I was on a conference call last week with JIEDDO commander Lt. Gen. Michael Oates, who discussed IED networks in Afghanistan, where IED attacks have doubled over the past year. While Oates was careful not to reveal much in the way of breaking news, he provided some interesting detail on the bomb networks in Afghanistan.

Bomb networks in Afghanistan differ somewhat from those in Iraq. Iraqi IED cells were largely funded by Saddam Hussein loyalists and sympathetic Sunnis in the Arab Gulf states. Bomb emplacers were the disenfranchised and the unemployed and most bombs were randomly placed. As an intelligence officer in Baghdad once told me, an emplacer would simply walk out his front door and drop a bomb onto the highway.

In Afghanistan, the networks have “almost a military-style organizational structure,” with top level direction of IED placement. Bomb emplacers follow directives from the “chain of command,” and the emplacers are usually trained fighters. “There’s a direction for where they should be emplaced, and the order is given and they’re emplaced,” he said.

I asked Oates about the Haqqani network, the military’s most lethal foe in Afghanistan; Bill Roggio of the long War Journal labels the Haqqani network “al Qaeda’s Afghan branch.” Oates said the Haqqani network was the “senior” Taliban faction operating in Afghanistan and it’s signature bomb is the “potassium chlorate-based homemade explosive.”

This cruder, more “homemade,” aspect is the big difference between IEDs in Afghanistan and those encountered in Iraq. Iraqi IEDs typically used military grade explosives and insurgents there widely used the explosively formed penetrator (EFP) shaped charge device. Afghan IEDs are much cruder devices, using commercially available fertilizer, potassium chlorate and ammonium nitrate, as accelerants. Triggering is typically rudimentary, mostly pressure plate or trip wires, with a few remotely detonated.

While Taliban IEDs are less sophisticated, because most roads are dirt, the insurgents are able to deep bury very large bombs that can destroy the most heavily armored vehicles with huge underbelly blasts. The lack of metallic components in those IEDs also makes them more difficult to detect. The military has been outfitting more vehicles with the simple, yet effective, mine roller.

One solution JIEDDO is trying out, is to set up telescoping poles with cameras on top to establish “persistent surveillance” on the more heavily trafficked dirty roads. The major obstacle to that effort is transportation, Oates said, getting the gear into Afghanistan and maintaining it. He said cameras mounted on blimps will also be used, as they were in Baghdad.

Oates is trying to beef up forensics inspection of the bombs themselves so as to track them back to specific bomb makers, an approach that proved effective in Iraq.

– Greg

Author, historian and former Marine Steven Pressfield is on what I consider the dream tour of Afghanistan with Marine Gen. James Mattis, commander, Joint Forces Command. You know that question, “Who would you want to be sat next to on an interminably long plane flight?” My answer would be Mattis, he is whip smart, a keen student of history and a seasoned combat commander.

Well, Pressfield sat across from Mattis on a G5 across the Atlantic and then joined him on a tour of the Afghan war zone, including visits with VIPs, grunts and Afghan troops, and blogs about at his site. I’m envious to say the least.

Mattis really impressed me when he came out against the first Fallujah assault as response to the killing of the Blackwater personnel; he argued his Marines shouldn’t be used as an instrument of revenge. I’ve been further impressed with what’s been coming out of JFCOM under his direction. I’m told he’s been looking into various Air Force/Navy and Army/Marines projects that lack joint context to solving what are joint problems.

I really liked Pressfield’s “Gates of Fire”, first rate historical fiction, though haven’t read any of his other books. It’s well worth your time to read his blog posts of his trip with Mattis. Pressfield also gives what I thought was a pretty darn insightful summary of his visit to the war zone, even if it was from within the “bubble,” as he characterized it. While he says he’s not a journalist, he clearly has a good eye for detail, and he does a good job capturing the big picture of the challenges we face in Afghanistan. I’ve got to think, spending as much time as he did with the good general, it reflects more than a bit of Mattis’ own thoughts on the situation.

