Honorable man

Sgt Salvatore Guinta is that anomaly, at least in recent years: a living recipient of the Medal of Honor. President Obama will hang the Medal around Sgt Guinta's neck this afternoon in the East Wing of the White House. I would give a lot to know what's going through the minds of each man at that moment! What does the soldier think when he stands face to face with the commander in chief? What does the politician think when he stands face to face with a hero--and not just any hero, but one who nearly gave his life to carry out the presidential strategy?

Sgt Guinta's difficult night is brilliantly related (though at second hand) in Sebastian Junger's War, in my estimation one of the best books ever written about combat.  If you haven't read it, you should. It's The Iliad, except that the heroes are the enlisted men. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The chaplain's assistant

There's a wonderful story in yesterday's Wall Street Journal: A Chaplain and an Atheist Go to War. The chaplain is Navy lieutenant Terry Morna, right; the atheist is Religious Programs Specialist 2nd Class Philip Chute, on the left with the assault rifle. "We're here for security," RP2 Chute explains. "We're not junior chaplains." They are a wonderfully mismatched pair. Not only is the chaplain a believer; he really seems to think he's bullet-proof. And not only is RP2 Chute an unbeliever; he's a committed atheist who will quote scripture to correct the chaplain on matters of faith.

My favorite line in the story (by Michael Philips) is the anguished cry by a Marine gunnery sergeant when Lt. Moran dallies before taking cover: "Tell the [expletive] chaplain to get behind the goddamn vehicle!" Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

On graceful exits

“The president didn’t send me over here to seek a graceful exit,” David Petraeus tells the New York Times. “My marching orders are to do all that is humanly possible to help us achieve our objectives.”

But, General, are you really sure? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

War (concluded)

I've finished Sebastian Junger's War and I have to say: this is the book we've been waiting for. It's the best account of Afghan combat, the best portrait of the modern American infantryman, and the best book about warfare in many, many years.

At the foot of this blog is a quote from a poet whose name I never did catch, and which I came across by accident during one of my first research projects for my MA "programme" in War in the Modern World at King's College London: "What truth soldiers would speak / None would hear, and none repeat."

Well, the soldiers of Battle Company spoke the truth, and Mr. Junger repeated it. This is a wonderful book. Buy it. Read it. Pass it on. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

War (the book)

I'm a third of the way through, and I'm hugely impressed. Sebastian Junger became an instant best-seller with The Perfect Storm. Now he's done it again with War. Apart from the rather odd dust-cover photographs, it's a masterful and convincing account of men in combat--in this case, at a fire base in "a small but extraordinarily violent slit in the foothills of the Hindu Kush" mountains of Afghanistan.

It's curious but true that the best accounts of the Afghan war have been written by journalists, not soldiers, though there have been plenty of combat memoirs. (Mostly by officers. Perhaps that's the problem? Mr. Junger concentrates on the grunts, not their commanders.) My previous favorite was The Only Thing Worth Dying For. Mr. Junger's may be the better book, because he was present for much of the action he describes; he didn't write it from interviews after the fact, as Mr. Blehm did with his great account of the Special Forces team that went into the 'Stan in November 2001, when the war was green and everything possible. Check it out at Amazon. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

On what General Petraeus can deliver

The New Yorker, which can be good reading when Hendrik Hertzberg is on vacation, has a Talk of the Town in its July 5 issue on the change of command in Afghanistan. George Packer is articulate and (surprise!) downbeat on whether David Petraeus can actually pull the president's irons out of the fire:

"But disarray among top personnel is almost always a sign of a larger incoherence. American goals in Afghanistan remain vague, the means inadequate, the timetable foreshortened. We are nation-building without admitting it, and conducting counterinsurgency on our own clock, not the Afghans’."

Well, of course we're nation building!  Whoever said otherwise? But Mr. Packer's is a refreshingly honest appraisal of a difficult situation, and for that we can thank George W. Bush. If he were still president, Hendrik Hertzberg would never have allowed anything sensible to be written about the war he launched. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

McClellan, MacArthur, McChrystal

You may be sure that it wasn't Casual Friday when President Obama fired General McChrystal today. (The photo, from the Rolling Stone article that ended the general's career as CINC Afghanistan, was taken during their earlier, ten-minute meeting, ages ago in Washington time.)

