Archive for the 'General McChrystal' Category

Gareth Porter has penned a commentary in the Asia Times on several subjects.  It’s long and much of it not very worthwhile reading.  But it’s necessary to read it entirely in order to understand his mistaken calculus.

At his confirmation hearings as the new commander in Afghanistan two weeks ago, General Stanley McChrystal said reducing civilian deaths from air strikes in Afghanistan was “strategically decisive” and declared his “willingness to operate in ways that minimize casualties or damage, even when it makes our task more difficult”.

Some McChrystal supporters hope he will rein in the main source of civilian casualties: Special Operations Forces (SOF) units that carry out targeted strikes against suspected “Taliban” on the basis of doubtful intelligence and raids that require air strikes when they get into trouble.

But there are growing indications that his command is preparing to deal with the issue primarily by seeking to shift the blame to the Taliban through more and better propaganda operations and by using more high-tech drone intelligence aircraft to increase battlefield surveillance rather than by curbing the main direct cause of civilian casualties.

United States officials at a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) conference in Brussels last Friday told reporters that “public relations” were now considered “crucial” to “turning the tide” in Afghanistan, according to an Agence-France Presse story on June 12.

Central Command chief General David Petraeus also referred to the importance of taking the propaganda offensive in a presentation to the pro-military think-tank the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) on June 11. “When you’re dealing with the press,” he said, “when you’re dealing with the tribal leaders, when you’re dealing with host nations … you got to beat the bad guys to the headlines.”

The new emphasis on more aggressive public relations appears to respond to demands from US military commanders in Afghanistan to wrest control of the issue of civilian casualties from the Taliban. In a discussion of that issue at the same conference, General David Barno, the commander of US forces in Afghanistan from 2003 to 2005, said, “We’ve got to be careful about who controls the narrative on civilian casualties.”

United States military commanders in Afghanistan “see the enemy seeking to take air strikes off the table” by exaggerating civilian casualties, Barno said. He objected to making civilian casualties an indicator of success or failure, as a CNAS paper has recommended.

The US command in Afghanistan has already tried, in fact, to apply “information war” techniques in an effort to control the narrative on the issue. The command has argued both that the Taliban were responsible for the massive civilians casualties in a US air strike on May 4 that killed 147 civilians, including 90 women and children, and that the number of civilian deaths claimed has been vastly exaggerated, despite detailed evidence from village residents supporting the casualty figures.

Colonel Greg Julian, the command’s spokesman, said in late May that a “weapon-sight” video would show that the Taliban were to blame. However, Nancy A Youssef reported on June 15 in McClatchy newspapers that the video in question showed that no one had checked to see if women and children were in the building before it was bombed, according to two US military officials.

The Afghan government has highlighted the problem of SOF units carrying out raids that result in air strikes against civilian targets. Kai Eide, the chief of the United Nations mission in Afghanistan, has now publicly supported that position, saying in a video conference call from Kabul to NATO defense ministers meeting in Brussels on June 12 that there is an “urgent need” to review raids by SOF units, because the civilian casualties being created have been “disproportionate to the military gains”.

But McChrystal hinted in his confirmation hearing that he hoped to reduce civilian casualties by obtaining more intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance aircraft. Petraeus confirmed that approach to the problem in remarks at the CNAS conference last week, announcing that he was planning to shift some high-tech intelligence vehicles from Iraq to Afghanistan.

Petraeus referred to “predators, armed full motion video with Hellfire missiles”, “special intelligence birds”, and unmanned intelligence vehicles called Shadows and Ravens, which fly 24 hours a day.

Although such intelligence aircraft may make US battlefield targeting more precise, Petraeus’ reference to drones equipped with Hellfire missiles suggests that US forces in Afghanistan may now rely more than previously on drone strikes against suspected Afghan insurgents. Given the severe lack of accurate intelligence on the identity of insurgent leaders, that would tend to increase civilian casualties.

Petraeus’ past reluctance to stop or dramatically reduce such SOF operations, despite the bad publicity surrounding them, suggests that high level intra-military politics are involved.

