’re not going anywhere for years to come. It will be years before the conditions on the ground in Afghanistan will allow the Marines to turn over security to Afghan troops. The CMC’s message was meant for his Marines as much as anybody else, saying they must adjust their “mindset” for a prolonged stay in Afghanistan.
While missiles and RPGs have downed more helicopters in both Iraq and Afghanistan, insurgents shouldering the venerable AK-47 are a far more frequently encountered threat to helicopters in Afghanistan than shoulder fired missiles.
Army and Marine helicopters have been equipped with electronic detection and countermeasures to protect against shoulder fired and larger missiles for years. Yet, there are no systems to tell pilots when they’re coming under small arms fire. That’s about to change.
The military is sending four UH-60 Blackhawk helicopters to Afghanistan, each of which is rigged with 18 acoustical sensors able to detect the supersonic shock wave of a bullet in flight and then triangulate and pinpoint the gunmen. The program, known as Helicopter Alert and Threat Termination (HALTT) system, under development by DARPA, will see its first operational testing come October, Zachary Lemnios, director of Defense Research & Engineering, told reporters today.
HALTT borrows technology from the Boomerang acoustic gunshot detection system developed for ground vehicles. The helicopter equivalent is intended to warn pilots of where the shooter is located, in under a second, so they can either take evasive action or engage.
After way too much speculation, Afghan commander Gen. David Petraeus has reaffirmed the tactical directive restricting the use of indirect fires and air strikes put in place by his predecessor, Stanley McChrystal. The restrictive rules of engagement, intended to limit Afghan civilian casualties, have caused considerable grief among American troops who fear their hands are tied when it comes to unleashing firepower across the Afghan landscape.
“We must continue – indeed, redouble – our efforts to reduce the loss of innocent civilian life to an absolute minimum. Every Afghan civilian death diminishes our cause,” Petraeus writes in the ‘updated” tactical directive. Portions of the directive were publicly released today with some parts deleted that addressed the specifics of when troops are free to engage for operational security reasons. “Subordinate commanders are not authorized to further restrict this guidance without my approval.”
“Prior to the use of fires, the commander approving the strike must determine that no civilians are present. If unable to assess the risk of civilian presence, fires are prohibited,” it reads. The highly specific exceptions to that rule are deleted; the military’s ROE is typically classified. “We must balance our pursuit of the enemy with our efforts to minimize the loss of innocent civilian life, and with our obligation to protect our troops.”
Our man who was just in Farnborough, Glenn Anderson, shot some great footage of BAE’s new ultra-lightweight howitzer that uses titanium on the trails to shave off some serious pounds. The M777 weighs about half what a typical 155mm howitzer weighs. Check out the BAE rep pick up the howitzer’s titanium trail with one hand.
Defense Tech has been doing some document exploitation over the last couple of days to help provide some interesting tidbits to our readers from the release of US military reports dumped by WikiLeaks. We know you’re all busy, so our team will keep reading them so you don’t have to.
In our first couple of scrapes, we noticed some pretty intensive use by SOF of the AC-130 gunship. In the following excerpt, check out the amount of ordnance expended during their gun runs…
Hell hath no fury like a Spectre scorned.