“The campaign has two extremities. At the top-end is the NATO/ISAF/American Machine. This Machine is made up of men and money, of massive bases and O’Hare-sized airfields, of vehicle parks and tarmac aprons chockablock with MRAPs and Black Hawks and C-130s and Tomcats. Its elements include drones and laser-guided missiles, satellite imaging and biometrics. It is thousands of tons of supplies and construction materials; rooms full of captains and majors manning laptops; it is PowerPoints, flow charts and projections, focus groups, think tank treatises. The Machine is also constituted of a can-do attitude, a fierce and dedicated work ethic, a commitment to integrity and transparency and an attitude of good intentions that no one who has seen it can ever doubt. All of it is powered by a will and a level of professionalism that is without peer for putting a man on the moon or a thousand-pound bomb down a chimney. That’s the input end of the dynamic. That’s the Machine.

At the bottom, at the receiving end, is the villager, the tribesman and the Afghan man in the street. From where he stands, the Machine is a marvel. It is rich beyond imagining. It can call down death from the sky or beyond the horizon; it can see in the dark and strike without warning out of nowhere. Its intentions are good. Its heart is in the right place. But what can it do for him? He has seen clever men manipulate the machine and wicked men take vengeance on those who have been reckless enough to befriend it. He may be illiterate, this man of the village or the street, but he is not stupid. He has seen great powers come and go. In his own or his father’s lifetime he has lived through domination by the Soviets, the Afghan communists, the warlords and the Taliban. Now the NATO Machine has come. If our man can tap this apparatus for a job or a contract, he will. Every little bit helps. Most Afghans, we are told, view the Coalition presence favorably. I would too. The Yanks and their allies bring in cash and development projects, and they’re a far more benign presence that Genghis Khan or the Brits or the Russians, who were there for reasons of conquest or self-aggrandizement. The Americans just want to help. The Machine wants to bring security, development, education. It wants to get Afghanistan up on its feet. Can it?

In the middle lies the space between the Machine and the man of the village, the man of the tribes. Here is the payoff point. This ground is occupied by the Marines and Army troopers and allies who man the frontier posts in the mountains, who hold down the outposts in the south and east. This space is held by the Marines in Helmand who fight and camp with their Afghan counterparts, who wash in the canals and eat the same lentils and flatbread, who haven’t had a shower in the past twenty-one days and won’t have one for the next three months. These are the guys who put a human face on the Coalition effort. They’re the young warriors who make friends and learn the lingo and constitute the person-to-person payload that the Machine above (which is as remote to them as it is to the Afghans they operate beside) has come halfway around the world to deliver.

My question is: are there enough of them? Have they penetrated deeply enough? Will they stick around? Does the Coalition possess the patience and political will to give their efforts time to bear fruit?”

– Greg

The Army is fast tracking a GPS guided 120mm mortar round to Afghanistan in response to an urgent request for precision mortar fire from commanders on the ground there, and should be fielded by the end of the year. Called the Accelerated Precision Mortar Initiative (APMI), it improves upon the current round’s 136-meter Circular Error Probable (CEP) reducing it to about 10-meters.

“This is designed for a precision capability such as against a sniper in a building, or enemies in a bunker or trench. If you were to engage with a conventional mortar round, you would have to fire 8-to-10 rounds to kill or suppress the target. With APMI, you will probably be able to do the same thing with one or two rounds,” said Bruce Kay, systems coordinator for the Army’s mortar programs in a press release.

The Army will soon down-select from one of three competing industry teams: Raytheon-Israeli Military Industries, General Dynamics and ATK.

This is another example of the Army redressing a long neglected weapon that will be hugely important in the small unit, infantry battles that will dominate current and future wars.

– Greg

So that paper we linked to and wrote about yesterday, Increasing Small Arms Lethality in Afghanistan: Taking Back the Infantry Half-Kilometer, is generating some major heat, particularly down at Special Operations Command (SOCOM), we learned today.