Abraham Lincoln fired George McClellan for good cause--he wouldn't attack.

Harry Truman fired Douglas MacArthur for good cause--he marched to the Yalu and then wanted to nuke China for attacking the UN forces in Korea.

Barack Obama fired Stanley McChrystal for--for what, exactly? Being incautious when a reporter was around? Oh dear!

I read the Rolling Stone article yesterday (didn't everyone?).  I thought it was a pretty good piece of journalism, except where Michael Hastings noted that the problem with counter-insurgency was that it required "huge numbers" of troops. Mr. Obama's mini-surge involved 30,000 men. I suppose Mr. Hastings (nor Mr. Obama, for that matter) wasn't yet born in June 1944, when we put 30,000 Americans on a single beach in a single day, and 1,465 of them died, from a nation only half the size of today's United States.

The other amazing thing about this kerfluffle is that everyone is shocked--shocked!--at the impolitic language used by Gen. McChrystal and his aides. (It was mostly his aides, you'll notice, if you actually take the time to read the article.) That's how soldiers talk, for crying out loud.

Today, the president of the United States had a chance to show that he was a bigger man than the general he put in charge of his "necessary war." Instead, he proved that he was a whole lot smaller. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The future of AfPak II

On a somewhat more elevated level than GrEaT sAtAn"S gIrLfRiEnD's interview with Major Mike (see below), Andrew Exum and Max Boot are throwing digits at one another over the American role in Afghanistan. Mr. Exum, who posts under under the nom du web of Abu Muqawama, started the exchange on June 16 by suggesting than the 'Stan was "the graveyard of assumptions." He listed some of those assumptions (for example, that the war is simply a clash between the Hamid Karzai government and the Taliban) and argued that each was wrong. Mr. Boot fired back the very same day: "where there's a will, there's a way." (It used to be that we all read the New York Times, and as a result we all thought the same way, though we might reach different conclusions. Now we all read the same blogs.)

Mr. Exum updated his blog post in response. Mr. Boot  fired back: "Yes, we can" win in Afghanistan, because the people prefer the Karzai government, with all its warts, to the Taliban. Unlike most revolutionaries (Lenin, Castro, Mao, Ho....) the Taliban have been in power before, and the people didn't like it. And again, Mr. Exum updated his blog--a pity he didn't argue at more length. It's an argument worth having, though it seems to me that the end result of Max Boot's faith in the power of national will is simply to pour more of America's treasure and youth into the Afghan graveyard. That's a long distance from Major Mike's notion that we should pull out the troops and let the Green Berets have a got at it. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The future of AfPak

GrEaT sAtAn"S gIrLfRiEnD, who is fast becoming my favorite blogger, has an interview with Major Michael Few about the future of the Afghan/Pakistan wars. In short: "By October, the Taliban will retreat for the winter, and we will declare victory. By next summer, we will withdraw and turn the mission over to the SF boys (a CJSOTF plus) as should have been done in 2002 and last summer to concentrate on FID with a renewed State Department effort." If you strip out the acronyms, Mike is saying that we should turn it over to U.S. Army Special Forces, aka Green Berets, and like-minded professionals, the same men who managed it so well in 2001.

GrEaT sAtAn"S gIrLfRiEnD seems to be a young woman named Courtney. I'm reasonably sure that's not her in black panties: she just likes to pepper her blog with provocative images of female hotties, provocative especially to the Islamicists. That being the case, how can I do otherwise when posting about her work? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Tank hits landmine

One of the refreshing things about Taliban propaganda is that the ragheads are blessedly (or is that word politically incorrect?) free of alphabetical jargon. 'US tank hits landmine explosion in Helmand,' writes Qari Yousuf Ahmadi on Voice of Jihad. Of course it wasn't a tank, if the incident took place at all; likely it was an MRAP, a vehicle so new that the military has no name for it, only the acronym for Mine Resistant Ambush Protected. Or a Humvee, which at least can be pronounced, but which is likewise the smoothing out of the acronym for High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle.