The Marine Corps Special Operations Command (MarSOC) has been involved in the most highly publicized cases of massive civilian casualties in Afghanistan. MarSOC was only established by the Marine Corps in February 2006 and the first company arrived in Afghanistan just a year later.

MarSOC was unable to recruit the more mature officers and troops needed for cross-cultural situations, and its recruits had only a few months of training before being sent to Afghanistan.

The unit’s commanding officer had been warned by one participant in the training before the unit had arrived in Afghanistan that his troops were too young and too oriented toward killing to serve in Afghanistan, according to Chris Mason, a former US official in Afghanistan familiar with the unit’s history.

In March 2007, a company of MarSOC troops which had only arrived in the country the previous month were accused of firing indiscriminately at pedestrians and cars as they sped away from a suicide bomb attack, killing as many as 19 Afghan civilians. Five days later the same unit reportedly fired on traffic again.

As a result, a powerful Pashtun tribe, the Shinwari, demanded to the governor of Nangahar province and Afghan President Hamid Karzai that US military operations in the province be terminated. Within a month, the 120-man MarSOC company was pulled out of Afghanistan.

Significantly, however, a new MarSOC unit was sent back to Afghanistan only a few weeks later, assigned to Herat province. Last August, a MarSOC unit launched an attack against a preplanned target in Azizabad that combined unmanned drones, attack helicopters and a Spectre gunship. More than 90 civilians were killed in the attack, including 60 children, but not a single Taliban fighter was killed, according to Afghan and UN officials.

Karzai said the operation had been triggered by false information given by the leader of a rival tribe, and no US official contradicted him.

When Petraeus took command at CENTCOM just a few weeks later, Afghans were still seething over the Azizabad massacre. That would have been the perfect time for him to take decisive action on MarSOC’s operations.

But Petraeus took no action on MarSOC. Meanwhile, other SOF units were continuing to carry out raids that did not get headlines but which regularly killed women and children, stirring more Afghan anger. Petraeus may have been confronted with the necessity of stopping all the operations if he wished to discipline MarSOC, which would have been too serious a blow to the reputation of US Special Operations Forces.

For two weeks, from mid-February to early March, the rate of SOF raids was reduced. But in early March, they were resumed, despite the near certainty that there would be more embarrassing incidents involving SOF operations. The worst case of massive civilian deaths in the war would come just two months later, and involved the MarSOC unit.

Analysis & Commentary

Right up front let’s deal with the issue of casualties caused by SOF raids – again.  The Captain’s Journal is generally opposed to high value target raids since an insurgency must be defeated from the bottom up rather than the top down.  The HVT campaign has been a remarkable failure, and should serve as a lesson in military doctrine and strategy classes for the foreseeable future.  We warned you years ago.

But this is not the same thing as saying that casualties – unintended casualties, counterproductive casualties – won’t occur regardless of the tactics being used.  Cessation of the SOF high value target campaign won’t end unintended casualties.  Either Porter’s argument is a non sequitur, or he knows this and he is simply being dishonest.  So he’s either stupid or a liar.

All one must do to understand that the limited force size requires other tactics to prevent U.S. forces from being overrun is read Taliban Tactics: Massing of Troops (you won’t find this kind of analysis anywhere on the web, which is why it is still up as a featured article).  TCJ has opposed the separation of Force Recon into MARSOC, believing that it is better for the Corps in particular to keep them attached to infantry.  The same goes for Army SOF and Army infantry.  They should be re-attached.

But while we have been critical of SOF and their use, Porter is mistaken if he believes that we will turn on McChrystal and SOF when he charges McChrystal with dealing with the issue of civilian casualties “primarily by seeking to shift the blame to the Taliban through more and better propaganda operations and by using more high-tech drone intelligence aircraft to increase battlefield surveillance rather than by curbing the main direct cause of civilian casualties.”

