I recommend that you spend a few minutes taking in Michael Yon’s latest entry, and spend the time to read it through to the end.  There are some pictures you might want to see, and this montage is very compelling.

The Battle of Wanat has been in the news lately.  Richard Engel with MSNBC did an expose on Wanat, and still grieving father David Brostrom says a number of wise things concerning the battle, but veers eventually into the lack of soft efforts (building schools, interacting with the population, etc.).  In previous articles I have disagreed with this perspective, since it makes no sense to charge Chosen Company with lack of COIN efforts when they were in a deadly fight for their lives on an hour by hour basis for the entire deployment.  Besides, Major Jim Gant gives us a realistic perspective concerning these things.

This is nothing more than a side bar comment as I have not studied nor read the details of what occurred at Wanat.

However, at the same time we were conducting tribal engagement with the Mohmand tribe (2003), we were also conducting combat operations in the Pesch Valley and the Korangal Valley. The details of these missions are not important. However, we had two informal “meetings” with the tribal leaders in and around the area where Wanat is located. The first time we held a meeting they informed us they did not want us coming through their tribal area. I explained to them, in detail, that we had to move through that area in order to accomplish other missions. I emphasized that we did not want to fight their tribe. They told us that we were not welcome there and if we came through their again that we would have to fight. My answer was simple,”OK. Let’s finish lunch together and then we will fight.” That very day we were involved in a very large fight with them on our way out of the valley.

Several weeks later, the tribal elders came to our firebase and we had another “meeting.” The same topics were talked about. We enjoyed a very nice lunch together and the outcome was – we will continue to fight. We could not come to any type of agreement on how we could work this issue out.

So we continued to conduct combat operations to include raids in their tribal area.

But at least we understood each other.

One last note. The terrain there was by far the most difficult terrain I have ever fought in.

Sometimes, you just have to fight…

Once again, this isn’t a statement about Wanat per se, but the tribes who live in and around the area. They are a tough, fighting group of people.

The U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings has recently published an interesting analysis of the role of weapons in the battle of Wanat, entitled “What Really Happened at Wanat.”  Excerpts are give below (and the reader is left to visit the USNI web site for further study).

Immediately after the release of the Army’s Occasional Paper, press reports seized on Soldiers’ accounts of weapon stoppages detailed in it. The Times reported that “Soldiers who survived the battle described how their automatic weapons turned white hot and jammed from nonstop firing.” A November 2009 Defense News story also cited reports of weapon stoppages, but went further, attempting to connect the deaths of Soldiers in the battle to the enduring debate over the reliability and lethality of the military’s primary infantry weapon, the M4 carbine.

Since its introduction with U.S. forces during the Vietnam War, the M16 rifle and its offspring, including the M4, have been the subject of some controversy, especially related to reports of the weapons’ reliability in combat. Initial reports from Vietnam indicated a high incidence of stoppages. These were in fact directly related to the Army’s initial decision to alter the ammunition’s propellant from military specifications (mil-specs) and to dispense with chrome plating the M16’s chamber—an improvement that had become a standard feature of all U.S. military small arms since World War II.

Both decisions led to premature corrosion of the chamber and ultimately to stoppages. Upgrades, including those that improved the manufacturing process and design of the weapon’s buffer, bolt, trigger components, and chamber, which would receive a chrome lining, resulted in a much superior M16A1. Troops issued the M16A1 in 1969 and later rarely complained about their weapons. One Marine rifleman did complain in a 1967 letter to his family following the battle for Hills 881 and 861 above Khe Sanh: “We left with 72 men in our platoon and came back with 19. Believe it or not, you know what killed most of us? Our own rifles. Practically every one of our dead was found with his [M16] torn down next to him where he had been trying to fix it.”

Not mentioned in the letter was the fact that many of the Marines who fought at Khe Sanh had been issued their M16s only days before the action and probably were unfamiliar with them. Also worth mentioning is the fact that the M16 of four decades ago is not the same weapon as the M4 in service in Iraq and Afghanistan today. Enhancements made to the original design have substantially improved the weapon’s reliability, so much so that commanders often praise the M4. At the 2006 Infantry War Fighting Conference, Major General Walter Wojdakowski, commanding general, U.S. Army Infantry Center & School, called the M4 “one of many success stories in combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Yet troops outnumbered at Wanat, like those described in the Khe Sanh account 41 years before, were still plagued by numerous weapon stoppages. Studies conducted by the Army, by independent research institutions, and by Colt itself offer some indication of the cause. In particular, they provide some possible explanations for the numerous stoppages suffered by Wanat’s defenders.