Ah, for the days when things had names, however foolish! Tank, for instance--that was a British cover word to hide the fact that they were developing an armored, tracked vehicle to roll over the trenches of World War I. Happily the code word stuck, and we don't have to talk about the ATVROT battles on the Eastern Front.

I think the Taliban are on to something with their homely translations. How much more evocative is "landmine" than Improvised Explosive Device! Perhaps if we could restore our language to its onetime flexibility we would be faring better in the Global War on Terror, Overseas Contingency Operation, Struggle Against Violent Extremism (whose acronym sounded a bit like a call for help), Man-Caused Disaster, or whatever it's called today. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

From Russia with love

Threat Matrix shows an interminable Taliban propaganda video with some interesting bits along the way, including the above screen shot of three Chechen fighters serving with the Taliban. (There were four in this immediate group.) "Arab" or foreign fighters joined the Chechens in their 1990s battles with the Russian army; now it seems Chechnya is exporting to Afghanistan. The website includes this quote from an American officer: "You can usually tell when they are in the area because accuracy of weapon systems goes up due to their extensive training and combat experience. You can also note almost all of them have a "special" weapon other then the AK-47 and wear a head band..... Specifically what got me was the grenade launcher on the AK-47. These are rarely used by Nuristanis due to the extreme lack of ammunition availability. Their kits also seem of higher quality where most of the Nuristani fighters use their pockets or the common green AK-47 front vest." Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Two ways of looking at a battle

I've added a Canadian blog, Milnews.ca, to my list to check more or less daily. This in honor of its recent post about a gory "battle" in Helmand province, Afghanistan. Here is how the Taliban reported it:

HELMAND, May 11 – As many as 55 Americans have been killed and 37 terribly injured with their three Chinook-like helicopters shot down in clashes with Mujahideen of the Islamic Emirate in Helmand’s Nowzad district through much of Monday, Mujahideen officials said. According to the details, the deadly battle erupted as about hundreds of American cowardly soldiers, airdropped by some 20 helicopters into the different areas of Nowzad district, wanting to carry out a large scale operation in the area, came under simultaneous attacks by Mujahideen from every directions that caused a daylong face-to-face fighting which started on Monday afternoon (May 10) and continued till late night hours, in which the enemy, after suffering deadliest losses and severest damages, fled the areas carrying the engines of the helicopters shot down by Mujahideen during the fighting along with them, while the wreckage of the struck helicopters including their wings and other parts of the helicopters and the mutilated parts of the bodies of the American soldiers still exist at the sites. No Mujahids have, by the virtue of Allah’s bounty and His mercy, been harmed, while Mujahideen have taken the abondoned arms and ammo. Jahidic officials say it is the first operation which has been so much perfect and successful since the invasion of US cowardly troops in 2001, and one of the luckiest operations since the operation al-Fath ( The Victory) commenced throughout the country.

And here's what actually happened:

KABUL, Afghanistan (May 10) – An MH-60 helicopter made a controlled landing after being hit by enemy fire in Helmand Province this afternoon. All crewmembers have been safely returned to base. The helicopter was supporting a combined Afghan-international assault force on a targeted compound near Nangazi, in the Sangin district, and had just begun its return flight when it was hit by enemy fire and forced to make a controlled landing. After landing, the helicopter crew was immediately picked up by additional aircraft. The helicopter could not be recovered and was destroyed in place with close air support. Multiple enemy fighters were engaged by the combined force and several suspected militants were captured at the targeted compound. The assault force and remaining crew have safely returned to base.

Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

On stifling innovation

David Brooks, a comparatively sensible opinionator for the New York Times, wrote a rather good column the other day about the U.S. Army’s evolution from smash-and-enter to “Good morning, ma’m, may I help you milk that goat?” Since he works for the Gray Lady, Mr. Brooks of course thinks this is a splendid thing. An Army made up of Good Guys (and Good Girls—I mustn't forget the girls!). Who could be against that?