This is stupid, and in a single article Porter has penned a hit job on McChrystal, U.S. air power, U.S. special operations forces, and especially MARSOC (of which he knows absolutely nothing).  Frankly, The Captain’s Journal doesn’t appreciate it one bit.  Furthermore, his radical bias leads him to miss the point, a point that was well taken and which would have been a worthwhile article had he drawn this point out and done some investigative labor.  He started well.  It didn’t take him long to crash and burn.

The U.S. is poor when it comes to releasing information, even information that demonstrates that enemy propaganda is false.  It’s OPSEC, or it’s FOUO (for official use only), or it’s has to make its way through a hundred layers of approval to be released.  Meanwhile, the enemy has already released their talking points.

We lose.  Game over.  We must do better at releasing the right information, and we must do it quickly.  Time is of the essence.  This goes contrary to the bureaucracy inherent in the U.S. military, and it will be a hard change to bring to the institution.  Can McChrystal accomplish this?  Time will tell.  But Porter missed the chance at a good article because he is stolid.

From the WSJ:

After watching the U.S. try and fail for years to put down insurgencies in both countries, Gen. McChrystal said he believes that to win in Afghanistan, “You’re going to have to convince people, not kill them.

“Since 9/11, I have watched as America tried to first put out this fire with a hammer, and it doesn’t work,” he said last week at his home at Fort McNair in Washington. “Decapitation strategies don’t work.”

In the interview, Gen. McChrystal noted he’s unsure whether the planned troop levels for the job he envisions will be adequate — despite the Obama administration’s commitment to raise the U.S. presence to 68,000 by year’s end, to go along with 35,000 allied forces. Iraq surge commanders had more than 170,000 U.S. forces.

“I know that I want it to be an effective traditional or classic counterinsurgency campaign by getting people down in among the population,” the general said. “I know that’s easier said than done with a limited-sized force.”

And thus do we have in four short paragraphs some revealing and even some troubling information.  When General McChrystal says that “decapitation strategies don’t work,” if he means that the high value target campaign is a failure, The Captain’s Journal most heartily agrees.  It has always been, it forever will be.  We have spoken against it for months and even years.  The design of the campaign should be to destroy the insurgency from the bottom up, not from the top down.

Hopefully McChrystal doesn’t mean that he wishes to convince the mid- or high-level Taliban commanders to join with the government.  In fact, we are heartened to hear that he is no big fan of the reconciliation program.  But what does he think that the balance of the forces have been doing while as a SOF commander he has targeted, captured and killed some HVT?  Does he believe that they have been engaged in only the softer side of counterinsurgency?

Surely he must know that both kinetics and population engagement have been included in the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, and continue to be?  Surely he knows this, doesn’t he?  Doesn’t he know that the Marines killed 400 Taliban in Helmand?  What does he mean when he says that we can’t kill people, we must convince them?  Surely he knows that there are irreconcilables that must be killed, and that his SOF cannot be engaged in doing this everywhere, all of the time?  His SOF must be attached to infantry units, and they must all be engaged in all aspects of counterinsurgency, everywhere, all of the time, including killing and road construction.  Right?

And finally he puts his finger on the root problem.  Doing this with a “limited-sized force.”  So when will he inform the administration that he needs more troops?  Sooner (preferably) or later?

We have been a critic of the specific use in which special operations forces have been employed in Afghanistan.  Just to rehearse two recent examples, in Lt. Gen. McChrystal Testifies we said:

TCJ had also hoped that General McChrystal would attach Army SOF to units in the field rather than use them on raids.  No such thing is on his mind, apparently.  Now, we have admitted before of our being nonplussed at this idea, this notion of SOF being the direct action kinetics troops, with so-called General Purpose troops being the defensive forces.  TCJ opposes this …

In A Half Dozen Gargantuan Bases, we said:

Even many of the Army SOF are base-bound except for their forays into the wild via helicopter rides to the next raid.  Some Army are doing it right (e.g., the Korangal Valley), as are the Marines in Helmand.  But the gargantuan bases are an obstacle to success in Afghanistan.  Empty them.  Send the Army on dismounted patrols, open vehicle patrol bases, smaller FOBs, and combat outposts.  Get amongst the people.