(17957)At 1300Z TF Bushmaster reported the enemy ambushed an ANA convoy SE of FOB Tagab at the mouth of the Tagab Valley. The ANA reportedly detained multiple enemy. At 1538z TF Bushmaster reported recieving SAF from 2x pax w/AKs 1700Z SE 44 TAKING RPG AND SMALL ARMS FIRE, CAS REQUESTED AND WILL BE PROVIDED BY F-18s, 1725Z MIRAGE WILL BE ON STATION, LOCATED AT CHECK POINT 4, 1724Z CAS AND JTAC ATTEMPTING TO GAIN CONTACT, 1747Z SE 44 JTAC IS IN CONTACT WITH AIRCRAFT, 1744Z JTAC IS IN CONTACT WITH CAS WHICH IS 2 F-18s, 1813Z AC-130 IS SCREENING THE ROUTE TO SE 44s FRONT, 1830Z SE 44 JTAC HAS RELEASED F-18s, 1830Z A-C130 IS ENGAGING TARGETS, 1833Z SE 44 IS BEING ENGAGED WITH SAF AND RPG AT LOCATION 42S WD 599 614, 1848Z SE 44 IS IN A LINEAR AMBUSH AT THIS TIME, 1854Z LEAD ELEMENT OF SE 44 CONVOY FOUND AN IED, SE 44 WILL MARK IT WITH A CHEM LIGHT AND C-130 WILL DESTROY IT WITH DIRECT FIRE, LOCATION OF IED IS 42S WD 590 607, 1931Z SE 44 MOVING BACK TO FIRE BASE LOCATION IS 42S WD 59563 60670, 1934Z AC-130 (SLASHER) REPORTS ESTIMATED 27 ENEMY KIA, IED WAS DESTROYED AND CAUSED NO DAMAGE, 2008Z SE 44 CALLED IN AT CHECK POINT TWO WITH NO FRIENDLY BDA AND APPROXIMATELY 4K UNTIL THEY REACH FIRE BASE TAGAB, 2036Z SE 44 HAS REACHED CP1, 2039 AC-130 EXPENDED 202 X 40MM ROUNDS AND 52 X 105MM ROUNDS, 2049Z SE 44 HAS RETURNED TO FIRE BASE TAGAB AND CALLED TIC COMPLETE
Newly installed Afghan theater commander Gen. David Petraeus has issued new “Counterinsurgency Guidance” to troops under his command. The 24 points are largely plucked from Field Manual 3–24 Counterinsurgency and David Kilcullen’s 28 COIN principles albeit with an Afghan flavor; for example, it includes the familiar “human terrain” is the “decisive terrain” and “people are the center of gravity.”
Petraeus has brought lessons from his Iraq command experience to Afghanistan, urging troops to get out and live among the people by positioning “combat outposts” as close to the people as feasible, similar to changes he implemented in Baghdad in 2007. Troops are told to get out of their vehicles and walk, another less from Iraq. While patrolling on foot troops should ditch the high-speed shades: “Situational awareness can only be gained by interacting face-to-face, not separated by ballistic glass or Oakleys.”
The new commander’s guidance includes many of the rules laid down by the previous commander, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, behave politely while in foreign lands and don’t do stupid things that piss off the locals. “Alienating Afghan civilians sows the seeds of our defeat.”
On the always hot-button rules of engagement issue, Petraeus’ new guidance doesn’t say a whole lot; it’s quite likely that a separate “guidance” will address ROE in more detail. It does say that troops must fight with discipline, using only the “firepower needed to win a fight.” As is repeated in every COIN tome, the document says killing civilians or damaging their property serves as an excellent recruiting tool for the insurgents.
The chart above shows monthly IED “incidents,” defined as IEDs placed by insurgents and either found or detonated, in Afghanistan from January 2004 to April this year. It comes from an alarming report from the Pentagon’s Joint IED Defeat Organization (JIEDDO) that was provided to CSIS’s Anthony Cordesman.
The JIEDDO data shows an astounding jump in IED incidents occurred beginning summer 2009 — coinciding with the Marine offensive in the Helmand River Valley — and IED attacks have steadily mounted. There were more than 1,000 IED incidents during March, April and May of this year; nearly half of total incidents involved IEDs detonating. As the JIEDDO brief notes, a “significant number” of IEDs may have been emplaced but were never found or detonated.
The JIEDDO data shows “that IEDs have become the equivalent of the Stinger in allowing irregular forces to pose a major threat even to the most advanced military forces in the world,” Cordesman writes. While the jump in insurgent IED attacks is indeed alarming, the data does show some good news: “the counter-IED effort has kept successful attacks far below the rate of increase in total attacks.”
