A harrowing, nearly seven-hour battle unfolded on (a) mountainside in Afghanistan’s Nuristan province on April 6, as Walton, his team and a few dozen Afghan commandos they had trained took fire from all directions. Outnumbered, the Green Berets fought on even after half of them were wounded — four critically — and managed to subdue an estimated 150 to 200 insurgents, according to interviews with several team members and official citations.
Today, Walton and nine of his teammates from Operational Detachment Alpha 3336 of the 3rd Special Forces Group will receive the Silver Star for their heroism in that battle — the highest number of such awards given to the elite troops for a single engagement since the Vietnam War.
RTWT.
Update: On further reflection – and taking nothing away from the valor of those troops in battle – it seems to me an interesting strategy to helicopter expensively trained soldiers in to a remote mountatin top, kill a bunch of baddies and shoot your way back out again.
Does this get us closer to home?
How special it must be for the senior chowderhead insurgent to go back to dumba** central and explain to the boss how 200 got creamed by 20-30 infidels. Prolly 201 after that conversation.
Thank you Operational Detachment Alpha 3336!
Part of it is because we have awesomely trained and capable troops and no real vision of what victory is in this war. So we deploy them well in nonsensical ways.
We called it the War on Terror. Just about as stupid as if FDR had stood up on December 8th, 1941 and declared war on aviation.
To fight a war, you have to define your enemy, establish your goals, and then blow things up and kill people until you reach it. You can’t be overly concerned about non-combatants, either.
From where I stand, we’ve done none of those things, and we are just continuously feeding the best of our young men to a slow attrition that will only end when we pull out. Radical Islam will then justifiably declare a great victory for Allah, and we will be that much further down the road to dimmitude.
Lex, They’re doing exactly what they’re tasked to do…train and and conduct joint operations with the locals… flush out the bad guys… grab these poor unfortunates by the stacking swivel and slit their heathen throats… it might be, as you say ” an interesting strategy” and I’ll allow that it dosen’t always work exactly as planned but neither does an air strike from 2000 feet. Best
As one of the smartest intel NCOs I ever met in the Air Force (youngest Chief Master in entire Air Force at 32) once said: “Captain, when is the Air Force ever gonna learn that you can’t ‘occupy’ a piece of ground with a bomb.” So in that sense, Snake is right. But ASM 826 is also right also in that we don’t have proper focus and therefore the slow-motion meat-grinder effect of the “ebb and flow” continues apace. What we need is a little cold-blooded “Perfidious Albion” action in the manner of Lord Curzon and pit the various tribes against each other with CIA bribes and let them claw each other into exhaustion/oblivion–then cut a deal with the surviving dominate tribe.
As one British Foreign Service officer used to say about British-run pre-war (WWII) Egypt: “No, we don’t RUN Egypt, but we do control those who do.”
Air strikes and hellfire missiles are all fine and good, but they’re impersonal and could be considered bad luck (In sh’allah). Having an A team show up in your back yard successfully coming to kill your leader is personal. The “there is no place you can hide” approach has a pay off worth the price.
At the brief I’ll bet intell assessed 20 Mujh and were off by a factor 10..
It was obviously a surprise as to how many were in there when they came in contact…I’ll bet that happens from time-time. Thank G we have such warriors and thank G we have an airforce that can accurately deliver hi-order 2000lb bombs so accurately. That fact is sorta buried in the story.
b2
It takes nothing away from these men’s almost preternatural abilities and bravery to conclude that without precision air support, they would all have been killed.
Was that the plan – invite ambush and then use airpower to put a larger enemy force through the meatgrinder, or was it simply assumed that airpower would be available to defeat whatever force was encountered, or ….??
concur with Snake and b2.
where we think THEY are, there shall we go to find and slay them… mayhap we weren’t cognizant of exactly how many to expect, but when you have our Spartans at hand, ask not “how many of theirs are there?”, instead ask only “where?”
The plan probably was “Raid in, grab chief, extract, shoot up guards throughout”.
They probably were off in, if I read this article correct, beginning (and position thereof) of fight, number of guards and their ammo supply.
Which to this armchair general indicates that this poobah was grander they thought (Or possibly happened to operate out of the local ammo dump for terrorists.).
Personally, for a Poobah just rating twenty guards or so I’d not gotten through the bother of deploying a Ground Team (Unless I wish to archieve something besides, experience building for the Afghan commandos, perhaps ?).
Send in a B52 (What airdefenses ?) with a belly full of bombs and a predator to spot and rearrange the landscape. Possibly Napalm afterwards to really get that burned to ashes look right.
But yeah, congrats on their perfomance.
Although I feel that most medals could be avoided to be handed out if somebody had done his job right in the first place. And almost always that does not mean the recipient.
I wonder if the ODA team was sent in there to draw the insurgents to the surface where the airstrike would then have the best effect?
Could be the fact that I went to jump school (super-duper paratrooper!), but did anyone else notice that they jumped out at angels 10 to land on “jagged, ice-covered rocks and into water?” Don’t know if it was a HALO jump or not, but getting a good landing even on a cushy LZ is tricky enough – never mind trying to land on a rocky mountaintop. BZ to those guys.