The catch, though Mr. Brooks doesn’t seems to notice that it’s a catch, comes in the second-last paragraph: “Now some say that the approach codified at Fort Leavenworth has become so dominant that it is actually stifling innovation. This is a complete intellectual sea change.” Actually, it’s not. Stifling innovation is what the U.S. Army does best, and what it has always done. It wouldn’t be so bad if the new dogma were working in Afghanistan, but it doesn’t seem to be. It’s as John Boyd liked to say: “It’s doctrine on day one, and it’s dogma the day after that.” Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

A Vision So Noble

This small book is the result of three years' work at King's College London (or perhaps it would be more accurate to say Kings' College Online, since I never actually went to London). It combines my MA thesis with two earlier papers that I wrote for the program, and it went on sale on Amazon.com this morning: A Vision So Noble: John Boyd, the OODA Loop, and America's War on Terror.

I've blogged from time to time about John Boyd, but the short version is that he was a colonel who maddened the Air Force and attracted acolytes among its civilian employees for his outside-the-box thinking about aerial combat, maneuver warfare, and the ways in which wars, basketball games, and chess tournaments are won. Arguably he was the greatest American military thinker since Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan. My task was to see how Boyd would have approached the War on Terror. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

On being Hamid Karzai

Robert Haddick of Small Wars Journal has a provocative piece online that’s summed up in this sub-head: “Note to the White House: You don't own Karzai -- he owns you.” With each escalation of American forces, Mr. Haddick argues, the Afghan president has a firmer grip on Mr. Obama’s testicles. The essay concludes: “the United States is fighting in Afghanistan not against terrorism but for its reputation, for its ability to convince the wider world that it is in control of its affairs and that its power can achieve challenging goals. But this means that the world audience, and not the U.S. president, will decide for itself whether it is convinced about the efficacy of American power.” Which was pretty much the case in Vietnam forty years ago. Blue skies! – Dan Ford

If you can't beat them ...

Say what you like about Hamid Karzai, but you can’t call him an American puppet. On Saturday, we’re told, he said to members of the Afghan parliament: “If you and the international community pressure me more, I swear that I am going to join the Taliban.” (The quote appears in the ninth paragraph of one of those Gray Lady “analyses” that are really editorials in disguise. This one beats the old drum that if only we get rid of the incumbent, everything will be fine.... Right! We had great success with that in South Vietnam!)

No doubt Mr. Karzai is playing the Cold War game of increasing American aid by threatening to cozy up to the enemy. (Alternately, he may have noticed the weird tendency of this administration to apologize to its enemies while pulling the rug from under its friends.) But his threat ought to be taken seriously: at a certain point, joining the Taliban is exactly what the West must consider doing: “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em!”

As it happens, my favorite military theorist made just that argument in his Patterns of Conflict briefing of 1986. The object of a counter-insurgency campaign, he begins, is to “Undermine guerrilla cause and destroy their cohesion by demonstrating integrity and competence of government to represent and serve needs of people—rather than exploit and impoverish them for the benefit of a greedy elite.” That is: we must prove that we represent the good guys. To which he adds a sly footnote: “If you cannot realize such a political program, you might consider changing sides!”

Blue skies! – Dan Ford

The Only Thing Worth Dying For III

I don’t usually get a whole lot of comments on this blog, so I think it’s worth noting what readers have been saying about this wonderful book: The Only Thing Worth Dying For. It tells the story of about the Green Berets who inserted Hamid Karzai into Afghanistan in November 2001. (That’s Mr. Karzai with the blanket wrapped around his shoulders, posing with the Special Forces A Team—or Operational Detachment Alpha, as it’s now called.)

Anonymous said: Thanks for spreading the word about this book!

Anonymous said: Amazing book. I'm surprised I hadn't heard more about it. Probably the best book I read about Afghanistan.

forrest said: An absolute MUST-READ for anyone interested in the modern style of warfare laughably called 'low-intensity conflict' and the US role in that warfare. As enthralling as I foudn the story, however, I found myself wishing Amerine himself had written the book and not a professional writer because it was a little too slick and seamless for me.