The Army’s draft Occasional Paper states that to maintain fire parity with their attackers, the Chosen Few Company soldiers “were firing their weapons ‘cyclic,’ on full automatic at the highest possible rates of fire.” For this reason, the paper concludes, some Soldiers experienced stoppages.

Staff Sergeant Erich Phillips, manning the 120-mm mortar, recalled that during the engagement his “M4 quit firing and would no longer charge when [he] tried to correct the malfunction.” An engineer specialist who loaded for Phillips recalled that, “Staff Sergeant Phillips poured out fire,” going “through three rifles using them until they jammed.” Specialist Chris McKaig, defending OP Topside, also experienced problems with his M4. “My weapon was overheating,” he recalled. “I had shot about 12 magazines by this point already and it had only been about a half hour or so into the fight. I couldn’t charge my weapon and put another round in because it was too hot, so I got mad and threw my weapon down.”

This same thread is pulled in the Douglas R. Cubbison study out of Leavenworth (I still won’t release or publish this paper since it has not been publicly released).  I find the issue of weapons reliability to be a compelling theme, but in the end, an incorrect one.  It isn’t surprising that an M4 that has fired 12 magazines within 30 minutes no longer functions properly.  Better, more reliable weapons could have been provided to the men of Chosen company (e.g., piston rather than direct gas impingement), and the outcome would still have been the same.

Most of the men who perished that fateful day did so attempting to defend or relieve OP Top Side (8 of the 9 who perished), and the kill ratio that day still favored the U.S. troops (“There were between 21 and 52 AAF killed and 45 wounded. Considering a clinical assessment of kill ratio can be a pointer to the level of risk associated with this VPB and OP. 21/9 = 2.33, 52/9 = 5.77 (2.33 – 5.77), and 45/27 = 1.67. These are very low compared to historical data (on the order of 10:1).”).

It’s tempting to point the finger at weapons systems, just as it is tempting to fault the company with lack of soft COIN efforts.  But in the end, they were outnumbered about 6:1 (300+ to about 50), they were on a poor choice of terrain, they had poor logistics, they suffered lack of air and artillery support, and most importantly, they simply were never given the proper number of troops or the resources to engage in force protection, much less robust force projection.  They were under-resourced, and no analysis of weapons systems can change that fact.  Rather than focus on why the M4 jams after firing 360 rounds in 30 minutes, the real question is why this particular M4 had to be put through this kind of test to begin with?

Taking Back the Infantry Half-Kilometer

Second Guessing the Battles of Wanat and Kamdesh

Wanat Video II

Wanat Video

The Battle of Wanat, Massing of Troops, and Attacks in Nuristan

The Contribution of the Afghan National Army in the Battle of Wanat

Investigating the Battle of Wanat

Analysis of the Battle of Wanat

From Financial Times:

Tracing his finger over a map of Marjah, Lance Corporal Paul Horchler sketched the route ahead. He would lead his marines along a canal, past the spot where a buried bomb had exploded the day before, then down a track nicknamed “ambush alley”.

His patrol was almost guaranteed to succeed. Either the Americans would have a chance to ask the locals where the Taliban were, or the insurgents would reveal themselves by shooting at them. Whatever happened, they stood to learn.

After trudging for an hour down a path flanked by fields and scattered adobe houses, seemingly deserted in the midday heat, the marines found a man willing to talk. He said he had seen four Taliban fighters at a nearby bazaar 30 minutes earlier.

“The Taliban, they’re probably watching us. I guarantee they are watching us,” said Lance-Corporal Monty Buchanan. “Whoever’s in the area will decide what they want to do, if they want to hit us or not.”

This is the daily grind faced by US marines in Marjah almost five months after they seized the town in Nato’s biggest operation of the nine-year Afghan war.

The offensive in southern Helmand province was billed as a centrepiece of General Stanley McChrystal’s strategy of pouring in US forces to protect the population from insurgents, but the climate of fear remains palpable.

Even before the general’s forced resignation last month over the publication of a Rolling Stone article in which he and his aides poured derision on the Obama administration questions were growing about the strategy.

General David Petraeus, who assumed command of the international force in Afghanistan on Sunday, is a leading US theorist in countering guerrilla warfare and has pledged continuity in strategy, although he has not ruled out adjusting its implementation.

L Cpl Horchler’s four-hour ramble past lavender fields and sunflowers outside Marjah was a lesson in the difficulties not only of separating the population from the insurgents, but in telling them apart. Many fighters operate within their communities, rendering the distinction even less clear.

Most of Marjah appeared to have deemed it too hot to be outside when the marines and Afghan soldiers set out into what felt like an immense vista for such a small patrol to cover; one that afforded almost infinite hiding places.