Regular readers of TCJ know that this is only a small sampling of our advocacy for re-attaching SOF to infantry as specialized billets.  Now comes developments in the area of use of SOF in Afghanistan.

McChrystal has asked two veteran special operators on the Pentagon’s Joint Staff, which he directs, to accompany him to Afghanistan once he wins Senate approval for a fourth star. The two are Maj. Gen. Michael Flynn, who headed intelligence for the chief terrorist hunting unit in Iraq; and Brig Gen. Austin Miller, a Joint Staff director for special operations.

Military sources say Brig. Gen. Ed Reeder, who commands special operations in Afghanistan, went in-country earlier this year to revamp the way Green Beret “A” Teams, Delta Force and other special operators conduct counter-insurgency.

Green Berets, the same group that led the 2001 ouster of the Taliban from power, now primarily work out of fire support bases, often independently of conventional forces. They fight to control the Taliban-infested border with Pakistan, and train the Afghan army.

Critics within special operations have said the A Teams need to work more closely with conventional forces and with NATO counterparts. “This would give us a needed one-two punch,” said a former operator who served in Afghanistan.

Recalling the ridiculous red tape in NATO’s Afghanistan, TCJ is in favor of returning this to as much of a U.S. operation as possible (including the British, by the way).  This isn’t to show disrespect to our NATO allies, but rather, to say that the effort must be led by the U.S.  But aside from that nuance (” … and with NATO counterparts”), we are certainly one of the critics of SOF.

Note that we aren’t critical of SF (Green Berets) being embedded with the Afghan Army anywhere.  With their language training, that’s there job.  We are indeed critical of SOF (Rangers, et. al.) being detached from infantry and the very counterinsurgency campaign that they should be supporting.  As we have said before, it is almost as bad an idea to separate SOF from the larger COIN campaign as it is to separate infantry from kinetics.

So TCJ nailed it, and we’ve been doing the fancy dancing.  Or did we, and should we?  How will this play out, and what will McChrystal do?  How will he use SOF?  Will this still be a HVT campaign to find and capture mid-level Taliban commanders, sending them to jail only to be set free and resume activities later, or will it become a real counterinsurgency campaign?  Time will tell, but this critic will continue to monitor the situation.

buy generic ambien no rx Where Can I Buy Xanax Online cheapest xanax pills
ativan lorazepam buy cheap ativan online Buy Ambien Online Overnight Delivery lorazepam on line fedex
ambien cr buy fed ex delivery Buy Medication Ativan Cheap buy alprazolam from mexico
cheap generic overseas ativan Buy Generic Valium cheap ambien without prescription
buy diazepam saturday delivery; Ambien For Sale In Usa buy valium madre natura
ativan for sale; Xanax For Cheap cheap diazepam?
xanax generic price Buy No Prescription Diazepam Online order ambien from canada
cheapest xanax no prescription Buy Alprazolam Cheap xanax peach pill
valium cheap Ambien Pill all about buy xanax?
buying xanax without presciption Buy Xanax Online Mo Prescription ambien blue pill
xanax compare prices Buy Xanax Online Without Persciption prices for sleep aid ambien
valium online order Xanax Price Per Pill buy xanax from india no rx
buy cheap ambien; Ativan Prices pharmacies that send xanax by fedex
“order xanax online” Generic Ambien For Sale Lorazepam depresses hiccups diazepam ups shipping 95.
buy ativan from discount store! Ativan Buy Cheap Ativan Online cheap ativan online discount pharmacy
buy xanax by electronic check Diazepam Order Online No Prescription ativan for panic disorder!
buy ativan 2.5 mg from india? Buy Valium Prescription Drug online sales valium
buy ambien online without rx Cheap Valium Si buy alprazolam online
cheap ativan buy pharmacy online now No Prescription Ambien Cr Buy “cheapest alprazolam”
buy valium phillipines; Buy 2mg Xanax No Memebership buy alprazolam
buy valium us pharmacy Buy Alprazolam Mastercard No Prescription buy non genaric ambien online?
xanax order online no prescription Buy 10mg Valium Online xanax cheap no prescription,
xanax sales online, Price Generic Ambien what color is generic xanax

Lt. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal has recently testified before Congress concerning both his nomination to lead the Afghan campaign and the recent air strikes involving noncombatant casualties.