The paper, written by a student at the School of Advanced Military Studies (SAMS) at Leavenworth, that’s the one for the Army’s best and brightest officers, says the infantry’s standard small arm (the M-4 rifle) cannot engage the enemy in Afghanistan where most firefights occur past 300 meters. This is due to an ineffective round, the 5.56mm, and inadequate training. The paper was written last fall, but has really been making the rounds just in the past few weeks.

I brought the paper up this morning during a roundtable discussion at the Pentagon with the folks from Program Executive Office – Soldier. Col. Doug Tamilio, program manager for Soldier weapons lethality (this guys weapons knowledge is unreal), said it was a very good paper, although he thought some of the conclusions were a bit out of context. Tamilio has made it mandatory reading for his shop, particularly after spending a few days down at SOCOM and hearing the splash the paper has made there.

“He’s right, the fight in Afghanistan is longer… But you’ve got to go back to where soldiers are today. Can a soldier engage beyond 300 meters accurately? The answer is probably not.” Most soldiers coming out of basic training can’t shoot expertly, except for the few sharpshooters. “It takes a while to become an expert at shooting at ranges beyond 300 meters,” he said.

But PEO Soldier is focused on equipping, not so much training. So what is PEO Soldier giving the infantry to take back that half kilometer?

To begin with the 7.62mm M-14 Enhanced Battle Rifle (EBR), a modern version of the venerable M14 rifle, Tamilio said. Long a favorite of Navy SEALS and other special ops units, the Army is now distributing two EBR 14s per rifle squad to get more range and lethality. Soldier feedback so far has been very positive, he said. A team is in Afghanistan right now collecting feedback from soldiers and putting together a report to brief to Congress.

The other weapon that’s gained favor with foot soldiers in Afghanistan is the Mk. 48 Squad Automatic Weapon (SAW), a 7.62mm version of the SAW that is used by SOCOM but the Army is now buying. Soldiers are leaving behind the 5.56mm SAW and taking the 7.62mm version with them instead, he said.

“The fight in Afghanistan has probably shown us that 7.62mm, in certain aspects, is needed and required,” he said. Soldier preference for the EBR 14 and the Mk. 48 SAW backs that up.

But moving the entire rifle squad to the heavier round is a bigger question for the Army infantry school at Fort Benning to wrestle with, Tamilio said. Until now, the policy has been that in a 9-man squad the Army would keep the 5.56mm round across the squad. “We’re starting to think of a mix within our squads.”

The question then becomes do you need a 7.62mm in every type of fight? Is it the right round for close quarters urban firefights? These are the questions the Army is grappling with, Tamilio said. He wasn’t ready to say the Army should move to the bigger round across the board.

PEO Soldier is trying to provide a “modular” capability to the rifle squad, where they can mix and match weapons for different missions, said Brig. Gen. Peter Fuller. That’s a concept borrowed from special operations, where they have a big closet full of weapons, tailored to specific missions, that they can choose from. The paper’s author referred to this preferred approach as the “arms room concept.”

The focus right now is on the three Afghanistan surge brigades, he said. “We’ve gone to them and said here is some additional capability we have in our closet that hasn’t been fielded… we can’t field it to the whole Army. But I can give you an increased capability so you have a little more kit in your kit bag to adapt to that environment.”

Okay, time for a deep dive into the tactical. The point of departure is this paper by Army Maj. Thomas Ehrhart, Increasing Small Arms Lethality in Afghanistan: Taking Back the Infantry Half-Kilometer (.pdf), written last year at the Command and General Staff College, that says fighting in Afghanistan has exposed the fact that American infantry are poorly equipped and trained for long range firefights.

In Afghanistan, the infantryman’s “weapons, doctrine, and marksmanship training do not provide a precise, lethal fire capability to 500 meters and are therefore inappropriate,” Ehrhart says. Unlike on the streets of Iraq, where firefights were few and were typically fought under 300 meters, insurgents in Afghanistan skillfully use the wide open rural and mountainous terrain to stretch the battlefield. The following excerpt sums it up pretty well:

“Comments from returning non-commissioned officers and officers reveal that about fifty percent of engagements occur past 300 meters. The enemy tactics are to engage United States forces from high ground with medium and heavy weapons, often including mortars, knowing that we are restricted by our equipment limitations and the inability of our overburdened soldiers to maneuver at elevations exceeding 6000 feet. Current equipment, training, and doctrine are optimized for engagements under 300 meters and on level terrain.”