As can be seen from the chart labeled “Lethality of IEDs Over Time,” the number of deaths per IED attack has “stabilized” at below 20 percent since April 2009. In March of this year, 434 IEDs detonated, resulting in 22 coalition troops killed and 252 wounded. In April, 475 IEDs detonated, resulting in 17 killed and 230 wounded. In May, 544 IEDs detonated, killing 34 coalition troops and wounding 250.
The Washington news cycle will be dominated for the next few days by the Wikileaks document drop as the journalistic herd pores over the 92,000 mostly classified reports that went up on the Wikileaks site yesterday and provided to some media outlets weeks ago. Keep in mind, these are mostly tactical level SIGACT (significant action) reports, and thus present a very narrow, tactical level view of the war.
The media’s frenzied reporting on some of what is contained in those reports has already veered into the sensational and the incorrect. An example comes from The New York Times, one of those, along with the British newspaper The Guardian and the German magazine Der Spiegel, provided the archive in advance by Wikileaks.
The NYT says Afghan incident reports show that the Taliban have used portable-heat seeking missiles (IR-MANPADS) against U.S. and NATO helicopters, a fact, the Times says, that the military has not publicly disclosed.
“The Taliban’s use of heat-seeking missiles has not been publicly disclosed — indeed, the military has issued statements that these internal records contradict.
In the form known as a Stinger, such weapons were provided to a previous generation of Afghan insurgents by the United States, and helped drive out the Soviets. The reports suggest that the Taliban’s use of these missiles has been neither common nor especially effective; usually the missiles missed.”
Yet, during an April 2009 conference call with reporters and bloggers, Lt. Gen. Gary North, U.S. Air Forces Central Commander, acknowledged that the Taliban do in fact use IR MANPADs (heat-seeking, shoulder fired missiles) in response to a reporter’s question on the subject. Here’s what North said:
“We do see, particularly in our rotor force, RPG-7s fired, of course, unguided. We see occasionally the SA– 7 type handheld IRSAM. Every aircraft in our tactical lift and our rotor type helicopters have got defensive measures capability and our intelligence is very good and so our aviators going out are armed with the latest intelligence and the best in technology for IR missile defeat and so we’re very comfortable with the technology, the capabilities, and as you know, aviators, both rotor and fixed, have to keep their head on a swivel because it is dangerous out there on occasion.”
The death toll in Afghanistan is on course to be the highest ever this year, and, as one would expect, the number of wounded U.S. troops is reaching all time highs as well. Through July 3, 2,000 Americans have been wounded in Afghanistan; in June alone, 517 Americans were wounded. That compares to 2,139 wounded in 2009.
Pentagon officials have long warned that the U.S. casualty toll would climb as the surge troops arrive and push into areas where the Taliban have enjoyed free reign over the past eight years. IED attacks, which have increased 22 percent over last year, continue to be the single biggest cause of coalition casualties
Influential Senator Carl Levin (D-Mich.), who chairs the Armed Services Committee, wants CIA piloted drones to add the Haqqani network operating in Afghanistan but based in Pakistan to their target list. U.S. officials, including Afghan commander Gen. David Petraeus, have long said the Haqqani network is their most lethal enemy in Afghanistan. Defense Tech friend and Politico scribe Gordon Lubold writes that yesterday, Levin told reporters:
“We know where they are, we know where their headquarters is, and the same thing with the Quetta Shura. I don’t think they should be off-limits to those strikes — they directly threaten the Afghan mission.”
The insurgent network is commanded by Jalaluddin Haqqani’s son Serajuddin. It operates in eastern and northern Afghanistan and enjoys a sanctuary across the border in the lawless Pakistani tribal regions along the border.
The Haqqanis have extensive links to the Arabian peninsula where they receive most of their financing. Afghan analyst Thomas Ruttig says the Haqqanis were one of the first Afghan mujahedin groups to welcome Arab jihadi volunteers into their ranks. Most of the 500 or so hard core al Qaeda fighters operating in Pakistan’s tribal areas are closely linked to the Haqqani network.