I have spoken to Marines and
Army Special Operations soldiers who served in Iraq under unpleasant circumstances. I think they would all be astonished that 12 Silver Stars were awarded in this fierce engagement and many of them saw no pieces of metal save the ones flying through the air at them and theirs.
Since our engagement in the Afgan war, that country has become the worlds largest supplier of opium derived drugs. It is now the backbone of the countrys economy. What the hell are we doing there and who are we helping???
Demonstrates why we are continuing to hit a wall in Afghanistan.
Live on a FOB – conduct brief kinetic ops based on intel from people we really don’t understand.
Look unless it is UBL himself these types of ops are fruitless.
The formula I saw work was:
Get off the FOB and live with the Afghans. I mean really get off the FOB — not just patrols — live and work with the Afghans. Seems like you or more vulnerable but in the end you are not. We did it and brought everyone home — and we were right on the border — in the so called bad lands.
Get with the tribes AND behind the Afghan leadership — military and civilian — BUT hold them strictly accountable. Transparent especially with regard to money.
Get after development and help the government deliver for the people. Use the radio to get the word out.
Once you are living with the Afghans then you find out who and where the bad guys are AND the tribes — if you have them on your side — will actually turn them over — no kinetic ops required.
All this border infiltration stuff is OFF. If the tribe says NO — that means no to moving through their areas. That means no direct attacks or large scale movements. So, that leaves IEDs which they will tell you about. All that is left is suiciders — very scary but not all that effective because it turns the people against the insurgents.
Just my two cents.
What are we doing there? We’re making sure that evil people can’t use the country as a base of operations for their plans to kill everyone on earth who isn’t what they consider a Muslim.
Who are we helping? The Afghans, ourselves, and the rest of the civilized world.
Look, Iraq has shown that defeating an insurgency, while difficult and time-consuming, is not impossible. Afghanistan enjoyed a honeymoon of sorts while Al-Queda committed the bulk of their resources to Iraq. Now that they’ve lost that battle they’re reallocating their resources and applying their lessons learned (these guys aren’t dumb, they know how to do AAR’s) to the fight in their back yard.
If we have the will to continue the fight until Afghanistan is won, which necessitates eliminating insurgent operations in the Pakistani tribal areas, these extremists will not have any good places to fall back to. It will take decades for them to reorganize their base of support.
Thomas Barton, J.D, Re your comment # 12 above…I totally agree… so it has always been …and so it shall always be …true wisdom, in my not so humble opninon, comes with accepting the hand that you’re delt, being thankfull that you’re alive and getting on with the rest of your life. Best
PS, Pardre Harvey, as we both know…any jump that you can walk away from is a successful jump.
They did this type of thing in ‘nam, ad nauseum. It wasn’t just SOF types the did it with either. Search and destroy was the order of the day throughout.
In fairness, there is no way around it when you are dealing with an insurgency. They wear you down, or you grind them down. IN ‘nam, we ground them down, and the Comms betrayed the VC into Tet, where they were destroyed. After that it was a pretty conventional jungle war involving NVA regulars, and we kicked them back north as well. It wasn’t until after the treaty was signed that the left in Congress betrayed Vietnam and refused even to supply ARVN. The RVN lost because the US did not live up to its treaty obligation, thanx to the Democrats.
Victories such as this one have a huge impact on the Islamic insurgents. Some are feeling they have been abandoned by Allah. I’m more than happy they feel such, and am more than glad my taxes are going to aid in the effort.
Jerry Pournelle, a former Arty Officer in Korea, wrote what he calls the Prince of Sparta trilogy (a very good read if you haven’t read it). In the series we see the key to winning an insurgency – nerve. Don’t lose it if you want to win. We broke the back of the insurgents in Iraq because of this one concept and you can’t win if you allow the fifth column behind you to sap your will either.
Snake is dead on the money. On this matter you should trust what he says. ODAs almost work exclusively with the native forces to fight the enemy. They do it for two reasons: training and trust. The also work with Civil Affairs groups and specialized ODAs (help with the designator Snake, I don’t remember) that assist the population rebuild. Last, but most importantly, the ODAs embed right in the middle of the population and begin to interact. They not only make friends, but they also get intel.
I suspect that this jump was the result of timely intel, and that there was supposed to be someone important in the jump.
Last, ODAs aren’t about direct combat, though they are exceedingly good at that. They are about training, hearts and minds, and intel.
Once more, Snake was right, and this IS the best method to help change Afghanistan.
Maj. H, I think the WP article is misleading in that the site of the operation was 10M MSL. According to the article at Weasel Zippers, datelined from Ft. Brag “It was impossible for the helicopters to land on the jagged rocks at the bottom of the valley. The Special Forces soldiers and commandos, each carrying more than 60 pounds of gear, dropped from 10 feet above the ground, landing among boulders or in a near-frozen stream.” Still, not something I would want to try for the fun of it.
“Then Walding tried to inject himself with morphine but accidentally used the wrong tip of the syringe and put the needle in this thumb, he later recalled. “My thumb felt great, . . .”
With this sort of sense of humor the guy could be a pilot.
Snake…you made me smile.