There’s a lot to unpack in this paper, the author gets into the relative merits and disadvantages of the 5.56mm round, reliability of the M4, the rifleman’s standard ACOG site, basic training, adding more marksmen to the squad and even the shortcomings of the standard issue magazines (Magpul gets a real big shout out for their PMAG M4 mag replacement). He concludes that only with significant changes to training, doctrine and weapons will infantry be able to engage targets out to 500 meters.

“In the table of organization for a light infantry company only the six –M240B 7.62-mm machineguns, two– 60-mm mortars and nine designated marksman armed with either 7.62-mm M14 rifles or accurized 5.56-mm M16A4’s rifles are able to effectively engage the enemy. These weapons systems represent 19 percent of the company’s firepower. This means that 81 percent of the company has little effect on the fight. This is unacceptable.”

I’m going to get into a number of these points throughout the week, but first off, I want to get into Ehrhart’s description of meeting engagements in Afghanistan and the standard U.S. tactical response. “The enemy travels light and employs supporting weapons from standoff, to include mortars and medium machineguns. Faced with these conditions, the modern [U.S.] infantry attempts to fix the enemy with direct fire and use supporting assets to kill the enemy,” he writes.

Supporting assets is either artillery, if in range, or more commonly air strikes. My question, can U.S. troops be provided enough organic lethality that they can overmatch the enemy with both direct and indirect fires without having to wait for air strikes? Prompt air support might not always be available and the infantry must have the weapons to overmatch the Taliban.

The Soviets in Afghanistan ran into the same tactical challenge. Read accounts of Soviet infantry firefights in Afghanistan in the 1980s and you’ll see they invariably hauled their AGS-17 30mm grenade launcher with them on most every dismounted operation, particularly in the mountains. It was cherished for its high rate of fire and nearly 1,700 meter range.

I know this gets into another important point the paper raises, which is an overly encumbered infantryman trying to run down Taliban light fighters. Yet, at around 50 pounds with tripod and ammo, the whole package was relatively light and mobile; it could be broken down into manageable parts. Soviet infantry valued the AGS-17 so much they built a special harness that attached to the assistant gunner’s back so that if they ran into a firefight he would drop down on his stomach and the gunner would mount the grenade thrower to his back and begin firing. The AGS-17 became the weapon around which the squad or fire team was organized, much like the light machine gun in U.S. and western armies.

U.S. infantry do not have a comparable weapon. The Mk. 19 40mm launcher weighs 73 pounds (the AGS-17 gun weighs 37 pounds), and that’s just the gun, add another 20 pounds for the tripod and then ammunition and you see why it’s typically mounted on vehicles. The weapon also has a bad reputation for rattling itself apart during sustained use.

The Soviets learned pretty quickly in Afghanistan that high rates of fire were vital. Lessons from Afghanistan led them to mount auto-cannon on their BMP infantry fighting vehicles, BTR wheeled vehicles and they rushed lots of ZSU 23–4 quad anti-aircraft guns to theater. The Soviets had lots of towed, rapid fire anti-aircraft guns organic to their infantry units and these were liberally placed about combat outposts in Afghanistan.

Another U.S. shortcoming in the small arms fight is the lack of a GPS guided mortar round. Only now is the Army developing a GPS round for its 60mm and 81mm mortars, and they have yet to reach the battlefield. With a 60mm mortar and GPS guided rounds, American infantry would be ale to accurately target Taliban fighters on the next ridgeline, and even behind it.

The American military, and particularly the Army, has been “platform focused,” doctrine and weapons development has focused on crews fighting a mounted weapons system, be it a tank, Bradley or what have you (the Army plans to spend $7 billion over the next few years to develop a new armored fighting vehicle to add to its massive fleet of armored fighting vehicles). The future of irregular conflict will predominantly be small-unit infantry fights, a fact the acquisition community has not grasped. It’s about time they did and begin fielding lightweight, highly accurate and lethal weapons that are easily carried by the infantry.