When I was a Special Forces reservist, I had my own experience in Afghanistan 13 years before ODA574 and it was interesting to me that Capt Amerine found the mujahidin to be pretty much the same as I had, meaning their approach to fighting hasn't changed sicne the late, great British Empire thought it could conquer and administer that amazing land.

As to the question the title of Blehm's book asks, the answer is found in the song "How Many Are The Heroes" which asks "And if freedom's not worth dyin', what the hell are you livin' for?" Captain Amerine, I'd like to shake your hand someday; you, too, found something in Afghanistan worth dying for-- yourself.

And DaveHays said: Best book ever on the war on terror or afganistan. Tells a great story of what it take to be an officer in todays military. I felt like I knew the guys in the ODA well before the middle of the book. This is a must read for anyone interested in the war, current tactics or just reading about the best of our best. I'm reading mine for the 2nd time.

Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

On our need for spies

Writing in (of all places!) GQ magazine, former CIA agent Robert Baer argues that the agency is broken, and that the kindest thing to do would be to put it out of its misery, or at least to rebuild it entirely. The December massacre of a station chief and seven of her staff, he argues, was not just a personal failure but an institutional one. He calls the station chief "Kathy," in deference to her covert status, but he spares her nothing: "She'd spent the vast majority of her career at a desk in Northern Virginia, where she studied Al Qaeda for more than a decade ... she was always slotted to be a reports officer, someone who edits reports coming in from the field. She was never intended to meet and debrief informants." She'd never managed a covert operation, and she didn't speak the language. But there she was in Kost, Afghanistan, greeting a suicide bomber with what amounted to her entire staff plus a few drop-in visitors. The assignment, Mr. Baer argues, betrays the death of the CIA's spy culture and the ascendancy of the computer-savvy analyst. Kathy was an analyst.

Boom. "The fact is that Kathy, no matter how courageous and determined, was in over her head.... She was set up to fail. The battlefield was tilted in Al Qaeda's favor long ago--by John Deutch and his [Clinton-era] reforms, by the directors who followed him, by the decision to drop the paramilitary course from the mandatory curriculum (which would have made Kathy a lot more wary of explosives), and by two endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that have worn the CIA down to a nub." Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Taking the war to Marineistan

The WaPo has an article that would have gladdened the heart of John Boyd, the advocate of offensive counter-guerrilla ops:

The Marines are pushing into previously ignored Taliban enclaves. They have set up a first-of-its-kind school to train police officers. They have brought in a Muslim chaplain to pray with local mullahs and deployed teams of female Marines to reach out to Afghan women.

The Marine approach -- creative, aggressive and, at times, unorthodox -- has won many admirers within the military. The Marine emphasis on patrolling by foot and interacting with the population, which has helped to turn former insurgent strongholds along the Helmand River valley into reasonably stable communities with thriving bazaars and functioning schools, is hailed as a model of how U.S. forces should implement counterinsurgency strategy.

It all sounds wonderfully reminiscent of the Combined Action Platoons that the Marines so successfully applied in Vietnam--except for one thing. The WaPo article notes that they're building a 3,000-man 'outpost' with 'two airstrips, an advanced combat hospital, a post office, a large convenience store and rows of housing trailers stretching as far as the eye can see'. The Vietnam-era CAP contained twelve Marines, augmented by triple their number of local police and militia, and they lived in The Village for months at a time. They took casualties, but they were never overrun, though the Viet Cong tried repeatedly to run them off. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

First, let your hair grow

Elisabeth Bumiller has an engaging story in the New York Times about what the US Marines painfully call a Female Engagement Team, which no doubt will be rendered and pronounced as FET. They're training at Fort Pendleton CA for deployment to the 'Stan. The idea--more than eight years after the Marines landed--is that if American women accompany American men into Afghan villages, then Afghan women are less likely to take fright. The Marines think of everything: “If you have a pony tail,” said Marina Kielpinski, the instructor, “let it go out the back of your helmet so people can see you’re a woman.” Blue skies! -- Dan Ford