On Tuesday, Lt. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, nominated to be the American commander in Afghanistan, vowed that reducing civilian casualties would be “essential to our credibility.”

Any American victory would be “hollow and unsustainable” if it led to popular resentment among Afghanistan’s citizens, General McChrystal told the Senate Armed Services Committee during a confirmation hearing.

According to the senior military official, the report on the May 4 raids found that one plane was cleared to attack Taliban fighters, but then had to circle back and did not reconfirm the target before dropping bombs, leaving open the possibility that the militants might have fled the site or that civilians might have entered the target area in the intervening few minutes.

In another case, a compound of buildings where militants were massing for a possible counterattack against American and Afghan troops was struck in violation of rules that required a more imminent threat to justify putting high-density village dwellings at risk, the official said.

“In several instances where there was a legitimate threat, the choice of how to deal with that threat did not comply with the standing rules of engagement,” said the military official, who provided a broad summary of the report’s initial findings on the condition of anonymity because the inquiry was not yet complete …

During his testimony, General McChrystal said that strikes by warplanes and Special Operations ground units would remain an essential part of combat in Afghanistan. But he promised to make sure that these attacks were based on solid intelligence and that they would be as precise as possible. American success in Afghanistan should be measured by “the number of Afghans shielded from violence,” not the number of enemies killed, he said.

The inquiry into the May 4 strikes in the western province of Farah illustrated the difficult, split-second decisions facing young officers in the heat of combat as they balance using lethal force to protect their troops under fire with detailed rules restricting the use of firepower to prevent civilian deaths.

In the report, the investigating officer, Brig. Gen. Raymond A. Thomas III, analyzed each of the airstrikes carried out by three aircraft-carrier-based Navy F/A-18 strike aircraft and an Air Force B-1 bomber against targets in the village of Granai, in a battle that lasted more than seven hours.

In each case, the senior military official said, General Thomas determined that the targets that had been struck posed legitimate threats to Afghan or American forces, which included one group of Marines assigned to train the Afghans and another assigned to a Special Operations task force.

TCJ doesn’t like how this testimony is going.  The General knows that the subject engagement was quite protracted, and that another “circle back” probably wouldn’t have changed things.  Yet he should also know what The Captain’s Journal has been able to uncover with a little bit of analysis, i.e., that the Taliban mass troops against smaller U.S. forces, and that in order to prevent being overrun air power has become necessary under such conditions.  He had the ideal chance to tell Congress that 68,000 U.S. troops is not enough, but instead of debating the merits of force projection in COIN, the conversation was directed at tactical ROE and “circle backs.”  This is not a good sign.

TCJ had also hoped that General McChrystal would attach Army SOF to units in the field rather than use them on raids.  No such thing is on his mind, apparently.  Now, we have admitted before of our being nonplussed at this idea, this notion of SOF being the direct action kinetics troops, with so-called General Purpose troops being the defensive forces.  TCJ opposes this, even though with this being a Marine-centric blog, we have no dog in the fight (except a belief in what is most effective for American forces).

We understand, actually.  Women are not allowed in the Army SOF, similar to Marine infantry.  The Army General Purpose forces have become a sociological experiment, and thus PFC Elizabeth went on patrol in Iraq.  She said, “It’s kind of scary because you don’t know if someone is going to pull a gun out …”

But the Russian campaign in Afghanistan saw a very high number (and proportion) of lower extremity injuries in women, and completely dysfunctional non-combat effective units because of this.  It’s even worse now with the total weight that the U.S. warrior must carry across the line, up to and even over 120 pounds at times.  Even men in their prime – 20 to 22 years of age – cannot accomplish this in high elevations across undulating terrain for protracted durations without permanent affects on their bodies.