The Wall Street Journal reports today that Afghan officials raised a flag over the new government offices in Marja, marking a tipping point in the battle for that southern Afghan town and surrounding area. I think the celebrations may be a bit premature and agree with what comments by Marine Commandant Gen. Conway in an appearance before the House Armed Services Committee. “Marja will be contested for a while until the Taliban pack it up. The nature of an insurgency is that they could well be back,” he said.

Insurgents typically melt away, either into the population or the countryside, when confronted with a massive military offensive. I smiled a bit when I heard British Army Maj. Gen. Nick Patrick Carter, ISAF commander for RC South, briefing reporters on the massive air assault that spearheaded the Marja operation. By landing troops at 11 different locations, using some 60 helicopters in 11 assault waves, “as if it were on a railway timetable drawn up in Germany,” Carter said the air assault “entirely dislocated” the insurgent defenses in the area within the first 24 hours of the operation.

Now, one of the key points to keep in mind is that insurgents do not hold ground. That’s a big war conventional way of thinking. Guerrilla fighters prefer to operate in the shadows where they won’t be targeted by ISAF’s overwhelming firepower. Those Taliban that stayed and fought it out with the Marines over the last few days? Those were most likely young guns for hire, brought in from Pakistan, used as cannon fodder by the Taliban. We’ve seen that before, repeatedly.

It remains to be seen whether the Afghan government can move in and establish some kind of authority in Marja and provide security for the locals without the predatory activities of corrupt officials and police. I’m not so sure the Karzai government is capable. At least they haven’t proven to be up to this point.

Australian counterinsurgency adviser David Kilcullen explains a standard insurgent tactic is to surrender control of an area so the government must move in and administer the area and then governance problems rise. Then, slowly over time, the insurgents move back into the area as the population becomes disgruntled. “The insurgents move forward by pulling back,” he said.

This will be the real challenge of ISAF commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s strategy, trying to connect the government to the people, but reforming the government at the same time. That’s a tall order.

In his briefing, Carter said it would be another 120 days or so before they know whether the local population has decided to go all in with ISAF and the Afghan government or will simply wait for the insurgents to return someday.

He then described the next phase in the campaign plan: “The next big effort that my headquarters will be doing, in conjunction with the U.S. civilian platform that supports and is integrated with it, will be to turn its attention to how Kandahar can be resolved during the course of the next three to six months.” There are around 1 million people living in and around Kandahar. While the city isn’t the insurgent stronghold along the lines of Ramad or Fallujah in Iraq, the Taliban do exert political control there, he said.

When military officials describe the insurgency in Afghanistan they often refer to it as a “syndicate,” or collection of many different fighting groups that typically coalesce for operations and then rapidly disperse. As we’ve come to learn from Iraq and now Afghanistan, clear “chains of command” often don’t exist when fighting today’s networked enemy. “Hydra-headed” is a common description, but actually pretty appropriate when describing insurgent leadership.

Thankfully, the invaluable Bill Roggio over at Long War Journal has put together a detailed analysis of the top leadership, key players and regional military structures of the Afghan wing of the Taliban. Its one of the best open source reports I’ve come across.

Briefly, as I urge you to read and save the link to Roggio’s report, the Afghan Taliban is nominally led by the Quetta Shura (QST) leadership council, based in Quetta, Pakistan. The one-eyed Taliban leader Mullah Omar sits at the top of the QST, but it was the recently seized Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar who was the real operational leader, which is why his capture by Pakistani and U.S. intelligence agents was so significant.

Roggio notes that members of the Taliban’s leadership council are moving from Quetta to the port city of Karachi to avoid increasingly accurate U.S. drone and direct action strikes. That’s bad news. Blending in with a population of some 15 million, many who are refugees from the border fighting and sympathetic to the Taliban, the QST leadership will likely be harder to target in the sprawling city of Karachi than Quetta.