Marines who seized Marjah from the Taliban in a blaze of publicity are now facing almost daily ambushes staged by attackers skilled at burying home-made mines or hiding them under bunches of dried poppy stalks.

The patrol flinched when a rat-tat-tat echoed across a field like the sound of distant machinegun fire: it turned out to be a creaking water pump. Moments later, L Cpl Horchler, 22, aimed his rifle at what appeared to be a figure traversing a distant sand dune on a motorbike, suspecting he might be a Taliban spotter. The man vanished over the ridge.

A gunshot snapped the air and again the marines started. One of the Afghan soldiers had fired a warning to halt a minibus they wanted to search. A patch of disturbed earth on the track prompted a diversion for fear it concealed a bomb.

The informant’s compound felt safer than the road, although not much. One of the Afghan troops urged L Cpl Horchler to interrogate the owner of the shop where the insurgents had been seen. He refused, loathe to risk endangering his source.

L Cpl Horchler’s men returned to base unscathed, but a second patrol would be attacked on the same route a few hours later by insurgents armed with rifles and rocket-propelled grenades.

As Lance Corporal Mark Reno, 23, said: “I’m sure we’ve shaken hands with them on a daily basis and not even known who they were.”

Analysis & Commentary

In McChrystal Calls Marjah a Bleeding Ulcer, I laid out some hard questions for my readers.

Did General McChrystal not cover the basics of classical counterinsurgency doctrine with his civilian bosses?  Did he or any of his reports mislead the administration into believing that Marjah or any other town in Afghanistan would be pacified in 90 days?  Did he or his reports – or anyone in the administration – really believe that this government ex machina we brought to Marjah would work?

It now appears that the answers to the first two questions above is no, and the answer to the last one which is yes.  The surprise at how long Marjah is taking betrays an actual belief that they could shout presto, clap their hands and make Marjah safe, secure and serene.

Forgotten are the long years of counterinsurgency work to win the Anbar Province, and in its place was substituted bare, unsubstantiated doctrine.  That there was surprise among McChrystal’s staff and the Pentagon is a pointer to harder points that need to be made; they see the world in a childlike fashion.

If nothing else comes from the Rolling Stone expose on McChrystal and his staff, we learn about the immaturity of McChrystal’s staff and even McChrystal himself.  The false beliefs concerning Marjah are in the books, but one example (out of many) comes to us by way of anecdote.

Even in his new role as America’s leading evangelist for counterinsurgency, McChrystal retains the deep-seated instincts of a terrorist hunter. To put pressure on the Taliban, he has upped the number of Special Forces units in Afghanistan from four to 19. “You better be out there hitting four or five targets tonight,” McChrystal will tell a Navy Seal he sees in the hallway at headquarters. Then he’ll add, “I’m going to have to scold you in the morning for it, though.” In fact, the general frequently finds himself apologizing for the disastrous consequences of counterinsurgency. In the first four months of this year, NATO forces killed some 90 civilians, up 76 percent from the same period in 2009 – a record that has created tremendous resentment among the very population that COIN theory is intent on winning over. In February, a Special Forces night raid ended in the deaths of two pregnant Afghan women and allegations of a cover-up, and in April, protests erupted in Kandahar after U.S. forces accidentally shot up a bus, killing five Afghans. “We’ve shot an amazing number of people,” McChrystal recently conceded.

Despite the tragedies and miscues, McChrystal has issued some of the strictest directives to avoid civilian casualties that the U.S. military has ever encountered in a war zone. It’s “insurgent math,” as he calls it – for every innocent person you kill, you create 10 new enemies. He has ordered convoys to curtail their reckless driving, put restrictions on the use of air power and severely limited night raids. He regularly apologizes to Hamid Karzai when civilians are killed, and berates commanders responsible for civilian deaths. “For a while,” says one U.S. official, “the most dangerous place to be in Afghanistan was in front of McChrystal after a ‘civ cas’ incident.” The ISAF command has even discussed ways to make not killing into something you can win an award for: There’s talk of creating a new medal for “courageous restraint,” a buzzword that’s unlikely to gain much traction in the gung-ho culture of the U.S. military.

But however strategic they may be, McChrystal’s new marching orders have caused an intense backlash among his own troops. Being told to hold their fire, soldiers complain, puts them in greater danger. “Bottom line?” says a former Special Forces operator who has spent years in Iraq and Afghanistan. “I would love to kick McChrystal in the nuts. His rules of engagement put soldiers’ lives in even greater danger. Every real soldier will tell you the same thing.”