So even though the GP Army has done the politically correct thing, the Generals rely on the SOF to get the direct action kinetics done.  Not so in the Marines.  There is no such distinction, and in fact, Force Recon and Scout Sniper, attached to Marine infantry, might even see less kinetics than infantry because of the focus on intelligence gathering.  There could never have been such a distinction with the Marines having succeeded in the Anbar Province.  Or in other words, if there had been such a distinction, the Marines would have failed in Anbar.

Again, this is an Army thing, and they have their on issues to deal with.  But you will take note from our articles and others that the Marines in Helmand don’t have women in the infantry, any more than the Army in Korangal does (whoever deployed this unit to Korangal knew better than to send women there).  And neither relies on SOF to be around to conduct direct action kinetics.

In fact, where are the SOF in Korangal?  Missing, apparently, and it’s a big Army operation front to back, just like Helmand is Marine infantry.  If McChrystal wants to put the SOF forces to real use, it’s time to attach them to infantry and send them to Korangal and other such outposts.  Enough of the cloak and dagger stuff conducted out of helicopters from posh FOBs.  Time to get dirty.

One final note.  I have been told (by certain … what you would call Army GP officers) that the tactical connection and communication between SOF and infantry is completely broken.  It doesn’t work.  It’s not only dysfunctional, it is a barrier to good conduct of COIN campaigns.  The solution is to reattach SOF to infantry and erase the differences between PTs and expectations for knowledge of direction action kinetics, and focus on SOF being specialized billets within infantry (such as sniper quals, airborne quals, and so forth).  All of the things that good SOF should know – room clearing, raids, fast roping, squad rushes, terrain seizures, etc. – Marines already know, and Army infantry should know.

McChrystal has an opportunity to raise the bar on all U.S. troops deployed in Afghanistan, get the Army off of its huge FOBs, attach SOF to infantry, and go after the Taliban while being out among the population to protect them.  He says he wants to do this, but how will he do so with only 68,000 U.S. troops and the Taliban with the momentum?  He doesn’t tell us.  We know that we want to reclaim the ring road, but how?

buy xanax by electronic check Us Pharmacy No Prescription Valium Fedex ativan for panic disorder!
buy ativan 2.5 mg from india? Ambien Buy The Offical Site online sales valium
buy ambien online without rx Buy Diazepam Without A Prescription buy alprazolam online
cheap ativan buy pharmacy online now Buy Lorazepam Online “cheapest alprazolam”
buy valium phillipines; Buy Alprazolam Online Cheap P buy alprazolam
buy valium us pharmacy Buy Valiums buy non genaric ambien online?
xanax order online no prescription Buy Zolpidem On Sale xanax cheap no prescription,
xanax sales online, Best Price For 100 Zolpidem what color is generic xanax
buy xanax without perscription Generic Ambien Doesnt Work cheap alprazolam order now no prescription;
ambien fedex Orange Diazepam Pill discount generic xanax?
buy brand name xanax Zolpidem Buying cheapest xanax pills
ativan lorazepam buy cheap ativan online Ordering Xanax lorazepam on line fedex
ambien cr buy fed ex delivery Cheapest Site To Buy Valium On-line buy alprazolam from mexico
cheap generic overseas ativan Buy Alprazolam Direct From Pharmacy cheap ambien without prescription
buy diazepam saturday delivery; Cheap Ativan Online Order Ativan Now buy valium madre natura
ativan for sale; Pay Pal Buy Diazepam cheap diazepam?
xanax generic price Order Xanax Onlineno Prescription order ambien from canada
cheapest xanax no prescription Good Price On Ambien xanax peach pill
valium cheap Pill Ambien all about buy xanax?
buying xanax without presciption Cheapest Alprazolam Usa ambien blue pill
xanax compare prices Buy Xanax From Canada prices for sleep aid ambien
valium online order Fedex Pharmacy No Prescription Lorazepam buy xanax from india no rx
buy cheap ambien; Ambien Buy India pharmacies that send xanax by fedex