Roggio also provides a list of Taliban leaders who have either been killed or captured, noting:

“The Taliban have a deep bench of leaders with experience ranging back to the rise of the Taliban movement in the early 1990s. On prior occasions, younger commanders are known to have stepped into the place of killed or captured leaders. It remains to be seen if the sustained US offensive and possible future detentions in Pakistan will grind down the Taliban’s leadership cadre.”

Another useful link is Roggio’s constantly updated page tracking U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan. There have been 17 strikes carried out so far this year, according to the site.

– Greg

In 2004, I was in Afghanistan working on a story on efforts to demobilize warlord militia and try to reintegrate mujahedin fighters into Afghan society as something other than warriors for hire. I was at a UN compound outside Kabul as a few hundred mujahedin (mostly from the Northern Alliance) exchanged weapons for money, food and promises of vocational training (turning war hardened mujahedin into tailors or carpet makers seemed a bit far fetched).

The thing that most struck me as I talked to those mujahedin was how tough they were; you could see it in their faces and the confidence in the way they talked about their chosen profession. Some of them had been fighting, first the Soviets and then each other, since they were twelve or thirteen. Fighting was all they knew.

I’ve always wondered why there hasn’t been more of an effort to tap into that pool of battle hardened warriors to battle the various Taliban insurgent groups. After all, the best weapon against a guerrilla fighter is another guerrilla (see origins of Army Special Forces). I understand the concerns about fueling a nascent civil war that some say is already underway in Afghanistan between the mostly Tajik Northern Alliance and the Pashtun Taliban insurgency, but expediency would seem to warrant the risk.

Well, ISAF is now moving in that direction. On a conference call with reporters last week, Maj. Gen. David Hogg, deputy commander of NATO’s Afghan training effort, said they have identified around 3,000 to 4,000 former mujahedin, what he called Afghanistan’s “inactive reserve,” that could be tapped and brought into the Afghan National Army.

“They’re getting a little long in the tooth, but they have some leadership experience,” Hogg said. If the Afghan army needs anything right now its seasoned small unit leaders, so even small numbers of battle hardened leaders could do some good. The former mujahedin fighters are taken to Kabul where they’re put through an eight week training program, he said; so far, some 900 mujahedin have been taught how to be part of a regular army and sent out to ANA units.

Hogg was quick to point out that these are not former Taliban fighters. Reintegrating Taliban insurgents is a politically tricky issue, but Hogg said they were ready to pursue Taliban reintegration and training if the decision is made by the political folks.

Hogg said more recruits have been flocking to the Afghan banner ever since ISAF implemented a pay raise, boosting base pay to $165 a month plus combat pay of $75 a month.

It also sounds like the Army’s Green Berets are getting back to their traditional Foreign Internal Defense mission. Hogg said SF is partnering with Afghan commando battalions, from basic training all the way through to their combat deployment.

– Greg

Tomorrow night, the always excellent Frontline is airing a new documentary, Behind Taliban Lines. It’s shot by a veteran Afghan journalist who followed an insurgent cell for 10 days as they moved men and material between villages and prepare IEDs to attack American convoys. He lived among fighters from Hezb-i-Islami, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s insurgent network, made up of Afghans, Pakistanis, Uzbeks, Tajiks and others.

The promo says his insurgent embed was cut short when two men arrive from Pakistan, ask why he’s being allowed to film, claim he’s a spy and should be beheaded.

– Greg

My colleague Christian Lowe over at Kit Up has a story about Marine Ospreys inserting Force Recon Marines and Afghan troops in blocking positions in southern Afghanistan to cut off Taliban escape routes and meet up with advancing ground elements. It marks one of the first operational uses of the Osprey in the Marja offensive, Christian writes.

The Marine’s ACE is operating 10 of the tilt-rotor aircraft and expects to receive two more from the 24th MEU as it transits the Red Sea on its way to Afghanistan. Marine officials told Christian that at least three of the Ospreys have been outfitted with the special built underbelly gun system and more aircraft will be getting them soon.