We have discussed the issue of a campaign against high value targets conducted by SOF.  I don’t believe in it.  I don’t think it works to curtail the insurgency.  But besides considerations of the utility of the strategy (and it is a strategy, not a tactic), there is the issue of maintenance of troop morale.  McChrystal set up a military cultural milieu in which direct action kinetics was relegated (or reserved) to SOF, while the so-called general purpose forces were essentially told to be policemen, and given rules of engagement that are more restrictive than those for police departments in the U.S.  Nothing McChrystal could have done would have worked so thoroughly to bust troop morale.

McChrystal’s vision is why he worked so poorly with the Marines and within the context of the MAGTF.  The Corps doesn’t buy into McChrystal’s bifurcation, and (properly) wants more control of goings-on within their battle space than McChrystal was willing to give them.  I gave Tad Sholtis (McChrystal’s PAO) multiple chances to say something – anything – positive about the MAGTF and the job the Marines were doing in Helmand.  No such praise came, and my communications with them were marked mostly by lip biting and equivocation.

I don’t know what the era of Petraeus will bring, and if he doesn’t immediately press authority down the chain of command, unshackle the enlisted men, reduce the rules of engagement with the enemy, ban PowerPoint presentations, unleash air power, get Soldiers off of the several huge bases they’re on, press for more distributed operations, and give commanders complete control over their battle space, then we will lose.  Either way, for the last year, the children have been in charge.

Via Weekly Standard, CNN Editor Octavia Nasr posts on Twitter:

Sad to hear of the passing of Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah.. One of Hezbollah’s giants I respect a lot..

Fadlallah was the spiritual leader of Hezbollah and is believed to be responsible for the deaths of 241 Marines and Navy Corpsmen in the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing.  Not coincidentally, the leader of Hezbollah, Nassan Nasrallah, also states his approval for the cleric’s vision and promise to carry on.

“We promise his soul that we will remain faithful to his sacred goals for which he lived, worked and sacrificed day and night, as we will sacrifice everything to defend them,” Hizbullah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said.

So CNN is squared up shoulder to shoulder with Hezbollah.  The real question is this: is anyone really surprised?

The first living Medal of Honor recipient since Vietnam is soon to be named, which is good news.  The disturbing part of the Washington Post article is at the end.

“We should be stationing our troops in places where they won’t be earning the Medal of Honor because the population and terrain favor us and we have quick access to air support,” said John Nagl, one of the authors of the Army’s counterinsurgency doctrine and president of the Center for a New American Security, a defense think tank.

Leaving behind the issue of allowing the insurgents safe haven for recruiting, raising of funds, training and rest, and leaving behind the issue of protection of lines of logistics and all of the other objections that could be raised to this incredibly stolid statement, Nagl’s quote betrays an Afghanistan policy and strategy that is in complete disarray.

He wants retreat in the face of enemy fires, allowing air power to accomplish the engagement.  But the incredibly incompetent Afghan National Army is embedded with U.S. troops, and is learning to retreat and allow air power to finish the fight.  What they will do when the U.S. has withdrawn in a year or two Nagl doesn’t say.

More importantly, McChrystal’s tactical directive severely restricts the use of air power.  In fact, the Taliban know this and have used it to their advantage.

The Taliban no longer run and hide when they see a fighter jet overhead, brazenness that airmen attribute to the nearly year-old directive to limit close-air support.

Joint terminal attack controllers, airmen on the ground who call in airstrikes, and fighter pilots report that insurgents are encouraging each other to continue firing because they know the Air Force’s F-16s and A-10s are dropping far fewer bombs now than this time last year.

“Keep fighting; [coalition forces] won’t shoot” is the order that enemy leaders are giving — in Pashtun and Dari, words that the JTACs have heard over their radios.

Pilots notice the bolder attitude, even from their bird’s-eye view in the sky.

“It can be very frustrating when you can see them shooting at our guys,” said Capt. Andy Vaughan as he walked out to his A-10 on a March 24 mission over southern Afghanistan. “They know we are not allowed to engage in certain situations.”

“The A-10 pilots … are just left circling in the skies,” said an Air Force officer here who asked not to be identified because he is not authorized to speak on the record.

So Nagl and CNAS want severely restrictive rules of engagement, including for the use of air power, because of their belief in the doctrines of population-centric counterinsurgency and the possibility for noncombatant casualties, but CNAS also wants to send this severely restricted air power after the Taliban in order to keep it safe for the Soldiers who engage the Taliban.

I’m pointing out the paradox not so much in an attempt to embarrass Nagl or CNAS, but to show the depressing lack of leadership and strategic vision for the campaign.  It is just that bad.